Tom Brevoort on how things are done at Marvel, in terms of important decisions:
Everybody takes a blow to the gut at some point where a story they thought was going left suddenly is going right because someone had a better take on it. But those turns don’t happen against the will of the creators involved. If Brian was absolutely dead set on not killing Ultimate Spider-Man, it wouldn’t have happened, or he wouldn’t have written it. If we were convinced that Ultimate Spider-Man must die and he didn’t want to do it, it would have been Jeph Loeb or Jonathan Hickman or Nick Spencer. But the fact that Brian wrote it should tell you that he got on board with the idea. He came to embrace it. The first moment it came up I’m sure it sent a chill down his spine, but it’s a story. He’s a storyteller sitting there, thinking about it, tossing the ideas around and seeing if it works. And he found a way it worked for him. That’s why our creative environment is better than anybody else’s in the business at this point. We have fans that poo-poo us without really understanding how this all goes down. They think that either every creator just does what they want or that everything is mandated from above or that everything is decided by a star chamber of five guys in a secret location. Maybe that’s how other people do it.
Okay, I can’t be the only person who doesn’t see a large amount of difference between “everything is mandated from above” and “If we were convinced that Ultimate Spider-Man must die and he didn’t want to do it, it would have been Jeph Loeb or Jonathan Hickman or Nick Spencer. But the fact that Brian wrote it should tell you that he got on board with the idea,” right? The latter just means that Bendis got behind the mandated from above idea, but admits that, if he hadn’t, he would have been replaced on the book. In what way isn’t that mandated from above?
I think I know what Brevoort was trying to say – Essentially, When it was discussed in the room, Bendis liked the idea and ran with it - but when you’re trying to argue that everything is collaborative, adding in things like “if we decided it’s the way we were going to go and Brian wasn’t onboard, someone else would have written the book” pretty much entirely undercuts the entire point.
I admit, I’ve occasionally thought that “editorially mandated” was a strange, straw-man argument to use when complaining about the direction of comics, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, some of my favorite comics have been “editorially mandated” – Half of the Silver Age stuff at DC came from Julie Schwartz or whoever coming up with an idea and telling the writer to make it work – and, secondly, I’m not sure why something being “editorially mandated” necessarily makes it a worse idea than something a creator comes up with themselves (For example: Superman walking across America for a year to find himself and/or the true America? Not editorially-mandated, but also not a particularly good idea. If the editor of the Superman titles had nixed that idea because he’d decided to mandate that Superman stories should feature the Man of Steel flying around Metropolis doing good deeds and rescuing kittens from trees, would that have been a bad thing?).
The issue gets cloudier with the advent of franchises and creative summits. To use the example of the death of Spider-Man: It wasn’t Bendis’ idea, according to Brevoort’s own account, it was Mark Millar’s. It messed with years’ worth of plans Bendis had created for an Ultimate Spider-Man title that starred Peter Parker, but he was convinced that it would be the best thing for the book and/or the Ultimate Universe, and so came up with what we saw conclude last week. So… is that editorially mandating the storyline? Is it creator-led? Because, after all, Millar came up with the idea, so it’s not as if it was an editorial decision… but at the same time, it contradicted and ultimately – no pun intended – overwrote what the creator of the book was intending to do, to the extent of killing the title character and relaunching the book. So which is it?
(Consider, as well, things like the creators of the X-Books. When Jason Aaron comes up with the idea for Schism, does that mean Rick Remender or Kieron Gillen or whoever has to change their plans because of editorial mandate, or creator-driven impulse?)
This isn’t claiming that there’s no such thing as “editorial mandate,” because – well, clearly, there is. But it is protesting the idea, I guess, that there’s some kind of massive line separating that from creative decision, or that one is necessarily “better” or more worthy than the other. Bad ideas are bad ideas – and vice versa – no matter where they come from, and the reality of comic publishing is far more complicated than creator vs. editor.
