This weekend in an interview with Tom Spurgeon, Ed Brubaker announced to the world that his Captain America run would soon be coming to an end like the life slipping out of the eyes of a hobo that you’ve trapped in an elaborate maze.
He might not have worded it like that, but you get the general sentiment, right?
Brubaker has been on Cap since the Avengers line was relaunched by Bendis as the New Avengers, and brought with him quite a new flavour for the series. In the preceding years, the book had bounced around from being written by the likes of Mark Waid and Robert Kirkman, and included a run that was scripted and drawn by Rob Liefeld. There was also a brief period of time (just post 9-11) when the Cap book focused on hunting down and killing terrorists which was a thing that happened once.
With his time on the book, Brubaker elevated the character and the series to new heights. At the time of the launch, he was more of the unknown quantity, Bendis already having made his bones writing the very popular Ultimate Spider-Man series as well as a highly acclaimed run on Daredevil. With Bendis helming New Avengers and some bright, fresh-faced kid named Warren Ellis writing Iron Man, Bru was always destined to struggle to get noticed unless his ideas for the book hit hard. And they did.
He brought back Bucky and turned him into a stunning and complex character. Infused the book with a darker pulp sensibility. Turned down the “superhero” notch and cranked hard on the “super-spy” flavour. And then he went and killed off the main character. After that, a “Captain America” didn’t appear in the book for some 10 issues before Bucky begrudgingly took on the role, which created a new engine for stories that had never been seen before.
Of course, after a period of time, Steve Rogers returned to the helm (you can play with the toys, as long as you put them back in place) and Bucky is now off in his own, super-slick spy series called Winter Soldier, which Bru says he will continue as long as Marvel (and the fans) will allow him.
When asked why he was stepping down from the book, his answer was two-fold. The first? He’d been writing the series for nearly eight whole years and the ideas were coming to an end. And the other? The new accelerated schedule that Marvel is putting the majority of their books on. From the interview:
Marvel is trying to do this thing now that with some of their better-selling books they want to get out more copies per year than 12. They want to get out 15 or 18 issues. Amazing Spider-Man‘s been doing more than one a month for a while now; someone I know does Uncanny X-Men or one of those books, and that comes out 18 times a year.
I couldn’t keep up with that schedule, honestly. I knew I was getting to the end of my run. I wanted to wrap up my run earlier. And [Marvel Senior Vice President Of Publishing]Tom [Brevoort] was like, “Well, you’re going to leave a bunch of plot lines dangling… do you want to go out like that? It’ll seem like you threw up your hands and said ‘I can’t keep up with this schedule.'” I was like, “No, I don’t want to go out that way.” So we brought in Cullen Bunn to write an arc with me. I gave him a list of a bunch of stuff. “Here’s all the dangling plot threads and here’s where we need them all to be by the time I get to my last issue.” And then we figured out a storyline together.
It’s strange. I did all these issues as an uninterrupted run. Then there’s four issues co-written by someone. Then there’s a last issue. [laughs] It’s a little odd.
He further stated that he had hand-picked Bunn (who is amazing… everyone is reading The Sixth Gun, right?) to write the penultimate issues with. As it stands, Bru’s last issue will probably hit in October, alongside a slew of other like-minded endings. Fraction will be drawing his Invincible Iron Man to a close, Bendis will be calling it a day on the Avengers line, and a smattering of other changes are all afoot, making the tail end of the year quite exciting, in terms of new projects, ideas and voices hitting Marvel’s line in the wake of Avengers vs. X-Men.
Bru has stated that when his run ends, he will not be picking up additional work-for-hire jobs, instead focusing on his creator owned ideas, such as Fatale over at Image. Cynically, this would be a statement of some kind, but Bru frames the decision as a creative one, and not a business one.
It was less of a decision and more just following my instincts, trying to make sure I’m only writing things I really want to write. I used to have a lot of ideas for superhero stories, and they scratched a real old-fashioned pulp writer itch for a long time. But the past few years, I’ve wanted more and more to just focus on my own projects, and most of my ideas have been for new things, or things outside comics. I remember just sitting there with my Cap notebook, trying to figure out what to do after the next arc was finished, and suddenly I just was like, “I think I’m done here” and it was this huge relief. I talked to Dan Buckley at Marvel, and told him what I was thinking, and he was really supportive of me, really great about it. I mean, I know I’m still going to be doing the Winter Soldier for a while, potentially a long while, but this feels like a major change, anyway.
We here at Comics! The Blog remain quite excited at what the future holds for further Brubaker projects. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to trap a vagrant.
