#136: High Anxiety

Yeah, we’re getting right down to that election, aren’t we? And I can’t help but think that this is a singular pivot-point for our nation if not for the world as a whole. Depending on which way events turn out, we could be looking at a calamitous future—one in which many of the strides that we’ve made are rolled back and many of the freedoms that we take for granted are stifled or stymied. I don’t want to turn this into a political rant—nobody has ever been convinced to change their position by a comic book editor, nor is it something that people seem to really want to stare at too closely. But this feeling of anxiety seems to have been growing across the population for the last couple of days, and it’ll still be another couple of days before we have any sense as to which way things are going to break. I’ve already voted, so I’ve done my small part—so there’s nothing more to do but wait and hope. I wish that I had a more positive opinion of people in general and could count on humanity doing the right thing. But that hasn’t been my experience, by and large. Human beings are quite capable of being stupid, foolish, self-centered and self-destructive, and so I don’t feel as though I can depend upon our better angels to save us. Either way, we’ll know the landscape by next week, and know what kind of a world we’re all going to be living in moving forward.

In the meantime, we can all join together in solidarity and support James Norcross.

If only I had a bunch of questions about a fictional universe and the creation of stories therein to take my mind off of what awaits in just a few days. Hey, here come some now!

Gwen

Stephanie revealed that Jean will go through a transformation into a Cosmic Queen. May i ask if it will be about defining Phoenix place in the cosmic hierarchy, or it will be Jean fully accepting that she is and always has been the Phoenix and stop fearing this aspect of her?

This really amounts to a spoiler question, Gwen, so I can’t give you any more of an answer apart from “keep reading!’ Sorry! But the stories need to play out in the stories.

Brandon Giles

How does Marvel decide who to do crossovers with and who not to? I know a Marvel/DC crossover is a pretty complicated process these days (though I’ll never entirely give up hope) but clearly some other crossovers are fine, given the recent Avengers/Ultraman team up. Does Marvel typically approach the other company? Does it vary? Last and most important, has anyone ever seriously pitched DAREDEVIL/TMNT?

At its most basic, Brandon, Marvel isn’t all that interested in doing a lot of crossovers. DC for the last several years has seemed much more open to doing them. But whenever Marvel does participate in one, there tends to be some reason for this internally, some objective that making a crossover helps us to achieve. But each circumstance is different, so I can’t tell you why we do each and every one, nor which instances came from Marvel reaching out to others and which ones were the result of others reaching out to us. The real answer is All of the Above.

X of Alex

Hi Tom! With Halloween on the mind, what are some memorable costumes that you can recall marvel staff rocking in celebration?

I don’t have all that many that I can remember per se, Alex, though there was one year when editor Evan Skolnick came dressed as Yours Truly. But your question does give me an excuse to post this link to an hour and a half of footage shot at a Marvel Halloween Party from 1991. It’s all haphazardly shot, and nobody is going to want to sit through all of it. But it will give you a sense of what these events tended to be like back in the day. I put in a brief cameo appearance at one point, though not for long.

Eric Brown of NRE

Hello Tom, hoping you remember me, I was the guy I asked about Kitty Pryde and Illyana Rasputin reuniting and potentially becoming a couple in this era at Baltimore Comic-Con, especially given how more prominent they’re being pushed in the comics with Jed’s X-Men, Eve’s Exceptional X-Men, and the upcoming Allen-penned Magik ongoing in January. Just liking to have this question be answered in Print, or in this case, Substack’d.

Since I’m here, it’d be fair to inquire two new questions: Do you believe titles that were invented in The Krakoa Era such as Marauders and IMMORTAL X-MEN will make a return as either future ongoings or limited series projects? I especially enjoyed IMMORTAL with all the introspective dives and seeing characters who walk the moral line on the spectrum interacting and coming together for a common cause while simultaneously trying to carve their own path to power or maintaining their status and influence.

And lastly, I had read on the forums when Krakoa was ending that Hickman proposed when it started a magazine format of the X-Books where instead of multiple titles coming out, it’d be compressed into two to maybe 3 magazine-format books where the titles would be in in order to not overflood the market and being a more accessible option for readers and new customers. I’m curious if such a format would ever be considered for publication especially given the amount of books released now in the From The Ashes X-Line and potentially the wider Marvel Line?

