#126: Some Friends Are Like The Sun

Going to open things this week with a bunch of links for you folks to check out, just for the hell of it.

We’re right on the cusp of having 6,000 subscribers to this feature every week, which is a pretty good achievement considering that when I began this undertaking, my goal was to get to 1,600. As tends to happen when new people drop in, a bunch of them pledge money for subscriptions. Now, this feature is free and will always remain so—I have a day job, so I don’t need your coin. But an organization that could definitely use it and that would also put any donations to good use is the Hero Initiative. It’s a charitable organization set up to help practitioners of the comic book form who have fallen on hard times, a story that is sadly too prevalent in our industry. So I would very much appreciate it if you would forward any cash that you’d be happy to give to me over to them instead, so that we can continue to support those in need. Here’s a handy link to their site where you can make a donation and also read up on some of the things they’ve done over the years. Once you do, I expect that you’ll dig a little deeper for another nickel or quarter to toss their way.

Among other things, my brother is a professional musician who performs under the name Mighty Joe Castro. It’s one of a number of things that he does in and around the arts—he’s a very multi-talented cat. I plug his music every week in the links at the end of this column, but I wanted to spotlight his video for what is probably my favorite of his tunes, “Embers In The Ash”. He directed it himself, and it can be experienced link. So please do so.

And now a quick bit of history. Superman hit big as a character after he made his debut in 1938, and in short order he was being featured in a daily newspaper strip, was appearing three days a week on the radio, and was the subject of a massive merchandise campaign through Macy’s Department Store that included having a Superman balloon in the Thanksgiving Day Parade. In his time. Superman was a hot commodity. And his handlers set up a separate venture, SUPERMAN INC. in order to oversee the licensing of his name and image to products and offers of all kinds. One that didn’t quite get off the ground was a deal from Republic Pictures to star the Man of Steel in a 12-part movie serial. Serials were chapter plays, in which a single episode would air every week in a local movie house, forcing audiences to return the next week to see how the hero got out of whatever predicament he was left in. Republic made an offer for the rights, and things seemed to be going well—so much so that they began preparation to film a Superman serial. But in the end, SUPERMAN INC. wanted script approval, aware of how many alterations Republic had made to other properties that they had licensed in the past. Republic was unwilling to agree to this, and so the deal fell apart. Which was ultimately to the good, as SUPERMAN INC. instead licensed the character’s film rights to the Fleisher Brothers cartoon studio, who produced a series of lavish animated shorts that are still held up as sterling examples of the form. Republic, meanwhile, wasn’t an outfit to waste any effort, and so even though seven chapters had been scripted already, they reworked their Superman serial into something more conventional. It was released in the early part of 1940 under the title "THE MYSTERIOUS DOCTOR SATAN, with the villain getting top billing over the film’s protagonist, the Copperhead. For those who may want to check this out, the entire serial, all 12 chapters, is available at this link. And in the end, Republic got their flying comic book hero after all, as upon hearing that the Superman deal had fallen through, Fawcett Publishing reached out and offered up their own Captain Marvel as a substitute. THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL is widely considered the best serial of its day, and its flying effects, while crude by today’s standards, are still relatively convincing.

Gimme a Q! I’ll give you an A! A bouncy A!

Alexander

Is Iceman still gonna be showing up by the end of the year, no spoilers necessary, just to know if we're still gonna be getting something from him by the end of year, because so far he hasn't been nowhere to be seen

Rest assured, Alexander, that when Iceman shows up in one of the books, it’s not going to be a closely-guarded secret. You’re going to be able to tell on sight.

Daniella Stacy

You mentioned Extraordinary X-men on you're last post and I wanted to ask was that a mistake or a future title?

Another question - what do you feel about line ups changing ( I hope they don't change any time soon ) but many writers think that line ups should change quite often such as the Krakoan X-men team

My last question is what about the multiverse ? Do you support multiverse plots or enjoy them or prefer everything to be based on 616

That’s just me being a dope in the moment, Daniella, writing EXTRAORDINARY instead of EXCEPTIONAL. It isn’t some additional new book, promise! In terms of line-up changes, I don’t mind them per se, but there needs to be a stable core of characters that anchors each series. Otherwise, what’s the point? And I don’t think there’s a problem with using the multiverse in a story, the really important thing is the manner in which you use it. The multiverse by itself isn’t really enough to make a story interesting on its own.

