Go, Read: Axel Alonso Interview

Great get by Heidi MacDonald at The Beat in the form of a casual but directed Q&A with new Marvel Editor-In-Chief Axel Alonso. Among the hinted-at positives: the new man in charge at Marvel seems to have a large measure of respect for the challenges ahead; he openly talks in terms of successful projects outside of just the mega-hit series, which I think will be a key for Marvel in helping revitalize their marketplace; he sees his job partly in terms targeting, recruiting and developing new talent while not riding roughshod over them, which sounds to me like a credible way of approaching a portion of his duties. We won't know until Alonso has the job for a while how his particular personality, his management style, and his taste all come to bear on the line. For instance, it seems to me on a cursory look back that the characters during Joe Quesada's reign for which Quesada himself didn't necessarily have a personal feel tended to suffer a bit to perhaps a more significant degree than in other Editor-In-Chief runs; how Alonso's own likes and dislikes will manifest themselves -- or if they will -- remains to be seen.

A few days ago Sean T. Collins analyzed Alonso's editorial moves at Marvel, the impact of having Tom Brevoort still involved seemingly more directly in editing several of their comics endeavors, and how Marvel sees Alonso's accomplishments to predict how Marvel might move forward under his leadership. It's a nuanced piece in a way, in that Collins seems to suggest that Alonso's approach might work for the Marvel line right now by injecting a looser, anything-goes element into the line that might develop into new ways of doing those comics, and how the timing might be right for that now and might not have been right for even a more modest version of this to be facilitated through Alonso in his former position at the company. Fun piece.

My guess is that Alonso's reception comes down to how fans feel about Marvel. If you feel the company lacks momentum and verve right now and that this is because they've stepped away from the strategies behind of big, sometimes shocking, but committed-to events that energized the line, you might be skeptical that Alonso is the right person to restore such strategies to the power they had at their recent prime. If you feel a lack of momentum and/or verve exists at Marvel and that this is because the last round of innovations and character re-imaginings has naturally played itself out and those need to be made possible up and down the line again, Alonso may have you intrigued. If you feel like things are going great, you might not put too much stock in anyone above the writing credit. You may hold any of the above positions and feel that Tom Brevoort's hands-on involvement is a bigger key, period. And if you believe Marvel is simply subject to market forces that are resistant to any kind of editorial wrangling, you probably stopped reading this post a while ago.
 
posted 9:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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