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Alright, let's get on with the show then. Waiting down upon the underworld to smash gangland, come a friend of the unfortunate enemy of criminal. In a serious, all powerful character, a problem to the police, but a good state of law. Hello everybody and welcome to the Els with Exchange!
I am, of course, Sal, and with me as always is Joel from K to Joel. Check out Joel from where Joelness absolutely hell yeah, I agree. That's a damn good intro to you. Thank you.
That's Joel, better Joel than the MST3K Joel. Big time. Dump dish. So yeah, I actually started watching a little of that.
I actually started watching the new MST3K. Oh yeah. Man, is that like a good punch of a show? I hate it.
Like you wouldn't believe. I had the feeling you did from your tweet. It was real bad. It was just really disappointing.
It was like Joel never saw any MST3K after he left. Which is like not like that as much as it is definitely that. So, thanks Joel. You colossal douchebag!
It's true. You can never go home again. I don't want to home there in the first place. I like Mike.
Oh, you're a pro. I know that's a big thing. Like I'm not that much into MST3K, but I know there's a big divide. There is Joel people and the Mike people.
The funny thing is I'll say this about the new show. We're talking about MST3K, by the way, on season 11 on Netflix right now. The fact is for us, for me anyway, I was a big Mike fan. I got into the show through the movie, I think.
Right. You know, the Grammarset movie. And then I saw the show was resuscitated on the sci-fi channel, which is of course like my favorite version of the show. But when I desperately wanted more MST3K, the only way I could get it was through like old VHS tapes.
So I would get old tapes. And sometimes you didn't know if Joel was in it or not. So I just randomly get episodes that had Joel in them. And even though I preferred Mike, the Joel episodes still had value.
Even though Tracy Bell used to play Crow even though I preferred Bill Corbett. The old Joel show still worked and was still funny. This show with Jonah is just garbage. Like I don't like Jonah.
He sounds interchangeable with Tom Servo, who's also replaced the guy with the Crow. That's a great thing, you know, the brand of humor from the three isn't as diverse as it used to be. That they just sound like the same 20-something snarky movie guy. And they sound they have the same voice.
So it's like, I don't know who's talking half the time. And they also made like weird cosmetic changes. They're robots. It's just it's a really disappointing.
You can never go home again type of situation where it's like, don't bring it back. I thought I wanted to back. Rift tracks is all I need at this point. So anyway, we're talking about Marvel today guys.
Not to put you on a weird page, but I felt a lot of that needed to be said. We said actually friend of the show Brad Geiger said something like, I've been trying to like the show and it's just so damn bad. And I'm like, yes, thank you. But yeah, I needed to say that loud.
But anyway, today we're going to talk about Marvel. A lot of people have been arguing that Marvel is kind of like a stray. Despite the fact that like there might be some like this, as they say, the sun shines on the dogs as some days. You know, sometimes regardless of the business practices and the publishing practices of a group, some great stuff can happen.
And the fact is Marvel isn't new at making good comics. They've made some good stuff. But for me, you know, I think a lot of people would agree that like, I was about to call it reverb, the generations and legacy are kind of like a step in the right direction. Definitely.
But for me, it feels hollow because nothing has actually changed. So true. It feels hollow. And I worry to seeing what we've seen with them kind of changing around X-Men.
I might have mentioned this on the weekly poll this week. I don't want them to half-ass a legacy or a generation's for Marvel the same way they're kind of like half-ass in the X-Men right now. That's the thing is that like Marvel is in this weird position where they loved they love the X-Men for a while. The X-Men were their darlings.
Then Fox kind of like made it obvious they weren't going to relinquish the rights or share them or whatever. The behind the scenes nonsense is that nobody really truly knows and don't let anyone tell you different. If anybody says what it is, they really don't know because they've only gotten like tweets and hearsay. But the fact is because we don't really know what's going on back there, but we do know at least that there as far as publicly there is no deal between Marvel Studios and X-Men or at N-Fox that those powers above one above all, so to speak, has kind of decreed that insistence on Fox properties won't be given preference.
And they kind of let those franchises go by the way. Some of them have been canceled outright and only movers and shakers like Benders are allowed to use them. Oh, yes. So it feels weird that because there has been no change in the contract or in the issues that the one above all has had with, we're talking about like Pearl-Marter who is the president of Marvel.
Because his opinion hasn't changed because the deal hasn't changed in two studios. There's no reason to assume that everything is copacetic. And there's no reason to assume that like a change in the wins won't cause him to show up in Marvel's publishing offices and say, I'm unhappy with this again. And like even though you finally fix the X-Men, break it again.
Like I just saw a solicitation that says the X-Men are going to be integral to the battle against Thanos. Oh no. And you know, just kind of like what? Not on my watch because I am grumpy about like not getting a few cents out of a billion dollar check.
I have lots of money but I could be having all the money. I could have a little more. I could have a comparatively smaller amount of money if if someone were to relinquish a metric ton of it. I just want another golden boat.
Is that too much to ask? Yeah, right. And you really deserve one. So my point being because there even though Marvel is cosmetically making some changes that people want to see, it feels like any moment the rug can be taken from under them.
