[AD] This is John from the Corner Box. In my daytime hours, I work at a company called Pan Universal Galactic Worldwide, and we've teamed up with a place I used to work, Marvel Comics, to put together an exciting new book that we're launching on Kickstarter. It's called Behind the Panels of Marvel's Secret Wars, an in-depth look at the art, and process of making Marvel's 2015 Secret Wars series--the one by Jonathan Hickman, and Esad Ribic--the one that's inspiring the upcoming Avengers film.

This is the first in our Behind the Panel series, and fellow ex-Marvel editor, and all-around talented writer, Ellie Pyle, has talked to the minds who concocted that story, which is the big capstone to Hickman's Fantastic Four/Ultimate Universe/Avengers epic, the comic that ended the Ultimate Universe. It will take you from the Marvel summit planning sessions, through the spin-offs, and into the lasting legacy of the series.

Exclusive to this Kickstarter, we've got art prints, a red-blue 3D puzzle. The most exciting bonus--they're called bite-sized covers. These are miniature reproductions of the comic book covers. They're all the size of bridge cards, but super thick cardboard, and they come in a miniature short box with Secret Wars art. You can collect them, store them, or display them.

Check out Secret Wars Kickstarter, and it'll get you there in your web browser, and you can see what I mean.

Now, on to the show.

Welcome to The Corner Box with David Hedgecock and John Barber. With decades of experience in all aspects of comic book production, David, John, and their guests will give you an in-depth, and insightful look at the past, present, and future of the most exciting medium on the planet—comics—and everything related to it.

[01:40] John Barber: Hello, and welcome back to The Corner Box. I'm one of your hosts, John Barber. With me, as always, my good friend

[01:48] David Hedgecock: David Hedgecock.

[01:49] John: Great to be here, David.

[01:50] David: Yeah, I'm excited, John.

[01:51] John: Yeah.

[01:52] David: It's not just the two of us.

[01:53] John: No, it's not. Neither of us has a Kickstarter going right now about our specific stuff. I'm weirdly, tangentially, involved in two other ones, one of which is a reprint of the Jem comics that Boom! put out, but that's not what we're here to talk about. We don't care. We're here to talk about the one that the company I work at, PUG-W, is putting out, and we've got with us the writer of Behind the Panels, Marvel's Secret Wars, Ellie Pyle.

[02:17] Hi, John. Hi, David.

[02:18] David: John, I don't even know if we're qualified to interview Ellie. She's got quite the list of credentials. She's done a lot of everything at a very high level, John. I don't know. I'm feeling inferior. We have to talk about Ellie's credentials first. This was given to me, Ellie. I didn't prepare this, but I thought it was very well done. So, I'm just going to read it. For our listeners, Ellie Pyle is a writer, editor, director, host, and versatile producer, who has worked in creative development across theater, comics, TV, podcasts, and games. She began her career at Marvel in the Spider Office, as the assistant editor on Dan Slott’s Amazing and Superior Spider-Man and Mark Waid's Eisner Award-winning run on Daredevil. Nice. She edited fan favorite, Fearless Defenders, and developed Silk's first solo series. At DC's Vertigo imprint, she edited such titles as Unfollow, Lucifer, and American Vampire.

As a senior editor and product lead at Riot Games, she explored new approaches to comics, formats, and distribution, returned to Marvel as director of creative development for Marvel Television, before becoming the creative lead on Marvel's fiction podcasts, including the interconnected Marvel's Wastelanders series and Squirrel Girl: the Unbeatable Radio Show, while also, somehow, finding time to co-host the Ambie-nominated Women of Marvel Podcast. Most recently, she returned to editing with Marvel Infinity Comics and print series, such as Spider-Woman, Deadpool, Carnage, and her probably all-time favorite book that she's ever had anything to do with, Spider-Boy. She wasn't at Marvel during the Secret Wars project that we’re talking about, but I'm sure she was delighted to have the opportunity to write for it.

[04:00] Ellie: I actually got to be there for the summits in which they started planning Secret Wars, but I was not there when the actual books were being written and drawn, and edited. So, it's been really cool to go from what I remember of all the planning process, and then reading the comics, to that middle step of, “how did all of this actually come together?”

[04:25] David: How much of that are you pulling from your personal memories of those big meetings and events?

