Marvel Comics' reaction to 9/11 was both heartfelt and far-reaching, understandable for a company not only based in New York but one so tied to the city in its demeanor and subject matter (Marvel's New York state is the setting for the majority of its line, being home for years to Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Avengers, X-Men and Daredevil, amongst many others): Not only did they publish the prerequisite memorial special editions (Heroes and A Moment Of Silence), they also created a short-lived line of emergency services comics (The Call), relaunched Captain America as a hero hunting terrorists (with patriotic covers announcing things like "Fight Terror" and "Never Give Up"), placed a memorial logo of the World Trade Center Towers on all of their comics published for more than a year afterwards, and published a very special issue of Amazing Spider-Man where the company's most well-known character visited Ground Zero to help with rescue efforts, and found that it wasn't only the heroes who realized how terrible the terrorist attacks were:
Yes, Doctor Doom crying may have been a little too much - writer J. Michael Straczynski later denied asking for that in the script to avoid a backlash - but the meaning of all of this was clear: As a company, Marvel Comics had been severely affected by the devastating attacks, and had not only faced up to the reality of such widescale destruction previously fantasized about in their books, but also felt that reality for themselves. This was a sobered company.

Cut to last week's Siege: The Cabal, the prelude to next month's Siege event running across their entire line. Following September 11th, an increasingly political subtext has crept into Marvel's superhero lines, whether it's the "Personal Liberty or Safety" question at the heart of Civil War, terrorist sleeper cell paranoia of the run up to 2008's Secret Invasion or "The People Running Our Country May Not Have Our Best Interests At Heart" theme of this year's Dark Reign, and it's been something that's worked very well for the company: A decade ago, they were coming out of bankruptcy and their future looked uncertain, and now they're being bought by Disney for $400 billion. Siege: The Cabal acts as prologue to the big Final Act of the uber-storyline that's been running throughout their titles since 2004's Avengers: Disassembled, and ends with Norman Osborn - onetime Green Goblin and now head of what is essentially Marvel's Homeland Security department - talking with Norse God Loki about how he can make a pre-emptive strike against the mythical realm of Iraq. Wait, I mean, Asgard:
This explains the opening of next month's Siege, which was released in previews last week:

That's Chicago's Soldier Field getting destroyed, by the way. While there's a game going on, and the stands are full of people. Considering Soldier Field's seating capacity is 61,500, it's probably safe to say that we're talking about upwards of 50,000 fictional deaths in the stadium alone, even going with a "Well, it wasn't sold out" defense, and that's ignoring any damage and deaths in surrounding areas.

I think I'm allowed a W. T. F. around now.

There are so many things that come to mind from seeing this preview, and this amount of devastation for the purposes of getting a plot about good guys teaming up to reform the Avengers going, and to prepare for a new, optimistic status quo called "The Heroic Age". Primarily, it's the thoughtlessness and/or bad taste of the whole thing, especially coming from the publisher who seemed so affected by - or, perhaps, just displayed more of an emotional response to - September 11th (Which resulted in almost 3,000 deaths) and seemed to have come to some level of understanding of what an event of that scale actually means (Hint: It's not four issues of Cap and Iron Man and Thor getting back together to kick some bad guy ass, True Believer!). Don't get me wrong, I understand the difference between fictional death and real death, but that doesn't excuse the strange insensitivity here.

Secondly: Killing tens of thousands of people as an excuse to go to war? This is supervillainy on a ridiculous scale here, way beyond anything we've seen in a long time and not only completely removed from the intentional scale and bombast of old school supervillains, but (a) literally collateral damage given little thought on the road to Osborn's true plan, and (b) unlike other supervillain's genocidal plans, apparently completely successful (I hope that the next scene, not shown in previews, will reveal the Soldier Field destruction to be a fantasy sequence, but somehow I doubt it - And, if it were, it'd seem even more ghoulish to release these pages to get fans excited about reading Siege: "Look, kids! WIDESCALE DEATH TWENTY TIMES LARGER THAN 9/11! THIS IS THE BIG ONE YOU'VE BEEN WAITING FOR! EXCELSIOR!"). I'm all for demonizing bad guys, but this is just insane; even going on the "Well, he's mentally unbalanced" explanation Siege writer Brian Michael Bendis has been giving in interviews about the character and project, it makes mastermind Norman Osborn into a character that is impossible to sympathize with, and reduces him to almost cartoon proportions and ideas about evil. All he needs now is a moustache to twirl when explaining his plan to the heroes.

(Second-and-a-half-ly: Killing tens of thousands of people as an excuse to go to war? Is this some kind of veiled "The American Right Wing Were Behind 9/11 As A Way Of Motivating People To Back An Invasion Of Afghanistan and Iraq" thing? After all, Bendis has said about the plot, "much like we've seen in our own modern history, it's not beyond world leaders to fabricate incidents if it serves a purpose." Hmm.)

Thirdly: We've seen this before, in more than one sense. Not only is this a deliberate and literal call-out to the accidental explosion that launched Marvel's Civil War, but the idea of using the destruction of a sports stadium to launch a war is from Tom Clancy's 1991 novel The Sum Of All Fears (adapted into a movie in 1999, but not released until 2002). Of course, in that case, it's a neo-Nazi trying to convince the US and Russia to go to war by placing blame on the event on the Russians, but still, the tone-deaf quality of the plot device becomes even stranger when you realize that it's not even original.

So what to make of Siege's Destruction McGuffin? A sign that, even if the rest of the world hasn't gotten over 9/11, Marvel has managed to move on and enjoy fictional slaughter as a motivator for superheroes to team-up again? Proof that cynical shock tactics outweigh genuine emotional responses when it comes to upping the ante in the name of sales? A thoughtless plot that leaves a nasty taste in the mouth? Maybe I'm just too sensitive to these kinds of things; it's been eight years, after all. Perhaps I should shut up and hope that they blow up an entire continent next so that Doctor Doom can reveal that he really did only have something in his eye down at Ground Zero. After all, destroying Antarctica would be really bad-ass, wouldn't it?

According to Disney executives on this morning's investors' conference call, the House of Mouse initially reached out to Marvel "a few months ago," but Marvel creator reaction this morning suggests that it was kept a secret from the majority of people who worked for the publisher, something that Ultimate Avengers and Kick-Ass writer Mark Millar hinted at on his message board today:

I had no idea this was happening. I doubt even Joe [Quesada] would have known as this would have been between Ike, Disney and the Marvel board. If Joe did know he obviously wouldn't have been able to tell us but this is very interesting. I was just complaining to a friend that nothing had happened in a couple of years and now this.

