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August 19, 2006

The Tom Brevoort Challenge Is Underway!

Over at his blog, Marvel fallguy editor Tom Brevoort launches an editorial simulation of sorts, in which he assigns three titles each to two fans who will be acting as editors of the titles.

There are no crossovers in effect- there is no CIVIL WAR, no PLANET HULK, no ANNIHILATION. And we're going to assume that all of these titles are at clean story break-points, rather than in the middle of long-running arcs.

Your goal over the course of the next two weeks is to increase your sales, put out crowd-pleasing, well-produced comic books, meet your financial obligations to the company, and get the books out on time.

As the editor, you can try anything you can think of more-or-less, provided that such actions get aproved by the Editor in Chief and the Marvel braintrust (in this case, played by me.) So your first move is to determine what you want to do with your three books. Do you want to make creative changes? try to put a new cover artist on? Have an idea for a specific storyline? Want to build a crossover?

Literally anything you can come up with is potentially fair game. The more creative you are, the more fun this will potentially be.

You also can do nothing, and leave any or all of these books alone in its current state.

He assigns Daredevil, Hulk and Ghost Rider to one reader who boldly decides to . . . keep intact all of the current creative teams with the exception of replacing Aaron Lopresti with Cary Nord on Hulk. Oooooohhhh. Don't go crazy there, buddy.

So pretty boring really, just one change. I do have tons of ideas for alternate creative teams; I just don’t think that new editors need to go changing everything just to make an impression, especially when their titles are reasonably successful as these titles are. Hopefully Tom will give me good reason to change the creative teams on each book over the next two weeks so I can mix things up a little.

While 50,000 sales is a good base, I think the sky is the limit as far as the potential of these books are concerned, so my next post will explore a few ideas for how we might start to bring that about.

I wonder how often this guy has complained in the past about Marvel/DC not taking any chances and being too complacent. It's a simulation, dude. Use your imagination!

Posted by YMB Staff at August 19, 2006 02:45 PM