JQ: Basically, Mark was a big mainstream comics guy for a while doing Spider-Man, but somewhere along the way Mark ended up doing more licensed and custom comics, if I’m not mistaken. I just know he wasn’t drawing any of the mainstream stuff. He left for DC for a little bit and Bill just had this vision that Mark was the guy. Before I knew it, Mark was attached to the project and I was like, “Wow, Bagley’s back? I didn’t even know he was around doing comics.” So he really sort of brought Bagley back. While Mark had some great success early on in his career, “Ultimate Spider-Man” is arguably the thing he’ll be best known for — over 100 issues with Bendis. It was a magnificent run.
BJ: Joe, ask [Marvel Publisher] Dan Buckley about this. Mark and I worked on this really cool set of Spider-Man cards together four or five years before then, but I think Buckley called up from retirement, heard about this, knew my house was on fire and I think he was the one who said to use Bagley.
JQ: I just remember that Mark wasn’t a main Marvel guy back then.

What an interesting and imaginary story!

Bagley left Amazing Spider-Man to do Thunderbolts and was still doing Thunderbolts as Ultimate Spider-Man started. In fact he was doing both titles for months: his final Thunderbolts issue was #50 and which came out the same month as Ultimate Spider-Man #7.

Bagley also found time during his busy Marvel schedule to work for DC. This amounted to doing work on part of an issue of Superboy and part of an issue of Superman 80page Giant.

For Jemas & Quesada to not remember he was working there is surprising, but to make up a fake job history is embarrassing. So what else in the interview is wrong?

Then there was the spiner rack program of the mid-1980s, where Waldenbooks and B. Dalton featured comics and graphic albums.

And before that, they had an agreement with Simon & Schuster, distributing trades via S&S and mass market reprints via Pocket Books. (”How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way” is still published by S&S.)

So Marvel should have had some data on what was selling in bookstores before then. (Going back to the mid-1970s with “Origins of Marvel Comics”.) With the Direct Market, they could have easily redirected a few cases to trade distributors while using the nonreturnable copies to fund the expirement of returnable trade copies.

Post-Manga, Marvel had done an excellent job of following the trade model of publishing affordable hardcover editions first, followed a few seasons later by the trade paper edition. (Although I have yet to see any remainder copies in bookstores… *SIGH* guess they get pushed over to the direct market…)

The piece shown was a commission for none other than Christy Marx, and she says, “Awesomeness is vouched for.”