#106: Splash the Zeros

It’s been a rough couple of days within the industry, with the passing of Ed Piskor and M.D. Bright (and outside of it, the loss of comedian Joe Flaherty). Piskor’s self-inflicted demise has in particular gotten all sort of people worked up, both in posthumous support for what he was going through and also upset that the zeitgeist of attention seems to be favoring him rather than the women he was reputedly inappropriate to. (And, of course, the screeching sound of so many who moved to try to monetize Piskor’s misfortune for their own financial gain rapidly scrubbing their YouTube Channels and social media histories lest they be caught with their pants down as the wind changes.) When something like this happens, it’s only natural to try to find some manner of meaning or purpose to thee events. That’s a very human reaction—we are comforted by patters, by the sense of an orderly universe that it being driven deliberately. But sometimes, there aren’t any such patterns and there aren’t any winners, only losers all around. This feels to me like one of those cases. Certainly those who liked Piskor and were close with him will feel his loss most tragically, and those who may have been mistreated by him may feel denied any sense of true justice. The whole mess is a tragedy, and I think trying to paint anybody on any side of it as the hero is maybe missing the point. It’s all just sad.

Which is all a pretty morbid way to begin one of these Newsletters, but I’m afraid it’s just the luck of the draw this time out. So with that preamble out of the way, let’s go ahead and dive into simpler topics, such as those readers asked about this past week:

Ducc

I noticed in the interview over on Den Of Geek that you stated that the mutants of the world *need* to go back to live among the humans again. The thing here is that From The Ashes is picking up from Fall of X, where Orchis was operating in every country hunting down mutants and were either deporting them to Arakko, forcefully depowering them or just simply placing them in gulags. All of this was being done while majority of humanity did pretty much nothing but let it happen. Prior to that, Judgment Day had humans en masse celebrating that the Eternals were declaring war on the mutants.

With solicitations of the Heir of Apocalypse miniseries confirming that Arakko is still going to be around, why exactly would (the majority of) mutants *need* to want to go back to live among humans again after such recent horrific events where they would once become "hated and feared" and not go live on the mutant planet?

A couple of things on this, Ducc. First off, you’re reacting to a not very wonderful summation of a slightly more nuanced conversation, so I can’t agree with your premise in specific. But getting at this question in general, first off I’d have to say that you’re jumping to a couple of conclusions about how events are going to play out across the final months of the Krakoa era. And I’m not going to want to close off any avenues for storytelling for the creators who are finishing those stories by ruling out any options.

But just for the sake of argument, assuming that Arakko is still around and that it hasn’t in some way been materially changed by the events of the Orchis War, the question remains: would the average mutant rather relocate to a far-off alien planet and culture rather than living in their birthplace? That question only gets heightened when you factor in that Orchis has been forcibly deporting mutants there all along. It strikes me as just a bit crazy for people to go, “Now that the conflict is over, you know what? I think I’ll exile myself just as the people who were trying to destroy my life wanted to do—and even to the same place!” Maybe that would make sense to certain individuals, but I can’t see it being a widespread position. No, I tend to think that most of the mutants involved would react similarly to how Ernie feels.

Christopher Krayer

For the X-Men relaunch, in the next year do you see any non-mutants being a part of the story line? Currently the only thing I'm reading X related is Iron Man, which has a perfect balance of a non-X hero playing in their part of the world. But going back to the 60s the best part of Marvel is the use of other characters in books and the development of supporting characters. I'm on the fence of coming back to the X-Men after 12 years off, and knowing there will be aspects of both will help reassure me.

Juggernaut is on the X-MEN line-up, Christopher—so mission accomplished!

Nacho Teso

I would LOVE if you could give us a glimpse into those spreadsheets. That's the kind of thing I'd love to see in the Marvel website, if that were possible.

In regards to second stints in titles by legendary creators, I'm loving what Dan Slott is doing with Spider-Man, Superior and Spider-Boy.

