#120: X-MEN is Go!

Well, folks, as relayed last time, this week saw the release of X-MEN #1, the first book in our new line of X-releases. And I have to thank everybody for their support over these past eleven months. In general, reaction seemed to be about what I expected, with some people really loving it, some people disliking it, lots of people falling somewhere in the middle—but most everybody reading it. Can’t really ask for better than that. Hopefully, some of you will come back for #2 and beyond, as well as sampling some of the other fine titles we have coming your way in the weeks ahead.

Also, a word of warning for what’s ahead: it looks as though, barring incident, I’ll be attending COMIC-CON INTERNATIONAL in San Diego this year, for the first time in close to a decade. So not only will I be missing doing the yearly Marvel Philosophy talk with the staff—Nick Lowe is going to do it instead, and I wish I had a ticket to that experience!—but it also seems likely that I’m going to have to miss a Newsletter release, for the first time since we started. With me going out as early as I am, I can’t see having the time to complete one. Nor does it seem realistic that I can pound out two of these in the course of the next week. So I’ll work to think of something, but be ready to spend your Sunday alone and joyless in the near future.

Now, this could all be a moot point, though, as I did something to my leg a few weeks back, and it’s not really getting better. I’ve had knee problems in that leg for a long time now, but in this instance, when I was getting into my car, I felt something pop. Since then, it’s continued to work, but at a diminished capacity. I really need to get it looked at. And depending on the outcome of that diagnosis, I wouldn’t be surprised of surgery is necessary to repair it—which would prevent me from attending SDCC. So maybe strike that entire previous paragraph from your memory. Or maybe not. We’ll see.

Comic book creator and ROM aficionado Chris Ryall revealed this week in the latest installment of his own Newsletter that “the primary lure of [this] newsletter is the lengthy section that is Tom replying to fan mail.” So that being the case, let’s get down to fishin’!

Joe West

As former editor of the Champions books, will we learn the fate of the Champions in NYX or elsewhere? I only ask because it’s been about a year since Kamala resurrected and the only other Champion she’s reunited/interacted with is Miles. I know you can’t say *when* we’ll see the Champions again, just wondering if they’re even still an active team right now.

I don’t know that you’re likely to see that addressed in NYX especially, Joe. And I’d guess that the Champions are no longer an active entity, since we haven’t seen them in a couple of years now. That tends to happen to groups when their titles go away, I’m afraid—especially one that are made up of characters who originated elsewhere in the line.

Alexander Zalben

Looking at your breakdown of the cover for UNCANNY X-MEN #141, immediately followed by X-MEN #1, which is bringing back a version of the familiar logo... Has there been any thought to also bring back the classic "heads in a box" for covers? Or would that just take room away from the cover artists?

As you can see from the doodle above, Alexander, I did consider it at one point. But I discarded the impulse—it felt like nostalgia for the sake of nostalgia, and as you say, it would have added another element to all of the covers that needed to be factored into compositions and set-ups. In the end, the benefits didn’t seem worth the energy.

Cian McDarby

I have to enquire further about the Cable sidelining. I get something like Nate Grey, X-Man getting sidelined. His solo might’ve lasted #75 issues and was only cancelled due to a direction change, but that was 20 years and he’s pretty obscure and kinda confusing. Ditto for most of the children of future’s past. But Cable?

Sure, Cable, Cian. Each of these characters has their fans and advocates who think that they’re all very simple to explain to people. But as I’ve said in the past, for years, X-MEN has had a rap for being impossible for new readers to get into because the amount of lore is just so vast and just so dense. I see it every day, as readers who are intrigued by one of our announcements ask the same question: “I haven’t read X-MEN before, where do I start, how can I even get in?” And no matter how many times we tell people that we’ve spared no effort to provide a ground level entry point in all of our new books, that’s a tough thing for people to accept and believe, apparently. So taking a bunch of the most complicated, most difficult-to-quantify characters off the board just makes things a little bit simpler at the outset. And these characters aren’t gone forever—in fact, you’ll see a couple of them before the year is out. But at launch, like the Corner Box conversation above, their upside wasn’t enough to override their downside—so over the side they went!

