During the 2015 San Diego Comic-Con, Marvel Comics announced an all-new all-different Blade series from writer Tim Seeley and artist Logan Faerber was in the works. The book would star the Daywalker as he fights alongside his long lost teenage daughter Fallon Gray in a modern update of the Marvel Monster magazines from the 1970s. However, months went by and the title never made it to our local comic shops. Now, Seeley has revealed the reason for the delay: He quit.
While that may sound pretty dramatic, the ‘Nightwing’ writer had a good reason for leaving the project. While speaking to Newsarama about working on various projects like his creator-owned books ‘Hack/Slash’ and ‘Revival’ while having an exclusive contract with DC Comics, Seeley shared that his involvement in ‘Blade The Hunter’ was counterintuitive to Marvel’s focus on diversity in their characters and their creative teams:
“The short story is, I quit. The long story is when Marvel hired me, I had just written ten years of a horror comic starring a female lead so I seemed like a good fit. So we threw around ideas of doing Blade’s daughter and when they announced it, Marvel was in a weird place because they had announced the hip-hop covers and a lot of people saw ‘Here’s another black lead with an all-white creative team’ and you know it’s valid and definitely the case. After a while, I felt like it was me screwing this up. I couldn’t help but feel like a black woman might write this stuff better than me and saved them from me. In the wake of ‘Black Panther’ launching so well, maybe ‘Blade’ is the book they find new talent on.”
Ladies and gentlemen, Tim Seeley gets it. It’s definitely great that a comic book publisher wants to showcase a diverse universe of characters, but is it really worth it if they don’t do the same thing behind the scenes? I love the fact that the House of Ideas is telling stories from all walks of life, but they don’t always have the people who relate to them most tell those stories. While he may be an excellent writer and a great fit for the job, I’m glad that Seeley was able to step aside in order for someone else to pick up the ball and run with it. Visibility and representation most certainly matter, but it’s also important to let people of color tell their own stories as well (even if they sometimes involve hunting monsters).
What do you think about Tim Seeley’s reasoning for leaving Marvel’s latest Blade series? Who do you think should replace him as the writer on the book? Let us know in the comments.
Despite being a “professional writer”, Ben likes run-on sentences far too much. For more of his attempts at being funny and the occasional insightful thought, follow him on Twitter and Instagram.