I can’t say that I think any good would come of us sharing all of those spreadsheets en masse, Nacho. All it would do is cause a whole bunch of fans who disagreed with our calculations in one way or another to have a rallying point that they could push against. But few are going to be convinced. Also, I don’t really consider either SUPERIOR SPIDER-MAN or certainly not SPIDER-BOY as Dan doing a second stint as a classic creator. In neither instance is he writing the main, driving AMAZING SPIDER-MAN series. You could maybe make an argument concerning SUPERIOR, but even then, it’s clear that Zeb is the one who is telling the central story of Peter Parker right now in ASM.

Lioo

Speaking of concurrently running series with common numbering, could you comment on why Avengers: No Road Home got the Avengers numbering? Was it simply to get #50 to a round legacy number? Was that a factor in the series even being approved?

And as for "second go-rounds", um. I think there is currently a certain writer finishing their second X-Men run that is quite popular. Also would you consider something like Grant Morrison on Batman, years after Arkham Asylum to go in this category?

The choice to include AVENGERS: NO ROAD HOME in the Legacy number count was purely mercenary, Lioo. I wanted to make it clear to readers that the events in that series were central and important to the Avengers mythos as a whole, and that it wasn’t merely a separate stand-alone limited series. Plus, I thought it might urge some longtime fans to pick it up in order to keep their numbering complete. And no, I don’t think that Grant Morrison on BATMAN counts, as again, ARKHAM ASYLUM was a one-off OGN and not the main BATMAN series. I think you make a better case for Kieron. But even there, Kieron isn’t doing X-MEN, he’s rather been doing other titles with X-MEN in the name—IMMORTAL X-MEN, for example.

Arthur

How are editors assigned specific characters/teams? Are you able to trade or hand-off characters or is it a little more complicated than that?

Another question, are more secondary characters, like Taskmaster, also given to specific editors? I know Taskmaster’s had his own miniseries in the last, but he’s normally not a title character (and if you know if Taskmaster’s going to be in anything soon are you able to share it with us)?

Individual editors are assigned titles by the Marvel hierarchy, starting with the Editor in Chief, Arthur. Within those titles, there are characters who are associated with that series, either because they debuted there or because they spent a long portion of their publishing history appearing in that title. And so the editor in question takes on oversight of those characters as well. So AVENGERS controls players such as Kang or Ultron. In the case of Taskmaster, I could make an argument that he’s also an AVENGERS character, having originated there and appeared often within its pages. I could probably win that argument, too—not because I’m necessarily right, but because I carry a decent amount of authority these days. But in general, I think we tend to think of Taskmaster as more of a floating character who moves between series—though most of those have still fallen under the purview of the AVENGERS/MARVEL HEROES office.

Jeff Ryan

Some people can draw an issue in a few weeks, others take a month or two. Do artists tell you what their speed is, or does everyone promise they can deliver monthly, the way auditioning actors all swear they know how to play a piano and ride a horse?

Most artists are not the best judges of their ability to produce, Jeff, as experience has taught us. And this is part of why we have an entire scheduling team dedicated to tracking individual artists’ productivity and managing their workflow from one assignment to the next. We tend to rely on data more than on promises—though in order to get data, you need to put artists onto assignments and see how they do under battlefield conditions.

Nacho Teso

Sorry for the second comment, but this is being an important topic this monday and I would like to know your opinion. Is Roy Thomas a co-creator of Wolverine? What specifics must be met to consider an editor as co-creator of a character?

Sorry, Nacho, but I chose your question about this situation to answer because it was short, as my answer is going to be. It isn’t really appropriate for me to discuss a situation such as this one publicly, especially while it is playing out. So I’m not going to be saying anything in regards to this either way.

Andres Felipe Galindo Olarte

1. How was the transition from the Avengers world to the X-Men world? Did you read every single comic in existence to develop your take on the new line?

2. What are your favorite and least favorite X-Men titles from the Krakoan Era of books?

3. What was the original pitch for Donny Cates' Ultimate Universe project before his accident?

1. The transition was relatively easy, Andres, at least as far as relinquishing the series I had been working on up to that point. Only time will tell if running the X-Books works out or not, but hopefully it will. And no, I didn’t go back and read or reread big swaths of earlier issues or anything. What I did do is take a look at the first issues in a number of big runs to see how they were approached; Chris Claremont and Jim Lee’s X-MEN #1, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s NEW X-MEN #114, Joss Whedon and John Cassaday’s ASTONISHING X-MEN #1 and Brian Bendis and Stuart Immonen’s ALL-NEW X-MEN #1.

