#132: Darn, A Perfectly Good Brain, Wasted.

It’s been an exceptionally busy couple of weeks, so this weekend is meant to be my time to rest and recharge after a bunch of traveling. And with New York Comic Con only a week and a half away, I’m definitely going to need it. No idea yet exactly what I’m going to be doing at NYCC, but they’ll almost certainly be an X-Men panel of some sort that I’ll be required to show up for. But I’m hoping to limit my involvement to Thursday and Friday so that I don’t have to make the long hump into the city over the weekend as well.

But none of you really care about my problems. You just want a Sunday morning dose of comic book history, salacious insider stories and your questions answered, right? So be it, let’s get to the good stuff, then.

Glenn Simpson

Imagine a writer who has worked primarily on DC is being brought in to Marvel. Outside of elements of the specific character or story, are there any lines of thought that would be given to the writer, like "we write Marvel stories this way, which is different than they do at DC". I feel like there is some sort of tonal difference to the lines in general, but can't decide if that's a real thing or just something I'm imagining.

There have definitely been people over the years on staff at Marvel who have thought this way, Glenn, but I’m not really one of them. If I’m hiring somebody for a writing job, it’s likely because I’ve enjoyed things that they’re written elsewhere before. So while there are certain things that I would instruct them in—such as making sure to name the characters in their story—I’d neither expect nor want them to utterly change up the way they were approaching things. But like I say, there have definitely been those over the years who have expressed a need to “shake the DC dust off of” creators who have shifted to Marvel from the Distinguished Competition. I’ve just never really bought into that way of thinking.

Paul from ASM

You said X-Force will be getting a larger than normal issue for #300, I'm guessing wolverine will get one for #400. Will those also have multiple creators doing back up stories and priced at 9.99?

It’s still a bit early to get into all of the specifics, Paul. So you’ll learn all of the answers to your questions when we solicit this issue in a few months’ time.

STILES

Do you think Madelyne Pryor could become a constant X-Man? I mean, it's not impossible for former villains to become important members of the X-Men, Magneto and Emma Frost are there to prove it. But I feel that Maddie is a bit complicated, not least because she's a clone of one of the X-Men's pillars.

Dark X-Men gave us a taste of what it might be like to see her working alongside the good guys, as well as showing that she also has great leadership potential. I'm not a fan of hers, but I confess it would be interesting to follow her journey from villain to anti-hero to hero.

The short answer here is yes, of course, Stiles—it’s possible for any character to excel if the right writer with the right approach gets behind them. But I will say that poor old Madeline Pryor is a bit of a mess of a character, one whose entire backstory and history has been revised to the point where her existence doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. The X-MEN ‘97 show did a much better job with her, largely by knowing where they were going from the start and so simplifying her background in that series. She’s one of a number of X-characters whose history is messy, and it’s difficult to truly get a grasp on who she is and what she wants, at least consistently. Until and unless somebody cracks that, she’s likely going to mostly be sidelined. I don’t want to field a character just because they’ve appeared in a bunch of comics previously.

Dewey

I just happen to be able to say Tracer appeared in Spectacular Spider-Man 211, as I re-read it not too long ago. Something I never thought about til this week: Was it ever intimidating to be coloring the covers of a book written by an accomplished colorist on Deathlok? Did editors routinely handle cover colors back then?

Ahh, good to know, Dewey, thanks for pointing that second Tracer appearance out! And no, it wasn’t intimidating to color those couple of DEATHLOK covers. In each instance, I did so not because I thought that I was any great shakes as a colorist, but because I had something very specific in mind and it was easier to simply do the job myself than to try to explain it to somebody else. And even then, I made a bad choice on at least one of those three covers.

Gwen

It was said that the PHOENIX book was Annalise idea, so i wonder if there was an original plan to Jean/Phoenix before that? I imagine that it would be really difficult to fit an Entity in a X-Men team, since she can solve their problems with a thought. How would Jean fit there?

