#139: Give Them Money!

We’ve got a little bit of a theme going on this time out. As always, this feature remains absolutely free each and every week, despite the many long hours it takes to assemble for your Sunday morning pleasure. And that isn’t going to change any time soon. However, there are a couple of things going on where a cash donation would be very much appreciated. So especially to those who have indicated in the past that they would pay a certain amount of money each month or year for access to this feature, I’d like to ask you to maybe throw a few coins in these directions. And for everybody else who hasn’t offered to pay me squat, perhaps some of you can find it in your hearts to do the same.

First up, friend of the page Karl Kesel, a writer, artist and inker of some renown, is in the midst of Kickstartering his latest IMPOSSIBLE JONES release. It’s a fun strip, very much in line with the sensibility of the HARLEY QUINN series that Karl did with Terry Dodson many years ago. Karl’s already met his main goal, but I know that he could use a bit more of a buffer to be able to do everything right and keep on being able to make comics like this one. So if you’d like to know more, all of the information on making a pledge can be found at this link.

Secondly, as a card-carrying member of the Siegel & Shuster Society, I am honor-bound to direct your attention to this fundraising link, where members of that organization are striving to get a Siegel and Shuster memorial constructed in Cleveland, the birthplace of the Man of Steel. They need to raise a lot of cash to make this a reality—more than a million dollars. And so, every little bit helps. If not for Superman, then for Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and any other kid who dreamed up great adventures.

And then, finally, as always, any donation to the Hero Initiative, which provides for comic book creators who have fallen on hard times, is appreciated. Here’s a link where you can find out all about the worthy things they do. Maybe buy yourself a copy of their SUPERMAN 100 PROJECT book, in which 100 creators, none of whom were me, each contributed a cover image of the Metropolis Marvel for charity.

All right, the pledge break is over. Let’s see what we’ve got for you this time.

Got lots of questions this week, signs of an interested and engaged audience. So, thank you! Here are a couple of half-baked answers for you in return:

David Brazier

Dare I ask about - The Clone Saga, a story that really divides fans. I loved it when it first came out and I am now re-reading it as the Epics are published. There’s so much I like, the character Kaine, the Jackal, the Grim Hunter, Stunner, etc. it’s rich with ideas. I wonder if you felt the same, or where you felt it eventually missed the mark. Was it just too long, too complex, was it the moment they made out dear Peter was the clone? Just really interested to here your take.

I suspect that I have a different perspective on the Clone Saga than you do, David, as I was viewing it from the inside out rather than the outside in. I can tell you that when it was first proposed and moving ahead, I simultaneously found the idea to be both utterly crazy and also pretty ballsy. I was never really down with the idea of deciding that the character readers had been following every month since 1975 wasn’t the genuine Spider-Man at all, but as a way of eliminating the millstone of the Spider-Man wedding, I thought doing so took some cojones. And it might have all worked except that two things happened. The first was that it was wildly successful, at a time when sales across the board were slowing down. That meant that the sales department pushed to keep it going on for longer and longer, ad infinitum. So it definitely outstayed its welcome, and by the third or fourth reversal of its premise, pretty much the entire Spider-Man readership had had enough. The second is that just as soon as the story got to its big turn climax, those involved got cold feet and attempted to reverse themselves, with disastrous results. I know that Tom DeFalco insists that this was always going to be the plan, but with no disrespect meant to Tom, I was around during those days too, and it was very much not what anybody working on those titles had been thinking or expressing. I don’t know that it was ever going to be hailed as a classic, but has the story ended the way it had been intended and the series allowed to move on from that point, it might be remembered more fondly. There are certainly plenty of folks such as yourself who liked it them and still like it now.

Joe West

how is it decided which characters get tie-ins for big events like Blood Hunt or Judgment Day? And why is it that the Guardians of the Galaxy are never included unless it’s a more cosmic threat and they have an ongoing series at the time?

