#108: Es Mi Vida. Por Que No?

Our title this time out comes from a late night occasion several years ago where, while waiting for some dinner to heat up, I was flipping through channels on by cable box and happened upon my local Spanish station showing a favorite film, Back To The Future. It was right towards the end, so I left it on, enjoying the cadence of the dubbing of this familiar work. Right at the end, as Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly asks Doc Brown about having pieced his message back together and used it to save himself, something that he’d been adamant that he would never do earlier in the film, Christopher Lloyd (or his dubbed voice, really) responded with the above, which made me crack up a little bit. The original English line is “Well, I figured, what the hell.” but as my junior high school Spanish clarified for me the replacement amounted to, “It’s my life. Why not?” The same spirit, but somehow a bit more blunt and on the nose. I’ve never forgotten it, and it’s come to sum up those moments when you make a choice because you want to, because it benefits you rather than being smart or right or proper. So every once in a while, I’ll utter it in similar circumstances.

And on that strange opening, we’ll dive into this weekend’s Q & A section. Our readership seems to be steadily increasing, and as a result the number of questions being posed is likewise on the upswing. I’m going to attempt to answer as many as I can, but in certain cases people want to get my opinion on some situation that I either can’t comment upon due to it being an ongoing thing, or something I’ve answered before recently, or just something so involved that answering it properly would take up the entire column. So if I don’t give you a response, just assume that it’s for one of the above reasons. All right, here we go.

Craig Byrne

The X-Men legacy number will be fixed before printing, right? (Also: Why doesn't NYX have one? Is it because of the very different tone?)

I'm seeing $4.99 prices on almost all of these. Is it just for the first issue or is every book going to be $4.99 every month?

There were a lot more questions about Legacy Numbering this past week, even though I had earlier indicated that we’d be adjusting the number in question. It shows, at least, that readers are invested in those numbers—perhaps a little bit too much. I received a couple of communications advocating for different numbers entirely, with the writer attempting to lay out their justification for why their number is the correct one. The only answer that I can give in those instances is that ultimately our answer is definitely the correct one in that it’s the one sanctioned by the Marvel Comics Group. Sure, you might have made other choices in the past—but we didn’t, so here we are. But in answer to your actual question, Craig, only the first issues are $4.99 due to them being oversized.

Joe West

Has Gwenpool been discussed at all during the development of current and future X-projects? Leah Williams made her a mutant almost 5 years ago and it’s only resulted in about 4 cameos throughout the Krakoan era (not including her Love Unlimited story). It’d be nice to see her on a team again.

You can apply this answer to almost any mutant that you’d like, Joe. Yes, Gwenpool’s name has come up during the time when we were developing the new X-Line, but there isn’t any news that I can share with you at this point for where or if she might be turning up somewhere.

Mark

Can we expect more launches in August alongside uncanny?

Yes, Mark. And in September and October, too. Ultimately, I’d like for there to be some X-group new #1 every single month, whether it be a major launch or merely a more targeted limited series.

JV

What are your thoughts on the other big 80s DC franchise - the Giffen/Levitz Legion of superheroes? Did you read/enjoy it? It is interesting to note the parallels to the Titans in terms of how DC managed (bungled?) the franchise - a top seller in the 80s and early 90s under some visionary creators that languished and they cannot seem to recapture its glory.

It's a shame because it is the perfect 'stand alone' franchise - links to the DCU but apart as it is in the future so it can stand on its own and reflect the current continuity as needed but not fully beholden to it. The long history of the series added to its mystique for me (I did not know everything but it gave the series texture and depth).

I like the Legion of Super-Heroes just fine, JV, although I was never as much a fan of them as I was the New Teen Titans. I think the Legion has some challenges baked into it that are specific to that property and when it was created—chief among them being the often antiquated-sounding codenames. And they’re a real double-edged sword of a problem. To modern ears, Lightning Lad, say, sounds old fashioned and a bit silly. But if you try to update that name to Livewire, and it somehow just doesn’t fit. (Do they even still transmit electricity through wires in the 30th Century?) And calling the character by his civilian name, Garth Ranzz, isn’t much better, as the Five Years Later incarnation of the series attempted to do. I think the Legion had a good decade or two there, and there’s always some spark of potential left in the property. But I think it’s more difficult to make palatable in 2024 than New Teen Titans is.

