When DC made the same move ten years ago it lost about half its staff. Marvel expected something similar. It got the opposite, and the publisher of 25 years is the one leaving.
Marvel Comics is relocating from New York to Los Angeles, and the headcount story is not the one anybody expected.
Staff finalized their decisions Friday. The move itself happens in summer 2027, sending roughly 100 jobs to Burbank. And according to reporting from inside the process, the vast majority of the staff said yes, which reportedly surprised Marvel’s own leadership.
Who is leaving Marvel Comics?
David Bogart, and he is the biggest name on the list.
Bogart has been Marvel’s publisher for 25 years. Rather than relocate, he is retiring. Reaction across the comics industry has been mixed, with creators lining up on both sides of how they remember working with him.
His exit is the clean break in an otherwise unusually intact roster.
Who is moving to Los Angeles?
Most of the people you would have bet against.
Tom Brevoort, senior vice president and executive editor, is going. So is Nick Lowe, the Spider-Man group editor. So is Sven Larsen, vice president of licensed publishing, along with his wife Monica.
Brevoort in particular is the kind of institutional memory a publisher does not replace. He has been at Marvel for decades and has touched most of the line at some point.
Larsen described the decision as agonizing, and put the situation in terms that explain why the numbers are a surprise.
“You can’t think of us as moving with Marvel Comics,” he said. “You have to think of it as joining a new company that happens to be called Marvel Comics.”
That is a person choosing to go while being clear-eyed about what he is giving up. A lot of people apparently made the same call.
How did DC’s move to Burbank go?
Badly, which is the whole reason this is a story.
When DC Comics relocated from New York to the West Coast about a decade ago, roughly half the staff did not make the trip. The move gutted institutional knowledge, and the comics industry has treated it as a cautionary tale ever since.
Everyone assumed Marvel was walking into the same buzzsaw. New York has been the center of American comics publishing for close to a century, and the people who work in it tend to have roots there.
Marvel got a very different answer.
Why is Marvel Comics moving at all?
To sit closer to everything else Marvel does.
The publishing arm has been the odd department out for years, operating three thousand miles from Marvel Studios, from Disney, and from the film and television machine that turns comics into the company’s most valuable products.
Burbank puts the comics people in the same time zone as the people adapting them. Whether that helps the comics or just makes the meetings easier is a question the next few years will answer.
What this means for Marvel comics
Not much immediately, and possibly a lot eventually.
Nothing changes on the publishing schedule. Books solicited for this fall and next spring are unaffected, and the move is still the better part of a year away.
The longer-term question is about talent. New York’s comics industry is a physical place with a freelancer pool, conventions, bars where people get hired, and decades of accumulated habit. Marvel keeping its editors is one thing. Whether a Burbank office attracts the next generation of writers and artists the same way is different.
Marvel has plenty going on in the meantime. The company announced this week that Miracleman is joining the Avengers in a new Avengers #1 from Chip Zdarsky and Marco Checchetto, on sale Nov. 4, with Miracleman revealed as David Colton. The roster there is Captain Marvel, Spider-Man, Daredevil, Wolverine, Luke Cage and Miracleman.
On the screen side, Avengers: Doomsday arrives Dec. 18 with a runtime of 165 minutes.
Summer 2027 is when the boxes actually move.
Article compiled with the help of the Pirates & Princesses newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
Bleeding Cool, the staffing outcome, David Bogart’s retirement after 25 years, the Brevoort, Lowe and Larsen relocations, the Larsen quote, the summer 2027 timing, and the comparison to DC’s roughly 50 percent loss
The Hollywood Reporter, the original reporting that roughly 100 jobs are moving to Burbank
AIPT, the Avengers #1 details including creative team, on-sale date and roster
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