Sure, I remember you Eric. But I don’t know that I’m going to be able to tell you any more here than I was in person. While it isn’t impossible that there might be some future moment when Kate Pryde and Illyana Rasputin got together, it also isn’t anything that’s on our radar right at the moment.

While it’s certainly possible that at some future point we might do series titled MARAUDERS or IMMORTAL X-MEN or what-have-you, those projects wouldn’t be a seamless continuation of whatever those books were during the Krakoa era or whenever they were coming out. So if you’re looking for more issues of an old favorite done exactly the same way, back issues are about all that I can point you towards.

And I don’t think that such a format is really viable in this marketplace, to be honest. You shuld see the amount of negative mail that we get whenever we just run a back-up strip in a particular title. People simply do not want to pay for content that they don’t want. And so if somebody wants to read, say, X-MEN and UNCANNY X-MEN but not X-FACTOR, they’re not going to be happy if the only way they can get the first two is in a package where they’re bundled with the third—and in all likelihood, a lot of them will forego the first two if it means them having to also purchase the third, even if the cost is negligible. These anthology ideas always sound interesting in paper, but in practice there’s a reason why anthologies don’t tend to have long runs in modern day publishing.

Biggu

I’m curious about Uncanny Avengers. I enjoyed that book a lot but it was interesting that it was an avengers team with x-men/mutants on it. I’ve always wondered how the opposite might work and if there’d be a demand for it. An X-men team/book with Avengers/humans on it. Like a team lead primarily by x-men and such but with like, Captain America on it. Instead of improving human/mutant relations by showing mutants can be avengers it’d be the opposite of like “well if Captain America is an x-man maybe these mutants aren’t so bad!” For some marvel citizens and it’d give some avengers the unique perspective of being x-men and seeing mutant struggles from a different angle. I guess if Uncanny Avengers borrowed the common x-men adjective “Uncanny” the opposite could do the same with like, Mighty X-Men 😂

At least for me, Biggu, reversing the paradigm of UNCANNY AVENGERS doesn’t work. And the reason is that the two series have vastly different premises. AVENGERS, ultimately, is about the best super heroes all joining forces for a common cause. And that’s easy enough, there’s absolutely no reason why some of those super heroes can’t be mutants. But the X-MEN are primarily an advocacy group for mutants. And while you can certainly have some degree of non-mutant presence on any such team, it begins to feel strange if half of the members aren’t members of the group for which they are advocating. Plus, in practical terms, Captain America being present on an X-Men team isn’t going to fix racism within the Marvel Universe, especially because racism and the struggle to overcome it is the foundational circumstance that makes X-MEN work. It’s the story-engine, and if you do away with it, then the stories stop happening (or at least stop happening in the same fashion. In essence, this just turns X-MEN stories into more AVENGERS stories with a slightly different label.)

Gary Scott Beatty

Through the Wringer was, admittedly, in poor taste, but do you really think it was done maliciously? I could see including a buddy in a story postmortem, thinking he’d get a kick out of it in the afterlife.

I don’t think that story was commissioned and executed in good humor, Gary. One only needs to read it to come to that conclusion. And while it certainly isn’t impossible that Bill Finger might have been tickled by its depiction of him as an untrustworthy inveterate liar and layabout, I don’t think there’s really any evidence to make one leap to that conclusion. No, I think Occam’s Razor applies here.

Jeff Ryan

With the prescription goggles of retrospect, what scene from a previous Marvel film would you have wanted to be a on-set visitor and seen filmed?

I honestly don’t know, Jeff. Largely because, while I like the Marvel films by and large, they don’t occupy my brain-space much when I’m not actively watching them. I suppose the obvious answer would be on the day the massive crowd scene was filmed for AVENGERS: ENDGAME in that pretty much everyone was there for that shot, and so you’d have the opportunity to potentially interact with the entire cast of characters.

Evan “Cool Guy”

just wondering if you had any funny or interesting stories about letter column titles: maybe ones you hated, or loved, or something that happened behind the scenes.

Another question that I can’t seem to come up with an interesting answer to, Evan. I do think that the title to the current THOR letters page: If They Be Wordy, is pretty good.

