The big news today, obviously, is that Marvel has finally created a seemingly viable creator-ownership option by importing David Mack’s Kabuki and Brian Bendis & Michael Oeming’s Powers to kick off its new creator-owned line, Icon. Near as I can tell there are two largely unexplored angles to this story:
1) The clusterfuck that was the transition between the last days of Bill Jemas’s reign to the first days of Dan Buckley’s must have been even worse than anyone thought. Huge creators like John Romita Jr., Mark Millar, and (especially) Grant Morrison took their respective creator-owned balls and went home because Jemas’s Marvel, despite initial promises, proved unwilling or unable to accomodate them. Indeed, Morrison decamped from Marvel entirely, forcing the company’s number-one franchise into the joint stewardship of Chuck Austen and Chris Claremont, a public-relations disaster from which it will likely take them some time to recover. In essence, Jemas’s mismanagement of the nascent Epic line and the imprint’s subsequent euthanasia at the hands of Dan Buckley and Gui Karyo screwed over not just up-and-comers, but some of the biggest names in the business. It’s simply astounding that it took the company this long to develop some sort of creator-ownership venue, considering the palpable losses the company incurred through its inability to do so sooner. (This is to say nothing of the fashion in which DC has begun stealing some of Marvel’s critical-acclaim thunder, in large part through a recent crop of successful creator-owned Vertigo titles…)
2) New Image publisher Erik Larsen had heretofore been seen as the guy who could turn Image Central’s fortunes around after years of lackadaisacal brand management by ousted publisher Jim Valentino. Several pundits theorized that Larsen’s mandate would include structuring the company’s publishing plans around Image’s existing popular series, two of the most notable being Powers and Kabuki. But Larsen has a long history of bad blood with Bendis, whose work for Marvel Larsen has mocked almost compulsively not just online and in letter columns but within the fictional world of Larsen’s Savage Dragon title itself. Bendis, for his part, has occasionally let on in his own letter columns that he sees Larsen as a habitual whiner. Could this long-running exchange of potshots explain why, at this critical juncture for Image, Bendis and his close friend Mack have defected to the House of Ideas? Larsen’s comments today are far from the usual “we wish them all the best in their future endeavors” boilerplate traditonally deployed in such circumstances, so I’d wager the creators’ mutual hostility did indeed play a role…