A Sense of Doubt blog post #3127 - The Mighty Tom Brevoort - 2023 Newsletters 67-70 - Comic Book Sunday for 2309.10
https://tombrevoort.com/
#67: Fifty Years of Comics - Sunday July 9, 2023
MAN WITH A HAT Always Free. Occasionally Interesting.
The cover you see there is for SUPERMAN #268, a thoroughly unremarkable issue to anybody but me. The cover was drawn by the great Nick Cardy from what must have been a relatively complete sketch by National Periodical Publications’ Publisher Carmine Infantino, who designed many of the covers that were then being done. The book was released on July 5, 1973, which makes it more than fifty years old today. And it’s consequential because it was the first comic book that I ever bought, which means that, as of this writing, I have now been a regular comic book reader for half a century. I’ve told the story before, but just to reiterate for anybody who may not have heard it: growing up in the 1970s, my father was a heavy smoker. That nicotine addiction was one of the things that would contribute to killing him at the young age of 41 years. But that was still well off in the distance in 1973. Anyway, in order to keep up with his habit, he would routinely stop by the local 7-11 in our neighborhood to pick up cartons of cigarettes, Pall Malls, his brand of choice. At the time, I was only six years old, not yet in school but relatively bright for my age. And on that day, for whatever reason, the 7-11s spinner rack had been moved from its usual location towards the back by the magazine racks to instead up towards the front, where the register was set up. So it was that my attention was caught by the bright colors as we waited in the short line to purchase smokes. Little realizing the dire consequences of the decision he was about to impulsively make, my father took note of my interest and asked me if I wanted a comic book. He may as well have asked if I wanted a first hit of crack. And so I quickly scoured the rack—I can still recall other covers that were on it that day, most notably JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #107—but I wound up going with a safe choice, the issue of SUPERMAN that you see above. While I had never to my knowledge watched the character on television or anything, you couldn’t be six years old in 1973 and not know who Superman was. Anyway, we bought the book, and I read it with the help of my mother. I could already read at this point, but a comic book’s vocabulary was still a bit beyond my grasp. I also didn’t have any patience for captions, they seemed like a waste of time to me, and so I skipped them routinely. Even when bits of the story made no sense to me, I would never go back and check out the captions. This was the sort of contrarian reader that I was. And while the book contains a completely forgettable pair of stories, I was somehow totally hooked, and began asking for additional comic books whenever the occasion presented itself. I’ve written about this issue more at length over at my website at this link and a bit more about that first purchase here. And now it’s been an incredible fifty years since those events took place, which is amazing to me. To put it in perspective, at that moment, Superman himself had only been around for 35 years. Speaking of the Man of Steel, I devoted a decent portion of my time off this week to expanding upon a pet research project of time. I find the story of the early years of Superman enthralling, especially how in a pre-mass media era the character exploded everywhere almost at once, becoming an all-consuming fad that changed the very landscape of children’s media. Because of the manner in which Superman was appearing simultaneously in comic books, as a newspaper strip, on the radio, in cartoons and elsewhere, it can be difficult to pull together an accurate picture of how the character and the strip developed. So I’ve undertaken a research project where I’ve been charting every street date, every piece of surviving correspondence, every air date and putting them all into a comprehensive timeline that encompasses Superman’s development over his first twenty years, from 1932-1952. As just a hint of the flavor so you can get a sense if it, here’s a brief excerpt covering May of 1940:
The actual timeline is color-coded in a manner that isn’t possible to duplicate here. I’ve still got a ways to go to get everything completed, but it’s a lot closer to finished now than it was at the top of the week. Anyway, enough about me. Let’s take a look at some of your questions from this past week. Jeff Ryan
Well, Jeff, working remotely as we’ve been doing for the past couple of years, I don’t typically get to see hard copies until much later on in the process. Marvel will ship me out a set of comps once a month that’ll include a copy of pretty much every comic and collection we put out. But in the days before Covid, I was a bit of a terror, especially to the folks who put together our collected edition. Through some fluke of luck, I seemingly had the ability to pick up any new collection, open it to a random page, and turn right to wherever the mistake in that volume had been made. Seriously, I did this again and again, much to the consternation of the folks putting those books together. For my own releases, though, I’m always happy to receive and to flip through the printed copies. J. Kevin Carrier
I would say, Kevin, that the best example of a project into which a whole lot of effort and time was spent that probably would have been better saved was in the completion of the Steve Gerber and Kevin Nowlan MAN-THING graphic novel. The project had been begun back in the mid-1980s, but there were a series of reasons why work stalled out on the thing. And every once in a while over the intervening years, some editor or another would attempt to get it moving again. They might even have a little bit of luck for a moment or two. But then it would stall out again. Finally, it was editor Mark Paniccia around 2012 who put his mind and his back into it and got the project completed. By this point, Gerber himself had passed on, and there was as little interest in Man-Thing as a character as it’s possible to imagine. So the book, divided into individual issues in an attempt to recoup some of the project’s costs, sold poorly and then vanished without a trace. It’s still a gold star on Paniccia’s resume as far as I’m concerned, but that is certainly a case where people may as well have not bothered—the moment for that story had passed. In the same way that I’m afraid the moment for more McGregor and Russell KILLRAVEN probably has. It’s a noteworthy strip, but one that is largely forgotten today apart from a relatively small pool of hardcore older fans. Chris Sutcliffe
I think you’re maybe stacking the deck here a little bit, Chris, in order to get the response that you’re looking for. But we’ll go with it. I don’t know that anybody could easily convince me that killing off Alicia Masters would end up as anything other than a net loss for the series regardless of how good that one story might be (see the death of Aunt May in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #400 for another example like this one). But if I was committed to doing it, I would let people up the chain of command know about it through Editor in Chief C.B. Cebulski. And if there were something crucial going on somewhere in some other line of business that concerned Alicia Masters, we’d become aware of that and then work out how to proceed. But for the most part, if I wanted to kill off Alicia and I thought the story was worth doing and could convince others that my thinking was sound, that would pretty much be the end of it, and she’d be toast. And no, we wouldn’t necessarily be worried about building in a way for her to return—while you might do that if you knew that the death in question was a temporary situation that you planned to reverse at some point (like the death of Steve Rogers after CIVIL WAR) then you might do, but for a death that you intended on being final, you woulnd’t do any such thing. At the end of the day, in the world of comics there’s always a way to bring characters back again if you want to hard enough. ComicbookDad531
I tried doing a version of this game over at the website a while back, Mike. You can read the results for yourself starting here. What I found was that the decrease in move frequency from daily to weekly really impacted on the game play in a negative fashion. The whole thing simply took too long. And I don’t have the time or energy left to me to run this sort of scenario on a daily basis like I did on the earlier Marvel.com Blog games (nor do I have the same massive and dedicated audience as I did there.) So while it isn’t impossible, I would really need to some up with some new way to approach it to make it less time-consuming and more interesting and entertaining all around. Jimmy Callaway
Well, Jimmy, we release different stories differently depending on the needs and expectations for them. I don’t really know why these were done that way, but if I had to hazard a guess, I would speculate that people may have felt that BRUTE FORCE was an obscure enough property where it wasn’t going to have as easy a time bringing readers back week after week for an extended run, and so the decision was made to release it all at once. Whereas Blade is a bit more of a known quantity and may have seemed more likely to be able to draw an audience back to itself week after week. Behind the CurtainWhat you see below is another lost cover image, this one by Olivier Coipel and Mark Morales and intended for NEW AVENGERS ANNUAL #1.
.Now that’s a super-nice Coipel piece, right? So why didn’t it get used? Simple enough. The big event that was going to take place in NEW AVENGERS ANNUAL #1 was the wedding of Luke Cage and Jessica Jones, picking up from their status quo at the end of THE PULSE series. That wedding was something that readers were interested in, and it became the hook of the marketing on the book. So we had Olivier do a new cover image centered on the marriage, and that became the eventual cover. I think we intended that we might use this cover someplace else, but as sometimes happens, no good place to use it ever turned up—it’s a bit too story-specific for that. I can remember considering using it as the image for the recap page but essentially not wanting to waste it there. Pimp My WednesdayNot too many new releases from us this week. But what they lack in number they make up in size.
Case in point, our 25th issue of MOON KNIGHT is a monster, featuring a 70 page all-new story by writer Jed MacKay and artists Alessandro Cappuccio, Alessandro Vitti and Partha Pratim. It’s effectively a graphic novel, and it introduces the MU version of Layla El-Faouly to the comics world. it also sets up next week’s limited series MOON KNIGHT: CITY OF THE DEAD. And as a special bonus, it also includes a classic Moon Knight tale from back in the day by Doug Moench and Bill Sienkiewicz. Steve McNiven even came back to execute the cover for this one. Who would have thought that our new MOON KNIGHT series would las this long and still keep on going?
