A glimpse at Marvel Editorial's knowledge of characters.

Though primarily a novelist, Brian Keene has spent some time in the comics industry including working with Marvel to write a Marvel MAX series of Devil-Slayer. This has left with some interesting experiences which he shares quite candidly on his podcast The Horror Show With Brian Keene. Recently on the podcast, Keene spent a considerable amount of time exploring Marvel's many PR nightmares. To further illustrate the troubles of Marvel's incompetency, Keene relayed a particularly interesting story which involving an unnamed Marvel editor.

The transcript is below:

When Devilslayer came out in trade paperback, it was the week of Book Expo America, BEA... So Devil-Slayer comes out in trade paperback, it's a Marvel comic I've written, and Nick Mamatas and I are at the biggest trade show in America for books and publishing and Marvel has this massive booth and we correctly assume that "Hey the book came out this week perhaps they'll have it here to show and display." And we walk up and the editor that's manning the booth, and it wasn't some temp that they hired, it was an editor. I'm not gonna name the person "Can I help you gentlemen?" Well yeah. And Nick says "He, uh, his new comic Devil-Slayer came out and we wanted to see if you had it." And the editor said, and I quote, "I don't think that's one of our characters." Motherfucker your only job is to know who your characters are so you can spin them off for lunch boxes and underwear and movies.



Given Keene's strong words for Marvel, we now have a better idea which of the Big Two recently hired him.