“It’s a bittersweet panel for me, because this will be my last panel at San Diego Comic-Con ever with that title,” Marvel Comics’ outgoing editor-in-chief C.B. Cebulski told a packed room at the top of Marvel Fanfare, before turning things over to the man he’d spent 20 years calling one of his best friends, the new Editor-in-Chief, Stephen Wacker.
Marvel Fanfare has been Cebulski’s baby since he inherited it from Joe Quesada’s old Cup O’ Joe format, turning it into a looser, more personal hour where he’d interview creators and friends from his own history at the company. This year, with his decade as Editor-in-Chief drawing to a close, he handed the format one more twist: he and Wacker interviewed each other, walking the crowd through both of their histories at Marvel on the way to introducing what’s next — for Wacker, for the company, and for Cebulski himself, who’s trading the corner office for Tokyo.
Wacker’s first official day at Marvel was the Friday before the panel; Cebulski’s transition out doesn’t finalize until the following Friday, leaving exactly one week where, as Wacker put it, Marvel technically has two Editors-in-Chief (jokingly) undoing each other’s decisions. It’s a strange overlap for a company that’s never had a handover quite like this one — mentor and successor, on stage together, comparing notes on the way out the door.
The two go back to the early 2000s, when they shared an office at Marvel and, according to both of them, made it the most fun place in the building. Photos flashed by of a much younger CB and Steve hunched over a laptop working through slush; another few years later, cheek to cheek in a bar somewhere neither could quite remember. Wacker landed at Marvel in October 2006 after playing on the DC team in that year’s Marvel-DC softball game and losing. He switched sides the next season and Marvel won both years running; Wacker is already trying to get a rematch going for 2027.
Both editors shared their own Stan Lee stories. Cebulski’s dates back to before he even worked at Marvel, spotting Stan Lee behind him at a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard and waiting outside afterward to get a photo. Wacker’s stories come from the job itself: editing Spider-Man anniversary issues with Marcos Martin and getting to argue continuity minutiae with Stan Lee himself over what actually happened in Amazing Spider-Man #1. He also credited Stan with making the bad days survivable: pick up the phone, get ten minutes of Stan Lee, and the day couldn’t stay bad.
The two also paused to remember Flo Steinberg, Marvel’s original mail-answering proofreader and a fixture of the Bullpen for decades, and Mike Pasciullo, who spent 25 years shaping the company’s presence at this very convention before losing his battle with cancer, both described as the kind of people you only get to brush up against by working at a place like Marvel, and both dearly missed. On a lighter note, Cebulski copped to once talking Tom Hiddleston into a surprise detour to wish former Marvel editor Ellie Pyle a happy birthday mid-tour.
Cebulski’s first-ever job at Marvel, back in 1999, was as a translator on the company’s edition of Ryoichi Ikegami’s Spider-Man manga — the same manga path he and Skottie Young worked on together over the years through Marvel’s Mangaverse line, which turns 25 this year. He lived in Japan on and off for years afterward, and from 2015 to 2017 was based in Shanghai handling brand relations across Disney’s Asia-Pacific business before stepping into the Editor-in-Chief role in 2017.
Now he’s heading back. Cebulski’s new position has him based in Tokyo, overseeing Marvel’s push into manga, webtoons, and Asia-Pacific-originated comics — colleagues introducing the move called it a return to “the job you were meant for,” and it’s hard to argue after watching him light up describing it.
Which made it the natural moment to bring out the news: a new publishing partnership between Marvel and Kadokawa, the Japanese publisher behind decades of manga, anime, and light novels, for five original manga volumes launching later this year. Kadokawa’s Kenta Matsui joined the panel alongside producer Naofumi Mashino, with Cebulski translating live.
The first title revealed was Spider-Man of Shibuya, following an all-new high schooler swinging through Tokyo’s Shibuya district, drawn by Tokitokoro, an artist Marvel fans already know from Jeff the Land Shark, Marvel Rivals, and Doctor Strange, here returning to Japan to lead her own series.
Character designs shown at the panel confirmed Daredevil and Punisher both play into the story as well, reimagined as an oni-masked vigilante swinging a chained blade and a katana-carrying, skull-emblazoned yakuza enforcer, respectively, with both artists keeping their exact roles under wraps for now.
A second title was teased before time ran out: a Spider-Gwen manga from Ryuusei Yamada, known for the assassin-and-samurai series Revenger and his work on Marvel Rivals, sketched in a sharper, more angular style than Tokitokoro’s. Both books are due out globally by the end of the year through Kadokawa, though exact dates weren’t announced.
If the Kadokawa reveal was the biggest news out of the panel, the most purely Marvel moment came a few minutes later, when Wacker and Cebulski welcomed Humberto Ramos to the stage and, with him, Brad Winderbaum, head of Marvel Television, Animation, Comics & Franchise, who’s taking on oversight of the publishing side of the business as longtime Comics & Franchise chief Dan Buckley begins his own transition out after nearly three decades at the company.
Marvel Fanfare panels usually come with an exclusive variant cover comic, with Ramos providing a special one for the event, a recreation of Amazing Spider-Man #337 — “The Return of the Sinister Six,” originally drawn by Erik Larsen. It wasn’t a random pick. When the new Comics leadership team got to know Winderbaum, they asked him the question they ask everyone: what was your first comic? His answer was Amazing Spider-Man #337, bought at a comic shop in Nanuet, New York, as a kid. So Ramos, by his own count one of Wacker and Cebulski’s closest friends in comics, going back to a fateful 2000 Chicago convention where an Image Comics editor left him a business card that changed his career, recreated the cover for the event.
But wait, there’s more! As a disciple of Larsen’s, Ramos gave Winderbaum the original art for this variant cover, made in his honor. Visibly overwhelmed, Winderbaum called it maybe the most humbling thing that’s ever happened to him, and pulled Ramos into a hug on stage in front of the crowd.
It’s a small gesture, in the scheme of a panel that also announced a new international publishing line and a changing of the guard at the top of the division, but it’s the kind of moment that explains why Cebulski, Wacker, and Ramos keep describing Marvel the way they do: as a family business that happens to make comic books. Ramos got his own original art from the cover as a keepsake, joking it’ll look good on the wall of his office.
The audience Q&A stayed true to Cebulski’s original pitch for the panel — fans and creators with no barrier between them. With artist Skottie Young joining the panel (first incognito before dropping his disguise), Wacker initially joked that the tradition ends now, before confirming that he’s a fan of the variants and they shall continue. A fan asked, somewhat jokingly, if they would consider baby variant covers for every single issue going forward.
The panel closed with a fun relic from Wacker’s past, a joke audition tape for the ill-fated Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark Broadway musical. But returning to the significance of this passing-the-torch moment, Cebulski thanked Dan Buckley, David Bogart, Jen Grunwald, and the rest of the Marvel staff who’ve been with him the whole way, and to Wacker, Ramos, and Skottie Young by name, for what he called keeping the torch — and the fun — alive.
Marvel’s five-title manga partnership with Kadokawa, led by Spider-Man of Shibuya and a still-untitled Spider-Gwen book, is expected worldwide by the end of 2026. Stephen Wacker is Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief as of this Comic-Con; C.B. Cebulski starts his new role leading Marvel’s Asia-Pacific and manga initiatives out of Tokyo shortly after.