And over on AVENGERS UNLIMITED, we feature the unlikely pairing of he Black Widow and Wonder Man, as Simon Williams shadows Natasha as research for a role he’s hoping to take on. It’s written by Sean Kelly McKeever and illustrated by David Baldeon, and this is only chapter one, so expect to hear more about it in the weeks to come. A Comic Book On Sale 20 Years Ago Today, July 9, 2003
We’ve talked a lot about Marvel’s ill-fated EPIC Comics rollout of 2003 in the past couple of weeks, so I don’t really want to beat a dead horse on this stuff. But I just couldn’t let this first issue of TROUBLE pass without telling you the little bit that I know about it. The story was that TROUBLE was a crazy idea pitched to publisher Bill Jemas and editor in chief Joe Quesada by the creative team of Mark Millar and Terry Dodson, an attempt to bring back the genre of romance comics in a modern idiom. And that, inspired by their efforts, Bill and Joe decided to make TROUBLE not a Marvel book but instead the opening rollout title for their new EPIC line. The problem is, this story is almost entirely false. I’m not sure who came up with the initial idea for the story that became TROUBLE—it may very well have been Mark, though it’s equally likely to have been a notion that caught Joe’s fancy. I remember him being really enthused about the idea. He was always attracted to any idea that seemed a little bit dangerous and transgressive, and so the notion that May Parker, Peter’s doting Aunt who had taken care of him all these years, was actually secretly his birth mother was an idea that sparked with him, wherever it came from. And I believe it was Bill who decided to make it the first EPIC book—largely because he wanted a big commercial hit to kick off the new line, which would be mostly made up of submissions from newcomers outside of the usual Marvel system. This was a way of giving those books some legitimacy. As opposed to those applicants, however, Mark and Terry were of course paid their regular Marvel rates for their work on TROUBLE, not the flat lump sum that was being offered the newcomers. The covers to this series, which had nothing to do with the contents, can only be described as troubling. I can remember that there were proof sheets from the photo shoot with these two barely-legal models floating around up at the offices, making at least some of the folks there feel a bit queasy. In the end, too, the creative team blinked, having gotten enough pushback from the fans as they became aware of the likely outcome that the final issue of the project was changed so as to make it clear that this was all happening to some other group of people somewhere else, and had nothing to do with the lineage of Spider-Man at all. Mark, I know, doesn’t talk about it much, and while I don’t want to put words into his mouth, that seems like a sign that it’s not a piece that he’s especially proud of or attached to. The thing is, the actual story execution isn’t really all that terrible, for all that it turns on being shocking and transgressive. So it wasn’t a bad project per se, just maybe a misguided one. And it was a square peg hammered into a round hole for reasons having little to do with its reasons for being. A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date
At the same time as TROUBLE, I was putting out my very first centennial issue of FANTASTIC FOUR, #500, which also saw print on July 9, 2003. This was the climax to “Unthinkable”. the big Doctor Doom story masterminded by the creative team of Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo. I’ve been told by more than a few readers over the years that it was this storyline that really put the Waid and Wieringo run on the map with audiences. It was a deliberately upsetting sequence—we were constantly being pushed to make the material more and more intense and unsettling during this period, more likely to garner some attention by pushing the boundaries. That wasn’t really what Mark and Mike were trying to do in general, but we definitely availed ourselves of the greater environment of permissiveness to push certain elements in that direction. But I still feel like it’s a comic that I could give to any FANTASTIC FOUR reader in good conscience, regardless of age. Anyway, this issue gave me the excuse to restore the original issue numbering, which had been broken back when the Heroes Reborn project started half a decade earlier, and I took full advantage of that opportunity. In addition, as a way of bringing in a bit of additional revenue for the outfit, we also put out an upscale Director’s Cut edition of FANTASTIC FOUR #500, released at the same time. While the regular book carried the lovely Paolo Rivera painted cover you see above and contained the full story, the Director’s Cut instead featured an all-new Mike Wieringo foil cover of Doom, and contained and additional 16 pages of behind-the-scenes material. This included bits of changed script and altered pencils, character designs and commentary from both Mark and Mike, a two-page Fred Hembeck celebratory strip, Stan Lee’s synopsis for FANTASTIC FOUR #1 from 1961 and a throwaway gag strip starring me and Dragon Man by Ringo that was done so late in the process that we didn’t even bother to ink it. The original to that strip hangs on a wall in my home to this day. I also got to produce a feature that I repeated again and again in future anniversary issues where I took several pages to reprint the covers of all 500 issues of FANTASTIC FOUR. Mind you, they were pretty tiny due to space considerations, but they were all accounted for, good, bad and indifferent. So the regular version of this issue is fine, and contains a strong and vibrant story. But I feel as though the real gem here is the plussed-up Director’s Cut package. I didn’t have any idea that I’d be around on the book long enough to get to do both #600 and #700 in later years, so I packed this one with every bell and whistle that I might have wanted as a reader.
MonofocusAmong all of the other organized nothing that I did this past week, I watched and wrote a great many things. Here are a few of them. I saw INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY, which I found to be pokey and plodding without any of the genuine danger and thrills to be found in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. By that same standpoint, while I was interested in seeing it (I’m as susceptible to nostalgia as anyone), I am probably not the target audience, as I kind of believe that every one of the films following RAIDERS has been a letdown, including the one(s) that most people like. for me, though, as a filmgoer who saw RAIDERS in theaters, each of the sequels have been a half-hearted attempt to replicate moves and moments from the first film, almost as though they were knock-off properties rather than sequels. And DESTINY is no different in this regard. Despite being largely set in 1969, it wants to have Indiana Jones fight Nazis because fighting Nazis is what Indiana Jones is intrinsically about. Rather than updating the action, the film hopes that you simply won’t have the temporal sensibility to be able to tell the difference between 1945 and 1969—hey, it’s all old stuff, right? And I thought the direction never rose above competent, especially when it came to the assorted action sequences. There is chase after chase in this film, and none of them contain anything approaching excitement. And the third act twist feels ill-earned and ill-executed. There do seem to be plenty of people who really seemed to enjoy it (or at least enjoyed that they found it better than CRYSTAL SKULL, another great dud) so your mileage may vary. For me, I’ll stick to the actual Republic serials. Meanwhile, in a similar vein, over on Tubi, I sat through the documentary DAVE STEVENS: DRAWN TO PERFECTION about the late cartoonist who created the Rocketeer years ago. Stevens was a hell of a talent, and it’s a shame that he didn’t produce more work—especially since I feel as though he’s become largely forgotten today. This is a nice showcase for his life and his work, even if it did feel perhaps a hair long. If nothing else, it’s a good advert to get people to seek out the complete Rocketeer edition that came out a few years ago for some excellent comic book reading. Less polished but ultimately fascinating to me as a document was the MEGATON OMNIBUS collecting the eight-issue run of MEGATON published by Gary Carlson during the 1980s throughout the early days of the Direct Market. I was a fiend for all of the new comics that were being put out by smaller publishers during that time, but I never picked up MEGATON for some reason—largely, I think, because I could never find the very earliest issues. And the whole thing is pretty fannish work, but it does contain formative contributions from Butch Guice, S. Clark Hawbaker, Angel Medina, Rob Liefeld and of course Erik Larsen, who is behind this edition. None of this material will change your life but if you’re my age, it will give you that sense of anything being possible in the Direct Market, that any kid anywhere might be able to break into the business and make a go of it. I also took one evening to sit through the second live action film based on the manga KAKEGURUI (“Compulsive Gambler”). KAKEGURUI 2: ULTIMATE RUSSIAN ROULETTE uses the same cast as the two-season live action adaptation and functions as a kind of extended final episode for the show, as the unbeatable, unpredictable gambling addict Jabami Yumiko duels a dangerous student who had been drummed out of the Hyakkaou Private Academy years before—ending in a three-way game of modified Russian Roulette. As always, the series exists in a strange heightened reality—one that is common in Japanese media and which I equate to SPEED RACER. In the world of SPEED RACER, automobile racing is the most important thing on Earth. In KAKEGURUI, it’s gambling. The entire reality bends to this premise, so as long as you can get on board with that, you’ll be able to have a fun time with its exaggerated characters and absurd stakes. So this was a good stand-alone entry, the perfect way back in after having been away from the show for a couple of years. There’s no question in my mind that the best, most consistent creative team working in comics these days is Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. Everything they do is top-quality work regardless of storyline or genre, and while there’s a similarity of aesthetics in their assorted projects, at the same time there’s range as well. Their latest is NIGHT FEVER, a one-off original graphic novel about an ordinary, bored man who impulsively adopts the identity of another person while on a business trip to Europe and winds up finding out certain things about himself. It’s a noir story, but with a bit of a paranoid psychedelic sensibility to it, and I enjoyed it a great deal. This is a team where, anything they do together, I’ll be there for, and recommend heartily. NIGHT FEVER is no exception. seek it out. And finally, after a long wait, i sat through the two premiere episodes of MY ADVENTURES WITH SUPERMAN on MAX and found them to be pretty wonderful adaptations of the core Superman mythos. It’s interesting to me just how far away from the center of popular culture the Man of Steel has fallen over the past three decades or so—time was (like when I was six) he was ubiquitous. But I don’t know that today’s six-year-olds have any affinity for the big guy, which is strange because he remains as appealing as ever if you simply do him right. MY ADVENTURES WITH SUPERMAN, at least so far, gets it right. The designs are good, the animation style is attractive, and the voice cast is charming. What’s also really nice is the interplay between the three main characters, Clark, Lois and Jimmy. They’re set up a bit differently than the traditional, but it really works, so I’m all for it. And Superman in this series is genuinely a good person. He’s kind and bumbling and just wants to live a regular life like his friends, but his powers force him to get involved in things. Not reluctantly per se, because if there’s somebody that needs help, that guy is there. But in a way that maybe makes you feel for him just a little bit. It’s a good start, and I’m interested to see how it develops from here. Posted at TomBrevoort.comYesterday, I wrote about this issue of JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA in which Zatanna joined the team. The conversation in the comments concerning the quality of this cover is worth reading alone. Nine word balloons!
And Five Years Ago, I began to write about one of the most formative series in my development, STAR BLAZERS
I need a sign-off, right? I get here every week, and then I stumble through a bunch of words to wrap things up, telling you that I’ll be back in a week like you don’t already know that. Something to work on. Not much chance I’ll get it worked out this week, but hey, you never know. Tom B |
Always Free. Occasionally Interesting.
So this time, I’d like to start off with a dream I had at the top of the week. I have lots of comics-related dreams of course, both work-related and otherwise. I visit lots of strange comic book stores similar to the oddball ones that used to exist in my youth and I attend a lot of strange conventions and seek out bizarre back issues a bunch of the time. Or I’m just doing something with people in the field for some reason. It’s pretty common. But a couple of these dreams are somehow more meaningful and impactful than the rest, even though I’m well aware that they’re all the product of my unconscious mind unraveling the issues of the day.
So. In this dream I had at the top of the week, I was at George Perez’s house along with Kurt Busiek. We had returned from a convention in Toronto—George lived in Florida, so that doesn’t really make any sense, but this was a dream and logic isn’t a pre-requisite—and I was packing up my stuff to head out, off to the airport or back home or wherever. While I bundled away a vast assortment of drawing implements, pens and pencils and the like (and realized that I wasn’t wearing shoes or socks for some reason) Kurt and George continued to chat in the other room. I could overhear their conversation, but I wasn’t directly participating in it. But it felt very nostalgic, the way it had been when the three of us were working together on AVENGERS. At a certain point, Kurt called out to ask me if I’d done something with Marvel to help set up the memorial project for the late Carlos Pacheco that we were working on—and I suddenly remembered that such a project was happening and that I hadn’t yet done the legwork involved. I pulled out my phone, either to write myself a note about it or to send an e-mail about it or to call the office. As I did so, Kurt and George came into the room, still talking about this project. And I remembered that George was going to be drawing a new story for this Pacheco tribute. Filled with emotion, I approached George and thanked him for what he was doing on behalf of Carlos, that it was meaningful to me. And, uncharacteristically for me, I reached out and hugged him. And that’s when I woke up…and remembered.
Okay, straight on into the questions for the week after that metaphysical beginning, starting with this suggestion for a sign-off from Robert Kirkman:
"Hats off to you, my friends."
or just
"Hats off!"
I dunno, just came to me. Leave me alone. They're not all winners.
Thanks, Robert! We’ll try it!
Chris Sutcliffe
To continue with this topic, I'm curious if there are characters you can kill without higher sign-off? Characters introduced in the same run as they're killed off, I would assume?
Also, can you make major character seem dead for an issue, to be reveal alive later, or would there be concern that people would think them genuinely dead?
Most rank-and-file characters can be killed off without any real sign-off, Chris. Most supporting cast members, heroes who never had or no longer have their own series, and certainly villains. And it’s no problem at all to make a given character appear to be dead for a few issues and then reveal that they’re actually alive. That’s just storytelling, and that is accepted as a given at Marvel.
Alex Segura
My big question, though. as a Very Busy Person myself is, how do you do it? How do you do balance what I know is a very intense, taxing job with everything else - this newsletter, family/personal, and side projects like your consistently-updated website and this (new-to-me) Superman project? I get this question a lot, too, more when I had a regular day job - and my response was along the lines of "I don't have any hobbies." With the understanding being that I turned my hobbies - writing, comics, reading, consuming art - into aspects of my "job." Is it the same for you?
