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According to Marvel's longest-serving editor, every line-wide comics event is an opportunity to learn. While speaking for a recent comics-centered interview, Marvel's Tom Brevoort described events like The King in Black as "a constant experimentation and learning curve," and even admitted that there was a lesson in Marvel's most recent tentpole event, One World Under Doom.

That is, it may have just been too long.

The interview in question was on the Word Balloon Comics Podcast with host John Siuntres. Having worked on decades of line-wide Marvel events in his decades of editing there, Brevoort noted that there's no exact science to pulling one off.

"It all comes down to 'What's the story idea, does it excite people, and do other creators want to play along and be part of it?'," the current X-Men captain said, "That's the part that's not math. You can put your best effort forward and still not succeed, or you can be running by the skin of your teeth and have a huge success because it just happens to be the right thing at the right time. It's hard to quantify it other than a general sense of things."

And yet, that's not to say that there still aren't tangible lessons Marvel creatives can get out of their event series. Ryan North & R.B. Silva's One World Under Doom, which saw the MCU's next big bad as essentially the god emperor of the Marvel Universe, was no exception.

"My sense coming out of that," Brevoort said, "Is that it sort of deliberately ran for a long while, and maybe it would have been better off being a little bit shorter? I don't know, possibly. So I go into the next one going, 'Maybe let's not do 10 months - maybe whatever the next one is, let's do 8 months.' Then that one will end up being too short, and then the one after that we'll end up going, 'Let's do 9 months. Maybe 9 months is the thing.' That's the sort of push and pull of the taffy as you're trying to figure these things out."

Pretty sound reasoning from nothing less than a veteran of the industry. Although we do have to point out - there's a missed Mr. Fantastic reference somewhere in that last bit.

Want more? Make sure you've read our list of all the best Marvel Comics stories of all time, and get ready for all the free Marvel comics coming as part of this year's Free Comic Book Day 2026 / Comics Giveaway Day  2026 events.