After two decades of becoming one of the largest comic book authors of all time with his contributions to Marvel Comics and co-creating Miles Morales, the Afro-Latino Spider-Man, one of the most popular characters of this century. Brian Michael Bendis decided to create a new autobiography, titled Fortune & Glory: The Musical!
The story will be released in weekly installments in the author’s Substack newsletter starting this week and releasing bi-weekly. After the story is completed, a print edition from Dark Horse Comics will be released. Fortune & Glory focuses on Bendis’ time writing the Spider-Man Broadway musical, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.
Bendis stated, “Every time I bring up, even to people who know me very well, that I was, for a moment, the writer of the Spider-Man Broadway musical, people stop what they’re doing and say, ‘Tell me everything.’ And I realized that yeah, that is a good one.”
Bendis continued to say, Why was I hired in the first place? Why would someone with Julie Taymor’s experience and pedigree look at someone who’s never actually sat through a musical and want them to write a musical? It was a struggle and I shouldn’t have …, But I had to try! We’re creative people, and an opportunity was put forth, and it would have been too crazy not to attempt.”
Bendis concluded in saying, “The plan was always to draw this one, I even held it up a few months because I was going to retrain my drawing brain and I was going to get there. The reality is, when the first one came out, I had no children. Now I have four children. And my four children are all that age … well, the window of how long they’ll be here in this house closes with every day. It became clear I was not going to be able to draw it.”
Unlike the first Fortune and Glory, Bendis won’t be drawing this story, despite wanting to. The drawing will be handled by Bill Walko, a cartoonist that Bendis has worked with on a eulogy for pop culture icon Stan Lee for The New York Times. The collaboration was titled My Moments With Stan and detailed the author’s key meetings with Lee of many of Marvel’s heroes and villains.
Bendis will only draw special parts and covers and wishes to have the project completed before having it start publishing. he is just now adding “appendices,” additional anecdotes “that were cool but don’t fit into the narrative but that I still think we should do.”
The project will run between 150 and 180 pages with installments running between six and 12 pages each.
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