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The Time Jim Zub Broke Miles Morales So Badly, He Had to Call His Creator

Picture it. You're Jim Zub, writer of The Champions (and a dozen other things). You had a great idea for a storyline that gets really, really dark with one of the main characters (Miles Morales). After a hard-fought series of pitches where one editor actually says 'I don't see how we'll come back from that,' you've finally been given the green light on the project and start writing. Around that time you wander into a screening of Into the Spider-Verse for the first time, and it blows you away. The positivity and the pure joy of the film has a profound effect on you.

Thing is, now you've rapidly begun to have some seriously big doubts about this crazy dark storyline you're currently writing, and the first issue of Champions, the one that kicks it all off, comes out in a week. You start to realize that you're gonna be screwing with this character in a major way, and that it's going to be bleak. So you start to freak out a little. Then a lot.

What do you do?

At the Spider-Man panel at Emerald City Comic Con this weekend, Zub told a crowd whet he fely he had to do. "I called Brian," said Zub. "I called Bendis." The co-creator with Sara Pichelli of Miles Morales, the Ulimate Spider-Man.

"I called Brian and I was like, 'I think I messed up,'" said Zub. Bendis asked him what he was talking about. "'I totally messed up. I broke your character, I'm really sorry. Uh, I'm doing something real dark, real dark, with Miles…'"

Zub said Bendis cut him off mid-blubber. "He said 'Stop. Stop.' I said 'no, no, you don't understand!'" Bendis asked him if he believed in the story. "I said 'I did, but I don't know if I believe any more!'"

Eventually Bendis managed to talk Zub down. "He said 'Jim, these characters are bigger than you, and they're bigger than me. And we can do all kinds of amazing things with them. If you believe in it and you put yourself into it, it's worthy. I trust you.' And I was like, 'I wish you hadn't said that.' But a few days later I'd kind of pulled my head out of the sand, and I'm really proud of what we're doing with it, and I really hope that people dig in and enjoy it as much as we have, putting it together."

Bendis, man. He can be on his deathbed, he can be working for another team, but he still manages to bring it all together.

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