I feel like it’s just a matter of commitment and discipline more than anything, Alex. But it is why one of my mantras when it comes to stuff along these lines is, “It’s not a job.” Which is to say, you need to give yourself license not to do something every once in a while when you simply can’t achieve it all. For me, though, for example, most Saturdays work approximately the same way: I get up somewhere around noon and start out by writing that day’s content for the website, which typically boils down to three items. It was four at a certain point, but I scaled it back to three once this Newsletter came along. Assuming that there aren’t any other appointments or pressing matters that need to be dealt with that weekend, that process will usually take me to around 4:00 or so. At which point, my son will likely have come around wanting to do a run into town to get snacks and provisions. He’s old enough now where he can drive, but he likes my bankroll and it’s a thing that we’ll regularly do together. So that gets done. Thereafter, at least in the summer months, I’m inclined to go sit out on my porch and do a bit of reading. This tends to be collected editions rather than single comics for the most part. After an hour or two, I’ll come in and usually watch a little something for an hour or two as we get dinner prepared. We tend to eat relatively late, typically around 8:00. That was a result of my working in the city and the time I would usually get home most weekdays, but it’s remained a part of our pattern regardless. After dinner, somewhere between 9:00 and 10:00, I’ll usually head into the office and start jamming away at the week’s Newsletter, as I’m doing now. It takes close to three hours to put one of these together, so that eats up most of the evening. Thereafter, depending on the weariness of the day, I’m likely to stay up until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning looking at stuff or watching stuff on the computer. Now, not every week is exactly like this—today, for example, I had a dentist visit for a cleaning, so that ate up some time in the afternoon and I didn’t manage to get any reading done. Nor did we go into town for snacks, instead we had Italian Ices delivered to the house. But otherwise, it fit the pattern. It really does come down to knowing what you’ve got to get done and then doing it at the earliest possible time. And I do like a basic routine.
Daniel Sherrier
So, if your first comic was generally unremarkable, what's the first remarkable comic you remember reading? Was there any particular issue or title that marked a shift toward comics becoming a lifelong passion rather than just a passing childhood hobby?
I was hooked pretty much right off, Daniel, despite the fact that my first book was so generic. But there were a few other early comics that had a big impact on me and made me more of an avid reader. And I’ve written about all of them over at my website. There was this FLASH 100-Page Super-Spectacular that introduced me to the character and to the work of John Broome and Carmine Infantino, there was this issue of THE FLASH that I got in a 3-bag after having missed it the first time, and whose Flash/Green Lantern team-up with the Reverse Flash as the villain electrified my imagination, and in a way there was also this Treasury Edition that reprinted ACTION COMICS #1 that gave me an interest in the history and heritage of the medium.
Manqueman
And where did McNiven return from?
Steve McNiven had done the covers for the first five issues of MOON KNIGHT, Manqueman. So he returned to do that of #25 as well.
Kieron Gillen
"I also didn’t have any patience for captions, they seemed like a waste of time to me, and so I skipped them routinely."
6 year old Tom is a smart one.
This reminds me of a story that I think came from Will Lieberson, the Executive Editor of Fawcett Publications back in the 1940s. He was riding the train to work one day, sitting next to a kid who was reading an issue of CAPTAIN MARVEL ADVENTURES. And Lieberson noticed that the kid was reading it strangely—he’d go across the top tier of the pages left-to-right, not moving downward through the rest of the page. Thinking to be helpful, Lieberson pointed out to the child that he was meant to read the story a page at a time—to which the kid replied, “Aw, it’s too slow if you do it that way!”
S-shield
you mentioned sticking with the old Republic serials. Any recommendations? I’ve seen the original Superman and Captain Marvel ones, but are there any other, maybe more specifically Raiders-esque ones you can point out?
Well, S-shield, the specific serials that inspired RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK are the two that feature Rod Cameron as government operative Rex Bennett, SECRET SERVICE IN DARKEST AFRICA and G-MEN VERSUS THE BLACK DRAGON. I have a real soft spot for MYSTERIOUS DOCTOR SATAN, the serial that was reworked from a proposed Superman serial that never happened. And almost any Republic serial that featured Linda Sterling was worth a watch, with MANHUNT OF MYSTERY ISLAND, ZORRO'S BLACK WHIP and THE CRIMSON GHOST all being worthy of consideration. That all said, these were relatively formulaic chapter plays that weren’t meant to be consumed in a single sitting, and which were directed at young children, so you do need to be able to approach them on their own level. None of them is going to be anywhere near as sophisticated as a Spielberg film.
Jeff Ryan
Without naming names, has anyone in comics purposefully been told incorrect information, so that if/when they spread it around it wouldn’t actually spoil the storyline? (This is what they did to David “Darth Vader” Prowse, a nice man but incapable of keeping Star Wars plot points secret.)
Not really, Jeff. It’s a lot more difficult to do this sort of thing with comics, because you’d actually need to create the misleading material, not simply talk about it. Most people who leak stuff do it with photographs or images from the book. I’m sure that somebody has tried this somewhere, but it’s not really an effective method of catching a leaker.
Will Shugg
I had heard awhile back that Paradise X was supposed to have one last issue that never came out because of low sales. Is this true? I know we had Marvels X not too long ago celebrating the Earth X universe, any chance a last Paradise X would ever come out?
I didn’t work on EARTH X or its sequels at the time, Will, so my memory on this subject is kind of vague. But my remembrance is that initially, that last series, PARADISE X was going to have a number of associated one-shots just as UNIVERSE X had before it. But when the time came to move into PARADISE X, the sales had declined on it to the point where Marvel wasn’t comfortable doing that many tie-ins, and so they were scaled back. But it wasn’t the last issue or anything, it would have been material along the way—material that Alex Ross and Jim Krueger had to rework into the main series in order to make the story all still work. But Alex and Jim could likely tell you better than I could—as I say, this wasn’t something I was involved with. I did edit the eventual prequel that the team did, MARVELS X, a few years ago.
Kevin S.
Re: Superman... "I don’t know that today’s six-year-olds have any affinity for the big guy, which is strange because he remains as appealing as ever if you simply do him right." That character has certainly had his share of "bold new directions" compared to others who have been around as long. Maybe sales figures led the Powers That Were to look for some kind of shakeup, but when I think of what I'd personally call the best Superman stories, they all involve just regular ol' Superman. What are your favorite iterations of the Man of Steel, from your fan and/or pro days?
I have a lot of them, really, Kevin. I grew up with the Superman of the 1970s, as written by Cary Bates and Elliot S! Maggin and Marty Pasko and largely illustrated by Curt Swan and edited by Julie Schwartz, so that’s very much down in my DNA. I love the really early Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster Superman, before everything had codified itself into a set formula and they were pretty much making it up as they went along. I love the gonzo zaniness of Mort Weisinger’s Superman titles of the 1960s. I love any of the Alan Moore Superman stories. It wasn’t entirely to my tastes at the time, but I see a lot of value in retrospect in the John Byrne Superman relaunch. And the “triangle” era where editor Mike Carlin coordinated the efforts of multiple creative teams to deliver what was a defacto Superman weekly was an excellent period. And I like most all of the more modern Superman classics that get mentioned a lot, such as Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s ALL-STAR SUPERMAN and SUPERMAN: FOR ALL SEASONS by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale. Pretty much any Mark Waid Superman story. Geoff Johns’ assorted runs. Kurt Busiek’s run, mostly with Carlos Pacheco. And I love the 1978 film, and the 1950s television show (particularly the early black and white episodes) as well as the radio series. And all of the Paul Dini/Bruce Timm animation—to say nothing of the 1940s Fleisher Brothers shorts. So I like a decent variety of Superman flavors, so long as the essence of the character rings true to me.
Devin Whitlock
Thanks for another great newsletter! Your Superman project sounds fascinating. I’m a big fan of the character and also interested in how he developed, especially in the early years. Have you read Superman: The Unauthorized Biography by Glen Weldon? I found it very informative. Thanks again!
I have, as well as dozens of other books on the subject—including things like Jerry Siegel’s never-published memoirs. But every time a new book drops, I inevitably race out and get a copy. I just recently finished VOICES FROM KRYPTON by Edward Gross and WITH THANKS TO SUPERMAN by Brian McKernan.
MADMan James
So, I'm a year late to this party, but I've somehow only just discovered this newsletter and am working my way through. For my money, the best "last issue" would be Thor 382. Walt Simonson wrapped everything up - Hela's overreach, the frost giant invasion, and did it all in highly entertaining style. Thor breaking Loki's arm at the end was a perfect cherry on top. I certainly haven't read every run of every superhero comic (although I have read quite a few), but of the ones I have read, I think Walt's run on Thor was the best.
It’s never too late to jump in, James! And I agree, that final THOR issue by Walt and Sal Buscema was pretty great. It turned out to be the first issue of the run that I bought new, having given up he title shortly before Walt took it over some years earlier.
Behind the Curtain
.Here’s a bit of a relic that has only become more of a forgotten item as time has gone on, but which used to be a thing that every reader was at least aware of and marginally familiar with.
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What you see here is the principle text of the Comics Code Authority, the outside self-regulatory group that reviewed all comic books that were slated for publication to weed out any material that was deemed to be too violent or sexual or dangerous to young minds. The Comics Code was set up in the earliest months of 1955 by the publishers themselves as a way to stave off any genuine regulation from the government, as televised Senate subcommittee hearings into the link between comic book reading and juvenile delinquency were then airing. The Code put a lot of publishers out of business, and drained a lot of interest out of the material for a very long time. By design, nothing stimulating was really supposed to happen in the pages of a comic book, which is why super heroes for so long couldn’t really throw a punch or have a fistfight, but instead had to solve puzzle problems and mysteries and safeguard their true identities. The Code was revised and relaxed a couple of times before it eventually dissolved as an entity in the late 2000s, its usefulness long since past.
Pimp My Wednesday
Again, another small week, in part because there were some shipping problems that wound up pushing a few releases back a week.
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MOON KNIGHT: CITY OF THE DEAD is a new limited series by David Pepose and Marcelo Ferreira, and which spins indirectly out of last week’s massive MOON KNIGHT #25. But it’s it’s own thing, it’s own story, the connective tissue being the Marvel Universe introduction of Layla El-Faouly, the Scarlet Scarab, who was featured in the Marvel Studios streaming series on Disney+. Our version is very much the same but also very much different, and you’ll get to see her as an active participant here for the first time. Look for the very cool Rod Reis covers such as the one above.
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And in digital land, AVENGERS UNLIMITED #56 brings us the middle chapter of the team-up adventure between master spy Natasha Romanoff, the Black Widow, and pacifist actor Simon Williams, Wonder Man. It’s brought to you by Sean McKeever and David Baldeon and it’s a whole lot of fun mixing and matching the worlds of these two disparate Avengers in a single story.