Melton

At what point in a new ongoing series is it decided that it will continue or be cancelled or relaunched? Take Phoenix by Stephanie Phillips. It had been greenlit for 10 issues as revealed by yourself - I believe you mentioned most if not all the ongoing x-men titles were greenlit for 10 issues - and herself. When do you decide whether it will be allowed to continue or will be cancelled or relaunched under a new team

There isn’t one specific moment, Melton, but there’s always the same moment: at the point where sales dip precipitously. That might be in one issue or it might be in a hundred issues, but if you get there, the series is finished. There are corollaries to that, certain runs or characters that are more likely to get another chance at the brass ring more immediately than others. But like with the crossover question above, those conditions tend to be singular in each case, so there isn’t a set of predictable situations that I can point you towards, sorry.

Callie

following up on the thought bubble question, what do you think of Al Ewing's use of them in Immortal Thor (if you've been reading that... I can't for the life of me remember if you edit that book). Feels like he's been doing an excellent job at utilizing them in a way that feels both classic yet incredibly natural to fit into a modern book.

Al Ewing is one of the modern day writers who feels at home with utilizing that tool, Callie, so I like what he does with them just fine. Also: the proper term is word balloons, not word bubbles. This has been a Marvel moment.

bic

Given that DC:s Absolute titles are selling absolute gangbusters and also Marvel's bestselling titles now take place in alternate universes, what does that tell about the future for the main universes in DC and Marvel? Is it time to move on?

You know, whenever one of these alternate universes sparks some momentary heat, there are always some fans like yourself that ask this question, bic. But the obvious answer is no, of course not. For one thing, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the way the mainstream Marvel or DC books are selling. For another, there’s no evidence that the momentary interest in Ultimate or Absolute is going to be able to maintain that interest over the long haul. Just look at DC:s New 52 from a decade ago. For about a year, it did gangbusters as it was a big new thing, and then immediately thereafter the entire line began to crater—so much so that they pivoted to doing Rebirth to bring back a bunch of the stuff that they’d gotten rid of for New 52. And all the while, the Marvel Universe just kept on selling and kept on being relevant. if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

JV

Would love to hear your thoughts on the 90s era Heroes Reborn initiative Tom - clearly it was a big sales success - but what were your thoughts on the inside at Marvel at that time?

"outsourcing" some of the main titles was a bold and controversial move that must have caused some concern within the company.

Speaking purely from the perspective of Marvel editorial of the period, absolutely nobody there was in favor of doing HEROES REBORN. Which I think is understandable. Doing so allowed outside creators to spend far more money working on those books than anybody within Marvel had been permitted to spend, and their outsourcing was a contributing factor to a massive round of layoffs in which a ton of people lost their employment. So while there certainly were readers who loved those books and were excited by them, that sentiment largely wasn’t felt by Marvel editorial itself.

Bully

reliable sales data has not been available to readers over the years. Both icv2 and bleedcool lists include sales data from just over 100 stores. I wonder if there is a big difference between the sales situation reflected in the two lists and the actual situation?

There’s a phrase in the computing world, Bully: Garbage In, Garbage Out. Which amounts to the idea that if your data isn’t reliable, then your outcome, your conclusions, can’t be reliable either. So it almost doesn’t matter how wrong any sales information is—if i isn’t right, then it’s impossible to draw any reliable conclusions from it. It can maybe give you a sense of something, but only a general sense is about it. I would expect that if you polled the right 100 stores, you could find that a cancelled title seemed to be a hit, and a hit book didn’t sell well at all. It’s maybe better than complete guesswork—but only just.

Warren V. Wind

I might be losing my mind but are you reusing readers questions because they seem to be repeat questions? Being a newer reader, I might be missing something you do on a regular basis. Or I'm going crazy!

I source each week’s questions from what is asked that week, Warren, so I shouldn’t be reusing old questions here. Of course, there may be subjects that people may be interested in and ask about again and again, or with a few weeks in between. Not everybody reads and remembers every installment of this Newsletter, no matter how I’ve tried to make that the law of the land.

Spike Stonehand

Nerdy question, and the sliding timescale might mean there just isn't a satisfying answer, but: how long did Krakoa exist within the Marvel Universe? Presumably not the full five years of publishing time, but for all of that to have been crammed into a single year boggles comprehension.

The only real answer that I can give you here, Spike, is that the Krakoa era lasted for as long as it lasted. The further away from it we move, the shorter that time period will become, just as happened with Utopia in the years before that. Because the more time that passes, the less relevant those stories are going to be to what is going on in the books at that point. It’s all going to turn into a swath of history that follows the characters around, all of it compressed into a relatively finite period of time. But this is all fiction, so it does what the stories need for it to do, so there isn’t a whole lot of upside in worrying about all of this too greatly. Ten years from now, nobody is going to really care much if Krakoa was just a long weekend—it’s not going to come up that often.