Annalise is absolutely the editor of PHOENIX and put the book together, hiring the creative team and setting the overall direction. But the idea of doing the series came from me. It was a part of my initial diagramming of the role-out of the line. So there was never any other plan for Jean—especially coming on the heels of where she was being left off at the end of FALL OF X, this seemed like the most logical direction to move her in. But given that Jean had been a member of assorted X-Teams over the years, it’s clearly been possible to have her in a group setting and for her not to immediately solve everybody’s problems. We just didn’t set things up that way here.

Evan “Cool Guy”

Any stories, characters, titles etc. you were worried wouldn’t connect with fans before being pleasantly surprised?

Pretty much all of them, Evan. You never really know what’s going to connect with people and what isn’t. To give you a more concrete example, I had no idea that Jed MacKay and Alessandro Cappuccio’s MOON KNIGHT run would be so successful that it would still be running today. I thought it would be a good book, but often that isn’t enough to keep a series afloat. On the other hand, every once in a while, you hit things right and a book exceeds your expectations. That’s what the new X-line is all about. I’m well aware that not all of these series, and in fact likely few of them, will be able to continue on indefinitely. But the intent is to put together good books that we can stand behind and hope that readers feel the same in enough numbers to make them a self-sustaining proposition.

Kevin Hines

Is that Avengers foil cover the back of the award? That’s fun. Does each award get a different foil back or was it just lifetime awards?

Yes, that AVENGERS cover is on the back of the award, Kevin, and from what I could tell, all of the Hero Initiatve awards at least followed that format.

Ian A.

Songbird joining the Earth's Mightiest Heroes was one of the great teases from Avengers Forever. Were there ever any plans in place to make that happen before Al Ewing brought her into Avengers Idea Mechanics?

If Kurt had remained on AVENGERS for a longer period of time, Ian, I’m sure that we would have gotten to that at some point. But that also meant pulling her out of THUNDERBOLTS, where she was a much more key piece of the puzzle. And once Kurt had left, his assorted successors had their own things that they wanted to do, and weren’t as invested in paying off a story that they hadn’t been involved with.

JV

do you know what Roger Stern's original plans for the Rita Demara Yellowjacket character were? I know at one point she was considered for the T-Bolts but her story got too convoluted during the Crossing.

Stern seemed to be setting her up as a villain with ties to Hank Pym. Anyone know?

Afraid that I have no idea what Roger’s plans for Rita DeMara may have been, JV, apart from what saw print. But just by having stolen the Yellowjacket gear, she was certainly going to be a villain with ties to Hank Pym, as you suggest.

Jeff Ryan

As a former editor of a title like Deathlok, do you "root" for the characters in subsequent appearances over the years? If so, in any form (Luthor Manning, rando roboassassins, Deathlocket) or specifically the Michael Collins version your title was about?

I think that, as an editor, I develop a certain affinity with certain characters having handled them for a while, Jeff. And that tends to be them in something akin to the form in which I worked with them, rather than just any old Deathlok. Amazingly, nobody else had done anything with Michael Collins in more than a decade following the cancelation of his series, so Dwayne McDuffie and I were able to bring him back in BEYOND years later. On the other hand, sometimes the characters develop in unexpected directions over the years to the point where it’s difficult to associate them with the version that I worked on. That’s kind of the case with, say, Firestar.

Branden

The solicit for Psylocke #2 mentions that her membership of the X-Men has been revoked. Is that just for her upcoming solo adventures, or does that bleed into adjectiveless as well?

This one’s a “wait and see” question, Branden, so you’ll just have to wait until those issues drop to fine out. Sorry!

Timothy Bach

Lately, I've been thinking about how many of the great artists had assistants they mentored and how some of these assistants often finished pencils or inks for their mentor. I wonder if you could write a little about that practice, how widespread it was or is, and especially about any assistants who became well known in their own right later. And are there any people who deserve wider recognition for this earlier "anonymous" work they might have done on well-known projects?

