Thursday, Aug. 31, 2000

QUESADA, JEMAS NEWS CONFERENCE TRANSCRIPT

Bill Jemas, Marvel Enterprises' president of publishing, marketing and new media, and Joe Quesada, newly named editor-in-chief at Marvel Comics, staged a telephone news conference on Wednesday afternoon to discuss Quesada's appointment and the future of the company.

Following a transcript of the questions and answers:

Question: Since you're taking over the whole company, what happens with Marvel Knights with the actual structure?

Quesada: Marvel Knights will pretty much remain the way it is. I, of course, will be stepping down from my position, sitting in this particular chair at Marvel Knights. Someone else will be taking over the position, who it will be I can't say as of yet. So with regards to Marvel Knights, the imprint will continue. I think it's a very important, and obviously it's a healthy imprint. The renegade structure that Marvel Knights established in getting guys who normally would not work for Marvel is still a very important thing to have here, and it adds a sort of prestige to some of these characters, and should continue to do so. I think Marvel Knights will be healthy and running; it just won't have me necessarily for the head.

Question: Are you hoping to carrying on the same attitude with the main Marvel line that you have with Marvel Knights?

Quesada: It's all I know how to do. It's not like the attitude changes from Marvel Knights once I put on a different hat. It's the same attitude we had with Event Comics, only we were working in a smaller pond. Now we're sort of working in this large universe, so the goal is, yes, to continue that.

Question: For Bill Jemas, why of all people, Joe Quesada?

Jemas: Joe's proved that he can do it at a time when people were giving up and running scared and acquiescing in defeat. The man and his team took characters like the Punisher and Daredevil, which had A) lost relevance and B) lost sales, and turned them into top 10 books - it was a remarkable achievement. And, by the way, we appreciate that.

But Joe also has a knack -- that a lot of very good creators don't have -- for working on a team as a team player and attracting new talent. So that when we, Marvel, was very anxious to launch our Ultimate line, it was Joe recruiting two writers that were perfect for what we needed to do - bringing them in and bringing them to the fold, and saying "Let's go." This is a person who basically runs, not a competitive imprint, but certainly had no financial interest. It was really a bonus to step up for the company.

So we really looked at who, inside and outside Marvel had the creative juice in the first place, and who could also recruit better talent than anybody else, and that's why we went with Joe.

Question: Will there be any immediate changes in the Marvel line in the few first months in terms of additions or dropping books or format, etc.?

Quesada: Right now, there's a goodly bit of a learning curve for me. Obviously my universe has gotten a little bigger here. I have to start looking at things a little more globally than I'm used to. I looked at things globally within the context of Marvel Knights, and of course I have my own opinions about how books are performing or how certain books should perform, and those might become evident somewhere down the road. It's not going to be something immediate and something sweeping, I think that would be a big mistake to make in the first place, but, yeah, everything will be looked at and scrutinized, and we'll figure out game plans and we'll try to attack everything appropriately and significantly and in the proper amount of time.

Question: Is the lack of performance of Marvel after the X-Men movie and not being able to capitalize on that with some accessible books based on the movie - did that have anything to do with this change?

Jemas: That's a good question. I can say that it does hurt that we have this worldwide beacon thrown on Marvel from the X-Men movie, and that by and large throughout the line, that has not turned into significant additional sales. So that does hurt, and I do believe that the wonderful and difficult content in the current books is part of the problem. I can't say that it was clearly cause and effect. I think that whether sales bumped up five percent or bumped down five percent after the movie was not so much a concern as that we really think that the company needs a leader for the comic books creatively like Joe, and this was a little bit independent of the issue with respect to the movie. I can tell you that the movie books did sell respectably well, and now we have X-Men, Uncanny and Wolverine all at the top three slots in the comic book-business. But the concern is that you can be the top three in the comic-book business all day long, and all that means is you're the leader of the losers - you're the leader of the people who are losing seven to 10 percent a year. So the ticker that we have to watch if we're going to be successful is new readers, and there's a very, very hard balance and -- I'm learning the hard way here as I enter the business more and more -- is that it's very difficult to grab a new reader with accessible content and not have that really visceral and hostile reaction from the people who have been reading for 20 years who like solving the jigsaw puzzle. I can name on one finger on one hand the guy that has been able to do that, and he's on the conference call with us, and that's why Joe's doing this.

