Tom Brevoort's a talker. He's long been one of Marvel's most public staffers, and in recent months he's only redoubled his efforts. In addition to his weekly "Talk to The Hat!" column at CBR and numerous interview, Brevoort somehow finds the time to keep up with volley after volley of questions posed to him by fans over on Formspring. And two recent answers really pulled back the curtain for on two special — or almost-special events.
The first nugget of information concerned the secret origin of The Avengers #1 back in 1963 — and how Daredevil made it all happen. According to Brevoort, delays in the debut of the Daredevil series due to co-creator Bill Everett led to then-Marvel publisher Martin Goodman to push Stan Lee to create a replacement — and fast!
"In those days, you booked print time way ahead of time–and if your book wasn't ready, you paid for the printing time anyway," explained Brevoort. "So it was vital to get something to press on time. But Bill Everett was a favorite of Martin Goodman, stemming back to the 40s when he created the Sub-Mariner. Regardless, there was suddenly a hole in the schedule, with no book where a book should be. In trying to solve this problem, Stan hit on the notion of doing a strip that brought all of the heroes together JLA-style–that would be a book that wouldn't require any ramp-up time, because the characters (and even the villain) all existed already."
The second factoid coming out of Marvel's Senior VP of Publishing is word that Pulitizer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon (The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) was "very close" to writing Marvel's Fantastic Four series. Although the deal fell through, Brevoort admits it "would have been extremely cool". Chabon has expressed a life-long love of comics — as readers of Kavalier & Clay could surmise — and he's written a few comics including a story in DC's JSA: All-Stars #7.
Stay tuned to Brevoort's Formspring page for this and other revelations — but don't be scared away when the long-time editors or his fans take off the kids' gloves.
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I love Chabon, but if it would have lead to Hickman not being on the book then I’m ok with it. It’s kind of like when Kerry lost to Bush in 04’…if Kerry would have won then we may never had gotten to a very well spoken Obama. Ah, politics…
Chabon on FF would’ve been pretty tremendous.
Erugh. Yeah, I’ll second wanting to see Chabon on something…anything comics. That’d be interesting.
FF has been so good with Hickman that I’m glad the Chabon thing fell through.
@oopsxlandmine @dgazzuolo You guys know the rules:
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Not that you were being sexist, homophobic, racist, or bigoted – you weren’t. I just lumped it all together. Sometimes these rules are hard for me, because I like to joke about pretty much everything!
It was either Avengers #1 or X-Men #1 that replaced Daredevil #1 on their production schedule. Tom B prefers for it to have been Avengers, but the timing works out that the dubut of The Doom Patrol (a DC version of the FF) could have inspired aspects of the X-Men (namely Professor X). It has been argued that the X-Men were just another version of the FF model, but I think that only makes the Doom Patrol connection stronger. During the previous two years 1961-1963), except for Hulk (and Thor, their version of a Superman) Marvels production of new characters/titles had been their take on what DC had success with the year before. Daredevil was going to be their version of an adult Batman (Spider-Man was their version of a teen Batman, and Goodman didn’t like it until the sales reports came in).