Exclusive: Marvel’s Tom Brevoort On Champions, Avengers, And Marvel NOW!

With Civil War II entering its final act, and Marvel NOW! kicking off this week, there are big things in store from Marvel Comics. This week sees the launch of the Marvel NOW! flagship title Champions, and more titles, including a brand new volume of Avengers, are on the way.

On the eve of the Marvel NOW! launch, ComicBook.com spoke to Marvel executive editor Tom Brevoort about Champions and the entire Avengers line going into this new era.

In the first part of our three-part interview, Brevoort discusses Champions and Avengers, teasing big things ahead, including a new Avengers headquarters, the Baxter Building! Plus, an epic battle across time with Kang the Conqueror.

Read on, and be sure to check the gallery for an exclusive preview of Avengers #1, and check back Wednesday, where we’ll be talking about the Avengers line more broadly, and about the new Occupy Avengers series.

Why did Marvel make Champions, a book that features all newer, younger characters and none of Marvel’s staples, the flagship title of this big Marvel NOW! Initiative?

Tom Brevoort: I think Champions is the launch that most specifically keys into where the Marvel universe as a whole exists after Civil War II. The premise of the series really finds this young generation of heroes that we have spent a lot of time setting up in various titles over the last couple of months and years having come to a sort of crossroads about what they want to do and how they want to act as superheroes.

Having lived now through Civil War II, not just as civilian bystanders who saw some punching and hitting, but being actually at ground zero and being active participants in it, they have learned in a very meaningful way their inspirations and mentors and role models are perhaps just as flawed and human and fallible as anybody else and are not the completely perfect shining pillars that they might have thought they were when they were starting out.

Thus, if anybody is going to embody the ideas and ideals that made them be superheroes in the first place, it’s going to have to be them. These are all characters we have spent a lot of time, as I mentioned, establishing and setting up and they represent the next generation of Marvel heroes and Marvel characters. Making Champions the flagship of the new launch seemed appropriate.

During the “Marvel’s Next Big Thing” roundtable for Champions #1, you and Mark Waid said this was not something you had planned from the launch of All-New, All-Different Avengers. What was the conversation or the plot point that struck you guys and made you think, “Hey, we should give these younger heroes their own book?”

TB: All this came out of our conversations about Civil War II while that event was being shaped and formulated, and then just looking as to what naturally would be an outgrowth of that. As a bunch of these characters are at the center, in particular, Miles, it really feels like, regardless of what happens in the rest of Civil War II, there should be some ramification and fallout of that.

All along, our plan for those characters in the Civil War II – Miles, Nova, and Kamala – from the jump, they effectively were the undecided voters. They were the ones who, at the outset, did not have a strong enough opinion on what was going on and thus, were torn between what Iron Man is saying and what Captain Marvel is saying. It’s almost like when parents fight. During the course of the event, they were always going to have to figure out for themselves where they stood and not just blindly follow whoever was in front of them.

I think when that conversation began to happen it became a fairly natural thing to go, “Well, this feels like yes, this could be the nuggets of a book. This could be a thing beyond just a plot within Civil War II. It could be something that could grow out of Civil War II in a real natural fashion and form the basis for a new book of a sort that we don’t really have right now.” It developed out of those Civil War II conversations.

Going forward with the Champions, how estranged would you say they are from the Avengers? Is there a real animus there or are the other heroes still looking after them?

TB: I don’t think it’s quite either of those things. There is no specific animus in that they are not at loggerheads or angry at or have hate for any of the characters that came before them and vice versa. The Avengers and the other characters do not have anything bad to say about those Champions kids.

But what they have come to is that point of self-determination. There comes that moment in every person’s life where you need to leave the parents’ house and go out and be your own person and that’s really sort of what Champions is about, in a global sense, for those characters. This is them as a group, as a combined united front, and as almost a generational thing, deciding for themselves who they want to be and how they want to conduct their business apart from how the people came before them were.

That even said it’s not like the Champions or any one of them could not team up with any of the other older Marvel heroes. It’s also not like the Avengers or anybody else are standing over them watching them to make sure they don’t make a mistake or get in over their heads. This is very much these kids doing it for themselves and everything that that implies, which means there will certainly be situations they will go into thinking one thing and then finding the situation is more complicated and more difficult to navigate than they might have considered and potentially making the wrong choices, the bad choices, and having to deal with the ramifications of that.

With the younger members of the Avengers leaving to form the Champions, where does this leave the older, remaining members of the team going into Marvel NOW!?

TB: It certainly leaves them a bit shorthanded. Going into the new Avengers series they are down to something like three or four members at the outset. As is typical for the Avengers over the course of history, there will be some recruiting going on through the first and second arcs in that book.

From the art we have already shown and the stuff we have already previewed, Spider-Man is going to come back into the fold in a major way. I know that, especially after Uncanny Avengers, I am going to say that and people are going to distrust that a little bit because he was sort of a weird, bait and switch in the early issues of Uncanny Avengers to help us hide the fact that Cable was in that book. But I assure you, Spider-Man is actually in Avengers and is actually a big part of Avengers. The new Avengers team that grows there will be staging, at least at the outset, out of the Parker Industries headquarters in the Baxter Building and Spider-Man will be a big part of that world.