[04:30] Ellie: The summit that everyone keeps describing to me as the most fun Marvel summit ever, I actually got to be there for. So, that's really cool that, as folks are talking about the first summit in which they were just BlueSky spit-balling the tie-ins, and “what are all the different parts of Battleworld?” Jonathan came in with a map, talking about, “well, what are all of the different stories that we can do if we go revisit some of these past events? If we did a Western in the Marvel Universe, what does that look like?” It was just this giant toy box that got thrown open, and everybody had a blast, which is really cool to hear, with all the writers that I've talked to, that they all keep saying pretty much the exact same thing about how much fun that was. So, it is fun for me, too, to not only get to revisit some of these creators who I worked with early in my career, but to also hear their stories about this event that I just got to see the very beginnings of how it came together, and where it went from there.

[05:35] John: Did you read it as it came out?

[05:36] Ellie: I did.

[05:37] John: When I left places, I would stop reading the comics that I was editing.

[05:41] Ellie: I totally understand, and I have had that experience with some things, where I've needed a break from stuff after I left, but in this case, I left because DC had moved their offices to California. I really wanted to go to California, and I also felt like I had hit a point in my career where people were asking me, “what's the Daredevil story that comes after Mark Waid's run?” And I was like, “oh, man. I loved this book so much. I don't know what I would do next.” So, I was like, “maybe I should take a break from superhero comics for a bit.” I went to work at Vertigo at DC, and wanted to get to have an experience of the creator-owned side of things. So, it wasn't a case where I had a lot of bad feelings that I needed to recover from my time at Marvel. No, I still loved Marvel. I still loved the books, and it was exciting to get to see where some of them went after I left. I left in the middle of Spider-Verse, which I have joked that every Spider-Man ever was too many for me, because I was the one who had to make those spreadsheets.

[06:53] David: Wait, what spreadsheets?

[06:55] Ellie: Of every Spider-Man ever. “Who was going to be in this event?” I had to maintain that spreadsheet for a bit, and “who had legal said would not be in this event?” Which is something that actually came up in my interviews for Secret Wars, how some of that stuff changes, over time. There's stuff that we couldn't do back then that now, obviously, characters have become available who have been able to be featured in events since then, but Silk is a perfect example of a book that, I had worked on her appearances in Amazing Spider-Man, I had developed that series, but I left before it actually launched. So, getting to read a book like that, that you had worked on the first few issues, but they hadn't gone on sale yet, while I was there. So, I talk about how I midwifed Silk, rather than anything else, that I helped out some, and at DC, I was getting access to all of these books. So, I was still having a blast reading them.

[07:58] David: Can you tell us what it looks like to develop a book at Marvel? I think our listeners would love to hear what that looks like.

[08:07] Ellie: Sure. So, at Marvel, because you're working with a set slate of characters, you're getting the prompt of “we need a book that's going to feature this character. We have that spot in our schedule,” or as was the case with Silk, “we've recently launched a new character in another book who we now think can handle their own series.” From that point, you're then figuring out, “well, who's going to write it?” and occasionally, people do bake-offs, but we really try not to, in editorial. I've found that you really want to go to somebody, and be like, “you're the person I want to have write this book. What's your take?” and sometimes there is an editorial brief of, “we want to go this direction with this character. What would you do?” And then finding the artist who's going to be the best fit for the character, for the direction, and casting the writer and artist. The editor really does everything from reading the initial pitches to reading the scripts when they come in, checking all the art when it comes in, down to the final lettering proof, every step of the way.

[09:17] David: Who are you reporting to for approvals when you have the idea that you want a certain writer or artist? Who's giving approvals for those things, or are you just given a blank check?

[09:27] Ellie: It depends on the project. It depends on the level of the editor involved. All of Marvel's offices are structured with executive editors, senior editors, editors, assistants, associates. So, depending on where you fall in that, you likely have a senior that you are checking things with. Also, sometimes, marketing or sales may have thoughts, as well, that should be taken into account, because we all know sales are the only thing that keeps this business alive. So, you do want to make a book that can sell, but I actually was very lucky, throughout my editorial career, that I had some real opportunities to, as Tom Brevoort once put it, “build the book I wanted to read,” which was what happened with Fearless Defenders, specifically--that I was handed that assignment, and Tom said, “we've got a pitch already in from this one writer, but go make the book you want to read.” It was my first flying solo editorial project. It was a really great opportunity, because it is rare that opportunities like that come along, that you're not serving “this character needs this specific thing. This character has a movie coming out. This needs to tie into an event,” for example. So, I've been very lucky to have some real opportunities to play.

[10:43] John: Did you wind up changing the book, when you came on to making it, or was it just a matter of guiding it the way it was heading?

[10:49] Ellie: For Fearless Defenders, I had a pitch from Collen Bunn, that I did end up working with him on that book. He had pitched it as a follow-up on a previous event story that he had done. So, I worked with him on the pitch, and then casting Will Sliney as the writer, but it was very much a “we built this from scratch” situation.

