#135: First Steps

As was revealed on social media a week or so back, the place that I travelled to after returning from the Baltimore Comic Con a week or two back was England, where I joined a group of FANTASTIC FOUR creators past and present for a set visit to the in-production FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS film. As you can see from the one photograph that has been cleared for release so far, our party included Marvel EIC C.B. Cebulski, SVP David Bogart, Sara Pichelli, Alan Davis and his wife Heather Davis, Matt Fraction, Dan Slott, Chip Zdarsky, Mark Bagley, Ryan North and Tom DeFalco. And in answer to more than a few snarky questions about this, the entire trip came together in a relatively short span of time, and a whole bunch of other FF creators were also invited (such as Jonathan Hickman, whose passport had expired) but couldn’t make it.

There is precious little that I can tell you about the specifics of our journey as not even an early trailer for the film has been released yet. But I can tell you that our group was treated like visiting royalty, and the incredibly busy people working in every department on the set stopped to give us several minutes of their time and to answer our myriad of questions about the production. We got to wander through the massive standing sets for the film, including much of the Baxter Building and Yancy Street, and also got to watch as the cast shot a scene. Vanessa Kirby in particular was super-interested in talking with everybody about her character Sue Storm. I now know far more than is probably healthy for me about this movie, but I can’t really tell you a single thing about it, sorry. I will say, thought, that this visit was an incredible experience, definitely a top-5 day in my long Marvel career. Everybody was incredibly welcoming and open, and the whole thing was awesome.

But enough about me. What have you got to say for yourselves this past week?

Brandon Giles

Was the Miracleman tease at the end of the first TIMELESS intended solely to promote the new series that was getting ready to come out or were there plans for a more direct Miracleman/Marvel crossover? I remember the second thing being speculated about at the time.

I think I’ve answered this previously, Brandon, but just to reiterate; yes, the tease of Miracleman at the end of TIMELESS was intended to signify that THE SILVER AGE was just about ready to come out. Dr. Petrov gets a glimpse of the universe of Miracleman as he and Kang are moving through Kang’s citadel earlier in the issue.

Matthew O’Hara

Believe it or not, Robert Kanigher's How to Make Money Writing for Comics Magazines is available on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1945307366/?coliid=I2KEND334CISY7&colid=2ZNBES0DHUT5C&psc=1&ref_=list_c_wl_ys_dp_it

Thanks, that’s helpful, Matthew. Of course, that’s also an unauthorized new version of that book, one that doesn’t return any revenue to Kanigher’s heirs, which is why I wouldn’t normally point towards it.

Leigh Hunt

I see you were in London recently with a bunch of other comic folk visiting the Fantastic Four Movie set. Do you have any stories to tell us about the visit?

Told you what little I’m able to at the start of this week’s Newsletter, Leigh. Possibly, after more details about the film become public knowledge, I’ll be able to say more. We’ll see.

JV

LOVED the Thunderbolts!

What was the original plan for the identity of the 'good' Citizen V?

Kurt seemed to hint at various people under the mask working at different times. Can you share the original plans/origin/motivations?

Kurt already answered you in the comments on this, JV, but to confirm what he said: Citizen V was intended from the start to be Dallas Riordan, as was eventually revealed in the series. There wasn’t any swerve or last-minute change there.

Steve McSheffrey

Has anyone ever done a mini where events carried on with the Eternals continuity never being forced into the main continuity by a very wrongheaded Roy Thomas? If it hasn't I do wish it were possible to be done in today's market. Too bad it would need a superstar list of creators (right through to letterer and color artist) to be even considered...

I tend to think that there just isn’t enough interest in ETERNALS to make that a viable project, Steve. And even if there was, while another creator might do well with it, it wouldn’t be anything like whatever Kirby intended or had in his head. So just as I find most of the attempts to go back and continue Jack’s FOURTH WORLD saga over at DC to typically be pretty week, I’d expect the same would be true of an ETERNALS continuation in other hands. There is only one Jack Kirby.