And there hasn't been really any shift in editorial, in the executive branch. None of the major changes. Even just line of thinking of anything from what we've heard when they're talking to the Diamond Distributors and anything. It's almost as if their thinking has gone back or not changed at all.
It's true. Yeah. Like there's been there has been no significant change. So it's just we're not stupid and we live in an information age where we all know who's in charge.
We can see what's happening. You know, the Jim Shooter years when Jim Shooter's being charged with Marvel, we didn't know how miserable all the creators were until well after the fact. Oh yeah. He ran that place with an Iron Fist.
Apparently he was a real pain in the ass about it. Now that said, some of those books were pretty freaking great. But it was a true golden time for comics. They all came out on time too.
Shooter, as much as you might love her. Hey, I'm crapped to the whip and fix the chronic lateness problem, which is becoming a problem again in modern Marvel. It's true. But so all right.
Our idea came from actually a bolt from the Blue, if you will, speaking of shooter references. But I was in bed and it was 2, 3 in the morning and I was just finished ending off the rack and I was just lying there. And suddenly I had this like thought because I was like, we did an episode of Elsport Exchange where we talked about like kind of like what we do if we were in charge at DC. Which was very off the cough and very fan casting and very fun too.
It was very fun. Yeah. I had a whole list of titles I wanted to see. So I thought it'd be only fair.
So the idea being I thought like how if let's say like magic happened and I was put in charge of Marvel, how would I address the publishing problem? How would I address you made a blood sacrifice to the right dark God and now you have been given this power? And it really had to be like it has to be preface with that because it had like I want anyone to misconstrue like that. I think that I'm going to be put into Marvel in some way or that I think that by making a podcast about it, Marvel is going to take my idea and change it.
It's literally just fantasy and it's just fantasy baseball, but with comics. It's fantasy baseball with comics. It's almost like it's D&D. But you know what?
No, let's roll for this. Let me grab my dice out of my wrong. I've got weighted dice because everything that's happening is just stuff that I wrote that I made up myself. So I had this like concept and it hasn't been field tested.
It hasn't been put through a simulation, but we're going to put it through the simulation in as much as we're going to talk about it. And so I thought let's address how can we fix Marvel? What could we do if I were put in charge of Marvel and and the second thing that I had to do was hire Joel to come up with all the titles. In an active pure looking out for your friends age, you want a job exactly to in the morning to which I'm like, yeah, I'm still awake because you're working on videos.
I am all for this idea. It would literally it would literally have been a situation where they're like a genie is like you can fix Marvel, but you have 24 hours. And it's like, oh shit. I need somebody who has who will in 12 hours will give me a pitch for 16 comics.
It's funny. You wrote me and I'm like, that's a great idea. I'll get to work on that tomorrow while I'm waiting for a video to finish rendering an hour later. Oh man, I've got 16 amazing books right now.
So literally I got 2 30 in the morning. I grab my phone. I go Joel, this is the show. And then I just copied all the stuff from my Google key and then I just sent it to him.
This is the publishing plan. You're in charge of the creative and leave me like one or two titles because I might want to come up with something on my own. So he's like, okay, so here it goes. This is this is if we were in charge.
The question is that we're asking is can we fix Marvel comics and the title of the episode is let's fix Marvel comics. Let's fix it. What can we do? Let's go at the else world initiative.
Let's call that. He's an else world brand. He put a little E on the corner. Yeah.
So okay, my concept is not too dissimilar from the rebirth approach in as much as there needs to be a singular vision with like-minded people at the top levels. I'm not talking about like like, Pro-Mutter. Let's pretend that either he's not there anymore or he was visited by three ghosts in the night. And he just lightened up.
But the fact is, you know, he doesn't really control creative as much as he says. Except for the parts where he's just like, don't do this and do this. You know, but he doesn't go like, hey, what about a book about this? You know, he's not the big idea guy.
He's the he's the money man. So but everything else we can have some kind of change over. So the idea is like, how about we get a singular vision? Some one perspective in there.
And I guess it's kind of just me. But I'm not so arrogant as to assume that I know what I'm doing or I have the best ideas. And the best thing that person who's putting charge can do is surround themselves with smarter and more creative people than themselves. And that's why I talk to Jimmy in this way.
That's what Joel. So what we're going to do is so my idea is we're going to start. For the first year of Marvel Comics, we're going to break Marvel into four pieces, four arms of Marvel. And what I basically did was, and four was an arbitrary number.
Originally it was three and then I thought, oh, shit, I actually need a fourth. And they just coincidentally happened. Yeah, they actually coincidentally became a literative. So we're breaking Marvel into four chunks.
The Marvel publishing arm, by the way, there's nothing to do with cartoons, movies, internet stuff. We're just doing the books. If I just gotten put in charge of Marvel Comics publishing house, what are we going to do? I'm breaking Marvel into four chunks, street, sky, space, and supernatural.