June 27th, 2011 at 12:04 pm
I think a helpful additional consideration would be whether or not the story flows organically, as opposed to feeling “editorially mandated” in the sense that the editorial staff — which can include the creators — are saying, “Okay, we want to do this, so these stories need to happen in order to justify this.” Joe Quesada had an end game of a single 616 Spidey in mind, so we got a whole bunch of stories that made absolutely no sense on their own terms, because they existed solely to serve an authorial fiat. Likewise, J. Michael Straczynski was so busy preaching to his audience about how they should feel about any number of REAL! WORLD! ISSUES! that he didn’t realize, or more likely didn’t even care, that the premises that he was using as the foundations for his soapboxing through Superman’s mouth didn’t even make sense (for example, in what possible reality would Superman NOT attract a crowd of thousands, if not millions, following every step of his walk across America?).
The problem with both Bendis and Millar, even with stories that they themselves choose to write, without any prompting, about their own characters? Is that they approach storytelling like a bullet-point list, where almost all that they care about is hitting all of the scenes that they want to write, and screw you readers if you think you’re entitled to something that explores the consequences of such scenes, or what would actually be required to bring them about, because like Quesada and JMS, they rely far too much on the justification of Because I’m The Writer And I Say So.
June 27th, 2011 at 1:02 pm
What’s REALLY disturbing is how casually they mention Jeph Frickin Loeb in the same breadth as actual writers like Jonathan Hickman and Nick Spencer, like they’re equivalent and interchangeable. For an editor to say that really disturbs me.
It’s kind of like an film interview where the director says offhand, if we couldn’t get Johnny Depp or Christian Bale for this harrowing role, we’d just get Dane Cook instead.
June 27th, 2011 at 1:06 pm
I think it was mistake killing Ultimate Spider-Man. You pretty much let Jeph Loeb utterly destroy the Ultimate Universe and been pretty much dead other then Spidey. Once you killed him off Marvel should put a bullet in it. What is left the mess that has become Ultimates? Three X-Men? Ultimate Fake Spider-Man? No one going to buy someone else as Spidey even if Benis writes it or Ultimate U.
June 27th, 2011 at 1:37 pm
There was an interview with Bendis back in 2003ish, where Bendie defended using Bill Jemas’ editorial notes saying that the notes were usually improvements to the story. That Bendis would take the idea and run with it shouldn’t be a surprise.
June 27th, 2011 at 7:25 pm
Alan: I tend to think that was Bendis being polite, because the first USM hardcover actually included Jemas’ original pitch for the character, and Bendis pretty much got rid of 90 percent of what Jemas had originally proposed, and the 10 percent that he kept was the 10 percent that sucked.
June 28th, 2011 at 11:59 am
“Okay, I can’t be the only person who doesn’t see a large amount of difference between “everything is mandated from above” and “If we were convinced that Ultimate Spider-Man must die and he didn’t want to do it, it would have been Jeph Loeb or Jonathan Hickman or Nick Spencer. But the fact that Brian wrote it should tell you that he got on board with the idea,” right? The latter just means that Bendis got behind the mandated from above idea, but admits that, if he hadn’t, he would have been replaced on the book. In what way isn’t that mandated from above?”
This is pretty much how I feel. Saying “We’ll give you your orders and you have the option to either agree with it or not but we’re still giving you your orders” is pretty much the same thing as dictating story.
I won’t, however, claim that editorially decided stories are ALWAYS terrible because that’s not true. It’s just a shame to see creativity by committee but that’s how it has to go with corporate-owned characters.
June 29th, 2011 at 6:26 am
Another thing to consider is that some editors are really smart, creative people who know how to do their jobs and are really good at figuring out what’s best for a story. That’s why they exist. Their function is to guide the creators to the best possible outcome, and if they’re good at it, “editorially mandated” is not a bad thing but just a good editor pushing a writer to write an awesome story.
Not all editors are that good. An editorial mandate is as good or bad as the editor (or editorial team) it comes from.