Passionate, but self-deprecating, shifting from insightful to excited, a conversation with Tom DeFalco leaves no doubt that this man loves creating comics.







DeFalco has had significant runs on “Amazing Spider-Man,” “The Mighty Thor” and “Spider-Girl” in addition to serving as Marvel's editor-in-chief from 1987-1994.







DeFalco is a guest at Wizard World Pittsburgh September 11-13, alongside colleagues Ron Frenz, Pat Olliffe and Danny Fingeroth.







“I was always interested in comicbooks. At a pretty early age I realized I wanted to be a writer. When I was in college, I sold some short stories, worked for the local newspapers, worked in PR on press releases, I did a weekly comic strips for the school paper, and whatever writing assignments came my way,” said DeFalco.







After graduating, DeFalco landed a staff job at Archie Comics, initially editing and then writing.







“I was doing comicbooks for Archie and Charlton, and I started to do some commercial comics for Joe Orlando, who was an editor at DC. Joe at one point asked me, 'Hey, have ever thought about doing any straight stuff, any superhero stuff?' I said, 'No Joe, that stuff looks so hard.' And Joe laughed at me, 'No, no, no. Are you kidding me? You gotta know characters. You know that. You gotta be able to construct stories. You know that. And here's the kicker, it doesn't have to be funny. They're paying you the same rate, and you're only doing half the work.' I thought, 'It doesn't have to be funny? He's right, you're doing half the job, and they're paying you the same.”







DeFalco began writing DC titles such as “Starfire,” “Kull the Unconquered” and “Superboy,” and eventually met Jim Shooter, who invited him to submit work for Marvel, where he landed an exclusive writing contract.







In 1984, DeFalco took over writing “Amazing Spider-Man,” succeeding Roger Stern, a man who DeFalco has put on the title.









“Was it intimidating? Oh yes. I thought Roger was the best Spider-Man writer since Stan Lee. Marvel moved me up to do some other things, so I was no longer editing Spider-Man, Danny Fingeroth was. Danny came in and said to me, 'Roger Stern has decided to leave Spider-Man, he's going to go write the Avengers.' I said, 'What idiot is going to be stupid enough to try to follow Roger Stern on Spider-Man? Whoever does it is just going to look like a total buffoon after Roger.' Famous last words.





“Danny tried to convince me that I could take over, and I wasn't convinced. I told him, 'How about I just do a couple of issues, and then you'll see that you need someone better on the book.' In my mind, I was just a temporary writer on 'Amazing Spider-Man,' I don't know at what point I realized I was the actual writer.”







That assignment was the first time that DeFalco was teamed with Frenz. The pair have done hundreds of comics over the past 30 years.







“The first time I met Ron, it was a comic convention in Pittsburgh. We went out to dinner and started to discuss some comics, and we discovered that we liked a lot of the same things. So we approach comics from the same direction. Aside from that, and this is going to sound weird, when Ron and I work together neither one of us has any ego about our ideas, all we care about is the story. We're both totally willing to throw out the most ridiculous idea to see if it sparks something, and we're both totally willing to trash any idea that doesn't work, even if it's the idea that we came up with.







“The weird thing about Ron and I is most of the time when we're talking about a story, we're talking about the character, and what's happening in the character's life and what's important to the character. A lot of times, we don't even get around to who the villain's going to be or anything else. All we do is discuss characters and somehow come up with these stories. You'd think after all these years, I'd know exactly how we did it, but I don't. I always say all the good ideas are his, and all the ideas you don't like are mine.”







In 1987, the duo put a new spin on Thor, by bonding him with mortal Eric Masterson.







“We liked the original dynamic of Thor having a connection to humanity, and we wanted to get some sort of human person our readers could identify with. Eric came out of those conversations. Thor's a warrior who tends to destroy buildings, so we figured in his secret identity, he's a guy who actually helps design and construct buildings. We decided on a single father because that was something you didn't see in comics at the time, Eric's personality is really a mixture of me and Ron—a lot of Ron's good traits and all of my bad ones.







“Then we built a cast of characters around Eric because Ron and I like to have a lot of supporting cast, and all of the supporting characters have their own lives. We build worlds, and within those worlds are smaller worlds, and every member of the supporting cast has their own set of subplots.







“We always know how things line up. A lot of people decide, 'I'm going to introduce this character, and he's a man of mystery!' and nobody's going to do all the work to work out what those mysteries are. If we're going to have any sort mystery, we work out what the mystery is, and what the solution to the mystery is so that we can set up all the clues properly.







