#107: Disrespectful Font

So events are moving steadily towards the launch of our new line of X-titles, and at the top of this week, we released pre-teasers for the three books that we then gave out additional information about during the week: PHOENIX, X-FORCE and NYX. The response to these pre-teasers was pretty interesting, both positive and negative. But there was one comment that was made that was so delightful that I’ve been talking about it ever since. I’m not sure who said it, or where on my assorted social feeds it was that I saw it. But it made its impact, it’s point of view and its complaint being so very singular. I genuinely do love it.

These new launch books were going to be terrible, the person opined. And the clear evidence of this fact?

In our pre-announcement graphics, we had used a Disrespectful Font.

I’m sure that you’re wondering what a Disrespectful Font entails. I mean, it’s not as though we issued these things in Comics Sans or something. I was momentarily perplexed by that question, too, but the poster in question elucidated his opinion further.

It was a Disrespectful Font because the font was yellow on a black background. These were the formative X-Men colors, hearkening back to the very first issue, and they sent the clear and unmistakable message that this new run would be eliminating all traces of Krakoa and its many evolutions for mutantkind completely, erasing them from history, nay, from existence! Back we would go, to the days of Professor X demerits and battles with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and a cast of entirely white, entirely straight characters.

Now, that’s a lot of narrative weight to put onto a font. I only wish we gave that much thought to our promotional efforts. But the more I thought about this strange phrase, the more I came to a singular revelation:

The font was being scapegoated!

It wasn’t the font’s fault that it was filled with that color, nor that it had been positioned against a black square. The font was innocent, it was being held accountable for a situation not of its own making! If anything, these were Disrespectful Colors, having nothing to do with the font upon which they were played out.

But that’s how it goes in the culture wars! One slip, one instance of being seen in the wrong place at the wrong time, and you are forever branded a heretic, an offender, a collaborator even. No coming back from that in the court of public opinion. That sad font is forever tarnished by association, forever to be equated with the expunging of everything great about the X-Men and a return to mediocrity and the world of the 1960s.

We used a Disrespectful Font. I love it.

Elsewhere, along similar thematic lines, this past Friday we sent our very last AVENGERS-related title to the printer, AVENGERES TWILIGHT #6. So I have officially brought a close to 26 years as the AVENGERS editor. From now on, it’s all mutants all the time, for good or ill (and likely a bit of both.)

And as I said above, we released a bunch more information about the initial spear-tip of the titles we’ll be releasing. You really have no idea of what else is to come, nor the wide span of tones and styles and genres and approaches we’re going to attempt to cover. Every book different, for all that they all exist simultaneously in the same continuity! Every title its own thing! I know that it’s folly to fall in love with your own stuff, and that some of these projects are going to fail to find an audience and going to have to be suspended at some point. But right now, it feels like an unlimited vista opening up in front of us, brimming with possibility and purpose. I mean, just look at these cover mock-ups. We first set them up a few weeks ago, and I keep looking at them. Nothing against the past few years or anything, but these look like X-Books to me, in a primal and foundational way.

I’d read them. Hope you agree!

Also, with everybody on Earth seemingly having gone crazy for the latest episode of X-MEN ‘97 (which I saw weeks ago and couldn’t talk to anybody about!) it’s perhaps worth pointing out that we’re approaching the Final Order Cutoff for a new collection of X-MEN ADVENTURES, the comic book tie-in to the original X-MEN animated show from the 1990s. So however you get your books, from your local comic shop or a book dealer, now would be the time to get your order in. Here’s a bunch of solicit information to help guide you on your journey:

ISBN 9781302958701

ON SALE 7/2/2024

FOC 4/22/2024

The classic comic based on the beloved X-Men animated series from the 90s!

Exploding from your TV screen! The iconic X-MEN: THE ANIMATED SERIES thrilled fans in the 1990s and defined the X-Men for an entire generation.

And their small-screen adventures, inspired by the X-Men’s classic storylines, were adapted into comic-book form as well! Cyclops, Jean Grey, Storm, Wolverine, Rogue, Gambit, Beast, Jubilee and Morph are Professor X’s uncanny X-Men — ready to battle threats including Sabretooth, the Juggernaut and Magneto, Master of Magnetism!

But when the mutant-hunting robotic Sentinels attack, one of the team will pay the ultimate price! Plus: The X-Men battle the misunderstood Morlocks — and, from the far future, comes the freedom-fighting soldier called Cable!

