#121: Idaho?

So we’re only days away from San Diego Comicon, the first one of these I’ve done in almost ten years. Back in 2015, the event had already grown far beyond the convention center to engulf the entire area for what some have dubbed “comic book prom”. I can only imagine what another decade has done to it. And my bad leg is already throbbing at the thought of having to navigate all of this distance.

San Diego Comicon has always been a magical place. I made my first trip out there in 1990, the last year before it moved into the Convention Center. It was a regular trip every year throughout the 1990s and 2000s until I eventually had an amazingly horrific time getting home one year and decided that enough was enough. But in 2015, the last time I ventured out to San Diego, I did win the convention by bumping into the Doctor himself, Peter Capaldi, on the street on Wednesday night.

The rest of the show was sort of downhill from there.

Hopefully, I’ll get to see some of you out there on the convention floor. Please remember that I dislike human beings in all their forms, and will probably have a discomfort in my leg, so approach with caution.

On another subject entirely, I don’t know whether anybody else has noticed this, but there’s something really strange going in over in Idaho.

But enough of all that, we know what you’re really here for, don’t we? You want your questions answered, don’t you? Fair enough! Here’s what people were talking about this past week:

Mercury Seastar

Were there ever any X-Men characters you tried to nab for the Avengers at any point or wanted to? I know you said before that you felt it was a mistake that no one had ever done a Phoenix series, with Jean in space. Was that ever something you thought about doing by taking the character over to the Avengers office at any point, or borrowing say Forge or any number of X-Characters for Avengers books?

You couldn’t really borrow an X-Character and then start up a solo series with them, Mercury. That wouldn’t be Cricket, or permitted. But in terms of X-Characters we wanted, we were constantly interested in getting the Beast back in AVENGERS, but the X-Office of the era constantly had Hank involved in a lot of stuff at any given time, and so we never did so apart from a guest-shot or two. On the other hand, we did get Wolverine for a decade or so, so there’s that.

Nichelle

I have read the new X-men and really enjoyed it , I've been noticing in many of the books that their are multiple telepaths in each team and I wanted to ask is that something editorial has talked about?

Another thing I wanted to ask is that I have also noticed that their are many new characters in every book so far , is this intentional?

My last question is , is their any character you personally " pushed" to be in a team book?

Well, thank you, Nichelle! I answered a question to this effect in the letters page in X-MEN #3, but the answer is that neither Cyclops nor Jed MacKay lined up their cast based solely on powers. And not for nothing, but there are a hell of a lot of telepaths among the X-Men’s ranks at large.

In terms of new characters, absolutely! The series always need to remain fresh, and one way to do that is to bring in entirely new players and see what sort of an impact they can make. This was especially important now, in that these new young mutants will never have experienced life on Krakoa firsthand, and so will have a different perspective on it. And I pushed for lots of characters to be where they are in the new line—I laid out a pattern for all of the series at the outset and that tended to anchor certain characters to certain concepts. That said, I didn’t dictate any of the line-ups, and we pivoted away from some of the characters I had initially thought would be in given places as things developed. For example, I was a little bit heartbroken to have had to lose Frenzy from the X-MEN line-up, but once we settled on the idea of Juggernaut being in the group, there didn’t seem like there’d be room for the both of them. Fortunately, she found a home in X-FACTOR.

STILES

Tom, how does the process for deciding on the characters' new looks work? I mean, the editors come up with the idea or usually the writers make a request. Will all the mutants have new costumes? Sorry if you've already answered a question like that.

What do you think about Banshee? He's usually extremely underrated, but he's a character with so many facets. He's been a villain, a classic hero, a teacher, a spy... I hope we get to see him one day in From The Ashes.

Well, Stiles, as I said above, I laid out some initial thoughts, and then left it to the individual creators to let me know who they wanted to use. So, for example, in the initial write-up for what became UNCANNY X-MEN, I envisioned the cast as being Rogue + Gambit + three other characters. And in the end, we’re going to wind up with a cast of about nine there, so that fit my prescription precisely and also went in a totally different direction.

