What follows are some brief excerpts from a revealing and fascinating interview posted over at Newsarama with Tom Brevoort, who goes into detail about the relationship between Marvel and DC, and how the relaunch of the latter's comic books (and subsequent success) effect them in the long run. There's a lot more to be found over at the site so be sure to head on over there by clicking on the link below.
Obviously, your goal is to make successful comics for Marvel. But does that mean you want to see DC fail?
No. Marvel is actually better off when DC is strong — strong sales-wise and creatively. So success for DC helps everybody, because it makes the infrastructure of our marketplace stronger, it brings more dollars into the market and more eyeballs into the stores. And I have absolutely no qualms or fears. I welcome the chance to battle it out with the competition on the racks. On my perfect, lovely, beautiful world, a lot of people going to comic stores this week, or next week, or the week after, because they've heard about this big initiative and Justice League #1 or whatever, and they buy Justice League #1 and they buy X-Men — that's a big win for me. And I'm very happy about it. And the reverse is true as well. If people go into stores because they're very excited about "Fear Itself" or "Schism," and they buy those comics but they also buy Justice League, that's a win for them.
So how would you sum up the DC/Marvel competition?
There's a genuine rivalry. We're competitors. But generally speaking, the actual individual people within the comic book industry are friendly with each other, as a general rule. Within that group, as with any group, there are individual people who don't care for other individual people, but the same is true anywhere. There are people at Marvel, believe it or not, that I don't love as much as other people. That's just the nature of any organization. But generally speaking, we're all pretty friendly, especially in a world where, quite often, creators go back and forth from one company to the next, doing what they're doing and following the best or most lucrative or interesting offer they have at the point.
I want Marvel to continue to be No. 1. I wake up every day and come into work and push to maintain that. But the fact that DC is doing a big media push and is relaunching all their stuff and is trying to drum up a lot of attention and get more people reading and following what they do, I think that's excellent. I think that's actually what they should be doing. I support it there. I support to the level of, I'm not going to go out and sell copies of Justice League. Every time there's a copy of Justice League out, I'm going to be trying to sell a copy of Avengers instead. But anything that gets people into the stores gives me a chance to do that. And certainly gives retailers a chance to put a few more dollars in their cash register and order next month's comics.
And if they sold a lot of copies of Justice League, that gives them the money to order a lot of copies of Avengers in the next order cycle. So it's all good.