Manqueman

I feel like I missed some but it’s irking me being unable to find the answer: when and how did Quentin Quire get a body after Wolverine/Sabretooth?

The situation that we were going to be left, according to Jordan White, was that any character that we wanted resurrected would have been resurrected by the end of the Krakoa era, Manqueman. They may not have made everything screamingly clear, but Quentin was no doubt one of the five million mutants who were brought back while Krakoa was away on its sojourn before reappearing in UNCANNY X-MEN #700.

Alison Cabot

Tom, can we hope that Emma will have a new love interest in this new phase, or can you not talk about that yet?

That’s certainly an interesting thought, Alison. Emma’s still in the process of wrapping things up with Tony Stark in INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #20 any day now, but after that, anything is possible.

Michael M. Jones

It's absolutely baffling to me that, at this point, characters like Cable and Bishop would be sidelined. Off-and-on members of the X-Men for over 30 years. Cable having had several long-running titles and a big-screen debut in Deadpool 2. Both appearing in the recent (and rather popular) X-Men '97 cartoon. By now, both Cable and Bishop are about as entrenched in the X-Men mythos as, say, Gambit or Rogue. And you can boil both of their origins down to "time travelers from the future, come back to the present to prevent certain awful things from happening" without complicating it. (Same as you can do with Rachel!)

I hear what you’re saying, Michael, but I respectfully disagree. And especially when you are talking about more than one of them in a given book, that stuff compounds wildly. Plus, by their very nature, characters from other times and parallel Earths don’t speak as directly to the fundamental mutant metaphor in the way that native era characters do. This isn’t their time, this isn’t their place, and so while they are impacted by it while they’re here, the experience isn’t the same thing for them as for everybody else. And that’s a detriment at launch as well.

Chris Sutcliffe

As a father of a five-year-old, I'm surprised that X-Men isn't a known quantity for him in way that Spidey is, or the core Avengers are. And as a kid who grew up in the 90s, that seems extra odd.

Do you have any plans to target books at a younger generation?

Well, Chris, I expect that has everything to do with other media, films and animation in particular. When was the last time there was a mainstream X-MEN cartoon, X-MEN ‘97 excepted? Kids don’t get exposed to the characters if they aren’t in front of them in a manner in which they can engage with them. In terms of comics, while I’m certainly happy to get any readers that I can muster, I think it’s doubtful than many 5-year-olds are going to their local comic shop and buying new issues. That’s an activity that’s a few more years ahead in their future, if anything. So I don’t know that doing an X-Book aimed at children that young would be worthwhile, or find its audience.

Stiles

Tom, will we see a lot of action in Exceptional X-Men?

You’ll see a decent amount of action, Stiles, especially once the series gets going. But that really isn’t what the book is about, especially at the beginning, not in the way that, say, X-MEN is. Instead, I’d say think about it as being more similar to ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN, the original one by Brian Bendis and Mark Bagley. It’s very character-focused, and it doesn’t rush through its early set-up and establishment of its characters. In that way, it feels to me similar to Chris Claremont’s early issues of something like NEW MUTANTS.

Nichelle

What characters fandom surprised you the most , whether it be the size of it or their attitude?

What are you're thoughts on characters sharing Mantles such as the two wolverines ?

Is this wave officially finished or can we expect books to be announced ?

I don’t know about surprised per se, Nichelle. But Thor fans in particular went absolutely apeshit when AVENGERS VS JLA came out and Superman struck down the God of Thunder. Despite having said very loudly that they wanted a definitive and unambiguous answer to the question of who was stronger—turned out that they also wanted a specific answer, and so they were very upset when that wasn’t the way that things went in that moment.

I’m of an earlier generation, but I generally think it’s a bad idea for multiple characters to share the same mantle and be active at the same time. It just gets confusing, and it makes it more difficult for new people coming in to figure out where they stand. But for all that, it’s a thing that we do a lot at this point, so it doesn’t seem to bug other people quite as much. And in certain instances, such as with Miles Morales, he just wouldn’t be the same if he wasn’t Spider-Man.