A Comic Book On Sale 55 Years Ago Today, July 16, 1968
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As sales on super heroes began to soften in the late 1960s, publishers began to cast around desperately, looking for the next new genre that was going to keep the lights on and the presses running. Stodgy, stiff-necked National Periodicals was perhaps the worst positioned for such a thing. It’s true that they were releasing a wider assortment of titles than just about anybody else, with a thriving war line, a new mystery/supernatural line, a romance line that was still doing some business, and a share of teen humor books. But all of their material felt a bit out-of-step with the zeitgeist. It was mainly a lot of old workhorse cartoonists attempting to appeal to a new younger generation whose language they simply didn’t understand. Possibly the hallmark of that generation gap was this series, BROTHER POWER: THE GEEK, released 55 years ago today. BPTG was the brainchild of writer/artist Joe Simon. Simon had been a powerhouse in the industry for decades, the forward-facing half of the popular Simon & Kirby team who had invented Captain America, the romance genre, and a half-dozen good-selling properties for DC. While he’d spent most of the preceding decade working outside of the field, new editorial director Carmine Infantino’s hope was that Simon still had some of that magic left up his sleeve, and could give DC a desperately-needed new hit. Simon, with some penciling help from Al Dare, came up with the story of Brother Power, a ragdoll given life and sentience when it is struck by lightning, and who travels through a hostile world, eventually finding comradeship and community in a hippie commune that names him Brother Power. (All of the Hippies have taken names starting with Brother.) It wasn’t a super hero strip, despite the fact that Brother Power was frighteningly strong, hence his name. It wasn’t really a monster strip. It was something new, something weird. It tried to be a bit of a social satire, but one that was sympathetic to the position of the young Hippie generation. At least in as much as Simon understood it, which seemed to be hardly at all. BROTHER POWER: THE GEEK ran for only two issues, but it wasn’t low sales that killed it, but rather complaints from DC’s most important editor, Superman’s Mort Weisinger. Mort apparently did a end-run around Carmine, going to the National Periodical bosses directly and telling them that he was afraid that the sick content of THE GEEK was going to bring the wrath of the authorities down upon DC’s head. Exactly what content Mort was concerned about is unknown, as THE GEEK was relatively tame stuff. Mort, apparently, didn’t like the general idea of the strip and was perhaps a bit worried about Simon’s track record and how his success might weaken Mort’s own power base within the organization. In the second issue, Brother Power was trapped in a rocket that was shot into space, a cliffhanger that wouldn’t be resolved for thirty years, when he was reintroduced by Neil Gaiman in a SWAMP THING ANNUAL and tied into the mythology of the Earth elementals and the Parliament of Trees. He’s been used occasionally since then, and even entirely reimagined once or twice in the intervening years. So far as I can tell, the government hasn’t particularly minded.
A Comic Book On Sale 20 Years Ago Today, July 16, 2003
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With no disrespect to any of the creative teams that worked on the series afterwards, pretty much the NEW TEEN TITANS had seen its best days under collaborators Marv Wolfman and George Perez, and after George’s final departure, the series sank down and faded away some, becoming just a shadow of what it had been at its height in the 1980s. This was the best-selling and most important DC title of the era, the one that challenged Marvel on its own terms and was able to compete head on. It was the book that illustrated to readers for whom DC was stodgy and old that exciting things could come out of the firm. But as often as later creators attempted to recapture the magic of that celebrated run, they were never quite able to do it. All that having been said, this particular era, written by Geoff Johns and illustrated at first by Mike McKone came the closest, and was a very strong DC title during the time when Geoff was writing it. It made an interesting reversal of the NEW TEEN TITANS in that the four characters introduced by Marv and George were now the old hand pros, whereas Robin, Kid Flash and Wonder Girl were all younger newcomers to those roles, with Superboy thrown in for good measure. This was a very good run, with Geoff focused on distilling all of his characters down to very simple ideas that were easy to grasp, something that he did routinely and well. He captured the spirit of those earlier times, making the threats legitimate and real and focusing the stories as much on the interpersonal drama of his cast as on the super hero adventures. It all just really worked and was a bright spot in the DC line during this period. Of course, I did wind up semi-accidentally dinging this book a few times along the way. Here’s how it happened. To start with, Barry Kitson was working on an AVENGERS/THUNDERBOLTS limited series for me, one that was intended to relaunch the series after the earlier pro-wrestling take had crashed and burned. Barry was working on the second issue when he called me to say that he needed to drop out after that. He’d been offered a sweet new gig by Dan Didio over at DC (I think it was LEGION OF SUPER HEROES with Mark Waid) But Didio insisted that he drop all of his current assignments and start on his DC work immediately, and the offer was rich enough that Barry didn’t feel that he could refuse. And that pissed me off. This wasn’t the first time that Didio had tried to play hardball like this when recruiting some talent from Marvel. Creators have to do what’s best for them and their families, of course, but i think it’s ungentlemanly to insist that somebody renege on their current commitments and promises in order to come work with you. I didn’t like that behavior. And so, for the next few months, I was on the warpath (as was Joe Quesada, who didn’t appreciate this behavior either.) Every time a new assignment would come up, I’d cast my eye across the DC line and see who might be a good fit for it. And unfortunately, something like three times in a row, it wound up being the person who was drawing this run of TEEN TITANS. I need an artist for JMS’s FANTASTIC FOUR launch? Hey, Mike McKone would be great for that! Somebody needs to finish AVENGERS/THUNDERBOLTS and then do the NEW THUNDERBOLTS series that comes out of it? Tom Grummett, who took over TEEN TITANS after McKone would fit that bill nicely. And so on. I hit that book something like three times in a row—no matter who they chose to take it over, I wound up almost instantly recruiting them for some new Marvel assignment. And i felt a little bit bad about it, because I had always been on good terms with Geoff (I even gave him a copy of the first NEW TEEN TITANS DC Archive when he took on the assignment and was assembling research material.) But his tastes and mine were close enough in this instance that I liked all of the guys he recruited. And I felt as though Didio had started this whole thing in the first place. Eventually, though, DC put Tony Daniel on TEEN TITANS and I decided that enough was enough. The series continued on until Geoff needed to pass it over to other hands, and then a similar slow decay to when George had left happened, and the title lost its regained luster.
A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date
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This final issue of OMEGA THE UNKNOWN, one of the strangest and most definitively non-mainstream projects that I ever worked on, saw print on July 16, 2008. OMEGA had been the creation of writers Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes in the 1970s, a very personal work that was dressed up like a typical super hero feature. OMEGA was a subversive title back in the 1970s, albeit one that also suffered from some scheduling woes, resulting in some fill-ins that chopped up the story in unfortunate ways. It was meant to have an eventual ending, but after the book was chopped by Marvel, Gerber and Skrenes swore never to tell anybody what it would have been. So it became a forgotten classic, lost among the piles of four color detritus. Now, in the mid-2000s, right after Marvel President Bill Jemas was sidelined, his temporary replacement was a man named Gui Karyo. Gui was a finance guy, a numbers guy, with no real experience in storytelling. But for a few short months, he was overseeing the whole of Marvel. One of the things he was very interested in doing was expanding Marvel’s talent pool, especially among popular and critically-acclaimed writers from the wider world at large. This led to me approaching a series of writers with whom I’d made some tenuous contact in the past about doing a project for Marvel—in particular, Michael Chabon, whom I tried on at least two occasions to get to write FANTASTIC FOUR to no avail. But at a certain point, Michael suggested that I reach out to his acquaintance Jonathan Lethem, as he knew that Lethem had an interest in comics’, having written a few short stories that used the Marvel characters of the 1970s as elements of the narrative. This led to Joe Quesada and myself having lunch with Lethem at a local restaurant and trying to convince him to do a project for Marvel. Lethem had an idea in mind: as a young reader, he’d been fascinated by the first issue of Gerber’s OMEGA THE UNKNOWN and the potential that it had evidenced—potential that, in Lethem’s eyes, had gone largely unfulfilled throughout the rest of the run. So he proposed to do a remake of that first OMEGA issue and then to carry on the story from there as he had envisioned, running a similar ten issues as the original. He also had an artist in mind for the gritty lived-in feeling that he wanted to achieve: Farel Dalrymple, who had recently done a story for DC’s BIZARRO COMICS anthology. Not a word of this sounded commercial in the slightest, but Joe went ahead and signed off on doing it, and we had a ballgame. And the truth is that Lethem’s story was so set in his mind and his scripts were so tight—he was way smarter than I was—that there was little for me to do on this project apart from keeping the Marvel machine from wrecking or compromising it, which I hope that I did. It was never a huge seller, but it brought the firm some prestige and did all right as a collected edition, so it was definitely worth doing. This final issue, amazingly for almost any Marvel comic, is almost entirely wordless, a weird wrap-up that confused certain readers. But I maintain that it all makes perfect sense if you read it in its collected form. One person who wasn’t at all happy about Jonathan doing OMEGA was Steve Gerber, who expressed his ire on message boards and rebuked attempts by Lethem to reach out to speak with him about it. It was simply still too raw a wound for Gerber, but he pissed about it enough that Lethem almost quit the project entirely. Jonathan did write Gerber an extraordinary twenty-page letter, beautifully written, speaking to him plainly and with some irritation about how Gerber was deliberately mischaracterizing Lethem’s motives and intent in an attempt to make himself look more like the aggrieved party. It was a counter-trolling masterpiece. Jonathan wound up not sending it or posting it publicly after Joe and I both advised him not to. And I felt bad about the whole thing—in particular, because the energy and effort Lethem had expended on that letter could have been channeled into a short story or an essay or something, a work that the world would now never have.
Monofocus
I was never a regular viewer or anything, but I can remember that period when AMERICAN GLADIATORS was a big thing, with a successful television series and a nationwide tour. So that was enough to get me to sit through all five episodes of MUSCLES & MAYHEM on Netflix, a documentary series dedicated to the creation, expansion and eventual destruction of that series and property. I am inevitably fascinated by how things, especially entertainment products, are made, and this was no exception. As you might guess the early days of the series were haphazard, exceedingly physically dangerous and put together seat-of-the-pants style. And as you’ll no doubt guess, once the show became big business, the performers were left wondering where their cut of the profits were, and getting fired as a result. It’s a very timely tale given recent events, and it’s all told with a fun, goofball sensibility and just the same hint of camp that the series itself had. This was pretty fun.
Speaking of how entertainment is made, I went down a rabbit hole this past week, watching retrospectives of several sitcoms over at the JOSE BIRD YouTube channel. I started with shows that I had watched, such as SCRUBS and CHEERS and then wound up going wider into shows where I might have seen some episodes but I wasn’t ever a regular viewer, such as FRASIER and THAT ‘70s SHOW. I find Jose’s videos to be well thought-through, very comprehensive and very well done. They’re also very long, close to two hours in some cases, which meant that I had to break my viewing up into segments. But if you liked any of the series listed above, or any of the others he’s done similar retrospectives on over at his site, they’re worth a look-at.