For the most part, Joe, to have a tie-in to a big event story, you either need to have a series already—typically one of the perennials of the publishing line—or your characters need to have some connection with the core storyline that makes it obvious why you would do a secondary tie-in story. So, for example, during BLOOD HUNT, it was easy to see why other vampiric characters might be making a resurgence at that time. The difficulty with Guardians is that those characters are typically light-years away from the goings-on on Earth, and most of them don’t really care about the day-to-day stuff there. So it’s harder to find a natural way to involve them except when the events of the storyline are galactic in nature.

Alexander Zalben

love to hear your thoughts on launching a new ongoing series as part of an event (as is happening next year as part of "One World Under Doom," which is why it's top of mind). I assume the logic is that an event will raise the profile of a new book, but as a reader I often feel like once past the event, the book stumbles a bit, since the initial concept was tied to the event comic/status/etc; versus having a distinct pitch of its own.

The answer here, Alexander, is that the initial story pitch for WEAPON X-MEN involved aspects of Doctor Doom and Latveria right from the start, so it was always going to need to reflect the One World Under Doom status quo when it came out. And at that point, why not make it a legitimate tie-in and garner that additional promotion for the launch?

Gwen

I would like to ask if you have ever consider about giving Jean a Cosmic Horror comic? It would be super cool to see Jean in a such different approach than we are used to, especially now that she’s fully involved in the marvel cosmic universe

I imagine that the source of this question was James Tynion’s recent comments that he’d love to write a cosmic horror X-Men title, Gwen. But at this point, PHOENIX as a solo heroine has only had five issues so far, so it’s a bit too early to create secondary titles with her. And I’m not really looking to do a creative overhaul where we fire all of the people working on the book and replace them with others who might do what you’re asking for. Sorry, maybe at some point.

Brandon Giles

As someone who enjoyed most of the actual stories being told during the Inhumans era but hated the corporate-driven way the mutants were pushed to the side during that time, I have to ask: do you think it’s been long enough that we might start seeing the Inhumans (specifically some of the ones created during that time, like Reader, Flint or Inferno) appear more often again?

I think that any of those characters could reappear at any time, Brandon. What you really need for that to happen, though, is for a creator to be invested in using them. I wasn’t really directly involved with much of that Inhumans material, and so I don’t have any particular affinity for it—so I’m far less likely than some to suggest picking up those characters in a given situation. I’m not against it or anything, I just have mountains of other characters that I’m more invested in. But given enough time, pretty much everybody in the Marvel Universe comes back, so I’d expect to see them again eventually.

Steve McSheffrey

When Speed and Wiccan were created, was there even a vague explanation in mind that the creative team considered how the souls of Wanda's twins became actual souls and not pieces of Mephisto, traveled back in time, and became the souls of two children unrelated to each other and Wanda while reshaping their genetics? As much as I enjoy both characters there's always a little niggling thought none of it makes sense.

Based solely on my personal experience, Steve, most readers weren’t concerned about this one way or another, they were simply invested in the stories, particularly the relationship between Asgardian/Wiccan and Hulkling. So the explanation was, “It’s fiction, this is how it went.”

Jeff Ryan

You mentioned the great team-up of Fabian Nicieza and Mark Bagley, first on New Warriors and then Thunderbolts. When do you, as an editor, first get a glint that a writer and artist team may be the next Claremont/Byrne or Wolfman/Perez?

I don’t know that there’s ever any specific moment where that becomes clear, Jeff, not that you could apply across-the-boards as a regular yardstick. By that same token, I’m not really certain that Fabian and Mark equate to Chris and John either. Each combination is its own thing. I think it’s relative easy to tell when some creators are producing excellent work, whether that’s attributed to the team or the individual components of that team depends on the circumstance, i think.

Daniel Sherrier

I hadn't even realized that more Cobra Kai episodes had dropped. According to IMDb, though, it's only the middle of the sixth season. Five more episodes will debut in 2025: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7221388/episodes/?season=6&ref_=tt_eps_sn_6

Thanks for this, Daniel, that makes a hell of a lot more sense. I had thought that final season was being broken into two parts, rather than three. Three, honestly, seems crazy to me—but it’s not my platform, so they’re going to do what they do, I guess.

