#119: Don't Ever Talk To Me Again, Dude!

So, delightfully, my misadventures in commuting continue this week. And this one is kind of my own fault. I don’t know what sparked me to take action, typically I don’t care about pretty much anybody else around me. It was a Rookie mistake, and a grim reminder about the world we live in.

This happened on Wednesday, the 3rd. The trains were less packed with commuters than normal because a lot of folks had taken off for a long weekend. But the railway service compensated for that by running shorter trains than usual, so it was still a tight squeeze during rush hour. What was an additional complication was that it seemed like just about everybody was carrying one or two bags of luggage, presumably on their way to whatever their long weekend was going to be.

I’m only on this train for one stop, until we get to Secaucus where I make my transfer. So as usual, I set up in one of the car ends. And because the car was short, this time I wound up by chance in the lavatory car. So I’m in a group of five seats situated across from the lavatory, and people are passing through on their way to the actual seats further into the. It’s a double-decker car, so right after the entranceway, there’s a staircase up and a staircase down.

So at one point, this woman comes in pushing a massive baby carriage. It’s one of those ones where the top detaches into a stand-alone bassinet. She enters the car and sits down beside me momentarily, but swiftly realizes that the stroller is blocking all of the people who are trying to get by. So reluctantly, she stands up and moves forward. But she’s stymied there as well, as there’s no way she’s getting that stroller up or down the stairs to the actual seats. So she kind of sidles over to the side to let people go past her. And as they do, they’re jostling the carriage, which is beginning to make the baby fussy. So she picks him up.

And this is when I get an idea.

And so I say to her: “Excuse me. This may be a stupid idea…” (I actually said that), “but maybe put the stroller in the lavatory? Nobody’s using it, you and the baby can sit down here and be comfortable.” She then turns back to the stroller and puts the baby back down into it and I think that she’s going to do this and even get ready to stand up and help her get the thing opened.

And instead, she says, “Don’t ever talk to me again, dude!” And she wheels the carriage out the doors of the train presumably to find a friendlier car to hang out in. And I’m left slightly soured, because I don’t quite see what I said wrong here. But who knows what other pressures she was under, what kind of a day she’d had up to that point. And, hey, with her gone, people could more easily navigate the car, so there’s that.

But fortunately or sadly, I’ll still talk to all of you. And in particular, answer a bunch of your questions. I did want to add one comment here, though: if I don’t answer your question for whatever reason, incessantly posting it again and again all over the place isn’t going to prompt me into action. Quite the opposite, if anything. So please don’t get so worked up over things.

Joe West

What’s the protocol for mutants being allowed to be on non-mutant teams? It seems like Wolverine is allowed to be wherever as long as it doesn’t effect his solo, and Storm gets to be an Avenger in this new era, but could Gabby Kinney be a Champion? Could Sunspot be a Guardian of the Galaxy? It doesn’t have to be those specific mutants, I’m just wondering if writers in other corners of the Marvel universe are allowed to play with whatever X-Men they want if there are no plans for them at the time.

The protocol at the moment is that any mutant can join any team provided that I give it the okay, Joe. Which is how you get Storm on the Avengers.

Alison Cabot

Does Rasputin IV appear in this new phase of the X-Men, or was she shelved?

I’m not going to make any bones about this, Alison. One of my first decrees to all of my creative teams as we started things up was that I wanted everything to take place in the here and now. And I wanted it to be digestible for ordinary people who hadn’t been following the books for a couple of years. So that meant momentarily sidelining any characters who came from the future or from an alternate timeline or any of that stuff. I made one or two exceptions—I permitted Rachel to be a part of X-FORCE because she was attached to Betsy. She’s also a long-established character, one that I think you can get into without even needing to immediately mention “grew up during Days of Future Past and was a mutant-hunting slave-hound”. Even relatively popular characters such as Cable and Bishop were sidelined for this reason. They’ll all begin to show up here and there as we get things established, but at the outset, i wanted a clean entry point, and there was already a ton of baggage from Krakoa that needed to be covered without trying to do alternate future origin or “a chimera made from the DNA of four other mutants”.