[11:07] John: Okay, cool. I thought there was something in place when Brevoort […].

[11:10] Ellie: No, it was a case of, Brevoort was basically like, “we need a book with ‘Defenders’ in the title, and we have a pitch that could be that book. It could not. It's your call.” That was an actually pretty unique experience, where I did get to build something from the ground up, because very often, you are coming onto books that are already in process. You're coming on to long runs. You're coming on to “what is the next story for this character, after such an iconic run as Mark Waid's Daredevil?” was the assignment that I was like, “man, I don't know,” but that is part of the job, too, is to be able to love a particular run so much, but also be able to say, “okay, what's next? What's the next iconic version of this, and how do we do that?”

[12:00] David: Yeah, that is the trick in the job, for sure. So, Ellie, I often say that anybody who's worked any meaningful amount of time in comic books, as their living, if you've done that, then you can literally work anywhere on the planet, and it will be easier than what you were doing when you were working in comics. So, you went from Vertigo to Riot Games. So, I'm interested to hear, does that still hold true in my thinking, and what was that experience like, and what were you doing over there?

[12:35] Ellie: Riot was in some ways the complete opposite set of challenges, coming from Marvel, where you're doing everything so fast, so cheap, which is, in my opinion, what comics are supposed to be, that it really is a, “okay, great. We're getting this done, and if we broke something, we'll fix it next month.” It's baked into the medium, and I think that that's something that has shifted somewhat, as we've moved more and more to a trade market, and a book market, and things being collected forever and ever, as opposed to just “what's going to happen next month?” which was an interesting thing that actually came up, working on the Secret Wars book, is the fact that those 9 issues, Esad drew every page, and that is not always something that you get to have happen on a long running book like that, which I know, it sounds crazy to say 9 issues is long-running, but for an event, it is.

So, I think that, moving from something that was as deadline-driven as Marvel to a place like Riot, where I was building the comics team with the plane somewhat already in the air, but we were also trying to figure out “what do we even want our comics business to be? A comics imprint inside a video game company, what does that look like? What do we want to staff in-house? What do we want to hire out? What format of comics do we even want to do? Do we want to do things that are just digital?” And I was tasked there with both overseeing the creative, but also, I was the product owner. I was coming up with a lot of the business strategy, which was a constant iteration of, “again, we're figuring all of this out,” but it wasn't the deadline-driven situation of, “you have to put a book out next month.” It was more “in a world where you could do almost anything, what do we want to do, and in what ways should we not reinvent the wheel?” Because comics are something that folks have been making for 80 years, versus “is there some stuff that we could reinvent?”

So, it was a lot more experimentation. It was a lot of trying to help folks at Riot understand what comics do well, and what the purpose of comics is, and what they would be best used for, which in my opinion, at least in part, again, goes back to comics being fast and cheap. It's one of the best forms of story R&D there is, as we have certainly seen over the last couple decades in other media, that it's a way to get stories out there, see what resonates with the fans, but for the stuff that doesn't, also you're going to get to try again.

[15:35] David: I've always submitted that, for big video game companies like that, there's so much money coming. It's 100x. The profits and expenses are so much greater that, when you're looking at comic books as part of that ecosystem, it seems, exactly like you say, the obvious answer is “well, this is not something we're going to try to monetize. This is something we're going to use as marketing material and ways to win more fans over, and continue storylines that maybe have dropped off, so that you can continue the marketing piece, and keep your people engaged, while the game developers are building up to the next big launch.” I don't see how you do any other version of that for a big video game company like that.

[16:19] Ellie: Yeah, and there were a lot of different versions of what we could do within that. Is this a case of, “are you trying to get comics fans interested in this game, or in these characters? Are you trying to expand the amount of story that a game like League of Legends can provide?” There's certainly a lot of lore in the League of Legends universe, in Runeterra, but it's not a lot of long-form storytelling in the game itself. So, I was there very much at a time when Riot was exploring a lot of different avenues for what that long-form storytelling could look like. “Which media was going to be the best fit for that? Which media could play well together? What consistency in continuity did we want to have across those media? Should it be the same continuity for everything that Riot releases, versus did we want to go more of the Marvel/DC model, where the comics are one thing and television is another thing, and the games are another thing?” But everybody can use anything that works, that somebody does.

[17:36] David: Yeah. Interesting that you have that experience. How long were you at Riot Games?