2. I suspect that it’s probably too soon for me to say anything in this regard, as a bunch of those series are still running, sorry.

3. And it would also be wrong of me to disclose any ideas that Donny may have had for an ULTIMATE launch, as he may one day yet still be able to use them somewhere, whether at Marvel or elsewhere.

Clonegeek

Why exactly hasn't OMD been undone?

Because we don’t want to undo it, Clonegeek.

JV

In the late 90s Hulk relaunch under John Byrne and Ron Garney - is it true that Byrne submitted a plot that simply said 'Wolverine and Hulk fight"? Was he fired off the book?

Too bad as it was off to an interesting start (early hints that the Hulk may be responsible for casualties, mind control, return of Tyrannus, etc). I can see Byrne being obtuse about something like that though.

I tell you, JV, John and I have maintained a relatively stable detente concerning this situation, where neither of us has spoken about this situation in detail publicly. And even though it’s been decades, I can’t see any good reason to rock that boat. Sorry.

Sam C

I was reading this week's Venom, and in his goodbye on the letter's page Devin Lewis said he disagrees with you about Mission: Impossible. I gotta know, what's your Mission: Impossible hot take? Also, with the recent shuffle of the editorial staff, is there still only a Heroes, X, Spider-Man, and Star Wars office? Has there ever been an idea of adding a dedicated Magic office for instance?

I don’t know what it was that Devin said on that page, Sam, so I’m only guessing. But my hot take on that franchise is that it turned me off completely at the outset by turning the characters picked up from the original television series (who were played by different actors after the originals refused to go along with the storyline) into traitors and bad guys. That seemed incredibly disrespectful to me, and so I’ve never been able to invest in that franchise since then. I haven’t seen most of the later films, only the fourth one due to my love of director Brad Bird and the fifth one because other people were interesting in seeing it. I’m sure it’s a lovely franchise, but it’s not my Mission: Impossible. And there’s also an X-Office, of course, as well as a sort of quasi-Midnight Sons office of sorts that’s coming together.

Andy T

When Marvel publishes an Omnibus of a particular creative team’s run on a book - e.g. John Byrne’s FF - and continues to publish to the entire series from issue 1 in sequential Volumes 1,2,3 etc, would that creative team’s run get reprinted again in a numbered Volume when those issues come up?

I would expect so, Andy, yes. But if you’re talking about our Epic Collections, we tend to jump around within the run so as to release material that hasn’t been reprinted before, or reprinted much, rather than the same stuff over and over.

Jellyroll Papadopoulos

In “What The-?!” #1 (August 1988) Page 26 we have “Secret Wars III” written by Gwen Dibley. That name was mooted as one of the possible owners of the Flying Circus before Monty Python settled in, and is reportedly “a woman [Michael] Palin had read about in the newspaper, thinking it would be amusing if she were to discover she had her own TV show”, although John Cleese claims it was the name of 11-year old Palin’s music teacher. Back to the comic. Who was Gwen Dibley?

As revealed by editor Carl Potts in his blog a few years ago, Jellyroll, Gwen Dibley was Mark Gruenwald:

Maurizio Clausi

When I started reading comics, the covers revealed what we would read inside the book. Each cover showed a key event in the adventure we were about to read. Today the covers are mere pinups interchangeable with each other that do not remain in the memory. I understand the need to create the covers long before the interior for advertising reasons but don't you think we've lost something important all these years?

Well, Maurizio, tastes change as time marches on. And in the case of comic book covers, the entire distribution system has chanced as well. So whereas once publishers were competing for largely impulse buy purchases at candy and convenience stores, for the last several decades, the books have primarily been sold in specialty shops dedicated to a strictly comic book buying audience. And that audience as a whole takes their comic books very seriously. And part of that, for whatever reason, is the feeling that word balloons on covers tend to look juvenile, and cover copy of any sort tends to distract from the beauty of the artwork. Not everybody feels this way, but enough readers do that it skewed the approach to cover in that direction. Occasionally over the years, somebody has experimented with trying to attract a greater audience by doing more story-specific cover situations or more cover copy and so forth. And inevitably, those books don’t sell as well as you might like them to.