Well, when you’re speaking about assistants, Timothy, you’re most often talking about inkers. While it isn’t unheard of for pencilers to have assistants, it’s a lot more rare. Whereas inking greats such as Terry Austin or Klaus Janson often started out doing backgrounds and secondary figure work for more established pros. But I don’t know that I have a whole lot to say on the subject. Clearly, I was never in such a situation myself.

Roi Hirst

One thing I really enjoy is reading the old letter columns, but although these usually appear to be included in 60s/70s omnibuses, they're often missing from later collections. The Miller/Janson DD omni doesn't have lettercolumns, for example. Fortunately, the Roger Stern Spidey one did... but it looks like the recently issued Black Costume omni doesn't. Any idea why this is?

I’m just guessing here, Roi, but I’d speculate that the reason why things like the Miller/Jason DAREDEVIL omnibus doesn’t include the letters pages is that the material it contains had previously been reconstructed for trade paperback and hardcover printings, and those books didn’t include the letters pages. And I have no idea whether the upcoming J.M DeMatteis Spidey volume will include them or not. But that seems to be the connecting element between the examples that you gave, so my guess is that the volume would include them.

Adam Chapman

Quick question- pre-Heroes Reborn launch Marvel published a series of one-shots celebrating the characters leaving the MU proper, including Fantastic Four: The Legend, iron Man: the legend, captain America: the legend, Thor: the legend.

From what I’ve been able to ascertain, there was one final issue as part of this series of one-shots, which was Avengers the Legend that was announced and solicited for August 28 1996 (as per Marvel Vision 8). But it would appear it never made it to print. Do you know why this book was cancelled prior to publication?

I’m not absolutely 100% certain of this, Adam, but my best guess is that the sudden and unexpected death of editor Mark Gruenwald prevented that book from being completed. Somewhere in my files I have a bunch of the material that had been prepared for it in a half-completed state. I’d also guess that the sales on the ones that had been released weren’t all that spectacular—so that when Mark passed, it wasn’t any huge loss to let the project die with him.

Alison Cabot

can we expect Emma to get an upgrade considering most of the heroes are getting significant power boosts or major evolutions of their existing powers? The last time we saw her get a power boost was in the Sins of Sinister event, where she became the Living Gem of Cyttorak, but that didn't last long.

I have to tell you, Alison, I’m not really a big fan of increasing everybody’s powers ad infinitum, so it isn’t really something that I’m looking to do. I want our heroes to have to work for their victories, and that’s exponentially more difficult to accomplish when they can suddenly move planets or wipe out suns or what-have-you. If anything, I might be looking to scale a few powers that have grown beyond all reason back to a slightly more manageable level. In any event, Emma is already a world-beater as she is, so I don’t see any great benefit to making her even more overwhelming. What would she ever have a problem with then?

Jackie Laura Dragotta

when the time comes to redesign Phoenix in the future for a new initiative or event, would there be a possibility of expanding beyond the green and gold color palette into other combos or with other aesthetics such as her here comes tomorrow outfit with Jean still being a hero ?

It’s tough to speculate on something that isn’t really planned to be happening any time in the immediate future, Jackie. But sure, it could be. When and if that time comes, we’ll try to create an attractive design, whatever the circumstances.

Kyle Evans

Someone showed me an interview from 1991 featuring Stan and John Romita. Romita was drawing Mary Jane and Stan made a comment about Gwen Stacy being the original love interest and wanting her to marry Peter Parker. Romita agreed with this recollection.

Obviously Stan's memory is not infallible, and this was well after Stan had helped orchestrate the Spider-Man/Mary Jane marriage, so it's possible he's conflating events or misremembering who he wanted to marry Spidey off to. Have you ever heard of some plan to marry Peter Parker and Gwen during the time Romita was working on Spider-Man?

