#9: 1,000 Clowns

We Reach a Milestone, then Talk about Nothing in Particular

Hey, everybody! Back again! It’s been a bit of a week, for obvious reasons if you’ve been following the news. But we’re not going to dwell on any of that here. Rather, let’s talk about comic books and related subjects for a while, all right?

To start with, I wanted to thank everybody who’s signed up to follow this Newsletter once again. We just passed the milestone of 1,000 subscribers, which puts us on track to reach the goals that I set out for this page when I started it. My interest here has never been financial, it’s all about building an audience for my nonsense, and so far, everybody has been great. So, because it’s something that I can do, I wanted to single out our 1,000th subscriber, christopherobannon@gmail.com. Chris (may I call you Chris?), I don’t know you, but it’s great to have you around, and I hope you enjoy at least some of what I’m about to lay out below. You are hereby granted the title of Hat-1000, which is meaningless and imparts no particular rights or powers apart from perhaps a momentary feeling of embarrassment as the spotlight unexpectedly swings your way for a paragraph.

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You could have knocked me over with a feather this past week when I came across the announcement below.

I’ve been a fan of Lake Street Dive for about a decade now, but I’ve never had the opportunity to see them perform in person. I had been casually thinking about going to one of the two shows they’ll be playing at Radio City Music Hall in September since it’s so close to Marvel HQ, but that all depended on what the state of the world was at that point and whether we were back to working out of the offices. This June 7th show, however, is practically in my backyard—literally closer than the supermarket. So I felt I had no choice but to buy tickets, despite the fact that the surge in infection rates is nothing to play around with. I’m easily swayed that way. For those unfamiliar with this crew, I’ve provided a link here to their awesome streetside cover of the Jackson 5’s hit I Want You Back , which is in the running in my mind for Best Cover Performance of All Time.

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Anybody who doesn’t like the 1966 BATMAN television series is a person not worth talking to in my opinion. So when Mark Evanier posted the video below at his always-entertaining site at newsfrommee.com earlier this week, I knew that I just had to share it.

This twelve-minute episode was produced by the 4th and 5th graders at Parkview Elementary School in Van Buren, Arkansas, who did an incredible and nigh-flawless job with it. Me and mine would set out to put together productions of this sort when I was of grade school age, but we never managed anything a fraction as terrific as this. Keep an eye on these kids, they’re going places.

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Reader and comic book writer Rich Douek sent along the following to me, which I’m now choosing to share with you all:

Been meaning to send you these since I read your post about George Perez. Such an icon, and a fellow New Yorker, to boot. The first comic shop I ever went to was Mike’s Comic Hut, in Flushing NY… apparently George was a regular and friends with Mike, because he did this amazing custom bag art for the shop over the years. I remember bringing home so many comics in these bags, and wish I had saved a few. 

Anyway, I was able to track some images down, and a lot of people who are fans of George got a kick out of them, having never seen them before. I thought you might, too! 

For folks interested in Rich’s work as a writer, he’s got his own substack page set up at the link below:

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I’ve been wanting to answer more questions from the audience here—so let’s hope this one doesn’t kill the whole thing. Reader Christopher Kent sent over the following question in the comments:

Your mention of sending board to the Code makes me wonder about the weirdest/dumbest/craziest changes you saw or heard about?

Well, Christopher, I’ve seen quite a few ridiculous changes that the Comics Code made in the past. I feature a look at a bunch of them over here, at my Tom Brevoort Experience site. But as for ones that I encountered personally, nothing has really stuck with me, to be honest. There’d occasionally be something that the Code would kick back to you, and occasionally you get on the phone and either talk them out of the revision or negotiate down to an equitable compromise. And some of it could be stupid, and all of it was inconsistent—certain things might be objected to by one reviewer but passed by another, completely randomly—but it was seen by most everyone in the trenches as simply a part of the process. In theory, Marvel’s in-house guidelines were often more stringent than the Code, at least for the longest time. (The Code, for example, would allow the words damn and hell depending on context, whereas Marvel prohibited them in all mainstream comics through around 1995 or so.) The Code would occasionally be used as a handy excuse when some editor wanted to change something that a creator had done: “The Code objected to it!” didn’t leave most writers and artists with a lot of room to argue the point. This was a weaselly tactic, but it was employed by editors semi-regularly.

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Behind the Curtain

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What you see above is a map of the Marvel offices that was produced and routinely updated for in-office use; to provide to guests who might be visiting and who needed to find some particular editorial office. This was the Marvel headquarters at 387 Park Avenue South, where the company was based from 1982 to 2000 or so. This is the Marvel I started at and the building I worked in for my first decade in the business (and by the business, as Mark Gruenwald used to say, I mean the industry.) This particular iteration dates from 1997, after the office space had undergone some renovation.