[17:40] Ellie: Two years, and what ended up happening, in terms of the question of “what do we need to do in-house, versus what should we outsource?” We ended up negotiating a licensing partnership with Marvel for the actual publishing side of things. Publishing comics and distributing comics is so specific. That was one of the wheels that we decided was not worth reinventing. That was a very cool experience also, because that's how I met John Nee, which directly relates to how I ended up on this podcast today. He was the publisher at Marvel, at the time. So, I got to know him while we were working on that deal.

[18:14] John: I was at IDW, at that point. Did we have a call about that?

[18:18] Ellie: We probably did. John called us, which was very funny, and you can edit this out later if you want. I think I caught him flat-footed a little bit, because I was someone John didn't know, and yet, I knew everyone else on his side of the phone call, and I think it's just so rare, for John, that he's ever in a conversation where he doesn't know everyone involved.

[18:39] John: Also funny, because I've been there too, at the same time, when I was working on the Marvel stuff at IDW. That's funny.

[18:45] Ellie: But after we talked to Marvel, Riot was definitely like, “we love this idea, and obviously we love Marvel, but let's go talk to some other folks.” So, we did talk to IDW. I talked to Lauren Bisom, who is now at Marvel, but at the time, was at DC. So, just trying to figure out our different options, and because we had not previously considered doing a licensing deal, what would that look like? And the deal we ended up making with Marvel was very unique, in the realm of what licensing deals can do, but shortly after that was done, I got an e-mail from Steve Wacker, who I had worked with in the Spider office, and who was then at Marvel Television, and was looking to hire someone into Marvel Television, which was what I had my sights set on when I first wanted to move out to LA. So, between the combination of getting to go back to work for my favorite boss ever, and getting to move into yet another medium, I couldn't say no.

[19:48] David: That sounds like it worked out pretty well.

[19:50] Ellie: It worked out great.

[19:57] David: So, what was your time at Marvel Television?

[20:00] Ellie: During the time that I was at Marvel Television, I was working with Steve, as a liaison between Marvel in New York, and Jeph Loeb's group, working on television here, getting to review all of the television stuff that was coming out of the Netflix deals, the Hulu deals, all of that, including some of the animation stuff that was being developed for Hulu, at the time, and then Steve's creative development department was a Swiss Army Knife, he called it, of creative development, where we could get pulled in to consult on games, on park stuff, on animation, where Steve had been, before he came into a broader role in Marvel Entertainment. It was a really cool job, where you didn't necessarily know, on any given day, what you were going to end up working on, and the brief that Steve gave me, when he hired me, was that our job was to be able to know what made a story feel like Marvel, and guide projects to feel like Marvel.

[21:12] John: That makes sense.

[21:13] David: So, how did you swing from that to the podcast arena?

[21:17] Ellie: The podcasts were one of the things that we were already consulting on, during that time, and when there were some restructurings throughout Marvel and Disney, we ended up getting transferred over into the new media department, and from there, podcasts became my primary focus, and it was at a time when the series that we developed with SiriusXM were kicking off. So, I got to get in on the ground floor of all of that with “what were we going to do with Marvel's Wastelanders, and then eventually Squirrel Girl?” Which was a lot of fun, particularly after how serious most of the Marvel Wastelanders podcasts were, in that post-apocalyptic, Old Man Logan-inspired universe, to then just Squirrel Girl’s College Radio Show, was a great palate-cleanser to throw into that, and getting to work with Ryan North on that was a lot of fun.

[22:17] David: And nominated for an Ambie for one of the podcasts.

[22:20] Ellie: For an Ambie Award, yeah. So, Women of Marvel is a fantastic, long-running podcast that I was very fortunate to get to do my exit interview, from my first time at Marvel on, when I left to go to DC, and then come back almost 10 years later, and come in as one of the co-hosts when Sana Amanat was transferring over into other things and did not have time for this anymore. That is actually one of my favorite things I got to do in my entire time at Marvel, was co-hosting Women of Marvel. I had fabulous producers who made it so easy. I will give a shout out to Isabel Robertson and Zachary Goldberg. They made it so easy to just show up and have these fantastic conversations with people, and you guys know--what's more fun than that?

[23:14] David: I love it. No joke, I think I created this podcast just so I could figure out a way to force John to talk to me at least once a week. I always enjoy talking to this guy, and then there's this added benefit of us talking to all these other cool people doing cool things, like yourself. So, Ellie, what is your favorite project that you've ever worked on, and why is it Spider-Boy?

