Marvel and Mouse

At the 2009 Diamond/Alliance Retailer Summit in Baltimore, David Gabriel, Marvel Comics’ Senior Vice President of Sales, spoke about the publisher’s plans for 2010.

Promotions like the New Year’s Eve Eve Party were discussed. Details concerning important storylines, events, and programs like DoomWar, Siege, and Marvel Women were announced.

While this presentation had attending retailers talking for the rest of the night, there’s still more to tell about what Marvel has in store for the year ahead, and Gabriel was kind enough to answer Diamond Daily’s questions about the House of Ideas’ future in an exclusive interview.

Retailers that have wanted details about the topics of Marvel’s Summit presentation and the publisher’s overall 2010 plans need look no further than this interview series.

This is part one of the four-part series.

Diamond Daily: At the Summit, talking about Siege and other important storylines in the works, you mentioned that in 2010 Marvel would be focusing on four-month events more so than larger eight-month or longer events we’ve seen in the past. Is that a response to what you heard from fans and retailers? How did that come about?

David Gabriel: I think this was a unanimous decision – from Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada, to the Senior Editors, to Publisher Dan Buckley, to me over in the Sales and Marketing department, to Assistant Editors, writers, retailers, fans. Everybody is in absolute agreement that the longer these stories play out, the less likely people are to be interested in them.

Daily: Thus the term, “event fatigue.”

Gabriel: You know, I really think there is no event fatigue. When we hear that here in the office, we all sit back and say there isn’t event fatigue; there’s extended, prolonged story fatigue. That’s what nobody wants.

But still, the fans are still going crazy over stuff like bannering books and sticking crossover labels on things. We also love that, as fanboys. We all love seeing stuff like the Utopia banner on a bunch of books. I’ll even give a shout-out to Blackest Night’s bannering. But I think we realized towards the latter part of Secret Invasion that sometimes [the story] is too long. It’s just too long.

We’re going to try to get in and out now, hopefully within four issues. The editorial idea is that everything is going to be big and fast. That’s not to say that if Jeph Loeb, Mark Millar, or Brian Bendis came to us with a Civil War 2 that we’d turn it down. Then we’d, of course, present what would be another industry-altering, eight-issue story.

But really the focus is on four-month events for the first quarter of next year.

Daily: Looking forward to some upcoming stories and important sagas – like Fall of the Hulks to name one – it seems like you're sticking to specific families of titles. What are the advantages to offering self-contained family events?

Gabriel: On the selfish side, workload-wise it keeps everything within certain editorial offices. All the Hulk books are within one editorial group. All the X-Men books, Avengers books, Spider-Man books, Ultimate books, Marvel Heroes books, and the others, those are all contained, making it much easier on the editors. Same can be said for the creators as well, to a certain extent.

That’s not to say that there isn’t going to be overlap still. In Siege, for example, the main titles for that will be New Avengers and Dark Avengers, with some tie-ins to Mighty Avengers and Avengers: The Initiative. But then there’s a Thunderbolts crossover and a Dark Wolverine crossover, because they’ve been major characters recently as well.

Having more self-contained stories also gives us a really good focal point for these events. So readers and retailers know that X-Men: Second Coming is all X-Men. You know that Siege is primarily Avengers. You know The Gauntlet is all Spider-Man. Fall of the Hulks is all Hulks.

This way, when there is a throw-in book for another character, I think that becomes a little more special, rather than just having everyone that’s in the Marvel Universe jump in.

Daily: Towards the end of Marvel’s Summit presentation, you mentioned the “Heroic Age.” What can you tell us about that?

Gabriel: The last slide we showed at the Summit was the “Heroic Age” slide. That will be some interesting stuff coming out, probably in January of next year. That’ll be a different way of looking at things – a new way of branding things, a new way of looking at the Marvel Universe.

Have to be purposely vague here. It’s a way of looking at the Marvel Universe as it hasn’t been looked at in years. I don’t think any other publisher is really looking at things like this right now either.

This is all a result of Siege. If you remember the first pages of the Marvel books from the '70s, Marvel always had these lines at the top of the page, month after month, giving a synopsis of what the comic was all about. We have something already written up that explains what the Heroic Age is, and we should be ready to roll that out sometime in January.

Daily: Let’s talk about your skip week plans. You mentioned a New Year’s Eve Eve Party lined up for participating shops for December 30. What can retailers expect in terms of product and in promotional support from Marvel?

Gabriel: We’re running this the same way we’ve run the midnight release parties, which have been well-received since we began those about two years ago. With Dark Tower, we did three pretty successful ones. This year, we did the Marvel 70th Anniversary Parties, but instead of doing them at midnight, we stretched them out and started at 9:00 p.m. the night before the regular Wednesday release.

The start of all this is going to be the New Year's Eve Eve calendars, which will be given out to customers for free.

That is being done specifically at retailers’ request. With the Marvel 70th Anniversary Parties, many retailers were selling the books in advance of the 9:00 p.m. deadline, and many retailers said there needs to be something punitive for stuff like that.

It doesn’t make sense for retailers not to hold the calendars and uphold the deadline this time around, since they really won’t have anything else to give out. This is something we’re doing for retailers that want to work with us on this and want something special for their store.

Daily: What else can you tell us about the calendar specifically?

Gabriel: The calendars will have the cool Marko Djurdjevic art from the special Marvel 70th Anniversary variant covers from this year – all the beautiful, single shots of Marvel heroes.

Attached to the calendars will be all-new Avengers ID Cards, totally playing into Siege. There’s also, I believe, a promo poster inside the calendar for Siege that you can pull out of the center without destroying the calendar. There will also be some “Easter egg” promo images placed on the back of the ID Cards, all printed at random.

Daily: That’s a good segue into talking about Siege a little more. Readers get their first taste of that story with the free Origins of Siege one-shot (OCT090532D). How successful have free specials like this one been in terms of getting readers ready and excited for an upcoming event? And how does Origins of Siege stack up against the other free specials you’ve done recently?

Gabriel: I know we’ve been doing these for about two years now, and we always hear from retailers how helpful it is to have that free issue to help kick start an event or promote a line of books.

Origins of Siege is going to be the best one we’ve ever done. I touched on this a bit at the Summit. It’s in the October Order Forms already, so that’s in Diamond’s system.

Origins of Siege will feature an eight-page, all-new prologue by Brian Bendis that sets the stage for Siege. There’s going to be a first preview of Siege #1 in there. And we’re also bringing back, for the older fans – in the late '70s/early '80s there was a series of posters that Marvel and Coca-Cola did on the origins of different characters – and we’re bringing those back.

These will each be on one page and tell the origin stories of the major players in Siege. These are poster-style pages, so they’re going to be heavier on art than text. Anyone that hasn’t read a comic in years and doesn’t know who the major players are will really be able to get into this thing with Origins of Siege’s origin pages and the prologue.