But clearly, while certain freelancers only learned the news this morning, some of Marvel's creators must have known about the deal ahead of time, if they met with Disney/Pixar CCO John Lassetter to discuss possibilities, as per this morning's conference call. Suddenly, Avengers and Ultimate Spider-Man writer (and unofficial Head Writer for the publisher) Brian Michael Bendis' curious tweet from Saturday evening suddenly makes a lot more sense:

in other news- there's a very interesting comic pros conversation going on tonight. its the what if to end all what ifs.

Apparently, you should have included Mark Millar in that conversation, Brian.

Marvel declined to comment on this story.

Marvel apparently has high hopes for Spider-Woman, calling it both "mind-blowing" and "groundbreaking", but it doesn't quite live up to that hype. It's certainly the best "motion comic" - or, let's be honest, "really, really limited animation" - we've seen so far, but what it does right almost makes what it does wrong all the more apparent.

Let's be clear: As a regular comic, Spider-Woman will probably be great. Alex Maleev's art is atmospheric and stylish while losing the artificiality and sterility that crept into his Daredevil work with Bendis, and will doubtlessly look wonderful on the page. Likewise, Bendis' dialogue here is prime Bendis, with the cadence and asides that his fans have come to expect, and they're unlikely to be disappointed when reading it. It's just that... it doesn't work as a motion comic.

The animation, what there is of it, is well done. But there isn't enough of it... or there's too much of it; something about it, about the way the backgrounds move but the figures seem distractingly static, especially in the talky expositionary scenes, makes you all too aware of how limited the animation really is, although nothing demonstrates that as much as the "fight" sequence at the end of the episode, where the animation is almost laughably limited, killing any suspension of disbelief and drawing attention to itself far too much. Similarly, Bendis' trademark dialogue just sounds awkward and unbelievable when spoken aloud (although part of that could have something to do with the very flat line readings from the actors; Nicolette Reed may have the trans-Atlantic accent that the creators knew that Jessica Drew had to have, but her disinterest in the material - or maybe lack of ability to emote - can be amazingly apparent at times), including truly cringe-worthy lines like "This is what we call bull-ca-ca," which just can't help but sound ridiculous when said out loud.

Ultimately, Spider-Woman feels unsatisfying not because everyone involved hasn't tried their hardest, but because of the very format they're working in; it could just be that Motion Comics in general are not only not the "future of comics," but also not a format that will last past this initial fad and first blush of excitement. There's the start of an interesting story being told in Spider-Woman, but it's one that I'd rather read the rest of, than watch.

Spider-Woman, Agent of S.W.O.R.D. Episode 1 [iTunes]

How's the con?

Con's good! I mean, it's day one, so it's fantastic. Ask me again at the end of Saturday night, and I'll let you know.

I was going to say, today's Mondo Marvel panel went really well. I remember last year, which seemed to be pretty much fans saying "You fucked up Spider-Man, so fuck you." It felt like every single panel turned into that.

Yeah, but you know what? That was totally expected. I was totally expecting that kind of stuff, and it was the kind of thing that I could've just not gone to the con, but I was like, you know what? We gotta talk about this stuff, and it's cool. But every con has a different personality to it, so you never know until you get that very first panel and I say, how's everybody doing. You know right away, [this time] there was an energy, it was a really upbeat crowd, and it was nice to see a full room because, lately in San Diego, it's become this multimedia experience so it's become less about comics. But that was a real, solid standing-room-only panel, so that was a good thing.

The bright side is, here we are, a year-plus later, after One More Day [the storyline that controversially undid Peter Parker's marriage to Mary Jane, courtesy of a literal deal with the devil. Or a devil, at least], and it's ironic, but I've been seeing all these emails coming through from people saying, begrudgingly, "I really like the new direction."

I think there're lots of arguments you can have with One More Day as a story, but Spider-Man is better because of it.

The thing about One More Day is, and I've always said this, "Were there better ways of skinning that cat?" Absolutely. The easiest thing to do would've been to kill Mary Jane. But then you've lost Mary Jane as a character.

And then you're stuck with a Spider-Man who's going to be grieving for x amount of months...

Exactly, he's going to be grieving, he's a widower, and being a widower [makes him seem] even older than being married in the first place. And then of course, you can't really lose her as a character, she's too important. We've got books that revolve around her, we've got movies that revolve around her. So you're going to have to bring her back, and then when you bring her back, you're still going to have to deal with the aspects of the marriage, so there was no clean way to do it. We did the best we could, and there are still some unanswered questions that we're going to get to, for the continuity-minded, the people who really wrap themselves around that, we'll answer a lot of questions. You'll be surprised how little Mephisto had to do with anything.

So when you have that kind of vocal fanbase, or with Captain America coming back to life, and you know that there is an answer six months down the line...

Suck it up.

Really? There's never a feeling of, we should rush this out, or we should try to deal with this sooner?

When I took over as editor in chief, Tom DeFalco, who was the editor in chief before Bob Harras, who I took over the job from, he came into my office, smacked me on the back - Tom's a friend - and said, 'I'm gonna give you some advice. From this point on, you have a very big target on your back. You're going to have to have very broad shoulders. If you're not going to do that, you're not going to like this job.' And at the end of the day, I'm making comic books. So I have some comic book fans that're making fun of me. I'm not trying to resolve the economy, I'm not trying to solve things between Palestine and Israel, you know, it's comic books and the worst thing we do is we kill off some trees and we piss off some fanboys. But as long as we do our jobs right, at the end of the day, I want to be able to look back when I either get shown the door or I walk out of it myself, I want to be able to look back and say, we gave everybody a great ride. The story's really good. It's all about story.

We know what's going to come down the line, we know how the Mephisto thing happens, and I gotta sell comics. It's serialized storytelling. They just gotta suck it up.

Now that you're coming to the end, with Dark Reign, of a story that you've been telling since 2005. Does that feel like the end of an era for you, to reach the end of a story that's pretty much gone across all of the franchises at the company?