The big new series that I’ve been watching the past few nights is 19/20, also on Netflix. It’s a Korean reality series that owes just a hint to TERRACE HOUSE and carries over a lot of its ethos. The premise of the series revolves around the fact that, in Korea, on the first day of your Twentieth year, you are legally considered an adult, regardless of whether your birthday is still months away. So the show gathers up a class of ten students, all of whom are 19 years old but will turn 20 in a week’s time once the New Year hits, and puts them in a living and studying situation designed to get them to develop romantic feelings for one another. Then, a few episodes in, we’ll his the point where the year changes and everybody will suddenly be permitted to engage in adult activities such as dating and drinking. But the show isn’t quite up to that point yet—Netflix is dropping three episodes a week to keep pace with the Korean release schedule. And while this all seems like it could easily be a trashy American reality show (and might turn into that once the year turns) the thing that it’s got in common with TERRACE HOUSE is that it is painfully earnest. All of the young people are taking this experience seriously, for all that they’re surrounded by cameras at all times and that they know what the intent of the broadcast is. But there’s an emotional honesty and purity to the show that I love. Like TERRACE HOUSE, the events are watched and commented on by a panel of otherwise-uninvolved celebrity hosts, and the manner in which they root for these kids is wonderfully genuine as well. Like I say, everything could eventually take a turn for the cynical or nasty, but based on the first three installments, this is a pretty engaging program.
And I know that the second season of FOUNDATION has started but I haven’t yet had a chance to watch the first episode. too busy typing stuff like this.
Posted at TomBrevoort.com
Yesterday, I wrote about the last Captain Comet story from STRANGE ADVENTURES #49.
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And Five Years Ago, I wrote about the first episode of STAR BLAZERS.
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Okay then, are you ready for this? Shall we try it? Here we go:
Hats Off to You, My Friends!
How’s that sound?
Tom B
Always Free. Occasionally Interesting.
It’s the weekend of the San Diego Comic Convention, an event that I used to go to every year without fail, but which I’ve not attended since 2015. Even then, some years ago, it had ballooned into a spectacle that simply engulfed downtown San Diego, turning it into a reflection of geek culture, both positive and negative. SDCC was always inevitably a good time, but it’s also become a bit of a chore—you need to be committed to attending SDCC, there are no tourists here any longer. Anyway, for those who have been in attendance, I hope you’ve been enjoying yourself as well as behaving and according yourself in a manner that speaks well for our shared hobby. And if you haven’t, know that you’re not the only one who isn’t there, and that in only a few more hours once this Newsletter goes live, the whole thing will have wrapped up and nobody will be talking about it or thinking about it until it’s time to begin prepping for next year.
So this week’s weird realization is that Marvel is going to be putting out a Fascimile Edition of a comic book that I edited, which seems a bit strange. Even stranger, the book is less than ten years old. I mean, I could sort of understand if it was an issue of DEATHLOK or NEW WARRIORS or something from my early days. Facsimile Editions feel like they should be for more unattainable comic books. And yet, here we are. The popularity and significance of Kamala Khan, Ms. Marvel, has grown to the point where we’re going to be putting out a Facsimile Edition of her first published appearance in ALL-NEW MARVEL NOW POINT ONE #1. Weird, but perfectly fine with me. Especially because it also includes the pilot story that Dan Slott and Mike and Laura Allred did for our SILVER SURFER series, which is one of the best beloved projects that I’ve worked on over the years. So if this gives some new readers a chance to become aware of that series and maybe track down the Omnibus or the collected editions, I’m extra all for it.
So, questions time! And we’ll begin this time not with a question but a bit of history from WORLD’S FINEST writer Mark Waid:
As regards people in comics being fed false info to avoid spoilers. In 1987, when I was on-staff, there was an inker at DC who'll go unnamed. He was so enraptured by Watchmen that he begged and pleaded for his editor, Andy Helfer, to send him the newest pages as they came in lettered and inked so he could get an advance look (he wasn't NY-based). He was relentless. He would ask nearly every day if anything new had come in, and it only got more annoying as the creators began to lag in delivery for those last few months (no one remembers that it took 12 issues of Watchmen 15 months to come out). Ultimately exasperated and fearful the inker might accidentally spoil the finale for others (the guy had a LOT of friends), Andy had production mock up a handful of completely fake pages for issue 12 using altered existing art and new dialogue. I was on-staff and saw them for myself; alas, all I remember was that they were extra-bizarre and borderline nonsensical just to rattle the recipient and make him look like a crazy person if he spoiled stuff. And, yes, I'd sell my soul to still have copies of those pages, and no, I have no idea how one would procure them these days.
Appreciate you sharing this bit of forgotten comics chicanery, Mark! And I certainly remember WATCHMEN having taken 15 months (or more) to come out—I can specifically recall the long wait between when #11 dropped and when #12 eventually made it to the stands. And I understand that my perspective on it isn’t viable today, when everybody that encounters WATCHMEN does so in its collected form, but I’ve long held the belief that the best way to have experienced WATCHMEN was with those gaps in-between issues. The amount of serious analysis my friend group of fans at the time put into it was pretty remarkable.
Jimmy Callaway
Was there any specific reason you can share why Michael Chabon didn't wanna do FF? And do you have any other wishlist writers like him or Lethem, literary types you'd like to see in the ol' bullpen?
Michael did want to write FANTASTIC FOUR, Jimmy. The difficulty came when negotiating the specifics of the contract. Michael and his representation wanted some contractual assurances that should any of his work be used as the basis for a FANTASTIC FOUR movie that he’d be recompensed and involved in some capacity. This was well before Marvel was making its own movies (and before the three FANTASTIC FOUR films that have since been attempted) and so we simply weren’t in a position where we could guarantee that. And so the whole deal fell apart.
JV
I checked out Moon Knight 25 last week (Miller cover) and loved it. Ill be checking out back issues of this run (really enjoyed the deep cut villains as well).
What I really enjoyed is that it had a pulpy action and fast paced feel. Intelligent action that I feel has been missing from a lot of comics these days. Action/adventure done in a propulsive way. Any other similar series you can recommend?
I tend to feel like the current MOON KNIGHT is a special thing, JV. But you could perhaps give a look to Chip Zdarsky and Marco Checchetto’s DAREDEVIL as something that’s in the same neighborhood. You might also try Chip’s BATMAN, except that it’s published by DC and I’m told those comic books are bad. I also think that any of the Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips graphic novels might fit the bill for you. They’re not really super hero stories, but the RECKLESS series has the same kind of book-to-book continuity and world-building that the best super hero comics have.
Matt Fraction
look i don't wanna note Robert to death but surely it's gotta be "hats ON to you" right?
I don’t know, Matt—but we can try it on for size and see how it fits.
Richard Melendez
How about, "Hats all, folks!"
Look, now you’re just being silly…
Jeff Ryan
You've mentioned how much you loved the 100-Page Monster comics, with lots of reprints for very little additional money, and that the buying public felt otherwise. Are there other trends where your heart and John Q Public disagree? "Boy, for some reason people like Captain America over Captain Ultra: Captain Ultra has so many more colors in his costume!"
There are probably quite a few, Jeff, though none that really strike me right this moment. While it’s always sad when something that you try doesn’t work, I tend to simply put it aside and move on to the next thing—the next series, the next idea. And given enough time, I might have a chance to try it again, even if it’s not in the same way. As an editor, it’s not my job to make people like a certain thing, but rather I have to respond to the feedback that the audience gives me with their dollars and their feet to produce work that they (and you) are going to care about and become invested in. But, you know, I liked Treasury Editions, but that format is simply too expensive to go out with these days. (When the regular comics were twenty cents, they cost a dollar at minimum. Now do the math for scale.)
Nick Mercurio
Tom, it seems to me from the outside looking in that you can go one of two ways as a Marvel editor: toward the “Marvel heroes” (the Avengers, etc.), or the X-Men. Is that true to any extent? If so, do you recall when you made “the choice”? Did you? And do you have an idea of what YOUR X-Men book would be? At least before the Krakoan age? Or even now?
I don’t really think it’s as simple as all that, Nick. For one thing, there are definitely other camps than just Avengers or X-Men. Spider-Man is a big one, as are licensed properties such as the Star Wars titles. And people do bounce around. Nick Lowe, who has been the Spidey editor for many years was working on X-Men titles before that. And Jordan White, the current X-Men editor, did much of his work before that on Star Wars books. And that’s to say nothing of people like Wil Moss, who worked on characters such as Superman and the Flash, whoever they are, before taking on Thor and the Hulk. In terms of what my X-MEN book might look like, I think there are multiple answers to that. As a reader, I came in on the Chris Claremont/Dave Cockrum/John Byrne era, so that’s always the X-Men material that speaks the most directly to me. But I’m also well aware that there have been forty years of stories since then, with the introduction and inclusions of many, many characters into that line since then. So I don’t think I’d be simply trying to re-create the feel and flavor of that old run, not as the only thing at least. I did spend an hour or so one day recently bouncing ideas around with Jordan White as a springboard as he began to work out his future plans for the X-Titles, and that implied some notions as to how I might go about structuring that line of books myself if I were ever to take it over. Not that I’m going to reveal any of that here. And honestly, if such a thing happened, by the time that it did, the ball would be elsewhere on the playing field and I’d need to begin my thinking from scratch again.
Chris Sutcliffe
As a comic historian, I'm hoping you could help. At the end of Iron Man 214 and Spectacular Spider-Man 126 (from around 1986/87), Marvel teases a Spider-Woman series starring Julia Carpenter, written by Danny Fingeroth and drawn by Keith Pollard.
As far as I can see, this series never happened (there is a later series in 1993 written by other people), but I can find no mention of it existing beyond the teases in those pages.
Do you have any idea what may have happened in this case?
I don’t know any of the specifics of what happened there, Chris. But Danny Fingeroth likely does, so perhaps he’ll enlighten us if he’s so inclined. But it wasn’t unusual in those days for projects to be started and then to stall out for one reason or another—some of them never to be picked up again. And I think this SPIDER-WOMAN project was one of them. Others, such as NICK FURY VS S.H.I.E.L.D. would take years to reach fruition and would see the light of day in a very different form than when they were first conceived. I seem to think that Danny may have repurposed some of his ideas that would have been a part of that project into some other story somewhere, but I don’t remember any of the details.
Behind the Curtain
Here’s an interesting artifact: Dave Cockrum’s initial design drawing of Lilandra Neramani, done before she even really was Lilandra.
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Dave was constantly coming up with characters and designs in a big sketchbook that he carried around with him. When it was time to create the All-New, All-Different X-Men, he and writer Len Wein went through Dave’s mountain of sketches and mixed-and-matched designs and character traits to come up with much of the new team. In the case of Lilandra, as I heard it from Chris, he came into the office one day, where Dave had a desk where he was doing cover designs and the like. And Dave had posted this drawing on the wall behind him. And Chris went immediately nuts for it, wanting to know who she was and what her deal was, and saying that they had to use her in X-MEN. Dave had the character’s name already—her full name, Lilandra Neramani, was apparently an anagram of the names of two ladies that Cockrum had pursued in the past. And from this simple drawing came the whole of the “Xavier’s Nightmare” storyline that wended through X-MEN #97-108 and just past the end of Dave’s tenure on the series. Everything involving the Shi’ar can be tracked back to this one drawing. And that’s definitely a logo in alien writing at the lower right, though what it’s meant to be saying I cannot decipher—Dave had some name or identity for this concept when it was intended as its own thing.