COLLECTING: X-Men Adventures (1992) 1-8

All right, enough with the preamble! Let’s get into the meat of the thing by addressing some of your questions from this week just past:

Joe West

Question: you said last year that there was a deficit of viable Black male characters in the X-line, and looking at the rosters of the three core X-Men books of From The Ashes, it doesn’t seem like much is being done to fix that. The Krakoan era gave such a major spotlight to so many Black male mutants, most notably Synch, Bishop, Sunspot and Manifold. Will we see any Black male mutants in the other announced books like X-Force and X-Factor? Are unannounced books in the works featuring them?

You likely know a little bit more now than you did then, Joe. And my answer here is going to be Yes, but No. Which is to say that we’re certainly going to see more characters of color in the X-Titles, both those that have been announced already and the ones that haven’t. But that said, I do still think that we face a deficit of Black male characters within the line, and that’s something that we’ll be looking to address as we move forward. I’ve put that challenge to the X-Writers and it’s already resulted in some changes to our upcoming planning. But like with any other demographic you might mention, the difficulty is always that you can’t be all things to all people all the time. Our first and most important goal is to tell stories and entertain, and that’s always going to take the number one priority. So we still have work to do in this regard. But we’re aware of it and trying to take steps.

Nick

I know the answer to this is probably ‘you can’t say yet’ but does the x-office have any further plans for R.B Silva? I really think he’s one of Marvels best talents and I absolutely love his take on the characters.

You know I can’t tell you about stuff ahead of time, Nick. But I will say that RB is working on a project in my office right this moment. But it isn’t for an X-Title…

Mark

You probably won't want to answer this but all time great artist, Greg Capullo is heavily rumored to be drawing the wolverine book. Is there any truth to this?

Like I told Nick, Mark, I’m not going t be announcing anything before we’re ready. But I will tell you definitively that Greg isn’t drawing the regular WOLVERINE series.

Alex Dee

what brought about the recently-announced solo books for Storm and Phoenix? With the X-line usually focusing on team books aside from a select few characters who can carry a solo with a bit of longevity, I'm curious if Storm and Phoenix were something creators pitched or if you and your editorial team felt they were something the X-line was lacking maybe?

Both STORM and PHOENIX were my doing, Alex, at least in terms of them being put forward as projects that I wanted to do. And they’re only the tip of the iceberg in terms of stuff going forward. The X-Line has a huge diversity of characters, many of whom, I believe, should be able to headline a series. Plus, past a certain point a lot of the X-Team books have started to feel a bit like five random mutant characters who happened to be standing near one another thrown together as a team. It’s all inevitably going to come down to how well stuff sells, of course, but I think i can confidently say that you’ll be seeing a lot more solo titles beyond STORM and PHOENIX in the new X-Line moving forward—certainly more than have been historically attempted.

JV

I saw on your blog that you were a fan of the 80s era (Wolfman/Perez) Teen Titans - I'm interested in your thoughts on what made the series work. And what you thought of the post Perez era, the Perez return era, and how long did you keep reading the title and why?

In response to an earlier discussion I find Perez' return to the series (baxter issue 50 led to some classic stories but was too short. Giffen's return to Legion 50 also was great in my opinion.

NEW TEEN TITANS was just about my favorite series in the early 1980s, JV. And what made the series work back then, beyond the talents of Marv Wolfman and George Perez, was the fact that it was really the first DC series to have the feel of a Marvel title of the era, while still maintaining its DC roots. So it was a really good synthesis of the best of both companies’ approaches. A lot of that came down to both George’s artwork and the investment he had in both the characters and the plotting. Without him, and especially while dealing with the burnout of having done CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, Marv teetered a little bit and a lot of what had made the series so special was lost, even with decent artists such as Eduardo Baretto and the great Jose Luis Garcia Lopez. George’s return was welcome, though a bit too limited, unfortunately. And thereafter, the series is a mixed bag all the way to the end, with ill-equipped editors often pushing the series in unworkable directions and making poor choices intended to appeal to the Image crowd, and so forth. The utter destruction of that property is a real tragedy—that book should have been bedrock-solid, and yet it was cancelled during a period when you could sell just about anything. That takes some effort.

Leigh Hunt

If nothing else, I find this place a decent place for comics news as I had no idea about the Wolverine thing. For regular comics news away from Marvel, where do you go for the latest/best coverage? Or do you just hear about things from internal chatter?

I tell you, Leigh, I wish there were some centralized place that I could turn for good and accurate comic book news. But all of what were once reliable sites online have turned into hacky click-bait factories of one sort or another, and nobody has stepped up to fill what I think is a definite voice—at least not in a way that I find appealing to my sensibilities.