Marvel in those days occupied three full floors, the 9th through the 11th, as well as a separate structure on the roof which was alternately referred to as the “penthouse” or the 12th floor, and where the Marvel Knights crew would be installed for a time. The “Suits” were primarily on the 11th floor—this included the Licensing and Accounting departments as well as the President, the Publisher and all of the business concerns. The 9th Floor was home to Manufacturing, the folks who interfaced with the printers in order to get our books printed and shipped. For a time, the Reproduction department was there as well, but they eventually outgrew the space and relocated outside of the building. they were the folks you would turn to in order to get copies of stats or film for any reprint s that had to be done. They also provided similar materials to licensees around the globe who would localize the Marvel content into a variety of languages.

Today, Marvel is far more security-conscious, and the offices, when we’re in them, are a closed shop—even creators can have difficulty being granted access. But in the 1990s, the policy was a lot more open-door, meaning that you routinely had guests wandering the office, popping into assorted offices to drop off work, chat, attempt to scare up a new assignment, go to lunch and just hang around. The atmosphere was casual at best and chaotic at worst.

Some other minor observations: the office on this map inhabited by Ann Bingley had been in the past the Editor in Chief’s office. First Jim Shooter and then Tom DeFalco had run the Editorial department from there. After the floor was renovated (which required the whole of Editorial to migrate down to temporary quarters on the 4th floor for several months) DeFalco relocated to the office occupied here by Bob Harras, Mark Powers and Jason Liebig, and which Joe Quesada would eventually occupy for a time, before Marvel moved to an entirely different neighborhood. The unmarked office directly beneath that corner office was briefly occupied by Chris Claremont during the time when he was on staff as an Executive Editor in the late 1990s. And on this map, that empty office at the upper left next to Ralph Macchio’s had been the office of Mark Gruenwald up until his unexpected death by heart failure in 1996. At the point when this map was updated, nobody had yet moved into Gruenwald’s vacated office. Until his retirement in 1996, Marvel arti director John Romita could be found in the office here housing Shirel Rhodes. John’s wife Virginia Romita ran the Bullpen from an office in that space that had been obliterated in the redesign, around where that line of Drawing Tables is on this map. Of all the people listed on this map, the only ones who are still at Marvel are myself and Sue Crespi, who today oversees many of the Bullpen’s operations.

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Pimp My Wednesday

Just one new book out of my office for this week, the latest issue of AVENGERS FOREVER by writer Jason Aaron and swing artist Jim Towe. This is the beginning of the second movement in AVENGERS FOREVER, a storyline under the umbrella title “The Pillars”. But each issue in this sequence functions as a stand-alone tail with connectivity to the others and introduces a new multiversal counterpart of a foundational Avenger. In this case, it’s all about T’Challa, who is rocketed away from the doomed planet Earth by his parents, and what he transforms himself into in a journey spanning decades. Each one of these “Pillars” issues has been really strong and creative, and my hope is that people will dig them—but I’m half-convinced that readers may be perplexed by them, and not be able to intuit how they all fit together within the larger narrative framework. Trust me, none of these issues are just empty calories, they’re all building to something.

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A Comic Books On Sale 80 Years Ago Today, May 29, 1942

It’s proven to be slightly more difficult to locate a noteworthy comic book released on any given random date that I would have thought, so for this week, let’s talk about this guy a bit. Today, the name Captain Marvel conjures up images of a different character entirely (possibly one of a few different alternate characters, honestly.) But in 1942, there was only one owner of that title, the original and best Captain Marvel of them all. So popular was the Big Red Cheese during this wartime era that his self-titled series CAPTAIN MARVEL ADVENTURES, at its height, was releasing a new issue every two weeks, an unheard of release schedule for the time, and one only rarely equalled today. At its pinnacle, the book boasted 14 Million readers, which is a staggering number. It’s no wonder that, of all of the assorted new super heroes that cropped up in the wake of Superman’s overnight success, Captain Marvel was the one that DC/National Comics chose to target with an infringement lawsuit—the big guy was beating them on the stands in a major way.