Stephen

has there ever been any thought about putting some of the infinity comics on Webtoons?

Yes, Stephen, and we’ve even done some deals with Webtoons over the years. But this is a much more complex endeavor than it may seem from the outside.

STILES

you mentioned that Thunderbird/John Proudstar will appear in From The Ashes. Are you thinking of keeping his current look or going back to something more classic? I mean, his current costume has great meaning and importance for the character's indigenous identity.

When we see him, Stiles, Thunderbird will be wearing his more classic Dave Cockrum-designed costume. But there’s a reason for that which will become apparent as the story progresses.

Batfromthehat

What led to the decision to deal with marvel cosmology and cosmic entities in Storm (we are getting Oblivion as early as issue 5, and Eternity and Living Tribunal I believe have been teased by the writer) as opposed to taking these kinds of stories on in Phoenix, when Jean/Phoenix is an actual cosmic entity herself?

It’s very simple, Bat: these are the stories that the writer, Murewa Ayodele, wanted to tell.

Stefan

How do you make sure that confidence/arrogance isn't leading to complacency? For example, wouldn't an overly confident/arrogant person be prone to attributing any negative sales trends that arise to factors other than themself? Or as long as superiors are not stepping in to criticize your decisions, can you assume you're doing fine? To that end, could it be said that the Jim Shooter/Bill Jemas approach to management may have advantages in pushing to make the end product better?

To your last point first: both Bill and Jim are very smart individuals with a lot of experience and practical knowledge between them. So they have both been more than capable of making the end product better in their respective times. that said, those talents are a bit offset by the negative virtues that each man possesses. It’s for minds greater than mine to determine whether the benefits of what they bring to the table outweigh the negatives. As for how I make sure that I’m not verging over into arrogance in my decision-making, I simply try to stay plugged in to what the audience as a whole is saying and try to be reactive to it. I can’t say that I’m 100% successful at that, but I seem to have a pretty decent track record so far.

Christiant

I won’t ask when. I have a feeling you couldn’t answer, but I will ask *if* you intend to have a redemptive story arc for Professor Xavier. He isn’t very good at being bad. From what I have seen in comics, good or bad is immaterial to a character’s popularity, it’s competence that matters. The odor of failure sticks to a character and seems to bring out the worst in the fans.

I guess that all depends upon what you think Xavier needs to be redeemed from, Christiant. We featured him recently in the X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES Infinity track on Marvel Unlimited, issues #4-6, and that story dealt with some of his actions during the Orchis War. But there have been enough stories over the years concerning Xavier acting badly that I don’t know that anyone could ever restore him to being a purely “good” character, not without rebooting everything and starting over.

Mperer

Do you read any ongoing comics from any other publisher?

I read lots of stuff from a variety of publishers, Mpercer! And I just got in a shipment from Midtown Comics this afternoon, so here’s what was in it: TITANS #14, AVENGERS BY JASON AARON HC Vol 5, BLOOD SQUAD SEVEN #4, NIGHT CLUB 2 #1, LOCAL MAN #13, WONDER WOMAN #12, REDCOAT #5, USAGI YOJIMBO: THE CROW #5, WORLD’S FINEST #30, JENNY SPARKS #1 and NIGHTWING #117. And that’s just my haul for this one week.

Jeff Ryan

If 2024 Tom Brevoort was editing Deathlok -- a comic with two lead writers who were taking shifts and writing almost separate books about the same character -- how would you deal with that? Rebrand then as limited series? Cut the Gordian knot and go full-time with only one of them Two monthlies? They're now co-authors?

I think the most honest answer I can give you, Jeff, is that if I was faced with this situation today, I’d probably select only one of the two writers to helm the series if they could no longer work together. Which means that it would likely be Dwayne McDuffie in the driver’s seat—which is ironic, given how everything played out. I’m sure that Gregory Wright would be understandably pissed in that circumstance, and maybe we wouldn’t even be speaking today. But that doesn’t change the fact that the editor’s job is to do what is best for the book, and having two dueling writers simply wasn’t that.

