“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?” Bendis asks, still in disbelief all these years later. The production was troubled, actors were injured performing stunts, Taymor was replaced, and it kept being retooled and retooled in previews before officially opening in 2011.īendis was hired early on, but even then, when he was already in the midst of his Spider-Man and Marvel success, he knew he was out of his depth.

Instead, it became one of the most notorious productions in Broadway history and its most expensive. With songs by U2’s Bono and the Edge and direction from Julie Taymor, who squashed naysayers by adapting Disney’s The Lion King into a Tony Award-winning blockbuster musical, Turn Off the Dark was supposed to be the rock opera for the 21st century. “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.” Fortune & Glory focuses on Bendis’ time writing the ill-fated Spider-Man Broadway musical, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Once done, the installments will be collected in a print edition from Dark Horse Comics.

The new story will come out in weekly installments in the author’s Substack newsletter starting this week, running bi-weekly. Now, over two decades later - after becoming one of the biggest comic book authors of all time with his work at Marvel Comics and co-creating Miles Morales, the Afro-Latino Spider-Man who is arguably the most popular comics character created this century - Bendis has produced a new autobiography, a follow-up titled Fortune & Glory: The Musical! “I did it just to blow off steam and it ended up being a thing that people connected to.” “It weirdly ended up being the first actual hit book I ever did,” Bendis says, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter from his home in Portland on a snowy afternoon.

It was also a hit, the biggest at that point in Bendis’ ascending career, and earned him three Eisner Awards, the comic industry’s version of the Oscars. 'Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse' Pop! Figures Coming From Funko (Exclusive)

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