The other character that is coming into the book at the jump is Hercules, fresh out of his recent Dan Abnett series, and having gotten his head back on straight and striving to get his life back on track and re-establish himself as essentially the first superhero, the prototypical archetype of what a superhero is and looking to re-establish his relevance in the modern world. He will be a player in the new book from the beginning. There are a couple of other people that will be showing up as we move forward and some of that is hinted at in Avengers #1 and some of that is what you will see as future covers of things come up.

Essentially, the core Avengers are not necessarily angry that Kamala and Miles and Sam have gone off to do their own thing. Again, for them, it’s a natural ebb and flow. It’s unfortunate, particularly as threats break out and you wish you had a few more guys in your army, but the Avengers as an institution and as an organization are used to dealing with this sort of thing, so they will probably be all right.

All-New, All-Different Avengers has introduced the new Wasp, Nadia. She’s a younger, newer character and, judging by All-New, All-Different Avengers #14, has a very idealized idea of what superheroes should be that makes her seem like a character that might be more at home with the Champions. Could she be a bridge character between these books? Why does she stay with the Avengers instead of seeking out the Champions?

TB: I think that’s a good point and I think it’s entirely possible and perhaps even likely that at some point we will see Nadia functioning as a bridge character between those two groups of characters, if not even between the two books. Nadia at this point has only just come into the Avengers. She has come from a fairly rough background. She has finally found some roots and some attachments to other people, in particular, The Vision, who is a strange surrogate uncle to her and Jarvis that she has a very close relationship with.

While these sort of ideals the Champions are talking about are very much speaking the same kind of language that Nadia is, she is just not at a point in her own personal development to go on that same journey at the same time with the other characters. She is more comfortable being with the Avengers and exploring her history and relationship as Hank Pym’s daughter and even her relatively newfound freedom and liberation being in the United States and being out from under the glove of the Red Room and establishing herself as a legitimate, bonafide superhero.

She did not really go through the same sort of right at ground zero on the battlefront realizations and experiences that the other three characters did during Civil War II. She has not had quite that same dramatic comeuppance in terms of realizing the world is a more complicated place and that it’s up to them to find their own way through it. Yes, some of that will be explored in Avengers. A lot of that will be explored in The Wasp’s upcoming solo series.

With the younger Avengers leaving and the older Avengers no longer required to do so much mentoring, and with them having a little more funding thanks to Spider-Man and Parker Industries, how does this change the tone of Avengers and the stories it will tell as compared to All-New, All-Different Avengers?

TB: I think in All-New, All-Different Avengers, just by virtue of how the cast and the set-up tended to lean more on the younger characters and on those mentorship situations you are talking about, the energy that drove that iteration of the series I think very much came from Spider-Man, Nova and Ms. Marvel and those characters’ interactions with the older Avengers. Not every story was about that but in most of the stories we told there were a lot of scenes and sequences that relied on that generational situation. That was very much a part of the oeuvre of the book.

That’s just not going to be there as much going into the new iteration of Avengers. It will be there a little bit because the Wasp is still there and she has some of that point of view. I think in a lot of ways, for all that it’s likely strange to somebody looking at this assortment of Avengers, it will be a much more classically-oriented Avengers team dealing with ridiculously big threats spanning the Marvel universe, being the go-to A-team for bad situations out in the world, and just being the A-list superhero team of the Marvel Universe.

Which is not to say they were not that in All-New, All-Different Avengers, but in essence, they are trading up from the disused hangar in New Jersey to the Baxter Building and Parker Industries in the heart of Manhattan. That, symbolically, is the change in the book as well.

We know that the first story arc of Avengers will be “Kang War One.” This team has been dealing with Kang even in All-New, All-Different Avengers, as well as other heavy hitters like Annihilus. What you say about what other threats will present themselves in Avengers?

TB: I can certainly talk a little bit more about “Kang War One,” and “Kang War Two,” and “Kang War Three.” That whole story is an outgrowth of the stuff we saw with Kang in All-New, All-Different Avengers. That’s been percolating in the background, including, in particular, in All-New, All-Different Avengers #13, in which the Vision went into the future and wound up by the end of the story snatching the infant that would grow up to be Kang and doing something with him. That sort of is the event that predicates “Kang War One.”

We will find out more about the firewall of time that was mentioned by Mr. Gryphon/Kang in some of the earliest issues of All-New, All-Different Avengers. The conflict between the Avengers and Kang is going to get very, very personal and very, very taken to a level that we have not seen before in terms of these characters.

In the course of the story, without giving anything away, one of the things the Avengers are going to come to is this sort of fairly obvious realization that with all of their battles with Kang over the years, the typical way it tends to work out is Kang starts an initiative. They come in. They combat him. They defeat him and he retreats back to his vast empire in the future where he will plot for six months and then show up six weeks later and try again.

And maybe they need to do a little bit more this time than just drive him off and in fact, we will see the Avengers in attack mode at that point, moving to the future and attempting to completely dismantle Kang’s war machine on his home turf.

Champions #1 goes on Sale Oct. 5! Check back on Wednesday for more of our interview with Tom Brevoort!