Tobias Carroll

One question that came to mind this week: there aren't a lot of them, but a few X-book mainstays have also spent time in the Avengers (Beast, Sunspot, Firestar, and Cannonball all come to mind). Is the experience of editing a story with a character who fits that description any different from editing a story with a character who you haven't worked with before?

Not really, Tobias. The character remains the same, after all, even if their context may be different. And having edited stories with some of these characters doesn’t really make them differ from how I might approach a Colossus or a Banshee or whomever that I haven’t really edited stories with yet.

AJHarper

why does Marvel refuse to bring back Mar-Vell in any meaningful way.

This’ll be a blunt answer, AJ, but the reason is because the best thing that Mar-Vell ever did was to die, and to die in a human and relatable way. I was there when he still had a series and I can tell you firsthand: Mar-Vell was dull. Nobody ever quite found a hook into him as a character to make him come alive and be interesting. He was a bit of a stiff. But he was in one really great story at the end, and so there’s always a contingent that wants to bring him back. And my response is always the same: okay, once you’ve resurrected him, what are you going to do with him that’s going to be worthwhile? And the answer is always some nonsense that doesn’t feel like it’s worth disturbing Mar-Vell’s gave for. Like Barry Allen over at DC, past a certain point, Mar-Vell is better off as a demised exemplar of heroism than one more live cosmic cipher who doesn’t get a whole lot of play.

Dan Gvozden

With so much online silliness, as captured by your opening story, how do you and your teams go about receiving and parsing criticism? I suspect there is a pull to only look inwards, towards people working at Marvel, and to ignore what can often be perceived as rantings about font/color from the "general public". But, at the same time, that can prove folly as well. With the decline of comic news and reviews sites, how to you take the temperature on creative decisions other than from industry peers and sales numbers?

I don’t know that there’s a good, simple answer to this, Dan. Speaking for myself, I’m pretty available on social media and I tend to scan the landscape to get a sense of general reactions to the work. I also get to hear feedback from the Retailers as to how their customers are responding to developments—especially as to how they’re affecting buying patterns, which are often different from what is being said. Beyond that, more often than not, I just trust my own gut instinct. Es mi vida. Por que no?

M-SuperStripe

Krakoa brought the X-men back to forward thinking, legitimately new and fresh stories.

Take away Krakoa - I might still read. But take away Krakoa, and intentionally make the books look like 90's re-treads "in a primal and foundational way"...... and go back to the extremely tired 'people don't like mutants' story telling well. I'm out. There is no reason to read these.

First off, Stripe, if the books that we’re producing don’t appeal to you, then you’re absolutely right to give them a pass. You aren’t obligated to check out any of our efforts, in particular if you believe that they’ll be “extremely tired”. What I would say to you, though, is that you’re not judging the work here, you’re judging what you fear the work is going to be, and reacting as though the comics you’ve made in your imagination are exactly the ones we’re going to do. They’re not, I can tell you that much. And the ones we make may very well be as tired as you fear, maybe more so. But maybe they won’t be. Maybe some of them will even appeal to you in some way. End of the day, though, it’s your money and your time, so if it’s not for you, that’s perfectly fine. The X-Men will always be waiting when and if you decide to dip your toe back into the waters.

Jeff Ryan

You do something quite genteel with the mailbag: you refer to people who write in questions by name, even going so far as to bold our names. Is that habit from the Bullpen letter-column days, or something you decided to bestow to everyone who writes in...even to complain?

I think it’s just common courtesy, Jeff. Though it certainly comes from a decent amount of letters page training over the years. If I’m speaking to you, I want to make sure that you understand that I’m speaking to you, and that I’ve read what you had to say.

Zack J

The lack of outlets for news about comics implies, to my at least, that there less opportunity for word of mouth and one side effect would be more weight being put on official promotional efforts. It may be that the only impression someone gets from a series is from the Marvel Official social media posts.

So with that strawman I constructed being the unimpeachable truth, why wouldn't y'all want to put additional efforts into those promotional efforts?

