Does Marvel’s Tom Brevoort Have Any Clue What Comic Fans Actually Want?

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Tom Brevoort is one of the comic industry’s most powerful editors. Brevoort began working for Marvel in 1989 as a college intern, rising through the ranks to his position now, which is Senior Vice President of Publishing at Marvel, as well working as a group editor for the company. Currently, Brevoort is in charge of the X-Men books, stewarding them through the current “From the Ashes” era to mixed reception, both critically and in sales. The books started strong but since have leveled off, forgotten in the wealth of quality that is Marvel’s Ultimate line and DC’s Absolute line. Brevoort is a legend at Marvel, having helped steward the publisher throughout the 21st century. Brevoort has never hidden out from fans, either, answering questions on multiple forums, from Substack to BlueSky to Twitter, and commonly talking about what he likes and what he doesn’t.

It’s one of those opinions that we’re here to discuss, and it involves using the success of Absolute Batman to subtly mock the opinion of Spider-Man fans who profess the superiority of Ultimate Spider-Man to that of Amazing Spider-Man, a book whose editorial philosophy he himself set fourth almost twenty years ago. Looking at these statements and what we’ve seen of the X-Men line, as well as taking into account much of Brevoort’s work, it all begs the question — does Tom Brevoort know what fans want?

Brevoort’s Opinion Is Surprisingly Out of Touch

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So, a little background for those who don’t know about the realities of comic book sales. For years, the most consistent bestselling comics were Batman and The Amazing Spider-Man. Sometimes, there would be event books, often edited by Brevoort, taking the top spot or the debut of an especially popular creative team, but the vast majority of the time, it was Batman and The Amazing Spider-Man trading the top spots back and forth. In fact, for years the health of comic sales have been judged by how well Batman and The Amazing Spider-Man sell. They are the canaries in the coal mine. However, the old order changeth, and new books have taken the top of the sales charts, with Absolute Batman and The Ultimate Spider-Man both outselling their mainline counterparts.

In the case of The Ultimate Spider-Man and The Amazing Spider-Man, many fans like to say that much of the book’s success comes from the fact that Peter and Mary Jane are married in the book. Now, this is a gross over-simplification, because even without the marriage of Peter and MJ, The Ultimate Spider-Man is consistently the best comic of the month. Jonathan Hickman and Marco Checchetto are creating a comic that does everything perfectly, something that Brevoort has talked about on other occasions. However, it’s impossible to deny that Peter and MJ being married was a lure for an entire generation of fans who have vehemently denied the Spider-Man they want by Tom Brevoort and Marvel editorial.

Brevoort’s comments (made in response to a post on BlueSky) are obviously meant to be partly humorous — he has certainly met with his share of fans mad at him for his opinions on a variety of subjects, including Spider-Man — while commenting on the situation between Absolute Batman and Batman. However, the big difference is that there is no one saying that Absolute Batman is better than Batman because of, say, an editorial fiat that completely destroyed a fan favorite relationship and is hugely unpopular but never gets changed. People like Absolute Batman more not because of DC’s spoken editorial policy with the character, they like it because it is fresh and new, with creators with a passion for the book. This is the exact same reason why The Ultimate Spider-Man is more successful — because it’s two creators leaving it all out on the page and giving readers exactly what they wanted from their character. That’s why this feels less like a joke and more of a jab at the fandom who have fundamentally disagreed with the mainstream take on Spider-Man, a take which Brevoort himself helped codify.

This shows a profound misunderstanding of not only what the fans of Absolute Batman want, but also the issues fans have with Spider-Man and Marvel under the reign of Brevoort and the editorial staff that he helped create back in the Quesada days. Brevoort is an editor who has worked on some of the best Marvel comics of the last thirty years, and also some of the best Marvel comics ever, but there’s two ideas that resonate through Brevoort’s work — bringing back older status quos and hero vs. hero conflict. Brevoort was the man behind Marvel’s event cycle throughout the 21st century. Nearly every major book that Brevoort edited was kicked off with a back to basics approach to the group — so for the Avengers, Brevoort edited several runs that each set out to establish the Avengers as the number one superteam in the Marvel Universe, taking the practice of creating Avengers rosters from popular characters and several mainstays, echoing what came before it. Eventually, this would lead to a hero vs. hero event of some kind. His tenure on the X-books is much the same, regressing the team back to status quo more in line with several periods of X-Men history, but borrowing heavily from the ’90s. Brevoort’s ideas on what make superhero comics tick — status quo, revolution, status quo — is proving to be further and further from what fans want. They want something new, which is what Absolute Batman and The Ultimate Spider-Man give them.

Brevoort Needs to Re-Evaluate What He Thinks Fans Want

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Brevoort is undeniably a legend at Marvel. The publisher would look very different without his guidance, and not necessarily in a good way. Brevoort definitely works well with the creatives at the company and is one of the greatest living Marvel historians, but it feels like Brevoort just doesn’t understand the problems Marvel is facing. In the eyes of many fans, Brevoort personifies everything that is wrong with Marvel, a hindbound approach to storytelling that ignores what made the Marvel Universe so vital in its creative heydays throughout the ’60s and ’80s — growth of the characters and the universe. The old Marvel Universe felt like a place that was changing; the current Marvel Universe feels like a place that is always resetting to status quo, with the events that came before just blending into the background noise of event after event and soft reboot after soft reboot. That is Brevoort’s Marvel Universe.

The success of books like Absolute Batman and The Ultimate Spider-Man comes from being unlike the type of comic that Brevoort has been helming for decades. They take familiar factors and mix them up in ways that lead to new story opportunities. The Marvel Universe that Brevoort has stewarded keeps leading in familiar directions and it often feels like he doesn’t understand why this is a problem for so many fans. It’s that lack of understanding that isn’t doing Marvel or the stories they’re telling any favors.

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2025-03-16 06:22