Posted in: Comics | Tagged: marvel, new york comic con, NYCC, rob liefeld, x-men

Marvel Responds to Liefeld X-Men Budget Comments: "We're Trying to Put Out the Best Books We Can"

Published Sun, 07 Oct 2018 11:12:28 -0500

At the New York Comic Con X-Men panel Sunday, Marvel responded to claims made by superstar artist Rob Liefeld that with the looming merger between Fox and Disney, and thus the return of the X-Men movie rights to the House of Ideas, Marvel was finally allowed to raise the X-Men comic book budget, including by hiring Liefeld himself for a big crossover event in 2019.

Here's what Liefeld had to say a few weeks back:

Here's the deal. Since the X-Men movies came out and Disney didn't have them, I don't know if you've ever paid attention, but Marvel kind of turned the volume down on the X-Men for almost 20 years. Now that they have them more, what was told to me was, 'Oh yeah. Our budgets on the X-Men books are back up to what they used to be because now we own them all.'

I have a new project, 2019, it's a huge X-Men crossover…It's awesome…Marvel called me up last Thanksgiving and said, 'We want you to do a big story.' I said well, let's see if they'll go for this, and I tried to do something no one has done before. So I gave them this pretty aggressive proposal for an event and I can't say what it is, I can't say what it involves, got a lot of new stuff.

But when asked about the X-budget in a reference to Liefeld's comments at today's panel, Marvel's Jordan White took to the defense:

We can't comment on the merger, but as someone who has been working on X books for a while… We're trying to put out the best books we can and fingers crossed, it'll be better than ever.

Uncanny X-Men writer Matthew Rosenberg also had a response for people who claim Marvel doesn't care about the X-Men: "There are 16 X-books."

Of course, neither response actually addresses whether or not Marvel has increased the budget on the X-Men comics since the merger with Fox was announced. If it's not a denial…