Mason Tripp

just wondering about Marvel's original graphic novel idea in 2013ish maybe? I remember Ellis and McKone did an Avengers book and Remender had Rage of Ultron which I enjoyed. Just wondering if there were more ideas that didn't pan out, it seemed like it was going to be a new thing with Marvel doing OGN but I don't recall much after it was announced 

We did four such OGNs in total, Mason. In addition to the two AVENGERS ones, there was also a SPIDER-MAN release and an X-MEN release. But the plain fact of the matter is that it’s difficult to underwrite the cost of producing the material in an OGN format, even with the higher sales price. It became apparent that we would be better off releasing those stories in serialized form first and then collecting them rather than trying to sell them all at once as OGNs. Maybe we’ll try this again at some point, but back then, the fiscals simply didn’t warrant doing more.

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Behind the Curtain

.While I won’t share all of these with you as I told Nacho a few paragraphs back, I did pull up one spreadsheet entry detailing the calculations for the Legacy numbering so that you can get a tase as to how it’s done.

This particular sheet dates to the beginning of the recent Jason Aaron and Ed McGuinness launch of AVENGERS in 2018—it’s that book that’s listed as taking up #691-715 here. But of course, that’s not quite how things played out, as AVENGERS: NO ROAD HOME #1-10 wound up also carrying central Legacy numbers. Today, we’ll see that on the spreadsheet as well.

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Pimp My Wednesday

Only one book again this time, though it’s a bit of a special issue.

Everybody involved in the making of FANTASTIC FOUR #19 threw themselves into embodying the noir sensibility of the story material dreamed up by writer Ryan North. That includes cover artist Alex Ross, who not only pained the cover but also redesigned the book’s logo and did all of the typography for the piece as well. And Carlos Gomez and Jesus Aburtov delivered the interior artwork using a striking limited palate that helps to sell the environment. So this one’s got a bit more extra love baked into it—hope you enjoy it this Wednesday!

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A Comic Book On Sale 25 Years Ago Today, April 7, 1999

TOM STRONG was the flagship title of the AMERICA’S BEST COMICS, or ABC, line of titles published by Wildstorm. ABC was Alan Moore’s imprint at Wildstorm. For much of the decade, Alan has been doing work for one or another of the Image partners, typically on properties that they owned such as SPAWN or SUPREME or YOUNGBLOOD. He was about to embark on a reinvention of Rob Liefeld’s series GLORY and was in talks about doing more SUPREME and YOUNGBLOOD when Rob’s company of the time, AWESOME, ran out of capital and shut down. Sensing and opportunity and having seen the good notices SUPREME was getting, Jim Lee offered Alan a deal to do his own line under his umbrella. But before that line could get off the ground, Lee did a deal of his own: he sold Wildstorm to DC Comics. Lee personally flew to Alan’s home in the UK to tell him about the deal and to assure him that he’d have no contract from and face no interference from DC’s personnel. Alan had been burned by DC on WATCHMEN and other projects and wanted nothing to do with them. But with everything already in place, he rolled the dice once again and proceeded working on AMERICA’S BEST COMICS. The line was deliberately designed to be something of a refutation of the sort of comics Moore had produced in the 1980s. Rather than deconstruction, he was instead looking to emulate the parts of vintage comic series that had fired his imagination as a young reader. Tom Strong, the lead character, was an adventurer decidedly in the mold of pulp hero Doc Savage, who was himself a progenitor of Superman. (On this first cover, artist Alex Ross evokes Joe Shuster’s figure from the cover to SUPERMAN #1 in the pose of Tom, a subtle homage.) Like Savage, Tom had been raised almost from birth by his scientist father to achieve the pinnacle of physical and mental perfection. He was the most prominent of what Moore coined “Science Heroes”, his equivalent of super heroes. Artist Chris Sprouse gave the series a clean, slick, attractive look that was very appealing. The title ran for 36 issues, and spun out a number of related series such as TOM STRONG’S TERRIFIC TALES and TERRA OBSCURA. But eventually, angered by small bit of what he felt was interference on the part of DC, Moore shut the entire imprint down in 2006. The entire ABC line was imaginative and inventive, evidencing Moore’s command of formalism and his adept use of language. They’re definitely back issues worth seeking out.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

