So it’s Spring of ’07 and I’ve just had two pretty above average interviews with Steve Wacker, Tom Brevoort and Joe Quesada about becoming an Assistant Editor at Marvel. Still, I’m a pretty pessimistic guy and assumed they’d just invited me back out of kindness. But then again, I'm pretty confident they've hired me, put me to work and paid me for a year and a half out of kindness. When I was called and offered the job, I was obviously pretty excited, but also a bit conflicted, as another opportunity that was equally exciting had availed itself. It was a tough call—both jobs had the same number of pros and cons. But I realized this other opportunity was something I could always come back to, while the door at Marvel might not re-open.
After keeping Marvel’s HR department on hold during the solid 30 seconds of deliberation (while balancing two giant packages in a leaky doorway in the midst of a rainstorm, no less), I accepted and returned home to an email from my new boss, Mr. Stephen G. Wacker, welcoming me to the team with an MP3 of the “Merry Marvel Marching Society” theme and, perhaps more daunting, Tom Brevoort’s now-publicized “Spider-Manifesto.” It brings me to my second “What Have I Learned This Year?” lesson: Be thankful for what you don’t know yet.
As I read over the document to help get myself up to speed on the work I’d been doing, a thought occurred to me: “I can never talk to my friends who read comic books again.” Remember, this was at the tail end of CIVIL WAR. Imagine if you’d have known months before anyone else did how "Back-In-Black" and "One More Day" ended and how "Brand New Day" began—I felt like I’d read a National Security report. But I remember wondering what many of you have wondered (sometimes in profanity laced e-mails)—how did Harry Osborn come back to life?
The answer wasn’t in the manifesto, and it wasn’t in any of the scripts I was handed to get myself up to speed. To be honest, the Braintrust wasn’t sure yet. But they did know they had to address it, they were simply going to wait until they had a story that made the most sense and that you guys deserved. That’s what made some of the early anger about "Brand New Day" so funny to me—most of the complaints were over story points we simply hadn’t revealed yet. But yeah, in some cases we weren’t sure. But that didn’t mean we weren’t working on it.
Liz Allan, Normie and the events of SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN #200 were all factored into the plans—we just simply hadn’t found the right story yet and didn’t want to rush such important information out. And then Dan Slott found it—the perfect way to not only bring Harry back but to explain quite a few of the changes between our current Spidey run and the JMS stuff. AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #581 (which we’re pushing out the door in a short holiday week here at Spidey Sentral) is part one of a two-part Slott/McKone gem that bridges the gap, and it’s Peter Parker who asks the question we’ve all been wondering—how did Harry Osborn come back from the dead? We’ll get some answers, but you’re going to have to wait till next month to see ‘em. In the meantime, enjoy some art!
Working on this comic got me thinking about story telling in the age of internet spoilers and excessive need-to-knows. I’m as big a user of spoiler sites as anyone, but being on this side of the comic fence has reminded me how much I love the job designated to a reader—one of discovering the story for yourself. Most fans of my generation grew up after a lot of the seminal Spider-Man moments. I can appreciate the death of Gwen Stacy, but I know the story from the back of a trading card. I can’t appreciate the magnitude of that moment on the same level of older readers because to me, she’s a relic of the past, not someone I watched grow and evolve. I wish I’d have been able to feel the shock readers felt when they turned the page and saw Gwen Stacy die. Part of the fun of being in the seat I’m in now is that these stories can’t help but be new to me—I’m one of the first eyes to see ‘em after the writer finishes. I get the unfiltered shock of turning the page and it excites me. I can appreciate the frustration of some folks in the readership that the secrets are revealed 11 months later, but for myself, I’d much rather discover the answers page by page than read a brief summary with “the answers.” That’s drama. That’s excitement. It takes patience and it takes time, but it’s wroth the wait. We’ve been planning his out for a while and we want to make sure it’s the best story it can be.
Change is tough, as I’ve learned in abundance this year. So for the segment of readership that still isn’t entirely on board with this new status quo, we hear you. We’ve had you in mind from the beginning, and we’re trying to make the kind of stories that will satisfy your curiosity. We’re simply taking the time and effort to get the stories right. Be thankful for what you don’t know, it makes discovering it all the more exciting.
