What Tom Brevoort says now about the affordability of crossovers

According to Popverse, one of Marvel's worst modern editors told a podcaster he seemingly recognizes why crossovers have made collectibility too costly:

If you've been collecting Marvel Comics for, say, two or three decades, you've maybe noticed a shift in how the House of Ideas runs its line-wide event tie-in issues. Namely, that they put out less of them. And while there are doubtless a lot of factors that go into that decision (more regular events, a global pandemic, etc.), a deciding factor from within Marvel HQ is simply that, these days, people can't afford to buy tie-in issues.

At least, that's how Tom Brevoort sees it.

Gee, why didn't he consider all that years before? And surely most importantly, why doesn't he consider the vitality of merit-based storytelling? What came as the result of Secret Wars and Crisis on Infinite Earths could've been avoided going forward, but the publishers regrettably came to rely increasingly upon crossovers instead of merit, and that's one of the biggest problems that brought down comicdom in the long run. If Marvel and DC really put out less now, well, they did so awfully late, and after only so much ruination of their cast of characters in the process. As far back as 2 decades ago, DC was the one who first began pandering to woke directions like DEI, and Marvel followed up on that several years later. None of that was merit-based, and coupled with all the line-wide crossovers, made for a very alienating approach going forward.

Marvel's longest-serving editor was recently a guest on the Word Balloon Comics Podcast with host John Siuntres, where the pair discussed Brevoort's storied history of working on line-wide Marvel events. "I've done more of these than anybody," the current X-Men editor said of Marvel's company-wide events, "Every time you try to take the lessons of what you did and apply it to the next one."

Wrong, he didn't, and their discussion of line-wide events proves it. And if we take Avengers: Disassembled and House of M as examples, he let Bendis turn Scarlet Witch into a dishrag. In hindsight, it's sickening, especially now after the WandaVision TV program and the 2nd live action Dr. Strange movie made use of the forced changing of Wanda into a one-dimensional madwoman.

One of those lessons, it appears, is that while comic sales are certainly not crashing, it's less likely that collectors are going to shell out money to collect tie-in issues for every company-wide event, such as last year's One World Under Doom. Although to be fair, you don't have to be an editor at Marvel to know that people's budgets are tighter than they were just a little while ago.

"The reality of the world is different now than it was 20 years ago," Brevoort told his interviewer. "Which is to say: when we were doing something like House of M or Secret Wars, you could do an awful lot of tie-in books and have the expectation that a certain amount of the audience was going to want to read all of those books, and was going to be financially able to read all of those books."

No kidding. The problem is that Brevoort and other staffers like Joe Quesada were counting on the entire fanbase to literally buy these things up completely unquestioned, no matter how poor the story, and no matter how horrific the treatment of the cast of characters was. It's the same with DC under Dan DiDio. This gives a telling clue they were also unofficially relying on speculators to buy these up in hopes they'd be worth a lot of money in the future. But all that did was cause the speculator market to collapse in the mid-90s, and it's only gotten worse since.

"As times have gotten tighter," he concluded, "And belts have gotten tighter, it's maybe not the best idea in the world to go quite that deep, quite that far. If we publish a crossover now and did as many tie-ins as we did in during Civil War, I don't know whether it would succeed or fail, but my guess would be those tie-ins would not perform as well because no one would be able to afford to read them all."

As if we already weren't going to defer to Brevoort's decades of experience in this, our own ailing bank accounts would have us agreeing.

Well why didn't anyone even back then make the point? Better still, why didn't anybody at the time argue that, if they alienated the audience, they can't be surprised if not only sales would decline, but prices would go up as the publishers became desperate to compensate for loss of revenue? This is just another clue what's gone wrong with serial fiction storytelling and publishing, and despite what's told, there's no chance even Brevoort will do anything to mend a horrid situation. After all, what did he do to reverse the severe damage done by erasing the Spider-marriage? Or the maltreatment of Mary Jane Watson and Scarlet Witch, to name but a few examples of Marvel cast members who were wronged? And then they have the gall to talk about company wide crossovers as though it was never a slight to artistic quality. I'm sorry, but despite suggestions to the contrary, this article isn't doing enough to repair the fiasco Marvel and DC became since the turn of the century, and Brevoort should've resigned his positions long ago. If he continues to bog them down with his very presence, it only confirms he hasn't learned any lessons, and if DC hires him despite how clear it is he hasn't or no longer has any talent, that too will make clear they're not learning lessons either. Nepotism is one of the biggest problems in comicdom today, and a leading reason why we still have dreadful figures like Brevoort to contend with, who don't have any genuine remorse over the disaster they turned mainstream comics into.