Stiles

I would like to know how the creation of the From the Ashes teams worked, especially Exceptional X-Men. Was the decision to specifically have Kitty and Emma lead a new team of young mutants an editorial decision or an Eve Ewing decision? I mean, there are several other mutants who have also been teachers in the past, right? Dani Moonstar, Karma, Northstar, Husk, Rachel Summers, Warpath... well, a lot

Kitty and Emma started with me, as I began to lay out the pattern for the new line, Stiles. That said, if Eve had a real problem with either of them, she certainly could have made alternate suggestions and we would have considered them. But Kate in particular was one of the characters that I’d earmarked as somebody who would naturally come to the fore if you took most of the mainstay mutant leadership off the board.

Mercury Seastar

Are solo books limited to being just that, focused on a single, solo lead, or can we except smaller titles with duos akin to the Black Widow & Hawkeye book that's currently out?

We can do absolutely anything we want to, Mercury, assuming that we think it’s a good idea. But I don’t know that there are a lot of duos that I can think of offhand who could support a project. Perhaps Sam and Bobby is Jonathan Hickman were writing it.

Diana

Hoping you can clarify something for me: how is putting Storm - one of the most recognizable members of the X-Men, who's been in practically every piece of X-Men media for decades - on the Avengers meant to help the X-Men line? Which X-books do you expect Avengers readers to pick up in light of this, considering Storm isn't going to be in any of them? How is this any different from her being shipped off to Wakanda and kept out of key X-Men stories for years on end?

All I can tell you here, Diana, is that you’ll just have to wait and see. But I will say that I think that having storm standing shoulder-to-shoulder with mainstay characters such as Captain America, Captain Marvel and Iron Man can only help to improve her prominence and standing in the Marvel Universe, in a way that being surrounded by the same old people would not.

David Pierce

Any chance you might eventually collect all the Deathlok Chronicles in order at your blog?

I hadn’t thought about that, David, but it is certainly something that I could do. But they are always still available in the past editions of this Newsletter as well if you want to go back and read them.

Callie

Is the 2021 miniseries Kang the Conqueror (subtitle: Only Myself Left to Conquer) canonical? It's one of my favorite stories with the character ever but I could never tell if it was canon to the main universe. It does initially seem to present some retcons that place it firmly in an elseworlds/what if scenario, but it's also such a self contained/insular story that I could see it just being something that happened in our universe that just never got brought up before or after

I don’t see any reason why that project wouldn’t be canonical, Callie.

Murewa Ayodele

who is an editor you really admire their comics and creator casting that you have not had the chance to work directly with?

I don’t tend to work with a whole lot of other editors, Murewa, especially at other companies. So there’s likely a long list. But just to pick two, Archie Goodwin. He was gone to DC from Marvel by the time I got on staff, so I never really interacted with him. Or if you want somebody who’s still among the living, Diana Schutz

Curtis King, Jr

You’ll most likely be fielding questions and comments about the new X-titles once they hit the racks, but for myself, I’d love to see your take on the upcoming DC Versus Marvel Omnis when those go on sale! I was only peripherally involved in putting them together but was definitely a participant in the collected issues’ original publication, so I can attest to the omnibuses being big hunks o’ fun (IMO, of course). Were you involved in QC’ing the omnis on Marvel’s end, or in on the creation of any of those original DC/Marvel crossovers

I worked on an assortment of those books back in the day, Curtis, including SPIDER-BOY, IRON LANTERN, THORION OF THE NEW ASGODS, CHALLENGERS OF THE FANTASTIC, UNLIMITED ACCESS, INCREDIBLE HULK VS SUPERMAN and of course JLA/AVENGERS. Accordingly, I wrote an Afterword for each of the two upcoming Omnibus volumes, and I provided the design team with some materials that I’d inherited from Mark Gruenwald pertaining to the MARVEL VS DC crossover—including better copies of some of the alternate results to the fan-voted fights that what they then had. And I got to go through and comment on the volumes as they were assembled and give feedback.