Again, I can only speculate here, Kyle, but I don’t believe that there was any intention to marry off Peter and Gwen at any point. Rather, Stan (and to a lesser extent John Romita) looked upon her as Peter’s “forever girlfriend”—i.e. the one with whom he’d never break up. This is in part why she was thrown off of that building once Gerry Conway took over the strip—he felt that her relationship with Peter could only go forward into matrimony from that point, and that wasn’t a place where he wanted to take Peter. Plus, Gerry liked Mary Jane better and thought she’d provide more spark and sizzle in the strip were she put together with Peter.

yoyo

Will cable one day sucumb to his technorganic virus?

And on that same note how can he be brought back if he dies- as a clone like hank or as cyclops+phoenix new child?

That question is at the very heart of an upcoming project, Yoyo—so perhaps the answers will be found therein. As to your second point, now that the X-Men have lost the ability to resurrect their fallen friend indefinitely, if Cable perishes, then that ought to be the end of him, no return available.

Henry Johnston

Does Marvel still hold the rights to the Men in Black comics through the Malibu acquisition? Have there ever been any attempts to revive the property?

I can’t say much about this, Henry, as all of those Malibu concepts are a part of the same NDA, which prevents me from speaking too greatly about the circumstances surrounding them. I will say that the original comic books are only marginally like that series of films, and so even if we were to decide to somehow do new MEN IN BLACK material, it likely wouldn’t be able to look anything like what most people associate with that property.

Manqueman

I know it's a question that could have been asked any time since 1961, but where's Powerhouse Pepper?

I'm asking in part because Tom may well know.

But also: for all we know, PP's a mutant which means it's a Q for the X office's Conductor of X.

I think that I would argue that Powerhouse Pepper is only of interest when he’s being written and drawn by Basil Wolverton. And since Wolverton is long gone, there isn’t a whole lot of juice to be had by reviving him. Still, that hasn’t always stopped us before.

Doe

Kid Omega has a lot of trauma due to Sabretooth and everything else that he had to face with X-Force, and I know times are difficult for the X-Men at the moment but I was wondering if love and romance are in the plans for him. He’s really growing on me and I’m a huge romance girlie.

Well, we do like to have romance in our X-comics, Doe, so I’m sure that we’ll get there at some point. This is still relatively early days, for all that our accelerated shipping schedule makes it feel like we’ve been around forever. But I’d maybe keep an eye on RAID ON GRAYMALKIN for some interesting cross-team interactions.

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Off The Wall

I’ve been a huge fan of cartoonist Fred Hembeck since I first encountered his work on the promotional Daily Planet pages that DC would run in their comics back in the late 1970s. He had an attractive style, and was also something of a comic book archaeologist for me, speaking about stories and characters that he’d read about when he was growing up that were before my time, and thus expanding my knowledge of the history of the medium. Eventually, I wound up hiring Fred to write and draw a number of short stories and features for me over the years. So I’d always wanted to own a Hembeck piece. and so when Fred did the attached image and put it up for auction on eBay back in 2007, I jumped at it. I seem to remember that it cost me $100.00, but it was Fred’s favorite character Spider-Man surrounded by many of his Steve Ditko-era friends and foes. So it’s a great quintessential Hembeck piece. As far as I know, it’s never been published anywhere. But it hangs on my wall in an upstairs hallway, across from the library.

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Behind the Curtain

What you see above is a test page that Dave Gibbons produced for himself before starting work on WATCHMEN. This was effectively a proof-of-concept piece, intended to display just how the constant nine-panel grid of the project would work, and to work out any kinks in the visual style and lettering style that he’d be employing in it. It was never intended for publication, thus Doctor Manhattan’s admonition about reproducing it in the first panel. But I don’t fear Manhattan’s wrath, and so I share it with you as something of a historic curiosity, Even with Dave just making up the images, it’s pretty impressive how he makes these nine panels seem utterly uncrowded, how he moves the camera in and out and chooses angle such as the downshot in Panel 3.