Sean Stoltey

Just reading through Secret Empire. Pretty prescient at the time, even more so now. Too bad not enough people figured it out. That said, I felt the art played against it a bit. Sorrentino is an amazing, yet idiosyncratic, talent. Was the intention to have Sorrentino do the whole book but time became a factor? Or was their intention in the multiple artists? I think that has worked in other books (AvX is a great example) but did not as well here. Was it an artistic or logistic choice being made during SE? And how do you feel about the multiple artist approach to events?

SECRET EMPIRE was always set up with multiple artists, Sean. That was a necessity from the jump based upon just how much story Nick Spencer had to tell and what his rate of production turned out to be. So Andrea was always going to be doing some of it, but not all of it. I tend to prefer to try to keep a consistent artistic team throughout an Event if it’s at all possible, but it isn’t always possible, especially with so many issues coming out so quickly.

Dan J. Alpert

I know strictly speaking Marvel itself did not publish the book, but as the Editor of the main comic, how much editorial oversight did you have on the story? I assume the main story is in continuity, is that correct?

I didn’t put FANTASTIC FOUR: FULL CIRCLE together, Dan, but I had as much input on the story as I do on any issue of FANTASTIC FOUR. The scripts had to pass my okay, I did line editing on the copy both before and after it was lettered. And every page of artwork went through me at each stage in the production. So, yes, it’s an in-continuity story.

And as to your question about the reported sales figures, see my answer to Bully above.

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Off The Wall

What you see above is an original page from AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #544, the first chapter of the universally-beloved “One More Day” storyline. It was given to me by Joe Quesada as something of a thank you for helping to workshop the story and provide feedback at every stage. And it’s framed on the wall of the room that holds all of my single issue comics, a room that is known colloquially among my family as “The Batcave.” Joe made no secret of the fact that he was unhappy to have his Marvel work displayed in a room named after a DC location—but, hey, it’s my house.

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I Buy Crap

This week’s haul isn’t something that I bought, but rather something that I was gifted. Around the time of New York Comic Con a few weeks ago, a contingent of executives from Tsuburaya Productions came up to Marvel for a meeting. In typical Japanese fashion, they brought gifts for the people they were coming to see. What you see above is a very fine, very detailed Ultraman action figure from S.H.Figuarts, who produce high-quality work. It’s a pretty great little toy, and it comes with multiple different hands so that you can achieve assorted iconic Ultraman poses, and even a second color timer that’s flashing red rather than blue indicating that Ultraman’s energy is almost all used up.

They also gave me this box of locally-source Ramen, which I haven’t yet sampled, but which may be an even better gift than the figure. It sure looks good on the box graphic.

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Behind the Curtain

.What we’ve got for you here today is a letter that was sent to a fan by Denny O’Neil on February 9, 1966 in which Denny attempts to answer an assortment of questions about Marvel. This was during the brief time when Denny was on staff at Marvel in the mid-1960s and it gives a sense as to how the people in the building were even then thinking about things. Plus, it’s on this cool vintage Marvel stationary of the era.

And this page is from FANTASTIC FOUR #47, which would have been in production not long before this letter was written. It gives a pretty good sense of what Kirby’s work was looking like at that moment, how complete or open his pencils were, and how much inkers such as Joe Sinnott were doing to create the finished result.

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Pimp My Wednesday

And here we go again! More coming comics to whet your appetite for Wednesday!

X-MEN #7 spins out the backstory of the Iron Night, the moment when a Sentinel attacked the town of Merle, Alaska and the X-Men decided to make their home in the abandoned factory in which it was constructed. Jed MacKay and Netho Diaz do the honors. And this also sets things up a little bit for Raid on Graymalkin, the book’s crossover with UNCANNY X-MEN, which begins next month.

And events reach a crescendo in Assistant Editor Martin Biro’s BLOOD HUNTERS #4 in which the ragtag team of Dagger, Elsa Bloodstone, Hallows’ Eve , Yelena Belova and Miles Morales take on the Blood Coven who whipped things up during BLOOD HUNT a few months back.

