Curiouser and curiouser...

The first thing I do when I power up my computer in the morning is to get online and hit several of the comic book news sites, message boards and blogs.

When I checked this morning, there was a new post on the official Marvel blog area from editor Tom Brevoort in which he responded to claims that he used to be a good editor and a stand-up guy but now he's just online playing clean-up for all the bad stories that come out of his office. I hadn't seen where that claim was posted originally, nor did Tom include a link pointing to such a claim. (Understandable, if you asked me.) He defended himself by saying that he works hard to put out books that are as good as they can be and, while he likes to hear criticism, he'll defend the stories if the critiques don't seem justified.

Sounded perfectly reasonable to me. Especially in lieu of the implication that he took some of the original comments rather personally.

I checked back after lunch, though, to find that the aforementioned entry was gone! I thought of two explanations: 1) One of the legals at Marvel felt it was a bit "iffy" in terms of content and had it removed to avoid potential problems or 2) -- and this strikes me as more likely -- Tom thought about it overnight and decided that the entry wasn't the best way to address the situation, so he removed it himself.

Now, either way, I'm not saying it that either posting the response or later removing was wrong. Perfectly legitimate all ways around, as far as I'm concerned. But I think this is one of those intriguing, little behind-the-scenes moments in the creation of comic books that I generally find more interesting than the comics themselves.

(On a side note, the entry wasn't actually deleted; the link to it was just removed. A clever individual with a little knowledge of how HTML and/or blogs work can figure out how to get to it fairly easily.)

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