A Sense of Doubt blog post #3267 - It Also Travels in Time via Brevoort newsletter - Comic Book Sunday for 2401.28
Greetings readers!
I interrupted my BOWIE MONTH stream of BOWIE ONLY posts yesterday for the very important post about the Detroit Lions and now for today's COMIC BOOK SUNDAY.
I am still working on my round-up of December 2023 comics, which seems so long ago, and so I am sharing today another newsletter from Tom Brevoort (not my first share of the comic book giant's newsletters). I redact the newsletter to just the portions directly dealing with many comics, from the new releases he'd editing (and I need to get to the local comic shop) to memories of great older comics, such as Teen Titans #20 from 1969, The Invincible Iron Man #76 [Legacy 421], Dark Avengers #001, and a personal favorite (though all of these are, really) Nexus #1 by Mike Baron and Steve "The Dude" Rude among others.
ENJOY!
Thanks for tuning in.
Redacted newsletter...
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MAN WITH A HAT
Always Free. Occasionally Interesting.
Pimp My Wednesday
What do we have for you this week? Let’s see…
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G.O.D.S. #4 features a mind-bending and time-breaking installment in which Wyn and Dr. Strange try and fail and try and fail and try and fail to save the universe from an agent of Oblivion. It’s by Jonathan Hickman and Valerio Schiti.
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In the third issue of PUNISHER, new Punisher Joe Garrison finds himself on the back foot right from the start, hunted by the police and crippled by his own trauma that’s been brought to the fore by Fearmaster, a Daredevil foe from the past. David Pepose and Dave Wachter bring the action here. I like this cover, although I feel that Joe’s face looks just a little bit too young.
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And in AVENGERS UNLIMITED, we move into the fourth chapter of our 25-part epic as Earth’s Mightiest Heroes separate to take action against their attackers on Ghesh and get to the bottom of why the moon of Yun-To is inaccessible. Derek Landy and Marcio Fiorito tell the tale.
A Comic Book On Sale 55 Years Ago Today, January 21, 1969
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I wrote about this issue of TEEN TITANS extensively at my blog, which can be accessed at this link. But it’s worth just quickly recapping the situation surrounding this issue, as it’s a bit of dark and unfortunate history that shouldn’t be forgotten. Having previously introduced a Russian super hero in a previous issue, newcomer writers Len Wein and Marv Wolfman intended to use this story to introduce DC’s first black super hero, a character called Jericho. They wrote the story, most of it was completed by artist Nick Cardy—and then there was a changing of the guard in DC’s management. Irwin Donenfeld, the son of DC’s founder, was out, and Carmine Infantino, formerly a key artist and later cover designer was put into place as Editorial Director. Carmine looked at the story and pronounced it unpublishable, rejecting it outright and putting editor Dick Giordano in a quandary, as the issue had to go to print in a very short time, too short to produce an entirely new issue from scratch. Carmine’s take was that the story was a polemic, and not something that DC should be standing behind—and in fact, Wein and Wolfman were both defacto blacklisted from DC as writers for years thereafter. They thought that this all smacked of racism, and they inveigled some assistance from Neal Adams, who read the story himself. Neal didn’t think it was anywhere near as unprintable as Carmine did, but even he was unable to convince Infantino to run the issue as written. So to help out his friend Giordano, Neal wrote and drew entirely new story incorporating as many of Cardy’s pages and panels as he was able to. The black Jericho became the white Joshua, a crime-fighter in the mold of Batman who made only this one appearance. The cover was already at the printer, and so a call was placed to knock out the crowds of rioters in blues and purples so that it wasn’t so easy to see that they were intended to be black. And that was that, the issue came out, and Neal continued his story over the next two. And Wein and Wolfman were out of a job, though things worked out for them long-term as well. So was it racism, or inexperience, or both? I tend to think that it was a little bit from column A, a little from column B. Carmine did eventually allow Neal and his collaborator Denny O’Neil to introduce John Stewart in GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW a few years later, but in 1969 and just having come into his job, he just wasn’t ready to okay what could have been an incendiary story. On the other hand, Marvel was by this time featuring the Black Panther in AVENGERS and would shortly be introducing the Falcon, so the color barrier had been broken already elsewhere. DC, though, as an organization was still very conservative, and wouldn’t give a black character a big spotlight until they launched BLACK LIGHTNING in 1976—and that was almost a very different, very wrong-headed thing as well. You can see a bunch of the unused pages from the original version of the Jericho story at that link above.