[23:40] Ellie: Spider-Boy was so much fun, and I have to give credit to Nick Lowe. A lot of Spider-Boy was done when I got there, but I loved working with Dan Slott and Paco Medina. Both of them were folks I had gotten to work with early in my career, and what a joy to jump back into all of that. I was told, at one point, that Dan had started dialing me before the call in which he found out I had been brought back into that part of Marvel was over. We've always had a great time on those phone calls. Dan's very much a writer who likes to talk through every story. He very much works out loud, until he finally writes it all down, and that has always been one of my favorite parts of the process, being able to work with writers like that, where you get to hear them tell stories, and see how it all evolves, and reading a perfect script is always fun, too, but getting to engage with their process, even if it is just being that listening ear of letting them hear it out loud, so that they can think through how they work.

I work pretty similarly to that, myself, when I write. So, getting to work with Dan is always a very fun and very collaborative process, and like I said, Paco is just a joy to work with, and that book was just so much fun, and I am a big believer that we should have comics that are fun, and that kids can enjoy. That's the only way we're going to find the next generation of readers, is if we have books and characters that new readers, and young readers, can connect with.

[25:28] John: If it weren't for Ron Lim, Paco Medina would be the nicest guy in comics.

[25:33] Ellie: That's absolutely fair. Though, I can think of a few other folks I would put on that list, but I'm not going to choose between them, and that book gave us a chance to take some wild swings, and Dan was having so much fun creating these new villains that Paco got to design, or the other artists that we had come in and work on the book. It was so much fun.

[25:58] David: I've talked about this on the show before, but there's an early--I think it's in the first issue--there's this really super clear defining moment, for me, for that series, where Spider-Boy--I think he's fighting Hellifino--and the bad guy gets away, and his adoptive sister, the girl who's taking care of him, she says, “hey, don't worry. You're going to beat him next time,” and he says, “no, I'm not going to beat him next time. I'm going to save him next time,” and I loved that moment. That was it, for me. I was like, “I'm here for the run,” because that was perfect. That was such a perfect little hero moment, and it clearly defined that character, in so many very wonderful ways, and I just loved it from there. Of course, the Humberto Ramos designs and the Paco Medina art, and of course, the rest of it is just icing on the cake, but that was a very clear, really beautiful little character moment.

[26:55] Ellie: And getting to work with Humberto, as well, always a joy, and I would put him on my Nicest Folks in Comics list, too. I would also say that I don't know that there is any writer who just fundamentally gets what makes Spider-Man, Spider-Man, as well as Dan, and I am biased, but I think it was really cool to see, with Spider-Boy, Dan taking that DNA of what made his Spider-Man stories so good, and then being able to apply it to “how does this play out if it's a young kid, and if you're having to learn all this stuff about great power and responsibility so much earlier?” And thinking back to Dan's Amazing Spider-Man run, with the whole “no one dies” thing, I think that the “I'm not going to beat him. I'm going to save him” is an extension of that. Dan's one of those writers who never loses sight of what makes these heroes, heroes.

[28:04] David: Clearly comes through in Spider-Boy, and again, it's one of the reasons why I just adored it so much. It really was a fun read, for me. Just purely as a fan--I don't know Dan or any of the creative team on that book--but as a fan, I just really enjoyed it. I heard that there's talk--I think Dan Slott actually mentioned it--that there's going to be another series coming, but he's not going to write it.

[28:25] Ellie: I have no inside info on that, unfortunately.

[28:31] John: How did you come back to work on those specific books?

[28:34] Ellie: So, in terms of how I ended up back in publishing from the podcast stuff, we hit a point where what podcasts Marvel was doing was changing. There wasn't as much in the fiction realm, and again, more restructurings, as Marvel made its way more fully integrated into Disney. Within all of that, I had already been working on Infinity Comics, which are Marvel's digital comics that are phone-optimized for Marvel Unlimited, which was a great fit, because that's a lot of what I had done at Riot, was “how do we make comics legible on phones?” So, from there, there came this opportunity of “could I move back into the Spider Office full-time?” And I did, and it was a real homecoming, including the fact that one of the first projects that I jumped into, on my first day fully back in the Spider Office, was the anniversary issue of Superior Spider-Man. I was like, “hey, guys. We're getting the whole band back together, including me,” and Joe Caramagna was like, “hey, we're right where you left us.” That was great. I think it's pretty rare that somebody gets a chance to revisit the earliest days of their career, and something that still ranks up there with favorite times of my career, getting to work with these folks, and you all know how comics are--that you go to conventions and you see these people who you haven't worked with in a decade, and yet, it's still such a bonding experience, working on these books, that they still feel like friends. So, getting to come back into all of that in the Spider Office was awesome.

