Comic Book Talk

There was this weird thing where the book was selling, but it had dropped off in sales. From the initial first issue. As had most of Marvel’s books by that point, but this had dropped off fairly dramatically. It had gone from a fairy high first issue sale where they had multiple covers and it had dropped down 20% or 30% so they were concerned about it.



And they looked and they saw that the variant cover with MJ as Venom had sold the best of all the covers. So they wanted to suddenly have Mary Jane become Venom that was what they wanted to do for the book.



And I was like ‘What? That’s not the book I signed up for’ I had signed up for a book about parents raising a small kid and the focus was going to be on the family and the small kid.



And they started questioning while we were still writing and producing issue six the whole direction of the book. And I was not interested in changing the direction of the book so early in the process. You know I figured let’s give it a year or two. We’re not talking about a book that wasn’t selling well enough to continue. We’re talking about a book that wasn’t selling well enough to make everybody else feel like it was the number one title that it should be in their minds.



But Marvel as a whole was going through a sales slump so it was just a weird situation. And I felt the reaction was too reactive to the marketplace and then we got sucked up into the Venomverse storyline where everything had to be tied to Venom and I just didn’t want to have to keep changing storylines to respond to marketing ideas that to me were less important than just developing a good series that people would find and embrace hopefully on its own terms.



I felt the people I left were in a bad situation where the marketing end of things were pushing them in directions that editorially they probably didn’t want to go.



I think Nick (Lowe)’s interest was in doing a book about this family and that was the book we were going to do.



But I’m at the point now where I just want to write the stories that I want to write. I want to tell the stories that I can be invested in as much as anyone else.