It doesn't feel like the end of an era, it feels like it's going to be a chance to breathe. One of the things that I really do long for, I remember when we first started - or I first started - this crazy trip of being editor in chief at Marvel, we started by taking books and characters and focusing on creative. Saying 'Okay, Joe Stracynski, go - Tell the best Spider-Man story you can,' or 'Grant Morrison, go tell the best X-Men story you can' -

You broke everything up, to fix it.

We had to. We had to, because the characters weren't defined well enough to have them intermingle again. We had to - Obviously, when Stan [Lee] created the universe, he wasn't thinking this, but we had to recreate everything while still holding all the history. And then, once we'd done that, once we'd taken ownership of it, we were able to branch out and do bigger stories.

I'd like to see the star collapse a little again, and get back to smaller stories, Now that we've reset the pieces and everything's going smoothly, let's go back to basics again, let's tell smaller stories, more family-oriented stories, see where that takes us. And I'll be honest with you, that everything we've been doing at Marvel Publishing, it's always a risk, because fans are - and this is the thing about fandom, and I understand it, I'm not criticizing it, I've been a fan for years - you know, we'll sit there and complain. We'll go, 'Oh, everything's event event event event,' but the marketshare, the numbers... tell us otherwise.

People like the events. You own half the market out there currently.

So there's a lot of fans out there saying 'Go back to basics,' but it's a matter of necessity for us also. We're just exhausted, and we need to go back to basics, regroup a bit, let our writers also take ownership of their books for awhile, because it's taxing on them, and on our artists. You know, let them tell their stories for awhile, and run their books, before we say, okay, let's get the band together again and go a little crazy.

And the other thing is, it will make the day that we go back to another event special again. I think, if we did another event following this whole culmination of stuff, it's just going to seem like white noise. I do sense that it's getting to the point where it's white noise.

I know I live in a world of hyperbole, but there has to be a certain truth in the hyperbole. So, when I say that we're coming to the third act, I didn't say that with [Secret] Invasion, and I didn't say that with Dark Reign, although Dark Reign is the beginning of that third act, when we get there, people will see what we've done. And then they'll go, cool, now let's see what you guys are gonna do next. What we have to do is come up with something compelling enough that they're going to want to go to all of our titles without having to tie them all together.

The challenge to our writers in the last summit was, come up with - If you had twelve months to live and this was the book that you're writing, give us the stories - You know, "Matt Fraction, you're writing Iron Man, give us the best effin' Iron Man story you can come up with for those twelve months. Bendis, you're writing Avengers, give us the best Avengers story you can." That's the challenge, so that each title becomes must read. Hopefully, that works, and we're going to market each one as their own thing. It's a change of gears, and most people will think that we're crazy but, I've often, I've talked to our publisher Dan Buckley about it: It's like being addicted to heroin. Something you've just got to come off.

That's an interesting analogy, "Sometimes, you've just got to come off heroin, other times, hey, let's go heroin!"

[Laughs] But they pay us in heroin!

It's a little daunting when you look at the future and say, wow, what's gonna happen? But I trust our creators and our editors to knock it out of the park.

You said at the Mondo Marvel panel that Paul Tobin was "recreating the Marvel Adventures universe," which may just be a hyperbolic way of saying "We're relaunching the line," and you have the Ultimate line being relaunched as Ultimate Comics. Is this happening because people have become so focused on the "main" universe that the other lines need a push?

It's funny, because Ultimate is almost the exploratory mission for Marvel. Like, we sent the Ultimate books out there to do some insane stuff, when Mark and Bendis were doing those books, and they did things in those books that we never would have dared to do in the regular universe. But they planted the seeds. It was the same thing at [Quesada's first editorial line at Marvel] Marvel Knights, which was an exploratory mission that took certain Marvel characters into places that Marvel never would've published before, and then by putting me in charge of Marvel, kind of took the whole line there. And then Ultimate was kind of the next step, you know, 'Go out West, kids! See if there's Indians out there!'

Ultimate was Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar, and then they came to the main universe...

Yeah, so now this next push in Ultimate, we're taking the Ultimate universe to places where, again, the challenge was 'Where can we go that we just can't go with the Marvel Universe right now? How can we break these characters down, and what can we do with them, and see where that takes us?' And that's really the fun of it, because it's only three or four titles, and if you break them, you break them. Spider-Man in our universe is still Spider-Man, but we can look at Ultimate and say, 'You know, I think that was the line. We shouldn't cross it.'

Is that why the Ultimate line exists, internally? Obviously, it has its fans, and it's there as an entry point for new readers, but internally, is it 'The Place Where You Can Do The Crazy Shit?'

I think so, I think that's, internally, what our writers feel when we're working on this stuff. You know, the Hulk eats people [Laughs]. That's a line we're not going to go near in the regular books, but it's an interesting take on the Hulk, and we're able to do certain things to certain characters. And at the end of the day, I hate to become redundant, but to bring up the whole Spider-Man thing again, we - all of us, the editors in chief before me - felt like Spider-Man works better as a single guy. The storyline that Stan set off in the newspaper strip of Spider-Man getting married worked perfectly for the newspaper strip, but for Marvel's publishing division, I think that we needed to get him single again. And that was at the very beginning of my tenure, even as a freelancer I used to think that all the time. You know, he's kind of dull and Mary Jane was portrayed as not very nice all the time, because that would drive tension into the relationship. And then Ultimate Spider-Man comes along, and we're like, yeah, that's kind of the way it should be. So that really proved to us that that's really where it works best. If I could've put Peter back in high school in the universe, I would've, but it's cool with him being just out of college and this young man trying to make his way through life at this point as opposed to being in high school. Those are the kinds of things that Ultimate did that we thought, it works.

So, does that make Marvel Adventures the kids line? Earlier attempts, like Marvel Age have seemed more "aimed at kids," but there's something about the Adventures books that works on multiple levels.

My theory when it comes to kids books is that, if you write down to kids, you're doomed to fail. So, the idea behind Marvel Adventures, we live in day and age today where, if you say that a book is "kid safe," that's not a message you're putting out to kids, that's a message you're putting out to parents. It's parent safe, and as a parent, I understand that. We look back on Stan's era, those early mid-60s books, and they look very kid-friendly, and they look very kid-safe, and quaint and easy to follow and stuff, but putting it into historical perspective when they came out, they were incredibly edgy. I think it was 1966, 1967, the Hulk was on the cover of Rolling Stone, and the reason the Hulk was on the cover and Rolling Stone did a six or seven page expose on Marvel was because Marvel comics were huge with college students. But the reason that they were big with kids was, when I was a kid, my dad wasn't interested in what I was reading, he didn't look over my shoulder. I didn't wear a helmet when I rode a bicycle, okay? It was called Darwinism; if I stuck my finger in a plug... there were no things on the edges of tables, there was no cover on the television to stop me knocking my head into. But we live in a different day and age.

