The internet is trying to kill me. It’s not the first time either, and it won’t be the last, but whatever. If I want my fill of gifs and yiffs, there are few other viable options so I sigh and I lean back in my chair, use my fingers to rub my temples and I exhale. All this before I muster up gumption and push forward into the masses and attempt to do what I think must be done.

The internet is trying to kill me, but goddammit, it’s not going to take me. Not today.

Fuck you.

This all started innocuously enough with a question. Each week, James and I ask for them (or if I’m being honest with myself, James asks for them while I forget) and the readers cough them up through twitter and through e-mail. We compile those questions and answer them in a feature for the site called UM, ACTUALLY where we give terrible and at times combative answers to simple questions. Sometimes, a few of the questions trick James into writing something more akin to a full essay. By and large, I’ve been able to avoid this fate.

You can probably understand where this is going.

Last week, Scott C. Bourgeois (@scottybomb on twitter) asked us what Marvel’s version of a New 52 would look like. Specifically, he asked us what titles would be in the line - nothing more, nothing less. Now being a guy who thinks he knows a thing or two about a thing or two, I dove into the question with relish, immediately assembling a line of books that I would like to read. It was pretty easy until I got near the end of the list. Left with a batch of blank spots on the roster, I began to think about the project a little too much. Instead of deftly hopping from name to name, I was dwelling, and as I dwelled, madness set in.

First, I chastised myself for being so pigheaded. At the start, I was aiming for pure Sorkin - an idealized list of titles that I believed in my heart of hearts deserved to be on the schedule. Six Avengers books? Five X-Men? Poppycock. In my line of books, there would be variety. Every corner of the universe would be touched, and long silent characters would once again be brought to the fore. It was a nice little list, but in the back of my brain I knew it wouldn’t work. There were too many niche books, and not enough tentpoles. So I scrapped the list and began again, trying to keep as many babies as I could while providing enough mass incentive to bring people into the comic stores every week… and then things fell apart again.

I realized that I had not only been building a line of books, but I had been attaching creators to those books - people I believed would be perfect for the proposed books. It ended with a large handful of my favourites writing an entirely new Marvel universe, each handling more comics than humanly possible. I should point out once more, that this is madness. I’m just a guy who has enough money to own a website, and I’m crafting a fictitious list of titles - one that I was asked to write by a person who expected to read the answer within minutes, and discard it in favour of his own opinions. That’s not a slight, by the way. There’s not a person anywhere on the internet who doesn’t secretly judge a list when they read it and make amendments in their head before (hopefully) getting on with their lives. But apparently, I wanted a semblance of realism. I wanted this list to be a thing of… not beauty, but reality. As I write this now, I realize I wanted, more than anything else in the world, to prove that I was a guy who knew a thing or two about a thing or two so bad, I would make my fake list as real as possible, matching monetary and editorial demands in stride. I wanted people to read the list and slow clap at its brilliance. “No, it’s not what I would like but by god, it’s a thing that would work,” I would hear people say.

What utter horseshit.

…

…Uhhh, anyway, stark realization behind, my process changed wildly. What was once a quick lark, jumping from book to book became an attempt at actually, honest-to-god comic book editing as I understood the process. Of course, the biggest problem with trying that is quite simple: I know shit all about what it takes to be a real comic book editor at the big two. I know what I would try and do at the companies. I know what books I would try and champion, and what creators I would try to put on books, but what of all the other considerations? What other things would I have to try and think about when trying to create this list? What are the things we take for granted when we read the comics, safe and sound in our comfortable chairs? I hit the internet looking for ways to find out, and I came up with a few personal guidelines for myself. Much of this was gleaned from old posts Tom Brevoort made to his Marvel blog in years past. Other things are just bits of information I’ve heard over the years as to what editing generally entails. What follows is a grotesque approximation of what I think an editor does, applied towards the conceit of making a New 52 for Marvel. Suffice to say, even if I’m remotely correct, they have to deal with a lot more shit than we give them credit for, and I don’t think I would ever, ever actually want to be in their shoes.

Oh, and one more thing, briefly: some of this willfully resembles the machinations for Marvel NOW!, albeit with a few personal flourishes thrown in. Reason being, I think that Marvel NOW! is what Marvel is doing as their own version of a New 52 - and the vast majority of their moves in that direction, I agree with wholeheartedly. (Also, it allows me to rely on the crutches of ideas they’ve already come up with, rather than disregarding good ideas whole-cloth for the sake of an experiment.) Onwards.

