“You have to love the comics you’re making”: Marvel Senior Editor Jordan D. White Talks ‘Astonishing Spider-Man’ and More

For five years, I had the privilege of collaborating with Marvel Senior Editor Jordan D. White on the X-Men Monday at AIPT weekly interview column. That’s five years of emails, video calls, eXclusive preview art, and — much to X-Fans’ chagrin — in-depth Weezer discussions. While X-Men Monday continues in collaboration with the all-new, all-different X-Office, Jordan’s still toiling away within the House of Ideas, helping bring a diverse assortment of cool comics to life. Given so many new Jordan-edited series are either launching or have launched already, I figured it was time we reconnected to talk Astonishing Spider-Man, Incredible Hulk, Hellhunters, and more.

AIPT: It’s good to talk comics with you again, Jordan! But first, just one X-Men question for old time’s sake. How are Kafka and his friends on Krakoa doing in the White Hot Room?

Jordan D. White: I can answer that to the best of my ability, but it would just be fanfic.

I assume they’re doing great. Kafka is a really competent guy, If a little condescending at times. But I like to think they’re doing quite well. They figured out a different way of living, so I think they went back to it and they are doing great — until they appear in a comic. Then, that means everything will be terrible for them. [Laughs] So let’s hope we never see them again! 

I’m kidding, I’m kidding.

AIPT: One question in and we’re already back to upsetting X-Fans. But moving on, let’s talk about editing. Comic fans can be a bit siloed when it comes to their tastes. Maybe they love reading Daredevil but can’t wrap their heads around X-Men continuity. Or they read Marvel superhero stories but resist output from beyond the House of Ideas. Meanwhile, comic book editors seem to be a very versatile lot who can hop around the industry. How do you stay engaged with your work, whether you’re editing the sprawling Star Wars or X-Men lines or a single Hulk series?

Jordan: Well, I said this back when I was doing the X-books and I’ll probably say it for the entirety of my career — to be good at this job, you have to love what you’re doing. And I don’t just mean you have to love making comics in general. You have to love the comics you’re making. So any book I’m working on — whether it’s a book I liked before I started working — I find something to love about it. The characters, the story — anything.

That philosophy stretches back to New Exiles, the first Marvel series I worked on. That’s part of why I love Sage — because of all the crazy stuff that was happening with her in that series. When leaving the X-Office, I was very fortunate in that the Hulk and Venom books I was taking over are great. I made sure I was caught up on what Phillip Kennedy Johnson was doing on Incredible Hulk and hopefully, the people reading didn’t notice there was a different editor.

With Venom, we were at the tail end of Al Ewing and Torunn Grønbekk’s run, so I helped finish that out. Then, All-New Venom is a very, very different direction that I was in on the ground floor of creating. So this is now a book that I worked on, but again, it was easy to jump on the previous volume because I loved what they were doing. Venom’s a fun character. I mean, you know from our X-Men Monday interviews that I love Spider-Man. So I’m thrilled to be in the Spider-World.

And then I’m working on all these mini-series, and for each one, there’s a different fun thing to tackle and understand. What is this series? What is this one about? What’s the idea here? I mean, there’s a huge difference between Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man and Hellhunters. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is all-ages friendly and connected to this amazing TV show I can’t wait for other people to see. And then you’ve got Hellhunters — a war comic about badasses killing Nazis who are messing with magic. It’s pretty crazy, dark, and terrific. So there are different things to love in all of these comics, but you get in there, you figure out what the project is, you commit, and you love it.

AIPT: Well, speaking of love, you already mentioned how much you love Spider-Man. I was beyond thrilled to see you editing Scott Aukerman’s new Astonishing Spider-Man Infinity Comic series. How does it feel to be part of the team adding to Spider-Man’s 60+ year history?

Jordan: It’s been terrific. I mean, this has taken two things I’m really excited and passionate about: Spider-Man and Marvel Infinity Comics. I really love working on them. Back when we were doing X-Men Unlimited, I was so excited about that series and we tried a lot of really exciting things to push that medium forward and promote it. And that series was really successful. When I came into the Spider-Office, I pitched Astonishing Spider-Man right from the get-go.

I said this should be is an ongoing Peter Parker-Spider-Man book. It shouldn’t be an anthology book. I want it to be an ongoing book. It’ll have little story arcs, of course, but it should read as an ongoing, in the same way Amazing Spider-Man is read. Everybody said that’s great, so then it was just a matter of finding the right people to bring an ongoing digital Spider-Man to life. 

AIPT: And how did Scott become involved?