So now you progress in time, and what was edgy back then is quaint today, and I would argue that our books aren't necessarily more or less edgy than they were back in Stan's era, but the one thing I would argue that Stan did back in his day was that he never talked down to the reader, even knowing that kids were reading them. So, with respect to Marvel Adventures, they're not "edgy," but they're not stupid. And I think what Paul's going to bring is more of a cohesiveness between all the titles, whilst continuing the "told-in-one," which is, I think, a better approach for keeping kids interested. It's hard work to keep doing told-in-ones while keeping up a linear continuity, but now that I'm working in the animation world, it's something that I see in a lot of animated shows, where each episode is a kind of told-in-one episode, but there's a larger continuity that you see at the end of each season.
You're very involved with animation, but how involved are you in the films these days?

In the films, I'm part of something called the Marvel Creative Committee, and it's - I never count, but I think it's five or six of us, we are involved in every early aspect of the movie, from the proposal of what the story's going to be, to the elongated beat sheet, to the screenplays, we sit there and we just take it apart to ensure that our movies are... They can never be the same as what's on the comic page, but that the experience someone gets is the same as what they get when they pick up that comic.

Could you, or have you, completely derailed something at a late stage?

Oh, yeah. That's our job. When we're derailing, we bring it up and say, 'Okay guys, we're derailing here.' The big difference between doing a motion picture and doing a comic book is, putting out a comic book costs us thousands of dollars...

It's one thing to fail with a comic, and another to fail with a movie.

Yeah, and by the way, if I fail with that one issue, I can fix it in three months. There'll be another issue. These movies are forever, and you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on them. So we're taking a very careful creative approach. And the beauty of things is, when we're sitting in these meetings, we're not just sitting there and going 'We need an Iron Man floating vehicle because we need a toy here.' That's not the approach we take at all. We're all about story, and character, and driving the movie forward, and driving it towards the inevitable Avengers movie.

Do you, through working on the movies, see the comics in a new way? As in, you see something and think, we should be doing it this way in the comics?

I think that the beauty of this whole thing, and I hate to bring up a stupid corporate word like "synergy," but there really is a lot of that going on. I was up at Marvel Studios three weeks ago, and I got to see some of the designs for Asgard [from Thor], and I sat there and I turned to Dan Buckley, our publisher, and Kevin Feige [Marvel Studios president] and said, 'Two years from now, this will completely affect the way that artists render Asgard.' Because it is completely unlike anything I've ever seen, but still has that essence of the [Thor co-creator, Jack] Kirby stuff that we all fell in love with. So I think that there's always that give and take. And, as we work on stuff in publishing, I'll send stuff to Kevin Feige, just preliminary stuff, pitches that we have on books that I think might make interesting sideline stories for a Marvel movie some day, so there's a lot of give and take, there's a lot of transparency right now.

I was thinking of something like Iron Man where the movie came out and generates a lot of interest, at the same time as Matt Fraction comes up with The Invincible Iron Man, and the portrayal is so close, and it's the best portrayal of the character in comics for years.

And because of that, Matt was just flown out to consult on Iron Man as well. So he sat down with Jon Favreau and Kevin Feige to discuss Iron Man 2, the ideas and concepts behind the second movie. So, yeah, all of that stuff is involved. The only thing that I can compare it to, I remember reading a great article on Pixar, and the way that Pixar makes their movies and I remember thinking, that's the way that we do it. In a perfect world, we'll continue to do that, and - especially being a fledgling studio - I think it's going to work. From what I've been seeing in the screenplays and what I've seen of the pitches... I mean, Iron Man 2 is gonna be a lot of fun. And those guys are having a good time making it, too. But something like Thor... I mean, this has an opportunity to be unlike any movie... There're grandiose elements that're akin to something like Lord of The Rings, but it's not really anything like that, and it's not going to look anything like that.

There's a lot of speculation about what Thor is going to be like. Any and every new piece of news drives the internet wild.

I love that stuff.

Does it drive you mad, do you think "I know what's really coming up, and you're all getting upset over nothing"?

I live for it, and anytime I can fan it, I will gladly fan it.

All that stuff is good. I really do believe that any of that stuff is good. Fans are passionate. If there's no chatter out there, I'm gonna get nervous. If the chatter's bad, you know that they care. All I have to do, and all Marvel Studios has to do, is deliver. They have to deliver the goods. Because if they don't deliver the goods and we have the bad chatter, then, okay. We had it coming. But speculation is just speculation, it's not going to hurt. It drives interest. Everybody that's chattering, they're going to pay to see it. They're going to pay to see it.

Is the same thinking what drives Marvel's internet activity? The company and creators are very active on social networking, you're all about Twitter, are you trying to push that kind of chatter?

To me, it's about community, and letting people see how the gears work. Even if they get rusty and something crush people between them, you know. It's letting people behind the curtain, and that's something that, when I was a kid reading Stan's Soapbox [A regular column where Stan Lee wrote about Marvel in the Marvel books of the 1960s and 70s]... I always say that Stan was the first mutant, he didn't know he was a mutant, but he did have a magical power, and that was, in a hundred words or less he would write that soap opera and me, reading it, would get to find out all about Marvel and I would feel like he was talking to me. Not to the kid over my shoulder, meanwhile, that kid's feeling the exact same thing. And that was Stan's magical power, a short burst of dialogue that just brought you into that world. I don't have that power. But I got the internet.