So we have these four worlds. It used to be, I remember when reading back in the day, you know, there used to be the spider editors and the mutin editors and the street level editors. So it's kind of like that where we're just looking at the street level, the sky level, the space level, the supernatural. Now what does that mean?
Four pillars of a superhero universe. Four pillars of the Marvel universe. The street level, obviously characters like Luke Cage or Spider-Man or Daredevil. Bite crime, they're killable.
They have to, they maintain secret identities a lot of them. Typically, identity, secret identities, they can be killed. They usually have some kind of really significant tether to humanity. They usually have like a shlubby, like type of work at a job or at least a blue collar job.
They work in the dirt of the Marvel universe. So, and each of these arms or these realms, as I call them, have some supervising editor in charge of them. And their job is not necessarily to come up with the ideas, but to wrangle the ideas and focus them towards a common goal. Creative Godfathers, if you will.
Precisely. Which is why some of these names might sound familiar and why it might concern you, but don't forget that their job isn't to come up with the ideas, their job is to wrangle and to help maintain focus. By the way, each realm of this publishing arm, street, sky, space, and supernatural, have four books under their titles. So, Marvel publishers, let's say 46 titles right now, we're dropping it to 16 titles a year.
That's 16 monthly books with four kind of larger ideological concepts of the Marvel universe. So right now, we're reducing the amount of books we're doing, but we're also going to be focusing them into their kind of spheres of influence. And I'm sure there can be crossover and interchangeability, obviously continuity and the shared universe is a big factor Marvel in something I do not want to lose. So, with street, I put Bendis in charge of street.
Why not put Bendis in charge of street, even though Bendis were in the galaxy for a lot of people, because Bendis is a big idea guy, because Bendis is a long standing creative and the dude cares about story and he gets character. He knows he knows crime, he knows neo-noir, he wrote some of the best years of Daredevil, he wrote stellar Jessica Jones, he knows the players, he knows the field. Exactly. I don't think he can fuck it up too hard.
Exactly. I'm not putting him in charge of space, obviously, dude doesn't care about space, but he gets the gritty street level New Yorker or Washington DC or San Antonio, like he gets the real estate. He gets the real lives, that's another thing he gets. He focuses on the smaller picture characters.
So, Bendis is in charge of street. Sky. Sky is an interesting factor, because it's like, what does that mean necessarily? He debated this.
I had to write him like, okay, what does Sky entail? Because it's me like, is that anyone who can fly? Because there's a lot of people who can fly. No, Sky is the superheroes who stand for a more ideological idea.
These are characters. Public figures, the Avengers type characters. We're talking about Captain America Thor, Iron Man, while coincidentally two thirds of them can fly. We're also talking about characters that usually the street level or the regular guy sees, you know, either or aspires to be.
These are literally to be looked up to celebrity enough that people can say, hey, look up in the sky, it's Iron Man. Exactly. It's whoever. And the best part about these realms, by the way, is that just because you immediately associate, let's say Spider-Man was street, right?
Doesn't mean that next year he wouldn't be Sky. Because maybe after your long story, Spider-Man winds up becoming something greater or he winds up being thrust into this more public role. And then the editor of Sky gets to run against and control the Spider-books. So, it's kind of like developmental in sports.
You do really well down here. Then next year we'll move you up to a higher echelon. Exactly. Or if the creator themselves wants to go in that direction, like, I have a good Sky pitch for Spider-Man, that kind of concept.
Who am I putting in charge of Sky? The only guy who knows Marvel's legacy and knows those characters in and out and can tell you a story that'll make you cry but also make you believe. And that's curp music. What is he been up to recently?
Right? I don't know. Not a lot. He's such an untapped resource.
Why isn't he doing something for someone? I completely agree. And there's the thing is a lot of people could have been in charge of Sky. But I think Curp Music to do to wrote Earth X and the dude who wrote Avengers Forever gets it and knows what he's doing.
And again, the dude can just, yep, somebody who heard the crack, crack goes here. But Curp Music is the kind of guy who's like, ooh, you know, who wouldn't do that? Thor. You can't do that.
Or like, ooh, I would recommend you do this. Or have you considered that idea? Boom. So, music's in charge of Sky.
Next arm is Space. Space for itself guards the guy. It's the kind of thing, the shiara brew, that kind of thing. Whatever.
I didn't, and look, I just said Space and I just let Joel run with it. It's a very broad thing. And I definitely put someone here where it's like, are they technically Space? Well, they can be and they have been in the past and maybe they should be again.
Like about 25 years ago, the X-men would have been Space. That kind of... Absolutely. They spent a lot of fucking time at the Baylanks.
You know, everyone who loves from an eyelash, they started at X-men. Yeah. So, and while I was thinking about like the bigger ideas like Dan Abnett could have been in charge of Space, I felt like it was kind of obvious. So I went with Al Ewing because Al Ewing understands he's a good idea because he is taking Marvel's cosmic in directions that people haven't quite seen before.
And I feel like if he were given more creative freedom and to the promise that what he did stuck and mattered, he'd get to go completely crazy with it. And he's a work horse too. And he's a work horse dude knows what he's doing. And because he's not in charge of a book, he's in charge of helping to focus everybody, he gets to play with bigger ideas without having to worry about like, oh shit, I gotta get a script done.
