Many people believe Brubakers run on ‘Captain America’ to be the titles best. But after nearly eight years he has decided to leave the title. In a recent interview with The Comics Reporter he discussed that as well as if he will remain on ‘Winter Soldier’.
TCR: Now, you told me that you’re wrapping up on Captain America.
Brubaker: Yeah. By the time this interview comes out, I will have written my last issue.
TCR: Congratulations. And that’s… eight years on Cap?
Brubaker: A little less than eight years. I think I started in August or September of 2004 writing my first issue, which came out in November of that year.
TCR: So why now?
Brubaker: Partly, it’s the beginning a shift from work-for-hire to books I own, instead. I hit a point with the work-for-hire stuff where I was starting to feel burned out on it. Like my tank is nearing empty on superhero comics, basically. It’s been a great job, and I think I found ways to bring my voice to it, but I have a lot of other things I want to do as a writer, too, so I’m going to try that for a while instead.
TCR: Now are you keeping Winter Soldier?
Brubaker: Yeah, I am. That’s going to be my only Marvel book soon. I’ll do The Winter Soldier as long as it lasts… or, I’ll do it for as long as I can. [Spurgeon laughs] Because I don’t know if it’ll last, but I’m really proud of that book and the second and third storylines on it are some of my favorite stuff I’ve done for Marvel, ever.
TCR: What do you like about it? What do you think is laudatory? Are you in that place where you can say, “I did that, and I did that very well.”
Brubaker: I think I got to tell a long story. In the early days, I got to create a big soap opera about Steve Rogers and Bucky and Sharon Carter and keep this thrilling adventure ride going. And each arc bled into the next. Then we did the “Death of Cap” thing and I go to really do an 18-part story that still didn’t end with Cap coming back to life yet. [laughs] I got to do some stuff that was really challenging. I got work with some great artists. Steve Epting, he probably drew 35 issues of my run in the early days. I think we developed a really great collaboration. And I always liked that kind of epic storytelling.
“The Death of Captain America” turned out to be the best thing that happened to the book in ways because everything we were able to do after that, because the main character wasn’t in the book, was so much more interesting than when he was in the book. It was a total curveball and you didn’t know what was going to come next. There was a lot of fun to be had in it, and at the same time it was driven by these characters that were characters I had an attachment to from childhood.
Brubaker also confirms that Cullen Bunn (who has been working on ‘Venom’ with Rick Remender) will be working with him on his final arc.
TCR: Don’t they team you up with a writer to transition out of these titles? Like baton pass it to them?
Brubaker: That’s not on purpose for this one. That was a situation with scheduling. Marvel is trying to do this thing now that with some of their better-selling books they want to get out more copies per year than 12. They want to get out 15 or 18 issues. Amazing Spider-Man’s been doing more than one a month for a while now; someone I know does Uncanny X-Men or one of those books, and that comes out 18 times a year.
I couldn’t keep up with that schedule, honestly. I knew I was getting to the end of my run. I wanted to wrap up my run earlier. And [Marvel Senior Vice President Of Publishing] Tom [Brevoort] was like, “Well, you’re going to leave a bunch of plot lines dangling… do you want to go out like that? It’ll seem like you threw up your hands and said ‘I can’t keep up with this schedule.'” I was like, “No, I don’t want to go out that way.” So we brought in Cullen Bunn to write an arc with me. I gave him a list of a bunch of stuff. “Here’s all the dangling plot threads and here’s where we need them all to be by the time I get to my last issue.” And then we figured out a storyline together.
It’s strange. I did all these issues as an uninterrupted run. Then there’s four issues co-written by someone. Then there’s a last issue. [laughs] It’s a little odd.
TCR: Tell me this. You’ve worked this specific period for Marvel. I don’t follow the mainstream books as closely as I would if this were the main focus of the site. It seems to me, though, that this period has been distinguished by a pretty deep writer’s bench for Marvel. There are a lot of you guys that are talented, that are working on those books for Marvel.
Brubaker: I definitely think… they’ve got Jason Aaron, and Jonathan Hickman and Matt Fraction and Rick Remender. Obviously Brian Bendis, who writes so many comics I can’t understand how he possibly keeps up. Kieron Gillen… all of these guys are talented guys. I’m leaving some out — Jeff Parker. There’s a lot of really good writers doing multiple books a month up there.
And it’s such an interesting time in mainstream comics to me because of how in flux it feels. DC had a massive shake-up. Marvel’s ramped up production on everything. It seems a little crazy sometimes. [laughs] I wonder from the outside if it looks as much like as it feels like it on the inside.
TCR: Is there something you see we don’t? We certainly saw the result of those changes at DC.
Brubaker: When I was at DC… sales weren’t necessarily great, but they were fairly stable. There was a certain amount of stability. Both DC and Marvel had stability, it felt like. But two years ago there started to be what seemed like freefall for a lot of books. My personal theory — This happened to coincide [laughs] with the books suddenly costing $3.99 as opposed to $2.99. I think that was when you started to see some books really fall. On the other side, there’s the argument that the best-selling books for the past ten years have been the $3.99 books.
It’s hard to say who’s right or who’s wrong on some of this stuff. But sales on these books were going down below what DC and Marvel would have found acceptable even a few years ago. So that stability just feels like it’s missing all of a sudden.
I mean, imagine how lucky I was to write the same book for eight years. That doesn’t happen a lot anymore. Brian Bendis has been writing Avengers for like nine years now. He’s written more issues of Avengers than any other person. It’s rarer and rarer to have these long runs on books.
See the whole interview here.