Marvel Comics Has A New Editor-In-Chief

After six years keeping watching over the House of Ideas, Axel Alonso is parting ways with Marvel Comics to make way for the publisher’s newest editor-in-chief: Longtime editor and president of Marvel’s international brand management C.B. Cebulski.

C. B. Cebulski, Marvel’s new EiC. Image: Getty, Suhaimi Abdullah/Stringer

In an interview with The New York Times, Cebulski expressed his excitement at the next phase of his career at Marvel.

Said Cebulski:

It’s crazy. It’s an honor. I’m blown away by the opportunity. We always hear about the writers and artists, but people forget the inkers and the colorists and the letters. Each of them is an artist in their own right.

In a short and to-the-point public statement, Marvel announced Cebulski’s new role and clarified that Alonso and the company had come to the mutual decision to part ways. In previous years, Cebulski was responsible for recruiting new talent for Marvel and overseeing the creation of new series – including Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona’s Runaways, which went on to win an Eisner award and has more recently been adapted by Hulu into one of the better MCU television shows. Speaking to the Times, Marvel Entertainment president Dan Buckley expressed his confidence in Cebulski’s ability to form collaborative teams that can “spark the right mojo”.

News of Alonso’s departure from Marvel comes at an interesting time for the company. Last week, superstar writer Brian Michael Bendis left Marvel in favour of an exclusive deal with rival DC Comics. Marvel’s also been dealing with a kind of public image problem of late, thanks to its controversial Secret Empire event and reports that a Marvel executive attributed an overall decline in sales to the company’s recent push for more characters who are people of colour, women and queer.

Only time will tell what sort of grand vision Cebulski has for Marvel.