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A Comic Book On Sale 25 Years Ago Today, November 3, 1999

It’s sort of appropriate that we cover this book this week as it was just collected in the DC VS MARVEL Omnibus that was just released. BATMAN/DAREDEVIL: KING OF NEW YORK was the last of the regular crossover projects from the two rival publishers—well, with the exception of JLA/AVENGERS, which came a couple of years later. While these had started out in 1976 as an amazing and unlikely thing, special in every regard, by 1999 enough of them had been produced at such a rapid clip that they had largely become pedestrian again. Part of what made these projects special was the novelty of them, the idea that you’d never gotten to see these characters work in tandem before and you likely never would again. But there had already been an earlier DAREDEVIL/BATMAN book a couple of years previous. Additionally, in the sluggish marketplace of 1999, neither company was really putting its strongest creators onto these books any longer. It’s not as though they were being done by third-raters or anything, but it was never the best that Marvel or DC had to offer—those talents were needed to shine up the properties that each company owned and controlled whole cloth. This particular book, like many of these crossovers around this time, was fairly forgettable—so much so that I had all but forgotten it until seeing it again in the Omnibus. I can’t say that it’s a bad story, but it’s no more exciting than a random issue of either BATMAN or DAREDEVIL, and certainly not as good as either series at its peak. It’s just kind of there. There was almost a formula to these stories by this point, in which each company had to maintain parity with its rival. So a villain from each camp, the same number of supporting players, no deviation. It got tedious. And that’s ultimately why these projects faded away: the sense of fun and excitement had been lost, subsumed by larger business concerns. It is nice to see all of these books collected and back in print again, though—every generation is going to be interested in at least some of them. But making them a regular thing robbed them of their uniqueness. A unicorn isn’t a unicorn in a flock of unicorns, after all.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

EARTH’S MIGHTIEST HEROES #1 was released on November 3, 2004 and was a pretty fun project. Released at the same time that Brian Bendis was refashioning the regular AVENGERS series into NEW AVENGERS, it was a look back at the earliest days of the team from a contemporary perspective, filling in a lot of the blanks that were simply glossed over in the original 1960s books. It was written by Joe Casey, who sometimes crafts the persona of a disaffected artiste, but who is not-so-seriously an enormous Avengers fanboy. Paired with him was Scott Kolins, a former member of the Romitas Raiders corrections team who had gained a lot of notice for his stripped down linear new style on THE FLASH. These eight issues were less concerned with battles so much as what happened in-between the battles, how the Avengers became organized and legitimized, and eventually how the founding roster gave way to a replacement team of reformed villains. Additionally, every issue’s cover was designed within the negative space of one of the letters in AVENGERS, creating a pleasing organizational design to the series. So it was a lot of fun. And it did well enough that a while later we did EARTH’S MIGHTIEST HEROES II, which was set later on in the 1960s during the period when the Vision joined and Goliath became Yellowjacket and married the Wasp. In that case, though, we wound up casting the wrong artist—not the artist’s fault, he just had a different vibe than what the material needed—and as a result it was responded to not so well as this first one. Thus, a potential third series that would have been set in the 1970s era never happened. But still, this series is effectively evergreen and remains just as good today as when it was first issued.

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Another Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