We’re going to continue to launch new projects moving forward, but after October we’ll stop talking about FROM THE ASHES. So on that level, yes, we’re done, But new books are still in the offing.

Jeff Ryan

Do you care much about the online reading orders for storylines and events? Is there's an ideal "director's cut" of the ideal way to read each chapter of a story? Or does the reading order defeat the effort of designing a story designed to be satisfyingly read even if you only read a three-issue tie-in, or only the core event, or only one single issue?

I like to start at the front of the comic, Jeff, and read through sequentially to the last page. But that’s me, you should do whatever brings you the most enjoyment. As you say, while the system isn’t always perfect and we louse things up from time to time, we’re constantly trying to make sure that you can read one portion of an Event without needing to read absolutely every last bit of it.

Ian

Do you have any thoughts on code name-less characters? The X-world in particular is full of characters that go by their “real names”, and it’s always bothered me. Sure super-hero names are a contrivance, but “Shadowcat” just feels more heroic than “Kate”.

Depends completely on the character, Ian. I always thought that calling Jean Grey Jean Grey in the X-MEN animation was a bit of a mistake. But I also understand that Marvel Girl was a particularly dated codename and that she had no other alias apart from Phoenix in the comics to fall back on. No matter what the codenames, though, I do wish that modern writers felt more comfortable in using them more often. As my junior editors will tell you, I ama fiend about naming the characters every issue and using the super hero names, not just the civilian names. I seem to encounter tons of comics that are about Clark or Bruce or Diana and that seem to be sheepish or ashamed to say Superman or Batman or Wonder Woman.

Emma Frostan

As I said before I'll wait your answer explaining me why Emma is a harlot and a home wrecker and Wolverine has a positive role due to his affair with Jean.

As this isn’t something I’ve ever said, Emma, I don’t see why I should need to explain anything.

X of Alex

San Diego Comic Con is creeping up on the calendar, which got me thinking about the extent it--and other trade shows--influence the publishing calendar. Do things like "we have to have X-Men #1 out by SDCC" influence your thinking when scheduling releases? Or is there no mind paid at all to lining up titles with big cons?

Not generally, no. We don’t tend to specifically schedule certain releases around conventions, Alex. But as we get closer to the shows, the stuff we have coming out or coming up is the stuff that we wind up talking about and promoting the most.

Evan “Cool Guy”

What's the quickest you've ever thought "This person has got 'it'" about a new writer or artist?

Oh, I don’t know, Evan. It tends to take me a little while and an exposure to more than any single story or submission before making that determination—at least where writers go. Artists are a bit easier in that you’re looking at what they can do on the page, so if they’ve got the necessary skills, you can tell that almost instantly.

Stephen

You mention Cerebus quite a bit and I noticed there’s a humble bundle with the whole series for $20ish. I’ve read the first two books over twenty years ago now, but do you think the series is worth a pick up and read for readers that don’t have a real reference for what was going on in comics at the time? I guess what I’m getting at is does the work stand alone if I ignore the politics etc that came later, and if not is there a good jumping off point

Everybody is going to give you a different set of answers on this, Stephen. But speaking just for myself, I think that deal is absolutely worth it, and I would leave it to you to find your best stopping point. For me, it tends to be around #200—which is later than most, but which is the point where most of the big story aspects have been wrapped up and before the narrative begins to reshape itself to Dave Sim’s changing beliefs.

JV

I love your newsletter and blog Tom - and I am amazed at the level of detail on comics you worked on or read from decades ago..do you keep a diary or notes? Or do you just have amazing recall (total recall ;))?

I mostly just remember a lot of this stuff, JV. I do have some very basic reference, including a chronological list of all the issues that I’ve edited over the years. But that’s simply a list of titles, nothing deeper than that.

Callie

is there actually a chance of Hickman's bobby/sam book coming to fruition in From The Ashes or was your offhand joke nothing more than an offhand joke?

