I’ll let his words speak for him. This is from a recent CBR interview:
One thing we haven’t been able to talk about up to this point but which hit in San Diego is the news that the Brand New Day – I almost said experiment, but it’s really been years now. It’s not an experiment. It’s a publishing format…
[Marvel VP] Tom Brevoort: If it’s an experiment, it’s an experiment that worked.
That format is wrapping and you’re moving on to different Spider-Man stories. You’ve both had a strong hand in taking that character where he’s gone, from Axel’s editing through “One More Day” to Tom’s manifesto on a single Spider-Man that so many people have read. Now that this era is ending for the character, how do each of you view how that process went? Did you pull off what you wanted to with the character in the way that you wanted to?
Brevoort: Well, I think the short answer would be: I think it went great. Praise must be ladled onto Steve Wacker and his assistant Tom Brennan as well as all of the assorted Webheads-slash-Braintrust writers for figuring out how to produce this book three times a month for three solid years with nary a miss. Any time you try something new like this, there are events you can look back on and go, “Well, we could have been a little tighter there,” but that’s also true of a regular run on a regular series. Just the fact that the book came out like clockwork and at such a consistently high level of quality is a testament to the machine that Steve and his crew built. It only got better over time.
I think if you look at the very earliest issues, you can see a little bit of the growing pains just in how one story would flow into the next, but over time that process became smoother and smoother, to the point where it really feels to me that going back to #600, and maybe even further back to “American Son,” like that series ran one good, big story after the next. So I’m very happy with how it has all played out. Like anything else that’s been done for three years, it’s been an incredibly grueling book to have to manage that way, and very difficult on a month-by-month basis even to coordinate with events going on in the Marvel Universe because they need to be working so far out ahead. So we’re going to switch up the way we run that title. We’ll take “Amazing” down to twice a month with a single writer in Dan Slott. We’ll do some other things, like the “Osborn” series launching at the same time that Kelly DeConnick is writing and the “Spider-Girl” book Paul Tobin is writing. And there will probably be more ancillary Spidey books in the future. To me, this is just the natural change up that any line of titles goes through periodically, the same way Avengers just did or X-Men just did.
I know there are people out there who will look at this and go, “Finally! They admit it’s a failure!” We admit no such thing. It’s worked really, really well for a really, really long time. But like anything, it’s time to change things up and try things a slightly different way.