You know? Like, just he'd be, he would probably be the hardest editor to work for just because he'd be like, oh yeah, he'd be everywhere. He'd be like, oh, how's that book doing? Like, I just talked to you like 20 minutes ago.
Yeah, but I got excited. Yeah, oriented. You can tell from his stuff. Yeah.
And he knows teams and he knows other stuff. Right. And finally, Supernatural was an idea. It was an after book.
So I was like, oh shit, where's goes right? I'm gonna go right to Supernatural. And because, what's his name? Because Neil Gaiman made a deal with Marvel recently and because he sold to Angela and because he was supposed to see some miracle man's kind of stuff, I put Neil Gaiman in charge of, in charge of Supernatural.
And by the way, again, the dude can't be trusted to write a script all the time. So just put him in charge of the publishing house. So it's like, people go to him and they say, Gaiman, I want to do this thing with sleepwalker. I want to do a big story.
Boom. Neil Gaiman just says, just gives him the idea, gives him the thought. He's like, let me think about it for a day or two and then I'll get back to you. That kind of thing.
So another guy who knows story, knows character, knows how all the pieces fit together. Exactly. They're all, they're all direct. They're all focused creatives who can go in a singular direction and who have, who have earned our trust and our confidence.
That too. They're also very like noteworthy. Sorry. They also have integrity and they care about what they're doing.
So they'll fight for things. They'll argue, they'll, they'll, they'll push and they'll kind of be right. Which is what you want in a like creative Godfathers. Now, like I said, boom.
So you got these four pillars in the Marvel Universe, Street, Sky, Space, Supernatural. And each one of those has four titles. You got 16 titles in total that we're going to be publishing on a month on basis. But that, but we don't have 16 characters and some of those groups have to be, have to be team books.
What about those characters that are guaranteed sales, but we don't have a place for them in the publishing line? I took that into effect when I did this. In fact, for every tier that I put together, I wanted one standout team for that tier to be represented above them. Also be like, Hey, if your favorite character didn't get a book should really read the team book because we're going to be cycling people in.
They're going to be having adventures. You're going to get a chance to see them and if the response is good, maybe they'll get spun out into something. In fact, in many cases, I kind of made the mentor mentee thing also affect a lot of these books that I chose to put together because that's a thing Marvel has now. They got their older classic heroes.
They got a whole generation of younger heroes that a ton of good work has been put in. You don't want those characters falling by the wayside. You need them to stay in the zeitgeist. It's true.
And I had another answer for that. But I'll get to that in a second. The idea here is that each realm has a year-long plan and a direction. So rather than have, we have a singular voice.
We have a singular idea. That's me, I guess, who's like, we're going in this direction. But each of the editors or overseers of their realms have this concept that they're like, okay, I kind of like going this direction for this realm. This could be a small thing.
This could be a big thing. It could be like, I want, but the concept is basically, I want to, at the end of the year, a year of publishing at the end of that year, I want us to get from point A to point B. And point A to point B could be, I want these characters to grow or I want these characters to be a year older or I want these characters to be dead or in the dumpster or broke or retired or I want them to be bigger and better and I want to move them over there or something. But you have to have a direction that you feel every day or every month or every bi-weekly period that you're buying comics.
You're reading this book and you're thinking to yourself, shit, where's this going? And you know in your head that it is going somewhere because we've told you when we had our big summit meeting that this is the plan and the direction. So even like, and you're also, when you're reading your comic, you're also thinking yourself like, what's that mean? You know, you're reading and then you're rereading.
You know, you're enjoying the story for what it is, but you also know that deep underneath the surface, it's going in a direction. So you're thinking that off-handed comic could mean something, it could have ramifications for the year-long story. DC's doing that really well in Reber and everything relating to the button and the watchmen and the missing 10 years. Exactly.
They're still talking about that three-joker thing. All we know is that the chair says there were three jokers. We still have not seen anything and everybody is drawing from every freaking angle to possibly solve this mystery. And you're looking at that from four different perspectives, four different publishing pillars of Marvel or four different pillars of Marvel are going in a singular linear direction.
And you don't know what that is and I don't know either, but I'm just telling you like this at the concept. So the other thing is creators that are working in that realm have an opt-in, opt-out opportunity at the inception. When you come in, you're brought into work on this book, hey, we're going in this direction. All of, like this realm you're going to be writing for, it's going in this one direction.
Do you want in or do you want to do your own thing? If you want to go in, then your book will be integrally tied to the direction this thing is going in. If not, we will do everything in our power to avoid your book being part of the wave that is going in that direction. Because we don't want to like hamstring people, but we also want to include you if you feel, if you have a big idea or if your character is big for the story.
Definitely. So we got that as well. Then I was like, okay, what are we going to do about the other characters that don't necessarily have their own book? And I've got that covered because it's something I've been touting forever.
And it's the graphic novel section. That's like the fifth unspoken pillar of Marvel. Excellent idea. The graphic novel section.
