At Comic-Con last week, Mad Cave Studios turned their 10th Anniversary panel into one huge announcement. Former Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada was returning to comics with a new imprint: Amazing Comics! The next day, Mad Cave invited me to talk with Joe at their booth after he finished signing preview copies of Amazing Comics’ first title, Disciple — a book inspired by Hamlet, but set in a world of assassins. Co-written by screenwriter/producer/actor Charles Dorfman, inked by Wade von Grawbadger, and colored by Richard Isanove, Disciple couldn’t have a better pedigree.
Though we’d met a few times in the past, this was the first time I’ve had a formal conversation with Joe, and it was honestly a delight. The interview has been edited for clarity.
Derek McCaw: I’ve seen you many times at Comic-Con, chatted briefly from time to time, and you look more relaxed than I’ve ever seen you before.
Joe Quesada: You know what it is, if you were at the early, early Marvel panels, Cup o’ Joe and all that, I was probably the same way. Once we became part of Disney, which was fantastic for us corporately, I felt the weight of a bigger responsibility. I had to watch my language, watch certain things that I said, because we were part of a bigger family.
I loved my time with Marvel. I loved my time with Disney. When that time ended, I knew a year ahead of time. I’d already talked to our publisher and president Dan Buckley about my exit from Marvel and the fact that I wanted to go and do my own stuff.
So I’d been planning Amazing – I mean, Amazing has been the name of my corporation since 2005, and it’s something that almost happened in 2005. It’s been in my mind, I’d been planning it, but my focus was Marvel, and once I was done with Marvel I could focus on Amazing and see where we’re going to land. There’ve been a lot of publisher options out there, and we talked to everybody.
Mad Cave felt like home – it felt like home immediately, once I spoke to Mark Irwin and Mark London here. Now we’ve got some great books that hopefully people will enjoy reading.
Derek McCaw: I like that you’ve kept your announcement to just the first book, Disciple. So many books get announced and then they take forever.
Joe Quesada: It’s not even about that. There’s something that’s coming out that I don’t want to have completely announced because on social media, the news gets gobbled up and it’s like bubble gum. It’s gone the next day.
So we’re going to try a different plan. It may work, it may not work, where we’re going to parse the information out little by little and try to keep people at least interested and saying the name Amazing and maybe intrigued a little bit.
The other part of it is I just want to have fun with our marketing. If you’ve seen the “Idaho’s #1 Comic Book Company” bits, they’re meant to be dumb. They’re meant for people to make fun of, but I really do live in Idaho. We’re going to continue that. If you go to our website which is under construction, you’ll see there are some stupid videos on there, too.
That’s one of the things that comics is missing these days. I think it’s the pressure of publishing, of big corporations. I sense there’s a lack of fun in the marketing. I just want to do what I do and see how it works out.
Derek McCaw: It’s no lie to say you pulled Marvel back up…
Joe Quesada: It’s a team of people.
Derek McCaw: Sure, but you were the face. And now you get to just be Joe.
Joe Quesada: Now I get to be the face of my own thing, right? I get back to doing what I did then, a lot of the stuff I was doing in the early days of Marvel, which is just have fun. I love these interactions with the fans. It’s my favorite part of it. And that’s why I started my Substack newsletter, which I’m going to promote right here, “Drawing the Line Somewhere” on Substack.
I started it a year ago, because I knew this was coming. And then… actually, I took 280 days off to prep for this. To just make sure this was launched properly and make these little mini-movies and things like that.
Derek McCaw: What is Amazing Comics going to look like? Besides Disciple, which looks great, but what are you going to look for, because you’re not creating a universe. You’re creating creators, or supporting creators?
Joe Quesada: I’m not saying one way or another in terms of what it will look like, what we’re creating or not. But what we’re looking for is… let me backtrack. Nothing against this, but I see a lot of new companies launch, and when you read the press releases, they don’t read like press releases for the retailers or the fans. They read like press releases for The Hollywood Reporter. In terms of “we’re creating IP, we’re creating content. We’re ready for you, Hollywood.”
And that’s not what I want to do. I play in that Hollywood role all the time. I’ve got my personal deal with Amazon, and Charles plays in it more than I do. You can talk with him more about that, but he didn’t mention his actual credentials and what he does for a living.
Derek McCaw: I looked him up on IMDb during the panel because he looked familiar.
Joe Quesada: The King’s Speech, I mean he’s had a movie nominated for an Oscar. He’s done some stuff at a very young age, and I hate him for that (laughs) with a passion. We talked about this, and the problem that we see is that there’s a lot of chasing Hollywood. And creating stories because “this is what Netflix is buying right now, this is what Amazon is buying right now.” Gearing your stories towards that, not realizing that by the time you’ve published that story they’ve moved on to something else.
So we’re not chasing. We’re just going to write what we love. We’re having fun with it. Charles and I get into our little mini writers’ room and we push and we pull, and we pick each other up and we knock each other down and we’re having a blast doing this. We just want to put out really good stories.