CAPTAIN AMERICA: MAN OUT OF TIME’s first issue dropped on November 3, 2010. And it was absolutely commissioned to take advantage of the release window for the then-upcoming CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGERS film. We did a bunch of CAP projects for that, including CAPTAIN AMERICA: PATRIOT, which I wrote about previously. This one was something of an underdog series and didn’t get as much attention at the time as I think it deserved. But it’s a really great book that holds up well—especially given some of what I’m about to tell you. It was written by Mark Waid, who’d had two noteworthy tenures writing Cap in the 1990s. Cap is Mark’s favorite Marvel character, and that love and affection and insight comes through in spades in this project. The artwork was produced by Jorge Molina, who brought a very nice quasi-John Byrne sort of flavor to his pages. And the conceit of this story overlapped with that of EARTH’S MIGHTIEST HEROES, which had come out six years earlier. This book was all about Steve Rogers waking up in the present day after being frozen in suspended animation at the end of World War II and grappling with the strange new world in which he found himself, ultimately also finding new purpose and a new reason to carry on now that the war that he was created to prosecute was long over. Getting back to that mysterious comment I made about how well this book turned out, one of the things that you need to understand about the way that Mark Waid works is that he never plans out every single move ahead of time. In particular, whenever he crafts a cliffhanger situation with one of his characters, he seldom has any idea as to how he’s going o get them out of it the following issue. Mark counts on his long experience and the adrenaline generated by being up against a deadline and having no solution to power him through—and he invariably finds a clever means of escape for his protagonists. But I can’t tell you how many times over the years Mark has called me up while working on a typically-soon-due script for a book that he was working on with me and opening the conversation with, “I got nuthin’.”Which is always just a little bit scary. But then we’d talk for a little while and kick a few half-baked ideas around, I’d typically say something at some point that would spark a notion in Mark’s head—and then he’d go off and write a solution that usually didn’t have all that much to do with what we had talked about. So here, we spent a good portion of the opening half of this first issue focusing not just on young Steve Rogers in the war but also the other members of his unit, the guys he was meant to be fighting beside (though he seldom did, since he’d be called upon to become Captain America to take care of business.) This was good characterization, but it also seemed just a little bit like wasted real estate. After all, halfway through the issue we were going to be jumping to the present and we wouldn’t be spending any more time with these soldiers. But the scenes were good, so we did them anyway. And then, months later, while working his way through the early AVENGERS stories, Mark came across AVENGERS #8 in which the team battles Kang for the first time and has the brainstorm that maybe as a dogleg in that first encounter, realizing that Captain America is a long way from where he ought to be, Kang zaps him back to 1945. And all of a sudden, we’re dealing with all of those soldiers again, as the military is releasing them back into civilian life and Steve Rogers needs to make a decision to try to fight his way back to what is for him the future rather than stay in his own time. And the fact that we’d done that set-up work in issue #1 made the entire story feel as though it had been meticulously planned right from the outset. But believe me, it wasn’t. This was all improv of the finest caliber. But it’s a well-honed improv that Mark does better than just about anybody else.

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The Deathlok Chronicles

Our very last entry! And what better way to start things off than with a bit of commentary from DEATHLOK writer Gregory Wright:

Gregory Wright

Well...interesting how often you and I connect with characters and don't even know it. I colored the issue of Peter Parker Spider-Man which contained the story you wrote to solve the Sandman problem. I didn't color that story though. I also had a conversation with Ralph regarding the idiotic problem of Sandman returning to evil...I was unhappy that his relationship with Silver Sable was never even mentioned throughout this. So he had me write a story of their final encounter in Amazing Spider-Man Annual 2000. I referenced YOUR story in it slightly, but left a little window there to acknowledge that he just might still be somewhat his old self...at least Silver Sable thought he might be.

Once we knew the series was coming to a close...it was really depressing. I felt we were finally getting on the right track and had tons of new ideas...but we just had to have as much fun as we could with the book for the final two issues and I really wanted to be sure to tie up as much as possible so the fans who WERE still reading would have a satisfying ending. I had to end Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD abruptly...trying to put a years worth of story into a couple issues to give THAT book a decent ending and I wasn't happy about that. With the cancellation pretty much went my hopes for a couple other spin off titles...sigh.

So after just about three years, DEATHLOK #34 was the final issue of the series. And we went out as Greg says above, by trying to wrap up all of our dangling subplots and bringing the entire show to some manner of tidy conclusion. For this cover, I wound up using both DEATHLOK logos (and I find that I really dislike the angle that AND is at—I should have just kept it straight, the slant doesn’t help anything.) They’re tinier than we would typically have approved of at the time, but given that this was the final issue, nobody cared much. What harm could it possibly do?

The loss for me is that we never got to move ahead into our next cycle of stories, which Greg and I had been brainstorming on before the axe fell on our series. We had what I thought was a fun idea as to where to go, but we never got to execute it. Originally, at the end of this story, Deathlok was going to get returned to the present. Except that it was going to be the wrong Deathlok, the Luther Manning version—in essence, we were going to switch them. So the pacifist Michael Collins would be stuck in the war-ravaged quasi-future of Manning, where his idealism could be regularly put to the test, while Manning, under the new Demolisher name, could interact with the modern Marvel Universe with a more devastating outlook. We were only going to do this for around six months or so before putting everything back to normal, but our hope was that we’d be able to establish the Demolisher well enough that he could be spun off as his own thing. Alas, none of it ever came to pass.

