Marvel Comics Exec Editor Defends Continued Opposition To Spider-Man And Mary-Jane’s Marriage: “You Seriously Think That If There Was An Easy Way To Make Sales Skyrocket, I Wouldn’t Do It?”
The web of discourse surrounding the publisher’s ongoing refusal to reunite Spider-Man and Mary-Jane continues to grow, and Marvel Comics Executive Editor Tom Brevoort is standing by his belief that despite fan sentiment, there is no inherent advantage to bringing them back together in the mainstream Earth-616 continuity.
As previously reported, Brevoort kicked off this latest Spider-Marriage conversation while answering fan questions for the latest issue of his weekly Man With A Hat Substack blog, as published on March 9th.
Asked as to his thoughts on the “recurring idea that the success of the new Ultimate Spider-Man (with a married Peter Parker) is an indication that the regular 616 Peter’s marriage to MJ should be reinstated, and that it is a fault of the editor(s) over there for not recognizing that and thus reaping similar sales success”, the Marvel Comics veteran asserted, “Yeah, I’ve been hearing from a couple of yahoos whose idea of a good time is to send us the same form letter about MJ and Paul every single day. But here’s the thing: I think the point of view that you’re talking about is simply incorrect.”
“First off, the difference in sales between Ultimate Spider-Man and Amazing Spider-Man is relatively slim,” he argued. “It’s not like Ultimate is doing twice or three times the business or anything. And secondly, I don’t think that the success of Ultimate at the moment is just down to Pete and MJ being married within it. I think it has a lot more to do with the quality of the work that Jonathan Hickman and Marco Checchetto are producing.”
“So I get that people who want Pete and MJ back together are of course going to point to that series, but the truth is that it doesn’t really make a convincing argument to me at all,” the editor concluded. “I’ve been around this particular sort of block too many times over the years to mistake the signals.”
Given the hot-button-nature of this issue, it came as no surprise that in the aftermath of his post’s publication, Brevoort found himself facing a wave of pushback from readers who were fed-up with the publisher’s continued insistence towards keeping the two apart.
While such complaints flooded out across the whole of social media, it was those that were posted to BlueSky, the editor’s platform of choice, that would elicit direct responses from Brevoort – beginning with a criticism that “all the information publicly available contradicts much of what he’s saying here, and back in my day, editors at least pretended to respect the “yahoos” who cared enough to write in and buy their books.”
“Let me ask you this, Fam: is Batman cratering?” the editor lashed out in turn. “Absolute Batman is consistently outselling it, right? Is Batman in the toilet? Do they need to bring Martha Wayne back to life in the main series? Seems crazy, right?”
“Martha Wayne is an element of AbBats that’s different from the regular book,” he explained of his argument. “So it’s analogous to Pete and MJ in USM. I don’t think it’s responsible for those sales either, but this is the sort of argument you guys are making. Correlation isn’t causality.”
It should be noted that despite Brevoort’s insistence, this comparison is completely disingenuous.
As explained by said fan, “Martha being alive wasn’t the accepted status quo for two decades, pitched by the original co-creator, and used front and center in all the marketing. The Spider-Man marriage though? It was then and is currently [as Ultimate Spider-Man heavily promoted itself on its featuring of a married Peter and MJ].”
Sadly, rather than admit that his argument was completely off base, Brevoort instead dismissed, “And now it hasn’t been the accepted status quo for two decades. Things change.”
“You state that its the quality of USM is what is driving sales, what exactly does that mean for the (lack of) quality for ASM?”, inquired a reader, to which the Marvel Comics higher-up fired back, “It means that your perception of the lack of quality of ASM isn’t shared by the readership as a whole.”
Responding to a reader who criticized, “ASM at the moment is only selling because its ASM. You give those stories from the last 2-3 years to any other IP that doesn’t have an established reputation and it wont even get views as fanfiction, the Marvel exec asserted, “Sorry, but that’s nonsense.”
“A book sells because people buy it, they buy it because they like it,” he said. “And especially after, what, 16 years there’s no momentum in the world that would keep a book ‘just selling because.'”
Pressed by yet another Spider-fan, “Convenient, anyone at Marvel can say a title is doing well, and they are not required to offer any proof. We do have the postal statements for the BND era and it shows obvious decline. If BND was the bestseller then, then Marvel across the board was in the pits,” Brevoort defiantly replied, “Jack, I’m in business, part of my job is to sell Marvel comics.”
“You seriously think that if there was an easy way to make sales skyrocket, I wouldn’t do it?,” the editor asked. “Or that I’m lying about information that I have access to and you certainly do not? At this point, why are we even talking?”
All, in all, whether Ultimate Spider-Man can keep its momentum into the next year and truly bury Amazing Spider-Man in sales, rather than just keeping just ahead of it, ultimately remains to be seen.
More About:Comic Books