Marvel Comics Executive Editor Tom Brevoort stops by to talk superheroes, Siege, scheduling, shenanigans and more after a big week of news and controversy from the House of Ideas. This interview is from PoP!-Cast Episode 38, so check out the full episode. Check back later for a text transcript, but for now…

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Lee Rodriguez: Lot of stuff going down the past couple of days, especially. The past few months, but just the past couple days, it’s been craziness. I almost don’t know where to begin. I guess the big announcement from the last week was the Avengers titles all canceled after April as part of the Siege event.

Tom Brevoort: I’m very tired.

Rodriguez: I’ll bet.

Brevoort: We just — I just thought this would be easier. We’ll just end them all, and that’ll take a big chunk of work off of my back and fewer things for me to worry about. And people have been asking us to end these titles almost since Brian started writing them, so now we are giving the public what they want, and we’re canceling them all! So there! Because you asked for it, they’re done!

Jason Kerouac: Now I haven’t heard anybody who wants that to happen.

Brevoort: [Laughing] Well, you haven’t trolled certain message boards or you haven’t checked my email box every once in a while whenever we do something aggravating in the Avengers titles. There are certainly people who would like to see change happen. And so in honor of them, we’re blowing it all up.

Kerouac: Now, amongst us fans, if Bob Reynolds grows a goatee, that’s aggravating. “This is the worst book ever!”

Brevoort: As much as it can be aggravating every once in a while, particularly when there’s a fairly typical fan interaction — Brian was actually just talking about it this weekend — where a fan will hear something about a story, extrapolate a version of it in their head, and get really angry about it, and then blame it on Brian — or on whomever: Ed Brubaker, or me or Grand Master; pick your guy. That’s always the toughest interaction to deal with because you’re not really talking about the story you’re doing, you’re talking about the story that this particular reader is afraid that you’re doing in their mind, three months ahead of time. But apart from that, the fact that fans get this tangled up and stuff and this involved and this passionate about speaking both when things are positive and when things are negative, this is actually generally a good thing. We like the fact that people are involved in the stories that we’re telling and the characters that we’re creating and putting through their paces. Really the worst thing that could happen is for us to get dead silence when we release a story or we release an issue. So, as much as there are certainly days that I don’t necessarily want to open the email box because something has happened, those are all well-balanced out by the fact that people generally are involved with what we’re doing even if they don’t love it every single day of single week.

Kerouac: I’ve seen plenty of people on your Facebook page, one guy in particular, railing against the Siege #3 promo that you guys are doing, and my theory is — first of all, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it at all. I think it’s just genius all around, but even if it was a little questionable as some people seem to think — it’s definitely getting people talking! And, my God, as people who are trying to sell copy, that’s the No. 1 thing you want to do is get people to know what’s going on, whether they’re bitching or praising.

Brevoort: It was certainly the big topic of conversation last week. It seemed like everybody was talking about it. Let’s make no bones about this. While this is sort of being done with the retailer situation and with the marketplace in mind, there’s also no denying that, on a certain level, this is throwing an elbow. This is throwing an elbow at our competition. And you know what? They’re our competition. I have to throw an elbow at them; we have to throw an elbow at them. We are all friendly; this is all one community. Their talent and our talent tends to go back and forth every x number of years. Their editorial staff is largely made up at this point of guys that used to be at Marvel at some point, so it’s not like there’s a lot of hatred or a lot of enmity particularly, but they are our competition. In a very real way, my job is to make you want to read Marvel books and be paying more attention to what Marvel is doing. That’s not really the sum total of what’s going on here. Again, I see it particularly as more and more information about this thing has come out, a lot of people have just been really upset. They’re reacting to it very personally because, whatever, they’re either big DC fans or they’re really enjoying Blackest Night or whatever, and they’re really looking  at this almost as a knock on them. It’s not.