Tom Galloway

I'm curious if you might want to resolve a rather obscure loose end from Krakoa. While we finally saw Thunderbird I revived, to my knowledge (and a quick check of the Grand Comics Database), we never saw or heard anything about reviving the first X-Man to die. Namely, Professor X...or at least that's what was intended when the story was published. Near the end of the X-Men's first run, Xavier reappears and it was revealed the dead Xavier was actually just as obscure as the Orge Factor Three villain The Changeling who'd shapeshifted in Xavier's form at his request. You'd think Charles would think he'd owed the guy and gotten him resurrected, but he's never mentioned nor appears during the Krakoa era. Yes, you can probably count the number of folk wondering about this on one hand, so I probably know your answer, but figured I'd at least ask.

The status quo that we picked up from the end of the Krakoa era, Tom, indicated that absolutely anybody whom we might want to say was resurrected could have been during the five years Krakoa spent before rematerializing to let all of the name mutant off in the final Krakoa-era issue. That said, as you indicate, these days Changeling is really incarnated as Morph—so it’s probably more likely that we’ll see the latter again rather than the former. Changeling’s death story is well over fifty years old now, and he wasn’t much of a character before it, so there’s not a whole lot of interest in him I think.

Mullet Man

Was thinking about a successor to the Deathlock Chronicles. How about reflections on your time writing Secret Defenders or Fantastic Force? I know you concluded that you shouldn't be a writer, so it might not be comfortable to talk about. But surely the lessons you learned writing a monthly informed your process as an editor?

That’s an interesting thought, Mullet, though again here, I don’t really know whether there might be enough worthwhile stories to share about that experience. But it is something to consider.

Jeff Ryan

The conventions of how (and how often) characters name-drop other characters, and the grander shared universe of Marvel, change. Where do you feel it is right now? Tilting towards OFTEN or SELDOM?

As is typical of me when questions of this sort come up, Jeff, I don’t think there’s a single answer for every circumstance. So I don’t mind a casual connectivity of a story with the rest of the Marvel Universe—right up to the point where that connectivity interferes with the story at hand. I really don’t like operating in a world in which every super hero is a friend of every other super hero and they’re all on one another’s speed dial to be called upon in case a consultation or some assistance is needed. That way turns every story in the line into an Avengers story. I much prefer to see Daredevil or Spider-Man or Thor or whomever handle their own problems through their own grit and skill and determination rather than having to reach out to some other Marvel stalwart who can snap their fingers and the story is gone. But I’m not bothered generally by Daredevil mentioning Spider-Man and vice versa.

David Lowe

Whatever happened to thought bubbles? I was reading Wolverine: Madripoor Knights by Chris Claremont recently, and in some panels there were characters thinking! With bubbly cloud balloons! It seems that in recent years, and not just in Marvel titles, there has been a shift towards narration boxes, while real-time thought bubbles have all but disappeared. Can you shed any light on this shift, when it happened, or why?

Thought balloons fell out of style starting in the 1980s, David, as creators such as Frank Miller began to use first person narration to get into the heads of the characters and that felt more sophisticated and less silly to the readership. And that opinion has only grown more calcified over time as newer generations of readers and writers have used them less and les. That said, there isn’t any prohibition against using them. The write in question just needs to want to. At different points, creators such as Brian Bendis and Jason Aaron have experimented with coming up with new ways to employ thought balloons—but so far, nobody’s quite cracked the code in a manner that’s inspired other creators to follow suit.

Stuart Perks

is there a hierarchy for receiving comps ? For instance does everyone who worked on a particular comic (including an anthology such as Marvel Voices) receive at least one comp copy and does that extend to cover artists as well ?

Yes, Stuart, with a certain minimum contribution, everybody who works creatively on an issue of a Marvel comic gets at least one physical comp copy. Those copies are provided by an outside source, though, so most creators don’t receive them until sometime after the book has gone on sale.

