Marvel Comics Exec Editor Says It’s “Impossible” For Every Big Crossover Event “To Matter And Be Consequential”
Though such line-wide crossovers are regularly marketed as bringing major shake-ups to their respective canons, Marvel Comics executive editor Tom Brevoort says that fans who expect each and every ‘big event’ to have genuine, forward-facing consequences are asking for the “impossible”.
Brevoort, who also currently serves as the group editor for the publisher’s X-Men line, spoke to such fan expectations during a recent sit-down with AIPT Comics‘ Chris Hassan, itself held as part of the outlet’s regular X-Men Monday interview series and centered on the upcoming Shadows of Tomorrow publishing initiative, which will center on the foundation of the new Graymatter Lane academy as “a central hub for mutant interaction”.
With the initiative set to be his second since his 2024 appointment as X-office overseer, Brevoort was at one point asked as to what “learnings” (a recently-adopted, corporate synonym for ‘lessons’), if any, he had learned from his post-Krakoa From the Ashes push and chosen to apply to Shadows of Tomorrow.
Looking back on his past year with the merry band of mutants, the editor admitted, “Well, I think there’s nothing but learnings [emphasis his]. And it’s not even just learnings about the X-Men — it’s also learnings about the current state of the industry, what people are responding to, what they like, and what they think.”
“I’ve felt from the beginning, and I’m kind of continuing to push in this direction, that the best sort of X-line is an X-line where most of the books function relatively independently and have their own particular direction, ethos, character situations, conflicts, and whatnot, rather than everything kind of being facets of one thing. We do that more or less successfully, and some books are better at it than others.
“Naturally, you’re going to get that no matter what approach you try to get to, but that certainly has seemed, at least for some X-readers, as not feeling good to them. They like a little more connectivity. So, trying to rightsize that and find the balance of that is an ongoing process. And I don’t know that there’s ever any one answer, because as soon as you get something the way one group of fans likes it, another group of fans is unhappy because it’s not the way they prefer it.”
Brevoort then told his host that this sentiment split had become readily apparent to him with the recently-wrapped and divisive Age of Revelation, which put most of the current Earth-616 continuity on pause and temporarily replaced them with various mini-series set within a potential future where Doug Ramsey took his new mantle as the Heir of Apocalypse a little too seriously.
In this case, he said, the divide had grown between fans who just wanted to enjoy the stand-alone story those who felt tge event should have more lasting effects than just ‘creating a new alternate timeline that may or may not ever be revisited again sometime in the future’, the latter of whom Brevoort argued had set themselves up for disappointment by adopting such unrealistic expectations.
“Now that we’ve gotten to the other side of the Age of Revelation and I’ve seen a bunch of the reaction, I think there’s a lot that can be taken from that in terms of event comics. With events, there are always kind of two schools of thought, and the two schools of thought tend to boil down to, ‘Oh boy, there’s a big event. I want everything to fit together with LEGO-like precision and every single comic to be lockstep with every other comic, and every event to matter and be consequential to every other event.’ And that’s just an impossible task. There’s no event that’s ever been done that way. Some of them have been more that way, and some have been less.”
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“And on the flip side of that, there are people who go, “Oh my god, there’s an event, I just want to read my comic. Why are you getting in the way of me reading my comic by making me pay attention to all these other comics?” So going into the Age of Revelation, we sort of very specifically said, for the most part, we want the books to be able to do the business of their individual books. Some were more tethered to where the story was going and the climax, and others were less tethered. That was, almost across the line, an individual choice on the part of the creators who were working toward that. And Jed MacKay, in writing the event’s finale, had to write an ending that served his story. That was more important than making sure absolutely every tie-in book had some follow-up in the finale.
“That having been said, I can understand readers who feel like they read three issues of X-Vengers, and then there was nothing for them in the Finale issue. But I feel like even going back to the source material of the Age of Apocalypse, as a reader and editor of the day, not all of those projects were super essential to the wrap-up in Age of Apocalypse Omega. The advantage that it had was there were fewer tie-in series, so it was maybe easier to get a greater percentage with some tangible impact than what we ended up doing.
“So, again, these are all kinds of walkaway learning things. In terms of launching stuff in Shadows of Tomorrow and moving ahead, I want to go forward with stories we think have merit and value to them. We want stories and characters where there seems to be a hunger or an audience for, and stories and characters being put forward for some demographic that’s not otherwise being served. You know, a different sort of book for every potential reader.
“But that, by definition, kind of means I don’t expect anybody to read every X-book. So inevitably, that means you kind of have to start to fragment the line a little bit more and go, “OK, this book is going to tell a story about Rogue — it’s a Rogue limited series. Will it have an impact on Rogue in Uncanny X-Men? Yes, in the global sense it’s the same character, and there may be things that happened there that Gail Simone, the writer of Uncanny X-Men, wants to carry forward and pick up on. Or it will impact in that it’s the same character, and it becomes part of her backstory and history as you go forward, and future creators can draw upon it as a source of story fodder.”
Putting a final stamp on his reflection, Brevoort ultimately asserted, “But I’ve worked too long and too hard to try to make all pieces fit together to no great return in other places to know that it’s kind of a sucker’s game.”
“I would rather there are two or three titles that clump together and are really a network in such a way. But it’s not achievable to ask the audience to devote that much time and money, particularly to buying a whole line of books in the way that maybe was more possible in 1990 when the buy-in was cheaper.”
Having kicked off with last week’s X-Men Vol. 7 #23 and Wolverine Vol. 8 #14, the X-Men’s Shadows of Tomorrow initiative is now officially underway, with its next entry, Uncanny X-Men Vol. 6 #22, set to hit shelves this Wednesday.