A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date
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I’m only spotlighting this issue of IRON MAN which came out on January 21, 2004 momentarily here, because Adi Granov’s powerful cover became such an influence on first the initial IRON MAN film and then on subsequent super hero movies that this pose has become an iconic super hero pose whenever a flying her crashes down to Earth again dramatically. It’s a hell of a legacy for a single cover to carry, and that’s all down to Adi’s polished, slick interpretation of the image.
Another Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date
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The first issue of DARK AVENGERS came out on January 21, 2009 and proved to be a monster hit. Which was a bit of a relief to me, as there had been people in the Marvel hierarchy who were convinced that nobody was going to want to read a book focusing on several villains dressed up as other Marvel heroes. But it worked because of Brian Michel Bendis’ ability to delve into the truth of the assorted characters he was writing about and to make their struggles and perspectives feel genuine, even if they were complete psychos. Brian was joined in his efforts by Mike Deodato Jr, with whom he’d previously done a run on NEW AVENGERS. That storyline had been written for Steve McNiven, but McNiv had to step off to do CIVIL WAR, and Deo stepped into the breach. And it wasn’t the best meshing of artist and story, it was a bit of a misfire. But here, having studied how Warren Ellis had approached writing for Deo on THUNDERBOLTS, Brian shifted gears and achieved a smooth and fruitful collaboration with his artist, which was always one of his real strengths. DARK AVENGERS was designed from the beginning as a title that had an expiration date, and when we got to the point where the DARK REIGN storyline was about to climax in SIEGE, the book came to an end. Throughout the run, it had consistently been the top-selling book in the line. When it finished, there were those who advocated for keeping it going, so successful had it been, but in this instance, we held the line and shut it down as planned when the story was over. (There was an ill-conceived attempt to turn THUNDERBOLTS into DARK AVENGERS right at the end of its run in an attempt to pump up sales, the less said about that move, the better.) In any case, this was a prime example of what made Brian’s tenure on AVENGERS so successful for the eight years he wrote it: his willingness to push the envelope, to change things up dramatically, and to give the audience a sense that absolutely anything could happen next. The whole thing was a series of pretty bold storytelling choices, and the run remains a highlight of this era. (Brian was doing similarly good work alongside it in NEW AVENGERS during this same time, but those stories flew a bit more under the radar simply because they weren’t the shiny new penny.)
Chasing the Dragon
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The opening up of the Direct Market in the early 1980s came at just the right moment in my comic book reading life. I had been reading the books for almost a decade at that point, and was beginning to grow bored with the same old thing. This is typical, of course, at one time there was an expectation that any given reader was going to follow comics for a few years and eventually drift away from them as more teenaged interests began to take up more of their time and attention. Maybe the same thing would have happened to me, but the explosion of new books starting up from new companies meant that there was always something with some potential excitement to it being released. Who knew which of these assorted companies might become a legitimate long-term competitor to DC and Marvel? Capital Comics didn’t become that, but it did unleash a number of series on the world that went on to become recurring features at assorted companies. But none of them garnered as much success as their initial offering, Mike Baron and Steve Rude’s NEXUS. Neither Baron nor Rude had done any work in the mainstream at the time that NEXUS premiered—they had collaborated on one story that saw print in Pacific Comics’ VANGUARD ILLUSTRATED, but that’s about it. Baron’s vocation was as a journalist, and Rude was just starting out as a working artist. But the combination of their specific talents, interests, outlooks and tastes resulted in a series that was a lot more sophisticated and modern and fun than almost anything else on the racks at the time. NEXUS tells the story of Horatio Hellpop, the son of an exiled mass murderer whom, after destroying the planet he’d been in charge of overseeing rather than permitting it to fall to insurrection, took his pregnant wife into exile with him, the pair winding up on the mysterious world of Ylum. There, the young Horatio is plagued by dreams of other mass murderers as he grows up. Only sojourns in a special