“From the moment we introduced Eric, we knew that he would die at the end. Knowing how it ends, if you read the individual issues, you will see all sorts of clues throughout the whole thing. Two that always leap into my mind, the first time Thor really deals with Eric, he says, 'This guy has a perfect life, but I sense tragedy in his future.' There was a story where we introduced the Thor Corps—which was a joke on the cover; there was never supposed to be a Thor Corps. We have Thor from the future, who is giving Eric a hard time throughout the whole series, and at one point he gets to take a glimpse into the future, and he sees Eric's future, and from that point, he is so nice to Eric, and basically telling him to enjoy every minute because he knows what fate has in store for Eric.”









While the major story plot points had been planned from the start, one unexpected development was Eric's popularity, which led to him being spun off into his own title as Thunderstrike.





“When we first introduced Eric, we planned that at a certain point Eric and Thor would merge. Later on we got the idea, what if Eric became the dominant personality? That happened when it appeared that Thor killed Loki. That was one of those real super-emotional stories that we did where Thor realized that there was only one way to stop Loki, and he blasted him, and as a result, he was totally banished and Eric was the dominant personality. That's when we had the cover “No More Mr. Nice God”—again, a joke! There are those who think Ron and I did not take this stuff all that seriously, and they're right.”







DeFalco translated his own enjoyment of comic creation into his work as editor assembling creative teams.







“One of my guiding principles is that if the creative team is really enjoying the material, that will somehow translate, and the reader will enjoy it too. I'm a lucky guy who's gotten to work with Ron Frenz, Pat Olliffe, Herb Timpe, Ron Lim, Paul Ryan—guys who really love what they're doing. We craft stories that we think are just a lot of fun, and that translates. I've heard people say, 'It isn't going to give you the secret of life, but you're going to enjoy yourself for 15 minutes while you're reading it.' You know what, I like to entertain people, that's kind of why I got into this business.”







“Because I am a writer, I tend to start with the writer. I want a writer who really has a connection to a character, and really believes or has the ability to project belief in the character. These days it seems harder and harder to find those kind of writers. People who can believe in the fact that this is a superhero who is doing things for all the right reasons, and dives totally into the fantasy. If the writer isn't a part of the fantasy, the readers won't be either.







“Then I try to find an artist who has a real affinity for drawing that character. It's always been an amazing thing to me to see guys just light up when that certain character just touches their hearts. I know how it feels because Spider-Man is a character like that for me, and Captain America and Conan the Barbarian and Pogo Possum and The Spirit. One time someone got in touch with me to write a Richie Rich story, and I thought, 'Richie Rich, that's fabulous!' I really like to write the Archie characters, but any time they say it's a Jughead story, aah, I'm in paradise.







“You find an artist like that, and you see if the artist and writer can work together. I always tell the artist and writer to talk to each other. I have been surprised that a lot of writers do not talk to their artists today, and I just find that very disheartening. The artist will always look at your script and say 'Hey, instead of doing this how about we do that' Me, I try to be free and open, and say, 'OK, let's go with it, I'll somehow make it work in the dialogue.' Writers can picture visual storytelling in their minds, but artists live in the visual. I've always taken it for granted that no matter what kind of great visual I can come up with, Ron Frenz can come up with a better one.”







In 1987 Marvel parted ways with editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, being second-in-command, DeFalco figured his time was up as well. Instead he was offered the job.







“It really did surprise me because at that particular time I was negotiating with an animation studio. I was getting ready to leave comics. We had already negotiated my salary; we were negotiating my final package. I already had one foot out the door, and the other on the banana peel. I put up the house for sale because I was going to move out to west coast.







“I had a conversation with Mark Gruenwald, and I said, 'Maybe I can hold off the animation studio for six months (to fix some problems). I'll fix all that stuff, and then you can take over.' I thought it would take six months; it ended up taking closer to a year. Actually the animation studio, when they heard Marvel offered me the editor-in-chief job they withdrew their offer, which really pissed me off because I had already started packing.”







As EIC of Marvel during the early 90s, DeFalco oversaw the largest publisher at a time of increased sales and a rapid expansion of formats. One of DeFalco's first decisions, and most enduring legacy was spurred on by “total fear.”







“I was editor-in-chief for about a month, and the president of the company called me up and said, 'We're about to have a budget shortfall of a million-and-a-half dollars. So we have to make a million-and-a-half dollars, and it has to come out this year, so you have basically two months before we need to get it to the printer.' And then he said, 'Do you have any ideas?' and I said, 'Not right now, but I'm going to have an idea by tomorrow.'