Jordan: Well, Scott got involved because I knew he’s a big comics guy, and I knew he’s a very talented writer. I worked with him on a bunch back in the day. He’s terrific and he’d only had the opportunity to do short-form stuff. The X-Men Black: Mojo one-shot was 30 pages, but it was just a one-shot. I knew he would really sing on an ongoing where he could tell a longer story. And when I talked to him, he was thrilled by that idea. He’s been really committed to it and obviously, he’s got the spider-quips down.

But Scott also had a story right away. He pitched me the Crime Lord story you’ve been seeing play out starting with the first arc. But he pitched it not as, “And then it’s done” — he pitched it as, “This is the beginning and it’s an ongoing thing, and here are the directions it can go.” It was exactly what I wanted. So it’s not that this is a 100-part story, but there are going to be mini-arcs throughout, but a larger ongoing arc for the whole thing that will be consistent. The other day, we were just talking about one of my favorite TV shows, Veronica Mars, which does that really well. It had a mystery every episode, but there was a bigger, larger story that was happening the whole time. That’s the kind of stuff we want to do here. And the fact that it comes out pretty much weekly is great because it keeps the propulsion forward.

AIPT: What’s it like not just collaborating with Scott, but comedic writers in general? I feel like you’ve had the opportunity to edit some pretty funny writers in your time at Marvel. That has to be a very unique, enjoyable, and potentially challenging experience.

Jordan: Well, I worked on Deadpool for a long time, and as a result, I worked with a ton of very funny people. Most notably, that’s where I paired up with Gerry Duggan and Brian Posehn on the Marvel Now Deadpool series. I love working with funny people because, well, comedy is great, and I love comics that are fun and funny. We’ve talked about my favorite X-Men series being Excalibur, which was a very silly series in some ways. But then, every once in a while, still does hit you with emotions and drama. There’s just always a fun element to it. The same is true of Star Wars. People think about Star Wars as very actiony, but there’s always a really solid base of humor. There are great light moments and jokes.

With Deadpool, what I always found was you have to be careful with the humor in that we don’t want it to overwhelm the book. There’s a fine line between the book being funny and the book being inconsequential. So when we started with Gerry and Brian, the things we always talked about as our touch points of being funny without being too silly that it doesn’t matter were Ghostbusters and Big Trouble in Little China. Both are very funny, but the world is still in actual peril. The Ghostbusters are funny. The world the Ghostbusters are in isn’t funny. In Big Trouble in Little China, the main character is funny and ridiculous, but the world isn’t just silly.

Sometimes we would go a little further than others into the world being a little silly, but we tried to always keep it grounded. The Watcher shouldn’t show up and be silly and stupid, but Deadpool should make a joke in front of the Watcher. Stuff like that.

But Scott has a great handle on that. I’ve never had that problem with him, where he’s trying to make things overly silly. He knows Spider-Man and he knows that Peter jokes in dangerous situations, but he doesn’t make the world unbelievably silly. It’s still the world that we know.

AIPT: I really like Web-Head. In a time when there’s a Spider-Verse constantly spinning out new Spider-people, what do you think makes Lynda Locke a worthwhile addition to Spider-lore?

Jordan: What’s fun about her is she definitely plays with the medium. She’s not breaking the fourth wall like she’s Deadpool, but Scott plays with the medium when he’s using her and plays with the audience’s assumptions. In the arc that she debuted in back in Spider-Man Unlimited, she comes into the story and it’s like she’s just a regular old hero. But she’s definitely not a regular old hero. She definitely doesn’t have the same heroic interests Spider-Man has.

And I also love the relationship she has with Peter. It’s a much more extreme version of the Black Cat-Spider-Man relationship because it’s not just that she likes Spider-Man more than she likes Peter — it’s that she hates Peter. [Laughs] She thinks Peter sucks, and she’s kind of not wrong. He was pretty awful on that date. And I say that as someone who loves Peter — but he was not at his best that night.

AIPT: And she also looks like Mary Jane Watson.

Jordan: She does. He definitely has a type.

AIPT: Now that you’re working in the Spider-Office, I’m curious — how do Spider-Man fans compare to X-Men fans? They seem to be equally opinionated but in very different ways.

Jordan: Well, I’m not doing the main Spider-Man stories that are getting a lot of feedback right now. With that said, please do write to us about Astonishing Spider-Man at [email protected]. I’d love to hear what you think about it and about All-New Venom as well. With that said, most of the stuff I’ve seen feedback-wise has been about Amazing Spider-Man. And it’s also hyper-fixated on a pretty specific thing. [Laughs]

AIPT: I was going to say, X-Fans are passionate about many characters, whereas Spider-Man fans seem fixated on one character.

