The Origin of Marvel Zombies 2
2006-08-09 15:44:31
So paperwork in, the Ultimate Office turned to figuring out the rest of the creative team for Marvel Zombies.
The office is, of course, headed by Ralph Macchio. For Zombies, the majority of the day-to-day editorial work was handled by Nicole Boose. I wasn’t that involved with the book after it got going (except to ogle the pages as they came in) and Ralph was mostly involved at the plot/script stage. So most of editorial credit—or blame—goes to Nicole, and I don’t want to sound like I’m taking credit where none is due.
But at this point in the story there wasn’t any day-to-day at all, because there wasn’t a creative team.
Putting together a creative team on a comic is a real challenge. If you get it right, you get magic; you get a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. We all have favorite runs on comics, series of issues where the stars aligned and everybody involved in the comic was perfectly in synch and creating great comics…
And you’ve probably seen some times where talented creators are put on a book together and they just don’t mesh together, no matter how good they might be separately…
We started with the writer. We needed somebody who was going to be able to tell a zombie tale we hadn’t seen before, not just rehash old movie plots…somebody with a wit and black humor that could stand up next to Mark Millar’s.
So Ralph, Nicole, and I ran through a few names, and nobody was clicking. Nothing was working right. The three of us were talking—we needed somebody who can not only write super heroes, but who can do the horror stuff, too. Somebody that gets zombies. I don’t remember who said it, but somebody said something like, “we really need somebody just like Robert Kirkman.”
And the room went silent for a minute as we all realized what had been said.
Among many other things, Robert Kirkman writes two hit comics for Image Comics—the super hero epic Invincible and the zombie series Walking Dead. As Robert was breaking into Marvel, a couple years ago, he had quite a few fans in editorial, because of the diversity in those two projects—some liked Invincible more, some liked Walking Dead more (which isn’t a bad tip for everybody to walk away with, by the way)…and the guy certainly gets both zombies and super heroes.
“Hang on a minute,” I said, and ran next door to Tom Brevoort’s office. At the time, Robert was doing most of his Marvel work in Tom’s office. So I checked on Robert’s schedule—could he do it, timewise? Tom thought that not only could he, but that Robert was a great fit for the book.
Ralph gave Robert a call, and Robert agreed to join in. I’m sure he was worried (to some degree) about typecasting himself as a zombies guy. Ralph seemed to put him at ease, because Ralph is great at that.
Plus, Robert’s too good to trap himself into any one genre. Plus plus, we definitely wanted to make sure this book wasn’t similar to Walking Dead—which is one of my favorite comics, and I highly recommend it. But there already is a Walking Dead, and the world doesn’t need a copy of it…
So the writing was in place, in, frankly, a smack-ourselves-on-the-head kind of way. I mean, it’s obvious Kirkman was the right choice. It’s embarrassing enough that it took us any time to figure that out…but the fact that we managed to do the exact same thing when it came to the art is even worse…
Next: Artist Sean Philips joins the Zombies team.
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About this blog: Associate Editor John Barber gives the inside story on the Ultimate line of comics--plus whatever other comics John edits!
About the author: John Barber has been a web cartoonist, self-publisher, author, and now comic book editor. He lives in New York with his fiancee Alison.
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