This particular cover was illustrated by Marc Swayze, who brought just a bit more realism to Captain Marvel and his world. I love the small detail that you can see where the lightning bold on Marvel’s chest has been stitched to his shirt. This issue was cover-dated June 26, 1942, but it went on sale on May 29th, a month earlier—the cover date was supposed to indicate to a retailer when to take a given issue off the racks and return its cover for credit. In the pattern of the series, this issue featured four self-contained Captain Marvel adventures, as well as a humor short featuring Captain Kid and a few other single and two-page features. Much of the art was done by Charles Clarence Beck, who had originated the visual look of the character—this particular issue also features contributions from Pete Costanza and writer William Woolfolk on the Captain Marvel material. But the Captain’s best days were still ahead of him, at least creatively, when Otto Binder joined the Fawcett Comics team. Binder would go on to write more than 50% of the Marvel canon across multiple titles, including CAPTAIN MARVEL JR., MARY MARVEL and MARVEL FAMILY.

Eventually, though, a combination of DC’s ongoing litigation and the controversy at the newsstand that had led to Senate subcommittee hearings on the link between comic books and juvenile delinquency caused publisher Fawcett to decide to get out of the field—they were making a fortune with their paperback book line and mainstream magazines already anyway. They settled with DC, agreeing to never again permit Captain Marvel or his family of characters to see the light of day again. This was a detente that lasted for two decades—until DC itself, in the form of publisher Carmine Infantino, negotiated with Fawcett to bring the characters back under the DC umbrella. This led, in time, to DC purchasing the characters outright, and eventually the Captain being decommissioned, referred to solely by the name of his magic word, SHAZAM! There has been some very good stories featuring the character and his crew since them, but nothing that truly tapped into the spark that had once made him the most popular super heroic character in comics by far.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

FLASHBACK was a quasi-event that Marvel staged in 1997 across the publishing line. It was the brainchild of writer Scott Lobdell, and the idea was that all of the books would rewind to before the beginning of the Marvel heroic age, telling stories of our characters set before they became super heroes. It wound up being the worst-selling event that we did in that decade—it turns out that fans wanted there to be super heroes in their super hero comics, who knew? But the throwback nature of the event did provide the opportunity for the more nostalgia-minded of us to have some fun, and we took full advantage of it.

I edited VENOM for several years in the 1990s, despite the fact that I had very little attachment to the character. That’s something that you’re going to need to be able to do if you want to be an editor in this business, work on titles for which you have only limited interest, The secret is in figuring out what it is that the people who like a given thing like about it, and being able to deliver more of that. I think my efforts on VENOM were haphazard at best—I don’t know that I ever cracked that code to the degree that would have allowed me to take advantage of it. Plus, the book was then being written by Larry Hama, and while Larry tended to be a bit of a seat-of-the-pants writer, he was always capable at coming across with material that was solid and professional.

Another wrinkle was that VENOM wasn’t set up as an ongoing series at all. Rather, during the period when Marvel was trying to wring every last dollar out of successful properties that it could, the decision was made to operate VENOM as a “series of limited series.” Which is to say, each storyline was a set number of issues, typically four, and then the book would start over again with a new subtitle and a new #1 issue. These days, that’s practically how everything operates, but in the 1990s, it seriously disrupted our ability to plan for subplots and single issue stories and the like—to say nothing of participating in events such as FLASHBACK.

The solution here was to schedule a VENOM one-shot to come out in the middle of some other VENOM limited series. VENOM: SEED OF DARKNESS was written by Len Kaminski, whom I’d known slightly before getting into the business as a friend-of-a-fiend. Len was one of those guys who had a lot of good ideas, but who could never completely get enough traction to elevate to the level of a big name writer. Probably the closest he came was while working on IRON MAN. Anyway, I liked the way Len thought, and he had done a VENOM arc for me at around this time, so I tapped him for this one-shot. Artwork was provided by former Bullpenner James Fry, with whom Len was tight. We were all fans of the pre-hero Jack Kirby monster comics, so we decided to make our VENOM issue into a pastiche of that sort of story. We introduced a new Kirby-style giant monster, Krobaa, to provide the necessary amount of black goo, and set reporter Eddie Brock on his trail in the manner of a civilian in one of those 60s stories. (Krobaa was certainly named after a crowbar, but not mine; I didn’t get my office crowbar until sometime in the mid-00s.)

As an added homage, because they were both such fans of the show, Len and James included an extremely thinly disguised pastiche of Carl Kolchak, and eponymous Night-Stalker of a short-lived and well-remembered television series in which he’d be drawn into stories involving the supernatural and unexplained. This story placed young Eddie Brock into similar circumstances, so at a key point he seeks out disgraced Daily Globe reporter “Cal Carlchok” for advice.

