The House of Ideas is moving to Burbank — and getting a new Editor-in-Chief on the way out the door.
Staff found out Thursday morning at a town hall in the Midtown office. Kevin Feige was there. So were Brad Winderbaum, who runs television, animation, comics and franchise, and David Abdo, installed as general manager of comics and franchise back in May. The publishing division is relocating to Burbank, California, where Marvel Studios and Disney already sit. Just over 100 people in the comics and franchise group have been asked to make the move by July 2027. Orientation sessions for them and their families start next week. The idea, according to a company wide memo sent after the meeting, was to put all the creative people who work for Marvel in one place.
That seems empty, somehow. When a company changes headquarters, unless you’re being paid so much money you can’t turn it down, you’re not moving. People have lives woven into where they live now, and mortgages, side businesses, and family. A few will make the move, but probably most of them won’t. A company like Marvel Comics is built on the relationships shared between the people who work for it. Strip that out, and you have a company on paper, but not in spirit. We’ll see how this goes.
Eighty-Seven Years
Martin Goodman started Timely Comics in 1939 out of an office on 42nd Street, back when the American comic book business was about four years old and looked like a get-rich-quick scheme. Timely put out the Human Torch, Namor, Captain America. When superheroes stopped selling after the war the company became Atlas and pivoted to whatever was moving: westerns, monsters, romance. Then in 1961 Lee and Kirby did the Fantastic Four and the whole thing started over.
Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, John Romita, Steve Buscema, all these people were New Yorkers. They wrote what they could see out the window, which is why the Baxter Building is on 42nd Street, why Matt Murdock works Hell’s Kitchen, why Peter Parker is from Forest Hills and takes the train. DC invented Metropolis and Gotham. Marvel just used the actual city, and that one decision is most of the reason the books felt the way they felt.
The lease on the Avenue of the Americas office runs out next year, which forced the timing. The company has been pondering the move for months; when the new leadership came in this past May, they went and looked at where Marvel’s creators actually live now. Answer: everywhere. The talent pool went global years ago, and of the Americans on it, more are in California than New York.
That’s a real argument, and the strongest one Marvel has. The counterargument is that the office was never for the freelancers in the first place, and that there’s something to be said for maintaining the legacy of the company as New York born and bred. The spirit of the city is in Marvel Comics’ DNA.
DC left town in 2015 for the Warner lot in Burbank. When Marvel finishes this move, the city where the comic book was invented won’t have a major comic book publisher in it.
The New Guy Is An Old Guy
Stephen Wacker is the new Editor-in-Chief.
C.B. Cebulski, who’s had the job since 2017, goes to Japan as editor of Asia originals, running the manga and APAC publishing push. It’s not a demotion so much as a redeployment to the thing he’s genuinely best at. Cebulski built the Shonen Jump partnership; Deadpool Samurai and Spider-Man: Octo-Girl exist because of him. He leaves as the third longest-tenured EIC in company history and stays on Wacker’s global leadership team.
Wacker’s a return. He was at Marvel 2006 to 2022, most of it on Spider-Man, which means he owns Brand New Day and Superior Spider-Man, for good and for ill. He also edited Daredevil and Hawkeye during the Eisner years, which is the better credential. He was in the building for Kamala Khan. Then he moved to animation and digital, co-produced the Rocket & Groot shorts, exec produced the Wastelanders audio dramas, left to run Jonathan Hickman’s 3W3M, co-founded a studio called Stone Kite.
The memo calls him a passionate advocate for creators and says he understands that Marvel Comics is the source code of the entire enterprise. This written into the memo, so it’s an important point to remember. It shows that somebody, at least, has their head properly attached and all the wires connected.
I think Cebalski being replaced as Editor in Chief is probably a good move. Marvel Comics has been floundering under his leadership for years. They’ve been playing with incidental characters, trying to recreate the lightning-in-a-bottle that was Iron Man in 2008 when the movie based on what had been a second tier character hit the theaters and basically took over. They haven’t had any strong ideas since, and they’re still chasing that rainbow. While change can be scary, sometimes it’s necessary.
Wacker will be at San Diego next week, starts in Burbank the week of the 27th, comes back to New York the first week of August. He reports to Winderbaum.
Why Now
Marvel lost the market share lead for the first time this century, and they lost it to DC. Nothing in the memo says that directly, but I believe it’s the entire reason any of this is happening. Feige is putting his own people on the publishing side and moving it onto his campus because the books stopped working, and the books are where everything comes from.
Whether Burbank fixes it is a different question. Krakoa and the Ultimate relaunch were terrific pitches that lost the plot somewhere in year two, and that is more an editorial problem rather than one of geography.
Marvel’s comics have always been the R&D lab. Miles Morales, the Ultimate line, Kamala, Krakoa, Annihilation, all of that came from people who were allowed to be strange on a book nobody was watching, and decades later the whole thing has turned into a billion dollars. You don’t get that from a division sitting down the hall from the people making the billion dollars. You get it from the storyboards, the thinkers, the dreamers.
I’d like to be wrong, because it’s hard to imagine a world without Marvel Comics in it. People who know more than I do are saying that Wacker’s a good editor, and the books on his résumé that won things were the weird ones. If Marvel can pick up the web lines that lead it back to the success they’ve always enjoyed, it’ll be because of the dreamers and the risk takers, not the bean counters.
Comic-Con’s next week. We’ll see what he says.