Christopher Krayer

I'm wondering if you know if the old Peter Parker the Spectacular Spider-Man series will get put in the Epic format? I know some have been done as Masterworks, but very few issues are available in trade unless they're cross over issues. Would love to read the old stories that didn't cross over.

It probably will at some point, Christopher, but at exactly what point I couldn’t tell you. There’s just a mountain of material that could be collected in that format (and which is constantly) and I’m not involved with sorting out what volumes are going to be done next. Sorry.

X of Alex

With Marvel characters often being licensed by outside entities to make video games, TV shows, etc., have you ever been called upon to consult to make sure the characters were well represented?

Yes, Alex, I’ve worked on a number of such things in my time at Marvel, going all the way back to my earliest days in Bob Budianksy’s Special Projects Department, where we consulted on now-ancient Nintendo games featuring Spider-Man, the Silver Surfer, the Punisher and others, and typically commissioned the box art or advertising art for those efforts. And I’ve been involved with a few movies to some degree and a few animated series as well. I wrote a piece on my blog page here about some notes that I gave on what became the first SPIDER-MAN movie, for example.

Bob Fifteen

How do the Marvel Unlimited / digital team decide to prioritise additions to the digital back catalogue? And do areas like the X-office have any influence?

Sometimes the reasons seem pretty obvious - such as the full run of Ghost Rider 2099 recently appearing to accompany the omnibus - but some of the gaps elsewhere seem pretty odd from a reader's perspective. There are still missing issues midway through relatively high-profile books like the original X-Force and Generation X runs, and things like Bishop's solo books are also poorly represented.

For that matter... how does the decision to collect some long ago X-book arc or limited series in a trade paperback or omnibus work? Does the x-office start that conversation, or become part of it once someone else thinks it might be worth it commercially?

Well, Bob, as you intuit, it often comes down to what materials are available or are going to be available due to them being reconstructed for some other publishing initiative, such as an Omnibus. I don’t really have much of anything to do with how this is all planned, but it’s fairly obvious too that people tend to hone in on what they know is coming up in the future—be that movies or television shows or cartoons or big comic book stories, whatever—and then try to program a certain amount of their release content to take advantage of the presumed interest in those large projects. As for the reissuing of older storylines in collected editions, typically the editorial staff isn’t much involved with that either. We can always suggest things if we think they have merit (and I’ve done so several times over the years.) But generally, we leave all of that to the Collections department, as that’s their job to begin with.

MB

Right, except you're going forward with a five issue Savage Land Rogue mini series. And you haven't responded to or addressed any of the negative feedback and concerns Rogue fans have about this series. So many of us have contacted the X Office email and no one has said anything, but I guess that's expecting too much.

You’ll have to forgive me, MB, but I don’t spend many of my nights sleeplessly concerned about some fans being upset about some upcoming release that they really know very little about. I’ve been doing this for way too long, and I know that if you announce absolutely anything, there are going to be fans that are unhappy—especially before it comes out and all they have to go on is their own greatest fears about it. Just look at how much the-sky-is-falling chatter there was when we announced that From The Ashes was coming. So I’m sorry that we’re doing a project that you don’t like the sound of. And might I suggest that he best way to express your displeasure might be to not buy the project in question? On the other hand, if you do wind up reading it, there’s a not-zero chance that you might actually end up enjoying it, and that your fears were all things that you or others invented in your minds and then assumed would be true. Apart from that, I don’t think there’s anything to address. We’re publishing a project, Read it, don’t read it, that’s entirely up to you.

TG Mollusk

I also really admire the craftsmanship of the Taschen books, but find reading my Spider-Man vol 1 inconvenient due to its size. Do you know of any other collected edition line that does something similar to Taschen’s coloring and/or page feel?

I can’t say that I do, TG, not of the same or similar material.

Kurt Busiek

This is also the point that you and I first started working together editorially, and that led to one of what was easily the two biggest boosts to my career. So even though I don't think I did especially notable work on NIGHT THRASHER (though I enjoyed writing the "Money Don't Buy" arc that you inherited in midstream), I'm very glad I was there when you arrived!

