Meet Marvel’s secret weapon, Ellie Pyle

The world knows who Marvel's heroes are. Many of us know the creators who make those stories. But how many of us know the people who make those stories happen? In many respects, the people behind-the-scenes at Marvel (or any comic publisher) are the unsung heroes of it all - and amidst them we found one that rises up that is perhaps the secret weapon of Marvel.

Ellie Pyle.

In her two stints at Marvel, first in publishing and then largely in digital media, editor and producer Ellie Pyle has quietly made a big impact. As an assistant, and then associate, editor from 2010-2014, Pyle edited the Cullen Bunn/Will Sliney run of Fearless Defenders in which Valkyrie first came out as a queer woman. She was also on Daredevil as Mark Waid explored the backstory behind Matt Murdock’s mother, and edited Dan Slott’s wild Superior Spider-Man, in which Doctor Octopus became Spider-Man.

Working as producer on the digital side since 2019, Pyle built out the company’s line of fiction podcasts with a bold vision of six interlocking series set in an alternate version of the dystopian Old Man Logan Universe, and became cohost of the Women of Marvel podcast when Sana Amanat left Marvel's publishing unit in 2020. She’s also been working on Marvel’s Infinity Comics for Marvel Unlimited.

Colleagues view her as a tremendous asset. “One of the reasons I like working with Ellie,” says Steve Wacker, who first hired Pyle back in 2010 as an assistant in the Spider-office, and then again for Marvel Television in 2019, “is she has a similar confidence that if it’s a project, we can figure out how to do it.” Also, he notes, “She is great with talent. They trust her immensely.”

Creators with whom Pyle has worked agree: “She fully understands story construction in a way that not all editors do,” Waid wrote me about her. “Her notes are invariably on-point, thoughtful, and insightful.” J. Holtham, who wrote the Wastelanders: Hawkeye podcast and co-wrote the final Wastelanders series, notes that “Juggling the needs of corporate marketing department, Marvel Comics editorial, the needs of producers, etc., it can make it hard as an artist.” Pyle, he said, “did a lot of that work for me. I’m sure there are entire conversations where she was going to the mat for me as an artist and my vision and the work.”

“It took a lot of guts from Ellie to allow somebody new to come in” on Fearless Defenders, says artist Will Sliney, whose very first work with Marvel was that book. “I could have totally messed it all up.” He found in her exactly the support that he needed: “There was a lot of reassurance from Ellie that you’re here, keep doing what you’re doing, you’re doing really