I can talk until the cows come home because I love the stuff that we do, and I love what I do for a living. Taking over as editor in chief, one of the things I wanted to do, I really felt that inclusiveness was missing. Including the rivalry with Marvel and DC. There was sort of a passive and boring détente, especially after [joint Marvel/DC project] Amalgam. I looked at it, and I thought, this sucks for business. You need that passion -

But fans take that rivalry much more seriously than you do. I mean, everyone at the two companies get along -

We do, everyone gets along for the most part, but the rivalry does very well. It's funny, but when I went to see McCartney on the street in front of the Letterman theater, the DC offices were right behind me. [DC art director and editor] Mark Chiarello sends me a text saying, dude, I see you, come on up, come on up and join us. And I'm like, I got front row! As much as I want to be with you, I'm here! I have great friends up there, and all this stuff is just poking at each other, and I think it's great for business. It's great to get fans riled up, get them passionate about something. Even if they don't buy a Marvel comic because they hate me, or they hate us, they're buying their team, you know?

I'm a New York Mets fan, and I have a daughter, and I've told my wife, I said 'Look, I'm a pretty liberal-minded guy. My daughter can, she can bring home an axe murderer. She can bring home Jeffrey Dahmer or something, when she's sixteen, and that won't be as bad as if she brings home a guy who's a Yankees fan.' That's what we're talking about here. It's that kind of thing. If fandom feels something, that's great. We're keeping them engaged in our books, DC's keeping them engaged, and it's our job to get the guys who're only reading DC to come over to Marvel. It's their job to pull our guys away from us. And by doing that, you raise the level of competition between the companies. And that was the hope, let's get paste the détente, let's get past the niceness, let's start competing. Let's do Coke and Pepsi and get into it. And I think it's been healthy for the industry.

But this goes back to the original question, and the original answer, which is how Stan made people feel. And I think, as a company, we've adopted a lot of that. I learned very quickly that the dumber the thing I said online, the more hits we got, and ultimately, the viral message will get carried by the fans who're irate about it. So if someone is pissed off at me because I said something ridiculously stupid about a character, they would then go to Bendis' board, or John Byrne's board, or all these other message boards, and say 'Do you believe what this jack-ass just said?' Now, all of a sudden, something dumb that I've said - "Dead is dead," [An oft-mis-quoted line attributed to Quesada by fans, saying that if a character died in a Marvel comic they would never be seen again] - is everywhere. It's not necessarily the quote, but it's everywhere. I'll take it, you're promoting my name, you're promoting our policies, you're promoting Marvel. So, I did learn to play with the internet in that fashion. And that's always fun to do, to say, 'Okay, what can I say today that will piss people off?'

You're just poking people with the internet as your stick.

It's fun. Look, you and I are having this conversation, and you can see that my tongue is firmly in my cheek, when you type it out, a lot of people don't see that. But it's all in good fun. You'll know when I'm deadly serious about something. It's comic books I'm deadly serious about, outside of putting out a good story, there's little else I'm deadly serious about.

Who is the one character that, for people, who don't really read comics that they should pay attention to in the next year?

I really do think, before Iron Man [the movie] hit... You know, Spider-Man, the X-Men and Wolverine are pretty recognizable, and were pretty recognizable before the first movies ever hit. Iron Man was a complete challenge to us because, not only was the character not really well known, but we were a brand new fledgling movie company, and it was a pretty big risk. So we put a lot of our time and effort into making Iron Man not only a popular character in comics, but we went out there and put out viral marketing and CGI animation on websites, and I think we did a pretty good job. I mean, Iron Man is a pretty damn recognizable character [now]. I'm not gonna say that he's at Spider-Man level, but he's pretty damn close. And now, as predictable as this answer may be, we're doing the same with Thor.

And Thor offers even more unique challenges at this point. I mean, you've got mythology and all these different kind of things. So how are you going to produce a Thor movie, but also a Thor that is uniquely Marvel, wholly unique to the idea of Norse mythology to the people who know Norse mythology. How do you make it interesting, and how do you tie it into the Iron Man movie and the upcoming Avengers. We've got a pretty intense plan around Thor, including the upcoming Thor (comic creator) team, who will take on [the series] sometime after our final third act soon.

Will they be announced here?

Not here. There won't be any post-JMS team announced here, but there will be some Thor news coming up within the next few months. I think fans will really, really, love the news.

But the focus right now is Iron Man, Thor - If you're not a Thor fan, you're gonna want to start picking up the books - and then focus, while it's kind of on Cap right now, it's going to intensify on Captain America as we get closer to that movie.

What happens after the Avengers movie?

We've been talking about things. This is really a question for Kevin Feige, and I don't want to step on his toes, but we've had some discussions, there's a lot of discussion and strategizing about the future of Marvel Studios... We have to [look beyond that]. We don't stop being in business after the Avengers movie.

What's the one thing you want to do, and haven't done, at Marvel?

[Deep breath] Wow. The one thing I want to do at Marvel?

Do you even think like that, or are you too focused on the day-to-day?

I'll tell you, I no longer think like that, because the beauty of my job is that I get thrown so many different things, no day is the same for me. For example, now being chief creative officer of animation. I did not see that coming. I didn't lobby for that position, I was just helping with animation and got, you know, a promotion to that position. Which is great, it's certainly going to be an education, it's a world that I'm not familiar with.

Does that mean you're going to step back slightly from the comics?

No. I also have the chief creative officer of publishing title, but I don't use it because it just makes the title look like a resume, and it looks ridiculous. But I get a lot of things thrown at me.

I can tell you that when I got started in comics, my one goal, my one aspiration was Watchmen. I got back into comics with Watchmen and through Dark Knight, and my goal was, someday, I want to write and draw that. It's like, as a musician, I was a musician before I was in comics, and as a musician I was like, someday, I want to write and perform Sgt. Pepper. I want my Sgt. Pepper. That didn't work out.

But even in comics, no-one's ever done Watchmen or Dark Knight again. They were Sgt. Pepper of their era. But it's what I aspire to. So, someone mentioned this to me, and it's hard for me to think about because I'm still doing what I do, but someone said that my Watchmen has been my ten years at Marvel, the body of work that we created here, and where we've taken the comic industry and Marvel as a company is one of those great stories. We were bankrupt, and now... we're not.

How does that feel, to have saved Marvel?

I was not in charge of saving Marvel, there was a team. I was part of a great team of guys and girls who've really put Marvel into a prominent position where we are now a movie studio, and that's a pretty spectacular feeling. When it's all said and done, I can look back and, I think the person that said it was right: That's my Watchmen. Nobody else can do that. Give it a shot. That's hopefully what I contributed, as well as drawing some funny books.

You're sticking around for awhile as editor in chief, right?

