(Comic Books) In celebration of this weblog's birthday, the rest of the comics press has apparently decided to go completely apeshit over rumors that Marvel's president of publishing, Bill Jemas, was to be shown the door come January -- and let's make no mistake, these are rumors we're talking about here. They're just rumors that virtually everyone with a contact at Marvel is hearing "unofficially confirmed." The company itself still has yet to release a statement on the subject... man, even I don't believe what I'm saying, here. Okay, Jemas is toast; the current stories have him moving out of his old office and spending a great deal of time "working from home," which is to say riding out his contract as unobtrusively as possible.
Once the circumstances became obvious, both The Pulse and Newsarama raced each other to the "submit" button, with Markisan Naso trailing behind. As I noted Friday, however, Comic Book Resources gossip columnist Rich Johnston has owned this story for months, so it's only fair to give him the quote, from an update issued Friday:
"Since the last column, a few other things have become clearer as the rumourmongers have gone into overdrive. I hear Bill Jemas's assistant Jenny Lee is now working for editorial, possibly with Axel Alonso as they shared a working relationship at Vertigo. I'm told a replacement for Bill Jemas has been found -- although I don't have his name. I understand he's an ex-employee of Marvel, previously of their business wing, who worked for Marvel from ten to five years ago, and left when Jemas arrived. Which means he's 'untainted'. I expect we'll all hear more soon.
"As of now, its uncertain as to whether Bill Jemas is working for Marvel. He's been homeworking more of late, since he returned from China, and his current contract extends to January, but it appears the situation has come to the boil and he may have departed prematurely."
We all did indeed hear more about Jemas' replacement. Word quickly spread that former Marvel Marketing employee Dan Buckley was being groomed to take the helm, a fact that both The Pulse and Newsarama quickly rushed to print (Rich Johnston, meanwhile, welcomed Buckley back into comics by endlessly reprinting a picture of him in a funny hat). The other shoe dropped soon afterward, when Marvel announced that Jemas' latest pet project, the recently revived, promptly neutered version of the Epic imprint, was ending its open call for submissions. Epic editor Teresa Focarile framed the news as a sign of immense fan interest: "The response has simply been incredible, and because of the high volume of pitches we're still receiving, we're no longer going to be able to evaluate them and respond to aspiring creators in a fair and reasonable time frame." Coming on the heels of the breaking of the Jemas story, however, it only looked like a signal that the Wicked Witch was indeed dead.
Comics fandom bellowed its pleasure at watching the Villain of "NuMarvel" getting his comeuppance. At last, all this decompressed storytelling and updating of the books for the 21st century would be rolled back, and Marvel would go back to publishing comics just like fandom remembered from their collective boyhoods! This possibility has anyone with more than half a brain in their heads a tad worried -- here's Ninth Art's Paul O'Brien on the subject:
"Hopefully traditionalism is not the mindset now finding favour at Marvel. It would seem unlikely, because the traditionalists would merrily wind back the clock and take Marvel back to the mid-nineties. Even the most clueless and lazy executive can see that the sort of comics with traditionalist appeal have in fact been among Marvel's lower seller titles for years, and that writers like Brian Bendis and Bruce Jones have seen their books gain sales. The market has moved on; a reset to the pre-Jemas era would be insanely stupid.
"Then again, Marvel has shown a noticeable back-pedalling from Jemas' controversy-baiting tendencies. The ludicrous furore over the X-STATIX storyline 'Di Another Day' (soon to see print as the redacted 'Back From The Dead'), and the silencing of Jemas as a mouthpiece for the company, all suggest a newfound discomfort with Jemas' entire approach, despite the fact that it's something that should surely have been obvious to them all along. On the other hand, while Jemas' grandstanding made sense during his reconstruction of Marvel's public image, a case can be made that the time for that sort of thing had passed."
I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas did display a genuine fondness for revision, if not actual innovation. By opening up the established characters to new approaches and giving creators more leeway -- at least initially -- Marvel did indeed manage to successfully present itself as a company willing to take chances, a stark counterpoint to the moribund DC Comics. That said, by all accounts Jemas' thumbprints increasingly began to appear all over Marvel's product line, and creators began complaining about the heavy-handed re-edits and second-guessing, a situation presumed to have led to Grant Morrison's departure from the wildly popular New X-Men. The fact that Perlmutter and Arad put the kibbosh on plans for the Epic line to involve creator-ownership could be seen as the final nail in the coffin; while DC bungles the promotion and distribution of the more adventurous titles in its stable, Marvel lacks the incentives necessary to convince top-quality artists to produce such works outside the confines of the Marvel universe in the first place. At this point, does it really make a difference whether Jemas stays or goes?
If nothing else, Marvel-watching has suddenly become an even more fascinating pasttime. The stakes now are no less -- or greater -- than whether Marvel will continue to thrive as a creatively interesting player, or simply slide back into the slow stagnation of the Direct Market's nostalgia for the way things used to be. May Marvel live in interesting times.