Cian McDarby

In #14 there’s a page that’s just basically an ad for a reprint of the 5th to 8th issues, and there’s a chalkboard of things that are funny and not funny. Among the list of unfunny things are stuff like Speedball and Peter David (who, from my own knowledge of behind the scenes drama of the 90s could be a good natured jab or the result of some feud lost to time), there’s one that says “90 bucks for 12 new KC pages”. That’s one I’ve never heard of before, and they seemingly circle back to it at the end of the ad promising the reprinting is “Way under 90 bucks and not one painting of Alex Ross’ dad”, so presumably, since Kingdom Come is a KC drawn by Ross, this is related to Kingdom Come. The question is simple: Do you know the story behind this 90 bucks for 12 pages bit? I must question how DC was planning to sell a four issue miniseries, dozen extra pages or not, at that price, no matter how high quality it is.

From what I can tell, Cian, this issue of QUANTUM AND WOODY is making a reference to the then-recent circumstance where Mark Waid and Alex Ross got to add a dozen additional pages to the deluxe hardcover edition of KINGDOM COME. Most of that new material comprised an epilogue, but some of it was devoted to a New Gods scene that had gotten squeezed out of the monthly issues earlier. And from what I can tell, that book sold fine.

Nick Ernst-Maynard

Does Marvel utilize any kind of internal wiki or software to track character info, continuity, or designs? For example, if a writer wanted to include character Z in their story but character Z hasn’t been featured in a book for a long while, is there any kind of reference spot to see what their last appearance was, what their status quo was, and what their design was? Or is that a part of the role of the editor to just “know everything”?

Not really, Nick. Rather, Marvel uses me and a couple of other people like me who have good memories for this sort of stuff. And of course, there’s an entire Internet at everyone’s fingertips to make doing such research a whole lot easier than it was in the old days.

Matthew

I saw the solicit for exceptional x-men issue 5 and I see that iceman is already missing in the cover and in the synopsis I got that this book is mostly about kitty and those new kids, but it is looking like that bobby is gonna be a secondary character compared to the others and just pop up in some issues, he's been said to be part of the cast now but he is in any of the others covers with the team, is he part of the team of the book or he's just there, and for now is exceptional the only book where Emma frost & Iceman are planned to be showing up this year?

All I really want to say here, Matthew, is read the book and all will be revealed. I think you’re worrying more than is necessary about the content of solicitations or cover images. And yes, Iceman is sticking around in EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN for the long haul.

Ray Cornwall

1. That Deathlok cover is GORGEOUS, and probably the best in the run in my eyes. Did you color that, or did someone else? What do you think of it?

2. Looking at your Comics in the Wild posts, I wonder if you know the answers to this. My primary comics buying experience in the 70s (from the ages of 5 to 10) came at spinner racks in 7-11s in New Jersey. Is there any sales records on how much revenue from newsstands came from 7-11s, or similar convenience stores? I know in the 1970s that there were about 5,000 7-11s in the US, so I always think of that as the high point of 7-11 comics sales in the US.

Agreed, Ray, that DEATHLOK #32 cover by Kevin Kobasic and Greg Adams was really sharp, one of the best covers we did during that run—for all the good it wound up doing us. And at that time in the 1970s, virtually the entire revenue for a given issue came from outlets such as the ones that you describe. While there was an early version of the Direct Sales Market that was developing, at that point it would only have accounted for maybe 5% of Marvel or DC’s sales on a particular book.

---

Off The Wall

At first glance, this perhaps looks like simply four Bronze Age DC comic books framed under glass. But there’s a bit more to it than that. Because those aren’t comics, what they are rather is the original printer’s proofs for those covers, which were given to editor Julie Schwartz to okay and which thereafter hung on his office wall for the month. If you look closely, you can see that there’s a pinhole at the top of each one. After Julie passed in the early 2000s, elements of his estate were auctioned off to benefit the Hero Initiative, including these four cover proofs. I bought them at the time, dropping $100.00 each for them, and they’ve hung on my wall ever since. And that’s because these were all special books for me in terms of my history of comics. That issue of SUPERMAN, #268, was the first comic book that I ever read. FLASH #224 was the first regular issue of the title that I found after having been introduced to the character in a 100-Page Super-Spectacular. FLASH #225 I got in a 3-Bag having missed it when it first came out and it was about the most exciting comic book that had ever been produced when I was six-years-old, featuring both the Reverse-Flash and a team-up between the Flash and Green Lantern. And JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #109 was the first issue of that series that I ever got. So this is my formative comic book reading experience in a nutshell.