And I like Banshee just fine, but then he was a part of the team when I started reading the book back in the 1970s, so I have a different perspective on him, I expect, than most modern fans. But we’ll see him in an interesting position in a project that hasn’t been announced yet, but which you should hear about before teh year is out.

Leigh Hunt

I didn't realise my question had already been pre-empted so...I will just say I don't think I like this personally. And it's disappointing to hear that other books will do the same thing. Still, it didn't stop me enjoying the book and looking forward to the rest of From the Ashes.

I think that’s fair, Leigh. But in this era of early spoilers, I love that this approach gives us the opportunity to hold onto some plot points right up until the day the title ships. So you’ll see the pattern repeated in most of the other X-Launches of this era. We will include those pages in the eventual collected editions, though, for those who don’t own a phone.

Iioo

In X-Men #1 there is a line about how it could seem that the X-Men are keeping mutants that look too different hidden in the base. Now I wonder if it was meant to have a meta subtext...

On the same topic, if you are shelving the more confusing characters, why use Xorn? I have no idea which of comics about him actually are about him, and I'm not that new of a reader.

I don’t know that it really had a meta subtext to it, Iioo, but only Jed MacKay could tell you for sure. But I did spend many a year complaining to people that the X-Men were comprised of a series of beautiful people living rent-free in an enormous mansion with all expenses paid—and they still walked around all day feeling victimized. This is one of the reasons why I liked GENERATION X at its outset—here were mutants who looked obviously weird and couldn’t so easily fit into regular society. And for the purposes of X-MEN #1, all that anybody needs to know is what’s presented in the issue, which is that he functions as the team’s healer. Anything else that you need will be brought up as we go.

Evan “Cool Guy”

It's always interesting to hear about the different offices, i.e. the X-Office, Avengers etc., I wonder if you have any stories about memorable clashes between the different offices?

I don’t know about clashes per se. Certainly we editors would argue at different points, that’s all a part of the process. But typically, the best idea wins. I know there were times where the X-Office wanted to bring in Wanda Maximoff to address/make her pay for what she did at the end of HOUSE OF M, but they never had a plan that made any sense to me, and so I continuously blocked it until we got to AVENGERS VS X-MEN, where it made sense. And I’ve spoken in the past about how there was a small tug of war between myself and Mike Marts over HOUSE OF M until it became what it became. And more memorably, while this wasn’t a clash between editorial offices, it still applies: at one point, the MARVEL KNIGHTS CAPTAIN AMERICA series had a plan to bring Bucky back from the dead, a plan that I thought didn’t work at all. And I wasn’t shy about saying so. There was one meeting that we’d gotten to a little bit early, and EIC Joe Quesada and I started arguing over this idea. And our voices grew progressively louder and louder until we were full-out yelling at one another. We weren’t angry at one another, just passionate about our individual perspectives. Ultimately, that story wound up not happening, but it did give Joe a bit of delight when he told me that Ed Brubaker wanted to write CAPTAIN AMERICA a few years later, but that he wanted to bring back Bucky, too. Fortunately, that story turned out all right in the end.

Ian A

Did the Tsunami line come out of a similar mandate from Jemas? And were you involved in any of those books?

I was involved in a couple of the Tsunami titles, Ian, including HUMAN TORCH and INHUMANS and SENTINEL and THE CREW, which was going to be a part of that line for a hot minute until cooler heads prevailed. It was a bit of a mess of a launch, really, as we had set out to do a bunch of titles without any clear mandate behind them, and then a certain way into production, Bill decided, based on his kids’ momentary interest in manga, that the books should all be manga-themed and manga-flavored. That led to a bunch of mid-step retooling, including all of the series getting matching logos with a faux-Asian typeface style and all of them being grouped under the Tsunami label. But that line had some really good books in it, even if they didn’t really have all that much to do with manga.