Well, thank you, Kurt. I’ll certainly be covering those NIGHT THRASHER issues when I get there as well, so that’s something you can either look forward to or dread. And certainly, ours was a fruitful collaboration during that period—you did as much or more for my career as I may have done for yours.

Emmanual Cabahug

Will Stephanie Phillips continue to write Phoenix after issue 11 or will someone else take up the mantle? Second, what will become of Jean Grey and Scott Summers once Jean Grey becomes Cosmic Phoenix (upgraded Phoenix), I assumed they are going to remain married right? Will we ever see them reunited again? Jean mention that her cosmic journey wasn’t permanent from X-Men’s Infinity (From the Ashes issue 001).

Most of this really comes under the heading of “wait and see”, Emmanual. I’m not going to spoil future developments here—that’s what we want you to read the comics for! But I will say that I’m not looking to make any changes in the creative personnel of the series.

Joseph Ruiz

does Marvel have a preference on how readers get the comics - physical or electronic (Kindle)? Or is a sale a sale?

We do not care how or in what form you get your comics, Joseph, provided that it’s a legal purchase and not pirating or something like that. But whether it’s the single issues, a trade paperback collection, a hardcover, an omnibus, a smaller collection or a digital version, the money works just as well at paying our bills, so it’s all the same to us. Buy what you want the way you want, we won’t mind.

Curtis King Jr

I’m glad to hear that you’re thinking of picking up some DC Finest volumes! (You can guess why!) I’m curious as to what’s attracting you to the line, since you already have some of the previously collected stories. There’s quite a bit of fan buzz about DC Finest on social media focused on the content of course, but also on how the line is organized and packaged. As a professional in the industry though, what’s your primary reason for laying down cash for material already in your collection?

It’s mostly that I’m an idiot, Curtis, and that I suffer from that collectors’ mentality. I love formats, and I can remember when not a fraction of this material was so readily available in print. So even though I have copies of the earliest Superman stories in Archive volumes and some of the Chronicles editions, it appeals to me that they’re now being presented in the FINEST/EPIC format, which is just a hair easier to deal with. And it means, at least for that week, I don’t need to go digging around in my exhaustive archives to read them again. (That is, until the FINEST book gets filed away and those same stories are released again in another cool package that I’ll more than likely also pick up.) I used to tell people only half-jokingly that I could stand virtually anywhere in my home, reach out and pull out a copy of the story from FANTASTIC FOUR #1, so many different versions of it do I own. And that’s still kind of true.

JV

This new warriors chat reminded me of the wonderful one page story that Fabian Nicieza and Mark Bagley did for the (amazing) Marvel 1000 special - in one page they got me excited about the New Warriors again (and really leaned into the teen activist angle) - would a reunion mini series be something that Marvel wants to revisit?

Same with a bunch of those amazing one pages - the Roger Stern/Jerry Ordway Machine Man 1 pager had me wanting a mini by those two as well? Any chances of this?

I suspect that the time to have directly followed up on any of the one-page stories from MARVEL COMICS #1000 and #1001 is well past at this point, five years later, JV. But glad that you liked them.

Gregory Wright

Hmmm. I was definitely occupying that office at that time. I definitely did not put that on my dartboard...but...sometimes OTHER people would put something up on it...and I wouldn't dissuade them so maybe that's how it got there...but I have no idea who did put it there. Just that it wasn't me. LOL. I can't wait to read your take on the five editors in chiefs as well as your selection process on New Warriors. From the freelance perspective, the 5 Chiefs didn't really effect me...I got along with all of them and I was winding down my time writing for Marvel as I shifted to doing color only "temporarily".

Could it have been Evan who put it up, maybe? That would certainly be ironic given that he wound up taking over the series as writer once Fabian left it.

Chris Sutcliffe

What was the the zeitgeist that meant that every hero was the size of a fridge, covered in shoulder pads and belts, and carrying massive guns? Was it simply the popularity of McFarlane and friends, and the mimicking that style? Was it the action films at the time? What was the big influence on 90s comics?