As long as it's fun. Because I was from the outside looking in, and I saw what Marvel went through when it was approaching bankruptcy, and I was walking through the halls when the pink slips went out, a terrible terrible time. And then, being at Marvel Knights when, overnight, 40-some people were let go. To this day, the attitude I adopted, and it's not something negative, but I never want to be surprised by walking into my office and seeing a pink slip there. I remember that look on people's faces, getting the pink slip and saying 'I can't believe it's me, I never thought this would happen to me.' Even in light of bankruptcy, the surprise was still shocking, it was daunting for people who must've sensed it was coming. And I don't even want that to happen to me. I never want to take any single day at Marvel for granted.

When I turn off the lights at night, I could come back here tomorrow and all my shit could be in boxes. It's the world of business and you can't take that for granted. So I've kind of adopted that, that little mantra for myself. But I've also said, at the same time, using a baseball analogy - My father got me into the sport, and used to bring up certain athletes like Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams who retired before their skills faded. He used to say, 'Whatever you do, don't wait until your skills diminish. Leave on top.' I feel the same way; I'm still contributing to the company, but the day I feel like I can't contribute to the company, I'll be the first one to walk into my publisher's office and say, 'You gotta let me go.' Or, 'put me somewhere else.' Because there are people in line for my job, I'm not gonna have this forever who need to have it, who need to guide us into a different era. I never want to be That Guy.

You seem very aware of the history and the legacy of the company, and the position.

It's something that, in the very beginning of my tenure, especially with [Brian Michael] Bendis and [Mark] Millar, who I have a lot of affection for, because they sort of came up with me and helped build a lot of this stuff. We used to sit around and talk about all the mistakes that were done before us. Certain people that took their careers for granted, certain people who went in a particular direction, and not because they were stupid or anything, but because they were the first ones to do it. And we were sitting around saying, alright, we don't want that. We want to avoid these things at all cost.

And it's funny, because I was having breakfast with Mark this morning, and I said, 'You know what's really scary? We're kind of at a place where I think, twenty years from now, there're gonna be three guys sitting around saying "We don't want to do what Quesada did, that was a huge mistake.' I try to, at least, look forward. People always ask me, what was your greatest success and greatest mistake at Marvel, and I always stumble on that answer, I never look backwards, I can't answer it.

Mixing police procedural with superheroes, Powers manages to explore the traditions (and cliches) of comic book superheroes in a way that Heroes has never quite accomplished (instead, the NBC drama mostly chooses to imitate them. Especially if they're old X-Men comics), and just may be the superpowered TV show you've always waited for.

Created in 2000 by Ultimate Spider-Man and Avengers writer Bendis - In fact, it was his first superhero comic - and Bulletproof Monk's Oeming, Powers follows two detectives in a police department that investigates homicides that are connected to superhumans... one of whom used to be a superhero himself. Mixing a variety of influences from both inside and outside comics — amongst them Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets, the novel that the TV series Homicide: Life On The Streets was based on — has allowed the series to stay fresh while changing subjects, scope and even publishers throughout its long history.

This isn't the series' first run-in with moving pictures; before news of the FX deal broke this weekend, the comic had been optioned by Sony Pictures as a potential movie for director Frank Oz, but things didn't exactly work out, as Bendis told MTV's Splash Page:

We had to sit through waves of screenplays that were just inappropriate for the product, and for fans of the book. There were whole drafts of the screenplay without [one of the series' two leads] Deena Pilgrim in them. They'd hand me the screenplay and go, "What's wrong with this?" and I'd go "He has no one to talk to!

This time around, that won't be a problem; Bendis himself is writing the script for the FX pilot:

I just handed in a draft to the network and we're getting our notes from the network as soon as [New York Comic Con] is over. So next week I'll get the notes, and as long as they don't involve sock puppets and some sort of orgy scene that I'm not interested in, then hopefully it will go in the right direction.

We're hopeful that there aren't any sock puppet notes because, handled correctly, Powers could be exactly what we wanted from Heroes all along, before we learned to settle for fast-moving schlock: A smart, funny, suspenseful drama that just happens to feature people able to do amazing things. Keep your fingers crossed.

NYCC: Brian Bendis Confirms Live-Action ‘Powers' TV Series On FX, Draft Completed [MTV Splash Page]

It was Marvel Comics creator Stan Lee who (aprochryphally) told his creators that Marvel Comics didn't give its fans change but the "illusion of change," something that today's Marvel is taking to heart. Here's editor in chief Joe Quesada talking about their universe post-Secret Invasion:

I'd say less "dangerous," more "unpredictable." At least I hope that's what I've been saying! It is a more dangerous place, because Osborn's in charge. But the truth of the matter is, we wanted it to be more unpredictable. Being unpredictable, I believe, leads to better storytelling. It's not clichéd storytelling. Again, we get or characters in a place that readers don't necessarily expect, get their backs against a wall, and see what happens. Look, at the end of the day, I think that's what leads to great storytelling—put your characters in a place that readers never saw coming.

Sounds exciting, right? After all, who doesn't want unpredictable stories and better storytelling? Only problem is, there was very little unpredictable about Secret Invasion; everything you'd expect to happen happened - including the "shocking death" of a beloved character and last minute reveal of a new status quo. For those unfamiliar with the series, Secret Invasion was a summer series of comics (a lot of comics) that acted as the culmination of five years of planning by Marvel's de facto head writer Brian Michael Bendis; familiar characters had been removed over the last five years and replaced by aliens, and now everything was coming to a head as the aliens declared war on Earth. To the surprise of no-one, the aliens lost; to the surprise of some, the status quo was pretty much reset at the end of the story to what it had been before.