Cian McDarby

Before From The Ashes was announced, some books on the X-Line leaked, very accurately. However: The three X-Men books all were leaked under wrong names.

Sorry, Cian, I’m not going to answer your question, mostly because I don’t want to give anybody who is inclined to leak information from Marvel pointers on how to do so more effectively. Hope you understand.

Andrew M Svec

I'm enjoying the From the Ashes books quite a bit, but why is there no love for Colossus? I mean he's one of the core "new" X-men from the 70s. He's been in all the biggest storylines including the Dark Phoenix Saga, the Mutant Massacre, the original Inferno, a key part of the Astonishing X-Men run by J. Whedon, and so many others. I've always found him to be such an interesting character, but for the past several years he's been controlled, manipulated, and maligned.

Like Iceman earlier, Andrew, Colossus is coming. In fact, you’ll see just a little bit of him before you even realize it in.

Evan “Cool Guy”

As much as I greatly enjoy Kieron Gillen, I was not a fan of the "Tony Stark is adopted" plotline. Maybe my biggest gripe (besides the fact that Tony and Howard are regularly drawn as looking extremely similar) is that the baby Howard (a super-genius) and Maria procured to cover up their super-genius baby was... also a super-genius?! I don't think this was ever really explained and just seems a little too coincidental for my tastes. Not to mention that the storyline never really went anywhere meaningful in the long term imo, whereas the shadow of Tony's long dead adoptive parents (particularly Howard) looming over his life has been a great reoccurring theme throughout the character's run.

I hope it's clear I don't mean to diminish adoption or the love between parents and their adopted children, that bond is as strong if not stronger than any biology, I just don't think it really works for Tony who somehow both looks like and has the exact same kind of super-science-engineering genius. Such a revelation could work if it makes us reflect on the character's history with fresh eyes and see interesting themes to be plumbed, but I don't really think that's the case here. I could think of other characters where it might though! Any chance of this being undone at some point?

My overall philosophy towards this sort of thing is typically “play the ball where it lies”, Evan. Which means that, unless it’s a situation that is crippling to a character or to the title as a whole, you probably shouldn’t spend a whole lot of time and effort on “fixing” some earlier creator’s stories. That way lies madness, to say nothing of a bunch of comic books that are only of interest to a small percentage of your audience members. I don’t really think that Tony being adopted has hurt anything to the degree that it bothers you, clearly. So I don’t really see any great benefit to reversing it. Sorry.

Eamon

The announcement of "DC All In" has got me thinking about line-wide publishing initiatives.

In the 2010's it felt like Marvel had a new line-wide initiative every other year but it's been six years since Fresh Start came out and there hasn't been anything on the same scale from the House of Ideas. In the same 6 years DC has had Infinite Frontier, Dawn of DC and now All-In.

Do you have any thoughts on this and why both companies are taking such different approaches? I know people complained about some of the initiatives but I always enjoyed them.

My guess is that because Marvel puts out so many more books it makes a line-wide initiative more difficult to pull off so it's easier / more effective to limit them to different families of books. E.g From the Ashes.

I don’t mean this to be snarky, Eamon—it isn’t intended that way, though I’m sure that people will report on it in that manner. But I think the answer here is simply that DC’s needed to do that kind of marketing more often than we have in recent years. For whatever reason, it seems as though a certain portion of the audience only pays attention to DC when they’re overturning the entirety of their continuity and offering another fresh start. That’s always exciting to people, with everybody wondering what the new DC is going to be like. All-In certainly seems like it’s trying to play that same card, while at the same time assuring everybody that the DC Universe that they’ve been reading about will continue on afterwards in the way the Marvel Universe and the Ultimate Universe do. We’re much more likely to do stories and marketing around specific groups of titles, like FROM THE ASHES as you pointed out.

Kyle

Is North's Fantastic Four ending in November or was issue 27 pushed back for whatever reason?

No, Kyle, it’s continuing. We released two issues this month, #23 and #24, and this is just where that catches up to us. You’ll see #27 in the next Previews catalog.

Mark Paglia

How does it work nowadays when Marvel creates a series based on another Disney-owned property? Does the Marvel side pitch ideas, or do other parts of Disney come to you with proposals? (Asking as someone who was sad to the The Acolyte cancelled, but would gladly buy a comic that finishes the storyline.)