Then, I'm sure your next question is “how did I get from there to what I do now?” And the answer, once again, is that I specialize in restructurings, which is actually something that did not occur to me, until recently, how much my entire career, except for those first four years at Marvel, really has specialized in transitions and weird Wild West times, where stuff was changing, or we were building new things at companies, between the DC move, and building a new division at Riot, and then coming back to Marvel, at a time when a lot of things were changing. So, within all of those changes, the position that I was in was eliminated, and I had the opportunity to move back to New York, which unfortunately was something that just wasn't going to work.

Again, a decision I made twice was that, as much as it breaks my heart, I will choose California over Marvel, if pressed to do so. I have a fiancé now. Just moving our whole lives back to New York was just--he's in school. It was not going to work, but what's exciting about that is, it gave me the opportunity to focus on my first love, which is theater, and I have a theater company called Bespoke Plays that I run with the showrunner for Avatar: the Last Airbender, Christine Boylan. That is a bunch of writers who mostly work in other parts of the entertainment industry, like film, television, comics, games, who just really miss theater in their souls. So, we specialize in brand-new genre plays by diverse writers. It's been a really cool opportunity to develop live theater, and both here in Los Angeles, we've done some stuff in New York, and in the past two years, we expanded to London, and we run the gamut, in terms of talent we're able to work with. We've got people who worked with us right before they had their big break and got too busy to come back and work with us again, to people who have been on long-running television shows, but again, want that opportunity to do theater, because they love it.

So, it's cool to have created a space where people feel like they can take big risks on live storytelling, and “what does sci-fi look like in theater? What does horror look like in theater? What does magic look like in theater?” So, I have been focusing on that a lot, since I left Marvel, including having four of my own plays done during that time, by Bespoke and other companies in four different cities, and I actually published an anthology of those plays, as well.

[33:28] John: What's Secret Wars?

[33:29] Ellie: There are multiple answers to that question, but the one that we are going to talk about is from 2015, when Jonathan Hickman blew up the entire Marvel Universe--just smashed it on into each other, shut down the entire line of books, which is something that I don't think has happened at any other time, that just line-wide, “the books are gone. This is the event,” and he did this in a main series, with gorgeous art by Esad Ribic, and I have been spending the last several months digging into the whole process of how that main series came together, but also how you shut down the entire line of books and drop everybody into Battleworld, a new world that was created out of all of these pieces and shards of the Marvel Universe, and 10 years later, all of these writers are just talking about how much fun this was, and I'm sure that there are also stories of books that unfortunately had not gotten very long to tell their stories before Secret Wars came along, but Jonathan did a really good job of figuring out an engine by which everyone could participate in this event while still having freedom to do a lot of different things, and that is the thing I've been hearing most often in my interviews I've been doing for this book, is how much fun those Marvel Summits were.

[35:09] John: Yeah, that's cool. That's not always the way, as you may have remembered.

[35:14] Ellie: I do, and as I said, I'm sure mileage varied, but it was an incredibly unique experience. It was an incredibly unique opportunity for Marvel to get to do some books that were unlike anything else that they were doing at the time, or had done in recent memory, and to explore a bunch of different versions of characters, where you could have 5 Spider-Men running around, you could revisit all of these beloved events past, but also try new things.

[35:52] John: Yeah. In the book you're working on, are you interviewing all of the writers?

[35:56] Ellie: I've been interviewing writers, artists, letterers, editors, people at all different stages of the comic-making process. How I'm approaching this book, it's going to be a coffee table book, it's going to be an art book, but the approach I'm taking is very much “how does a comic get made? How does an event get made? Let's talk to people at all different stages of this process,” and having been on the inside of that, “what are some things that people who have not done this job might not think to ask about, might not think to explore?”

I got my first inkling of the fact that editors existed from reading letter columns as a kid, in the X-Men comics I was reading as a kid. So, the idea that there was this job that wasn't “writer,” that wasn’t “artist,” but where I could get to work on these stories that I loved so much, was a cool thing. I think people who want to make comics learn a lot from any process book like this that comes out. The number of scripts that I've read, including the Secret War scripts, that start with a note to the artist, that I'm sure is something that people started doing because of scripts they had seen published, where folks had done that, I think that the more we can make this process visible to people, the more opportunity there is for people to learn about this art form that we all love.

[37:34] John: Are there any particular fun insights you can tease that you've already run across, or odd things about this book?

[37:41] Ellie: Yeah. That's a pretty broad question, but I will say, one of the facts about the making of Secret Wars that has been a surprise to a bunch of people, including me, is that Issue #2 of the main series was actually drawn first. Before Issue #1, it was written and drawn, because that's where we first see Battleworld. So, if you're doing a line-wide event, having that reference art of “what does Battleworld even look like?” Is going to be so much more important early in the process than having the last day’s destruction of 616. You need to create the world that the story is going to take place in, and have that for people to work off of, more importantly, than destroying the world that everybody already knows what it looks like.