X of Alex

The hidden page in X-Men #1 brought to mind those AR stickers that were all the rage back during MARVEL NOW. I've fond memories of those, and don't mind the extra action of grabbing my phone to scan the code. However, with an eye toward preservation, are you considering putting the page into the collection/reprint of the issue going forward?

Yes, Alex, as I said above, the QR pages will be incorporated into the eventual collections. And just this week, somebody threw out the idea of including them if the issues got second printings—but it was already too late to do that for X-MEN #1, so I doubt we’ll follow through with it on the rest of them.

David Miller

I have a question, who have you not interacting with in comics whom you’ve heard the nicest things about? Societally we are fascinated by dirt, but I love hearing stories about kindness too.

My go-to answer for this question, David, is almost always Archie Goodwin, one of the finest editors and writers in the field, who left Marvel just as I was coming in, and who passed away several years later. Consequently, though, I don’t really have a story to share with you about Archie.

Emma Froststan

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.

Might want to pack a lunch, then…

Mark Coale

I think at least maybe 2 of those Batman stories were in the From the 30 to the 70s book that I got as a kid. Do you have that or the Superman book? If so, any stories stand out from reading them?

I had them both, Mark, though I got my copy of the SUPERMAN volume years after having read it out of our public library several times. And I wrote about the BATMAN volume at length here.

Mungho

You've maybe heard of me. The Beast fan. I just wanted a little clarification. People insist to me that the Beast now in X-Men #1 is just a clone with no connection to the original but implanted memories, while the original is burning in the MU's hell. Mostly because they said he didn't go through proper Resurrection Protocols. I do tend to get caught up in the minutiae of comics, but this is really preventing me from enjoying Beast's return. It's been a very bad five years to be a Beast fan. Even if you can just say, 'Don't worry about it, just keep reading.', or 'MacKay's got it well in hand.", I'd just like some confirmation from an official source.

I think you can rest easy, Mungho, in that the Beast who is appearing in X-MEN is every bit as real and legitimate as the rest of the characters—all of whom are fiction, and so can survive such stories. The question of how resurrection worked in terms of continuity of individual is one that the Krakoa era mostly tended to sidestep, so I don’t feel the need to try to make sense of it all after the fact. We’ll simply accept what the texts told us, which is that the assorted resurrected mutants were the same people that they had been before, and in the Beast’s case, he got resurrected with his memories of the last bunch of years effectively erased from his mind. But still Henry McCoy.

Jeff Ryan

What's your biggest reading omission in Marvel's (very) long history? Is it just individual issues of Marvel Two-in-One? or have you purposefully never cracked open a masterpiece like Tomb of Dracula so you know there's one great run of back issues still waiting for you?

I had to think about this for a while, Jeff, as I really have read enormous amounts of Marvel’s published output over the years. And I’d have to say that it’s probably the black and white magazines of the 1970s, most of which I didn’t follow in the era and never went back to fill in the gaps on. And largely that’s because I didn’t have all that much interest in monster or horror series in the first place, nor martial arts stories. I know there’s good material scattered throughout those various magazines, and I’ve read some of it. But I don’t know those books anywhere like I know the rest of Marvel’s output from that era.

TD Mollusk

I’m currently doing a deep dive into Spider-Man books, and I noticed that you were Executive Editor for some of the Mayday Parker Spider-Girl titles of the late 00s/early 10s. Do you have any stories about what kept that project kept going? There was a long-running original volume, then an “Amazing” relaunch, then a “Spectacular” relaunch that may have been an early digital-first title (?) while still getting printed in the “Web of Spider-Man” anthology book, then “Spectacular” was relaunched as a miniseries, etc. …it seems to me like the character/book was given a lot of opportunities to succeed, despite being a B- or C-list character with what I imagine was a fairly niche audience.

The reason I ask is because X-Men fans love their obscure characters with niche audiences. What would it take for a similarly C-list X-character to get that sort of support (multiple attempts to lead a book)? Would that even be possible now?