Nothing more than an offhand joke, Callie. Or not quite a joke, more a scaling of what elements might be necessary to make such a project work.

Tom Galloway

As long as you're talking about covers and showing the X-Men #1, there's a particular effect on that one that I really dislike. Namely Scott's optic blast somehow having become gaseous. It's a pure energy beam; there's never been any indication of physical residue after he fires one. Using his visor, he can focus it to a very narrow beam, but it's never been shown to have a set of physics of its own such as Darkseid's Omega beams which curve and angle on their own more than an Uber driver trying to get somewhere in Boston. Yet we increasingly, even on action figure attachments, see this bit where what seems to be a plume of optic blast smoke similar to pistol smoke curling out of the edge of his visor. A sort of glowing aftereffect I could see (sorry), or a bit of drawn as a minor, pale, amount of energy barely seeping out as the visor opens/closes. But not what to all indications is something acting like a physical plume of gas rather than projected energy. I get that the effect is trying to project a "he just fired a blast" perception, but it's just so wrong for how his blasts have always been portrayed.

Back in my art school days, Tom, I had a friend who had an expression that seems relevant here. He used to say, “If it looks good, it IS good.” Which means that it doesn’t really matter how you got to the result, whether your perspective is flawless or your draftsmanship on point. If the piece looks cool, then it works, and if it doesn’t, no amount of perfect perspective is going to make it work. I think the same is true of Cyclops’ visor smoking. That’s been a motif that’s been used for a lot longer than you seem to think—the first place I remember seeing it was in the X-MEN/NEW TEEN TITANS book back in 1983

It looks cool. So it works. And it helps to convey an action, that Cyclops has just fired his optic blasts.

Diana

Follow-up: Marvel editors (yourself included) have never had a problem putting, say, Wolverine on multiple books and teams while also being "surrounded by the same old people". But you seem to be suggesting Storm's status quo is an either/or situation, where she can be diminished with the X-Men or elevated with the Avengers. I'd really like to understand the thinking behind that, especially considering Phoenix is also being excluded from ongoing X-book storylines using more or less the same logic of "she's too big for the gig"...

I can understand you being disappointed that Storm won’t be in a series with other favorites, Diana. But between her own title and AVENGERS, she’s going to be appearing more regularly and more often than virtually any other X-Man save Wolverine. But you have to make choices when lining up a series—you can’t make everybody happy and you can’t use every character everywhere, or else it becomes chaos. So these are the choices that we made.

Cris Lander

The last time we saw Nate Grey was at the end of the "Age of X-Man". Will we ever see the character again, or is that supposed to be the end of his tale?

While I wouldn’t expect to see him any time soon, Cris—that same launch time prohibition applies to Nate as well—this is Marvel, and if there’s one thing that you can count on, it’s that everybody comes back again sooner or later if you wait long enough.

Bob Fifteen

Does X-Statix fall under the X-Office these days, or are those characters very much their own thing? Milligan and Allred's take on them has always been a little distanced from the main books and continuity due to their satirical tone, but as X-mutant books, are they still with you now?

Actually, on a slightly wider note - do things like Deadpool, Major X and the various flashback / 'interquel' miniseries featuring X-Men characters still get some level of X-Office oversight?

On a tangent to that - I've really enjoyed the X-Men '97 prequel comic as well as the animated series. Are we likely to see any more comics tied into that?

X-STATIX is an X-Book, Bob, so it and its characters fall squarely under my oversight. Don’t be surprised to see a few small connections in the near future. And yes, all of the things that you’ve listed also fall under the purview of the X-Office, though occasionally we’ll choose to have them in other offices depending on circumstances. X-MEN ‘97 is a good example of that. Jordan White had established a good rapport with the animation team doing the first series, so it didn’t make sense to move any follow-up series away from him. So if and when we do more, that book will be under Jordan.

Matt Brassil

What was the strategy behind including the 3K bonus page as a QR-code rather than printing that page within X-Men #1?