Question: Each of Marvel's EIC's has left an imprint. What's going to be your legacy?

Quesada: Hopefully, creating something from what's perceived as nothing right now. I really want to try to inject this place with an energy that I think has been lacking for some time, and understandably lacking - this company's been through a series of layoffs and shakeups, and morale is not what it would be. I remember walking through the halls of this company when I was a young budding artist trying to break in, and to me, it was the equivalent of a minor-league baseball player being called up to play for the New York Yankees. This was Yankee Stadium, and there was an energy, a crispness, a static that ran up and down your spine when you walked in here. That's been missing for quite a while, and it's been understandably missing, and it's something that I really want to instill in people. When they walk through these halls - this is the Yankee Stadium of the comic-book industry. In order to be Yankee Stadium, we have to bring in some DiMaggios; we've got to bring in Mickey Mantles. At the end of the day, hopefully, we'll be able to do that. That's kind of what we did with Marvel Knights - but we did it on a smaller scale. Now we've got to do it on a bigger scale.

Once you get those players in, you can sort of fill up those seats with behinds. It's a really grassroots approach - there's really no magic to it in that sense.

Question: With the new position, what impact does that have on the more creative aspect of your job, penciling and right things? Are you going to be stuck more with the business side?

Quesada: Actually, part of my initial discussions with Bill was the fact that taking the EIC position I had to still continue drawing. Obviously, I'm going to have to cut down, but it's my belief that one of the important things about Marvel Knights, and one of the reasons why were able to attract the creators we were able to attract is that I'm in the trenches with these people. I'm working, I'm a freelancer - it's a day-to-day thing. I know what it's like to stare at a blank page in the morning, and there's nothing more difficult in my mind than to do that. The minute that I lose that edge, I lose that line of communication with the people who are really most important to my business, which are my freelancers and my creators. We live and die by that, and our characters.

It's an understanding that no, I can't pencil as much as I would like to, but I will continue penciling. It will probably be special projects, probably still involving Daredevil, but we've yet to see. So the answer is yes, I'll still be creative. No, probably not as much as I'd like to be, but some sacrifices have to be made on my end as well.

Question: Why now? What precipitated this move in the position?

Jemas: We're looking at a pretty long continuum here where the business has been rocked, I would say, since the mid '90s. We went from having a really easy fun business to having a really hard fun business. The move to Joe has really been incremental. Joe went from sort of Marvel competitor to Marvel insider with his own imprint, but not all the way in to being 100 percent there, so I can't say that any particular incident precipitated this, but I can say the time is certainly right to have a real lead creator take the lead role at the House of Ideas.

Question: The Ultimate titles - how important do you see them and why are they so significant?

Quesada: The Ultimates are one of the many steps. Contrary to what people may believe, there is no magic bullet in this industry, and there is no comic book messiah. Ultimate is one of the many steps that Marvel will be taking to bring back the youthful reader. Both Bill and I are in agreement that we have at least a lost generation of kids that did not grow up reading comic books, so consequently there aren't a bunch of 8- and 12 year-olds that had brothers and sisters who have a comic book collection that they could hand down to them. We have to start cultivating readers, and I've said it on many times - we have to get them young because comic books are the equivalent of literary crack. Get a kid hooked on it, and chances are you've got them hooked for life. The Ultimates are an important piece of that puzzle, but probably not the only piece of that puzzle. That's my particular view on it.

Jemas: That's a good point, Joe. I would say that the Ultimates are significant more for the business model than for the content. In other words, we could have done Ultimates about the X-Men books with some alterations, about the Wolverine books, about the new Peter Parker book by Paul Jenkins. We could've done the Ultimates about some of the current content. The Ultimates are significant really because Marvel is taking a very aggressive view at marketing towards teenagers. Joe and I were talking about this the other day - kids in our generation got their comic books from their older brothers. We've lost a generation of older brothers now, so Marvel is out there with our marketing partners sampling 12 million of these books.

So the Ultimates really relate to putting - and I'm not going to say the crack thing -- a diverse piece of literature in the hands of a 12-year-old and getting them to read. Again, the Ultimates are significant because we're taking a very aggressive position with respect to newsstand distribution, and it's a three-part program. But, if that model works the way we hope it works, it will be repeated against all of the mainstream Marvel titles.