SPIDER-GIRL was seriously the book that would not die, TD, and that was entirely due to a remarkably adept group of fans and supporters who were able to keep the series going by hook or by crook for well over 100 issues. And the thing that they did that no other fan group has been able to duplicate since was to get the sales on the title to pop up every time the threat of cancellation loomed before them. I’m not entirely sure how they went about it—I do know that they petitioned the buyers at major bookstore chains to ask Marvel for collected editions that could be sold through their stores—but they were incredibly effective at it. Any time news broke that the book would be ending, this group of fans would spring into action—and suddenly the sales numbers would spike up, to the point where the Powers That Be decided to keep the book going a little bit longer. Nobody has been able to duplicate their efforts since, regardless of how much they loved a given book and advocated for its continuation. Those SPIDER-GIRL fans were one-of-a-kind.

Justin Hensley

I was a fan of that Guardians series, mainly due to Casey Jones being on art. He used to work at my Dad's local comic shop and wound up being friends with him. I've followed his work for years. Do you have any other experiences working with him?

I don’t have any particular stories about Casey, Justin, apart from the fact that I worked with him on a number of series over the years, including some really nice fill-in issues of FANTASTIC FOUR during the Mark Waid/Mike Wieringo era.

Mullet Man

Hi Tom, I am reading the delightful U.S. Avengers. Issue #8 has an amusing caption from you explaining that a character's words are being translated from "ALIEN FRENCH". I know this is a joke, but do you have an explanation for what that means?

First off, Mullet, it was Al Ewing who wrote that editorial caption, not me—sorry to break the illusion for you. And as also established in SILVER SURFER around that time, “Space French” sounded like French spoken with an outer space accent. Glad that I could clear that up for you!

Lincoln Crisler

Love reading these insights going into the new era! Question: how would a writer go about submitting/pitching to your office these days?

Marvel doesn’t accept unsolicited submissions of any kind, Lincoln, so you can’t just out of the blue show up and pitch us a bunch of ideas. What you can do, though, is to get your work published elsewhere, even in other fields, and then get that work in front of the eyeballs of editors who may like it and want to work with you. At that point, a Marvel editor would reach out and potentially ask you for ideas, and that’s when you’d be able to pitch something. Good luck!

Robby Earls

A few posts ago you mentioned a rule you have about Ultron always maintaining his status as a top-tier villain. It got me thinking about the Age of Ultron event, a book that certainly abides by that rule.

But it’s also kind of a unique story among Bendis events. Unlike Secret Invasion or Siege or even Civil War II, this one wasn’t really built into any ongoing 616 narrative. In fact, it seems to have had a far larger effect on the 1610 universe.

Was that always the plan or was that event originally supposed to be more tied to Brian’s Avengers book (as suggested by the .1 issue teeing it up)? Was it always going to be somewhat cabined to give Ultron a chance to go all out or was that a later tweak?

I find that I’m a little bit hazy on the sequence of events involving AGE OF ULTRON, Robby. But as I recall, it was a victim of the switchover of Editor in Chiefs from Joe Quesada to Axel Alonso. If I recall things right, AGE OF ULTRON had been started by Brian Bendis and Bryan Hitch with the intention that it would be an upcoming Event series—we started early as Hitch’s ultra-detailed style took a long time to produce. And then, when Axel succeeded Joe as EIC, he had other stories that he wanted to pursue first, in particular AvX. So work continued on AGE OF ULTRON, but its launch window was pushed back. And even with that, at a certain point it became apparent that Bryan Hitch wasn’t going to be able to get the whole thing done in time for it to come out as an Event series—we may have pulled him to work on other projects during that period—so we divided the story into three acts and brought in Carlos Pacheco and Brandon Peterson to do the later chapters.

Loony Tunes

Given the struggles of some space set books like Nova, Silver Surfer, Guardians even, what made you put Jean in this space and feel that it was a good long term direction for her, if it is long term? Was it because there aren't many other ongoings with other cosmic heroes?

