An entry from my Marvel blog of years gone by in which I talk about the first project I ever solo edited.
December 22, 2009 | 1:00 AM | By Tom_Brevoort | In General
The first thing I ever solo-edited was the MARVEL COMICS POSTER BOOK FEATURING JIM LEE, which went on sale in the summer of 1991. It wasn’t a tough project to do at all, basically consisting of eight cool Jim Lee covers recolored and printed without logos, and with some brief spot-copy on the backs. I seem to recall that I wrote that spot-copy-I did a lot of that sort of thing working in Bob Budiansky’s Special Projects area, where we worked mainly on posters, trading cards, licensing artwork, movie adaptations and custom comics. It gave me a strong, well-rounded education in many different facets of this job, and exposed me to a ton of creators.
Jim Lee was very helpful on the project, despite never having met me before then. He arranged to have the original artwork for most of the pieces we wanted to include in the book sent back to me at the office, so we could achieve the best possible reproduction. The pieces were recolored by Gregory Wright, for whom I’d interned a year earlier and who was one of the stronger colorists of the period. And the typically-cheerful Joe Kaufman did the design and the mechanicals, one of the easiest guys to work with.
There was one big hiccup with the project. On the production schedule, and in every conversation and memo dealing with it, the project was referred to as the JIM LEE POSTERBOOK. So that was what I assumed the name of the thing was, and what we got designed and mechanicaled up. It was only when the cover was sent around for final routing that Editor In Chief Tom DeFalco came to me to tell me that we couldn’t name the book after the creator, but that instead it should be called the MARVEL COMICS POSTERBOOK. There was some argument between assorted parties that we needed to say Jim Lee on the cover, since that’s what we were selling it based on, which is why the final prominently says FEATURING ARTWORK BY JIM LEE. But I remember having to get the entire cover torn apart and redone, including rewriting all of the back cover copy so as to not spotlight Jim, all under a crushing deadline as the thing was supposed to go to the printer that day. The first of many such crises I’ve dealt with over the years.
More later.
Tom B
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
Wow. You couldn’t even mention Jim on the back, on a package that was entirely of his art.
kdb
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Yep. I had to argue to get him mentioned on the front, too. This was during a period where Marvel was very trepidatious about making any particular creator seem important. It was an outgrowth of Jim Shooter’s stated belief that the editors made the comics and the specific creators were largely interchangeable–though that idea was being carried beyond Jim’s point by this time. It’d take a while still for Marvel to even become comfortable with listing the creators’ names on the covers.
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