It turns out tha, after Eddie is able to defeat Krobaa with flashes from his camera’s flash bulb (which is so in line with one of those 60s monster stories that it hurts), the creature is revealed to be as much a victim as anybody else. It was really the hostility in the heart of the scientist that Krobaa had bonded with that caused the creature to run amok and harm other people—the true Krobaa was meant to be a peaceful explorer. More crucially, Eddie’s publisher Barney Bushkin refuses to run the story, despite Brock’s photographs, and so his big break doesn’t happen, increasing the underlying resentment that will eventually direct his transformation into Venom. It’s a pretty fun done-in-one story, and it saw print on May 29, 1997.

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Monofocus

Spent a portion of this week reading IDW’s latest release in their complete FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE library, volume six. I was a big fan of this strip while it was running, and cartoonist Lynn Johnston’s work has lost none of its charm over the years. It’s a slice-of-life strip, focusing on a Canadian family household, the Pattersons. While the strip worked when followed in the daily format, it gets really good when you stack up two or three years of it in a single sitting, as these volumes do. But volume six, Johnston has been continuing to age her cast in real time, and so the younger characters we’ve been following all throughout the run of the feature are graduating and heading out into the working world, while the central couple is beginning to encounter the difficulties of middle age. It’s a strip with a surprising amount of heart to it, especially when consumed in bulk. And the cartooning itself, the drawing, is just top-flight. The strip ended about 15 years ago now, and this volume takes us up to the late 1990s, so it seems like there must be two to three volumes remaining in the series.

In broadcast, this has been a week where I’ve spent more time finishing up shows that I started watching rather than sampling much of anything new. So a few quick hits: STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS has become a favorite in only four episodes. It’s the “purest” STAR TREK show in years, possibly since the original, in that it’s episodic and focused on the adventures of a single ship, the Enterprise, as she goes about her duties for Star Fleet in deep space. The writing has been good and the cast has been great. I’m also not so invested in the continuity of the original series to be bothered whenever the new show does something that in some manner violates something established way back then. Like at Marvel, at a certain point, the continuity is there to serve the stories, not the other way around.

Elsewhere, THE FUTURE DIARY has kept me hooked, with only one last week before the final three episodes drop. I think the thing I’ve enjoyed the most this season is just how good-natured everybody is. As I outlined a week or two back, this year, rather than a single couple, the production had set up two rival guys to vie for the attentions of the leading lady. But there were wrinkles beyond that: an episode or two in, Aki (who seemed to be slightly in the lead in terms of the interest of Moka) was given the task of playing cupid for her and his rival Koyo, and despite the fact that this is entirely against his own interests, he throws himself into the task whole-heartedly. What’s more, at a point where Koyo and Moka have taken a kayak to a remote island, Koyo is informed of the arrangement (he and Moka both had been kept in the dark about it) and given a limited amount of time to release Aki from this obligation, and Koyo SWIMS BACK TO SHORE WHILE TOWING THE KAYAK in order to do so in time. It’s utterly preposterous and utterly amazing all at once. We’ve reached the point in the narrative where the trio is going to be separated and Moka has to make a definitive choice between the two, and I find myself surprisingly invested in the outcome, for all that narratively the choice seems as though it can only go one way. (I mean, it’s got to be Aki, right?) All of this is delivered with a lack of drama-for-the-sake-of-drama. I love Japanese relationship shows like this one because they’re so removed from the style of their American counterparts. They’re more thoughtful and more honest (for all that they are every bit as emotionally manipulative as any reality-based show.)

The closest thing domestically is probably Netflix’s LOVE ON THE SPECTRUM, which just dropped a new season set in the U.S. rather than Australia as in years past. This one, too, made for enjoyable viewing, as a variety of different people, all of whom fall onto the Autism spectrum in one way or another, attempt to make connections and find romance. Again, this is all handled with a minimum of performance drama and an overabundance of understanding and respect. You have to love the purity of these folks, and cannot help but become involved in their struggles to deal with other people. I’ve suspected in recent years that I may be not on the spectrum so much as spectrum-adjacent, so there are a lot of moments in this show that hit close to home in one way or another.

Finally, I finished up the first season of SEVERANCE, which did an excellent job of ramping up tension while flipping over a few of its cards in its season finale. It’s one of those shows that can be uncomfortable to watch, so intense does it get psychologically—I found that, for myself, I couldn’t ever easily down two episodes in succession. I needed a palate-cleanser in-between. But it was singular, and created a sense of paranoia and disquiet that reminded me of the feeling of TWIN PEAKS back in the day a little bit.

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As always, thanks for all you do, keep your head up, and I’ll see you with more next week. And if you have anything that you’d like to know or ask me about, by all means leave a comment and I’ll endeavor to get to it. I could use all the help I can get here.

Tom B