It may come as no surprise to some, but it seems that Kevin Smith won't be the new writer on Amazing Spider-Man because of fears he won't be able to keep on schedule. And considering that he's behind on Spider-Man/Black Cat and Daredevil: The Target, such fears seem to be well founded.
Newsarama got all the goss first hand from Joe Quesada. Here's a snippet:
NRAMA: Getting back to Spider-Man, speaking of the relaunches and Kevin Smith coming on as the regular Amazing writer - has that been pushed back, cancelled, or what?
JQ: It was pushed back because of Jersey Girl, a little. Kevin and I had a heart to heart on the set of Jersey Girl; because I wanted to be sure...I love this guy like a retarded brother. It's so tough to get angry at Kevin. I ask him for script, and get, 'Oh man...you know...I got this movie thing going on, and this other stuff...' So we talked about his taking over Amazing, and I told him that I wasn't going to be able to cut him any slack with respect to shipping schedules. I'd need him to deliver.
So - we're going to have Kevin launch a brand new Spider-Man title instead of JMS and JR Jr. At that point, Kevin said I was absolutely right. It's not that he can't do the monthly thing, but you just don't know what's going to come down the pike for Kevin. He just finished Jersey Girl, but every now and again, someone throws him an incredible project, and he has to run, and he's missing for a month.
So - we wanted to make sure that Amazing continues to run smoothly, so Kevin will be launching a Spider-Man book. It might end up being controversial - gee - what a surprise for us. So - we'll see what happens, but you can probably expect to see that sometime around mid 2003.
Click here to go to the full interview.