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Tim Seeley Talks About Quitting Blade, Under Pressure (UPDATE)

In an interview between Tim Seeley and Newsarama, he talked about his career and decision to go exclusive with DC Comics, he talked about the Blade series he was meant to write for Marvel Comics, and what the hell happened with that.

It was during the retailer presentation at San Diego Comic-Con in 2015 that we first broke out the news, that Marvel was to publish a new Blade series with a female lead.

That was then confirmed at the Women Of Marvel panel later at the show, as coming from Tim Seeley and Logan Faerber.

It was intended to be published that autumn.

But it didn't happen. Instead it got further delayed.

Fallon Grey is a sixteen year old girl from rural Oregon. Nominated for Prom Queen, Captain of the debate team, most popular girl in her class. But there is another side to Fallon. A feeling like there's something more inside of her. When terror strikes her small town, she'll find out just how right she was. As fearsome supernatural forces hunt Fallon, she'll come face to face with something even more shocking than the monsters on her tail. Eric Brooks…Blade…her father?! And in each other, they'll discover the purpose they've each been struggling to find

It was then announced earlier this year at C2E2 that Afua Richardson would be drawing the comic instead. And at a previous juncture at NYCC she had said that, of an unnamed project,

"I get a call from Axel Alonso, come in, rip the script apart, create the designs you want…."

And it seemed that was Blade.

Well, today Tim Seeley joins up some of the dots… and it all stemmed from online criticism that a comic book starring a black female had been announced by an all white all male comic creative team. And Seeley couldn't take it. He told Newsarama,

The short story is I quit. The long story is when Marvel hired me, I had just written ten years of a horror comic starring a female lead so I seemed like a good fit. So we threw around ideas of doing Blade's daughter and when they announced it, Marvel was in a weird place because they had announced the hip-hop covers and a lot of people saw "here's another black lead with an all-white creative team" and you know it's valid and definitely the case. Once the announcement hit, it was just one bad week. I kinda felt that it was completely fair and never something we hadn't considered, but everybody at Marvel was totally cool about it and wanted to find a way to make it work. After a while, I felt like it was me screwing this up. I couldn't help but feel like a black woman might write this stuff better than me and saved them from me. In the wake of Black Panther launching so well, maybe Blade is the book they find new talent on.

A prominent example at the time wasJA Micheline's essay for Comics Alliance, "Why I'm Boycotting Marvel Comics"

I feel like I have to say this five or six times. Whenever this comes up, I get a tsunami of white people wondering what my problem is and suggesting I'm racist for saying white people can't write about people of color. It's not that white people can't; it's not even that they shouldn't (except in some circumstances that I have written about almost ad nauseam recently) — it's that white people are the ones who, historically and systemically, are consistently offered the opportunity. And in 2015, perhaps the right thing to do is to let people of color have a turn.

As to whether Afua Richardson is still on the book, and what her role might be now, that hasn't been mentioned. The last we heard was…

Could this clarification from Seeley see Marvel update the status of the series – and even address the issues he raised?

UPDATE: As a result of this article, Afua Richardson has tweeted in support of Seeley, saying,

With Tim's response,

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