We're going to approach it kind of like Earth One or if you want to talk about Marvel season one. But basically I want to say high profile creators who have big idea pitches will be considered and approved by a graphic novel editor thrown over a seer who I nominate Mark Wade because the dude has been editor in chief of his own comic company and Mark Wade knows story. And again, he has the experience of resume and he gets these characters. But Mark Wade's the editor of the graphic novel section.
I saw this as an excellent way to to bridge the gap between a lot of stories that never finished and also just do cool concepts with characters who might have new stuff coming out soon. Exactly. And depending on what realm the characters that are being written about in the graphic novels, Fall Under, the supervisor of that realm might is given the opportunity to review and read the pitch of the graphic novel. They can pop their head to decide whether or not that graphic novel takes place before during or after the year long plan that way.
And by the way, they don't say, oh, that doesn't work out. We're working on a plan. You just say that takes place before or after my year long plan or you can say, actually, that can fit in right here. And I can work on that because I know about that graphic novel, which I've read already because it's already done.
It's already being it's already written or the pitch is already done. I can fold that in before the books are even published before the years out. And I'll be sure to drop a reference in there somewhere and I hate this takes place after. I can fold in that graphic novel.
So it so it so it either it either does work and it does matter or it doesn't and it's still just a great work on itself. This way, when you announce these titles and you say like, let's say, I don't know, whoever you have a great pitch for a graphic novel or a number of graphic novels, but somebody say like somebody comes in and he's like, I got this graphic novel and they're like, we're doing this original self-contained graphic novel here and it's coming out in the fall. And they go, hey, is that going to fall under the year long initiative of blah, the interviewer or the interviewee rather can say definitively, yes, or no, it's not its own thing or actually I can tell you definitively will take place after this year long initiative. This way you can answer that question because there's a thing that Marvel can't Marvel can't do.
They love to have their cake needed to in as much as they sure do. They have their continuity and they have their shared universe, but there are so many conflicting issues because they publish many freaking books and because they don't have anybody paying attention or caring about it that you haven't already established. Oh my god, when does this take place? Who's it like, what is that?
This has been in like five different places in five different books when he really shouldn't be. Exactly. So but you have you have the ability to say definitively. Yes, this is what it happens.
This is when it takes places where this does affect the year long initiative. Even though they don't necessarily have any control over what's happening in the graphic novel, they at least have the ability to say it matters or it's part of the initiative so that the graphic novels themselves, maybe they'll sell because people are trying because collectors, we've already got that's the thing is that you're publishing books for the wrong market. You're trying to publish books or creators or collectors are buying books whether they whether they're good, bad or or matter, you know, they're buying them because they're completely because they're collectors. In this matter, you're appealing to collectors by saying it does take place when there's one continuity, but you're also appealing to the person just like stories and just wants to do that.
So boom, you're just a so your graphic novels are a separate entity, but they don't have today. So they're basically five pillars of the of the Marvel of the Marvel publishing line. And that's the idea. And by the way, characters that are not included in the current monthly schedule will be given preferential treatment in the graphic novel section.
Yes, that's a good idea. So there's a building by a Avengers team. I wanted a wild card for up and I'm like, oh, maybe this guy, maybe this guy. Well, okay, anyone who I don't give it to gets a graphic novel then.
Exactly. Because the thing is like we got a Spider-Man book. It's coming out monthly. We're not going to flood the market with Spider-Man books.
We're not going to sell the mark with Wolverine books. But if like, let's say Iron Man gets left out of the shuffle, right, even though we should be publishing an Iron Man book, he didn't make it into the publishing line. And because we're only selling 16 books a month, instead of 40 freaking six, we will sell all 16 books. That's the thing.
People might actually want to read these people might actually be able to afford to buy all of these. And if there's some people who are like, I will not because Iron Man is not in it. Guess what? Wait, three months is graphic novel coming out and it'll cost the same amount as four issues because that's how much graphic novels cost.
Graphic novels are like 25, 15 books, 15, 25 books. And when you drop the price line down to $2.99, $2.99 on an issue, that's not bad. And you're still making your money. So anyway, that's the concept.
That's the conceit. That's where we're coming from with our publishing line. Now I've counted on Joel to come up with something and I actually asked Tiffany to come up with something as well. And she's got a supernatural pitch which we'll fold in when we get to Super Natural.
So Joel, I can't wait to hear it. I talked to you for the last 31 minutes. Now it's your turn. Let's hear what's going to come out under, and we got to come up with a publishing name for this, by the way.
But I have no con, like Marvel killer or something like that. I don't know. But what comes up with the killer is nice. I mean, you could also do what DC Rebert is kind of doing.
You could go back and borrow old names like what's stopping us from calling Street the Marvel Knights in Brent. Oh yeah, absolutely. That's fine with me. I mean, I guess the publishing initiative is planned.
I'll call it right now. I'll call it Marvel Foundation. There you go. And we'll go from there.
Just be really do should we put our own names in there, the Marvel Elseworld initiative. It's like, oh, but elseworld is really confusing if you put that in there. It's too, it's too DC. But yeah, so let's hear it.