Question: Character wise - who do you see as your first priority?

Quesada: Spider-Man. Hands down, I think we need to take a good look at the Spider-Man titles. And again, I'm speaking off the cuff here - this is editor-in-chief day one. Spidey's one of the things that I think is very important for us to look at, because as Marvel goes, so goes the industry, and as Spider-Man goes, so goes Marvel, and you can throw X-Men into that mix, too. Obviously, I think we have to start at the top - Bill and I have talked about this -- and we need to take a good hard look at what we're doing on these titles, creatively, editorially and find out how to hone them and make sure we're healthy as the ship rolls along, especially with the Spider-Man movie looming in the future. I think that it's imperative that we take action now, and not wait until it's two months before the movie's released.

Question: What steps would you take to make sure you don't lose those new readers to viewers who would watch the adaptation. How would you make them come back to those books?

Jemas: I've been kicking around the entertainment business for 20 years, and the main lesson that people have learned in the 20 years that I've been there, and this is a pretty significant attitude change - I cut my teeth at the NBA - as cable television went from an also ran to 50-, 60-, 70-percent penetration of the market, what happened was there was more opportunities to televise more games. Almost to the man, woman and child, every person involved in ticket selling believed that if you could watch the game on television, you wouldn't show up to watch it. There are still people walking the buildings at Madison Square Garden who cringe when we televised an event, because why would you bother to buy a ticket, go into Manhattan, brave the subways if could sitin the comfort of your own home to watch a game? What would happen was that every big game for the past eight years has been televised, and every game has been sold out.

What really happens with a media phenomenon is once you hit critical mass, the public will have a strong appetite for every strong product that you produce against that character. Guess what? There was no such thing as a Pokemon comic book, but because the Pokemon cards and televisions show got hot, the Pokemon comic books became a reasonably successful title. My sense is that more is more and more is more than that, and that the better Marvel does in the electronic games and movie, and t-shirt and everything capacity, the better the comics will be.

Question: Are you planning on any immediate changes with the staff?

Quesada: Before we make changes, we may make some additions. Bill and I have spoken about additions to the editorial department that would benefit Marvel, not just on the super-hero front, but in other directions we're planning on doing. There are some positive changes that we've talking about, things that have been rumored for years and years, but no one has really acted on it at Marvel, but again, I don't want to give away everything in this particular press conference. But news will be hitting soon about some of the things we have planned.

Question: How much of Marvel Knights do you attribute to Jimmy Palmiotti, and how much of that will be missing in the equation when you take over as editor-in-chief?

Quesada: I don't think that Marvel Knights really missed a beat when Jimmy resigned. To be perfectly honest with you, who really ran Marvel Knights had nothing to do with Jimmy and I, we were just the pretty faces behind it. Nanci Dakesian and her assistant Kelly Lami really did most of the grunt work with that; we just recruited talent.

Jemas: That's an awfully harsh question for Joe to answer, in all fairness. My assessment as a person who was highly involved with both of them, is that Jimmy is a great guy and a good fellow who has a lot of friends in the business, but we were very, very comfortable with Joe as the prime mover at Marvel Knights, and that's why we brought him in.

Question: Concerning the language you're using - you were hurt, the company is lacking a leader, the energy was lacking -- ow that we have Joe as the head pusher of this literary crack, what sort of changes can we look for in the actual offices?

Quesada: One of the biggest problems at Marvel has been the ever-looming spectre of "Oh my God, what's going to happen next?" with regards to books, with regards to jobs. We have to change that perception in house first. Will the books be changing? Most likely. How will they be changing? I can't tell you yet, because I really don't know. This is editor-in-chief, day one. I don't know how the creative community will respond to this. I'm hoping that it's favorable. I'm hoping that we will have some people knocking on our doors that we haven't had in quite some years that maybe either decided to leave or that this wasn't a fun place to work anymore. Even more important than that, we'll have some people knocking on the door that never even thought of comic books as an outlet for their creativity or as a financial outlet for their creativity. It's a tough question to answer, but I'm hoping that the outlook is favorable. I'm hoping that there will be some names attached to Marvel books that you haven't seen in a long time. I'm kind of betting on it, and I'm not going to give away names, but if you look at Marvel Knights and the track record, you can see that there's been more than one occasion where you've picked up a trade periodical and said, "I can't believe so and so is working for Marvel," even though it's Marvel Knights. I think you'll be getting more of that down the road.