Jordan: Right, it’s equally passionate, but it’s much more laser-focused than it was with X-Men. With X-Men, like you said, every character has extremely passionate and devoted fans. In the same day, you’d get people talking about Polaris, or you’d get people talking about Storm, or you’d get people talking about Nightcrawler. There’s only one Spider-Man.

Well, there are two.

AIPT: [Laughs]

Jordan: But there’s only one Peter Parker, who’s the main Spider-Man.

AIPT: Ben Reilly too.

Jordan: No, his name’s Chasm right now.

AIPT: Oh right. Sorry, Chasm.

Jordan: But he was Spider-Man, and you’re right. Now that you said that, I have seen people writing and saying they’re unhappy because they do want him to be all right as well.

AIPT: I think that’s a key similarity between the fandoms. A lot of Spider-Fans want Ben to be happy, they want Peter and MJ to settle down. It’s similar to how so many X-Fans want their favorite X-couples to be OK and free of relationship drama.

Jordan: Yes, they want what’s best for the characters. They want them to be happy, and they want their problems to be resolved. And I, of course, understand that impulse and I have even shared it. I’ve told you this story before — telling the Jamie Madrox fans that they don’t want Madrox to come back because as soon as he comes back, he’ll ruin his marriage to Layla — and I was right. The next appearance he had after that, he was killed off. [Laughs]

So I get that impulse, but it’s definitely not a recipe for the best stories, in my opinion. It depends what the goal of the story is and what the goals for the characters are. The argument can be made that we can see a happy, married Spider-Man in Ultimate Spider-Man. And you know what, absolutely you can — it’s a great book. But it’s also doing a different thing than Amazing Spider-Man is. And as much as I love Ultimate Spider-Man, I would not want that to be the only Spider-Man book because it’s a different thing. There’s room in the world for both, so that’s great. But yeah, solving all the characters’ problems isn’t usually the best way to do it, even though it’s of course, the protective impulse you want to have of the character you care about.

AIPT: I just want Web-Head and Spider-Man to be together, and I’m very angry about it, Jordan.

Jordan: Alright, I’ll do it for you. 

AIPT: [Laughs] Oh, great! That’s all you have to do, fans. Just book some time with Jordan. But I’m curious, as a lifelong Spider-Man fan, was there ever a time in your experience as a reader when you were very upset with a story decision made? And then, how did you make peace with it?

Jordan: Well, there was a specific one. What a lot of Spider-Man readers know — and some don’t — is since Spider-Man got married, there’s been kind of a constant effort to undo it because it solves a lot of his problems and it changes what he’s about and doing that, most of the time, the editors don’t want to do. Now, when I started reading Spider-Man, he was married to Mary Jane in the David Michelinie and Erik Larson run, which was my bread and butter. I loved that run and Erik Larson is my favorite Spider-Man artist of all time. There are comics in there I read 50 times — the return of the Sinister Six, those early Venom stories — I just love those comics. And Peter Parker is happily married during them. So in 1999, one of the efforts to undo the marriage was Mary Jane got on a plane and it blew up.

AIPT: [Laughs] I remember that. I was reading the series at that time. It was… interesting.

Jordan: And Spider-Man’s friends were like, “You gotta get over it, start dating.” Then, eventually, she came back and was like, “Yeah, but this is still all too much and I need to move to the West Coast.” And at that time, there was a Marvel encyclopedia that came out — I don’t know who published it — but in the Spider-Man section, it said, “For a long while, he was in a long-term relationship with Mary Jane Watson,” and that was the mention. And this was pre-One More Day, so they were married, but this encyclopedia misrepresented that and I was furious because I cared really deeply about their marriage.

Now, the thing that changed my opinion on it and made me see it differently was going from thinking about it as, these are just characters I love that I’m enjoying reading about, to thinking about them from a story-centric, creative point of view. It was on a web board in the early aughts that Kurt Busiek explained why the marriage is bad for the character. Let me be clear — not the relationship. Not, “Mary Jane is not the one for him.” That has nothing to do with it. It wasn’t about emotions. It wasn’t about real people — because they’re not real people. It was, here’s what Spider-Man is fundamentally a story about. Here are the kinds of stories you tell about Spider-Man, and here’s why him having Mary Jane either lessens his problems or makes the problems different enough.