As you might imagine, this all depends upon who the rights-owners happen to be. In the case of, say, STAR WARS, our editorial team meets with the Lucasfilm Story Group a couple of times a year to work out what it makes sense to publish over the coming months. In those meetings, ideas may come from either side, but by the end of them, we’ve typically aligned on a particular publishing plan, one that fits into Lucasfilm’s larger overall plans for STAR WARS across all media. I don’t know whether that makes a Marvel The Acolyte follow-up any more or less likely, but there you go.

Little Tiny Fish

Recently you've mentioned or featured several members of the New Warriors (Nova, Night Thrasher, Dagger in Bloodhunt, as well as a new Namor title) and I've been making a meal of expectations out of the crumbs. With 90s revivalism in full swing, I couldn't help but hope a new New Warriors series may be around the corner. However, now that you've moved to the X-Office, I assume they're not under your purview anymore. What are the odds that you could/would champion the return of more stories around the classic (used loosely) team?

Not really, Fish. It’s probably more the result of my having gotten the third NEW WARRIORS Omnibus recently, which reprinted most of the books that I edited in that line from back in the day. Seeing them again put them back into my mind afresh. I’ve wanted to do a NEW WARRIORS revival for some time, ever since I was prevented from doing one in the late 1990s. But the time has never seemed right for it at any point.

Antoine

In this new era does jean love logan in a romantic sense enough to cause a love triangle or the love triangle has already been resolved for good hence she loves him just as a friend ?

I think that will all be revealed once we bring those characters into contact with one another once again in the pages of some future story, Antoine. I wouldn’t want to cut off any story avenues in an informal venue such as this one.

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I Buy Crap

This week, motivated no doubt by the wrap-up of the MY HERO ACADEMIA manga, with a final chapter that I truly thought was excellent, I went out and dropped a few coins to get this tiny figure of my favorite character from the series to sit here on my desk. This is Tsuyu Asui (call her Tsu), known professionally as the Rainy Day Hero Froppy. As you might guess from her appearance, she’s got the proportionate strength and powers of a man-sized frog. Consequently, she’s just a little bit weird, though no less heroic. She was never a mainstay character, often fading into the background particularly after the first couple of volumes of the manga. But I was really taken with her, and how she defied they typical “Best Girl” tropes of the genre while still remaining a positive character. So now she’ll keep her big eyes on me as I jam out one of these Newsletters every week.

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Behind the Curtain

A couple of years ago, when Brian Michael Bendis made a move over to DC Comics after almost two decades as a mainstay in the Marvel publishing line, DC touted his arrival with a house ad that trumpeted BENDIS IS COMING! Not to be undone, I spent a few minutes one day cobbling this attached response ad together, using my limited Photoshop skills to rework their logo into BENDIS IS GOING and repurposing a Joe Quesada piece from the death of Peter Parker in ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN. This was just meant as a joke internally, but there isn’t any reason that I can think of why I shouldn’t share it with you, especially after so much time has passed. So here’s more of the sort of thing I waste my days with.

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Pimp My Wednesday

Hey, we’ve got another pretty big week of stuff coming your way this Wednesday! Let’s take a look:

Despite what it says on this cover mock-up, this is actually issue #24 of FANTASTIC FOUR by writer Ryan North and guest-artist Ivan Fiorelli. And it features the second half of the two-part story begun in #23 but focuses most specifically on Reed Richards, who is also our narrator. It also features Alex Ross’s final cover on the title, one in which I allowed him to do pretty much whatever he wanted after months of having to paint Dinosaur Doctor Doom, Sue as a femme fatale and Ben and Johnny as cashiers. This is what he did. And keep your eyes out for a big project coming from Alex in the weeks ahead.

The MARVEL 85th ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL is this year’s “birthday book”, an oversized issue designed to commemorate the anniversary of the company as a whole. This one features a framing story by Ryan North and Josh Cassara that’s set in the 85th Century and takes readers on a tour of a futuristic space museum dedicated to the historic Age of Marvels. Each display leads into a separate story, including a cosmic Ms Marvel tale by Iman Vellani, Sabir Pirzada and Stephen Byrne, a classic Excalibur story by Alan Davis, a wacky Spider-Man adventure brought to you by Christopher Priest and Carlo Pagulayan, a very cool manga version of Moon Knight by Yuji Kaku and a futuristic Contest of Champions courtesy of Steve Skroce. It’s a blast of big-time fun!