[38:34] John: Also works the other way, that on that world, that's where you're seeing the Marvel heroes coming out of the last issues of their comics. […] I remember there's an X-Men crossover we did, where Laura Kenny lost an arm, and it gets reattached in the next issue of X-Force, but an X-Men crossover had to have taken place before she got the arm reattached.

[38:55] Ellie: Yeah, that's stuff that I think readers don't necessarily think about, is that all this stuff is being made weirdly out of order, a lot of times, particularly if you've got multiple artists working on a book. Working on Amazing Spider-Man, back in the day, we'd have Humberto drawing one issue, and Cammo drawing another issue, and then a guest artist working on a third issue. So, Dan, particularly for a book that was shipping twice a month, he was having to write all out of order, because in my opinion, the cardinal rule of comics is that you need to keep everything moving. You need to not be the reason that someone else can't do their job, and I think that goes for everybody, at every stage of the process. So, that sometimes means that scripts are coming in five pages at a time. It means that pages are going off to inkers or colorists before the whole book is done. That's the only way that people are able to turn books around on a monthly basis, but the other part of that is, it's not like you're starting at the beginning of the month to get a book done, particularly for a big event like Secret Wars.

They had a lot of lead time, at least in the beginning. The lead time always runs out quicker than people think it will. Not just on the series itself, but also for the entire line, everybody knew more than a year ahead of time that they were writing to an end point. So, because of how the comics business works, there were books that launched in the six months leading up to Secret Wars that then had to figure out, “okay, great. How do we do 6 issues, and then have our character realize the world is ending?” But folks did have some runway, and some ability to incorporate that into the stories that they were doing, and find “what are interesting places to leave off the story, and then to come back into the story?” Because of course, if you destroy the world, you then have to recreate it, and they did that with an eight-month time jump. So, that was a really good opportunity for stories to create a mystery of “what did happen during that missing time?”

[41:15] John: Makes sense.

[41:16] David: In this new book, are you guys putting in roughs and thumbs of Esad Ribic’s work, and things like that?

[41:22] Ellie: So, I don't have thumbnails, because I don't know that Esad does them, but I do have line drawings from Esad. There will be examples of places where the art changed during the process, and we're able to see side-by-sides of that, and talk about why some changes might have been made. There are thumbnails and designs that we've gotten from other artists, because this isn't just going to be a book about the main series. It's also going to be about the tie-ins. So, talking to different artists and editors, and writers, about “how did you design all the different versions of these characters? Were they being pulled from an earlier era, or in what cases were there new designs?” For example, I've got a bunch of designs for 1872, which was the Western series, being able to look at some of that stuff. We're going to have a lot of different things.

[42:21] David: That sounds really cool. I'm totally down. I think Esad Ribic is one of the all-timers, man. That guy's just an incredible talent, and he's just as good as ever with that Aliens vs Avengers project that he did with Hickman, just in the last year, or so. Excited to see some of his pencils in that book. I already ordered mine, John, just in case you were wondering.

[42:43] John: No, I know. Mason said he would appear on the podcast when you saw your name come in on the […].

[42:50] David: Oh, well, then he can come on, because I already did it. I think I was a day one.

[42:54] John: No, he said that, day one […]. Editor of this book, Mason, is supposed to be on next week. It was actually not even Secret Wars related. We were just going to--

[43:06] David: Yeah, we were just […]. Ellie, I'm exhausted hearing about all the things that you've done in the last 15 years, and I look back at what I've done in the last 15 years, and I feel very lazy. What an incredible body of work you've been putting together, and such a wildly diverse--well, not really wildly diverse, but seemingly wildly diverse media.

[43:32] Ellie: I will say that the through-line really is that I love developing stories, and then, I love seeing how stories evolve through different media. I love the craft of adaptation, and “how do you plant a seed in a comic that then shows up in television or film later on? How does what happens in those shows or films then echo back into the comics or the games, or other things?” So, I find that fascinating, and that is something that, no matter what media you're working on, elements of that will come into play, if you're working with a major IP.

[44:22] John: You were working with Shelly at Vertigo.