Just because something hasn’t worked in certain instances is no proof that it won’t work in all instances, Loony. And in looking over the X-line and wanting to put forward a variety of titles each of which would kind of have its own flavor and style, and given that Jean was becoming the Phoenix again at thr end of Krakoa, it was a no-brainer to set her up in a cosmic series. I always thought that people were foolish for not having tried this with her in years past. Plus, it gives us a platform from which to being to reconstruct our cosmic area of titles—but I’ve said too much, you’ll hear more about all of this in the days to come.

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Behind the Curtain

.Back when I was writing a regular weekly Marvel column for Comic Book Resources and also answering questions over at Formspring and thereafter on Tumblr as well as a blog on Marvel.com, I had a couple of set responses that infuriated a small crop of fans. These would be people who would complain about a given title, to which I’d say, “I’m sorry you didn’t care for it..” Which I thought was valid, in that not every comic book is for every reader. But these fans didn’t like that sentiment, and would come back combatively time and time again. At a certain point, Marvel’s P.R. guy of the time Joe Taraborelli made me up the seal below, which I could simply post in response to such comments. It didn’t get a whole lot of use, but I appreciated the effort and the very nice design sense of it.

I also would routinely get into scraps with online rumor mongers who would work really hard to spoil stories ahead of time, in the service of lining their own pockets. A number of such features would run deliberately-provocative headlines, even if what they were reporting was relatively banal. It was a way of generating more clicks and more eyeballs for teh sites at which they were employed. So once again, Joe T. came up with a seal that could be slapped down whenever I encountered one of these situations:

As journalistic integrity is now a thing of the long-distant past in our new post-Truth reality, this one was also retired at some point in the past.

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Pimp My Wednesday

Here’s some new goodness fresh from the printer to help you while away the hours until I return from San Diego:

NYX #1 actually shipped to a bunch of outlets by mistake this week. We had done an overprint in an attempt to get the book into more readers’ hands, and the overship copies wound up going out before teh regular ones. Oops! But it’ll be available everywhere for real this week, and you’ll be able to see this little gem that Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly and Francesco Morarino have put together for you. Like PHOENIX, it was edited by Annalise Bissa rather than by me directly, so that should tell you that it’s a step up right there. And also, for those who were wondering why the QR Code in te book didn’t work this week, it’ll activate this Wednesday, once the genuine ship date has been reached, giving you all a look at one of the impending threats that will bedevil our community of displaced mutants.

Meanwhile, DEADPOOL/WOLVERINE: WEAPON X-TRACTION continues to wend its way through titles scattered across the Marvel line, with the second chapter appearing in CAPAIN AMERICA #11. I’m sure that the work J. Michael Straczynski and Jesus Saiz have been doing on this series is enough to have gotten you through the door by itself, but this issue will also include five ridiculous and unforgettable pages of Wade and Logan on an interdimensional adventure as presented by Ryan North and Javier Garron, for no additional cost. Who loves ya, baby?

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A Comic Book On Sale 65 Years Ago Today, July 21, 1959

This otherwise random issue of G.I COMBAT features one of the excellent washtone cover images generated by DC production man Jack Adler in conjunction with artist Jerry Grandinetti. The idea here was to create more painterly images that would stand out on the racks and theoretically improve sales, especially during this period in which comic books were much more of an impulse buy medium. And that cover does its job, it’s a spectacular illustration, and a lot more sophisticated than everything else that came out that month. The interior stories were all written by Bob Haney under the editorial oversight of Robert Kanigher, and illustrated by a murderer’s row of military artists: Joe Kubert, Ross Andru, Mort Drucker and Russ Heath. There were also a variety of military-themed features and filler gag strips as well as a letters page. Books such as this one are teh reason the so-called “Big Five” DC war titles of this period are so highly prized by collectors. Jack Adler continued to produce washtone covers for different titles for several years, though the process was apparently time consuming and couldn’t be applied everywhere. Very few of them, though, were on super hero books—GREEN LANTERN #8 in 1961 was a notable exception.