Question: How did this lack of energy, lack of leadership, lack of capitalization things happen, and how will you be able to effect not making those mistakes again?

Jemas: Part of the issue at Marvel, and I can't say that I enjoy knocking my predecessors, but I don't mind either, there was a real disconnect between the business guys and the creative guys. They lived on different planets. Even to the point where there was the church and state distinction, where the publisher might or might not get actively involved in the editorial direction of the company. Because of that separation, there was often a lack of support or a lack of knowing support. That was exacerbated even when editorial and business and creative sides would line up. They might be doing something a thousand percent different than what was happening in the rest of the business at Marvel. A great example of this was Maximum Carnage - it was this nasty, but spectacular crossover issue that created this horribly popular, charismatic character. One of our electronic game companies came in and released the biggest video-game release that Marvel had ever done, and maybe one of the biggest in the industry around Maximum Carnage. As that was going on, the editorial guys took a long, hard look at Carnage and said they didn't want that disgusting character involved in their books anymore. So at the time that we were having our largest electronic game release ever, the character was more or less banned from the books. There was a real and deep disconnect between the publishing side, the editorial side and then the rest of the business. One of the things that we're doing here just to make sure that that doesn't happen and to make sure that we understand each other's needs is that we're forming an editorial board. Frank Fochetta is a long-terme publishing industry expert, and he's the senior-vice president of publishing at Marvel. Frank, Joe and myself will work together to make sure that Joe has everything he needs to take care of business from the business people.

Question: Are you going to be pushing more for a Vertigo-type line for Marvel that doesn't work under the Code?

Quesada: Again, there will many things that will be happening here. There might be different imprints, there might be a different attitude to certain books; we haven't really sat down and discussed the exact game plan. We've talked about a lot of things in theory. A lot of this will have to do with the additional staff that we bring in to Marvel as well, but you might see a different flavor of Marvel book, besides just a straight ahead super-hero. I've heard a lot of people call Marvel Knights Marvel's Vertigo imprint. It may be nothing more than that at the end of the day, but again, we're talking about things that I really probably shouldn't be hypothesizing about right now. We'll have more concrete answers as this thing moves along.

Question: Are there any books on the top of your list to take a good hard look at and be realistic about the creators?

Quesada: I think I already stated before that I want to take a good look at the top of our list, which essentially is X-Men and Spider-Man. It's not to say that I don't think the books are performing properly, but I think we need to take a good hard look at them, along with Bill and the editors in charge of those books and find out if we're headed in the right path, or if there are any icebergs in the way, and I think those need to be dealt with immediately, because that is the strength of this company. Once we work on those, then we'll trickle down and see what the rest of the line is doing.

Question: Are you confident that you'll be able to build bridges to the various editorial offices to make everything work smoothly?

Quesada: I'm going to try. When Marvel Knights first started out, it was a very difficult situation for us in the sense that we were sort of on the coattails of the whole Heroes Reborn thing, which set up a lot of resentment in these halls between the editors at Marvel and what was going on in the studios in California. A lot of it had to do with the broken down line of communication. They had no idea what was going on at the West Coast, and West Coast had no idea what was going on with the East Coast.

Part of our deal with Marvel Knights was that Marvel give us office space, not because we needed office space, but basically because we wanted to be here. We understood that there were going to be some problems after Heroes Reborn. When we walk through these halls, naturally, we were viewed as outsiders, and I would say that it took a good six months to three quarters of a year to show people that we were here in the trenches with them. We were keeping late hours, we were working along with them. We were not just running buckshot, using characters without approval. We tried to make sure we went though the exact same approval process that every editor here has to go through in order to get their books approved and published. Once again, being in the editor-in-chief position now, there's obviously going to be a bit of a point when you're going to have to prove yourself and say, "Hey, we're all a team, and we're all still doing this," but I think a lot of those bridges have been built in our tenure here at Marvel Knights. We've established great relationships with people here. So far the reception I've gotten after the news has broken has been nothing but fantastic and warm. It's very well appreciated from me as well.