Jeff Ryan

How much of an editorial workload difference is there between doubling the size of an issue for one month and adding a 13th issue for that year? And is one generally more successful than another?

Adding an issue is likely more work than adding pages, Jeff. The pages will affect the schedule of your artists in particular, but the additional issue will do that more so, and is more easily handed off to other hands as necessary. In terms of success, I don’t think one is intrinsically better than the other. Though certainly adding another issue of a profitable series to the year is more helpful to the budget.

Steve Stoltey

What do you remeber about the trasition from FF to Avengers for Jonathan Hickman's big storyline? Difficult? Simple? Fun?

Also, was it planned to just culminate in it's own titles or was there always a plan for Secret Wars and Everything Ending?

And last, was there ever any serious talk about a reboot, or was everybody on board with continuing to be not-DC and making all these years of stories continue to work?

The transition was very simple, Steve, and something that Jonathan was up for and even enthusiastic about when it was happening. While we had planned on spinning SECRET WARS out of what we had been doing in FANTASTIC FOUR, it was Jonathan who suggested that we could do the same a different way in AVENGERS and NEW AVENGERS. The biggest argument—and it wasn't very big—was in convincing people to call the book NEW AVENGERS rather than ILLUMINATI or some other thing that I was convinced would sell less.

And there was never any serious discussion of a reboot of the sort that you’re referring to. It simply isn’t a thing that we think we need in order to tell excellent stories that are still reader-friendly. And honestly, rebooting would create far more problems than it would solve, for all that it might be momentarily exciting to some people. I tend to think that DC’s NEW 52 is a textbook example of why restarting your line is a bad idea, even if it seems good for a short while.

Chip Zdarsky

“ So might I suggest giving those Chip Zdarsky BATMAN comics a rest, maybe?”

I can’t believe you started this newsletter talking about your family emergency so I can’t even be mad about this

Search your feelings, Chip, you know it to be true.

Luke Spanton

the photos you shared of your collection were wild! I noticed in one of them that you are using "DrawerBoxes" for some of the books. How have those worked for you? While I have transitioned much of my (far, far, far smaller) collection to trades and Omnis, I still have a few short boxes of floppies, and it looks like the DrawerBoxes might a more accessible way to store them.

DrawerBoxes work well for the most part, Luke, though it really comes down to how well you assemble them. And the weight of a box worth of comics is still going to be the weight of a box worth of comics even if you’re trying to slide it open rather than lift it up.

Zac

Something I’ve always wondered about is sales and the life of a title. Obviously, single issue sales still drive a major part of the market. Given the length of a run on a title, how much do trade sales and digital sales or even clicks on a title through the Marvel App (assuming those are monitored) influence the life of a book. For example, the recently canceled Sensational She-Hulk series. Does reading on the app help gauge reader interest. I bought every issue in hard copy form by the way. I’m just curious how it works with digital and trades seemingly being different audiences from single issue readers.

All sales matter, Zac. Clicks and reads in Marvel Unlimited don’t really constitute a sale, though, so they’re not as helpful. But any other manner of actual purchase, whether a digital copy or a tangible one, or in collected edition form either way, is going to help.

Taylor Murphy

Hey Tom, do you know when the new Bullpen page you mentioned will be released? Besides reading orders, any other items you’ll be including there you can share with us?

The new X-Centric Bullpen Page will make its debut appearance next week in X-MEN #1 and then all of the titles that roll out from there, Taylor. And I don’t know that I need to spoil it ahead of time (mostly because I don’t know that it’s especially awe-inspiring. It’s kinda like reading one of these Newsletters, actually.) But if you’ve got something you’d like to see us do there, let us know!

JV

Do you ever cull the collection (throw out, sell, etc)? Or just it just grow and grow? Long term plans for the comics?

Not really, JV, not that much. I’ll upgrade collected editions if new ones come in containing material I have in some other edition and like that, but for the most part what I have is what I have. The amount goes inexorably up, not down.