---

I Buy Crap

Let’s be real here. From the moment you saw that I’d bought a copy of UNCANNY X-MEN #94 a few weeks ago and talked about how I still didn’t own GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #1, you knew that I was going to do this, right? Having spent no money at NYCC or the Baltimore show, I figured that I could afford to do this. I’d been keeping my eye out for a reasonably-priced copy for a while, and this past week, one showed up. So now it’s mine, completing my collection of the ALL-NEW, ALL DIFFERENT X-MEN finally after all these years. This is still a pretty good comic despite its years—it’s got some Bronze Age goofiness to it, mainly on the part of what the menace is that the new X-Men are gathered together to oppose. But it introduces a whole bunch of brand new characters memorably and economically as well as bringing back a trio of other obscure players and bringing them all together. And Dave Cockrum was at the height of his powers in 1975—there wasn’t a better character designer working in the field at that moment.

---

Behind the Curtain

.What you see here on the left are the pencils to a page from UNCANNY X-MEN #174 by artist Paul Smith. And on the right is the printed inked , colored and lettered page—Bob Wiacek did the inking in case you were wondering. As you can see, having come over to Marvel from animation, Smitty’s pencils were very open but complete, and he was already a master of body language and depicting movement and emotion. It was while Paul was working on the series that UNCANNY X-MEN became undisputedly the best-selling series in the Marvel line and in comics overall.

---

Pimp My Wednesday

Here are this week’s treats for you!

NAMOR #4 takes us to the halfway point in World War sea as seven different prospective rulers vie for control of undersea civilization, with Namor attempting to broker peace between them. It’s an epic hot-blooded adventure brought to you by Jason Aaron, Paul Davidson and Alex Lins.

And Associate editor Annalise Bissa brings you NYX #4, recently named the best From The Ashes title in an article over at Comic Book Resources (and such a source is clearly unimpeachable, eh?) This issue focused most centrally on Prodigy and his perspective on mutant events within Manhattan, including the reign of terror of the Krakoan, who is holding him aloft here. It’s by Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly and Enid Balam.

---

A Comic Book On Sale 20 Years Ago Today, October 27, 2004

Twenty years ago, DC art director and cover maven Mark Chiarello put out the first issue of one of the rare projects that he oversaw directly. This was SOLO, and the concept was that for each issue, a hand-picked excellent artist would produce a number of new stories of their own choosing, collaborating with whomever they liked (if they chose to collaborate at all.) The result was an artist-focused anthology series that could sprawl all over the DC Universe, and of which no two issues were remotely alike. This first issue was devoted to Tim Sale, and in it Sale produces short pieces alongside writers Darwyn Cooke, Diana Schutz, Jeph Loeb and Brian Azzarello as well as a few that he wrote himself. Subsequent issues would focus on Richard Corben, Paul Pope, Howard Chaykin, Darwyn Cooke, Jordi Bernet, Mike Allred, Teddy Kristiansen, Scott Hampton, Daimon Scott, Sergio Aragones and Brendan McCarthy before the series finished with its twelfth issue. Eventually, the entire run was collected in a handsome hardcover. While all of the issues aren’t equally great, the range of creators and styles involved and the specific interests of each of the core contributors made this a terrific series of one-shots. Highly recommended.

