“We Haven’t Found The Answer What To Do With Angela”- Tom Brevoort

It’s Angela time! Yesterday, Bleeding Cool looked at Marvel Executive Editor/Senior Vice President of Publishing and Marvel’s longest-standing employee Tom Brevoort‘s comments on what happens when a comic book publisher buys in other comic book publishers’ characters. Natually, we focused on Miracleman, with a soupcon of Watchmen, but he also talked about the Charlton characters of Blue Beetle, The Question, The Atom and more, bought  by DC Comics. “I don’t think that the Charlton characters have been all that well served by their time as part of the DCU—but that’s entirely down to me having encountered them before that era. If they hadn’t been absorbed into DC, few people would remember them at all. The same is true of the assorted Quality characters, and even the bigger guns of the 1940s such as Blackhawk, Plastic Man and Captain Marvel would largely be things of the past with only a small group of hardcore aficionados today were they not similarly brought into the fold.”

And more recently of DC’s purchase of Wilstorm Studios, with the recent increased attempt at integrating Wildstorm characters with the DCU. “I also feel like the Wildstorm characters have largely suffered in trying to make them integrate into the DC cosmology time and time again—which is funny, because that’s one that I don’t really think should be so difficult. It probably doesn’t help that the DC Universe, like the Marvel Universe, is already such a crowded landscape, with the characters who form its pillars already solidified. It’s tough to be Apollo and Midnighter in a world where the original Batman and Superman are running around, to the point where you’re much more nakedly a riff on the World’s Finest Team rather than entirely individual players.”

But he also talks about Marvel Comics and a recent less-than-successful attempt. “At Marvel, we’ve done less of this kind of character-absorption. I’d say that Daredevil worked out pretty well, even if the character was completely reinvented. And Ghost Rider was made to work once he left the old west and was recreated in the present day. I don’t think we’ve quite found the answer to what to do with Angela yet, though—removed from her connection to the SPAWN mythos, there’s not all that much to her, and our attempts to cement her into Thor’s family tree haven’t entirely taken off the way we might have hoped.”

When Neil Gaiman sued Todd McFarlane over the ownership of Angela, Cogliostro and Medieval Spawn, characters he had co-created with Todd McFarlane, he left owning Angela outright, Spawn’s heavenly opponent as an angelic bounty hunter, and surrendering the others to Todd as part of a deal, as well as whatever rights and artwork to Miracleman that Todd owned. He then sold Angela to Marvel Comics. Introduced into the Marvel Universe, Angela became a Guardian Of The Galaxy, before it is revealed that in the Marvel Universe, she is Aldrif, the daughter of Odin and Freyja, making her sister to Thor and Loki. A storyline used for Thor Ragnarok, but for a different character. After messing around with the Asgardians for a few years, she later joins the Avengers team Strikeforce, as co-leader alongside Blade. And then…. nothing for a while. Anyone at Marvel editorial have an idea what to do with her? You did pay quite a lot for the rights…