Axel Alonso Becomes Marvel’s Editor-In-Chief

  • Share
  • Read Later

Marvel Comics announced this morning that Axel Alonso had been promoted to the line’s editor-in-chief. Joe Quesada, who’s been the company’s editor-in-chief since 2000, will continue on as the company’s Chief Creative Officer, a job he assumed in June. Alonso’s new job is a fairly thankless position in terms of public response: very often, anything that goes right is perceived as the creators’ doing, and anything that goes wrong is perceived as the editor-in-chief’s fault.

In recent years, Alonso has been editing the X-Men line at Marvel, although he’s had a somewhat lower public profile than Marvel’s other VP-Executive Editor Tom Brevoort. He made his name as an editor at Vertigo (overseeing projects including 100 Bullets and Preacher); besides Preacher, he’s worked on quite a few projects at both DC/Vertigo and Marvel with writer Garth Ennis, including Hellblazer and Punisher. Alonso’s known for working on projects that nudge at the boundaries of mainstream comics, including Peter Milligan and Mike Allred’s X-Force/X-Statix and Warren Ellis’s newuniversal.

As for today’s other big piece of comics news, the impending reprint of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s long-out-of-print Flex Mentallo miniseries from DC/Vertigo? Alonso edited the final issue of that, too.

(More on TIME.com: Reading the Tea Leaves: Bob Harras Named Editor-In-Chief of DC)

(More on TIME.com: Reading the Tea Leaves: Quesada Becomes Marvel CCO)