Marvel’s Tom Brevoort Talks The Future Of ‘Marvel Legacy’

Marvel fans are just days away from experiencing the dawn of a new era in the Marvel Universe.

Marvel Legacy #1, which ComicBook.com can confirm has sold over 325,000 units, will begin new storylines featuring Marvel’s most popular heroes, as well as some potentially universe-altering events.

ComicBook.com spoke to Marvel Executive Editor Tom Brevoort to find out what fans should expect from the Marvel Legacy era.

We keep hearing the Marvel Legacy one-shot is going to set up many stories down the line. Is this a brand new story for the one-shot or is it vignettes that will be completed in various ongoings?

Tom Brevoort: It’s a brand new 50-page story, through the course of which we’ll check in with all sorts of different corners of the Marvel Universe where we’ll see different things brewing with different characters. Many of those elements will then spread out into the assorted individual Legacy story arcs in the different books. But it is a story in and of itself, and it does set up not only those various Legacy launches but also a big storyline that will be playing out across the Marvel Universe as a whole over the next year to two years.

The Marvel Universe has always been interconnected – are all these new books leading to something or will they be off on their own and connect in different ways?

TB: Each Legacy story arc in each title is its own thing (apart from special cases such as the crossover between X-Men Blue and Gold and the one between Avengers and Champions). So each title can be read independent from the others—if you like Daredevil or are interested in the Daredevil hook, you can dive into that book without needing to worry about Guardians of the Galaxy. Same as usual. But as I said previously, the story in Marvel Legacy #1 is definitely leading to something—a few somethings if I’m being honest

Are the creative teams on these books for the long haul?

TB: I think that depends on what you mean by the long haul—some of them, such as Dan Slott on Amazing Spider-Man or Jason Aaron on Thor have already been on for a very long haul, and will continue to be. Others will cycle through when the storylines that they’ve set into motion come to their natural conclusion—both Dan and Jason, for example, will one day no longer be writing Amazing Spider-Man and Thor respectively, though that time is still a ways off. This is one of those questions to which every title has a slightly different answer, and even what the fans want varies depending on who you ask: you want your creators to stick around, but not for too long where they begin to get stale, etc.

So, short answer: barring the vicissitudes of fate and business, the creators doing these various titles should be there regularly—though not necessarily the same “regularly” in every case.

Marvel Legacy Anniversary Issues

Some books are close to hitting major issue milestones – is Marvel already planning big things for those?

Yes! We’re well aware that we’ll be approaching not only Thor #700 but Iron Man #600 and Captain America #700 and Amazing Spider-Man #800 and so forth, and each creative team has planned accordingly! Lots of big, fun stuff coming up heading to these centennial releases.

For books that fans might just think is a continuation of the series that came before it – how does Legacy shake those titles up?

I don’t think those fans are wrong—these storylines ARE all continuations of what has come before them. That’s kind of the whole point: Legacy as a whole is a celebration of the rich, winding tapestry that is the history of the Marvel Universe and all of the heroes therein. The point with Legacy was to find, with each series, some bit of business, some element or aspect of the character that had been either missing or overlooked in recent months and put it back at the forefront.

That’s maybe easiest to understand in the case of titles such as Invincible Iron Man, where Tony Stark has been in a healing coma and not a participant for many months. But on a series such as Amazing Spider-Man, for instance, we’ll be seeing Peter Parker returning to a much more traditional status quo. His business and wealth will be a thing of the past and his reputation will have taken a beating, which will bring him back to being the struggling everyman kind of a character that everybody remembers. And so on. Each book is going to be doing its own thing, the thing that best relates back to its history and the history of the Marvel Universe.

Marvel Readers, New and Old

Capturing new readers and bringing back lapsed readers is always a major goal for Marvel – how does Legacy plan to do that differently?

We don’t—we plan to do it the same way we always do, by telling excellent, compelling stories that reflect the complexity and majesty of the Marvel Universe as well as the world outside your window. So we’ll have exciting things happening all across the board, reminding people of all the different aspects of Marvel that they love and hearkening back to those classic elements in a major way.

When is Jonathan Hickman coming back?

We just got his final dialogue in for those last two SHIELD issues, so sooner than you’d think!