Well, Mark, it was a bonus page to begin with, an extra page—we didn’t scale back the contents of X-MEN #1 in order to do it. And it gave us a page whose contents we could conceal until the day of release, thus avoiding any early spoilers. You’ll find that we’re doing similar pages in most of the new X-launches. They’re a little free bonus, a little extra—sort of a modern day equivalent of that “Things To Come” page that ran in the first issue of the Claremont/Lee X-MEN #1.

Chuck Hibbon

Did any of the Neos get resurrected on Krakoa or are they too different from mutants?

Not that we’ve seen, Chuck, but you never know. I always thought there was some buried potential in the Neo that didn’t quite connect properly. So it isn’t impossible that we may bring them back at some point.

Neon Frost

You said the choice of Emma and Kate for a role together in the new line started with you. What made you choose that direction for the characters? I would love to hear your thoughts behind the choices.

I kinda think you should read the book before we start talking about those specifics, Neon. So I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a month or two before we can get into any answers.

Glenn Simpson

Bit of an "inside baseball" question - how much of a role does trademark protection fall into the average year's worth of titles? I've seen a story where Jon Ostrander's Suicide Squad was the result of the lawyers passing a list around. And we often see one-shots and minis that don't seem to be demand-driven. Anything you can reveal there?

We do keep track of things such as the need to maintain and renew trademarks, Glenn, but it really doesn’t affect our storytelling much at all these days. We can often maintain a trademark simply by using a mark in a trademark fashion, like on a variant cover or the like. So we wouldn’t need to do a SUICIDE SQUAD book if that were our mark today, we could simply do a cover somewhere where they were battling the Avengers or somebody. So this will occasionally impact on cover copy and why certain logos are used, but that’s about it.

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Behind the Curtain

I’ve debated back and forth about sharing this next document, as I don’t even know whether anybody will be able to make heads or tails of it. Certainly, those of us who were in attendance found the whole thing confusing. But what you see below is the multi-page agenda from the one and only Marvel Retreat that took place at Bill Jemas’ home. This was right towards the end of his tenure as Marvel’s President and Publisher, and he had lost faith in the editorial group’s ability to tell sensible stories. So he set out to teach us all how to craft comic books the Bill Jemas way.

Bill had seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding a short while earlier and he was enamored of it, which is part of why it garners a mention here. it expressed themes that spoke very directly to him.

It’s interesting to see Bill’s perspective on the difference between AMAZING SPIDER-MAN and ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN. I don’t know that many others would consider the first any less of a soap opera series than the second.

Bill was also obsesses with basketball—he had come back to Marvel after a stint at the NBA, so he loved the sport. This is why Ultimate Peter Parker tries out for the team when he first gets his powers and was a backbone concept in Bill’s proposed YOUNG XAVIER series, outlined above, where Charles Xavier would have been a teen basketball sensation.

Bill also went through a period where he was stuck on episodic television storytelling, in particular shows like THE SIMPSONS whose status quos would restore after each episode. He advocated that this was how our world should work as well.

As a part of this Retreat, every office was required to pitch a new series that conformed to Bill’s new guidelines, with the guarantee that they would all happen after we talked them through in the room. I don’t remember how many actually made it into print, but it wasn’t many. But the one from my office did, and we’ll speak about it in depth a bit further along in the Newsletter.

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Pimp My Wednesday

After a bit of a drought, we’ve got a whole bunch o different titles coming at you this week!

NAMOR #1 by Jason Aaron, Paul Davidson and Alex Lins is very much in the spirit of Jason’s PUNISHER: KING OF KILLERS series. Which is to say that every issue is 30 pages long, with specific sequences handled by one of our two artists, and that it’s intended as a stand-alone project for all that it has connections to Jason’s recent AVENGERS era. Among other things, it’s going to map out the various kingdoms and peoples of the undersea world and introduce a whole bunch of new, cool characters.