---

A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

Unless I miss my guess, this issue of PETER PARKER, SPIDER-MAN, #12, released on October 27, 1999, contained the last comic book story that I’ve written for Marvel. And it came about in order to solve a problem that editor Ralph Macchio had. A few months earlier, the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN creative team of Howard Mackie and John Byrne had done a story that returned the Sandman to his villainous roots. For about fifteen years, he’d been on a redemption arc after a traumatic encounter with Hydro-man, and had become a member of Silver sable’s Wild Pack and also momentarily an Avenger. But Howard and particularly John wanted him back as a Spidey villain. The problem was how they got there. After years of the heroes of the Marvel Universe having slowly grown to trust the Sandman in his more heroic intentions, their story revealed that Reed Richards had secretly had him under surveillance that entire time, expecting him to go bad again. And wouldn’t you know it, for no good reason, he suddenly does! I don’t think that anybody would have minded having the Sandman back as a villain per se except for the off-handed manner in which it was done, casually discarding years’ worth of developments and in essence saying that the readers who had bought into the Sandman’s reformation were chumps. I know that I didn’t care for it, and I was relatively vocal with Ralph about that fact. So having some extra space to fill in this issue (all of Marvel’s #12s at this time were made double-sized as a matte of course), Ralph challenged me to come up with a story that would make the Sandman’s return to villainy more plausible. The trick was, I couldn’t contradict anything that had been shown in that earlier ASM issue. I gave it some thought, and I hit on what I thought might be an acceptable answer. The Sandman’s personality shift was so radical that it was almost as though he was a different person. I had seen something like that happen before in a story the Sandman had been a part of. In FANTASTIC FOUR #41-43, the Wizard and the Frightful Four capture the Thing and use the Wizard’s ID Machine to turn him to their side, making him cruel and nasty and violent, unleashing all of his inhibitions. I reasoned that if the Wizard was disgusted with the more line-toting turn his old partner had made, he might be able to use the same device on Sandman, transforming him back into an unrepentant thug. And so that’s what we did. The fact that the device in question was something pre-existing rather than a new contrivance is what made the story work for me. I don’t know how well anybody else felt about it, but the complaints about Sandman’s reformation stopped coming in once it saw print, so that’s something at least. The artwork was done by Geof Isherwood, and as was the style of the time, the story was produced Marvel style—which is to say that I wrote a plot first, Geof drew it, and then I dialogued the story from the artwork. I can remember being on my commuter train ride home one evening with the pages, furiously scribbling potential dialogue down in the margins as I leafed through the pages, the characters feeling like they were talking to me. The one flaw that still bugs me in the finished story is that nobody bothered to get Geof reference on the original ID Machine, so he drew his own new contraption. it worked well enough, but it would have been better if he’d been able to more closely replicate the original Jack Kirby design. Not his fault, though.

---

Another Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

The MARVEL VISIONARIES: JACK KIRBY hardcover came out on October 27, 2004. I didn’t put this book together, but I did select its contents, as I also did with all of the other volumes in the Hardcover VISIONARIES line. There had been a couple of earlier softcover volumes that I didn’t have anything to do with, however. I was and am an enormous fan of the work of Jack Kirby, and at the time a good deal of his past material was still out of print. So I was always actively looking for projects where I might be able to get some more of it back into print. The idea behind this volume was to encapsulate Kirby’s entire career at Marvel in one book, starting with the first story that he did for what was then Timely Comics and continuing all the way up to his final stories in the late 1970s. The trick was to hit all of the highlights and hidden gems to a certain degree while also covering as many of the key characters that Jack was associated with as possible. There was also a small section at the end where we included some of Kirby’s pencils and related rarities. The volume sold well enough that eventually we did a second one devoted to Jack, and years later it was reissued in softcover (though I believe the Yellow Claw story was excised from that printing as being too overtly racist to republish at that point.) These days, a staggering amount of Kirby’s Marvel material is steadily being reprinted—virtually everything that he did during the Marvel Age, certainly—and his impact on the comic book world and on Marvel specifically is more widely understood. he was made a Disney Legend in 2017. I loved this whole line of books, and I’d recommend any of them as a good, strong primer on what each one’s subject brought to the field and to Marvel.