I think you’re maybe giving too much weight to a silly comment about a font selection here, Zack. But we put a considerable effort into our various promotional efforts. that being said, we release around 70 titles each month, and there simply isn’t time enough and bandwidth enough to promote each and every one equally. Even if we did send out a multitude of press releases and announcements, the audience wouldn’t be able to absorb them all. It’d all become white noise—especially when you factor in that DC and Image and everybody else is likewise promoting their series.

X of Alex

You've spoken about your own experience of taking over the X-line--but what about your teammates, Martin Biro and Annalise Bissa? What was their reaction to the switchover?

I don’t know that it’d be proper for me to speak for them, Alex. In the case of Annalise, our resident Krakoa expert, she had been a part of the X-Office before shifting over to work with us, so I expect that returning to that world was relatively comfortable for her. But that’s a broad impression, and only Annalise and Martin, to say nothing of Darren and Noah and Mark and Drew, could tell you how they feel about this.

Robby Earle

All this talk of new books has me curious about your approach to putting new teams together. I know every book is different (and I’m certainly not asking you to comment on the teams behind ongoing/forthcoming books), but I’m wondering if you have any general observations you can share.

Specifically, have you found it’s better to spread out your big names across titles by pairing superstar writers with up-and-coming artists (and vice versa) or do you think it’s better to pair creators of more or less the same vintage? Put differently, how much do you factor in the experience level and/or expected draw of each creator when you’re building a team?

This is a bit of a difficult question, Robby, in that there isn’t any one pat answer, the approach changes in each situation. But in general, I follow my instinct in terms of who I think might be able to do well with a given series and which creators might be simpatico with one another. I generally don’t worry all that much about superstars vs up-and-comers apart from the fact that each book needs to have a certain Q-Factor to it to generate interest in the series. But the full equation is Characters + Creators + Concept, and so newer writers and artists may actually be the best selections if what they want to do is the most appealing. But to give you a somewhat more concrete example, David Marquez was going to be coming available right in the window when we’d be launching the new X-Books and he was interested in doing something in that world, so he was on my short list early on to do one of the launch books, though I wasn’t certain which one it would be. For UNCANNY, my initial pitch for what the book should be revolved around Rogue, and so i began thinking about who might write a strong Rogue. This led me to reach out to Gail Simone, who was interested and put together a pitch. That pitch included a number of X-Men that I knew David liked and he had also expressed an interest in deep character work, so I wound up putting him and Gail together. And that seems to be working out well—though you’ll all be the judge of that in a couple of months.

Mark

x-force is at legacy #290 and wolverine is at #392 (when this era ends.) can we expect a special issue for #300 and #400?

Almost certainly so, Mark.

Robert Furey

You mentioned Avengers Twilight was written in 2019. Why did it take so long to be released from there? Is this a normal length of time between writing and release?

AVENGERS TWILIGHT was actually conceived in 2016, Robert, but it took until 2019 for Chip and Daniel to be working on it. As for why it took so long to be released—are you kidding? Have you forgotten that we had a global pandemic, one that shut down our production for months, and curtailed it for months thereafter. As a project that wasn’t connected to the mainstream continuity of the Marvel Universe, TWILIGHT was easy to push back in favor of other things. So it wound up scheduled a few times during that period, and then being kicked back when the month wound up with too many releases, most of which were contemporary and needed to come out at that moment. So TWILIGHT is definitely an outlier when it comes to the time it was produced under, and it’s probably the project that I’ve had in development the longest.

Cory strode

A few years ago, I re-read the New Teen Titans up until the big crossover story they did in the late 80’s/early 90’s and figured out why the series sputtered creatively, in my opinion. I had always heard it was Perez leaving or Marv being burned out after Crisis, but it was fairly clear to me as I read it the second time. George and Marv had set up character arcs for everyone in the early issues, and when they had completed them all, there was nothing to take their place. Stories were driven by things like Changeling wanting to deal with the death of the Doom Patrol, Kid Flash not knowing if he wanted to be a hero any more, Starfire’s home planet being enslaved, etc…

Once those stories got resolved, they hadn’t set up any new story arcs, and if become a standard “villain fight of the month” book with no underlying drive to keep us caring about the characters. My question is, as an editor, what do you do to help a creative team when you see they are starting to run up against this?

My second question is a lot simpler: With you moving to the X-Men we are getting a relaunch. Is something similar going to happen to the Avengers line when they have a new editorial overseer? It seems like Jed McKay has a long Overall plot in mind, and the endpoint of you leaving doesn’t seem as definitive.