The first issue of AVENGERS: THE ORIGIN came out on April 7, 2010, and the series was written by Joe Casey and illustrated by Phil Noto. I had previously done two other throwback AVENGERS projects with Joe: EARTH’S MIGHTIEST HEROES with Scott Kolins and EARTH’S MIGHTIEST HEROES II with William Rosado. Both had turned out well, though the second series wasn’t quite as good as the first. Nevertheless, with the first AVENGERS film coming, there was room in our publishing schedule for some relevant ancillary Avengers projects. I hit upon the notion of producing a longer and more involved (and more modern ) look at the formation of the team, expanding the original story from its initial 23 pages to five whole issues. Phil Noto had around this time done a couple of illustrations for fun depicting assorted Marvel heroes as they would look in an overtly 1960s setting, doing them as faux LIFE Magazine covers and so forth. So he seemed a good choice to illustrate the series and to bring it some distinctiveness. His painterly approach also helped to separate it from typical comic book releases. Like EMH and EMH2 before it, AVENGERS: THE ORIGIN attempted to justify some of the more bizarre and inexplicable storytelling decisions made in the original story, such as the Hulk somehow deciding to pose as a robot clown employed by a traveling circus. In doing so, I think we just replaced 1963 nonsense with nonsense of the 21st Century variety, and I don’t know that our version of events is truly any more plausible. But it’s a solid retelling of the classic origin, and a story that can be read and enjoyed by anybody regardless of how little they may know about the Avengers. On the other hand, today the book might seem perplexing to audience members who first encountered the Avengers in film, as the movie incarnation had a a completely different audience. Still, this was a fun book to produce.

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Chasing the Dragon

MAGE by Matt Wagner was a favorite series of mine when it was first coming out throughout the early 1980s. I had the good fortune of having been there from the start, having been an early supporter of publisher COMICO as I had corresponded a little bit with one of the company’s founders, Gerry Giovinco. MAGE: THE HERO DISCOVERED was intended as the first series in a trilogy that would chart the full life story of its lead character, Kevin Matchstick. What’s even more incredible is that, even though it took decades, Wagner made good on his plans, completing MAGE: THE HERO DEFINED in the late 1990s and early 2000s and then MAGE: THE HERO DENIED in the mid-late 2010s. Altogether, it’s a staggering piece of work, though the later sequels aren’t quite as visceral and effective as that first series. Then again, that could simply be my age talking. In any event, MAGE is the story of Kevin Matchstick, a Philadelphia college student who is based visually on Wagner himself and who learns after an encounter on the street with the World-Mage Mirth that he is a foredestined champion in the eternal struggle between light and darkness. MAGE was a mythic fantasy with a patina of super hero comics draped over it. Nobody in the series wears costumes per se, but Matchstick is inevitably clad in his black and white lightning bolt T-Shirt, and the other heroes who eventually appear also carry similar iconography upon their person. Wagner was a crackerjack artist who only got better and better as he produced each issue, and his work took a quantum leap forward when Sam Keith came on to ink it partway through that first series. But Wagner’s real strength was as a writer, and he was one of the most underrated writers of the 1980s and 1990s. He produced a variety of different titles and series, both creator-owned and for major companies, all of which were literate, all of which were worth reading. But MAGE featured his most stripped down writing—Wagner leaned on the book’s visual component to do a lot of the heavy lifting for much of its run. The series was collected into three oversized volumes by DONNING/STARBLAZE in the late 1980s, in the same format as their ELFQUEST collections. This made MAGE one of the few comics that you could share with non-readers and that they’d take seriously, because they were legitimate books. And MAGE had a great way of mixing the mystical with the mundane: Matchstick’s weapon for much of the series is a baseball bat that carries the essence of Excalibur, and he’s almost killed by an enchanted staple gun. That mixture of the mythological and the mundane was really the key to MAGE’s narrative success. And the fact that the series’ three incarnations paralleled Wagner’s own life and growth made for fun parallels as well. Wagner’s wife and family are fictionalized along the way to join Kevin in his later adventures, making the whole series feel very personal somehow. When I relaunched THOR for HEROES RETURN in the late 1990s, I desperately wanted to get Wagner to write it—I thought he’d do a superlative job in mixing the Asgardian with the ordinary. Sadly, Matt was committed to other projects at that moment, and so I had to look elsewhere. But I’ve always regretted not having the opportunity to do more work with him than an occasional piece here or there. Perhaps someday.