But there will be bridges that need to be built. I'm sort of the guy at the top now, and it's sort of an awkward position for me to be in, but one that I'm really looking forward to. There will be bridges that I will be building with editorial, but hopefully that editorial will be building with the press, because I really think we need to expand that as well. Our editor needs to communicate a little between with all you guys on the phone right now a little bit better about projects that we have coming up, and a lot of it has to do with our level of excitement. Let's face it, if I don't believe in a project, I can't expect an editor underneath me to believe in a project, so, hopefully those are some of the things that will become immediately evident as time goes by.

Question: How do you get the product out in front of people?

Jemas: That's a good question. Of all the things that worry me as president and acting publisher here, I understand that that's an important problem, but it really worries me the least. Distribution, in the long haul, is the easiest piece of the puzzle. Curtis is a powerful newsstand distributor, and we're linked up with them. Believe it or not, Curtis has the full support of Diamond Comics, our comic-book distributor, because Diamond is smart enough to know that every new reader Curtis brings in through the newsstand will ultimately end up buying their comic books through comic book stores.

The reason why I'm not so worried about that is because I've seen Marvel at its peak with 75,000 newsstand retail outlets. Just to give you some context of that number, that was at a time when Fleer was running Marvel cards and baseball cards and basketball cards and football cards. We thought that we were one of the best-distributed products in the country, short of just cigarettes. We were at 35,000 outlets. Then we did the Marvel survey, and there were 75,000 retail outlets. We have the ability through Curtis to get comic books placed everywhere that video-game magazines would be sold. The issue historically is that as content producers, we hit a point where the stuff that was out at newsstand for new readers was sort of inaccessible and irrelevant to the new readers. So I'm not so much worried about getting the distribution done, because we can get placement everywhere in your town that you can possibly buy a magazine. The challenges are twofold really: getting the content, improved is a pejorative word, because getting some of the content altered enough so it can be accessible to new readers, and then getting enough marketing done so that people are interested in having the books on their shopping list.

To come full circle, that's why Joe is 100 percent right about the Ultimate content. That is just one of many content initiatives, the key is making sure that marketing and distribution are lined up with the content, and I'm very confident that Marvel will be able to get that done in the near future.

Question: Was the Curtis deal recent?

Jemas: Curtis has been with us way more than I have. Curtis has been around nearly forever with Marvel.

Question: How many are newsstands are you in now?

Jemas: Let me give you some rough numbers because I don't know exactly. My best guesstimate now would be that we are in 15,000 newsstand outlets. For the Ultimate program, we actually bought slots next to the electronic games magazines. We'll be in at least 25,000 outlets for the Ultimates.

Question: Where do you see Marvel's position in nine months in terms of presence in the marketplace?

Quesada: With regards to Marvel, it's going to look and feel familiar, but it's going to be completely different at the same time, if what we have planned sort of bears fruit. Again, I hate to speak cryptically about it, but it's going to be some things that Marvel has tried to do in the past and we haven't been able to succeed. A lot of it has to do with putting the right people into the right seats within the company. I can speak editorially and straightening up some departments and maybe really aggressively pursuing some avenues that we haven't done in the past editorially. Also, probably making it a better place for creators to work. Because of my background, which is artist and also I was a publisher as well, I understand a lot of the levels of what goes on over here, but my main perspective in life has always been from the freelance artist perspective, and that will never change due to what I've done for so long.

So consequently, I do want to make this a better, friendlier place for freelancers to work, and it's my firm belief that if you make it that, you get better work. And also you have to stand back and get out of people's way and let them do what they do, which is if you hire great creators, you've got to let them create. Nine months down the road? That will be a visible change. If anybody would have told me that Marvel Knights was going to be the success it was, or if they would have told me where I was going to be a year from now, I would have told them, 'Wow, that's pretty cool.' We did a decent job. The attitude has been the same from when we started the imprint two years ago to now, and that's the attitude I want to bring to this company and hopefully that'll be the attitude I can instill in all the editors as well.

