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Spidey time
2007-07-31 17:32:38

The Spidey Braintrust

Gugg thinks he's still writing Flash...

There's been a fair bit of publicity on this already, coming out of our announcements at the San Diego Convention, but for those of you who may have been living under a rock, we've debuted the creative teams for the upcoming thrice-monthly AMAZING SPIDER-MAN series. The writers who make up our "Spidey Braintrust" include Dan Slott, Marc Guggenheim, Bob Gale and Zeb Wells, and artists on the first four months' worth of stories are Steve McNiven, Salvador Larroca, Phil Jimenez and Chris Bachalo. It's a great line-up of talent and a great new/throwback approach to the days when AMAZING SPIDER-MAN was the on-and-only Spider-Man title, and concerned itself with telling the ongoing story of Peter Parker.

There is a little bit of information that kind of got lost in the shuffle, and may actually have been misreported in some places as a result. So I'm just going to lay it all out for you.

People have been asking how this is different from the way the Spidey books were handled in the 90s, when storylines leapt from AMAZING to SPECTACULAR to WEB and so forth, and the way they were handled in the Superman titles before that. And the difference here is that each writer will write all of the chapters of his particular story, be it a self-contained one-shot of a six-part opus, and despite the fact that three issues will ship in the space of one month. So nobody is relegated to the thankless task of writing Chapter Two of somebody else's story, and each of the writers can allow their own writing preferences and style to come through in the execution, rather than attempting to achieve some sort of blanderized, vanilla middle ground.

The overall game plan for the year and beyond has been worked out among the Spidey Braintrust members, and is mapped out on a costantly-evolving flowchart that shows where all of the characters are in any given month and who'll be working on whcih issues and which stories when. So all four of these guys has been a key contributing member in the larger saga of Spidey's life that'll unfold in the coming months--everybody's had the chance to have their say, contribute their bits, and influence the direction. And so, each issue will carry a credit for the entire Spidey Braintrust, though the specific writer of that story will be identified as well.

Most importantly, the writer-artist pairings that were anounced for the first four months are not permanent assignments. Which is to say that, as we move further into the year and each of the writers comes up again in the rotation (which won't necessarily be in sequence either, so Zeb won't always be the fourth man in) they'll be paired with different artists depending on the schedule. So while Marc is working with Salva on his first story, he may wind up doing his second with Phil, or with Chris, or with artists who aren't in the mix just yet (we've got one or two other surprises left to throw at you in this regard.)

I think it's going to be an awfully fun ride, and I hope you'll all check it out when we debut at the end of this year.

More later.

Tom B

amazing
Tom,
I am so excited about this that I am ashamed of myself. The potential exists for this to really be a great way of telling Spidey stories much more akin to what happens with an improv jazz group that passes the motif around.

The question I do have for you is how success will be measured. It seems that now you have the scenario where you have replaced 3 creative teams with 4, so how will Marvel justify the cost? Do you need to see Amazing push twice or three times the current sales to make it pay off?

Posted by bigdaddyhub2 on 2007-07-31 20:25:57

Can we have an idea of some of the characters that will be appearing?

I hope we get some more artistic diversity, as Larroca, Jimenez, and McNiven are pretty much all from the same school.

Posted by CylverSaber on 2007-07-31 21:08:11

CodeGuy
Well, they've replaced 3 teams with four, but they're not doing four times as many comics. It's still three comics a month, just like before. Since artists are paid by the page, the costs shouldn't jump up too much.

Also, Amazing was doing much higher sales than the other two Spidey titles. I would imagine that Amazing sales could actually go down a little bit, but doing that three times a month would still average out to more sales overall.

Posted by CodeGuy on 2007-07-31 21:17:40

I've been assuming they just want all issues of ASM to be in the same bracket as ASM is now rather than have one well selling book and two way below it.

Posted by bomaya on 2007-08-01 11:23:16

This has the poteintial to be a great animated series... just don't screw it up like they did with the CG animated series from... 2002, I think?

Posted by Buckinju on 2007-08-04 09:25:18

Oh great i hope it's gonna be a better series then that last cgi one.

Posted by RoySil on 2007-08-07 14:29:35

trade
so....what are the plans for having the series in TBP? an HC would be better....just like the "The Best of.." series. How will the collections be scheduled? I hope the stories will be seamless enough to have a good HC book.

Posted by omar_paeste on 2007-08-08 20:56:44

this series rocks
I'm so happy this stupid skrull civil war rebelion thing is over now it's time to let the real comics come into play!x9

Posted by Heroclicker on 2008-02-24 13:05:26

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