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A Comic Book On Sale 20 Years Ago Today, July 21, 2004

And speaking of Green Lantern, this issue of DC COMICS PRESENTS starring the Emerald Crusader was also released on this date twenty years ago. It was part of a series of ten releases designed to honor the late Julie Schwartz, who had passed away. Julie was almost single-handedly responsible for the Silver Age of Comics, and was a beloved figure (even if some unsavory behavior has come out about the man in the years since.) Back in the day, like many of the other editors, Julie would commission an exciting cover first, and then have his writers construct a story around that image. This was a bit of a hit-or-miss proposition, with a lot of those stories having very little to do with the situation depicted on the cover. But the cover sold magazines, so this was a process that worked, at least for the time. The idea here was to have modern artists recreate a number of Julie’s covers—Brian Bolland in this instance—and then have modern day creators attempt to write new stories around them, two to an issue. Brian Azzarello and Norm Breyfogle and Marty Pasko and Scott McDaniel gave it a try in this issue. The cover image was originally produced by Gil Kane for GREEN LANTERN #31—but in this recreation, Brian Bolland has depicted the main figure flying off as Julie himself, which seems appropriate.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

MOON KNIGHT #1 came out on July 21, 2021, and I’m as surprised as anybody that the series is still running, albeit having been relaunched as VENGEANCE OF THE MOON KNIGHT following the demise of the lead character. But it’s a testament to what Jed MacKay and Alessandro Cappuccio have constructed here, issue after issue. They started out producing mainly single-issue stories with a continuing threat and unfolding mythology, and then only gradually got into longer multi-issue tales. The book was certainly buoyed by interest in the then-upcoming Marvel Studios streaming series, but it continued to perform at a rock-solid level even after that series was a memory. The covers on our early issues by Steve McNiven, a friend of Jed’s, certainly didn’t hurt our sell-in and sell-through on those early issue. This was Alessandro’s first regular ongoing series, and he’s really made it his own. Looking back at this first issue from only three years ago, it’s readily apparent how much better he’s gotten since that time, how much he’s grown in his storytelling skills and visualizations. And color artist Rachelle Rosenberg has been a secret lynchpin to the title, keeping the look of every issue consistent, even when we were forced to bring in a fill-in artist, typically Federico Sabbatini. I ad to give the book up in order to do X-MEN, handing it over to Devin Lewis to shepherd, but I was happy and amazed that there was still a book to hand over, even after so many issues. it just goes to show you that the right creative team with the right approach to just about any series, just about any character, can connect with an audience and make that project a hit. So for fans who occasionally wonder, “Why are you bothering with THAT book, it’s sure to be cancelled in a few issues!”, this is why. because sometimes, you hit the ball just right.

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The Deathlok Chronicles

As always, a few remarks from DEATHLOK co-writer Gregory Wright on our last installment to begin:

Gregory Wright

I agree about Greg Adams. I don't know where he came from but he represents the first stability we had in a long time. This issue was frustrating due to the lateness and everything being so rushed we couldn't make certain changes that would give the story a more focus. It became clear by this point that I had pushed Deathlok too far into the realm of NOT being quite so much the pacifist and had been doing it for the past few issues. The goal was to push him over the line..and it feels like it went too far too fast so by the end where he drops the "No Killing" parameter if feels like we've seen this bluff one too many times. I did want the character to be changed from this point on. I wanted what was done in these issues to reflect in the next issues. Unfortunately Dwayne had no interest in Siege, so I had to send him off, and due to his more family oriented upcoming storyline I had to reunite him with his family at the end. Michael's body remaining always bothered me...it makes little sense. Oh well. I was really excited for Dwayne's next, (and last it would turn out) storyline because he was finally going to do his Black Panther story. He was a huge Don McGregor Black Panther fan and I was eager to see what he would do...maybe now Greg Adams would help get our artist troubles solved. Maybe?

I seem to think that having Michael’s body survive was something that Bob Budiansky insisted upon when we ran this story in front of him. He didn’t want to eliminate the possibility of coming back to it entirely in case things didn’t got eh way we hoped.