In a lot of ways, I admire A24 Studios. Because, and this is one of the things that we’ve talked about, they put out, they don’t just do one genre. They put out movies of all different types and genres. Even if you look at them and think “I’m not really sure if I’m into that thing,” you know that when you’re going to see it there’s a 95% chance you’re going to walk out saying, “I don’t know if I got that movie, or if I liked that movie, but it was a quality movie.” Right? Quality performances, quality direction, the whole production was quality.
That’s our goal. We want people to at least know that when there’s an Amazing Comics on the stand, it’s a very small shop. And we’re going to make each one of these, it’s the best comic that we could put out.
Derek McCaw: I think that’s what Mad Cave stands for, too…
Joe Quesada: And Dupuis! (Mad Cave’s partner in publishing Amazing Comics)
Derek McCaw: I admit I’m not as familiar. Every time I read something from Mad Cave, even if I think I don’t know why I picked this up, then I read it and I go, “oh, that’s why.” Because I knew it was Mad Cave.
Joe Quesada: Yes! It’s reader-centric. And I’m not sitting here saying that if Hollywood wanted to… that we wouldn’t do it. All I’m saying is that we’re not making it for Hollywood. We’re making it for retailers and readers.
Retailers sell product and keep the lights on. They’ve supported me for, what, 30 years now? And the readers have as well, in my years before Marvel, my years during Marvel and hopefully after Marvel. That’s the headspace at Amazing.
That’s why also we don’t have a huge staff. My wife’s editor-in-chief. I do the creative stuff. My daughter’s doing social media. We have friends that are working for us, sort of moonlighting for us and doing things. Hopefully we can keep it tight-knit.
It’s very much the Marvel Knights formula, you know? Marvel Knights was four people. Jimmy, myself, my wife Nancy who managed the imprint, and our assistant Kelly. And we had a bunch of friends who would help out every once in a while.
Derek McCaw: I know it’s coincidence, but technically both you and (former DC editor-in-chief) Dan DiDio are working at Mad Cave at the same time. It’s great.
Joe Quesada: Somebody posted the other day, and I’d totally forgotten about this, because I knew Dan – Jimmy (Palmiotti) introduced me to Dan a million years ago. Dan was writing, doing journalism for Arena magazine, which was like a Wizard knock-off. And Dan interviewed me in Arena magazine. So I’ve got to find that magazine and re-read it. It was long before I was at Marvel. We might have been doing Event Comics at that point.
Derek McCaw: You mentioned at the panel yesterday that Brian Bendis had been on the phone with you, and asked “what do you have left to do?” And that takes me to why I started off saying you looked so relaxed. Because this does remind me of how you were when you were an up-and-comer. But now you don’t have anything to prove.
Joe Quesada: There is stuff to prove. It’s more for myself. When you work at Marvel, and I think some people sometimes forget this when they go off on their own, when you work at Marvel you have this huge net underneath you. You can do as many tricks on the trampoline as you want, but that net is Spider-Man and Captain America, you’ve got those characters behind you.
I’m well aware that leaving Marvel, things aren’t going to be the same. I can’t expect a built-in audience to just buy my stuff. I’ve got to hustle for it. And that feeling of operating without a net is titillating. I really really really do love it, kind of calling my own shots in a lot of ways, you know?
If it fails, it’s not the fans’ fault. It’s no one’s fault. This is mine, ultimately. It’s not gonna fail. I’m just saying I take full responsibility. It’s my thing.
Derek McCaw: You’re taking a risk.
Joe Quesada: It’s all about risk. We took tons of them at Marvel back in the day.
One of my favorite parts of Disney’s acquisition of Marvel was that I got to work in feature animation, with Big Hero 6. I got to work with the legendary Joe Rohde on the initial Marvel theme park. One of my greatest memories is that I turned to Joe one day and said, “okay, you guys tell stories in a different way than we do. Would you tutor me in how you do stories?” And he said, “sure. Meet me at the Animal Kingdom in Florida.”
And he walked me through exactly how the story is told, and how it’s all kept within the berm and stuff. That was education with Joe Rohde, of all people.
It was the same thing with theatrical. Marvel itself had nothing to do with the Spider-Man musical. It was licensed out. Then Disney took over Marvel at that point, and it was a mess. It was an absolute mess. But I got to meet Tom Schumacher, who is just a genius. Tom and I hit it off, and again, I learned a lot about theater as we tried to patch that thing up. I was in a lot of meetings, and we’ve remained friends ever since.
But there’s people that I got to meet like that, and experiences that I’ve had, that I never thought I would. I thought I’d do comics, TV, movies? And it was so much more than that. So when Bendis said, what do you have left to do up there? What haven’t you touched? It really hit home. I was just kind of treading.
Derek McCaw: You’re working on your own Broadway musical then?
Joe Quesada: Yes. Disciple the Musical.
Derek McCaw: You heard it here first!
While the official release date for Disciple has not been announced yet, you can follow its progress at Amazing Comics and Mad Cave Studios.