Rob

This year marks the 30th anniversary of Generation X. As an X-Men reader, Gen X was my New Mutants, the young team that I could relate to as a young reader. Just wondering if there were any plans for the Anniversary?

I really liked GENERATION X when it first started, and I would like to do something with those characters and that title. But it won’t be for a while, Rob.

Neon Frost

Any plans to have Emma Frost be a part of any other books in the relaunch/2024 opening slate or is Exceptional her home for the foreseeable future?

At launch time, EXCEPTIONAL is the place to look for Emma, Neon. But there’s nothing that says she couldn’t turn up in other books, or even get one of her own down the line.

Jeff Metzner

Regarding Magneto's seeming youth and vitality: This happened so long ago that it might not solve the "problem" anymore, but didn't Eric the Red specifically de-age Magnus at one point?

Yes, Jeff. But the problem isn’t Magneto’s current physical state, it’s the fact that when he first fought the X-Men in X-MEN #1, he presently would have been something like 71 years old. No later rejuvenation is going to fix that.

Ben Morse

I remember when Bill Rosemann pitched the idea of Ultron as the big bad for Annihilation: Conquest thinking making him a cosmic heavy seemed like a logical move with loads of potential—do you remember having thoughts or a stake as the Avengers guy?

I clearly didn’t have any overwhelming problem with it, Ben, as it wound up happening. I think the only things I talked over with Bill were my “rules of engagement” for Ultron—which is to say, any story that Ultron is in becomes an Ultron story, he’s too big a character and too big a threat for it to be otherwise. And that was certainly the case in ANNIHILATION: CONQUEST.

Sempronio

I'm thinking that X-men and Avengers have the same writers. Would it be possible to have some connection between these books? A crossover

I like that the anniversary of Phoenix is celebrated. One of the best sagas was Dark Phoenix.

I love the idea that every book of X-men has their independency and their own plot. It was very difficult to follow all Krakoa series. But I'd like to have some interaction between different x-men 's teams. For example between Anngel and Cyclops or Storm and Cyclops,.

Will it be explored in this era the connection of mutants with humans and with other super heroes. I love when Marvel mixes its differnet universe in books.

I love to have a Mystique solo, and the great writer who is writtening her book. Would more book be released in 2025?. I want a Magik and Psylocke's book. I want to have a book which explores Illyana using her Magik.

Last but not least: I would like that Mackay writes some pannel where Cyclops and Beats talks about their connection and the hate that there was between them during Uncaany's period written by Bendis.

Without saying too much in specific, Sempronio, I think you’re going to find a lot to like in our new era. And possibly a few things to dislike, too, we don’t want you getting spoiled.

Gus

Thanks for sharing the pictures. I showed them to my wife, she is VERY glad that I have curated my collection down and am keeping it in plastic boxes (she finds seeing through to a cover more aesthetically pleasing than the long- or shortboxes).

I was wise enough, Gus, to have married a woman who realizes that the house that those boxes are sitting in was paid for by comics. So she’s always been very forthright in saying, “What’s good for comics is good for the Brevoorts.”

Shaun D

With such a huge collection do you still bag and board all the single issues? I've mostly given up boarding but still bag.

This may shake you to the core, Shaun, but I never bagged and boarded my books. Oh, any back issue I bought would come in a bag, of course, and a number of the stores I shopped at would include a bag and later a bag-and-board with each issue purchased. But a good deal of my collection remains unbagged—in particular, the books that I bought back in the 1970s when I was first starting out.

Dan Brennan

You've mentioned that Iceman is going to be someone you think people will be talking about by the end of the year. I understand you're not going to give out spoilers here and have to pace announcements, but just as a big time Bobby fan who's been waiting for any news of him since his last solo ended, I was wondering if you could share when you expect we'll get our first hints or looks at what he'll be up to next? Is it something we might hear about or see unfold in the next month or two, or more like something that you won't actually even be able to talk about before October or November?

Don’t worry, you won’t be able to miss it when it happens, Dan.