Pimp My Wednesday
We’re back to having a big release week after a couple of smaller ones.
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AVENGERS #3 starts the book’s “CITYSLAYERS” arc which introduces the villainy of the extradimensional Ashen Combine and their floating headquarters, the Impossible City. It’s written by Jed MacKay and illustrated by C.F. Villa, with a knockout cover by Stuart Immonen. We were very deliberate in our first two issues, but this is where the foot really comes off of the brakes.
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And delayed from last week thanks to some shipping difficulties, this Wednesday also sees the final issue of AVENGERS BEYOND, the successor title to ALL-OUT AVENGERS dedicated to action-heavy adventures that the audience would be dropped into the middle of. This one wraps up the underlying plotline featuring the Beyonder, and was of course written by Derek Landy and illustrated by Greg Land.
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Also finishing this week is the 60th Anniversary series I AM IRON MAN, delivered by the team of Murewa Ayodele and Dotun Akande. After four adventures set during the past, this final issue happens in the here-and-now and throws off more wild ideas per page than most of you may be ready for. The love that Murewa and Dotun have for the character has come through in every page of this series.
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As if that wasn’t enough, Annalise Bissa has put together the second issue of DAREDEVIL & ECHO #2 by Taboo, B. Earl and Phil Noto. It sees the sightless crusader and the deaf warrior getting involved in a mystery surrounding a local Church—a mystery that both of their ancestors had been involved in decades before.
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And busy Martin Biro also put together two releases for this week. The first is this final issue of COSMIC GHOST RIDER as produced by Stephanie Phillips and Guiu Vilanova in which the mystery of the multiple Cosmic Ghost Riders is finally brought to light.
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Martin also shepherded this final issue of the HELLCAT limited series, in which Christopher Cantwell and Alex Lins crafted a bizarre mash-up of noir, the supernatural, a murder mystery and slice-of-life comics into a flavorful stew. In addition to Patsy Walker herself, this issue also includes meaningful roles for Sleepwalker and Daimon Hellstrom. What other comic can promise you that?
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And since I just happen to have it handy, the HELLCAT #5 cover that you see above is a homage to an earlier piece, one done by the late Carlos Pacheco and Jesus Merino for AVENGERS FOREVER #8 circa 1999. As it turns out, I did the quickie sketch for that cover, and it’s equally applicable to this one as a result. So here it is. You can see why I stopped being an artist.
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Finally, in the world of vertical scrolling, AVENGERS UNLIMITED wraps up the three-part adventure uniting Simon Williams, Wonder Man with the Black Widow. It’s a killer climax by Sean Kelly McKeever and David Baldeon!
A Comic Book On Sale 70 Years Ago Today, July 23, 1953
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Another good example of the oeuvre of EC Comics in the 1950s, who were the finest comic book publisher of their age. it was the horror comics such as this one where EC made its real money. Many of its other titles devoted to science fiction or war or crime would occasionally struggle to break even—but the horror books kept the dollars coming in. Which is perhaps why I find it so astonishing to see this cover. Typically, the horror comics publishers of this period would feature images as lurid and grotesque as they felt they could get away with, and EC was no exception to that trend. But here, the horror isn’t visceral at all, it’s all intellectual, all internal. You might have to look at this cover for a moment or two before its message really wormed its way into your brain. But I love it for being so unabashedly understated. As was the company’s pattern, this issue of VAULT OF HORROR, #33, featured four stories, each one drawn by a different artist, all four of them written by editor Al Feldstein (with some initial input from publisher Bill Gaines, who would often come in with springboards for stories based on whatever he’d read that night.) Feldstein would write his copy directly onto the boards, breaking down the story broadly as he did so, and then it was up to each individual artist to visualize it as they saw fit. The level of craft in the EC books was very high, and the artists were all competitive, looking to wow one another with their efforts and to not be the weak link in a given issue. So this time, your dime got you an opening story dawn by Reed Crandall in which a secretary and her boss’s lawyer contrive to inherit his money by getting him to kill himself. They are successful, but he dead man returns to make sure they don’t enjoy their ill-gotten gains. The second story, illustrated by Jack Davis, involved a group of local kids who are interested in death and capital punishment, and who bury one of the other neighborhood children alive for their infractions. The third tale was the work of George Evans, and concerned a series of killings in a small town that a doctor and the local Sheriff attempt to solve, only for the doctor to learn that the Sheriff himself is a deformed creature who has been preying upon the townsfolk. The final story was drawn by Graham Ingels, and was about a renowned puppeteer who hit hard times and whose wife was only interested in him for his money. After the puppeteer drops dead of a heart attack, his wife’s body is found alongside his, killed by his vengeful puppets. These stories all sound pretty basic and dopey by modern standards, but they were incredibly literate for the period. EC legitimately attempted to raise the level of content in comic books, but in the conformist 1950s, they were operating too far outside of the norm to be permitted by society to survive.
A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date
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Now here’s an issue that I remember for one specific reason: it’s the first issue of a comic book that I edited where, when the final book came in, I thought the end product was good. Mind you, I had only been editing DEATHLOK directly for three issues, so there’s maybe some hubris involved here. But I was genuinely happy with the results here. I’ve spoken in the past about how I inherited the DEATHLOK title and the strange splitting-of-the-baby that resulted in me having two writers who alternated story arc—which wasn’t the best way to go about things. But as it featured an African-American lead character, this series was of greater personal import to Dwayne McDuffie and Denys Cowan, who worked together on this opening arc. Dwyane titled it “The Souls of Cyber-Folk” after the book by W.E.B. DuBois, but neither I nor my boss Bob Budiansky were familiar with the tome in question, a seminal work about the Black experience, and so Bob tried to change it to the more straightforward “Cyber-War”. But Dwayne was able to successfully argue him out of that alteration. The story involved the revelation that there was an underground network of characters all of whom were cyborgs, regardless of whether they were considered heroes or villains, who shared a commonality of experience that other people couldn’t relate to or understand. Deathlok is ushered into this community by Misty Knight when somebody is murdering the assorted cyborgs of the Marvel Universe. At the end of last issue, it turned out that the killer seemed to be Doctor Doom—so in this issue, Deathlok and Misty have to battle the most dangerous villain there is. Fortunately for them, this isn’t actually Doom at all. Rather it’s one of his Doombots who has gained sentience and has christened itself Mechadoom. And by the end of the issue, Mechadoom has crashed Deathlok’s cyborg systems, leaving him helpless and unable to move before the crazed mech-being. There was some beautiful art done here by Denys and inker Mike Manley, who added a nice texture and grit to Denys’ forms. In the end, while trying to treat with everybody fairly, I wound up inadvertently screwing the both of them. chalk it up to inexperience, but that’s hardly an excuse. Anyway, the other thing that I remember about this issue is the fact that I had to fight for this cover. There was some concern about the fact that the word DOOM was larger than the DEATHLOK logo. Apparently, there was believed to be some regulation in the second class postage rules that prohibited a magazine from displaying any copy larger than its logo. This sounded like nonsense to me then and it does now as well. I was able to get away with it, though, by convincing whoever it was who had the objection that since the DOOM was transparent and the face of the letters was the same color as the background, it wasn’t actually more prominent than the logo. That argument worked, as you see above. It’s kind of a shame that I was so ill-equipped to deal with overseeing a book in these early years, as I really liked the Michael Collins Deathlok and the set-up for his series. But I definitely mismanaged it to an early grave. (Not too early, though—the book ran for 34 issues. But in the early 1990s, that wasn’t a stellar run.) This issue was released on July 23, 1991.
Monofocus
It’s mostly been a week of continuing with ongoing perennial series in terms of my viewing habits. So I’ve continued to enjoy STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS even if this season isn’t quite as sharp and flawless as the first one was. I’ve become totally enamored of 19/20, which is suddenly like a whole different experience now that the kids have become adults and they’re drinking every night and able to date one another. I’ve also been liking MY ADVENTURES WITH SUPERMAN which feels like it very much channels the spirit and style of the Nate Stevenson SHE-RA reboot, which I adored. and I miss having new episodes of MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM: THE WITCH FROM MERCURY every Sunday now that the run has concluded, as I loved the whole thing. And I’ve got two episodes of FOUNDATION stacked up calling to me whenever I can get a second for them.
But I have ben experimenting with some other shows, too. At the recommendation of Marvel editors Alanna Smith and Darren Shan, I started watching MADOKA MAGICA on Hulu. On the surface, it’s a traditional sparkly magical girl anime, but there’s something off about it from the beginning, and the deeper into it you get, the darker and more twisted it all becomes. I’m only about 2/3 of the way through it, and the main character Madoka hasn’t even become a magical girl herself yet, but it’s a pretty great subversion of the genre. Definitely one to try out, though you’ll need to consume at least two or three episodes to get to the point where events begin to take a nasty turn. The less you know going into it, the better.
And inspired by the fact that the reunion series just dropped, I went back and watched the pilot episode of JUSTIFIED, a series that I missed when it premiered but that multiple people have told me good things about over the years. I’m not 100% sold on it from just the first episode, though I do intend to keep watching—part of the problem is that I’d seen a few of the key scenes in this episode earlier as YouTube clips and the like, so the best bits of it had already been inadvertently eaten. It’s based on a character and a story written by Elmore Leonard, but apparently goes its own way past a certain point.
I’ve also watched the first two parts of SUPERPOWERED, the MAX service’s new three-part documentary on the history of DC Comics. And it’s been all right so far. I’ve seen complaints that the show didn’t cover this moment or this event, but there’s only going to be so much history that any project like this can include, and taking it from a broad perspective, it appears to be relatively on point and thorough. There isn’t much that it can tell me that I didn’t already know, but it was cool to see some of the bits or archival footage that I’d never experienced before, such as Joe Shuster working on a page of Federal Men prior to Superman. I was also amazed to see how often Marvel is referenced, not simply verbally but also visually. They show a bunch of Marvel books and speak about it plainly in a way that isn’t typical for this sort of company retrospective. (They also cover Image in detail, but given that Jim Lee is their top man at the moment, I would think that would be relatively unavoidable.)
And I also took in the special SDCC-timed Amazon Prime drop of the INVINCIBLE: ATOM EVE origin episode. And it was good, but maybe just a little bit long for what it was. I liked the first season of the series a whole lot, particularly in how it juggled the events of the comics to make for a more cohesive season. And this one-off is well done. But I found that I was starting to get antsy when the fight sequence at the end seemed to just keep going on, and to no really great payoff. It wasn’t terrible or anything, but not my favorite installment by any means. Still, great to get a little appetizer to hold things over.