And also starting up this week, in the pages of INCREDIBLE HULK #14 of all places, is the serialized story DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE: WEAPON X-TRACTION. This eight-part epic by Ryan North and Javier Garron will run as bonus content across 8 different titles in our line. Its inclusion adds no additional cost to the cover price. And it’s a wild and madcap romp as you would expect from Ryan in which Logan and Wade are pulled from their natural place in time and space to…do something that will reveal itself as the story unfolds.

Javier Garron also did this promotional image for the storyline, which will now be available as a variant cover on INCREDIBLE HULK #14.

And the second of our X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES launches takes flight this week in the pages of PHOENIX #1. Stephanie Phillips and Alessandro Miracolo, under the direction of Associate Editor Annalise Bissa, take Jean Grey out into the cosmos, where she can spread her wings and burn as never before. This first issue guest-stars Nova and brings back a villain from a series I worked on two decades ago. And as with all of our launches, it’s designed to be absolutely welcoming to newcomers and it has a tone and a flavor entirely its own.

And not to be overlooked, Assistant Editor Martin Biro is dropping the final issue of BLOOD HUNTERS this week—well, the final issue until the new BLOOD HUNTERS series starts up in a month’s time, anyway. Once again, this issue features three stories, so in addition to the wrap-up of the Blood Hunters serial by Erica Schultz and Bernard Chang, you also get a Silver Surfer tale from Fabian Nicieza and Patch Zircher as well as a Satana story by Mary Sangiovanni and Giada Belviso.

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A Comic Book On Sale 70 Years Ago Today, July 14, 1954

The BATMAN comic books of the 1950s often get a bad rap. And it’s true that, as the decade wore on, the series began to dabble more and more into science fiction adventures featuring strange aliens and the like. But that was what was popular at the moment. Prior to that, though, BATMAN still maintained some of its legitimacy as a grounded series set primarily in the fictional Gotham City in which the Dynamic Duo putted their skills against the underworld as well as costumed super-criminals. This issue isn’t especially noteworthy, but it is representative in general of the title as a whole at this time. BATMAN #86 contained three stories. In the first, Batman and Robin remain underwater at too great a depth and cannot surface without getting “the bends”, nitrogen bubbles in their bloodstream. So they are forced to convert a submarine into an undersea mobile Batcave and continue to fight crime from there until they can remedy their situation. In the second, the Joker is inspired by a ballgame to make his next series of crimes baseball-themed, and he builds himself a new gang like the manager of a ball club. In the last slot, we get the cover feature, in which Batman and Robin meet Chief Man Of The Bats and his son Little Raven, who have been inspired to act as the Batman and Robin of their Reservation. The real Batman and Robin step in to sub for the Chief after he is injured, imperiling his secret identity. The writers for these stories were Edmond Hamilton, Bill Woolfolk and Ed Herron, with artwork provided by Dick Sprang and Sheldon Moldoff, all working anonymously behind the Bob Kane byline.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

The BOYS’ RANCH hardcover was released on July 14, 1992 and was a hardcover collection of the six comic book issues that Joe Simon and Jack Kirby and their studio had produced for Harvey Comics back in the very early 1950s. Joe Simon had made a deal with Marvel through Tom DeFalco, who was a fan of this material, to produce collections in the MARVEL MASTERWORKS format. The first one, though, FIGHTING AMERICAN, didn’t sell great, and so BOYS’ RANCH languished in a flat file in Bobbie Chase’s office until she or one of her juniors might have time to put it together. I was a fan of this material as well, and I was already doing the MASTERWORKS volumes, so I asked DeFalco if I could take it over, and he agreed. So I got to work a bit with Joe Simon and his son Jim, and I had my one professional contact with Jack Kirby, whom I hired to write one of the two introductions to the volume. (I didn’t really have the budget to pay for two introductions, but nothing was going to prevent me from getting Kirby to write a piece. if anybody ever flagged the additional expense, it never came back to me.) BOYS’ RANCH was another in a series of “kid gang” strips that Simon & Kirby did, a genre that they originated in comic books with YOUNG ALLIES for Timely. The strip was, obviously, a western, and it also had a reputation as being one of the best series of its day, for all that it failed to find long-term commercial success. One story, “Mother Delilah” in issue #3, still regularly shows up on lists of the best stories Jack Kirby ever worked on. At the outset, Richard Howell, who was also an enormous S & K fan, was going to recolor the volume, but the budget on the book was scaled back and so I couldn’t afford that. Instead, we took years-old copies of those first six issues of BOYS’ RANCH and we had people color-code them on plastic acetates attached to each page. This caused some difficulties, as coloring in the early 1950s was at best a haphazard process. The printer would reach out at different point indicating that a give character’s hair or outfit was colored differently from issue to issue, asking about how they should approach it. So we had to work all of that stuff out on the fly. Joe Kaufman, one of Marvel’s in-house designers, gave the book extra effort. He threw his all into it, and it’s one of the nicer volumes we released in this period. Unfortunately, as you might expect, an obscure western strip from decades earlier had even less appeal in the market than FIGHTING AMERICAN did, and so the sales on this book were anemic. That killed the prospective third S & K volume, BULLS-EYE, stone-cold dead.