Jemas: The only thing I want to add to Joe what Joe said is that the closer you get to the comics part of the business, the easier it is to miss the forest for the trees. It's very easy to miss the X-Men characters. The people that make a fortune and spend a fortune predicting movie results had the X-Men logged in at $22-25 million for its first weekend. What they missed was the tremendous popularity and importance of the X-Men characters to a generation of 11-17 year-olds who grew up watching them on television. The problem has been that Marvel, across the board, publishing electronic games, t-shirts, hats, and everything that you can do - we had a 3-4 year hiatus for producing quality process to satisfy the demand of that fanbase. As we come on line with more and more good product across the board, you'll see dramatic increases. Activision just released an X-Men console game and a Gameboy game called Mutant Academy. They're the No. 1 titles, and that's a top company. The sell on the Spider-Man game has been spectacular. It really goes to an across the board look that as Avi Arad and the guys at Marvel Studios become more successful with getting good solid movie and television projects cranked out, we on the comics side and the consumer products side are going to be right there with filling out the overall consumer and fan experience with good products. So, my sense is nine months from now, we will continue to grow at a pretty strong rate on every aspect of the business.

Question: The press release is very vague - Bob Harras will remain on staff as an advisor. Could you be more specific about Bob Harras' role with the company?

Jemas: I understand why you ask that question. I'm going to say what I'm going to say, and that's all I'm going to say. That is mostly up to Bob. We value our friendship with Bob. We value his contributions. If Bob wants to be extremely active, he will be extremely active. If he'd like to be less active, he'll be less active. But we really want the relationship to continue in the strongest sense, and it's really not appropriate to talk about an individual person's financials, but we'd like to continue to have a real strong relationship with Bob.

Question: Does he still have an office at Marvel?

Jemas: (Pause) I don't really want to go to far into it with Bob other than to say that he's always welcome as long as Joe and I are around. He's always going to be a very welcome person at Marvel.

Question: You mentioned third-party publishing opportunities. Is that outside of the comic field, or does that tie in to talk that Marvel might be licensing its characters to other publishers?

Jemas: The third-party publishing falls into two categories. One will direct Joe's life very directly, and that's what we call "custom publishing". In the past, we would do a major comic-book promotional deal, like the one we're doing with the Buster Brown shoe company about Spider-Man, what would happen is that people in the consumer products division would run around and put together an embarrassingly weak book that would get sampled to millions of fans,. So that what millions of fans would see would be Captain Toothpaste drawn by somebody's brother-in-law, colored by a kid out of college with a bad Macintosh. It did not work. Move number one, and we're doing this right now, with the Buster Brown deal, and we did it with the promotional insert we did with the X-Men movie in TV Guide, we're going to take our best writers and pay them all the money they deserve, so that when we sample and promote through the Marvel world, it's going to be Frank Frochetta putting the deals together, and Joe's guys executing top-notch creative effort.

There used to be a real arrogance among our creators saying, "I'm publishing 200,000 copy a month book, and I ain't doing custom," and now there is a real sense of reality now where now they're realizing they can reach 10 million people in TV Guide.

The other chunk of it is we have lapsed in terms of fishing and finding new top quality third-party products. Frank is going to be out there, and we have a few deals in progress that I can't talk about. You all lived through Transformers and GI Joe converting a whole generation of kid toy fans to comic-book readers. Now, we stopped doing that. If we're going catch new fish, we've got to give them the bait that they want. I would've loved to have had the Pokemon comic-book rights, but we were not standing there to get them, and the books were executed reasonably well, but certainly nothing that would bring new and better readers into the business. So 50 percent is doing a better job of it when Marvel sponsors a book, and the other 50 percent of it is going to be what was used to be called licensed publishing, but we'll think of a new name that indicates quality rather than second hand work.

Question: Given the erratic shipping of the Marvel Knights line, are you confident that the architecture will be in place to keep the line running on time?

Quesada: There were lateness problems with MK at the very onset. There were some growing pains. Right now the only thing that's really grossly late at Marvel obviously is Daredevil. Outside of that, we've been running pretty much on time with everything else. So, it's kind of a bum rap, it's probably a well-deserved rap, but I don't think it's a rap that's going to affect that standard, core Marvel titles at all. It's not like I'll sit there and tell editors, 'Hey that book's on time. I want it running late because that's my rep. That really isn't going to change.

Marvel Knights is strange beast because at the same time we also -- it's something that's tough to explain -- because it's something that you sort of do on feel, but you have to understand that when you're working with some of these top creators and you're working on mini-series of particular characters, and the basic reason that character is moving is because of the combination of the writer, the artist and the character --we don't really have the liberty that some of the editors at Marvel have to say, "You know what, you're bounced for a couple of issues," especially when it's only four issues, because we have a certain amount of sales quotas that we have to adhere to from Marvel, which are probably stricter than some of the sales quotas put on the regular books. It's just the nature of the beast. There are a lot of underlying things and behind the scenes things that happened at Marvel Knights why some of the books were late, and why Marvel allowed them to be late. That's the question that no one ever seems to ask - why does Marvel allow these books to ship late? There's a good reason, it's not foolhardiness and it's not bad business. There are reasons for these things.