What realm we're going to start in first. Well, I mean, let's start from the bottom to the top. You know, let's start from the bottom, and then we'll be here as as Drake, a famous Canadian once said. But yeah, so starting with Street, obviously, when you ask me to put together a street initiative, I could not think of any other hero to start with then the Punisher, of course.
Okay. Well, Punisher, here's my thing for the Punisher. We have him, but we're bringing him back home to New York from this. The Punisher hasn't actually been in New York for a couple years.
Now he was in LA when God, what's his name? He doesn't work in comics anymore was writing him. Yeah, yeah, I don't remember who you talking about but what the fuck was his name? He was the guy he wrote Red Wolf for a bit as well.
Yeah, there was a big scandal around him, but no one would actually say anything that he stopped writing comics. So I guess the scandal might have been true. Was that Nathan Edmondson? Yes, that's the one.
All right. There you go. Becky Clunin is writing the Punisher right now, and it's good. I enjoy it.
Yeah, but again, he's not in New York. He's not in his element. He's kind of all over the world right now. Bring him back home.
Bring him back to New York is what my what my marching order would be for that and for a creative team. Give it to two old hands who know hard boiled who also were very instrumental in the original Marvel Knights and in the resurrection of Marvel the last time they hit us up. Give it to Jimmy Paul and the audience just in great. Okay.
Now, just in coming out drawing is that he would be writing Grey would be helping. I was gonna say Amanda Connor would not be weird in Amanda Connor drawn Punisher books. If you've ever read the pro, you'll see it looks I mean like that's the kind of universe that I'm imagining and it looks pretty solid. I would read the shit out of a Punisher drawn by Amanda Connor.
So there you go. And because she's married to Paul and the audience Justin Gray is there frequent collaborator there. It's the Paul and the Oddy Connor family doing a Punisher book set back in New York doing just straight up crime stories. Maybe not quite as like dark as the Ennis stuff, but at least like Marvel Knights.
Yeah, like Ennis's early work with his welcome back Frank era. Yeah, we're heading to the welcome back Frank era. You know, it's you know, it's dark. It's messed up.
It can be occasionally weirdly funny sometimes. I think Paul and the Oddy is able to capture that too where it's almost like it's in scratchy levels of violence. Totally. Can do that.
And you know, you can bring back, you know, a bunch of characters who aren't dead. You know, you can bring back Barracuda and the Russian and probably Jigsaw. You can do something in this. Hey, listen, Ben just put him into infamous Iron Man this week.
Did he really? I didn't read that yet. He's in it. Oh my God, Ben just likes Jigsaw.
Ben just also uses Jigsaw during his Daredevil run. Yes, he did. Let me tell you. Well, it's because the hood is there and he had Jigsaw in the hood jet.
But of course, because the hood with his like cadre of T and C-lister gets the E-bike big time. So okay, as far as the four books being published under Street, one of them is Mainstay, probably the streetiest Street hero hero vigilante. It's a dark yet peppy looking, it's a beautiful, fun looking Punisher book, definitely. And I even thought of like a subtitle for it, the Punisher, The War at Home, because he's coming back home to New York.
Okay, and I guess for the year long endeavor, it's just Punisher kind of like seeking his roots and kind of getting back, seating his roots getting back into New York. There's that. And then I also remember the pitch I had a long time ago. In fact, someone made fan art of this.
I want the Punisher to start coming upon crime scenes where a bunch of criminals have already been murdered and up on the walls and up nearby. There's the Vietnamese character for Punishment. And he's like, do I have a copycat? Is someone around killing people in New York?
Is someone stealing my shtick? And then we eventually tell the origins of the Vietnamese Punisher, the Viet Cong Punisher, who Frank met during the war. Although I guess he can't be Vietnam anymore, can't because he'd be too old. He would be pretty old.
You could make him like, it's Spencer Storm one. Yeah, it's let's let's, yeah, basically I want to introduce a new villain who is a dark mirror to Frank Castle who he met during the war. And the big thing is that this mystery villain is killing other criminals before Frank can get the chance to basically trying to go him into a conflict. Saying, you know, come come back to the place at all started, come back to the place the Punisher was born.
We never got to have our battle. Let's have war forever, you and me. Okay. And that's why it's called the war at home.
Where do you want Punisher to end up at the end? What's the, again, you know, basically it's a story of like, you know, I'm pretty bad, but at least I'm not this guy. Okay. This is the true level of Megalomania that could happen to me if I became this other guy.
So it's almost like you have Punisher in kind of like a dark place in the beginning. And by the end, he's like his, his kind of purpose is reawakened, but he's also kind of like more okay with it. Yes. Yeah.
It's a reawaking of Punisher's purpose. It's like, you know what? Yeah, there will always need to be a Punisher because there will always be men like that in the world. It'll also be men like me.
Okay. I'll read that. I'm buying that month and month now. Here we go.
And of course, we can draw him to look like John Bernthal because he's got a Netflix series coming up. So Frank will magically start looking more like John Bernthal. Fine. I mean, like, like you make a chisel jaw white guy with black hair and you're done.