Well, Cory, assuming that you notice this happening, you do one of two things. Firstly, you point out the problem and work to get the creative team thinking about how to create that character velocity again. Failing in that, though, you start looking around for another creative team, because the one you’ve got may simply be tapped out. In terms of AVENGERS, while the book is shifting over to editor Wil Moss, no relaunch is planned—it’ll still be Jed telling his stories and following his direction. Until he’s tapped out—and then Wil will start looking for a new creative team.

Joe Vitale

What is your take on the use of classic characters who fall into public domain? Mark Millar is ready to do his own Superman when the time comes. Others have made ridiculous horror movies of Winnie the Pooh. Which public domain character would you like to work on?

I’m no legal expert, Joe, but my understanding is that what material falls into the public domain at any given time is a complex issue. Meaning that I suspect that whatever Superman story Mark might want to tell would possibly use elements of the character that were developed later and might still be protected by copyright and trademark. Or maybe not, Mark is a pretty canny guy. I don’t know that I specifically have any characters in the public domain that I’d want to do stuff with—though Dracula is a part of the upcoming BLOOD HUNT series, and he fits that bill.

Ossama

Will there be a push to release more Red Band series (other than Werewolf by Night) post Blood Hunt, making it an imprint a la DC's Black Label, and if so, why create a new imprint for adult-only readers when MAX still exists?

Also, can we expect the Red Band issues to come to Marvel Unlimited, or will they be left out just like the MAX titles? After the Disney+ and Hulu merger, I don't see why not implement parental controls within the app and have everything on there.

I’d say that it all depends on what the response is to the Red Band releases, Ossama. But we aren’t quite at the point where it’s a Black Label-style imprint, so answering questions about how that will work and why that and not something else are I think premature. Let’s get at least one book out into the marketplace before we have to figure that out, hey? and as far as I know, the Red Band editions will not be available on Marvel Unlimited, only the “vanilla” versions will be. And that’s in the service of making the Red Band versions special and more limited. If readers want them, they’ll need to go to their local retailer on release day in order to get them—which is kind of the whole point.

Robert

We know Mariko Yashida is alive on earth-616. Will there be any appearances from her in the newly announced Wolverine book?

Do we know that, Robert?

David Berlanga

Could the "Spider-Man Newspaper strips" that Stan Lee and John Romita Sr. created please be added to Marvel Unlimited? It's hard to find elsewhere. Also, is there any interesting history on those strips? Such as a time/year Stan left the strips, and a different writer was perhaps helping ghost write? Same for John Romita Sr? I've read some of them and they're really good!

No plans of which I am aware to add those newspaper strips to Marvel Unlimited, David. I don’t know that we even really have good reproduction materials on a lot of that strip. John drew the strip for its first four years or so, but Stan dialogued it for decades after that. He did use ghost writers to help plot the strip over the years, including Jim Shooter and Roy Thomas, both of whom have spoken about this in a variety of places.

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Behind the Curtain

.Beyond a certain point, as a hedge against needing to run unscheduled reprint stories in ongoing titles when the regular creative team couldn’t get their work completed in time, every Marvel editor was required to keep at least one stand-alone fill-in story ready on hand for when it might be needed. And often, books would be cancelled with those reprint stories still on the books and having been paid for. Consequently, those stories would often undergo some severe reworking, to turn them into issues of another unrelated but still being published comic. So here’s an example of that process in action. Below, you will find three pages of pencils for an unused inventory issue of NOVA, illustrated by Alan Kupperberg.

And then here are the same three pages, now inked, scripted, lettered and colored as an issue of IRON MAN, #157, by David Michelinie, Dan Green, Bob Sharen and Joe Rosen. Some of the story specifics have been tweaked in copy to make it work as an Iron Man story rather than a Nova story. And it consequently isn’t the greatest Iron Man story ever created. But it’s a sight better than a reprint.

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Pimp My Wednesday

This week, it’s the end of the line.

AVENGERS #13, pictured above, is my final issue as editor after 26 years at the helm. But the real reason to check it out is that it’s the second half of our Fall Of The House Of X tie-in by Jed MacKay and Francesco Mortarino.