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Blind Item

At a certain point, I inherited a mainline Marvel hero title after its previous editor left staff to take a new job elsewhere. The book had been a strong seller for many years, and had just been relaunched with a new big ticket creative team that included a superstar writer. This writer had been a controversial figure in certain quarters for his strongly-held beliefs concerning how the various Marvel characters should be depicted, but he was incredibly popular and held in high esteem despite having also been at the center of a number of difficulties over the years. I was a fan of both the writer and the artist, and I came onto the series determined to give them a good experience—the writer had clashed with editors in the past, I knew, but I wasn’t going to be one of them. His viewpoint and my own weren’t all that different, and I figured that I could establish a relationship of trust and work through any difficulties reasonably.

This outlook was put to the test almost immediately as I went over the materials that were passed to me. On the schedule already was an Annual, which the writer intended to use in part to retell the origin of the main character. No immediate problem there, right? Not so fast! Because in this retelling, due to the passage of time, the writer felt that it was necessary to update certain elements of the origin in order to make them make sense to the readers of today. Now, I was a lot more orthodox in my continuity in those days, and I found that I didn’t like or agree with a number of the alterations that the story intended to make. Some of them made certain other stories no longer work in continuity, and others added elements that I thought weren’t really warranted. So I called up the writer and expressed my reservations to him. We had a decent back-and-forth conversation about all of this, in the course of which I convinced him of absolutely nothing. He was determined to produce his revised origin just the way that he had laid it out.

Now I had a choice to make. It was well within my authority as the editor to demand that changes be made, but doing so was likely to cause the writer to exit the project, and might cost the series its artist as well, since he was there in part to work with the writer. So in the end, rationalizing that the story had already been tacitly approved by the editor who had left, I allowed it to stand. The one minor thing I did do was to add a bit of cover copy to the book. The writer in question was simultaneously revising the early stories of another character in a way that wasn’t being universally embraced, so I gave this Annual the same subheading as that other project to tie them together as a piece.

Years later, I was told by a mutual friend of both myself and the writer was that this was the moment where he decided that I was a pushover and that he could do as he pleased. Which perhaps explains how the series ran as we did further issues. We were always operating close to the wire, the writer had a bunch of other commitments and wasn’t always 100% on top of the deadlines on my book. Additionally, the direction he wanted to take things in was at times rubbing up against my own personal aesthetic. In other words, I didn’t always love the storytelling choices being made, and I argued them back as they came up, but I made very little headway.

This all came to a head over a two-part crossover that we set up with another book. It was a key anniversary, and to celebrate it, we had arranged for the characters involved to share an adventure once again. Our book would produce the lead-in chapter, and then the other book would do the finale and wrap-up. But this meant that the plot in question needed to be vetted not only by myself but also by the editors of the other title. Consequently, as the schedule grew tighter for everyone, I called up the writer and left a message on his answering machine imploring him to get the plot turned around rapidly, as we’d need to get the necessary sign-offs on it before we could proceed.

A word here about the writer’s answering machine. It had two separate similar messages on it, one that would play when the phone wasn’t picked up, typically when no one was at home, and another that would play when the recipient was on the other line or when the phone had deliberately been left off the hook. After you’d called his number enough times, you would innately be able to identify which message was which. This is a small detail that will be relevant later on.

So a few days go by, and then I receive a call from the artist, who is upset. Apparently, he’s just gotten off the phone with the writer, who has instructed him to draw half an issue’s worth of battle between the lead character and the guest star from the other series. And the artist is upset because he feels that he should be getting paid for a portion of the plot if he’s going to have to come up with all of the specific details of what is going on. I tell the artist that there’s a bigger problem, which is that I don’t know anything about this plan at all, and that I can’t clear a mindless fight scene of that length in a book that other people also need to sign off on.

