In a recent interview at CBR, Marvel VP & Executive Editor Tom Brevoort defended its approach to tie-ins for its events, by indicating that fandom sees DC and Marvel as teh same event approach wise. Tom goes on to say that DC has a different approach and do so by indicating that his comments aren’t a slam at DC, but that DC has a different approach to events.
Slam or not? You decide.
Are Marvel events as self-contained as Tom indicates?
An excerpt:
So I can understand where, if you’re looking on a retailer’s shelf or thumbing through the Previews catalog, you’ll go “Oh my God, there’s a checklist for ‘Shadowland!’ There’s a checklist for ‘Chaos War!'” But that’s really all about “Here are these books that are connected to the central spine of the story,” like with ‘Siege’ or ‘Secret Invasion’ or ‘Civil War’. With all these events, we really do strive to illustrate that if you’re only buying the core title – “Chaos War” 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 or “Shadowland” 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 – you’ve got a beginning, middle and end. You can understand it all and enjoy it all, and from there everything else is additive. “I wonder what the Fantastic Four are doing in this event. What’s Iron Man’s take on this? That new Power Man sure looks interesting” – whatever the case may be. People can pick and choose and be selective. It’s not all-or-nothing; I don’t think we build events that way.
I think some of this is that we get tarred with the same brush as our competition. I really don’t want to make this seem like a slam at them, but certainly the last two events they did, “Blackest Night” and “Final Crisis”, seemed to have fairly central components of their core story taking place in comics that were not the central title. “Final Crisis” had the “Superman Beyond” chapters that were absolutely essential to figuring out what was going on at the end of that series. And “Blackest Night” had crucial plot elements being revealed in “Green Lantern.” And this isn’t a “Right or Wrong” thing. It’s just a different approach. That’s how they chose to set them up. That’s just not how we tend to do things over here. But I think the readers see that and have the same concern about our events: “If I buy into ‘Shadowland’ I’m going to get three chapters in and be forced to buy ‘Daredevil’ To understand the ending.”