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Another Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

CAPTAIN AMERICA #29 was released on July 14, 2004 and was my first issue as editor of the title, a position I would hold for about 15 years. It was the first issue back under the general Marvel Universe imprint after having migrated to MARVEL KNIGHTS at the beginning of this run. It was also marketed as a tie-in to AVENGERS: DISASSEMBLED, which was a bit of an exaggeration if not an out-and-out fib. It was something that I was asked to do at the eleventh hour on a number of MU titles that may have needed the sales bump, including IRON MAN, SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN, FANTASTIC FOUR and THOR as well as the two CAPTAIN AMERICA books. Two books? Yes. A couple of months earlier, I had launched CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE FALCON with the intention that it would be the Marvel Universe Captain America series, not suspecting that this change was in the works. So both titles had to cross over with DISASSEMBLED and not contradict one another. I don’t know that we quite managed that, but read today as separate entries, each one works individually, so I guess that’s the more important part. This four-part run was written by Robert Kirkman, which I think was a Brian Bendis suggestion, and artwork was provided by Scot Eaton. It’s a fun little four-parter, with its roots in the Mark Gruenwald era of the series, even if its tone is a lot lighter and more comical than what was to come thereafter. I think this was my first time working with Kirkman, but it was far from the last—he was a hungry hustler, so he was always trying to get me to bite on additional projects or to let him take over ongoing books. I suspect he was hoping that he’d get to continue writing the book in its eventual relaunch, and was disappointed when that gig went to Ed Brubaker. Still, it worked out all right for him in the end. The cover was by Dave Johnson, a really good cover designer who wanted to emulate the sorts of covers he remembered from the 60s and 70s on this piece. He included a version of that Hydra Attack burst, but I thought the lettering on it wasn’t up to snuff, so I wound up having to get it replaced with a slightly larger burst that would obscure the original, which was integrated into the artwork.

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Another Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

Long forgotten and overlooked, GUARDIANS #1 was also published on July 14, 2004 and was written by my Associate Editor Marc Sumerak. This was the project that was pitched at Bill Jemas’ retreat, and it did wind up getting published—even if it didn’t really do any business. As far as I can recall, it’s never even been collected, which is a bit of a shame, as while it doesn’t have anything to do with the GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, it was still a good story, one that had the flavor of a 1980s film about it. It was about a quartet of friends who, years ago, while pretending to be space adventurers, had an encounter with an actual alien being in an E.T. sort of a way. But that was decades ago, the kids are all grown-up jaded adults now, who barely remember those events, thinking that they may have simply imagined them all. And then their friend from the stars comes back, telling them that he needs the help of all five of them to recover something he’d left on Earth during his last visit or calamity will happen. So it had a bit of the flavor of Galaxy Quest to it, in that the now-adult kids now need to become the space heroes they imagined themselves as when they were young. Casey Jones provided the very appealing artwork for the book. If I’m remembering things right, Sumerak left staff about halfway through the writing of this series, his life taking him in other directions (including wanting to write more stuff.) It was very much the sort of series that Jemas liked: it had no super heroes per se, no costumes. It was simply a fantasy story that could have formed the basis for a film, and it was clean to enter. There aren’t any references in it to the Marvel Universe that I can recall, so it’s functionally set outside of it. And it’s been utterly forgotten since it came out, which is too bad, as it was really a nice little book.

