David Gabriel spent 23 years at Marvel Comics doing the unglamorous work that kept the lights on. Disney cut him anyway.
Gabriel joined Marvel in 2003 as Manager of Sales Administration, a title that understated what he would eventually become: the architect of the company’s collected editions business. In 2005, he pitched the first Marvel Omnibus to the New York Times as a product designed to get “the extreme collector excited” around the Fantastic Four film. That first volume, 848 pages for $45, sold out in weeks. By 2009 Marvel was releasing 12 omnibuses a year. By 2019, 33. By 2024, 89. Gabriel built that program from nothing.
In 2013, bookstores accounted for only 28% of total comic industry revenue, with specialty stores still holding the majority. By 2021, bookstores drove 56% of a market that had crossed $2 billion. The collected editions Gabriel championed, from Omnibuses to the Epic Collections line he launched in 2013, were designed precisely for that bookstore audience: older, more affluent readers who wanted complete runs, not monthly single issues. “Big, fat, color collections at the best price we can maintain,” he told reporters when the Epic line launched. That description fit the product. It also described Gabriel’s entire philosophy: no ideology, no reinvention, just durable commercial publishing.
That record stood in sharp contrast to the editorial decisions his bosses were making during the same period. While Gabriel was growing the back-catalog business into a revenue engine, Marvel’s editorial under Axel Alonso was executing the “Marvel NOW!” diversity relaunch, replacing Thor with a woman, Captain America with Sam Wilson, Iron Man with Riri Williams, and cycling through a half-dozen other legacy character swaps. In 2017, Gabriel told ICv2 retailers what they already knew: “What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity.” He later clarified that retailers were complaining about the abandonment of core characters, not the introduction of new ones. The establishment savaged him regardless.
The contrast between Gabriel’s track record and the editorial direction Marvel pursued is the story nobody in comics media will write this week. The man who made Marvel profitable through traditional publishing, who understood that a reader who spends $150 on an omnibus of Jim Starlin’s Warlock run is a reader worth having, got cut alongside Lauren Bisom, Marvel’s sole YA editor, and Devin Lewis, the editor behind this month’s Daredevil #1, which sold 300,000 copies. Comics Beat editor Heidi MacDonald said Gabriel “was behind a lot of the editorial decisions coming out of Marvel.” Industry commentator David Harper confirmed the news with four separate sources before he believed it: “When I heard David Gabriel was out at Marvel yesterday, I had to confirm with four different people until I finally believed it.”
Nobody has an answer for who replaces him. Not a single person MacDonald contacted could say. The direct market, which Gabriel had effectively led since DC’s longtime sales veteran Bob Wayne retired, now has no clear steward. Marvel Comics as a publishing entity has survived within Disney’s corporate structure by remaining quietly profitable, largely through the collected editions Gabriel spent two decades building. Kevin Feige protected Marvel comics because it fed IP to the MCU. With Feige’s era also winding down, that protection is gone. Disney’s new CEO Josh D’Amaro, one month into the job, ordered the cuts. The people who knew what they were doing are out. The ideologues who made the monthly titles a punchline are, for now, still there.
What does the end of Gabriel’s tenure mean for the direct market, and for the readers who still buy $150 hardcovers of stories Marvel’s current editorial team would never greenlight?
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It's dead. It's all dead. The 21st century will destroy the greatness of the 20th century and they'll do it with glee.
I’m frankly amazed that a normal, older, white guy still had a job there. I assumed they were all personae non-grata.