Jeff Ryan

Neil Gaiman has said that early in his career one of his most exciting moments was writing lines for Batman. It was one thing to write assorted comics that got into press, but another thing to help write Batman, a character everyone knew. Did you have a similar moment early on in your career: "whoa, now I'm REALLY working at Marvel since I got to help make a SPIDER-MAN/HULK/SPEEDBALL comic!"

Not really, Jeff, not to the extent that Neil talks about. I did once write an issue of FANTASTIC FOUR UNLIMITED and was astonished to discover just how easy I found it to get into the voices of the assorted characters, so closely had I read them over the years. So that’s probably the closest. And certainly, getting to edit FANTASTIC FOUR was always a pinnacle goal, and one that I’ve since accomplished—but it took me something like a dozen years to get there, so it wasn’t really formative in the sense that you’re speaking about.

Adam

Marvel just released teases for the next three X-books (X-Force, Phoenix, and NYX). The Phoenix logo, I realized, is actually from the Ultraverse book Phoenix Resurrection, not from the regular Marvel book. I know the regular Phoenix logo comes from from 2018 Phoenix Resurrection book (and it was used in Phoenix Song: Echo) and you wanted to specifically use older logos from the '80s and '90s, so was this a deliberate choice? It's just weird to see any Ultraverse references these days.

Also, I know you don't want to give away any plot details, but it does sound like this is a cosmic book, which is a fascinating way to use Jean Grey and the Phoenix. Did you set out do a variety of different genres, much like Dawn of X had done, or was this a pitch someone sent you that you just really liked?

That PHOENIX logo isn’t exactly the one from PHOENIX RESURRECTION, Adam, though it was built from that as inspirational source material. As with the rest of the logos in our line, we looked over what had been done in the past and selected the versions that spoke to us the most directly, and which looked good sitting together as a group. In the case of PHOENIX, that logo choice was made by series editor Annalise Bissa, though I supported it. And it doesn’t have any particular connection to the ULTRAVERSE in this use, in case you were maybe thinking that. And yes, PHOENIX will be a bit of a cosmic book, which is where I always thought the character would work best and what I wanted to see way back in the day. As I told Alex above, part of our design is to make each X-title special and unique, with a greater emphasis on solo series. So doing a PHOENIX book came from me, but the actual guts of the series were conceived by Stephanie Phillips and Alessandro Miracolo with Annalise.

Kevin F

Are you aware of the ongoing issue surrounding review copies of upcoming X-Books being shared and leaked among fans, leading to the dissemination of spoilers on Twitter as early as Monday? This problem has persisted for months, with advance copies being shared among voluntary reviewers for specific comic book websites, and subsequently being circulated among wider circles. As a result, spoilers, panels, and even full pages are often shared online prematurely. Given this trend, what are your thoughts on the matter and what steps, if any, is Marvel considering to address it?

I’m aware of the generalities of what you’re talking about, Kevin, although I think you’re looking in the wrong area for an explanation. We don’t send physical review copies to anybody. Where most of the spoilers tend to come from is when shops get their shipments of the week’s books, which typically happens on Monday and occasionally over the weekend, allowing those with access to them to grab copies and scan or photograph spoiler images. The problem with fixing this, of course, is that the only way to do so would be to crack down hard on the people who are selling our books, and that’s a self-defeating strategy for the most part. So when we learn about this sort of violation, we’ll take steps against it—but it’s exceedingly difficult to absolutely trace these leaks back to a singular source with enough evidence to do something about it. Welcome to the world of instantaneous communication.

Evan “Cool Guy”

do you have any pets?

Well, Dan Slott, but I don’t know if that really counts.

Stuart Perks

Reading the current run of Immortal Thor where Roxxon has acquired Marvel Comics I am curious if fictionalised versions of other comic publishers have ever been referenced within the Marvel Universe. I expect there are legal problems or trademark violations naming them outright but is a nice thought that perhaps there is that one copy of Astro City drawn by Steve Rogers that I have yet to read.

This isn’t something that I can recall us doing a whole lot of, Stuart, outside of crossover situations like AMALGAM and the like. But the one I can recall involves a thinly-disguised version of DC’s Jenette Kahn attempting to make a deal with the now-exonerated Spider-Man to do a comic book in which he battled Leon Spinks—a reference to the SUPERMAN VS MUHAMMAD ALI Treasury which was then coming out.

