Tom Brevoort gets nostalgic:

There was a time, back in the late ’90s. when I was seen in some fan circles as the “great white hope.” Some of that was that people were liking the books I was editing that, but some of it was also, I feel, that I wasn’t so much at the center of things. Because the closer to the center you get, the more people you’re affecting, and the greater the chances become that you’ll piss someone off with something. You can’t swing a dead cat but for hitting somebody who thinks Joe Q is Satan, Brian Bendis is the antichrist, Mark Millar is an Al Qaeda mastermind, Axel Alonso is the enemy of all that is good and decent, and JMS is the devil. And the same thing is true with the folks in charge across town.

The thing that’s sort of funny to me is how a new, younger breed of editor has risen to take my old place as the great white hope. Whether it’s Andy Schmidt or Warren Simons or Steve Wacker or “whoever’s editing WORLD WAR HULK, that guy knows what he’s doing!” (Mark Paniccia), there are quarters where this is spoken as gospel truth. And what’s funny to me is that nobody on the outside really has any idea how much (or how little) input and effect I might have on any of the projects they love at the moment. And assuming that their careers continue to rise, it’s only a matter of time until Warren, Steve and Mark are traitors, mercenaries, liars and fiends. (Andy Schmidt avoided all this by leaving staff.)

Oh, Tom. You say that like it’s a bad thing.

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