Posted at TomBrevoort.com
Yesterday, I wrote about the death of Gwen Stacy from where I read it first: in the pages of MARVEL TALES #98
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And five years ago, I wrote about this Modern Comics reissue of the first issue of BLUE BEETLE.
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And that means it’s time to wrap this thing up! So it’s Hats On To—wait, wait, that doesn’t really work at all, does it? Fraction, think you got it wrong this time, you’ve been outperformed by Kirkman. And that can’t possibly feel good.
Anyway, see you in seven! Hats all, folks!
Tom B
MAN WITH A HAT Always Free. Occasionally Interesting. Greetings, Hatketeers! And welcome back to another session filled with personal nonsense only vaguely relevant to any other human being, a smattering of comic book history and some plugs for upcoming releases of which you should certainly avail yourself. I’m not sure quite where I’m going with this first bit, but I wanted to start by talking about a thing I ran into on social media a few days ago. I get copied in on all sorts of topics when different fans are unhappy about different things, based on my job title and the fact that I’m maybe more likely than most to respond. In this instance, it was a bunch of fans who were unhappy about recent developments in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN concerning Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson—developments that didn’t serve to undo the disillusionment of their marriage, now gone fifteen years. In particular, there was one fellow who opined that the death of Ms Marvel in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #26 constituted a last minute change, that Mary Jane was “obviously” the one intended to die in that story, but the fan blowback was too harsh and so the book was quickly reworked at the last minute to sacrifice Kamala Khan instead—a fact that apparent thanks to the “clear” art changes that had been made. Now, fans having their own theories on what has gone on behind the scenes is nothing new—they’ve always had them, and they always involve a certain amount of projection, giving motivations to the creators in question that may not exist in any way outside of the fan’s perspective. So in this instance, I made the perhaps ill-advised choice to step in and indicate that the book in question was in no way changed at the last minute, and that as much as anybody might like it or not like it, that was the book that was intended to be put out. Those clear art changes were nothing of the kind. And I think if you take a step back, that’s pretty obvious. I mean, (SPOILERS) Kamala just came back in the HELLFIRE GALA #1 special released this week, and we’ve made public announcements about the new, upcoming MS MARVEL: THE NEW MUTANT series already. And I think it’s apparent that we couldn’t have had that entire plan worked out and those announcements locked and loaded if that ASM issue had been some last minute ad hoc change of direction. But as soon as I responded and made that statement, all sorts of irate Spidey readers started turning up in my feed. Each one of them was upset but each one of them had a slightly different view on matters, both on what had happened and what they thought should have happened, and each one chose to interpret what i thought was a clear and direct statement about one specific point—that AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #26 was not changed around in any way at the last minute—as meaning whatever they needed it to mean to support whatever their personal position and belief happened to be. Here’s the thing: we’re all attracted by conspiracy theories. We all want to think that there’s some organized idea behind much of what happens, good and bad, in the world. And we want to feel like we’re one of the special ones that discerns the truth. But this sort of thinking creates a vast amount of confirmation bias and is detrimental to critical thinking. It maybe lets you feel good about what you choose to believe, but in a way that is further and further divorced from objective reality. I think this entire approach is dangerous. So if you’re a reader who didn’t like some story we did, some direction we took a favorite character in or the way some storyline played itself out, I think that’s entirely your right. Not everybody is going to like everything we do. And I think there’s a way to express that, respectfully. But maybe be careful about not conflating the characters for the people making the stories. To my experience, there are very few mustache-twirling super villains working in comics, and an even smaller amount that “hate” fictional characters that they spend hours working on for money. You can dislike the work without disliking the people behind it. And for my part, I’m going to attempt to refrain from answering more of these seemingly-simple questions going forward, since the return on investment just seems to now be an unending mountain of crap that has very little to do with me directly—I didn’t edit the comic in question, let alone write it. But I do support and stand behind the efforts of those that did. Even Nick Lowe. But I will still answer your questions here. And to prove it, let’s get into what you all were wondering about this past week: Craig Byrne
I’m sure that there are other logos from the past that I’d like to use should the occasion warrant it, Craig, but it’s not like I have a list to hand or anything. Typically, I’m not a huge fan of changing the logos, especially on long-running perennial series. But sometimes, it seems like a good move to make in order to signal to the audience that something has changed here, and that this book is now different from the way it was when you last looked at it. That was the reason for moving to that alternate logo on AVENGERS, to help distinguish Jed and C.F.’s run from the Jason Aaron era that came right before it. Typically, on a title that has some history behind it like AVENGERS, there are alternate logo treatments from the past that I like, and so resurrecting them is far easier than attempting to craft something new. I’ll do that too should the situation warrant it, but an existing old logo is already road-tested and will hold some nostalgia for a small segment of the older readers, and that’s a benefit I may as well capture. Alex Segura
This sort of question comes up every once in a while, Alex, and it’s a flattering question to be asked. And a tiny bit of it has—my contribution to FANTASTIC FOUR #1 PANEL BY PANEL, for example, was rewritten and expanded from pieces that I’d run over at the site. But the big problem with making a book out of even a portion of what’s collected over there would be clearing the rights for the visuals. When you’re talking about comic book stories, it helps to have pictures—without them, the text doesn’t carry as much weight, especially when so much of it is a reaction to the individual issues being experienced. And I think such a book would need to reproduce more images than most of the rights-holders would be willing to permit. If there’s a book on comics to be written by me, I’ll probably need to start that project from scratch, even if it overlaps with some of what I’ve written about before. And in any case, any such project will have to wait until I’m retired from my regular job of editing new comics day in and day out. Jeff Ryan
Some of it is certainly speed, Jeff, that and the changing tastes of the audience that demands a greater level of detail in their comic book pages than they used to in the past. But also, in terms of building a career, anybody who evidences a certain level of aptitude and popular support is going to be offered larger and more prominent assignments—assignments that may be better-paying, if only because they will circulate more highly and thus generate greater amounts of incentive payments. But really, the thing that stands in the way of long, unbroken runs these days is the fact that it now typically takes an artist around six weeks to do a book—and those books ship monthly. You can see how something is going to have to give somewhere with that math. Tony Tower
Well, Tony, it tends to come down to a couple of pretty basic factors: how important the project is to the company at that moment fiscally and what the impact might be from delaying it in order for the same creators to be able to complete all of it. As an example, CIVIL WAR was a massive hit right from the start, selling well in excess of initial projections and raising the numbers on all of the tie-in books that the storyline impacted as well. So when problems came up in terms of being able to get the later issues completed on schedule, it was relatively easy to look at the situation and conclude, “We’re already ahead of where we expected to be. So we can let this ride for a bit.” Whereas on other projects, on most projects really, especially ongoing monthly titles, there’s a constant need to have issues coming out within the month where they were solicited so as to meet the organization’s financial requirements. So if you’re facing a situation where one of those projects has hit the rocks, you wind up needing to triage—sometimes well, sometimes poorly, sometimes just throwing bodies at the problem until the requisite number of pages is completed. It’s not something that anybody involved relishes doing—especially considering that these issues aren’t quite as disposable as they were once thought to be, where a lousy art job would be gone and forgotten a month later. These days, all of that work lives on in collected form. But needs must. Chris Sutcliffe
As an overall rule, Chris, we estimate a typical Infinity comic release as being approximately 30 frames in length, which is calculated as the equivalent of six 5-panel pages, and paid for accordingly. There are occasionally ones that are longer or shorter than that—sometimes even within ongoing series when a particular artist has chosen to pace things out more leisurely. But that’s the overall metric. Behind the Curtain.The week of the San Diego Comic Convention is a pretty exciting time in the industry—unless you’re one of the people who isn’t attending. In that case, it tends to be a relatively quiet week, as books have been completed ahead of time to free up editors and talent to travel, and most of the bigwigs who might do something to make you need to scramble are otherwise occupied. So there’s a bit more time to mess around.
And so, you get things like the STEVE WACKER logo shown above, adapted by me from the classic SLEEPWALKER logo using my very sketchy photoshop skills (which are extra sketchy in this case, as photoshop wasn’t among the programs used, most of this was done in basic Paint.) The idea was put into my head following a conversation between Associate Editor Annalise Bissa (Hi, Mr. Bissa!) and Editor Darren Shan that pointed out the word similarity. From there, it was a thing that I picked away at for an hour and a half in-between other things.
But I didn’t stop there. No, I took this new logo and added it to an old headshot of Steve that I’d had in my files. (For those not in the know, Steve is a long-tenured figure at Marvel and in the industry, who for years edited the Spider-Man books. ) And that brief bit of work was worth it to get a laugh out of Steve and a bunch of the other folks who worked closely together while Wacker was on staff.
This is the latest in a string of “Bad Photoshop Theater” pieces that have been worked up by one or another of us over the years. Above is one done of me a dozen years ago, following a Chicago convention where we did a dinner with fans in a high-end restaurant. That led to a whole running bit about me starring in a CSI-style television series in which I’d solve crimes involving food-related homicides. Nobody else has seen any of this stuff publicly so far as I’m aware, so it all lives up to the “Behind The Curtain” branding—even if it is mostly stupid and dopey and a waste of time. Pimp My WednesdayIt’s August, already! Where does the time go?
This week starts off with a very special, slightly off-kilter issue of FANTASTIC FOUR by Ryan North and guest artist Leandro Fernandez. This Alex Ross cover should give you some sense as to just how odd it is. It reminds me of some of the one-off stories that John Byrne did on the title years before, if that helps at all. But I’m really happy with the way that this one turned out. Ryan really took a risk here.
And in MOON KNIGHT, Jed MacKay is joined by swing artist Federico Sabbatini as the focus switches to Hunter’s Moon and a mission he undertook to Subterranea while the events of the oversized #25 were transpiring. Oh, and those cover blurbs about GODS indicates that these are among the issues that include all-new pages relating to the story that also set up characters and situations for that upcoming Jonathan Hickman and Valerio Schiti series. There are nine or ten of these in total, and while the pages can be read individually (and none of them are absolutely 100% necessary to enjoy GODS #1) they add up to a bit more if you peruse them all.