amniotic tank can make these visions bearable. And once they become too intense, Hellpop is driven to seek out and eradicate the subjects of his nightmares as Nexus, the Liberator, who possesses vast fusion-casting powers derived from an unknown source. The mystery behind Hellpop’s abilities and the dreams that drive him are a recurring subplot over the course of the first couple of years of the series, as is his developing relationship with Earthgov operative Sundra Peale. The first three issue of NEXUS were released in an oversized black and white magazine format—a format favored initially by a lot of new publishers entering the industry. Swiftly discovering that the new breed of comic shops wanted product in the same general format as Marvel and DC, Capital turned NEXUS into a color comic with its fourth release. Swiftly, though, it became apparent that Capital had overextended itself, and it got out of the publishing business in order to double down on its original job as a comic book distributor. So NEXUS was gone for a short while, before returning at First Comics, a strong player in the 1980s. The series lasted there pretty much until First’s demise, at which point Mike Richardson of Dark Horse bought the NEXUS copyright and trademark at bankruptcy and returned them to Baron and Rude, an incredible bit of generosity on the part of the publisher. NEXUS was a heady mix of intergalactic geo-politics, science fiction speculation, slapstick humor under a veneer of superheroic adventure. There really was nothing else quite like it at the time. A lot of the appeal came from the artwork of Steve Rude, who drew upon disparate influences including Jack Kirby’s Marvel Comics, Russ Manning’s MAGNUS: ROBOT FIGHTER and Alex Toth’s SPACE GHOST. Eventually, though, Baron and Rude hit a creative impasse, and decided to part ways. Since then, each creator has produced his own continuation of NEXUS, but without their other half, neither version is as compelling as the earlier work had been. NEXUS was truly greater than the sum of its parts.
The Deathlok Chronicles
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This is about where I first came in. DEATHLOK #3 was in production when I started at Marvel as an intern, so while I didn’t have much to do with it, I did see it start to come together. As mentioned last time, artist Butch Guice had quit the project to pursue other opportunities after finishing issue #2, which meant that a new artist had to be found for the project. After a bit of searching, Dwayne McDuffie suggested Denys Cowan, who was interested. Over in the comments last week, co-writer Gregory Wright described the search for a replacement artist this way:
Gregory Wright
Oh man, the search to replace Guice was horrible. The book was running late since it wound up getting scheduled before it was ready to be scheduled. That was a small part of Guice leaving...he couldn't make our schedule and do the other projects he was more interested in. I called everyone I could think of whose art looked in anyway similar to Guice. Most of them said the same thing..."I don't want to have to follow Guice on this sort of project, he's way too good." Meanwhile Denys Cowan had expressed interest. Now we all LOVED Denys' work, but it was nothing like Guice's and generally you don't want clashing art styles on a limited series like this. But...we all agreed at the end that it was better to have a fantastic artist who was really excited to do the book, than someone who was maybe a little more similar is style, but just had no real oomph. Denys turned that 3rd issue around in about two weeks and it was brilliant.
My memory is that this third issue wasn’t turned around in two weeks, since it was still in production when I came on staff as an assistant editor at the end of 1989. But it did get produced steadily, which was what was needed to get the series back on track. Rick Magyar was brought on board as the inker and he was a great match for Denys’ style—their pages looked lush and detailed and textured. It wasn’t the same as Guice, but in some ways, it was even better (though probably not quite as commercial in the marketplace.) Like the second issue, Dwayne scripted this issue entirely on his own while it was co-plotted by Greg and Dwayne together. I don’t remember why this happened, I just remember that it did—likely, Greg had some other commitment that was due at the same time, and backed away as necessary.
So it seemed as though the worst of the problems had been overcome, and things were back on track. But that feeling would be short-lived, as moving into issue #4, more difficulties would crop up that would set the stage for the condition the series was in when I inherited it.
Super Heroes On Screen
I was asked over in the comments section to talk a bit about my favorite treatments of super heroes and comic books in other media, particularly in film and on television. And so I’m going to try a bit of that here and see how it goes.
