“Sometimes the best way to find like-minded souls is to sit across the
table from them and have a conversation. You'll soon realise that they have
the same vibe and that they want to do something fun with these characters.
For examaple, when [writer] Ed Brubaker came to Marvel I think he really
came into his own. He had been at DC for years but at Marvel he found
something, his muse, whatever you call it. Who would think that Ed Brubaker,
a crime noir writer, would be the guy to reinvent Captain America. This year
there are three or four new writers who I'm starting to get that tingling
feeling about. These are voices who are definitely going to be changing
things the way Mark Millar and Brian Michael Bendis did.”
The creators that have the high profiles at Marvel tend to be writers, which
is strange seeing as Quesada started out as an artist. “Marvel is definitely
more reader-centric. This is a product of the disaster that was the comics
boom. I can say this as an artist, but that whole catering to the collector
was really based upon the artist and the immediate impact that certain
artists had on certain books. But at the end of the day a lot of these books
weren’t really sort that you could read again. So today we are catering more
to readers, catering to the comic shop reader, the bookstore reader. But I
would also argue that there are artists out there that do have a significant
impact and put asses on seats — guys like Steve McNiven, Adam Kubert and
Bryan Hitch. But yes, for the most part I think fans are following writers
more than artists.”
You might assume that Quesada has loathing for the comic book collector, the
stereotypical geeky who puts his comics in sealed bags and stores them in
his parents' attic, but that is not the case. “Collectibility became a very
dirty word but the truth of the matter is that collecting is an aspect of
reading comics for many fans. Who among us buys a comic and just throws it
away after reading it? Chances are we hand them to someone else to read or
we put them away somewhere. Collectibility doesn't mean you’re putting them
for your college fund. When I was young I kept comics that had an emotional
value for me. I was saving them because I knew that some day later in my
life they would take me back to that earlier time and place. I still have
first three Spider-mans my father gave me that got me reading comic books.
They are torn up and worthless to anyone else. I think a lot of us do that
with comics.”
Saying that, Quesada has tried to make comics more accessible to those who
might never step into a comic book shop. Trade paperbacks — a run of comics
collected together and sold as one volume — are sold in most book stores and
have expanded Marvel's readership immensely. I ask Quesada why, if sales of
the trade paperbacks account for much of Marvel’s revenue, does the company
continue to publish comics.
“It used to be thought that if we collected a run of comics and put them in
convenient little packages, then the monthly comic would be gone,” he
replies. “My firm belief was that the [trade paperbacks] would attract a
different kind of consumer to the monthlies. The trade paperbacks in the
bookshops reach out to a whole new clientele that was unavailable to us in
the past. I like to refer to them as the casual comic book reader. The
habitual reader is the one who goes to the comic shop every Wednesday
because they know that that’s when the new books come in. That’s a very
unusual shopping pattern. I can’t think of anywhere that I have to be on a
particular day and time each week to pick up a product. Most people don’t
buy stuff like that — maybe music fans who are anxious to get a new album
when it first comes out, but that doesn’t happen every week. The collected
editions have allowed us to get to a type of reader who would like to be
habitual but just doesn’t have the energy or the need to go to the comic
store every Wednesday. So what these readers might do, if there are in a
Borders or Barnes and Noble and see volume three of Ultimate Spider-man, is
say to themselves, ‘Oh I have volumes one and two, I might get that.’ They
are still as addicted as the reader who visits the comic shop every week but
they just happen to buy the books in a different way.”
Quesada has also changed the formula of Marvel’s books to make them more
reader-friendly. “Before the advent of collected editions most comic books
had huge soap-operatic stories that went on and on and never really got
resolved until years later. We decided to change this to make sure that
whatever the story arc is, it gets resolved within four or five or six
issues, so that the person who spends money on the collected edition gets
the complete story. Of course there will always be a few dangling plotlines
left here and there and the odd cliffhanger.”
The new formula has not made Marvel’s books any less exciting or adventurous.
One of the biggest-selling series of Quesada’s tenure has been Civil War,
which pitted hero against hero over the introduction of a superhero
registration act and featured the sort of action you’d expect in a summer
blockbuster. Beneath the epic scrap, however, was a book that subtly
commented on post-9/11 America, the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq.
This was daring new territory as political discussion in comic books is a rare
thing. Marvel had in the past tackled issues such racism, abuse and drugs
but its approach was usually heavy handed. Plots that involve superheroes
trying to solve real-world problems, such as when Marvel’s finest banded
together to fight famine in Africa during the Eighties, always expose the
fairly ridiculous nature of the genre. Some fans reacted angrily to the
issues raised by Civil War and lobbied Marvel to sack the series’ writer,
Mark Millar, who had publicly criticised America's involvement in Iraq.
The petition didn’t work and Quesada is obviously proud of what the books
managed to do — provoke debate: “We used those stories as metaphors for what
was happening in the world. We didn’t take a political stance. On Civil War
what we wanted to do was pose the argument and let our readers think about
what was being said. And that’s exactly what happened. Our readers were
vehemently on one side or the other. It would be unfair for Marvel to take a
stance because we do have readers who think differently about the issues but
I think that it is fair game to talk about the issues in the context of our
fun superhero universe.”
Quesada is not one to shy away from controversial decisions nor is he
reluctant to defend himself. One story that had the fans raging across the
internet was Spider-man One More Day, in which Spider-man makes a deal with
the devil — Mephisto in the Marvel universe — to save his Aunt May from
death. The price was not his soul but his marriage to his soulmate Mary
Jane. No, this wasn’t a quickie divorce the devil was pressing for but a
complete removal of Spidey’s marriage from history. At the end of the book
Spider-man wakes up single, his aunt is alive and a la Dallas, it’s as if
his marriage had never happened (the book’s writer, J Michael Straczynski,
humorously has Spider-man reference the infamous plot device used by the
soap).
This end result was something Marvel chiefs had been trying to achieve for
years. The feeling was that Spider-man’s marriage to Mary Jane Watson in
1987 had limited the character. “Ultimately that was the sole goal of doing
One More Day. We knew from the beginning that this story would be a poisoned
chalice, that it would cause a tremendous amount of controversy. Since the
inception of Spider-man’s marriage, every editor-in-chief prior to me had
tried to or thought about undoing it but never had the story or wanted to
deal with the slings and arrows that would go with it.
"The marriage was something that had always bothered me, even as a
reader. For the longest time I had been thinking, boy I’d really like to
undo this, and once I got the story, I said, hey let’s do it, let’s pull off
the bandage. I knew that for a year or two we’d be dealing with online
chatter but realistically the story hasn’t hurt sales. If anything,
Spider-man is a more viable publishing entity today than ever before. But
that’s part of the job of being a caretaker of these characters and making
sure that they are there for the next generation.”