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Pimp My Wednesday

What do you know, they still make and publish comic books! And so, here are a few tasty morsels that are coming your way this Wednesday. Have your cash at the ready!

Reaction to our first issue of EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN was exceedingly positive, and hopefully we can maintain that good feeling and built upon it with this second issue. This one introduces or other two new mutants, Melee and Axo, and brings our entire cast together in a hopefully-organic fashion. It also continues to be a deep dive into the heart of Kitty Pryde, who is carrying more scars than she even wants to think about. It’s by Eve L. Ewing and Carmen Carnero. Really love this cover by Carmen.

And speaking of cool covers, this off-model FANTASTIC FOUR cover by Josh Cassara is also pretty wild. This special Halloween release by Ryan North and Ivan Fiorelli puts the spotlight on Reed and Johnny, a pairing that we don’t typically see together. It’s also got a blood-spewing magical skull and a sinkhole to nowhere, so you know that it’s got to be good!

And in Annalise Bissa’s corner, PHOENIX reaches its fourth issue, in which Jean Grey contends with Gorr, the God-Butcher from Jason Aaron’s wildly successful THOR run. It’s written by Stephanie Phillips and illustrated by Alessandro Miracolo as usual!

And finally, from editor Darren Shan, we’ve got what is likely the biggest underdog book of the FROM THE ASHES launch era: SENTINELS #1. This one’s a bit of a wild swing on my part, creating a series steeped in the lore of the mutant-hunting menaces. But writer Alex Paknadel and artist Justin Mason do great work here, and so the series has a very unique flavor to it. It’s a military book with some super heroic flourishes, and it’s got a lot to say about humanity and addiction and grief and trauma and about a dozen other things. When we were first conceiving this title, I was thinking about it in the manner of MARAUDERS: a familiar name from the canon that would be used for something very, very different in this new era. So I hope you’ll check it out.

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A Comic Book On Sale 85 Years Ago Today, October 6, 1939

Even as the rise of costumed heroes in the aftermath of the debut of Superman began to drive interest in the field and saw other new publishers come in with their own colorful crime-busters, that wasn’t the only genre being established by new Publishers. Fiction House primarily dealt with pulp fiction adventure magazines, and their comic book entries very much resembled the kinds of pulp magazines the firm also published—so much so that occasionally they would use the same cover image on both a comic book and a pulp mag. consequently, while they did feature regular characters and strips, for the most part they stayed away from super heroes, preferring instead to specialize in the sort of adventure fiction that they had made their bones with. They also specialized in featuring a lot of scantily-clad ladies on their covers and in their stories, the better to attract a slightly older reader for whom PLAYBOY was still a distant possibility. JUNGLE COMICS debuted on this day 85 years ago and spanned the whole of the Golden age, only giving up the ghost some 163 issues later in 1954. The cover-featured character, Kaanga, a Tarzan knock-off originated in Fiction House’s JUNGLE STORIES pulp magazine. None of the stories in it are really anything terribly noteworthy, but Fiction House as a whole was an important and reliable publisher during the Golden Age years. Their most well-remembered character is probably Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, who was featured in the similar JUMBO COMICS, which had debuted sometime earlier.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

