Marvel Comics “Brain-trust” Senior VP Tom Brevoort and EIC C.B. CebulskiAccording to ComicBook, the pretentious editor Tom Brevoort now claims Marvel’s less interested in doing crossovers – either universe-wide or with different publishers – in contrast to DC, whom he claims does:
“Marvel isn’t all that interested in doing a lot of crossovers,” Marvel Comics VP and Executive Editor Tom Brevoort explained in his Substack newsletter. “DC for the last several years has seemed much more open to doing them. But whenever Marvel does participate in one, there tends to be some reason for this internally, some objective that making a crossover helps us to achieve.”
The X-Men editor continued, “But each circumstance is different, so I can’t tell you why we do each and every one, nor which instances came from Marvel reaching out to others and which ones were the result of others reaching out to us.”
While DC has consistently published at least one intercompany crossover every year since 2015 — everything from Conan the Barbarian (Dark Horse) to Power Rangers (Boom!) and The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (IDW) — Marvel has participated in significantly fewer crossovers with outside companies. Especially when compared to the output of the ’90s and 2000s, when the Marvel Universe crossed over with the likes of X-O Manowar (Valiant) Backlash and Deathblow (Image), Witchblade (Top Cow), Invincible (Skybound), and Red Sonja (Dynamite).
If it’s within their own universes, then assuming this is true, it would put DC in a bad light, compounding their own artistic bankruptcy. On which note, even if Crisis on Infinite Earths isn’t the worst of the company crossovers from a historical viewpoint, it did most unfortunately set a very troubling tone going forward, since only so many of the crossovers DC did turn out the following decade emphasized hero deaths, and in the case of 1993’s Bloodlines, you could easily argue it emphasized sadism, what with the way the Aliens rejects were willing to murder people.
Whenever DC goes that far to be so excessive, and Marvel less so, it only has the effect of making the latter look better by contrast, even if their subsequent crossovers proved to be very bad in their own way (Avengers: Disassembled, House of M and Civil War, anyone?) Not to mention that Marvel’s just as guilty of turning out insufferably violent stories that rival the worst of DC’s stories written for cheap sensationalism. And despite what Brevoort’s telling his correspondent, Marvel just recently developed an Aliens crossover with Avengers.
If Marvel really has suddenly reevaluated universe-spanning crossovers, it’s probably because the sales really are in freefall, and if it’s crossovers with different publishers we’re talking about here, something to consider is that their woke approach of the past decade or so may have turned off some other publishers who don’t want their products subjected to the same kind of PC Marvel’s going by.
But DC’s proven they too can be very woke, and if it discourages some fellow publishers from working with them on a crossover, concerns would be justified. One crossover they did do many years ago was with the Kuwaiti publisher of the Islamic propaganda comic The 99, and that was a major humiliation. It would be foolish to think Marvel under their current leadership couldn’t still do the same. So it’s only if sales really are tanking that further crossovers would be considered less worth the effort. And if more consumers are avoiding Marvel/DC’s worthless modern products, that’s a good thing.
Originally published here.
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