Visiting Marvel Comics in 2000

In December 2000, I visited the offices of Marvel Comics.  I got to bring my camera, talk to a bunch of people there, have lunch with the editorial crew, and take home some comics for review.  (That included a fresh-off-the-office-printer copy of “Ultimate X-Men” #1.)

I was worried it would be cancelled at the last minute – Joe Quesada’s daughter had been born only a couple of weeks earlier, as I recall.  But everything went off without a hitch.

I came across the pictures from that day on a backup CD tonight, and had to show them off.  I’m pretty sure these all accompanied my original write-up of the visit back in the CBR days, but the images have been lost in the transition to the new site there.  You can read my full write-up still, which includes the original invite from Quesada to stop by.

These pictures were all made with a digital camera that was, at best, 3 megapixels.  Crude times.

 

The Building

 

This is the outside of the building, likely taken from across the street when I walked into the wrong building to begin with.  The doorman of that building pointed me in the right direction.  He knew right where Marvel was.

You can’t see Marvel’s windows from here.  They were up a few stories higher… Marvel had at least two floors.  I visited the editorial floor. The other was finance and accounting and whatnot.

The Bullpen

Here’s the glorious bullpen of the time.  I might have taken this shot from behind Pondscum’s desk, but don’t quote me on that. ( Sadly, Marvel laid off Pondscum in 2011. )

(Love that Excalibur poster over on the left.)

You can see that the computers were starting to take over for the art tables already…

 

The Editors

Stuart Moore was editing at Marvel at the time.

His iMac was not the popular Bondi Blue color.

 

Axel Alonso — now the Editor in Chief — had the Bondi Blue iMac.  I remember before taking this picture that he had to take a good hard look at the stuff up on the wall to make sure nothing was being spoiled.  I think we were safe. Wish the resolution was high enough to read that white board, though…

Which brings us now to the EIC:

Joe Quesada’s office — here, let me just reprint what I wrote originally:

Quesada has the corner office on the tenth floor. His drafting table and desk are on the “far side” while a wall of comic statues are on the set of built-in bookcases on the side you walk in on.

The office is strewn with comics stuff. A partially-broken Batmobile sits on the desk, along with the infamous Death Row Marv SIN CITY action figure and a Too Much Coffee Man statue. A Kid Death and Fluffy page hangs up on the side.

A whiteboard behind Quesada has phone numbers of artists and Hollywood folk written on it.

And, in a view all too common at Marvel, a Macintosh sits perched on the desk. Macintoshes are the computers of choice at Marvel. There are more fruity looking monitors in that office than I’ve ever seen anyplace, although I suppose in a graphics-oriented company that it makes sense. Heck, I even saw a 21-inch monitor on one desk. Very nice.

I had a computer obsession even in 2000, four years before I switched to the Mac.

Quesada also drew comics in that office.  Here’s what the other half looked like:

Again, the lack of resolution prevents me from telling you what that thumbnail sketch is hanging up on his board there to the right of the lamp…

Here’s the view out his window:

You can imagine Spider-Man swinging by from there, can’t you?

For more details, go ahead and read the original write-up, but I wanted to preserve the pictures for posterity here.  I only wish I had taken a lot more, but I didn’t want to look like a total tourist in there…

 

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