How to Make Comics, By Someone Who Doesn’t

Editing Marvel’s New 52

The edict forms without a master, starting as mutters and thoughts from various members of editorial before swooping through the creative types, finally getting traction when the editor-in-chief decides to make it so. In response and reaction to last year’s big change made across the aisle, Marvel will be changing their line completely. They will be formulating a New 52 of their own devising and rolling it out in a few months time.

Obviously, the broad strokes will need to be addressed first. We have to look at what DC did, and what it accomplished, and ask ourselves what we could learn from it all. From there, we need to determine how those lessons learned best apply to the Marvel approach to character work and marketing. For instance, do we really want to launch all of the titles at once? Even disregarding the tremendous creative push that would entail, it makes for quite the marketing problem. On the one hand, you will have a giant splashy launch, which should lift every book from their former numbers across the board. On the other hand, several months into the line, you have no fresh product to promote while your creative teams are still working themselves out. Each and every one of them is building up from scratch, and that takes time. Sometimes this will work, sometimes this will not, and when you’re launching 52 books all in one fell swoop, the ones that won’t are bound to fall and fall fast.

Also: with all of our resources tied into this launch, what back up plans do we have? What if a writer or artist fails to deliver on deadline? Hell, what if they fail to deliver in general given the time crunch and various other pressures. And what happens to our books as we lead up to this big change? Many books will need to be gearing down while teams simultaneously gear up for the big push. Some writers will need to be removed from books early in order to put them in place for the new things. Most of the artists will need to disappear entirely as we mine from the lower tier so that they can get a start on designs for characters they haven’t drawn before. Then, of course, they will need to start drawing. Wouldn’t it be better to spread the releases out a little? You lose the momentous splash, but you gain a lot of continuous momentum, as titles can close out on their own terms, at their own paces (with a few speedy conclusions here and there, no doubt). Then, with the rolling releases, you can still find something big to market every month, leading up to the period immediately after all the boats are launched, when the first round of books is ready to get their second push, into their second big storyline or what-have-you. Of course, we’ll have to run this by marketing (run all of this by marketing) and get budgets for what we can launch and when. After all, each month, there’s a finite amount of marketing dollars, and we’re going to have to make sure we have to have enough to go around, properly balance the big launches with the smaller ones, so the smaller books don’t get washed away in the tide… while we still ensure that our bigger books launch strong enough to carry things forward. That’s going to be quite a delicate balance.

So, with the vague shape of the launch hammered out, it’s time to think in specifics. We need to put some things up on the board, get a picture as to what books we’ll want, and what others we might want. We’ll have to consider what media will be hitting the stands soon, as well as what would be the best time to launch certain books. For instance, even if we know and Ant Man movie will be coming out in the next few years, do we want to try and launch a book now in order to have product on the stands, or do we want to hold back until the movie hits for a series to really take root? Right now, it’s iffy as to how long an Ant Man series would last, and we don’t want to have to cancel the series in order to bring it back up a short time later - for secondary characters, you generally only get one good chance to launch before all following launches debut to middling numbers, a fanbase already burned by a disappearing series, or just flat out no longer in the mood to read further adventures for a while. We’ll have to think about that, for sure.

Whatever, let’s just start by putting up some sure fire books on the board - things that will always remain on the publishing schedule, even given the direst of straits.

• AVENGERS
• X-MEN
• CAPTAIN AMERICA
• IRON MAN
• HULK
• THOR
• SPIDER-MAN
• DAREDEVIL
• FANTASTIC FOUR
• WOLVERINE

TITLE COUNT: 10

These are the ten sure-fire wins, guaranteed to launch and launch well enough for a years worth of stories, given a worst case scenario. We’re obviously not aiming for the worst case, but regardless. Everything else is up for discussion, but the safe bet, the one that will get us a bit more stability through the line, would be to start by expanding these franchises. Obviously, we’ll key onto things that have brought us success before, and are bringing us success now. Cash in on the brand name and the cache of certain characters and start from there.

So, AVENGERS splits wide into the main title, NEW AVENGERS, YOUNG AVENGERS, and an Avengers book born out of the current status quo - something tethered to now, rather than what we’ve done before. A meshing of the X-Men and the Avengers into one team really suits the climate of where the universe will be, with the bonus side affect of having our two biggest teams meshed into one. Marketing is all over this one, for obvious reasons. We’ll call it UNCANNY AVENGERS.