And in AVENGERS UNLIMITED #58, Kate Bishop joins forces with Runa the Valkyrie to solve a mystery in Asgard that’s caused the disappearance of All-Father Thor. It’s written by Kalinda Vazquez and illustrated by Alba Glez, and was edited by Annalise Bissa (Hi, Mr. Bissa!) A Comic Book On Sale 80 Years Ago Today, July 30, 1943 It’s a mostly forgotten series today, but when it debuted and all through the wartime years, BOY COMMANDOS by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby was a sales juggernaut, selling in the kinds of numbers that only SUPERMAN and BATMAN matched at DC. The Boy Commandos were another of Simon & Kirby’s “kid gang” strips, a genre that they’d instituted starting with the Young Allies at Timely and thereafter the Newsboy Legion at DC. But the Boy Commandos made the concept more immediate and relevant to the readers of that period. Their gang was a junior commando unit serving under Captain Rip Carter, and they didn’t merely battle spies and saboteurs on the home front like so many others—the Boy Commandos went right into the heart of the conflict, albeit without any particular loss of life. This fourth issue, released in 1943, must have read like something of a fever dream when it first came out. It was a rare book-length story, broken up into several chapters, that predicted the D-Day invasion of Europe by Allied forces. As you get from the cover, it was one of the most spectacularly visual comic books that Simon and Kirby had put out up until this time, fifty full pages that took the fight back to Germany and the Nazis’ own homelands. The genuine D-Day was still a year in the future when this book hit the racks, but it almost doesn’t matter. This is high adventure patriotism at its finest, with excitement and drama and energy and entertainment value. A movie on paper, but better than a movie, because it could visualize anything that Kirby could illustrate. A Comic Book On Sale 55 Years Ago Today, July 30, 1968
I’m spotlighting this issue almost solely for its cover, with it’s absurd cover copy to get across the situation. But this cover does highlight another change that had come to DC in recent months, and that change was Neal Adams. One of the first new young faces to enter the industry, which had been something of a closed shop for a decade or more, Adams came in with a great understanding of printing technology and a sense of his own value. He was immediately a more illustrative and dramatic artist than anybody else at DC, and proceeded to revolutionize the flavor of the line simply by his influence. It’s likely that the sketch for this cover was done by Carmine Infantino, who had been promoted to Cover Designer in an attempt to halt the erosion of DC’s sales, and who went on to become Editorial Director and then Publisher in short order. He and Adams had a good working relationship, though they occasionally clashed on policy—Adams was more progressive than Infantino or really anybody else in the business at the time, and inclined to push ahead and ask “why not?” more forcefully than others, and so get his way. He also just drew better than anybody else at this moment. It’s perhaps tough to see the influence he had, as so much of what he brought to the table has been subsumed by the generations that followed him, but Adams was a revelation. Even with Adams’ lush rendering on display here, the cover image and its attendant copy is fully in editor Mort Weisinger’s style—a style that tried to outline every situation such that the youngest reader could understand what was going on. Storybooks rather than sequential artwork. Here, Superman doesn’t have enough time to stop himself before colliding with the force-shield enveloping Stanhope College and destroying it—but he does still have enough time to utter a run-on sentence explaining the fact that he’s not going to be able to stop in time. This cover actually illustrates the Supergirl back-up story in this issue, and for those who may be wondering about the resolution, rather than attempting to stop himself, Superman instead speeds up, fast enough to break the time barrier and so avoid a fatal collision. As these things go, that’s really a pretty clever solution to this problem, so kudos to Weisinger and writer Cary Bates for coming up with it. A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date
Well, sort of. THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN AMERICA #1 by Fabian Nicieza and Kevin Maguire first saw print on July 30, 1991, but it had been in the works for several years before that. And in the end, Maguire wasn’t able to complete the series, and other artists were brought in to finish the final two issues. But at least before that, this was a pretty great project, one that could have been truly world-class had it gotten done as intended. it was still good, but those last two issues diminished the quality just enough that it failed to achieve classic status. Anyway, when the book did see print, the editor of record was Mike Rockwitz. But it had been in other editorial hands before that, notably those of Gregory Wright, whose office I interned for in the summer of 1989 some two years earlier. And in the first week of my internship, I had something happen that I was afraid might end the whole thing right there and then—so I cowardly hid the results, which weren’t discovered until well after I was done as an intern, and which were never attributed to me until I began telling this story. In any case, at the time I started, work on this project hadn’t gotten all that far—there were only perhaps a dozen penciled pages to be had at that time. Kevin was drawing the book on graphic novel paper, which is to say original art boards that were larger than the typical 11 x 17 so as to reduce properly for a larger size and to also bleed the artwork to the edges of the page on all sides, something that regular comic book pages still couldn’t do for the most part. At some point during that first week, Greg and his assistant editor Evan Skolnick asked me to make a few sets of copies of the pages for some use or another. The boards were large enough that, even on the large-size copies available at Marvel, they would have to be photographed in halves. This was going to take a bit more time than a regular copying job, and there was already a bit of a line-up at the copier when I went down there—but I had an edge, I thought. I’d already learned that there was another copier upstairs on the eleventh floor, the one occupied by accounting, assorted business types, foreign publishing and licensing. That copier didn’t tend to get as much use, as those divisions didn’t have as much work that needed to be copied. So I took my load of boards upstairs in order to run them off. Now, the copiers of that day were relatively primitive things, and they had lids that would latch down so that the copies would come out clean. But this only worked so long as the boards being copied were small enough to fit onto the bed of the machine, which these boards weren’t. So I was forced to copy them with the lid open. And so I proceeded to work my way through the copies that I needed, rotating each board and swapping it out for the next as I went in the manner of an assembling line. And then, something sickening happened. The hinges on the copier lid were pretty well worn and they didn’t maintain friction well. So it was that at a certain point, the lid slammed itself shut while a page was being copied—driving that latch hook straight through the original penciled page being copied. I was immediately both horrified and terrified as I opened the lid to see the impaled page hanging off of it, and I removed it as gingerly as I could from its perch. It was punctured—not a huge puncture, but enough of one to bring my career as a Marvel intern to a close, I thought. I stood there considering the situation for a moment or two, alone thanks to the fact that I wasn’t using the regular copier and consequently nobody had seen what had happened. And then I moved to complete the copying of the remaining pages, stacked everything back up with the punctured page buried in the center of the stack, and brought the whole thing back to the office, depositing it uninspected into the flat file. It’s not really a moment I’m proud of, and not one that was likely to have resulted in my termination, because accidents happen. Still, I wasn’t taking any chances. A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date
Now this one is a wild one. This first issue of SILVER SURFER came out on July 30, 2003 and was written by the soon-to-be-wed team of Dan Chariton and Stacy Weiss. It was a series whose overall ethos I had brainstormed, though the specific story and the manner in which it was told was all down to Dan and Stacy. They’d come to Marvel with a screenwriting background, and this series was their first comic book work. The notion I’d had at the time was that one of the things that had gone wrong with the Surfer over the years is that he’d become to pedestrian a character. When he first appeared, and for his first couple of years, he’d been an awesome figure, inscrutable, unknowable, and therefore mysterious and interesting. But a succession of stories had reduced him to being just another super hero, his alien otherness had eroded away. So that’s part of what we were trying to recapture here. This was also the period in which Marvel President Bill Jemas was at his most vocal about wanting to do stories that weren’t simple super hero adventure yarns but rather real stories about real people. Bill would have preferred things, I think, had there been no costumes or super-powers in these stories for the most part. So the focus of the book was on a new character, Denise Waters, whose autistic daughter Ellie is the victim of an alien abduction. to be specific, she’s spirited away by a gleaning figure on what looks to be a flying surfboard. There was a larger storyline that would be spooled out as Denise attempted to find out what had happened to her missing daughter and her search brought her into contact with the Silver Surfer. And the book ran for fourteen issues until those mysteries were all revealed and resolved. But there was a huge gap in-between issues #1 and #2. And that was all down to the artist, who went by the pen name Milx. Milx was a Malaysian artist with a great style, very European-influenced with a hint of manga about it and a nice color palate. He had sent in samples to Marvel and I had hired him for this series based on them. He was a little bit slow on the first issue, but not to a concerning degree. But then, time began to go by and there weren’t any further pages forthcoming. All attempts to contact him led to nothing—he had ghosted us, disappearing into the night without a word being said. I was later told that the pressure of having to produce such work on a regular deadline terrified him when he was confronted by the reality of it, and so rather than say something or face up to his situation, he instead ran. There was a bit of a fire drill when this all came to a head—there was no way to get things caught up at that point, not without resoliciting the issues after #1, which is what we wound up doing. The artist who took over for Milx was Lan Medina, and he did a fine job with the assignment. His work was perhaps not as exciting and electric as Milx had been, but he had the added advantage of actually delivering his pages when he said that he would. Milx would eventually resurface in the American comic book market, producing work both under his real name and his pen name alias for other publishers. But he’s not worked for Marvel since. MonofocusIt feels like I watched it a million years ago now since another episode has since been aired, but I enjoyed the hell out of the STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS /LOWER DECKS crossover episode. It began with a premise that really shouldn’t have worked—having characters that originated on the animated STAR TREK comedy interacting in real life with the STRANGE NEW WORLD crew and somehow bridging the tones between the two shows. But the episode pulled the whole thing off. I’d imagine that much of the fun is blunted if you haven’t watched both series as I have—they’re likely my two favorite entries in the recent spate of new STAR TREK series. Of particular note, Jack Quaid seems to be freakishly tall—he towered over most of the SNW cast in a way that his animated character simply couldn’t. in particular, having lost my own father at a relatively young age, the sequence in which Anson Mount talks about having reached a birthday that his character’s father never got to experience struck home for me in a meaningful fashion. I could relate in a big way to that. I also finally cracked into FOUNDATION, the first episode of this second season at least. And I still like it, though it really has precious little to do with the Isaac Asimov books that it’s ostensibly based upon. And that’s not surprising—the Asimov stories chart the Fall and Rise of the Galactic Empire from the point of view of the Foundation, a coalition of scientists and researchers that Mathematician Hari Seldon has put together to insure that the coming dark ages last only 1000 years rather than untold millennia, as predicted by the predictive science of Psychohistory. Each Asimov story is typically set decades apart from the last, and each one deals with a key crisis faced by the Foundation as it goes about its task, including the interference of the mutant Mule whose existence couldn’t be predicted by Psychohistory and who threatens to destroy the entire plan. There aren’t any real continuing characters per se, which makes doing a television series something of a task. I’m not sure that this production team has really cracked how to approach it, and it does feel as though Hari is hanging around past the point where he’s outlived his usefulness as a character as a result. Still, it looks great, and Lee Pace is as magnetic as ever in his role as Empire. I’m sure that I’ll continue with it. In print, I spent part of today consuming the single-volume hardcover edition of Charles Soule and Ryan Browne’s EIGHT BILLION GENIES, which was pretty fascinating. I suspect that I was primed for the material in that I just finished up MADOKA MAGICA, which in its own way dealt with wishes and Genii. Anyway, the great thing about EIGHT BILLION GENIES is that the concept is simple and easy to grasp—every person on Earth is granted a genie who will give them a single wish, and what happens to the world and society as a result of what happens thereafter. It’s good in that it doesn’t follow a simple narrative structure—there is no one specific bad guy to be overcome, the story situation is fluid and changes consistently in ways that make sense to the narrative. It wasn’t perfect—as a lawyer himself, Soule has a tendency to aggrandize those in the profession, at least in terms of their proficiency with language and argument. Some of his story twists revolve around this in a manner that doesn’t entirely seem plausible. But overall it was really good, and it held me for a single sitting. Definitely worth it as a unique read. Posted at TomBrevoort.comYesterday, I wrote about this 1966 Newspaper Article about the impact the BATMAN television show starring Adam West had on the comics according to one college-aged fan.
And five years ago, I wrote about the third episode of STAR BLAZERS
And that’ll bring us to a close for another week! So Hats All, Folks! Tom B |
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2309.10 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2991 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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