Some weeks past, I mentioned working on the dumbest cover I’d ever put out. And that’s it above, a variant on AVENGERS #13. I tossed off the idea as a joke, but it was one that people liked, so I wound up doing it. For those who don’t entirely get it, it’s a reverse shot of the cover to my first issue of AVENGERS. On that cover, the team was charging towards the camera in an awesome George Perez image. As George is sadly no longer with us, it seemed appropriate to call upon Ron Lim to handle the reverse shot of the Avengers running away from the camera, leaving me behind in the dust. I loved flopping the entire trade dress on the back cover on this one.

Here’s George’s original #1 front cover, just so that you can see how good a job Ron did with this stupidity.

Also in stories this week but with only one cover is G.O.D.S #7 by Jonathan Hickman and Valerio Schiti. It’s a story focused on Dimitri, both his history and his own personal quest which reaches fruition in this issue.

And Assistant editor Martin Biro has the third issue of NIGHT THRASHER dropping this week as well. As the last editor of the 90s series, I feel as though this project harkens back to the history of Thrash in a very legitimate manner. It’s written by J. Holtham and illustrated by Nelson Daniel.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

HULK #3 came out on April 21, 1999 and was the first issue of the series that I worked on. I inherited the book from departing editor Matt Idelson, who had taken a job uptown at DC. After more than a decade of being under the guiding hand of writer Peter David, the character was shifting back in a more traditional direction under John Byrne and artist Ron Garney. Garney in particular was a great choice for HULK, he did big characters extremely well, and he brought a lot of power and physicality to the Green Goliath’s rampage. The storyline concerned the Hulk’s old enemy Tyrannus using advanced technology to take control of the Hulk’s form, causing him to knock a passenger jet out of the sky, killing all aboard. This event sets off a worldwide manhunt for the Hulk and his alter ego Bruce Banner, one that would drive the series moving forward, and eventually bringing the character into conflict with other Marvel heroes. The book was woefully behind schedule when I inherited it, so the first order of business was to work with Byrne to create a fill-in issue to help buy Garney some more lead time. That issue wound up being #5, which recounted the events of a Hulk sighting from multiple different witnesses, each section drawn by a different artist, which was fun. Ultimately, though, Byrne and I proved to be incompatible co-workers, and I wound up bringing in Jerry Ordway to wrap up the storylines that he had set into motion after he had left the assignment. Garney suggested Paul Jenkins as a more regular replacement, and Ron stuck around for another year or so working harmoniously alongside Paul.

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Another Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

Also released on April 21, 1999 was THUNDERBOLTS #27, which guest-starred X-MEN’s Archangel. But the real reason I wanted to spotlight this issue is for the funky cover copy. Given the sort of classic nature of the series, I tended to use more word balloons and off-beat cover copy solutions on the THUNDERBOLTS covers, to some good effect. I’m almost certain, though, that this copy was the brainchild of writer Kurt Busiek when we were coming up with the cover image. It has Kurt’s cadence to it. THUNDERBOLTS was a bit of a surprise hit in the latter part of the 1990s, a book that shouldn’t have been able to gain traction, and that certainly was going to be doomed once its initial storyline had run its course. Which just goes to show that nobody knows anything, and that sometimes you can hit something just right and wind up with an ongoing success. And now there’s going to be a film pulling from some of what we did, including the name itself. It’s all a good lesson to not count something out before the game has been played.

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Another Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

FANTASTIC FOUR #512 came out on April 21, 2004 and was the first issue in the continuation of the Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo run on the title. This was after Mark had been fired by Marvel publisher Bill Jemas and Mike quit in solidarity with him. In the intervening months, Bill had been sidelined, Mark and Mike had agreed to come back for a couple of issues to finish out their run properly before moving on to DC, and then Dan Didio flipped out upon hearing that Ringo was going to be doing this—resulting in the pair staying on FANTASTIC FOUR for another year. I still look at every issue of this run from #512-524 as a little gift. But the schedule was tight enough after all of these shenanigans that we had to release the pressure somehow—and so this issue and the next, we had Paul Smith come on to do back-up stories with Waid focusing on Reed and Sue and Reed’s previously-introduced archaeologist pre-Sue girlfriend Alyssa Moy. We’d intended to use Alyssa more in the main body of the series, but across these two stories, it turned out that Mark and Paul were pulling in different directions, and so even after Paul’s departure, we pivoted into a different direction. This two-parter also guest-starred Spider-Man and gave Waid the opportunity to steer things more heavily into the comedy. Hated by the world after their interventionist adventure taking control of Latveria in a prior storyline, Johnny Storm reaches out to his old pal Spidey for advice on how to live with being a loser. Waid wrote a very fun Spidey and the interplay between the two characters was crisp. And Wieringo is one of the best Spider-Man artists of all time, so these two issues were a lot of fun. After all of the drama we had all been through, it felt like something we had earned.