[44:24] Ellie: I was, and that was a great experience, as well. I mean, creator-owned books are a completely different game, just in terms of, it's a completely different editorial skillset, because at Marvel, for example, you really are the custodian of these characters, and there's a certain extent to which, if somebody comes in and pitches you the story where Spider-Man kills a guy, then it's your job to be like, “maybe we don't,” which is actually a ridiculous example for me to use, because in my interview with Dan Slott for the Secret Wars book, he talks about how Renew Your Vows is the story where Spider-Man kills a guy, but you can do something like that, but you have to find the angle in which it works, but part of an editor's job at a place like Marvel is to make sure that nobody breaks the toys so much that everybody else can't play with them, versus on a creator-owned book, you really are trying to figure out how to help someone best tell their story. For me, it's much closer to directing theater than it is to writing. It's not a question of “how would I tell the story? What story would I tell?” It really is a question of “what story is this person trying to tell, and how can I be the best first audience for that, to help them achieve what they are trying to achieve, rather than my vision?” And I think you need elements of those things both places, but the balance is different.

[45:57] John: The example of working with Dan Slott on that stuff, Dan's not going to irresponsibly be the guy that suggests Spider-Man kills a guy. That's a story everybody pitches. It's that “What if the Punisher accidentally killed an innocent guy?” Spider-Man kills a guy. Superman kills a guy. “What if they killed a guy?” is one that everybody comes in, or it's a story about Jarvis. That's not really a concern when you're working with Dan Slott on Spider-Man. Does that come off more like a creator-owned book, in a weird way?

[46:25] Ellie: That's a great question. Yes, but it does in the sense that, if you're working with a writer like Dan Slott or Mark Waid, or Jonathan Hickman, who absolutely, you can trust them with whatever they're going to do with these characters. It is much more of a “get out of their way” situation, editorially, than a “trying to tell them what their story should be.” Not that an editor should ever be trying to tell someone what their story should be, but sometimes you have to, and even sometimes with people you wouldn't expect. Not any of those guys I just listed, but there are folks who sometimes will come in, and they'll step over the line of a rating on a particular book, or they will pitch something that they think is an amazing story, but is not going to come across the way they think it's going to come across, and I've had a few of those conversations in my career, where I've been like, “I 100% know the statement you're trying to make here. It is going to come across the exact opposite way, and you're going to make the wrong people angry.” So, there's some of that.

I think you're exactly right, that it is a lot closer when you're working with such an experienced creative team, that you can trust them and just get out of their way, and I think that's what an editor should do, and I think that's why you find that those are the creators who are able to tell some of those stories that you wouldn't let anybody else tell. Looking at Spider-Man kills a guy, looking at Doc Ock takes over Spider-Man 's brain for a year and a half, those aren't stories you could put into just anybody's hands, but when that somebody has the experience to back it up, and even more importantly, the love of the characters to back it up, and there's definitely a version of loving the characters that I see sometimes in younger creators, and even younger editors, where it's like, “no, you need to love a character in a way where the worst possible thing can happen to them, and that's a good story,” not in a “we need to protect them way.”

I think the stories we remember most very often come from breaking some of those things that would have been rules for anybody else, such as destroying the entire Marvel Universe, and rebooting the whole line. Not just anybody is going to be able to do that, and obviously, the book is still in the process of being written, but I think that is something I will probably touch on is, how did Jonathan gain the confidence of the people that he needed to, that he could pull this off?

[49:06] John: Yeah, that's his little serial killer notebook. Sorry to spoil the ending. I think that's probably a great way to tie it up. I think we did good business here, as you like to say, David.

[49:16] David: Yeah, I think we did good business, John.

[49:17] John: All right.

[49:18] David: I've been working in this industry for 20 years, and oftentimes, I feel like an imposter, and I have never felt like more of an imposter than I have talking to Ellie and listening to all the stuff that she's done. So, yes, we need to get off, so I can go cry. Ellie, you're amazing. Thank you so much for joining us. That was delightful, hearing about all your experiences. I hope we can have you on again, sometime soon.

[49:44] Ellie: I'd love it. Thank you guys so much. This was a lot of fun.

[49:47] John: Thanks for coming, and thanks for joining us here on The Corner Box. Like us, subscribe, all that stuff. Tell your friends, and come back next week, where--I think I gave it away--we'll have Mason. See you all then. Thanks again, Ellie. Really appreciate you coming on, and--that's right. I'm sorry. More importantly, Secret Wars on Kickstarter right now. Google Kickstarter Secret Wars, and it'll get you there.

[50:10] Ellie: Mason will tell you more next week, but there are lots of cool bonuses for people who jump in now.

[50:15] David: Yeah, we're going to have the link in the show notes as well, for those who do that kind of thing.

[50:19] John: Thank you very much. See you next week.

[50:21] David: Spider-Boy rules.

This has been The Corner Box with David and John. Please take a moment and give us a five-star rating. It really helps. Join us again next week for another dive into the wonderful world of comics.