So what killed the series ultimately? I think the most key mistake is pretty obvious: me hiring an untested and in-no-way-ready young penciler without some sort of a track record to point to and then not immediately correcting course when the problem became self-evident. That was the move that cost us the most goodwill and the most readers, and put us onto a downward trajectory that we were never able to pull out of. That said, I think the bedrock mistake was in setting the series up with alternating writers. This meant that the series wasn’t able to settle into an identity and maintain a consistent flavor—it would change every couple of issues, despite everybody’s best intentions. End of the day, though, I was simply too green and too inexperienced to be able to deal with all of the challenges, and so I made a lot of stupid blunders that cumulatively kiboshed the book. So it goes.

As a parting gift, inker Greg Adams gave me the final page of this final issue, as you see above. Which was very nice of him. All I focus on looking at it now is just how tiny the heads are on Deathlok and Siege in Panel 2.

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Monofocus

STAR TREK LOWER DECKS came back for its fifth and final season a week ago, and while the first three episodes that Paramount+ has released so far are perhaps not quite as sharp as the series has been in the past, they’re still very fun and very satisfying. I’m typically in favor of a show bringing itself to a planned conclusion while it’s still in its prime rather than hanging around too long and going through lackluster seasons that diminish its overall impact. But I do feel as though LOWER DECKS could have run longer—especially in a landscape where there are momentarily relatively few STAR TREK shows in production. Being animated, there really isn’t any reason why it couldn’t run indefinitely. I’ll enjoy the remainder of what’s still to come without a doubt.

And speaking of LOWER DECKS, I also read Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio’s wonderful Choose-Your-Own-Adventure LD project WARP YOUR OWN WAY this past week. And it was as clever and fun as you would expect, integrating the branching pathway structure of the story and the fact that the reader will “replay” the adventure several times in order to get to a good resolution as elements of the plot, which I’d not seen done before. I spent a bunch of time studying this sort of structure back in the late 1980s when my writing partner Mike Kanterovich and I produced an entire Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book about a mutual friend of ours for his birthday, so I’m always interested when somebody is able to find a new way to approach the essential structure of these things. And it’s as entertaining and Easter-egg-laden as an episode of the animated series, so it sticks the landing of being true to the source material as well. Good stuff.

I’ve also started reading mentalist Derren Brown’s new volume NOTES FROM A FELLOW TRAVELER. This isn’t a general audiences volume—Brown wrote it as a journal of his latest production, SHOWMAN, while it was touring, and it’s intended specifically for magicians and conjurers and professionals in that area. I’m definitely not that, but I’ve had an interest in stage magic since I was a kid, and so when it became available, I snapped it up. And so far, it’s a really mind-expanding read. Derren doesn’t spend any time explaining how he produces any of the illusions and effects that he conjures during his act, but rather spends a lot of time discussing the story that he crafts throughout each performance and how that impacts upon the audience members more that simply a natty guy doing slight-of-hand illusions might. So it very much speaks to the purpose of storytelling and the manner in which to do so effectively, and I’m finding it to be quite an interesting read. If you’re not familiar with Derren, since he’s British and much more widely known in the UK, an enormous repository of his past work is available to peruse at his YouTube page. But be careful: this is a dangerous rabbit hole to fall down, as you’ll swiftly find yourself watching mystifying video after video after video.

And finally, prompted I think by the advance hype for the SATURDAY NIGHT movie (a film that I still have not seen, by the way), I wound up watching a series of videos put together over at the LATE NIGHT SATURDAY YouTube channel at this link that analyze and review every episode of the first season of the program. I was too young to have watched these episodes when they first aired—I didn’t come to SNL until around 1983 or so, after my family had relocated to Delaware from New York. But I’ve seen them all in the years since, and they remain something of a cultural touchstone for that era. My opinions didn’t always line up with the video-maker’s (I’ve always loved Dan Akroyd’s Deca-bet piece, for example) but I found the analysis to be cogent and fair, and I enjoyed reliving many of these shows without needing to watch them again in full.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about the second series of Topps Marvel Super Heroes Stickers.

Five years ago, I wrote about the Last Original PLASTIC MAN Story of the Golden Age.

And ten years ago, I wrote about this Great Cover.

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Next time: will we be heading for a nightmarish dystopia or a brighter future? We’ll have some idea by then. In the meantime, try not to let the moment get you down, remember to vote, and I’ll see you on the other side!

Hat’s All, Folks!

Tom B