Speaking to Collider,JMS began the conversation talking about his beloved sci-fi space series, Bablyon 5 but talks quickly headed toward his run at Marvel, particularly on The Amazing Spider-Man and Thor.
On his 6-year Amazing Spider-Man run and disillusionment with Marvel "Big Events"---
JMS: I tried to call it ‘The Barely Adequate Spider-Man’, but that didn’t do so well. (laughs).... I was able to do all sorts of stuff I wanted to do [speaking on his work in television]. The problem with my tenure at Marvel is the fact that they started to get more and more event oriented.
I’m all for crossovers if they benefit the individual books. But it was feeling more and more like the individual characters were being bent towards the event in ways I didn’t think were appropriate. I mean to make Reed Richards a bad guy in Civil War… I just never bought into that. And that Captain America would surrender to a mob? I never bought into that. The more you have characters doing things that they wouldn’t do, because you want it for an event, I just had an increasingly hard time with that. And you can see why after a while, I pulled back from that. Which is why I hid in Thor. I said, ‘I’ll do this book but don’t touch me with the other events.’ It was a character that nobody wanted to write because nobody knew how do deal with him. They offered it to Mark Millar, who ran screaming into the night, they offered it to Neil Gaiman. I said, ‘I’ll write him.’ And my idea was, ‘leave me the [frick] alone.’ Just write this character.... And every [Thor issue] we did was in the top 10 every single month. There wasn’t much action. It was just the character story. ‘Great, I can finally be left alone.’ And then, ‘We’re doing Siege of Asgard.’ ‘[frick], really? No one wanted to touch this character two years ago, and now you want to make an event around him?’
I called [Marvel Publisher] Dan Buckley and said, ‘I heard what your plans are for this. Everything I’ve done, it’s going to be shot to hell.’ Similar to how Spider-Man was shot to hell with One More Day, which was Joe Quesada’s thing. And that’s when I said, ‘I just can’t do this anymore.’
Straczynski goes on to talk about how that's a fairly common phenomenon in not only comics but other creative mediums as well, such as television and film. In a quest to have totalitarian control of his creative vision in television, he went from writer, to story editor, to producer. And in comics, he's going the Image route theses days, launching
Studio JMS in a setup that's similar to what
Robert Kirkman has with his
Skybound Entertainment. It appears that the writer has some big plans for his Image offshoot and definitely has some exciting projects in development with Starz and MTV to name a few. Agree or disagree with the sentiments above? Sound off in the comments section below.
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