Posted in: Comics | Tagged: bryan hitch, comics review, joss whedon, marvel, spider-man, ultimate captain america

The Joss Whedon/Bryan Hitch Spider-Man Comic That Never Was

Bryan Hitch's interview with CBR was revelatory in all sorts of ways. If only for the comics that weren't as well as the comics that are. Such as;

my one regret at Marvel is that I didn't get to do a good run on Spidey. It was discussed a few times, with Joey Q turning down a Spidey book from me and Joss Whedon. I know, right?

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I'd also been writing a six-part "Ultimate Captain America" series I'd started drawing. It was fully written, and I was drawing the first issue in the gaps between Ultron scripts coming in.

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Despite Marvel coming to me and asking for the Cap series, rather than my pitching it to them, it was constantly being sidelined and eventually dropped to my disappointment

He also talks about his working relationship on Age Of Ulton and Marvel in general

Stylistically, if we're comparing Mark's writing on "Ultimates" with Bendy's on "Ultron," both have very different leanings on the two very different projects. Mark likes, where possible, to show rather than tell whereas on "Ultron," Bendy was choosing a more dialogue-structured narrative, at least on the issues I drew. That can be a little trickier for an artist. If you have twelve speaking characters in the same location for 30 or 40 pages, then obviously no writer is going to consider the physical location of each one in how he or she writes the dialogue. So just figuring out where to put each one so they can speak in the right order is tricky enough for a four or five-page scene, but something of this length, "a one-act play" as Little Tommy Brevoort called it, 30-40 pages over several issues was very hard.

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Obviously the work I did there over more than ten years is a true high point in my career and, in looking at the Marvel movies, clearly influential, but I guess there's a time when you feel like you don't know anybody at the party anymore or nobody's laughing at your jokes and it's time to call a cab. Possibly, had I known the Ultron series was longer than the five issues I'd originally thought and if I hadn't had the Cap book pulled from under me, I may never have considered moving on, but stuff changes I guess.

We also learn of his upcoming plans;

It's also true of my next project which I'm already well into writing and I'll start drawing in January. I'd originally intended an April release again but after what happened with "AGP" I want to avoid potential delays on the inking and coloring, sick relatives, holidays, anything that could throw a spanner in the works. Fortunately with "Ultron" coming out now in spring, I feel like I can put my next book back until summer for release as the Marvel book now fills the gap between that launch and the end of "AGP."

Naturally this has generated a certain amount of discussion. Over on Little Tommy Brevoort's Formspring page he has responded;

Assuming for the moment that you accept those statements at fac value–which isn't something I'm granting–it would only seem to make logical sense that there must have been other extenuating circumstances in each of those cases, would it not? Everybody has their own perspective on stuff like this, of course, but ask yourself: if things were that cut-and-dried, would any of those projects not have happened?

America's Got Powers issue 4, by Jonathan Ross and Bryan Hitch from Image Comics, is published on Wednesday.

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