DC is my competition. DC is Marvel’s competition. I’m gonna throw an elbow every now and then, or we’re gonna throw an elbow every now and then because that’s the heart of what competition is. I’ve asked this question a couple of times on Twitter and out in the world: “How is this bad?” I think beyond that, I don’t know if this is bad particularly for DC, either. For all that we’re telling retailers “If you happen to have 50 of any of these books left on your shelf because you ordered a ton of them to get sets of rings and make your buck that way and now they’re just clogging up shelf space and backroom space and eventually back-issue bins, send them to us and we will send you one book in exchange for free that hopefully you can sell at a premium price more easily than you could sell 50 copies of” — whatever, the issue of Doom Patrol let’s say. That all being said, DC has sold those copies. They have been sold to those retailers. This is not money out of DC’s pocket. This is not making them, I don’t think, any particularly more difficult for any reader to find, particularly since this is now well over a month since those books when on sale. I think in almost every single case the subsequent issue has seen print. And it’s not like all of those books aren’t going to be collected somewhere because you know that DC much like us has to have a trade program in which these books are all gonna be picked up.

Again, the more I pose it to whoever’s chattering about it — fans, retailers, readers — “How is this bad?”, people just seem to be coming back with nothing more really than: “It’s dirty. It’s low. It’s dirty pool.” But they can’t actually put their finger on exactly why or how. They like to try and move the goalposts: “Well, why didn’t you do it for this?” or “Why didn’t you do it for that?” And to some degree, that’s fair enough, but that’s moving the goalpost. This is about this. Within that, I haven’t yet heard a really strong answer as to why this is bad other than it gets people agitated.

Rodriguez: Maybe it’s just me, but I read the whole thing as having tongue firmly planted in cheek. I thought it was fairly good-natured. I would say the same thing if they were doing it to you.

Brevoort: Geoff Johns tweeted his response about “There’s nothing less rare than a Deadpool cover.” I got a chuckle out of that, which again is not exactly 100 percent precise but it’s close enough and it’s fun. It’s sort of in the spirit of this thing. We all take a lot of this stuff very, very seriously because either we’ve invested in it so much as readers and fans or it’s what we do 40, 50 or 60 hours a week. It really is OK to have a little fun with it, too. It goes back to one of my classic theories that I’ve expounded on many times over the years and other people have as well so I don’t claim that I’ve invented this. There’s a constant phenomenon that happens in our business and it probably happens in other entertainment venues as well I just don’t happen to be as involved in those to be able to see it firsthand, where sometimes the readership likes to look at the creators and the staff like the characters, and they react to us — they sort of assign you either a trading card designation “You are superhero or supervillain” or a hat color — black or white — or whatever and tend to react to your statements and your moves and your whatever as though you’re a two-dimensional character with seven power ratings and that sort of thing. When in point of fact, everybody involved in this business are flesh and blood human beings and on occasion, when the occasion warrants, we’ll go out, we’ll have a drink together, we’ll see one another, we’ll play softball against one another, or go to functions and be in the same place. But at the end of the day, certainly I can’t imagine that DC and DC’s corporate managers do not want them to sell more books and do better and be bigger and knock Marvel out of the No. 1 spot, and so, too, it’s the same for us. This is competition, but it’s not, I hope, as mean-spirited as people seem to want to make believe that it is. This is not Victor Virtuous knocking down the evil wizard. Neither is it Captain Cruelheart tormenting the virtuous white-stallion-riding hero. It’s a little more shades of gray than that. And now my email box will fill up all over again.

Kerouac: I will pay good money for a Tom Brevoort as Victor Virtuous HeroClix figure. I want that little dial on the bottom to twist.

Brevoort: Created right here on the air for you. This is how we do it.

Rodriguez: Magical. I think people love turmoil. I kind of thought it was much to do about nothing. I am a huge fan of the promotion, though. I think that this sort of back-and-forth playground stuff has been missing a little bit lately. I think it’s good for comics. I think it gets people talking. I think it bolsters genuine competition when I think sometimes people get kind of stuck into the ruts of things and things get kind of stagnant. I think this strokes the pot a little bit. I think it’s good. I think it fans the flames.