Because what’s the function of Mary Jane back in the comics that I read and loved as a young person? She was there as a support, right? She was there so that when he’s having a bad day, she could show up in lingerie — like a literal thing that happened in multiple issues. She was there and then every once in a while she would have a plot where she was in danger and he would save her. Every once in a while, she would have a plot where she’s stressed out and smoking too much or she’s sad that he goes out so much so she goes out dancing a lot. But I don’t think it was great for her character. What else can you do if you don’t have her being a supportive wife? You have her what? Being like, “I don’t like that you’re out there being Spider-Man,” and then she’s kind of bad, right? Then, she’s a negative force in his life.

They’re going to be together forever. She’s his destiny. I’m committed to that. Is he going to date other people in the comics? Probably. Is he going to end up with Mary Jane? Yeah, of course, man. But it’s kind of always going to be sometime in the future. Or even if they’re together, their marriage is always going to be sometime in the future. I think Tom Brevoort said it pretty well when he wrote his manifesto about Spider-Man pre-Brand New Day, where he was like, Spider-Man is at its core a story about youth. And the older we make Peter, the farther it gets from that. If Peter is making mistakes and learning because he’s young, that’s great. If he’s 40 and making mistakes, he’s kind of a loser. So I think it’s better for the character to be kept young.

I feel the same way about Superman. I really love the concept of Superman, but I find it so much more interesting when him and Lois aren’t married. Again, I have nothing against marriage. I love marriage. I love my own marriage. But my favorite Superman stories are before she even knows he’s Superman, when she’s still trying to figure out who Superman is. I think those Silver Age Superman comics are amazing. Of course, they’re going to end up together. Of course, she’s his true love. But the journey’s more interesting than just watching them be happy.

AIPT: That’s all very logical. It’s the bargain you make with serial storytelling and characters who have existed longer than we’ve been alive. I was very anxious reading New X-Men as it came out, and was devastated with what was happening between Cyclops and Jean Grey. But then I bought the New X-Men omnibus during the pandemic and reread the series through older, much more rational eyes and it all made sense. And most importantly, it was a good story. Anyway, as we wrap up, what’s coming up in your various series?

Jordan: Coming up in Astonishing Spider-Man, in addition to Flame War, we’ve got another new villain named Deadlift. You can see him on the cover of the first issue getting punched. You’re going to see more Web-Head for sure. There’s a really fun arc that bounces back and forth between Web-Head’s point of view and Peter’s point of view that’s terrific. From there, it’s just going to get crazier and bigger. You want to know what happens with Crime Lord — strap in. It’s going to be a good time. We’ve got two great artists on this series: Salva Espin and Julian Shaw. They’re both absolutely doing a terrific job. We’re pretty far ahead because of the weekly schedule.

In Hellhunters, you’ve got World War II Ghost Rider, Wolverine, Bucky, Nick Fury, Peggy Carter, and Soldier Supreme. It’s really fun and it’s really dark.

Then, in Incredible Hulk, we just had our big anniversary issue, which ended with Banner kind of locked inside and Hulk having taken control. Meanwhile, Hulk’s traveling companion Charlie was dead for a while, but they managed to save her. But in doing so, have unfortunately turned her into a monster as well. So Hulk has to deal with the fact that his traveling companion is now also a monster. And Charlie is thrilled about it — she loves being strong and powerful. Hulk was obviously like, “Yeah, that’s fine. I’m big and strong, so it’s going to be fine.” Banner’s not so convinced, but there’s not a lot he can do about it right now. So we’ll see how poorly that goes.

AIPT: Awesome! Finally, what’s the best holiday song that’s not Weezer’s “The Christmas Song?”

Jordan: Well, I think the Christmas album I’ve listened to the most is certainly not a traditional one, but it’s the Vandals’ Christmas album, which is sometimes called “Christmas With the Vandals” and sometimes called “Oi to the World!,” depending on which edition you get. It’s a very California punk-rock Christmas album, and it’s super fun and sometimes extremely vulgar. But my favorite song on that is probably “Thankx for Nothing,” which is a song about a person who got nothing from someone, even though they bought them a lot of presents. It’s very funny.

I do enjoy Christmas songs. I’ve written three Christmas songs. Christmas songs are fun. Back in the day when I used to do lots of ukulele covers, there were two years in a row when I recorded 12 days of Christmas songs. That was super fun to do. I did some sincere ones and then a pretty good number of ridiculous ones. I did a song from the Star Wars Holiday special. I did “Dick in A Box.” [Laughs] It was a good time. But the Vandals’ is probably the one I’ve listened to the most. It’s a good time.

AIPT: Well, I’ll tell you what else was a good time — getting to catch up with you, Jordan! Thanks for taking the time to chat and happy holidays!

And readers, for more from Jordan, don’t miss his new ongoing AIPT interview column — Venom Unleashed — in which he shares insights from each issue of All-New Venom, exclusive preview art, and more!