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The Deathlok Chronicles

Once more, we begin this installment with some remarks from DEATHLOK co-writer Gregory Wright:

Gregory Wright

I went back and checked, and the rivets showed up in 11. They sort of appeared and disappeared during Denys's last issues, likely because he started doing breakdowns at some point. I really had fun scripting this issue with all the crazy stuff going on, and I loved coloring this style Denys used. So YOU are to blame for that light blue!! LOL. I always hated white covers as well as pastel background covers, even though they really POP on the stand. I do love the cover copy on this one.

I actually think there’s a lot of value to white covers. They always pop on the racks, which is the name of the game. But, yeah, that light blue was me, and not a wonderful decision at all.

DEATHLOK #11 put Dwayne McDuffie back in the writer’s seat—though not in the way you might think. You see, having used out fill-in inventory story in #8, I was required to commission another fill-in job to have on hand. And since Greg was writing the main series, I asked Dwayne to write it in this case. This issue’s story was the result, involving an old Power Man villain Chemistro as well as a new character intended to be a recurring foe, High-Tech. But when it was written, it wasn’t with the intention that it would get used so quickly. However, Dwayne had a bunch of situations going on in is personal life at this time—I forget the specifics of this one, but his life seemed to constantly have a level of drama swirling around it. Anyway, when it came time to write the plot for this issue, he was in the middle of something, and he asked if we could use the inventory plot here in order to buy him some time. I agreed, which is how Denys wound up drawing what was meant to be a story that would earn him back a buffer on the schedule.

You can see from this cover especially how Denys was continuing to push his style in SIN CITY-inspired directions, laden with a Mike Mignola amount of spotted blacks. It’s a cool look, but very much the antithesis of the style that was then ultra-popular, and so that continued to be worrying both to me and to Greg, who was beginning to express a feeling that Denys wasn’t giving the work his fullest attention. Now, it was around this time, unbeknownst to me, that Dwayne and Denys and a few others began to develop the characters and story bible that would eventually become the Milestone Media line of books. I didn’t know about that at all, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Greg knew about it, and so some of his frustrations grew from the knowledge that Denys was spending a certain portion of his time working on something else entirely. Either way, the conversation regularly began to include more and more moments where we wondered if what Denys was doing here was in the best interests of the series. Little of this, of course, was expressed to Denys directly, which is some real BS.

This story also included a couple of scenes that strained my suspension of disbelief to the breaking point, though I allowed them nevertheless. Needing to get across the country to deal with the menace in question, Deathlok disassembles his handgun and then Fed-Exes the parts to himself so that he can reassemble it at the other end. It’s a fun bit of business, one that turns on the notion that the power source for Deathlok’s gun was the generator built into his cyborg form. This is why the gun didn’t work if anybody else tried to use it, it needed to interface with the ports built into Deathlok’s hand. However, we’d never expressed this fact clearly in the book, so the whole matter seemed implausible. Even more implausible was the fact that Deathlok takes a commercial flight in this issue to get where he needs to be, wearing an overcoat and a hat in the manner of the Thing. Even in 1991, there’s no way that he’d have cleared screening, or that nobody would have noticed his half-zombie/half-cyborg features. The moment was played light, for chuckles, but I don’t know that I really bought into it. But I still didn’t have enough confidence to push back definitively in such situations.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about the FAMOUS 1st EDITION reprint of SUPERMAN #1

And five years ago, I wrote about the unused Jack Kirby pages for INCREDIBLE HULK #4

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And that’ll bring us to the end of this week’s installment. Thanks for stopping by the neighborhood, and I hope to see you again next time.

Es mi vida. Por que no?

Tom B