So I take off at this point for a walk around the block to clear my mind. And I ask myself why I’m working so hard to make things comfortable for a creator who is doing nothing but making the situation harder and who isn’t showing me any basic respect. I return to the office and make a beeline for the EIC’s office, where I tell him that I’m going to fire the writer in question. The EIC has no objection to this, so I call the writer up, getting his answering machine. Now, the phone message indicates that he’s at home, and is either on the phone or screening his calls. So I make a couple of other attempts to get through to him throughout the remainder of the day, all with the same result. At this point, I figure that he’s simply not going to pick up, and I do what I have to do. I call back again, explain my grievances on the answering machine, and tell him that he’s off the book. This is a crummy, cowardly way to fire somebody, it’s always best to speak to them directly, to metaphorically look them in the eye and do what needs to be done. But I didn’t feel like I had another option and I didn’t want the situation to drag on another day. So that’s all on me.

In the end, the writer of the other series wound up filling in on that issue of the crossover, and then I worked with the artist to line up a replacement writer who could bring the ongoing storyline to a somewhat satisfying conclusion while we worked out who would take the series over on a permanent basis. Close to a week later, I received an e-mail from the writer expressing with outrage that he had tried to do what I had asked for and get the issue underway, and that I had somehow cast him as the bad guy and fired him as a result. I didn’t see any reason to respond to that communication—I didn’t think there was any point in litigating the blame on a situation that was already resolved. But ultimately, the failure here is on me—because it’s always the responsibility of the editor.

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The Deathlok Chronicles

Once again, we start off with the thoughts of DEATHLOK co-writer Gregory Wright:

Gregory Wright

I never knew Denys was upset by the Guice cover...I always loved that he inked it! It's interesting to me that he felt under the shadows of Guice...who ditched us, lol...and Denys SAVED us! This was the first time I got to work with John Hebert, but not the last! Got him some work in the Punisher office with me and did a bunch of coloring jobs over him. We've stayed friends for years and swap all kinds of "stories" not fit for print. Even though it was a "fill-in" issue, I wanted to try to establish our own villains. As it turns out that was really a good fill in to use at this point since we had had so many guest stars. Mainframe was ours, and I had hoped to make Ben Jacob's in his armor something more as well. I do think we should have focused more on creating our own villains and supporting cast.

I suspect that you’re probably right that we should have spent more time and effort establishing our own villains and supporting characters earlier on. By the time we really began to delve into that, it was too late.

DEATHLOK #9 was the first half of a two-part story guest-starring Ghost Rider—we were clearly front-loading the series with every popular character we could get our hands on in an attempt to guarantee sales. This, ultimately, was probably a bad idea, as we weren’t expending enough energy to establish our series and what it was. The stories were fine, but they often felt as though we were borrowing too much from other places.

But the big thing that began to become apparent here was the difficulty with Denys Cowan. In retrospect, it is pretty clear that Denys was much more engaged working on the stories that Dwayne was writing than the ones Greg was doing. And that makes sense. Dwayne was approaching the character from the perspective of an adult black man of that era, and so that approach likely spoke to Denys on a more personal level. Certainly, the work he and Dwayne later did at Milestone Media was an extension of that selfsame sort of an approach. I suspect that Denys was a bit bored working on Greg’s stuff. He still approached it like a professional, still gave it a solid effort, but there was a spark missing, and we began to sense it by this point.

In order to try to keep his interest level high, Denys at this point began to experiment with his style. At the time, Frank Miller had made a big splash with his new graphic approach in the SIN CITY strip that he had just started in DARK HORSE PRESENTS. Influenced by Frank’s daring, Denys began to apply a similar approach to his own pages, which were suddenly awash in greater and greater percentages of spotted blacks. Which was a perfectly legitimate thing to do. However, the flavor of the moment at the time was the more line-driven styles of creators such as Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee and Todd McFarlane. They were what popular, commercial comic book artwork looked like at the time, and what Cowan was doing was almost the antithesis of that. It was bold stuff, but it scared the crap out of me. Denys also had an individual sense of what made technology look cool. He started adding rivets to Deathlok’s faceplate, which made Greg a little bit crazy as there wasn’t any call for them. I can remember half-heartedly trying to get him to eliminate them, and him insisting to me that they looked cool. I didn’t have the backbone yet to insist on my way as the editor, so the rivets stayed.