There were two parallel WTF moments during the series, for different reasons, that ultimately show the lack of conviction in being "unpredictable" that the story had, both involving spaceships with unexpected occupants. The series opened with a crashed ship full of superhero duplicates who may or may not have been the real thing, meaning that the heroes everyone had been reading about for years had been alien fakes - except, of course, they weren't. After three issues of doing nothing with the idea, magic technology was invented that revealed that, yes, all of the ship's occupants were aliens and everything was exactly the way that you thought it was in the first place (Magic technology was a running theme of this series; things were scientifically impossible until they weren't: "We couldn't duplicate the abilities of the humans until I invented this new technology!" "We couldn't detect the aliens until I invented this new technology!" and so on; it was an ongoing cheat that, ultimately, neutered the impact of the story. The big death at the end of the series fell victim to it - the Wasp died because somehow she became a nuclear bomb through an injection or something? Maybe? It's hard to care about something when you don't even really understand what's happening). The same kind of letdown happened at the very end of the series when another spaceship opened up to reveal everyone who had been replaced by the aliens, completely healthy and awake, because the aliens needed to have the originals alive in order to impersonate them. Despite, you know, having impersonated two dead heroes earlier in the series (Captain Marvel and Captain America; they don't count because hey, why are you asking questions, okay?, as far as I can tell). In both cases, the creators - and I don't think that blame can really solely been laid at the feet of Bendis here; editors and, most likely, licensors would've been unhappy to have seen characters revealed to have been alien imposters had it happened - went with the safest, less interesting, more comforting to fans, route possible: It's okay, they said, things aren't really changing.

Publicly, of course, it's a different story. Here's Bendis talking about just how the end of the story - in which Iron Man's SHIELD Homeland Security-style organization is replaced by a new Homeland Security-style organization headed up by Norman Osborn - changes everything:

What I pitched was that what happens at the end was there's a power shift in the Marvel Universe that creates a situation where most of the heroes get to feel what it feels like to be Peter Parker all the time, that even when you win you lose. And it was interesting to me to have Luke Cage or Clint Barton or even Captain America feel like they know what Peter Parker always feels like. And everyone got charmed by that idea at Marvel.

See? That's entirely different from the status quo of the Marvel Universe for the past few years, where America's become a police state where the government controls the superheroes and Luke Cage or Clint Barton or even Captain America have been forced to work underground because they refused to sign up! Except, of course, it's not; the identity of the head of the superhero police may have changed - and even then, barely; Norman Osborn has been in charge of a government superhero task force since the end of 2006's Civil War series - but the dynamics of a world in which you do what you're told or you're unpopular ("Feared and hated by a world they've sworn to protect," as the X-Men used to be described as, and this particular paranoia about authority and popularity is so much more an X-Men outsider fantasy than a nerdy highschool Spider-Man one) are essentially the same.

By the end of Secret Invasion, all $400-or-so of it, nothing of note has really changed (One character died, yes, but another one was revealed to have never died at all, so even that's a wash). The status quo has been successfully maintained, as has the continuity of fans' collections the world over. And, most importantly for Marvel, a lot of comics have been sold by successfully baiting and switching readers with the possibility that everything they know is wrong... Nah, only joking.

According to Bendis, Peter isn't the only one who's been waiting a long time for this moment:

It took like a year to green light this issue, and I'm really happy about it. We're going to do a special Ultimate Spider-Man Annual that deals with the subject of Peter and MJ's burgeoning physical relationship... [I]t's a tough sell, because it's a touchy subject that has to be handled appropriately. But then I brought up that, I said, "You know, you've got another Ultimate book where the brother and sister are making out in front of Captain America! And I can't have a conversation about this?" I mean, come on. This is something that's real. This is something that happens.

The original reasoning behind the story came from Bendis' desire to take his enjoyable soap opera in a more realistic direction. Well, as realistic as you can get with a radioactive Spider-powered hero:

I think about my life when I was 15 or 16 a lot when I'm writing this book. And I had a girlfriend, and we were very, very close. And that was the question. Should we, or shouldn't we? And we also, because of where I was raised, we were all going to private Hebrew school, so there was a pretty hardcore sense of morality, but everybody was kind of fooling around anyway. So it was there. It is there... It seemed to me there's a point where if the book's set in real life, it's really about them being teenagers, and this should be addressed. It's part of life. You've seen Juno. And did you hear about these kids who might’ve had a pregnancy pact? I mean, it's part of life. Of course, I'm not going to do anything as insane as that. But it is part of the life we lead. So we're going to address it.

But how far will the addressing go? Obviously we're not going to see Peter and MJ have sex - that would have to be a Marvel MAX book - but will the two characters even end up in bed together, or will they decided against it after 40-odd pages of neurotic conversation? You'll find out when the Annual ships to stores in October.

Brian Bendis: Ultimate Spider-Man Annual and Changes [Newsarama]

Secret Invasion, Marvel's big crossover has a few things on its side. Being written by arguably Marvel's most popular writer Brian Michael Bendis - writer of New Avengers, Mighty Avengers and Ultimate Spider-Man - and the result of literally years of planning (Bendis started laying the groundwork for this storyline with his 2004 Avengers Disassembled story), the idea of aliens having infiltrated Earth by disguising themselves as superheroes and villains throughout history allows for any and all character development (including deaths - This week's second issue brought back a character by retconning the death into having happened to an undercover Skrull - to be undone without having to say that all those old stories never actually happened. They just happened to aliens, is all.

Final Crisis, on the other hand, comes somewhat out of left field. It's also the result of a long-running storyline, but one previously told in scattered titles - Who knew that Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle would be so important? - before ultimately spinning out of an unpopular, critically-panned, series (Countdown to Final Crisis). Its real problem, however, may be its lack of high concept hook; sure, it's what happens when "evil wins," but what does that actually mean?

Let's compare the two in what we do know:

The Pitch: Like all of Marvel's big event stories, Secret Invasion has a movie-conscious high concept sale: "Aliens are amongst us, trying to take over the world! Who do you trust?" Final Crisis, though, is pretty much relying on the creators' star power and a vague promise of putting favored heroes through bad times to sell itself. Evil may have won the cosmic struggle, but how does that concept translate into a story...?

Win: Secret Invasion

The Scale: Secret Invasion more or less takes over the entire Marvel line for its' run - The main series is eight monthly issues, but there are multiple spin-off titles (including Secret Invasion: Who Do You Trust, Secret Invasion: Front Line, Secret Invasion: X-Men, Secret Invasion: Spider-Man, Secret Invasion: Thor, Secret Invasion: Young Avengers/Runaways, Secret Invasion: Fantastic Four and Secret Invasion: Inhumans) as well as continuations of the storyline in issues of other series; by midway through its run, the storyline will have totaled 34 comics, and that's not counting all the stories that led up to the official launch. By contrast, Final Crisis is fairly self-contained; besides the seven-issue main series, there are seven spin-offs to bear the brand (The mini-series Final Crisis: Rogues' Revenge, Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds and Final Crisis: Revelations, and the one-off issues Final Crisis: Requiem, Final Crisis: Submit, Final Crisis: Resist and Final Crisis: Superman Beyond) with a minimum of crossover into regular series promised. By midway through Crisis' run, you'll have had to purchase nine comics - again, not counting all of the prologue books - to get the whole story.