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Behind the Curtain

.So this past week, we had a bit of a discussion in the office about this classic cover to UNCANNY X-MEN #141. I think it was Jordan White who pointed out that the set-up for the logo really doesn’t work: it’s a three-dimensional logo, yet it somehow slides underneath the Wanted poster (which also goes over the corner box) while popping over the corner box. It’s a very weird construction.

I did a quick doodle at a certain point to illustrate the fact that laying the logo across the image wouldn’t have worked well, in that it would have obscured Storm, Nightcrawler and colossus, three characters who are actually in the issue. I suggested that maybe the solve here would have been to eliminate THE UNCANNY portion of the logo from just this issue and shifted the logo up higher. That’s what was done on #137 a few months earlier.

Nick Lowe, meanwhile, made some adjustments of his own, including having the logo run behind the Corner Box and changing its color. I told him that I didn’t think the logo still popped as well, and that EIC of the day Jim Shooter likely wouldn’t have okayed this approach. But I can’t argue that it is still pretty visible and it shifts the emphasis back onto the spotlight and what is in it.

These are all issues that we think about when putting a cover together. And we foul them up routinely.

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Pimp My Wednesday

This is the week, fellow babies! From The Ashes—A New Beginning!

And that new beginning begins in X-MEN #1, brought to you by Jed MacKay and Ryan Stegman, with Marte Gracia. It’s been eleven months in the making and hopefully it doesn’t stink. But I know that I can count on you to be brutally honest once you’ve taken a look—I can already predict the “meh!” responses elsewhere on the Internet. Anyway, it’s a pretty great package end-to-end, so please give it a go and let us know what you liked about it.

And just because a couple of people have asked me who that is behind Cyclops, I’m showing my very crude cover sketch for this first issue here, which I sent Ryan’s way when we were first starting on this cover and which he made worlds better. But I suspect that the idea here—that the X-Men are protecting a mutant in distress and that Cyclops has just drawn a line in the sand with his optic blasts doesn’t entirely communicate on the final piece. This may have been better in theory than in execution, especially with the UPC there. It’s still a kick-ass cover, though.

And if that isn’t enough, Assistant Editor Martin Biro has assembled our latest GIANT-SIZE Special, this one dedicated to the SILVER SURFER. It’s got a new story by Mat Groom and Tommaso Bianchi as well as a classic tale from Ron Marz and Ron Lim. Martin’s story on the text page about having to use an issue of SILVER SURFER to convince his mother of the value of reading comics is almost worth the price of admission right there.

And Associate Editor Annalise Bissa continues to shepherd X-MEN: HEIR OF APOCALYPSE as #3 drops! The situation grows more dire as the number of claimants to Apocalypse’s title continues to shrink—and Archangel isn’t having it! Steve Foxe is behind the words, Netho Diaz the images!

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

I’m spotlighting this issue because with the DEATHLOK CHRONICLES continuing to run, how could I not? This particular DEATHLOK #1 was the first new attempt to relaunch the character after the series that I was responsible for went the way of the dodo. It was launched as part of the largely-forgotten M-Tech line of books, which also included X-51 and WARLOCK. The idea was to build a little corner of the Marvel Universe around technology. I don’t know if this was the suggestion of one of the revolving door of executives that went in and out during this bankruptcy era, but it certainly feels that way—especially in that the three books in the line seem to have been hastily assembled out of half-baked ideas that were lying around, and nobody seemed to have much faith in it or much interest in even working all that hard on it. Strong words, I know. You see, over in CABLE during his run with Jose Ladronn, Joe Casey had introduced a new cyborg character with a connection to SHIELD. This was Jack Truman, also known as Agent 18. Casey hadn’t intended to spin off the character, but with the M-Tech line being pushed for, EIC Bob Harras decided that Truman would become the new Deathlok. (Harras built all of the M-Tech books out of X-MEN ideas—X-51 was merged with a Sentinel, and Warlock had been an X-Character since the jump. I suspect Bob was trying to leverage from the only sales platform that he felt that he had available.) I don’t know how down with this Casey really was, but he went along with it, trying to make this crazy new direction work. He was joined in this endeavor by Leonardo Manco, an artist who was perhaps the diametric opposite of Jose Ladronn. Where Ladronn’s Jack Truman drew heavily on the stylings of Jack Kirby, Manco’s was a lot more European looking in flavor, he definitely gave the series a hyper-detailed look. But there was a price to be paid for that look, and it was often storytelling clarity. Casey had to do more and more of the lifting in copy, explaining what was going on in the tough-to-parse imagery. The series lasted for just under a year, and then Truman was folded back into the X-World, where he eventually disappeared once Casey wasn’t writing for the line any longer.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