---

The Deathlok Chronicles

We once again open with some thoughts from DEATHLOK writer Gregory Wright:

Gregory Wright

Jeff Ryan asks an interesting question. As far as I know, no book has ever been cancelled out of spite. HOWEVER there HAVE been books that an editor (not Tom) did not like or want to edit and did sabotage the book to get it cancelled. Sounds crazy...but I had a couple admit to it. When Heroes Reborn came about there was a LOT of anger because the creators on those books were left with no work whatsoever at Marvel...and it was felt that it was a major slap in the face to the editors as the books were taken from their control...but that's another story. I've never been bitter about cancellations. They were always a direct result of a book not selling and no editor ever cancelled a book.

This cover is one of my favorites done by Kevin. I loved coloring it. This story was not as confusing in the plot...funny how that goes. The biggest issue I have is that the coloring was done really fast and not acutely. And too many places where characters that really need to be colored correctly are instead knocked out in one color. I loved going BACK into the story from Captain America: Deathlok Lives. But the reader really needed to read THAT as well to keep it straight.

I’ve run into that situation as well, Greg. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve ever been angrier than in the period shortly after the massive layoffs at Marvel in the 1990s, when a particular Associate Editor went around the office celebrating the fact that he’d managed to get a particular title that he had been editing cancelled. I was pretty much ready to put him through a wall, and he’s never earned back my respect in the years since. Not that I imagine that it matters to him one way or the other. But I don’t forget, which means Marvel doesn’t forget.

By the time that we were working on DEATHLOK #33, we knew that the series was going to be ending, and so we worked to bring our final story to a successful and satisfying close—even though it had kind of gotten away from us in terms of its complexity by this point. I can tell that things were beginning to run late again as this issue has two letterers on it, which meant also that most if not all of the balloons were done on vellum and then pasted up onto the inked pages in order to save production time.

That said, at the very least the series had regained its consistency now, with Greg, Kevin and Greg working as a comfortable team. And the issue shows that. It feels a lot more solid than most of the middle of the run, even if it gets a bit too caught up in complicated time travel shenanigans. There’s a lot going on here, and you can definitely see Greg attempting to make good on his decision to produce a book that was more energetic and fun to read.

New Assistant Editor Glenn Greenberg broke the news of DEATHLOK’s demise on the Death Sentences letters page (I was always really happy with that letters page title), informing the audience that the following issue would be the final one. This was beginning to happen up and down the line to outlier titles, though it would become a more pronounced situation over the next 18 months to two years as the entire industry began to severely contract once the speculator boom had run its course. And on occasion, there’d be no warning at all when a given title was hitting its final issue, so at least DEATHLOK readers got a little bit of a heads up.

---

Monofocus

After mentioning last time that I hadn’t gotten a chance to see it yet, I made it a point this past week to seek out SPY X FAMILY: CODE: WHITE, the feature film based on the manga and related anime series. And it was…all right. It was nicely animated and decently paced, the plot held together and the action sequences were largely well done. And there were some amusing gags along the way. But somehow, it wasn’t really much more than just an extended episode. Because the premise of the entire series relies upon the various members of the fictitious Forger family not finding out the truth about one another, this meant that situations had to be contrived to pout Loid into action as a super-spy and Yor into play as a master assassin on their own, which kind of fragmented the adventure. Still, it was perfectly fine, and is a pretty good stand-alone entry point even for those unfamiliar with the series. Here’s a look at the trailer.

I also ran into regular reader Jeff Ryan while I was down in Baltimore, and he gifted me a copy of his book FATHER AND SON ISSUES, which I’ve been reading since then. It’s an overview of the life and career of the Romitas, John, Virginia and John Jr (JRJR), three people who have certainly earned a volume such as this one. And despite some occasional typos, it’s a pretty good summation of the careers of all three.

---

Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about the awful 1979 live action LEGENDS OF THE SUPERHEROES AND CAPTAIN AMERICA

And five years ago, I wrote about an incredibly cruel and thoughtless story about the late writer Bill Finger that DC burned off in their AMAZING WORLD OF DC COMICS fan magazine, "Through The Wringer"

---

And that’s all we gots for this outing, I’m afraid. Enjoy your Halloween this week (a holiday that I never truly cottoned to in my youth) and we’ll reconvene in November!

Hat’s All, Folks!

Tom B