“I went home and thought, whatever we're going to do, it's got to be expensive, and it's got to be something that comicbook fans must have. I thought of an idea that every comicbook fan of my generation had in the back of his head for years. We should have hardcover versions of the first ten issues of 'Fantastic Four,' the first ten issues of 'Spider-Man.' Every comicbook fan in the world envisioned the day when their comicbooks would be on a library shelf or a bookshelf.







“The next day I walked in, I don't remember if I called them the Marvel Masterworks, but I outlined my plan and said one should be Spider-Man, one should be Fantastic Four and the third I would guess should be X-Men. The president of the company said, 'Reprints in a hardcover, who will buy this?' And the person in charge of sales, a woman by the name of Carol Kalish—she's sales, I'm editorial a lot of times we butted heads. She looks up at him and says, 'Every serious comicbook fan.' He turns to her and says, 'You really think these things will sell?' and she said, 'Absolutely. I think Tom has solved our budget problems right here.'







“We came out with our first Marvel Masterworks very quickly, so quickly that if you see the first printings, we barely designed the table of contents or that sort of things. The second printings looked much better. We got those out there; we solved our budget problems and Marvel is still doing them. I often look back at the Masterworks and says, well at least I accomplished one thing while I was editor-in-chief.”







There are few things about comics that scream the 90s more than enhanced covers, with many innovated at Marvel before spreading across all the rapidly-growing industry.







“The first couple of things we did, we had no idea they were going to work, so we didn't advertise them. We did a glow-in-the-dark Ghost Rider cover, and we had no idea whether this thing was going to glow in the dark or not. After it was printed, we tested it and found out that it glowed in the dark, and then said, 'OK, tell all the distributors that the cover is glow-in-the-dark.' There was a Silver Surfer one that had foil on it, and again we didn't know whether the foil would stick to the cover or if it would fall off.







“Were we constantly trying to do different things? Absolutely, but we try to do different things in every story that we do. The one question that I, as editor-in-chief or as an editor, always asked was, 'What makes this story different from all others? What do we see here in this story that we have never seen before?' and if the answer is 'We've seen everything before,' then we shouldn't be doing this story.







“I think the maximum that Marvel ever did was 5-6% would have enhanced covers, and then you had companies where 100% of their line would have these enhanced covers. Yet everyone was criticizing Marvel for flooding the market with these enhanced covers. My guys used to go, 'I don't know why everybody's criticizing us, you have these other companies where all of their books have enhanced covers.' 'That's because nobody cares about those books, they care about Marvel books. So be happy that people are looking at what you're doing and ignoring what other people are doing.'







Now a mainstay of comics, major crossovers began in the mid-80s and exploded in the 90s. Their dominance at corporate publishers has continued debate on how they impact creativity.







“In those days, I think the comics benefited because a lot of the big crossovers were homegrown and came from the titles themselves. We had families of books and the people within that family, the Spider-titles or the X-titles or Avengers titles, somebody got a really good idea, and they passed it around to the other people. 'Operation: Galactic Storm' I know came from the talent. Most of the X-Men crossovers came from the talent.







“As a writer who was doing some of those things, I could gear my book to really benefit from the story line. In those days, some guys would say, 'I'm doing something really big in my book, and this doesn't really fit in.' and we'd say, 'OK, you don't have to play.' It was much more voluntary. A lot of times people wanted to play because they could see it would increase their sales, and a lot of times guys wanted to play because they could see a way it could enhance their character.







“I think as time has gone on, some stories are still coming up organically from the talent, and some are being shoved on the talent from the top going down. I think when it organically comes from the talent, you get a much better story and much better characterization. When it comes from the top, you take your chances.”







One such crossover event in which DeFalco was directly involved was Spider-Man's divisive Clone Saga.







“When the Clone Saga was first proposed to me, I thought, 'This is ridiculous. We don't want to do this.' Danny Fingeroth said all the Spider-Man people had a big conference, and they came up with this story and they were all really excited about it. 'Nah, I don't think we can do this. Let me go talk to the guys and I'll tell them why I don't think this can work.' The next day, the guys are very passionately pitching the story to me, guys like Sal Buscema, who had been in the industry I don't know how many years at that stage, passionate about this story line. I said if my professionals are this passionate about this story line, I can't imagine how passionate the readers are going to be.