Cover artist Kaare Andrews was remarkably faithful to my little cover doodle, done on a post-it note and sent over to him to communicate the basic idea of what I was looking for. I do this sort of thing routinely, but the results are typically further far afield.

I can’t tell you how badly I wanted to add a word balloon to this Ryan Stegman cover image in which Cyclops is asking Agent Lundqvist, “Pass the salt?” But in the end, I thought it was just too goofy a thing to do on only our third issue. You’ll remember, though, won’t you? In any case, this issue features Scott Summers vs The United States of America by the aforementioned Stegman and writer Jed MacKay. We’ll reveal a little bit more about what went down between the end of Krakoa and the start of FROM THE ASHES as well as just how the X-Men came to be set up in an abandoned Sentinel Factory.

Meanwhile, the ever-industrious Annalise Bissa is dropping the second issue of NYX from Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly and Francesco Mortarino. Wolverine Laura Kinney is the main subject of this issue, and it gives a better sense as to just what is going on in this series while also bringing back a classic X-Foe from the past.

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A Comic Book On Sale 55 Years Ago Today, August 25, 1969

Would you be surprised if I told you that the best-selling comic book in 1969 was ARCHIE? Buoyed by a successful Saturday morning cartoon series and the popularity of the hit single “Sugar, Sugar” by the promotional band The Archies, sales on the everyday teen’s comic books skyrocketed to the top of the chart. This was all playing out during a time when interest in super heroes was tapering off again, just as it did in the postwar period of the 1940s. But each ARCHIE issue was well-crafted, easy to engage with, and typically pretty funny. And with success, the line began to expand, with a bunch of additional Archie titles being launched. EVERYTHING’S ARCHIE was one of these expansion books, though there was little to differentiate it from the regular ARCHIE series. It was fat-packed with shorter stories, often of only one and two pages, with a couple of slightly more developed 6-pagers mixed in for good measure. Stories were illustrated by a powerhouse crew of Archie creators: Harry Lucey, Stan Goldberg, Bob Bolling, Al Hartley and Joe Edwards (though nothing from the preeminent Archie artist of the era, Dan DeCarlo). Stories were provided mainly by George Gladir and Frank Doyle. The cover here attempts to tap into the twin popularity of the cartoon and the fictitious band. And it’s a bit weird to see that cover copy proclaiming “Skooby Doo”—SCOOBY DOO, WHERE ARE YOU? wouldn’t premiere for another month when this issue hit the stands, so this is a use of the slang term after which that cowardly Great Dane was named, and not some attempt to draft onto interest in that show.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

