Great moments in not-staying-on-message: Brian Michael Bendis in this week’s Axel-in-Charge column at CBR, talking about the genesis of Avengers vs. X-Men:
There’s a lot of ways that could go wrong. So Axel, Tom and the guys smartly said, “Let’s get together — just the five writers and the three editors with Nick Lowe.” They all came to my place in Portland, and I stuffed them full of donuts — as was reported last week [Laughter]. And we went there with not much more than “The Phoenix would make a really good MacGuffin for this.”
Axel Alonso, four paragraphs later:
Understand: We’d backed off doing an “Avengers Vs. X-Men” several times before because we didn’t have the right set-up or inciting incident. If we were going to have the world’s two biggest super teams go toe to toe, it had to be over something that mattered, not a McGuffin, and there couldn’t be a clear-cut good guy or bad guy.
More an amusing attempt to save face for those potentially horrified at the Phoenix not being given the “appropriate” respect than anything else, I have to admit that I’m hoping that Bendis is the more honest of the two here: I want the Phoenix to be a MacGuffin, because I feel like the classic Marvel intra-hero slugfests are all MacGuffinned-up, with the inciting incident being something that can be easily left in the background until everyone decides to team-up and save the day. In a story like this, don’t you want less talking and more punching, ultimately?
February 20th, 2012 at 11:01 am
If you actually read the words, you’ll see these are not contradictory statements. Bendis says they had “not much more than” a MacGuffin because all they had was that one idea and some doughnuts. “Not much more than” suggests this was insufficient, otherwise they needn’t have had a big doughnut/story meeting.
Then Alonso says it was important that it be “not a McGuffin.” In other words, the Phoenix deal had to be fleshed out as a story, so that’s what they did. Over doughnuts.
However, as a Scottish person, I think you’re well-equipped to give us the correct spelling of “MacGuffin” since two spellings are used in this same article. “Mac” or “Mc?”
February 20th, 2012 at 11:27 am
Sales said make the X-men fight the Avengers, and editorial asked “Who wants another doughnut?”
February 20th, 2012 at 7:15 pm
Graeme Mcmillan blogposts… always in the form of a question or just a bad blog posts?
February 20th, 2012 at 8:15 pm
Mmm … donuts.
February 20th, 2012 at 9:23 pm
isn’t the phoenix always a Macguffin. its a a giant flying firebird that grants wishes. it was a plot device when they made the thing up in the 70s to kill jean grey the first time! they could make anything the point of contention, why pretend? they should let us decide who wins through twitter!