Like it doesn't matter what Frank looks like as long as he looks like some variant on what he's been looking like forever. It's true. He's the most no frills in terms of cost. Does he have the skull on his shirt?
Perfect. He can wear literally anything literally like and yeah, that's my only provision. I'm like, okay, Joel, I'm gonna take this pitch, but he's always has to have the Punisher logo. That's fine.
And can I can I make one edition just because I'm just a jackass and I have I'm drunk with power. Please do it. At least one issue where he wears the old uniform with the white boots and the skull teeth ammo belt. Like just one issue, maybe where he needs to wear it.
Something like that. That's an excellent idea. Here's the thing. This new mystery villain blows up his safe house, which means Punisher has to go really low-fi.
He has to get the battle van out of storage. It has costume is and he has to wear that and drive around in it. Okay. And like listen, he can go through the ship and get it all torn up and then he has to like just throw on like a coat and just put some hands and he's like, I don't know why.
I got a uniform originally, but this is my uniform. It's just a face of death. But anyway, yeah, I'm down. All right.
You like it's funny what you find in your closet. Yeah, I like that. All right. Let's do it.
Do one of those stories. All right. What's next? What's next?
What's next in the lineup? Keeping with the trend of street level and keeping with the trend of Bendis. I have a daredevil book surprisingly. He's doing really big on Netflix right now.
Another thing that kind of informed my choices when doing these books is I assumed a lot of these would be a reaction to Secret Empire, whatever that ends up being. And again, we're only a zero issue in. We don't know how it's going to end. But this is like my wheels turning in my head of how I think it's going to end.
Yeah. And where I think a lot of characters are going to be. I call this pitch daredevil hell's kitchen. And the idea is that Hell's Kitchen was hit harder by the battles of Secret Empire more than any other borough in New York.
It was basically steamrolled. And as we joined the comic, Matt Merroff is digging through his dad's old gym trying to find his trophies, trying to find his gloves and everything because the area is just, it's been glassed essentially. Okay. By Captain America and the Secret Empire.
And he's like, you know what? I need to be more active again, not just as a superhero, but Matt and Merr Doc needs to work harder than ever before to rebuild Hell's Kitchen to rebuild my home. Maybe I don't want to be a lawyer for a year. Maybe I want to actually get involved in local politics because most successful politicians started as lawyers anyway.
But basically, I'm doing a thing on one of my favorite junk, when it runs with Green Arrow, when he became mayor of Star Series. I kind of want to see Matt Merroff become mayor of Hell's Kitchen for maybe like a year to balance that and being a superhero and trying to help out again. And here's the other thing. He starts crusading because obviously Hell's Kitchen needs to be rebuilt, right, which brings in construction and Teamsters and the mafia again.
And guys like Tombstone and the Kingpin and all these other guys are just salivating at the idea of all these no-show jobs and everything else that they can get going in Hell's Kitchen. But Matt's like, no, we will rebuild this place better than it ever was before. And I will fight you to the nail to make sure he goes that way. And he fights like, you know, supervillains on the street and he fights political corruption in the office too.
I like that. Now here's the question at the end of the year. Does he become mayor or does he go fucking mayor? This is stupid.
I need to punch criminals in the face, not like it doesn't work. I'm not there yet. I don't know if you will ultimately be disillusioned with politics or if you'll keep up with it. Eventually, Green Arrow was disillusioned with politics and just didn't want to do it anymore.
I wonder if Matt would be the same or if Matt would kind of stick with it longer than GA did. Okay, well, that's enough of an idea that I say that is passed. That is a member of the street. You got 50% of the street done.
What's next? Okay, so again, keeping with the kind of Netflix thing of it, because I mean, that's basically what Netflix Marvel is. It's Marvel Street level. I kind of fused two ideas on this.
At first, I wanted to do a Power Man and Iron Fist book because I love those characters. The only problem is they had a book and it was canceled and now they're going to have a Luke Cage book and an Iron Fist book that will also probably be canceled. No doubt. I thought, well, let me go defenders.
But then I'm like, no, because we already have Daredevil on his own. He doesn't need to be on his own and have a team at the same time, especially if he's doing all this other stuff. So my pitch for the for the team side of the street universe is a brand new book I'm calling Defenders for Hire. Okay, Luke Cage and Danny Rand getting the band back together for the heroes for hire.
So you got Misty Knight calling wing Jessica Jones, maybe even Electro will stop by for a little bit white tiger and third deal is that, you know, after the secret empire decimated everything else, people need more help now than ever. People are eating each other in the streets. And so they need to call someone and they're just having good old-fashioned 18 adventures. This will be a little lighter than the other two because, you know, Danny's funny, you got funny characters in there.
You got Luke Cage and Jessica Jones still trying to raise their kid through all of this. Okay. So you kind of have like the family side of it too. And I think Bendis would do really well if you had a hand in that.
Yeah, I think so. Now, okay. So it's Defenders Heroes for Hire. Is it is it one stable of a cast or are they rotating or are the characters that will pop in and out?