THOR #85, the final issue of the series, was released on October 6, 2004. It had been something of a surprise hit and a solid seller when we had launched it again following the Heroes Reborn experiment in 1998, but by this point, the book was a bit out-of-step with the Joe Quesada Marvel, and so it was put to bed. This was only meant to be a temporary thing. Like AVENGERS, CAPTAIN AMERICA and IRON MAN at that same time, THOR was meant to come back almost immediately with a fresh creative team. But that obviously didn’t happen. Initially, the idea was that Neil Gaiman would write THOR, but that wound up falling through. (Neil did recycle a couple of the ideas that he’d come up with into his ETERNALS series some time later.) Then, Mark Millar was ready to give it a go. Until he wasn’t. Eventually, the series was brought back under J. Michael Stracyznski, but that was a number of years later. At any rate, part of the AVENGERS: DISASSEMBLED effort was to bring in some new talent to write the final issues of the assorted books, virtually all of them suggestions from Brian Bendis. In the case of THOR, the person that we turned to was Brian’s longtime friend and collaborator Mike Avon Oeming. Mike, as it turned out, had a really firm grasp on the character and his world, and his mythologically-based final storyline was well received—so well received that we followed it up with a pair of additional THOR-related projects by Mike: STORMBREAKER and THOR: BLOOD OATH. On the art front, this was another landing pad for a member of what came to be known as the “CrossGen Mafia”, those creators who had spent a couple of years working for the now-defunct Florida-based publisher and almost all of whom wound up in key positions at Marvel when that company shut down. Andrea Divito brought a very John Buscema-influenced approach to the series, but mixed things up by employing a more European page and panel compositional style. Steve Epting, then gearing up to take over CAPTAIN AMERICA and another CrossGen expat, did the stunning cover. Possibly due to the fact that it took so long for the series to come back, and that when it did, JMS’s run with Olivier Coipel was so strongly embraced, this era wound up becoming pretty well forgotten. But at the time the DISASSEMBLED books were coming out, and immediately thereafter, Oeming and Divito’s THOR was only second in popularity and notice to Bendis and Finch’s AVENGERS.

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The Deathlok Chronicles

As is now typical, we begin this section with a few thoughts from DEATHLOK writer Gregory Wright:

Gregory Wright

Congrats on the award...and you really should embrace the love when it comes your way..Yeah I'm the only one who hates the white covers. But they do ALWAYS WORK. And this one is great. I really enjoyed getting to do a Siege solo story with my pal Steven Butler on this. I wish I could've found a way to make him more different from all the other big gun type characters...sigh. Kirk Jarvinen was also fun to work with with a little slice of life type story. Love his "homage" to Granny from the Warner Brothers cartoons. I loved seeing my pal John Hebert get another shot at drawing Deathlok in this annual...and a little jealous I didn't write it. John was always fun to work with. The trouble with annuals is that they tended to be stories that didn't "count". You pick up a character and drop them off right where you left them, unless you are the regular writer. Evan Skolnick was always thinking up new characters and this annual was perfect for him. It's really more of a TRACER story than a Deathlok story. I would have utilized the character if the book had gone on longer. It's too bad he didn’t get used again. Of course MOST of the characters that were forcible created that year met the same fate. You bring up an interesting point regarding the criticism of the "nepotism" that was pretty rampant at the time. What a lot of folks don't understand is that it wasn't always easy to get folks who didn't work in the office to commit to doing an annual or a short story that wasn't going to count. And some of the changes that had to be dealt with were just too frustrating for someone not in the office. Using a writer or artist who worked in the office made making changes easier, made it easier to get the work in on time and meant you had someone with access to all the information needed for the assignment at hand. And there was no shortage of writers in the office looking for work. I had great experiences having Tom DeFalco, Ralf Macchio, Bob Harras, Howard Mackie, Archie Goodwin, and even Mark Gruenwald writing for me. I used the bullpen letterers often and the Romita Raiders as well. And then there were the large assortment of people from the office who could color a book over night. There really was more benefit to it than just giving work over to a friend in the office. But from the outside...the optics weren't so great.

I kind of have to skip ahead a little bit to talk about DEATHLOK #30. At a certain point while we were in the midst of our big Luther Manning comeback saga, Tom DeFalco pulled me into his office and let me know that the series would be ending with issue #34 in the immediate future—that the sales simply didn’t warrant keeping it going any longer. Now, after we had used up our last inventory story back in DEATHLOK #11, I was obligated to commission another one, and to keep that issue on hand should there ever be a need to spell the regular creative team. and I had done so, commissioning a story from Scott Benson, who was a friend and co-writer of Len Kaminski and who had been working on the WAR MACHINE title at that time. Scott and Len were a bit more legitimately computer savvy than most of the people working in the industry at that time, and so Scott wound up pitching a tale in which Deathlok’s operating system got infected by a virus. The ultimate resolution to the story, the thing that eventually eliminated the bad code and restores Deathlok to proper functionality, was for him to be “turned off” and then turned back on again, in the manner of a computer. The artwork was produced by Kev Hopgood, who had previously been working on IRON MAN, inked here by the ever-reliable Jimmy Palmiotti. It was a fun story, and probably one of the best-crafted issues in the entire run.

