Modern Marvel

Marvel Comics faces their toughest challenge yet - a changing world in publishing.

From an article in the New York Times...

In the year 2011 this is how the day-to-day destiny of Marvel Entertainment, the home of universally recognized characters like Spider-Man, Iron Man and the mighty Thor, and whose publishing division releases 60 to 90 comic books a month, is now determined.

One day last month in the company’s office in Midtown Manhattan, its top creative talent — 30 or so people, mostly male, many bald or bearded, or both — were gathered in a conference room known as the Hulk room, for what felt like the simultaneous meetings of a corporation, a television writing staff and the traders of the New York Stock Exchange.

One by one the Marvel editors who surrounded the long conference table stepped to the front of the room and delivered rigorous but colorful PowerPoint presentations on their coming comics, with story lines plotted out for months or years in advance: Who would join the Fantastic Four to replace the Human Torch, who fell in battle to the evil Annihilus? Who might be the new adversary for the blind vigilante Daredevil? What would Galactus, the planet-eating cosmic entity, consume next, and did anyone have a young hero ready to graduate to the X-Men?

Though the meeting could at times be rigidly precise, it had moments of spontaneity (like when Brian Michael Bendis, the author of Marvel’s Avengers, New Avengers and Ultimate Spider-Man series, observed that an enigmatic writer named TBD “has got a lot of books” assigned).

Similarly Marvel, which has produced comics in various forms since 1939, is a company that teems with talent while it is confined by its traditions and is enjoying a hard-fought moment in the spotlight while it grapples with larger difficulties afflicting the publishing world.