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Monofocus

Inspired by my rewatch of the anime ZIPANG and my continued reading of the manga it was based on (in French, which makes it slow going on my part) I was inspired to pull out a film with a similar premise that I had first seen when it premiered in 1980: THE FINAL COUNTDOWN. It’s an enjoyable and fast-paced movie whose biggest failing is that it doesn’t do enough with its premise. It stars Kirk Douglas as the Captain of the nuclear carrier the U.S.S. Nimitz. A freak weather event while the ship is out on maneuvers somehow transports it backwards in time to December 6, 1941, the day before the Japanese war machine sneak attacked Pearl Harbor. As the crew works out where and when they are, the question looms: Can and should they use the power of the weapons that they possess from forty years in the future to destroy the Japanese fleer, thus preventing the attack? Martin Sheen plays a civilian auditor for the Department of Defense who happens to be on board during these events, and he’s the voice pushing for action—especially once the Nimitz accidentally saves the life of a man who was meant to be killed, an important Senator who likely would have been FDR’s running mate in 1942 and then succeeded him as President upon his death. In the end, though, the film chickens out, returning the Nimitz to the present before the foe can be engaged and thus sidestepping the moral quandary altogether. This may be why I find ZIPANG so appealing, it doesn’t pull its punches in this manner and it diverts from the written history often spectacularly. THE FINAL COUNTDOWN, by contrast, almost feels like a commercial for the U.S. Navy with its long sequences showcasing ships and planes in the field. If you like that sort of thing—and I found it appealing as a boy-0-then the movie will work for you. If not, then it may prove to be a slog, even though it does wrap up with a nice little TWILIGHT ZONE-style end beat that I found just as effective this viewing.

Not too much to say about the second season of PHYSICAL 100, which I watched on Netflix. As before, it pits a variety of athletes, weightlifters, wrestlers and health experts from all fields in a series of elimination competitions to determine who has the overall most powerful and adaptable physique. It’s pretty fun, in that the competitions themselves are pretty wild. Of particular note, despite the fact that this is a Korean show, is that an enormous competitor is quickly nicknamed Thanos by the cast, and an eventual team of all-stars is routinely called the Avengers. It shows just how global these characters have now become.

I also caught up on the second half of the second season of INVINCIBLE, including its dynamite final episode. It’s a pretty great adaptation/remix of the very good comic series by Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley. While the show, like the comic, is overtly extremely violent, I really loved the fact that the episode took a considerable amount of time having the lead character struggle with that violence, struggle with the fact that he momentarily lost control and did something horrific. That’s a greater level of self-awareness than this sort of material often gets and it’s one of the things that makes the series stand apart. Also fun, of course, was to see a couple of bits from the one Invincible story I worked on adapted in altered form. The production obviously couldn’t use Spider-Man in the show, so they created their own similar arachnid hero, which worked well enough (especially since he was voiced by Josh Keaton, who had played Spider-Man in the SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN cartoon a few years ago.)

And I also tuned in for the first episode of the final season of STAR TREK DISCOVERY, which I liked well enough even as it moves further and further into the realm of implausibility. I’m sorry, I don’t care how far in the future we are now, I simply cannot buy that a person in a magnetized suit can cling to the outer hull of a spacecraft traveling at warp speed without being reduced to a greasy smear. DISCOVERY often feels to me like the TREK show that really wants to be a STAR WARS show, with seedy watering holes and land speeder bikes and the sort of grungy technology that universe is known for. It isn’t unwatchable, but it definitely rankles my suspension of disbelief a lot more regularly than it probably ought to. probably for the best that this particular series is being retired after this season.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about a famous Planned Parenthood comic featuring THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN VS THE PRODIGY

And five years ago, I wrote about the Minor Mysteries of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #8.

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And that’ll be a wrap, everyone! See you for more next time!

Hat’s All, Folks!

Tom B