“At the time we didn't know the clone was going to be called Ben Reilly. I said, 'We're going to discover that the one we thought was the clone was the real Peter Parker, and the one we thought was Peter Parker is going to retire, but what happens to him? He's married to Mary Jane now, what happens to him? We need to know that.' They said, 'Well, what could happen to him?' I said, 'I don't know, maybe he could get a happily ever after. He and Mary Jane discover she's pregnant, and they go off and live happily ever after.' At which point Marc DeMatteis beamed at me, turned and he and Howard Mackie slapped five. 'I knew he would do it!' I said, 'Do what?' They said, 'Come up with the ending.' Those guys had bet that I would come up the right ending for it.”







“Danny Fingeroth afterwards came to me and said, 'Listen, everything is good, but on 'Spectacular' we have this guy Todd Dezago, who's just starting out, he needs some help with plots. Is there any way you could help him, and maybe do the plots for the books. Sal was he penciler of the book, and he puts his arm around me, and said, 'Yeah, I need somebody who can write plots that I can draw, so I want you to plot this book for me. I got Sal on one side, Danny on the other, what the heck am I gonna say, no?







“I said I would write a few plots until Todd learns how, and then he can take over. I think a different Spider-Man book opened up and Todd went there, and next thing I knew I was writing 'Spectacular Spider-Man' every month. Wait a minute, I'm editor-in-chief, and now I'm writing three books a month. I gotta get sleep sometime. But you know, when you're in love, you're in love. I was a maniac in those days, writing three comicbooks a month, full-time job as editor-in-chief, traveling all around the country, and writing things that weren't even comicbooks. I have no idea how I did it or how I found the time.”







While Mary Jane's pregnancy was fumbled and ambiguously dropped towards the end of the sprawling saga, DeFalco had the opportunity to pick up the thread again as writer of “What If...?”









“Ron Frenz was working for DC, doing 'Superman.' I thought if I'm going to write a Spider-Man kind of story, I should really call Ron. So I called Ron and said, 'I've got this idea for a one-shot story. Can you just do one issue, one story?' He says,'Yeah, yeah, for old time's sake. What is it?' 'Peter and Mary Jane are married, have a little girl, and it's a story about her as a teenager. I'll call it Spider-Girl.' 'Spider-Girl? That's ridiculous, why don't you call it Spider-Woman?' I said, 'There have been so many Spider-Women, Spider-Woman has the stink of death on it. There haven't been any Spider-Girls before.'





“In the course of doing that story, Ron and I both fell in love with Mayday and her cast of characters. As we're finishing up, he said, 'I really enjoyed this. Do you think we'll ever get a chance to do another one?' I said, 'No, it's What If? well maybe a year from now we might be able to do another one. Who knows?' Ron and I hadn't been working together for a while and ended up doing a Thor/Thunderstrike one after that. We realized we missed working together.







“'What If Spider-Girl' sold a lot better than anyone thought. The company came back and asked me, 'Hey do you think you could do six issues of this Spider-Girl character?' 'Just six issues? No problem.' As we got towards the end of the six issues, they kept saying, 'How about six more?' They kept asking for six more for 13 years.







“To my surprise they asked if we could do another Spider-Girl story for 'Secret Wars.' Each time I do a Spider-Girl story, I always do it as if it's my last one because, y'know, it could be.







Following the events of Spider-Verse, the current story features most of the MC2 heroes and centers on Mayday dealing with the loss of her father.







“It's odd, some comicbook fans looked at the first story and said, 'Wait a minute, Mayday's father's been dead for two months already, and she's still moaning about it?' Um, yeah! That's what people do. Boy, you've obviously never lost anybody close to you.







“A lot of times, comicbooks are like, 'somebody died? Well, I have to keep on going, so I'm not going to miss them anymore.' When somebody close to you dies, it haunts you forever. At a certain point, the pain is not as intense, but you never really let it go. That's life, and death, but not comics.







With “Secret Wars” leaving the future of alternate futures/realities in question, there is no certainty that MC2 will be seen again.







“I just look at it as how can I write the best story I can in a way that I can say my own goodbye to a character. I've actually said good-bye to Mayday so many times over the years as I was assured the book was canceled. I've been wrong every time so far, but maybe this time is the final time. This time looks like it may be the end. This is probably going to be the last job I do for Marvel Comics.







“I've had a great time at Marvel; I've loved the characters and hey, if my time is over, that's the biz. Now I'll just have to go off and do other things and hopefully have a great time doing that.”