Matthew Perpetua

I have been using the digital codes on Marvel books for as long as you've been running this promotion, well over a decade now. Recently there was a switch so that some issues will have codes you can put in to be redeemed, and others will ask you to send a photograph of the issue you bought to customer service in return for the code. There's no real pattern to this - some issues of a series will be one way and then one issue will arbitrarily be the other. What is up with this change, and is there any explanation to which issues go the customer service way? Maybe something to do with some printers not having the peel-off sticker option?

You know, I’m not certain myself, Matthew. But I’d guess that you’re right in that it may be due to certain printers not being equipped to handle the sticker option.

Pierre Navarre

Any update about the Avengers variant cover celebrating your 26 years run as Avengers editor ?

I’ll tell you about it the week before it goes on sale in this very space, Pierre! It’s dumb!

Joe Vitale

Would love to know your reaction to episode 5 of Xmen ‘97: “Remember It”. Social media reaction has rightly so been positive. Amazing piece of work.

Kind of dealt with this up above, Joe. I generally try to stay mum on the assorted Marvel Studios output for two reasons: 1) I tend to get to see a lot of this stuff earlier than the general public, and so it can be difficult to keep straight what has been released yet and what hasn’t, and 2) There’s no real willing. If I say that I like something, fans just say that I’m shilling for the company. And if I talk about not liking something, then I’m kinda crapping where I eat, and there’s no point in that. But all of that having been said, I’ve been enjoying the hell out of X-MEN ‘97 from the jump—and Episode 5 is clearly the strongest episode so far. To point to something that maybe people in general aren’t focused on about it, some of the storyboarding of those action sequences with Gambit on the bike and Rogue in the air were incredibly well executed. And even before the pyrotechnics began, this was a killer episode in how it lays out and then plays through the triangle between Magneto, Rogue and Gambit. And I’ll tell you, when we were first starting to formulate our X-Plans, I was suggesting that we move Nightcrawler in a specific, more pious direction. But Saladin Ahmed and Gail Simone both argued to do something else, and now I’m very glad that I listened to them and let them do their thing. Because Nightcrawler is perhaps my favorite new thing in X-MEN ‘97—that’s the sort of version that I want to see in our books. And we will.

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Behind the Curtain

Here’s a bit of a strange artifact that I think I collected from the blog of writer and former Marvel staff member Scott Edelman. It’s a collection of quotes that he scribbled down for posterity from his days on staff back in the 1970s.

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Pimp My Wednesday

Time once again to see what wonderment awaits you in the week ahead:

AVENGERS TWILIGHT hits its penultimate issue under the confident craftsmanship of Chip Zdarsky and Daniel Acuna. This turned out to be a prescient book—Chip wrote the scripts in 2019 and some similar events played out in real life, prompting some hurried adjusting from us as we got towards print. Fortunately, the essence of the story is still intact and works well. And as usual, you get your choice of cover images either from Alex Ross or Daniel Acuna.

And Associate Editor Annalise Bissa is dropping another GIANT-SIZE book this week, this one dedicated to the incredible HULK. It’s a special train-themed bonanza, with a new lead story by INCREDIBLE HULK writer Phillip Kennedy Johnson that’s a part of the ongoing narrative continuity, so you won’t want to miss it. Andrea Broccardo provides the images. And if that isn’t enough, it’s backed up with a classic Hulk story by Peter David and Dale Keown. Look for the lovely if destructive cover by Bryan Hitch!

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A Comic Book On Sale 65 Years Ago Today, April 14, 1959

CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN #8 was the final issue of the series worked on by its co-creator Jack Kirby. There’s been a bunch of chatter in the Kirby fan community of the last couple of years insisting that CHALLENGERS, rather than THE FLASH, should be considered the spark point for the Silver Age of Comics, and while some of those arguments are a bit spurious, others have a decent amount of merit to them. So to recount what at least we think we know here; CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN debuted in 1957 in the pages of SHOWCASE #6 and #7. The concept was given a two-issue test run rather than the single issue accorded each feature so far. According to some accounts, CHALLENGERS was initially conceptualize by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby while they were working for their own publishing concern, Mainline. When their partnership split up following the failure of Mainline, they split their existing assets and Kirby got sole custody of the CHALLENGERS idea. Needing work, Jack promptly took it to National/DC, where editor Jack Schiff folded it into the firm’s tryout series, SHOWCASE. Those first two issues must have sold well because the feature was brought back for another two episodes in SHOWCASE #11 and #12. From there, it was launched into its own title well before the Flash got there. The Challengers were Ace Morgan, Red Ryan, Prof Haley and Rocky Davis, each a specialist in his own field, who were flying to a radio interview about their individual exploits. Their plane crashes along the way, but all four men survive, even though the crash should have meant their deaths. Deciding that they were all living on borrowed time, the four men decide to spend the rest of their lives exploring the unknown and unexplained, and facing it head on. In essence, it was very much like the Fantastic Four without any super-powers. While he was often paired with other scripters such as Dave and Dick Wood, the stories in CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN show the clear presence of Kirby’s plotting style and expansive and imaginative graphics. In more than a couple of instances, the stories in CHALLENGERS were book-length, which was a new thing in the late 1950s as most comics still contained multiple shorter pieces. This final issue, for example, has two stories in it. The Challengers definitely had an impact on the business, as, in the years immediately following the book’s launch, the same sort of formula of a team of four adventurers getting involved in specialist situations was applied again and again: the Suicide Squad, the Sea Devils, Rip Hunter and his crew, and the Fantastic Four to name just a few. But historically, CHALLENGERS is mostly remembered as a mid-tier title. So what happened? Well, Kirby left. He’d had a falling out with Schiff over a contract he’d signed agreeing to give Schiff a portion of the proceeds from the newspaper strip SKY MASTERS, and once lawsuits were involved, the well-placed Schiff shut Kirby out of DC. This caused Jack to seek out work elsewhere, which is how he wound up at Martin Goodman’s busted down publishing house working for Stan Lee. CHALLENGERS continued to come out all through the 1960s, but art duties passed on to Bob Brown, who was a decent craftsman but who didn’t possess the sort of sprawling imagination that Kirby had used to make the series stand out from the pack. That imagination, rather, was put to work on fashioning the new Marvel breed of super heroes.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

SHE-HULK #2 was released on April 14, 2004, and it revealed the actual set-up of the series: having been recruited by attorney Holden Holloway after she was let go by her current law firm, Jennifer Walters would be practicing “Superhuman Law”, the area of the legal code concerned with super-powered exploits and all of the difficulties they caused. In all honesty, we probably should have gotten to this set-up by the end of our first issue if we’d been more on our game, but it seemed as though we had a bunch of runway to get through first to bridge the gap from where She-Hulk was when we picked her up and where we wanted her to be. This was Dan Slott’s first super hero series for Marvel, a title he insists today that he wouldn’t write, as it should be helmed by a woman. But in 2004, while he was coming off of a bit of buzz for his ARKHAM ASYLUM: LIVING HELL limited series for DC, Dan was coming off of a decade of trying to segue to super hero work after being pigeonholed early as a licensed property writer, and would write any super hero project you put in front of him. The lively and clever artwork was produced by Juan Bobilo, who brought a unique sensibility to the series—one that occasionally drove Slott crazy. Dan was a huge fan, whereas Juan was not, not in the same way, and so it would occasionally drive Dan crazy the way Bobilo depicted certain well-known characters. But I insist to this day that the dynamic between the two is what pushed Slott to be funnier and more clever in order to compensate, and so made the book a hit. And SHE-HULK was deliberately comedic, although not in the same fourth-wall-breaking manner as the earlier John Byrne series. Instead, it dealt largely in self-referential meta-humor wherein the fact that the characters were living in a fictitious super hero universe was the prompt that generated story situations. So She-Hulk helped a man who wanted to sue a company whose negligence had resulted in him having gone through an origin, tried to help a ghost who wanted to testify against his own killer, and brought J. Jonah Jameson to trial for years of slandering Spider-Man. It was a pretty fun approach, one that often carried more depth than it may have seemed to on the outside, thanks to a genuine investment in the cast and their individual lives and problems. This was really Dan’s breakout hit, the book that put him on the map at Marvel and which led to everything else he’s written since. So if you really hate what he’s done, hey, it’s ultimately my fault. Sorry, not sorry.

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The Deathlok Chronicles

To begin with, a few new insights from co-writer Gregory Wright:

Gregory Wright

Regarding this issue of Deathlok...As I took on doing the Punisher and Ghost Rider crossovers I felt that what Dwayne and I had begun with the original mini-series was drifting away. I regretted agreeing to do this crossovers instead of doing the CYBERWAR arc next. This just wasn't what we set out to do, and trying to figure out a story that did work was really difficult. I loved Denys' new direction here, but it was really difficult to figure out. And I was trying to do a story in which the reader would be tricked and pulled in the wrong direction so I could reveal the twist later...but alas...this sort of story did not sit well with Bob, so that part was...altered...Mike Manley and I would discuss it panel by panel so he could ink what it was supposed to be. Denys didn't start with the rivets in this issue, he saved those for Dwayne and issue 11. But yeah coming from Gruenwald's office of the continuity police, they drove me crazy. But they did indeed look cool.