Issue #23 of the OFFICIAL HANDBOOK OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE came out on August 25, 1993, and it was the first issue that I worked on, under the direction of Executive Editor Mark Gruenwald. OHOTMU was Mark’s baby, and so he always kept an eye on it, even though he’d mostly pulled back from doing a lot of the block-and-tackle work on it. There wasn’t a whole lot of hands-on editing to be done, to be honest, although there was inevitably plenty of reference-gathering and spot illustrations to locate when space opened up for them. And Mark made me write a text page in every issue—I thought that he should do it, being the senior man in this endeavor, but he disagreed, and so I managed it throughout the rest of the run. Honestly, I think the Master Edition of the HANDBOOK was the point at which it jumped the shark, and it never quite attained the same level of commercial success again. The original OHOTMU that came out in 1982 was immediately more visually interesting, with different pencilers each assigned to myriad characters. This led to a nice variety in the styles, for all that what was called for was a clear front shot of the character. And the fact that the text involved a detailed write-up of each character’s origin, backstory, history and powers made it a useful reverence work. The later 1985 Deluxe Edition improved on the original by releasing larger issues, more of them, and expanding the entries that needed the space to multiple pages. The Trade Paperback collections of these volumes were so useful as office reference that every editorial office kept at least one full set on hand. And that, I think, is where the problem came in. Because Mark was interested in making the OHOTMU more useful as an in-office reference source, forgetting to a certain degree that it also had to be a commercial product. So he decided to attempt to eliminate style from the character drawings, and also to depict full turn-arounds so that you could see how the outfits looked from the side and back as well as the front. to this end, he created a set of master OHOTMU boards, each of which had a particular body type already drawn on it in non-reproduction blue. The idea being that the same stance and pose would be used for all of the characters. Additionally, rather that bringing in different artists, he hired Keith Pollard to draw all of the characters for each issue, and Joe Rubinstein to ink them all. And because costumes and story details were continuing to evolve every month, he decided that rather than printing this series as a standard comic book, he’d instead do it as perforated three-hole-punch cards that could be separated and stored in dedicated binders in alphabetical order. This meant that rather than running from A to Z as the previous two editions did, the Master Edition had a random assortment of characters in every issue. It also had the secondary effect of increasing the price, as the perforated books needed to be individually shrink-wrapped for shipping. And the write-ups on the back were boiled down to a few basic factoids, with each one limited to just a single card’s worth of space. If somebody had been through a lot, like say Spider-Man, a ton of information would need to be left out. One of the things I had to do quite often was work out what to cut from entries that ran long. The covers were composited from the individual heads of the characters in that issue, with the most prominent character getting a central full figure. In practice, this meant that the issues looked repetitive—one of the appeals of the Master Edition had been its connecting covers, which were eventually turned into a very popular poster. These covers, not so much. I wound up working on the series for just over a year, until it eventually petered out with issue #36. All of these improvements to the format weren’t improvements in terms of making the series commercially appealing, and so readers fell off, not wanting to invest the money on the pricey individual issues, plus the binders. (Many of them also didn’t want to break up their issues, nor even open the shrink-wrapping, thus defeating a lot of the purpose. to use the Master Edition of the HANDBOOK, you couldn’t keep it mint. I’m certain that Mark wanted to go back, retool and come at the Handbook project again having taken these lessons to heart, but sadly he never got the chance. He passed away only a few years after the final issue of the Master Edition came out.

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The Deathlok Chronicles

Let’s begin things with some words from DEATHLOK co-writer—and now solo writer—Gregory Wright:

Gregory Wright

In all honesty, Dwayne was a stronger writer than many folks...and he solidly proved that with the Milestone titles. I was conflicted about his leaving...I kind of felt like I was a fill-in writer and my stories were being ignored. I was disappointed the the schedule cause his last story to be the most chaotic artist wise. I love Chris Wozniak's work and was excited to see what he was going to do, but I always thought this looked nothing like his work. Maybe it's the various inkers...but it's not the best example of his work. At this point I had to figure out how to clean up the continuity of the book and get it going in MY direction. I was thrilled that we got the go ahead finally to use Luther Manning. This gave me a chance to try and connect everything we'd done on the book together and give it it's own identity. I was happy to write the epilogue with Manning in this issue, but somehow the credit was never put in place...and people gave Dwayne the credit for that page and assumed HE had come up with all the plans with Manning...ughhhhh...I knew I had to make this book my own, fast. And step one was to finish off some continuity that had been around way too long...

I imagine that Wozniak was jamming like crazy to get that double-sized issue finished on time, and so that’s likely why it doesn’t really look like his best.

I think that DEATHLOK #26 was one of the best issues that we put out in the run, and it was definitely the moment where the series felt as though it was finally back on track, even if it wound up being too little too late. After his excellent work on issue #22, we brought Kevin Kobasic on board as our regular penciler, joining inker Greg Adams to finally give us a stable art team on the series. They would do every issue from here on out, apart from the one inventory job that I scheduled rather than have it go into limbo.

Thanks to the fact that Greg was on good terms with the Spider-Man office headed up by Danny Fingeroth, we were able to use Hobgoblin, a known and still somewhat popular Spidey villain, in this issue. Danny tended to be protective of his characters, but given that Greg was coloring some of the Spidey books, he felt as though he could trust us for the issue. The end result was that it immediately cemented the series, which had been somewhat off on its own for a decent period of time, back into the center of the Marvel Universe. And the plot is straightforward as well, a solid one-off: the Hobgoblin is commissioned to wipe out Deathlok just as the cyborg’s wife Tracy is giving birth to their daughter, Patricia. At the same time, the subplot with Luther Manning continues to pick up speed, as the modern day MU Manning continues to have dreams of being turned into a cyborg killing machine. It’s a pretty solid repositioning of a title for the future, though I don’t know that I did enough on the cover or in the promotion for it to draw attention to that fact.