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The very first adaptation of a comic book character to the big screen was Republic Pictures’ 1941 serial THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL. In those days, there were regular Saturday morning matinee showings for young kids, and at a time before television, just about every kid went to them regularly. A typical showing would include a cartoon or two (produced for movie houses and with much more fluid and expensive animation that would become standard for television), a newsreel, a B-western or two, and a chapter of a serial. Serials had become a staple of movie houses in the silent era, when THE PERILS OF PAULINE became a huge and much-imitated hit. Serials, though, were the bottom of the barrel of movie-making at the time, produced on the cheap for an audience of children. They didn’t carry a lot of prestige for all that they could be a strong draw at the box office. By the start of the 1940s, there were several studios regularly producing chapterplays for the cinema. Today, Republic is considered the best of them. They had developed a formula of fast action, furious fights and daredevil stunts aided by the special effects work and miniatures craftsmanship of the Lydecker Brothers. These guys were ILM before ILM was even an idea.
THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL grew out of an earlier effort on the part of Republic to acquire the rights to produce a Superman serial. In 1940, no property was hotter in the children’s market, and Republic and others had found great success in adapting comic strip and radio characters such as Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and the Lone Ranger. Negotiations commenced and a script was even worked on, but in the end, Superman’s publishers wanted approval over the content and Republic didn’t want to give that up. So the Superman serial was retooled into THE MYSTERIOUS DOCTOR SATAN, with the Man of Steel replaced by a powerless home-grown hero, the Copperhead. Hearing that Republic had lost their efforts to acquire Superman, the head of Fawcett Publications reached out offering their firm’s new similar hero Captain Marvel as a replacement. Fawcett was easier to deal with, and so Republic wound up doing serials not only starring Captain Marvel, but also Spy Smasher and Mister Scarlet, though this last one didn’t reach the screen in that form, a more popular character was substituted from another publisher. (There’s also the possibility that Republic’s home-grown flying her Rocketman was inspired at least in part by Fawcett’s similar Bulletman.)
In any event, a deal was struck and THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL premiered in 1941. Just for context, the serial was advertised in WHIZ COMICS #20, super-early in the run. Captain Marvel co-creator C.C. Beck never wavered in his hatred for the serial, stating that it didn’t capture the whimsical nature of the character, but at the time it was written and filmed, there were only six or seven Captain Marvel stories to draw from, and those early adventures were relatively generic and humorless.
THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL is a great serial, one of the best. It’s got action, atmosphere, mood, thrills—and a hero who is positively homicidal, routinely gunning down fleeing enemies in the back with a machine gun or hurling them from the tops of buildings. (When footage from the serial was later reused in the satirical J-MEN FOREVER, the character was aptly renamed the Caped Madman.) Actor Tom Tyler is a picture-perfect Captain Marvel, looking as though he stepped right out of the pages of the comic. And while Frank Coghlan Jr. is a bit too old to be the boyish Billy Batson of the comics, he’s got a youthful enthusiasm to him that’s very charming. The rest of the cast was created for the serial, though a few, such as Whitey, were eventually brought into the comics as well.
The big challenge for the Lydeckers was to convincingly make Captain Marvel fly, and they did a hell of a good job for the era. They created a full-scale dummy of Captain Marvel, slightly larger than lifesize, and then they would rig it on long wires or attach it on rods to a speeding car, and the hero would convincingly sail through the air in pursuit of evildoers.
I’m convinced that THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL was one of the reasons why the Captain’s title began to outsell Superman’s, leading DC to sue both Fawcett and Republic Pictures for infringement. The case wouldn’t be settled for a dozen years, and it led to Captain Marvel being forced into limbo for two decades. it also prevented Republic from doing a sequel to the popular serial. Ironically, in the end DC wound up owning the character that they’d put out of business.
So THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL is a lot of fun and a real favorite of mine. For those who are curious, the super-cool trailer for the serial can be viewed at this link. If you do end up watching the whole of the serial, I’d advise you to parse it out. It wasn’t designed to be watched in a single sitting, and so it grows a bit repetitive and stale if you attempt it that way.
Posted at TomBrevoort.com
Yesterday, I wrote about a forgotten crossover between Kid Eternity and Plastic Man in the pages of HIT COMICS #32.
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And five years ago, I wrote about the FIVE BEST COMIC BOOKS OF 1978
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2401.28 - 10:10
- Days ago = 3131 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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