Is this going to happen line-wide across the company? No. Let's really be serious about it, that's not the way it's going to be. Everything is one a case-by-case basis, but everything will continue rolling the way it's rolling. It might look different, it might feel different, it might smell different, or it might read different.

GHOST RIDER MOVIE UPDATE

Dimension Films has acquired the rights to the live-action Ghost Rider movie, it was announced Wednesday by company co-chairman Bob Weinstein.

Dimension will produce the movie with Crystal Sky Entertainment and Marvel and will distribute the film in the United States.

"Both Dimension and Marvel Comics have enjoyed great success in developing edgy, provocative projects like Ghost Rider," Weinstein said.

"Following the high level of interest in recent comic book adaptations like The Crow and X-Men, we believe that Ghost Rider offers tremendous franchise opportunities for Dimension."

Steven Paul, president and CEO of Crystal Sky Entertainment, and Avi Arad, CEO of Marvel Studios and will be produce the project.

"After Dimension's success with Scary Movie, there is no doubt that Bob and his team can maximize Ghost Rider's potential for us," Paul said. "After all-night negotiations, we are proud to reach an agreement with Dimension."

The picture will be co-financed by Dimension and Crystal Sky Entertainment. The deal will go under several agreements Crystal Sky has in place.

Writer David Goyer and director Stephen Norrington will re-team on Ghost Rider after working together on Blade. Both will also be executive producers.

FIRST LOOK: MAXIMUM SECURITY: DANGEROUS PLANET

Maximum Security: Dangerous Planet will ship on Sept. 27 from Marvel Comics. The issue was written by Kurt Busiek, with art by Jerry Ordway and Will Blyberg.

Here's how Marvel describes the 48-page one-shot:

"Next month, Maximum Security will explode across the entire Marvel line-and this one-shot lights the fuse. The great galactic powers of the universe have gathered to deal with a globe they perceive as a threat, but is that world the rampaging Ego the Living Planet-or Earth itself? Featuring appearances by Professor X and his cadre of mutant Skrulls, the Silver Surfer, the Inhumans, the Starjammers and the Avengers Infinity team. The action storms across the Marvel Universe in October."

Ordway provides the cover to the book, which will cost $2.99.

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FIRST LOOK: MUTANT X #25

Mutant X #25 will ship next Wednesday from Marvel Comics. The issue was written by Howard Mackie, with art by Tom Lyle and Andrew Pepoy.

Here's how Marvel describes the book:

"Will Havok finally leave the Mutant X world? When faced with the opportunity, will Alex Summers at last return home? This turning-point story will irrevocably alter the lives of The Six -- and for one member, definitely not for the better!"

Mutant X #25 will be 48 pages and will cost $2.99.

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DARK HORSE'S SANITY: AIKEN'S ARTIFACT

Fox Interactive and Dark Horse Comics on Wednesday announced the creation of an exclusive comic book inspired by the upcoming PC game, Sanity: Aiken's Artifact.

The promotional mini-comic is available to all gamers who pre-order Sanity: Aiken's Artifact at the nationwide retail chain Electronics Boutique. Additionally, the game-themed comic book will be bundled with more than 35,000 subscription issues of Wizard #119.

The book was written by Dave Land, with pencils by Trevor McCarthy and inks by and Mike Perkins.

The game will hit retail shelves at the end of September.

Sanity: Aiken's Artifact is a story-driven game that features more than 20 single player and 10 multi-player levels and stars Ice-T as the lead character voice of Agent Cain.

Here's how the game is described:

"In the near future, citizens around the world have begun to display remarkable psychic abilities. Called Psionics, these tormented souls are able to generate energy emissions using only their minds -- often with catastrophic and deadly results.

"Succumbing to the lure of the power they possess, these Psionics will stop at nothing to achieve control of the universe ... one man, Agent Cain, a powerful Psionic working for an elite government agency, stands against them, risking his own sanity to save ours."

The comic establishes a prequel story line and uses the lead characters featured in the game.

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