Well, you see like a couple of cameos like Patsy Walker shut like the kid may guess the sheet of that kind of thing or is it like we're looking at this core group like exiles. We're looking at this one group of people from Microsoft. I'm thinking and this kind of goes for all my team books. It's the Trinity.
It's Luke Danny Jess. Okay. We'll probably miss you too. So maybe the core four and then we'll have people subbing in and out.
Maybe like Patsy Walker needs help on a case. So she reaches out to them and they come and help her out. And then next week, it's someone else who needs a hand. I was thinking too, the big thing they need to fight against is on top of everything that's wrong in New York.
People in the city in like these low-income areas have started developing iron fist powers out of nowhere. Okay. People are starting to weaponize their chi. And this gives Danny a thing of being like, Oh, fuck.
I guess I got to call up conlon and see what the hell's going on here. Why? Why is someone giving these people powers? Nice.
And that's like, is that could be your mystery? Like that could be your long history? Like the power like who is giving the power of the iron fist? That kind of thing.
I think it would be a good way to maybe bring back a Davos, the steel serpent and be like, yes, I've opened an evil foot style dojo and the ground into York and I'm training people in the dark iron fist undo you, my most hated enemy, Danny ran. And you know, I've got a cool team of Kung Fu guys and you got a team and we're eventually going to clash at the end. Now, who is making this book? Oh, that's a good question.
You know, man, I really love David F Walker. I think he really got screwed out of the book. I think he gets the comedy. He gets the family angle.
I don't know how he would do with the magic stuff, but I know he definitely got like the kind of exploitation movie angle. I probably give this one to Walker unless you had a better pitch. I mean, who's someone else who has history with the heroes for hiring these characters and who would be able to do a good job with them? That's a good question.
Christo's gauge. I put him on any day. He's great. He would be like, okay, whatever we want to do.
That's even better because Christo's gauge worked on the Daredevil Netflix show. Okay. He manned his wife's. That's right.
That's right. Now, is Sammy drawing this or are we getting somebody? I mean, you could get him if you wanted to. He would be fun.
Who's actually drawing that new defenders book because I would actually look pretty good. I assume it's Alonzo, but not Alonzo. Malieve, let me take a look. Because he's really good.
It is. I don't know. It doesn't look like it's Malieve. It's somebody else.
It's Bendis who's going to be writing it. Now, who's the artist? David Marquez. Hell yes.
Yeah. Put Marquez on that because again, if you look at the solicitations for that defenders book, don't it look pretty? Yes. Oh, no.
And Punisher's going to do a little cameo in that book, which I'm really excited about. But, okay, David Marquez and Christo's gauge writing it. All right. I'll take that.
I'll put David Marquez on anything. As long as his wife is pregnant again, I'm totally fine with it. Oh, I forgot that happened. Yeah.
So, okay, you got two solos and a team book. What's your fourth? Okay. I think everyone knew this had to be the fourth one.
Spider-Man. Spider-Man back to the streets. Yes. Back to this.
That's literally what I wrote. Oh, really? Back to the streets. I literally wrote Spider-Man equals back to the streets.
Yeah. It broke back. Nice. Goddamn, it's not we've been working together too long.
It's true. I'm finishing my thought. Now, what is your pitch for Spider-Man? What are you going to fix him?
So Spider-Man lost everything at the end of Secret Empire. They're basically building up to this anyway. Yeah. He lost everything.
He lost his company. He's at the lowest. He's been in a very long time. He's had to move back in with May.
So step one, and that is, I got to move out of my aunt's house. I was like, God damn 30 years old. I had a company last week on May. And she's like, Oh, just eat your wheat cake, son.
Okay. Okay. And he's like, I got my shit back together. But I kind of rock and bellbow of this one where he's like, because he's moved back into the old neighborhood, essentially, he's getting very nostalgic and he walks by Empire University and he walks by the bridge where Gwen Stacy was killed.
And he goes to like revisit all these major important like touchdowns in his life. And he meets new people there. Like, you know, he meets still. He's like, Hey, still, cuz the spider thing going, you know, yeah, you know, it's been pretty rough on me.
Hey, can I borrow five bucks for the bus? Broke. And she's like, okay, sure, you can borrow five bucks. And then you know, he runs into Spider-Man 29.
I was like, Oh, hey, man, you're still hanging out in this time period. That's pretty awesome. It's a way of like working in the spider characters. We're also making a spider book and eventually it all ends too with him.
The first arc, at least with coming face to face with Miles Morales and Pete apologizes to Miles. Like, I'm sorry, I was so sucked up in my own bullshit. I couldn't be a good big brother. I couldn't be a good mentor to you.
If you want, I want to try and teach you at this hero thing. I want to give you all the guidance I never had when I was starting out. And that's like a touch tone thing of Peter being a big brother to Miles. Another thing, Pete's going to need a job, right?
Because Pete has always been defined by the job he had, either, you know, working for that Google stand in being a photographer, being a teacher for a little bit. Yeah. Here's my pitch for him. Okay.