Englehart et son expérience amère sur Big Town (paru fin 2000/début 2001) :
"An almost total disaster.
Conceived as a gift to Marvel - a new franchise with unlimited possibility - it ended up edited by people who couldn’t understand it (and it ain’t that hard). It was approved as six issues, plotted as six issues, and then cut to four. The first issue was printed with pages out of order and characters dumbed down. The title was changed to FANTASTIC FOUR: BIG TOWN, even though it featured all the major groups. And then #4 had non-sequiturs edited in for no reason anyone’s ever been able to explain. (My favorite is a caption, « The very core of the earth, » as the Silver Surfer soars into New York.)
Nice covers, though."
http://www.steveenglehart.com/Comics/Big%20Town%201-4.html
L’interview du scénariste au moment de la sortie du titre :
https://westfieldcomics.com/wow/low/low_int_043.html
« Steve Englehart : The whole thing that Marvel is built on, and I think it was certainly a good way to go, is that reality didn’t really change when the super heroes came. It was still our reality and the super heroes were living their secret identied lives amongst normal people. But I thought, once Reed Richards and Tony Stark started inventing giant machines to fight off Dr. Doom and repel Galactus and things like that, there would not only be the psychological change, in the fact that Galactus nearly ate New York and people would react to that, but on a more practical level, there would be all these advances. It’s like they always say, if you do the moon shot, you get real useful things out of it. If they had invented all this stuff, if they had gone so far out beyond the cutting edge in order to accomplish what they were doing, that stuff would feed back into the general population. To come to the bottom line, once Reed Richards took his girlfriend, his best friend, and his girlfriend’s brother into a rocket and went to space and came back with super powers, the world started to change at that point. Big Town begins 10 years to the day after that, because the general conceit these days is that the entire history of Marvel took place in ten years. So, New York has become the focal point of the world because the super heroes are there. The FF is there, the Avengers are there, Professor X and Hank Pym are there. There’s a street gang in New Jersey called the Mutts, which is short for Mutants, and it’s basically the original X-Men. Because of all of this, there never was a Silicon Valley. Everybody who was interested in that kind of thing came to New York because that’s where Reed Richards and Tony Stark were. The entire history of the world has been reshaped by the fact that these people exist. What I’m saying is, here is the Marvel Universe if that had happened. It’s extrapolating from the original Marvel thing, but going in this direction rather than the one that they took. Some people have said, « Is this an Elseworlds? » I’d say it’s The Road Not Taken. It’s called Big Town because it’s this huge city. Physically, New York is now three times the size that it was. It encompasses a good chunk of New Jersey, a good chunk of New York state, and a good chunk of Connecticut. All of it has been rebuilt because there’s been so much money and so much technology. The technology was a good thing; everybody really got into it. Which isn’t to say there aren’t bad parts of town still, but it’s the Marvel ethos that super heroes are good and do good, taken in this different direction. The other meaning of Big Town is that it’s like going to the « big town. » It has that glamour. And it does have the Fantastic Four, and the Avengers, and the original X-Men, and a few random other people, all living in this same place and so they interact. It’s not a question of that this is the Fantastic Four’s book and maybe the Avengers might guest star. No. They all live in this place so they all hang out together and they get into adventures together. »
Le script original du N°1 :