I’m pretty certain that the rivets first show up in issue #10, which we’ll talk about today. But it has been a long time since I’ve looked at it, so you may be right.

You can begin to get a sense of Denys Cowan’s SIN CITY-inspired style on this cover, in which both Ghost Rider and Deathlok are heavily covered in shadows. It’s pretty impactful, apart from that light blue background. So I should admit that I was the one who colored this cover. I think it started out as an experiment, to figure out how to put color over Denys’ more heavily blacked-in figures and still have it read. The previous cover had been white, so I knew I had to do something different here—but light blue really wasn’t it. Today, I think I might try for a shocking primary red, with only the impact point of GR’s chain in a white-yellow burst. If nothing else, it would have a lot of presence on the rack. Also, I will go to my grave insisting that CHAIN REACTION is really good, really clever cover copy for this image. As we were required to have cover copy in every cover, coming up with stuff like this remained a challenge. I liked CHAIN REACTION then and I like it now.

I don’t remember too much more specific about the production of this issue apart from what I detailed last time about #9. It was clear, though, that Denys was getting a bit bored and trying to keep himself interested by messing around with his approach. Somewhere in this period, although I’ve never entirely nailed down the timeline, he and Dwayne McDuffie started working up the characters that would become the foundation for the eventual Milestone Media line of titles a year or so later. That was a passion project for both men, and it may help to explain why Denys’ focus seemed to drift away from DEATHLOK a bit in this period. In any event, this was Greg’s last issue in his cycle as the writer, and with #11 Dwayne would be back in the writer’s chair.

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Monofocus

This week, I blasted through the six episodes of Netflix’s THE MAGIC PRANK SHOW featuring magician Justin Willman. And it was all right, but not quite as sharp as I was hoping. And after a steady diet of mentalist Derren Brown performing similar real life stunts, it really couldn’t compete at the same level. The premise of the show is that Willman and his team are called upon by regular people to redress some long-ago wrong done by a family member or a boyfriend or girlfriend by producing an immersive illusion effect in real life around the victim, effectively pranking them. None of these pranks are especially scary, and they all take the target’s mental state into account. But this does tend to make the whole affair feel a bit toothless, for all that it’s good humored. So Willman gets to freeze a guy’s head solid, pose as a robot to freak out a tech-phobiaed target, and create the illusion that a sleep study applicant has woken up in a strange post-apocalyptic future landscape. The fact that each episode is a mere 30 minutes in length is one of the real selling points of this series—it gets in, does its business and gets out without a fuss. A nice, simple confection of a show.

I also watched the first half of the two-part documentary STEVE! covering the life and career of Steve Martin. I hope to be able to watch the second half tonight once I finish writing up all of this drivel. Having read Martin’s book BORN STANDING UP, I already knew the broad strokes of his career. But it was still fun to see all of the vintage footage and the excerpts from his journals and such, and to remember that while he was at one time clearly the most popular stand-up comedian in the land, he gave it up while he was on top as he discovered that he had pushed his approach just as far as it would go. That’s an extraordinary thing for somebody to do. Really fun, well presented, I hope the second half holds up as well. I expect it will.

Finally, while I had read them as individual comics as they were coming out, and found them to be a hugely satisfying personal pleasure, today I sad down and read the collected edition of MIRACLEMAN: THE SILVER AGE, a story that I had been waiting to consume since around 1994. And while I enjoyed it on an issue-by-issue basis, I felt like the story made a much greater impact when consumed all at once. Time has somehow passed MIRACLEMAN by a little bit—I feel like it’s a property and a series that should be held in the same regard as WATCHMEN for the impact it had on how super hero stories are told. But many of its tricks and innovations have been adopted and built upon by the generations of creators that have come since, and so it doesn’t seem as revolutionary in hindsight. But it was really good and really satisfying—about what you’d expect from Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about the Five Best Silver Age Character Resurrections.

And five years ago, I wrote about the Five Best Comic Books of 1982

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This felt like a long one somehow. Hope you’re still all awake out there! If so, enjoy the rest of your Sunday (or whatever day it happens to be as you’re reading this) and have a good week until we meet again!

Hat’s All, Folks!

Tom B