Brevoort: I think so, too, and hopefully, it will be good for most everybody involved. I guess we’ll see. I guess we’ll find out.

Rodriguez: Switching gears a little bit back to the Avengers stuff, there’s been the rumored Avengers Academy, and I’m sure the Avengers franchise is not about to wither up and die. I’m sure there’s got to be something else.

Brevoort: We’re ending all of the books.

Rodriguez: Forever, right?

Brevoort: All of the books are ending.

Rodriguez: Yes, I’m sure. What can you tell us about what’s coming up next a little bit? Reassure some folks.

Brevoort: We’ve certainly mentioned a few times in a few places that sort of the next cycle, the next sort of Dark Reign landscape of the Marvel Universe thing that we’re doing is moving into this area called the Heroic Age. That certainly implies certain things, and it’s still, unfortunately, at least a couple of weeks early for me to be able to tell you anything too definitively about that other than sort of what it implies by its very nature. But just as at the end of Secret Invasion we moved into Dark Reign and that sort of recalibrated the landscape of the Marvel Universe and put some pieces into some new and hopefully interesting places and generated a whole bunch of stories for maybe too many months, so, too at the end of Siege and going into Heroic Age, some things will be in some new places and hopefully that will generate a new landscape and some new, interesting stories for a lot of characters that’ll drive us through the rest of 2010 and into 2011.

Rodriguez: There’s some talk about moving away from strictly event-based storytelling, and Jason and I have gone back and forth about whether or not Dark Reign was an event as much as just sort of the current status quo across the line. Is this the kind of idea going forward — that we have the much shorter event in Siege leading into this Heroic Age stories — is that going to be the way we’re going to be seeing things for the next little bit, as opposed to seeing kind of bounce from event to event?

Brevoort: First off, I tend to agree with whichever of you took the position that Dark Reign was not an event. Dark Reign was not an event; Dark Reign was the backdrop.

Rodriguez: Yeah, eat it, Kerouac.

Brevoort: We labeled it “Dark Reign” and certainly we put “Dark Reign” on a whole bunch of covers, probably for a little bit too long, to kind of indicate this fact, but that was really designed to be the “here’s the landscape of the Marvel Universe and here’s how things have shifted and evolved.” Heroic Age will be the same kind of thing coming out of Siege. Going forward, Siege itself — while it’s a big event, just in terms of its length if nothing else — is a little bit smaller than big events stories that we’ve done in the past. We’re looking, going through the rest of this year and the top of next year, to do some scaling back or some recalibrating of how we do larger stories across the line. That doesn’t mean there won’t be any events, but that means, on a very realistic level, theoretically every story we do in every book is an event. In terms of things that are larger or effects of bigger things, you’ll probably see events that focus on a couple of books rather than the entirety of the Marvel Universe a little more. I could really make the argument that, tie-ins aside, Secret Invasion was very Avengers-centric and was really an Avengers event, the aftermath of which affected a lot books. Siege is very much an Avengers event. That sort of thing will continue; it may be parsed in a slightly different way, but some event that runs through whatever Avengers title there might be in Thor or Iron Man or Captain America or the characters that make up the central Avengers characters, I wouldn’t see that as being off the beaten track or not possible as we go forward.

In a way, probably the best sort of example that I can think of off the top of my head right here right now is the Utopia event that we did. That was a little bit smaller scale; it was really just Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men and then X-Men Legacy and the Dark X-Men book off to the side.. That was a much smaller, more self-contained, more quickly concluded event that had a big effect, particularly for the X end of the universe, moving the mutants out of San Francisco and putting them on the new Nation X Utopia island. I think you’re going to see more things along those lines as we move forward, at least for the time being. We’re not going to stop doing big events stories. We want people to be excited about the stories we’re doing, and one of the ways to do that is do something big. But we’ll probably scale a bit down in terms of the sheer number of titles that are involved to a slightly more manageable level, at least for the time being. Until you, the readers and retailers, tell us differently, and then we’ll do something big again.

This is just a taste of the 45-minutes we talked to Tom Brevoort.  Be sure to download the full interview for the rest.