CAPTAIN AMERICA #30 was the final issue in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ run as writer of the series and my final issue as editor of the book as well. It came out on July 7, 2021, so three years ago. That’s a really good cover by Alex Ross I have to say. Alex unfailingly always does great work, but a number of his CAP covers veer into being genuine Americana. Ta-Nehisi’s time on CAPTAIN AMERICA was somewhat controversial given who he was and who he is—though coming after Nick Spencer’s era, in which we memorably had Cap say, “Hail Hydra.” and blew the Internet apart, it was a lot more a tempest in a teapot. And Ta-Nehisi was great to work with, fiercely intelligent (a hell of a lot smarter than I am) but also aware of his shortcomings. He’d been writing BLACK PANTHER for a while when we recruited him for CAP, but he still felt that he hadn’t mastered comic book storytelling to its fullest. so as much as anything else, that was my place to lend a hand—though in all honesty, I did frighteningly little. Ta-Nehisi also wrote stories that were about the times in which we were living, but all filtered through the lens of the Marvel Universe. It was about as contemporary a title as I’ve ever worked on. Two things hurt the run a little bit, I think. The first was the rotating spate of artists, in particular across the second dozen issues, where we wound up inadvertently with the wrong person in the chair and then had to scramble to find a replacement. Leonard Kirk, who illustrated the final six issues or so did a bang-up job, I have to say. But also, this run got jammed up by the Pandemic lockdown, and a period in which buying comic books was impossible, and then difficult. That little jig right at the end took some of the wind out of our sails in terms of momentum. But I still think the material holds up, especially if you read it as it’s available now, in collected form.

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The Deathlok Chronicles

To kick things off, here’s DEATHLOK co-writer Gregory Wright:

Gregory Wright:

At this point I was back to writing very full scripts and calling Walter to keep him staying with the plot. As he got better he also got later. Sigh. Kim DeMulder had been one of my dependable talented inkers as an editor so I had suggested him to Tom. Happy we got one issue from him.

I HATE the special covers. Mostly they are not designed to really use the special effect and this cover didn’t work for me. I’m not sure what would have worked but I colored a lot of covers where I was asked to determine which color would get the effect. Uggggggghhhh! The few that worked were a glow in the dark Ghost Rider head A Silver Surfer and a very cool Warlock cover where the entire background was a hologram. Well, they did increase sales…

I disagree with you on the cover to DEATHLOK #19. Especially when seen in person (as opposed to the scan I shared) I think that cover looks really nice, and that the foil does its job and enhances the image without overpowering it. I’m still pretty happy with it. There were some bad and dumb enhanced covers that got done, but I don’t think it was one of them, for all that it certainly wasn’t as perfect as that glow-in-the-dark GHOST RIDER cover.

We were in schedule trouble going into DEATHLOK #20, and I wound up making the situation worse on a few different levels.

But first, let’s talk about Coldblood.

Coldblood started life as one of the other pitches for a Deathlok revival that was in competition with the version pitched by Dwayne McDuffie and Gregory Wright. It was the work of Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy. Obviously, it didn’t get chosen. But editor Terry Kavanaugh suggested that Moench & Gulacy rework it into a new character, which could then debut in the weekly MARVEL COMICS PRESENTS series that Terry was helming and for which he always needed material. The character appeared in one serial there and there weren’t any follow-up plans for him. So I’m pretty sure that I suggested to Greg that we bring him into CYBERWAR when we were first figuring out the overall story. I think the fact that this would be defacto Deathlok vs Deathlok appealed to me—though it was probably a poor instinct as the story was already so crowded with other players.