As Greg mentions above, DEATHLOK #22 was the beginning of co-writer Dwayne McDuffie’s final story for the series, one that he’d been hungry to get to for a while due to the fact that it was in large part build around Don McGregor’s work on BLACK PANTHER. Unfortunately, Dwayne didn’t get the support that he really needed here, and so this last storyline becomes something of a train wreck, with a different artists on each of its four issues. The schedule woes that I had been putting off for so long had finally descended upon my head, and I had no choice if we were going to make all of our ship dates but to bring in other hands. Having finished #21, Walter McDaniel was again in a schedule hole, and so I bumped him ahead to #23. At this point, I think I’d finally reconciled myself to the fact that I was going to need to take Walter off the book. While his work had been growing, he still wasn’t consistent enough nor fast enough to keep up with the demands of a regular series. But that was a problem for next month—I had learned from my experience with Denys Cowan not to fire somebody midstream in an issue.

Speaking of Denys, it was somewhere around this time that I got a call from him. He had heard that Walter was having problems on the book, and he called me up, perhaps thinking it was a bias against black artists. He demanded to know what was going on. Today, if a freelancer called me in this fashion, I’d tell him to get stuffed, that it was none of his business, but I was still young and green, and so I laid out the situation for Denys, about how Walter couldn’t seem to produce as quickly as we need him to. Denys seemed to accept that, and he went away mollified—but even after all this time, I’m still not certain what motivated him to call, apart from trying to look out for a younger member of the community.

Anyway, moving into #22 we needed a fill-in artist, and so I wound up turning to somebody that I didn’t really want to hire. Kevin Kobasic had been my intern a couple of years earlier, and he’d since come on staff as Don Daley’s assistant editor. But Kevin’s first love was drawing, and he’d been trying to get something going as an artist for some time, having worked on a couple of back-up stories and maybe an Annual or two. But he hadn’t done anything to really distinguish him form the pack, and I thought that bringing him on board would be seen as nepotism of a sort. But this was a case of needs must, I had to produce these four issues in jig time, so I needed to use any and all resources that were available to me. And while he too was still learning, Kevin did a credible job on this issue, and he delivered it on time as well. He was hungry, and that can be an incredible driver for an artist. This issue is probably the best-looking one in the four parts, and Kevin’s cover, seen above, is pretty good as well (despite none of the cover copy separating properly, making it borderline unreadable—I still had a bunch to learn about making things like this function.) It also helped that Kevin was tight with Jimmy Palmiotti, having worked with him in the PUNISHER office, so Jim came back to ink this one issue over Kevin. And today’s DC Editor in Chief, Marie Javins, colored the issue. Marie was in the office, which almost certainly explains why she got this terminally late gig.

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Monofocus

I’ve been working my way through ZOWIE!, the new book from TwoMorrows written by Mark Voger that’s a deep dive into the super hero crazy brough about by the BATMAN television program in 1966. The volume covers not just the comic books of the day, but also the cartoons, the other live action television programs that BATMAN inspired and all of the occasionally-crazy merchandise that was released around it. As is typical for a TwoMorrows publication, it seems thorough and entertaining.

And in the world of video, I’m waiting for my copy of the first release of YAMATO, BE FOREVER: REBEL 3199, the latest Space Battleship Yamato project. It’s an updated and expanded reimagining of the events of not just the BE FOREVER, YAMATO film of 1980 but also incorporating material from the SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO III television series that aired the following year—all updated and brought into line with the continuity of the revival series. As a promotional effort, the first five minutes were released on YouTube, albeit untranslated, so those who are interested can get a taste of the story. And more broadly, the trailer can be watched at the link attached.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about The Five Best Comic Books of 1971

And five years ago, I wrote about The Five Best Comic Books of 1986.

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And that’s going to have to hold everybody until I return. I’m going to try to set up some manner of stopgap Newsletter to post next week while I’m gone—but until it happens, don’t count on it, sometimes the best laid plans fall apart. In any event, see you all on the other side!

Hat’s All, Folks!

Tom B