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The Deathlok Chronicles

We begin this section, as usual, with some thoughts from DEATHLOK co-writer Gregory Wright:

Gregory Wright:

I love the cover to this issue. Probably the best one Walter did. I think I suggested J.J. Birch to you as he was fast and I had enjoyed working with him on FOOLKILLER. I was completely baffled by the amount of artist problems we kept having and was very frustrated that my storyline wouldn't have the same artist for the five issues. And I think I was pushing Deathlok too hard in the direction of being more threatening...it was getting old. I had Siege for that. All said and done, I think the issue looks much better than it had a right to. I seem to recall that you DID suggest COLDBLOOD and I was thrilled to use him. But like you say the issue was already to crowded for ANOTHER subplot. I had several other editors "suggest" I add in additional characters to already crowded storylines. I'm not sure WHY it happened or why I always just agreed. I do know at this point I wanted to try and be one less thing for you to worry about. Good thing we had Walter back for the next issue...

I don’t know, I don’t love that cover to #20 as much as you do. I prefer the covers to #18 and #21, below. Even his #25 cover is pretty good. Might be that I just don’t love that brown background on #20 or the way the two back figures are knocked out.

DEATHLOK #21 was the final issue in the “Cyberwar” storyline, a story that had been plagued by delays and artistic difficulties. As a result, it was a story that never quite came together the way we wanted it to. But it did accomplish one thing in terms of moving the story of Michael Collins ahead: As I mentioned at the outset, the driving through-line of both this story and the series as a whole was that Collins was searching for his human body, hoping that his humanity might be restored. But by the end of this adventure, he seemingly sees his body destroyed, and so that objective is no longer a possibility for him. (We deliberately hedged our bets and showed the readers that the body had still survived, but Michael was unaware of that fact.) So like it or not, another of the elements that had provided the series with some direction had been wrapped up. This wouldn’t have been such a problem except that we weren’t really replacing them with anything, and so the character began to feel a bit directionless, like he was being pulled into adventures by chance or happenstance.

We also finally caught a break on the art side. I’m not certain where I found Greg Adams’ inking samples, but despite him being a newcomer without much of anything in the way of published credits, I brought him on board. Apparently, I learn nothing. But we were desperate for a new regular inker since Jimmy Palmiotti’s departure, and Greg’s samples looked good. And this time, it worked out—Greg worked like a bandit on these pages, delivering them both on time and looking good. He wasn’t worried about any deficiencies in Walter McDaniel’s pencils as others had been, he simply got down to the job at hand, determined to do his best work. He was a lifesaver, and became a lynchpin of the artistic team going forward.

Still, even with Greg, we were still in an insurmountable scheduling hole, one that was only going to get worse with Dwayne McDuffie’s return to the writing chair.

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Monofocus

Dan Slott recommended the animated film ROBOT DREAMS to me, and it was a delight, albeit perhaps 15 minutes too long. It concerns a lonely anthropomorphic dog who orders a robot to help relieve his solitary lifestyle, and the way the relationship between the two develops. The animation is wonderful, with a real European flair to it, and the story, told entirely wordlessly, is haunting and affecting. It also makes an interesting choice at its climax—one that left my wife feeling frustrated but which I found interesting. I don’t want to say anything more so as to not spoil anything. But it’s worth checking out if you get the opportunity. And to give you a taste, here’s a trailer.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about The Five Best Comic Books of 1990

And five years ago, I wrote about the Classic Era of new STAR BLAZERS Projects

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And that’ll do me for this week! so until next we meet, be good, take care of your knees, and let’s try to show some empathy for one another, eh?

Hat’s All, Folks!

Tom B