Win: Depends on how you look at it; Secret Invasion is bigger, but Final Crisis is cheaper

The Creators: Invasion's Bendis and artist Lenil Yu have the fan-favorite thing sewn up, having previously worked together on New Avengers and having separate runs on books like Daredevil, Ultimate Spider-Man, Superman: Birthright and X-Men. However, they've probably not got the cache of Final Crisis' Grant Morrison and JG Jones. Having written acclaimed runs on JLA, X-Men, Animal Man, Doom Patrol, 52 and more personal projects like The Invisibles and We3, Morrison is easily one of the most highly-regarded comic writers around, and Jones' work on Wanted and the covers for 52 have made him a well-loved artist... and one who rarely does anything other than covers. Crisis will be his first sequential work in four years.

Win: Final Crisis

So, is it a tie? Can you play comics Switzerland and not choose a side? The final choice may simply come down to what kind of comics you like - Both series are, in their own way, dealing with cultural and political zeitgeists, so it may just come down to whether you want to see bad guy aliens in positions of power punching Iron Man, or the more metaphorical thrills of submission and subjugation of free will by a New, evil, God. The decision, as they used to say on Blind Date, is yours.

Final Crisis #1 [DC Comics]
Secret Invasion [Marvel Comics]

New Avengers and Secret Invasion writer Brian Michael Bendis was the first to reveal his involvement in the movie:

I totally wrote some of it!!!!

fuck! i've been holding that in for a year!!

last philly show, i get a mysterious late night call from marvel's kevin feige. he drops the scoop on me that sam jackson is coming in to do a cameo the next day but they have no dialogue.

kevin told me a couple of scenarios, something they were thinking of teasing and asked if i could do a solid and shoot some lines at him.

i sent about three pages of stuff. and they picked what worked for them and... ta daa!!

god damn!! that was so cool!

now, for the record, i'm not taking credit for the scene, i didn't think of the scene or get sam jackson to do that. but it was very cool to have a bit in the movie. it just was!!

and now i'm officially allowed to brag!

before the iron man movie was set to film but way into active pre production, i, and others, got a super secret call asking if we'd read the iron man script as it existed and come to the set for what is now referred to as the iron man brain trust. we were hand picked by jon f. and kevin f. for our unique takes on the character.

i was there, mark millar, axel, joe, tom and a few others who may or may not want me airing thier biz. we were flown out and brought to the stages which were the howard hughes spruce goose warehouses. (which in itself was awesome)

we were brought through the sets and the armor as they were being built and met the entire staff. all of which was filmed for the dvd. i have no idea if it will make it in. i half hope it doesn't. i wasn't my usual glam self.

we then sat in a big room with the marvel guys and jon f. all day and went through everything. we talked about everything. every inch of it. we looked at the spx houses demo reels audtioning for the job. and yes the best reel got the gig, obviously.

truth told. the script was in pretty damn good shape at this stage. but that wasn't the point. the point to me is a good idea is a good idea and a bad one is a bad one, doesn't matter where it came from. there is a lesson here.

irregardless of my participation... the fact that this brain trust was even created showed such intense respect for the character and it's legacy. a half hour into the meeting i was so happy to be in the room i was going to burst. comic creators not being treated like the second class porn peddlars we used to treated like but actual writers. it was very cool.

Just got word this is no longer a secret so prepare for some Braggy McBraggy. But as Bendy has written on his board this morning, we can finally talk about one of the coolest things to happen in our careers. Completely out of the blue, when the script was still in the early stages, we got a call from Jon Faverau to fly out to the beginnings of what would be the Iron Man set and do a little script consultancy work...

The brian-trust was all people involved in Iron Man to some extent at the time and hand-picked by Fav. This was me (because ULTIMATE Tony was a big influence on the film), BB, Joe Q, Tom Brevoort, Axel Alonso and Ultimates editor Ralph Macchio. We signed an official secrets thing after reading the script (which I swear I somehow managed not to ever tell anyone about) and got to work on this little baby over a couple of days. It was genuinely thrilling and we not only got a look around the caves which we were being built out there in the California desert, but also got to see some of the early ILM test stuff (a lot of which never made it to the finished movie).

That said, the most exciting part of the trip was rolling up our sleeves and getting into the plot. As Bendy said, Faverau didn't get us out there to just high-five the guy. He wanted us to be brutal and honest and I have to say I almost crossed the line when I talked 'em out of The Mandarin, who was in the original draft, and there was a terrible silence in the room for about ten seconds until Fav agreed and we all got talking about beefing up the Obadiah Stane/ Iron Monger thing (originally planned for the sequel). The whole crew were gracious, very respectful of Marvel East's input and— best part— paid us for our troubles. I've known for about sixteen months how great this movie was going to be and it was so thrilling to see the whole thing come to life up there at the London Premiere last week.

I Can't Hold It In Anymore... The Iron Man Epilogue, Part Two... The Iron Man Brain Trust [Jinxworld]
The Secret Iron Man Movie Brain Trust [Millarworld]
(Both via Lying In The Gutters [Comic Book Resources])

Famous names: Bendis and Bagley weren't the only people behind this project - Then-president of Marvel Bill Jemas was so involved that he plotted out the first seven issues of the serialized comic and acted as an additional editor on the series until he left the company.

Crunchy goodness: 5

Spinoffs/Sequels/Copycats: In addition to the entire Marvel "Ultimate" line of books (The Ultimates, Ultimate Iron Man, Ultimate X-Men, Ultimate Fantastic Four, et al), this particular series also was the starting point for the short-lived MTV animated version of the character, with Bendis as an executive producer and spawned its own video game.

Memorable product tie-in: Around the time of the first Tobey Maguire movie, all the merchandising for the character used Bagley's version of the wall-crawler, meaning that he probably got 10c for that pair of panties that your loved one got for you that you never wear.

Most painfully dated moment: Dig the Limp Bizkit-inspired designs for Peter Parker's "contemporary" schoolmates, yo.

Ultimate Spider-Man at Sequential Art