Unfortunately, even with a regular creative team now all pulling in the same direction, we were about to make a couple of bad choices that would ultimately sink us for good. I don’t know that it was possible to have saved the series at this point (at least without a complete creative overhaul, bringing an entirely new team on board)—most prospective buyers had already made up their minds as to whether it was something they were interested in reading. But our goof-ups didn’t make it any more appealing. But more on that in the coming weeks.

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Monofocus

Over the past week or so, I powered my way through the latest season of SOLAR OPPOSITES on Hulu. It’s a show that, rightly or wrongly, I think of as animated methadone. Which is to say, it’s a perfectly fine show, but it does a lot of the same sorts of things that much better, much sharper shows such as RICK AND MORTY or STAR TREK: LOWER DECKS do better. But it’s always fine, and in the absence of some other option (The RICK AND MORTY anime isn’t really doing much for me) it’s an acceptable holdover. It’s fun, but it never quite hits the same highs.

Elsewhere, after coming across a brief retrospective, I’ve begun rewatching MARTIAN SUCCESSOR NADESICO, a series that I enjoyed when it first aired in Japan back in the late 1990s. The show is a strange mélange of robot drama, slapstick romantic comedy, self-referential meta-commentary on the animation business itself and ship-based science fiction, and the manner in which it bounces back and forth in terms of its tone and flavor can be difficult to digest for some. But I love a good ship show—ever since SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO, I’ve checked out anything that seemed to be tilling in the same fields, and while I haven’t really found another show to rival it, NADESICO is a fine effort all its own. The series concerns the titular ship, the High-Mobility Battleship Nadesico, which was created by the civilian weapons contractor Nergal, engaging in a long-running conflict between Earth and a mysterious enemy, one that the media propaganda has named “Jovian Lizards”. The truth is that these invaders are actually (spoilers) the remnants of a long-thought-destroyed Earth colony left to die in space. What’s more , they’ve patterned their entire society after an obscure Super Robot series, Gekigangar 3. So often, the series is pitting the real robot genre against the super robot genre in real time. There’s a whole lot more to it, more than I can easily get into here. But in case you might want to take a look yourself, the first episode can be found here. If nothing else, the really good opening title sequence is worth a watch. (It isn’t on episode one, but you can see it here.

And speaking of rewatches, I’ve also been looking back at episodes of SUPER DIMENSION CENTURY ORGUSS, the second of the three SUPER DIMENSION series that were key to robot animation in the early 1980s. I had watched a good portion of ORGUSS in real time back around 1984 when it first aired, trading snow-filled multi-generation video tapes from Japan with other early anime fans. But I’d never seen it subtitled, and so when I found out that the whole run is available on YouTube, I thought that I would take in the initial episode. Well, from that point, I’ve kept going. ORGUSS really isn’t a great series, but it does push some nostalgic buttons for me, and that’s enough to keep me going on it. I don’t know that I’ll make it all the way to the end, though. The show is about pilot Kei Katsuragi, who inadvertently sets off a dimensional bomb that propels him and his transforming mecha twenty years into the future, to a time when the walls between parallel worlds have ruptured, and there’s an ongoing culture war between different warring tribes. Kei winds up mainly hanging with the Emman, a group of traveling traders who repair his plane, turning it into the titular robot, Orguss, named after the God of War. And what the heck, here's the first episode. And unlike NADESICO, it carries its mellow title sequence right from the beginning. “Where are you goin’, when are you coming home?”

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about When Captain America Wasn't In Captain America

And five years ago, I wrote about this issue of INCREDIBLE HULK.

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And on that fine note, I shall take my leave of you. Summer is almost over, so be sure to enjoy your Sunday, as temperatures are going to begin dropping from here on out!

Hat’s All, Folks!

Tom B