Anyway, realizing that I needed an artist for an issue and that Coldblood would be appearing in it, I reached out to Paul Gulacy to see if I could convince him to take it on. Negotiations couldn’t have gone on for too long, but I remember them as being endless—Gulacy was noncommittal, wanting a higher page rate among other things. Eventually, he passed on the gig, which meant that the clock was even closer to doomsday hour. Instead, I wound up bringing in Tom Raney to do this issue. Tom had a great, detailed style that I thought was very commercial. Unfortunately, that style made him a bit slow in those early days, and before you know it, I had used up all of the time I had left to get the book to print. It was a Friday, the issue needed to go to the printer by the following Monday, and all I had was some very sketchy layouts for five pages, which Tom had done so that Greg could dialogue the issue while he was still working.

In a bit of a tizzy, I cast around for someone, anyone, who could complete the issue over the weekend. Five pages in that amount of time was not an easy ask, and I feared that I was going to need to split them up among multiple artists, none of whom would be able to coordinate their efforts. It was a real mess. Finally, I’m not sure how it came about after all this time, but J.J. Birch, also known as Joe Brozowski, agreed to take on the job and get it done by Monday, so that we could get them colored by all hands that day and sent the book to print. His final pages were not the best in the world, but they were good enough to print, and so the issue made it out the door on time. But it was another haphazard wreck of an issue in a string of them, and I felt like the book was running out of control and coming apart at the seams. I had held the line on this issue for too long, and I knew that I had to be better about not letting that happen in the future (even though I did a couple more times) and that I needed to get the ship in order. But the schedule was so dire at this point that it wound up taking me about six more months to dig us out of the hole I’d let us get into.

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Monofocus

I’ve been working my way through the second season of STAR TREK: PRODIGY since it dropped on Netflix. I had forgotten just how good of a STAR TREK show that series was, despite being a co-production with kids-focused channel Nickelodeon (it’s weird to see the Nickelodeon logo at the start of these episodes). It’s a shame that we won’t be getting any more. I’m about half a dozen episodes into the season, and it’s been a pretty great ride so far. Having functionally blown up their series premise at the end of the first season when it looked as though that was going to be all of the PRODIGY that there’d be, the creators are forced to spend their initial few episodes building a new framework for the show. The fact that they’re able to do so relatively smoothly without events feeling forced is a testament to their skill. The core characters are still pretty fun, even if they do feel more like a super hero team than a Starfleet crew. And the assorted references to TREK history are always appreciated. It seems like Paramount is pulling back on TREK after a number of years when we’ve had a wide variety of options, which seems too bad to me. I realize that a movie is where the real money is likely to be made, but I’ve always felt that STAR TREK worked best on a episodic basis. That’s what it was created to be in the first place.

And speaking of STAR TREK, I also sat through the first season of STAR TREK: LOWER DECKS since it was put up at Paramount’s YouTube channel here. That’s a great show, and I haven’t looked at these early episodes since they were first being released. What’s interesting to see looking back is just how quickly this series found its identity and its feet. It arrives practically fully formed, with very little of the early trial-and-error you see on most new launch series. it also has a delightful way of both celebrating the franchise and skewering it at the same time, a bit of self-reflection that many IP holders simply wouldn’t allow for fear of breaking the foundation of the property. Like PRODIGY, LOWER DECKS is also coming to an end, albeit after five seasons rather than two (though those seasons were half as long as PRODIGY’s.) I’ll miss both of these shows when they’re gone—the definitely expanded the parameters of what a STAR TREK program could be.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about The Five Best Comic Books of 1972.

Five years ago, I wrote about the Five Best Comic Books of 1985

And ten years ago, I reposted a 15 year old piece on a favorite Golden Age comic book.

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All right, that’s it! I’ll be back again next week with another of these things. See you then! But don’t ever talk to me again, dude!

Hat’s All, Folks!

Tom B