So when I became aware that the series was going to be wrapping up, I made the executive decision to run the inventory, rather than let it get shelved and wind up being burned off in some future MARVEL SUPER-HEROES SPECIAL like so many others. What this meant in practical terms is that I effectively robbed Greg and Kevin of an issue in their run—though it’s likely that at this point Kevin and Greg Adams needed the break to maintain the schedule. There’s certainly an argument to be made that I should have prioritized my regular creative team over the fill-in—but choices like this are why editors get paid. Given that we weren’t going to be able to pull the book out of its fatal tailspin, an additional issue really wasn’t going to do us any practical good (even if it might have put food on the table for another month for the creators involved.) Would I do the same thing today? Depends entirely on the circumstances, but probably, yes. It’s a solid issue, but entirely disposable.

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Monofocus

This past week, when I wasn’t busy traveling all across the world, I sat down and read the just-released autobiographical memoir DRAFTED by Rick Parker. It’s the true tale of how he’d been drafted into the military during the era of the Vietnam War and his assorted experiences in that capacity. I had known Rick a little bit when he was a letterer on staff in the Bullpen at Marvel in the early 1990s, and he’d picked up some notoriety as the artist on the licensed BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD comic. He was also responsible for the regular “Bossmen” strips in MARVEL AGE and on the Bullpen Page that would tell fictional adventures of EIC Tom DeFalco and Mark Gruenwald and others. DRAFTED is less overtly comedic but still retains a fun, funny edge to it. It’s a nice substantial read. And for those who may be interested, you can order yourself a copy here.

I also received my contributor’s copy of the new expanded hardcover edition of ORIGINS OF MARVEL COMICS, the first book to reprint classic Marvel stories and to give an inside look at how they came to be. That inside look, though, was a bit lopsided in how it apportioned creative credit for all of the early characters, and so I was asked to write a historical piece describing the “Marvel Method” of production and indicating how Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Herb Trimpe and Marie Severin among others had a lot more to do with the stories in this volume than may have been initially apparent. Editor Chris Ryall put together a pretty impressive package of extras here, with text features from a number of people important to either this volume or the field in general. For all that the book has flaws, it remains an excellent sampler of the work Marvel was doing in the 1960s, and for those of us who encountered it and its sequels back in the day, it was a hallmark tome that brought just a hair of additional respectability to the comics that we loved.

In terms of filmed media, I took in a showing of MY OLD ASS, a movie about a girl of 18 years of age who is about to leave her small town world and venture out into the wider world. But when she gets high during an overnight campout, she winds up summoning her future 39-year-old self, who warns her about what is to come and what she absolutely should not do. For all that the time travel element was the big hook for me in terms of getting me to view the film, it’s really more of a straightforward coming-of-age story. So it was good on its own merits, but it didn’t really make the most of it’s intriguing premise. I mean, how many of us haven’t thought about what you might tell your younger self if you were able to speak with them? Still, it was a very entertaining view. Anyway, if this sounds somewhat intriguing, you can watch the trailer here.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about the final installments of one of my favorite bad super hero strips, The Web in MIGHTY COMICS #50

Five years ago, I wrote about a key story in DYNAMO #4. Excelsior!

And ten years ago, I wrote about the great Jock cover to DETECTIVE COMICS #880.

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And that’s all we’ve got for you this time. Thanks for stopping by! Hope to see you again in a week!

Hat’s All, Folks!

Tom B