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Marvel Comics executive editor Tom Brevoort has been talking about the ways in which comic books change their characters to fit the MCU lately, which makes sense, given that it’s something that’s been happening for years now — but why does it keep happening, and what kind of thought goes into pulling the trigger to make the change?

That was something a reader asked Brevoort in this week’s edition of his weekly Substack newsletter, Man With A Hat. And, as is his way, Brevoort answered with a cool-headed clarity. Adapting a character to fit their portrayal from the MCU or other outside media “really just comes down to gut instinct,” he wrote, although he added that even in that case, “somethings, people guess wrong. But even then, there’s always the possibility of some new story that will make everything all right.”

Ultimately, though, Brevoort argued, it’s a matter of making sure that audiences are able to recognize the character that they’ve become familiar with elsewhere when they read the comic books. “Once you become aware that a global audience that absolutely dwarfs that or ours in publishing is about to experience a character in a given way, then it becomes almost inexorable that certain elements of that depiction are going to wind up seeping into future stories,” he reasoned, “either immediately or over the long haul as creators who grew up with that interpretation of the character being central to them come into the field and start to write the stories.”

The example he presented — one of two originally raised in the original question from reader Brandon Giles — was Kamala Khan, whose comic book incarnation was killed and resurrected with a new power set, becoming a mutant in the process to tie her more closely to the MCU plans for the character.

“Say what you want about the Kamala Khan situation, but it’s a stone-cold fact that far, far more people relate to her as having weirdo hard light powers than embiggening herself. So you could choose to fight that, to swim upstream against public awareness. Or you can work to bring about a unification between the two in the best way possible—without throwing out everything that came before.”

And if you manage to get a few high-selling issues out of the process, all the better. (That’s not an invitation to kill off Wolverine any time soon and bring him back taller and less Canadian, Marvel.)

Keep up to date on Popverse's Marvel coverage, with these highlights:

• The MCU needs Anya Taylor-Joy's Magik in it (and not just for the X-Men connection)
• How Disney+'s What If...? is the moonshot for the next 50 years of Marvel Studios & the MCU
• Marvel Studios has accidentally created a new Phase that predates Phases 1 - 6: the MCU Phase Zero
• Overgrown children of the atom: Marvel's X-Men can't evolve past their '90s commercial peak
• The biggest outstanding questions of the Marvel Studios' movies & TV shows
• Donald Trump is the landlord for Marvel's House of Ideas
• Marvel Studios swapping out Doctor Doom for Kang offers the chance to jettison the Multiverse Saga
• What Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige is saying (and not saying) about the MCU X-Men franchise says a lot about the future of the Mutant Saga
• If Marvel is going to bring Loki back for Secret Wars, it's time to give him an upgrade
• In 2021, Sony's boss said people won't miss Spider-Man in its Spider-adjacent movie. Turns out, they do.