TITLE COUNT: 13

Keeping in the AVENGERS family, let’s look at what we can do with some of the other characters in the line. As always, we have our big three - and given the movie climate, we can also lump in HULK and throw in BLACK WIDOW and HAWKEYE as well. All of these characters should have ongoings right now, or at least, places in this new line up. We can discuss creative teams later, especially on BLACK WIDOW and HAWKEYE, as they are harder sales and will need pretty much perfect pitches - and even THEN, there are no guarantees…

Anyway, with the foundation of movie production as a base, we can easily bring out a few more books. WINTER SOLDIER is a no brainer, what with the upcoming CAPTAIN AMERICA sequel featuring the character heavily. We can add in JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY, which is a book that has seen success as of late - plus it would do good to have a lot of THOR content out, featuring other characters, when the second movie comes out.

TITLE COUNT: 17

Up next, X-MEN. We’ll definitely want to play up some new ideas, given the shift coming in the next few months, while not leaving behind anything that’s working. We’ll definitely want an X-MEN book, plain and simple, sans adjectives, and keep UNCANNY going. It’s a recognizable name that all X-fans can identify with. WOLVERINE AND THE X-MEN will continue, what with its continuing success, as will an X-FORCE title. Obviously, we’ll keep WOLVERINE going as well - but the question is, do we spin off a second Wolverine book, or keep single character books to the one title for a while… give a spotlight on the one area and allowing some other books or characters to get some play in the open slots? Let’s face it, not all of the smaller books will make it far, so we’ll need to have some back pocket ongoings that are surefire hits in order to keep the new line’s momentum. Let’s keep Wolvie at one book for now. Also, goes without saying, DEADPOOL continues, given its still solid sales. Keep it to one title, lesson learned, etc etc.

TITLE COUNT: 21

Now finally, to the NEW YORK group. The FANTASTIC FOUR has been doing really well for us as of late, with Jonathan Hickman strengthening sales to the point where the team can carry two books. We would like to continue this forward by bringing FF along as well, although do we run with the same premise, or do something different with the book? With a secondary book, sales might stagnate if we try the same thing. In the same token, we can destroy goodwill if we change things too much, or at all. Something to discuss with the incoming writer.

DAREDEVIL is a given, though there’s nothing really to spin out from there. We can add PUNISHER to the line - PUNISHER still sells quite consistently for us and will probably do so continuing forward with minimal changes.

Now as for SPIDER-MAN, we keep AMAZING, obviously. It’s the flagship, and has always remained a constant. With this launch, we probably want to keep down to the one SPIDER-MAN title, for the reasons we’ve already spoken of. But is there any other books we can attempt to spin off at the time? Do we keep VENOM or SCARLET SPIDER, or do we try for something different? Another attempt at SPIDER-WOMAN or SPIDER-GIRL? We’ll have to discuss this, but we can probably manage at least THREE titles coming out of the SPIDER-OFFICE, with the potential for another Peter Parker helmed book in the future.

TITLE COUNT: 25

So our count so far is 25… and a few of those are just hypothetical. We can talk with the current talent, and get their thoughts on what they would like to pitch from, and ask them for pitches. Similarly, we’ll be asking every editorial office what they would like to try and pitch for this new initiative. There’s still a lot of books that can be put up on the board, but we’ll need the right pitches for everything. Once we get a better idea of things, we can start nailing down the rest of the line.

For day one, that’s good. Going forward into future parts of this series, we’re going to dive into the back catalogue and see what characters or concepts might be good to use for this new hypothetical line. This will de done in tandem with making sure there are great creative teams to go onto those books. After all, the bigger characters will sell regardless (although much care should still be taken with the creative teams) but if something doesn’t quite line up with the creative team of a small book, then things will go swiftly downhill from there. There needs to be a solid pitch and a solid team ready to write every book in the line. I’ve got my ideas, but in addition to that, I would like to know what you think.

What else should be part of the line? And of the books offered, do you have any dream creators that you’d like to see writing certain books? Pitch them in the comments below. I would honestly like your opinions. I know I have the rest of the books I’d like planned out, but there’s another very important part of editing: it’s not done in a vacuum. You have to and should take ideas from all sides, and end up going with your gut. I could very well cut some of the books I have in mind for some of yours. The results will play out on the site in the next few coming days, complete with running fake editorial commentary. Because I honestly can’t stop myself.

Hop to it, internet. Let’s see what you’re made of.