I think that pretty much everybody was influencing everybody at that time, Chris, and that was what the audience and the marketplace was responding the most to—which meant that additional creators attempted to get in on that action. So it was a spirit of competition combined with a spirit of needing to go where the money was—or at least trying to get there.

Ian

I appreciate it when you share thumbnails and breakdown what makes the art on a given page great. Little of the conversation around comics (including these questions) is about art. Mostly characters, stories, etc. Why do you think that is?

I suspect it’s because so few readers really have the language to be able to discuss such matters intelligibly, Ian. I think that everybody can identify artwork that they like and respond to. But articulating WHAT they’re responding to and WHY they’re responding to it can be elusive. It’s more difficult for non-artists to be as familiar with the terminology, and most of them haven’t studied to be able to discern how a given page or sequence functions and why it gets a reaction out of them. Talking about the stories or the characters is a lot easier.

Simon Birch

I saw Chip Zdarsky's panel at Thought Bubble this year and we were all told a secret that we all swore would not leave that room.

But he also had effusive praise for you, specifically how you give story notes and don't just OK everything to get it out the door.

Is there any time that sticks out to you as a story note that completely changed the way the writers went on the approach the story, for better or for worse?

Also, Chip mentioned he loves Comics History books, I wanted to ask about recommendations but there was no time left. Do you have any or have they been catalogued elsewhere?

That secret was about Chip’s hairpiece, wasn’t it? I promise I won’t tell, Simon. And I sort of hope that all of my story notes changed their stories they were about for the better, But I try not to keep score in that way. As the editor, my job is to work behind the scenes to make the best books possible. The creators are the performers who are on stage putting on the performance—and its they who should get any accolades for what people enjoy. So I often throw out a whole bunch of different ideas, and some of them get used, often adapted or altered to the creator’s liking. And as long as that solves whatever the problem ,is, that’s fine by me.

Isaac Kelley

I've wondered for years, is there a strong market preference for glossy paper? I've always found gloss to distract from the art and love it when books are printed on paper without gloss (is "matte" the word I want?). A good one-to-one example is the Penguin hardback collection of Panther's Rage versus the Epic Collection of the same. My limited circle shares this preference, but I know how echo chambers work, so maybe I'm in the minority. Does the market prefer their comics shiny or did everyone just start copying Image in the 90's and that became the default, or maybe nice glossy paper is cheaper than nice non-gloss?

for years, comic books were printed on the lousiest, crappiest paper available, Isaac. So the call in those days was always for better materials and a better product. But what you find today is that there’s no real consensus on what people prefer in terms of things such as paper stocks. Some like a matte finish, some like the pages glossy. It’s mostly a personal preference. For example, I don’t love the super-thick cardstock covers on the recent GHOST MACHINE books. I feel like they make the interior pages feel flimsy and thing. But somebody must like them, because those creators keep doing them. Which is fine by me—it’s not exactly what I might want, but if I’m interested in the material, the format is a more secondary consideration.

ComicBookDad531

if you took a break from your newsletter for one week and decided to have someone else fill your shoes or hat if you will. Who would it be? Also who would be your dream fill in newsletter author?

Dad, nobody is going to be filling in on this Newsletter. Nobody would even want to.

Montana Mott

I found your comments about Agatha Harkness interesting! Out of curiosity, what do you think of the version of Billy Kaplan in that new show, as somebody who shepherded his creation and edited so many books he appeared in over the years?

To be honest, Montana, I haven’t seen the back half of AGATHA ALL ALONG yet, so I don’t really have any thoughts that I can share with you about the depiction of Billy therein. Sorry about that.

Evan “Cool Guy”

What are the actual deadlines for a monthly book? Like how far in advance does the script come in, then the final art etc.

We send books to the printer ideally around four weeks before they see print and show up at your local store, Evan—though we can go down to three weeks as needed. So the letters and colors and the final assembly of the book needs to be completed at four weeks. This means that the inking needs to be finished, ideally, at five weeks, and the penciling at eight weeks. These days, it takes the average artist approximately six weeks to draw a 20-page issue—some creators are faster than that, others slower. But that means that the script, or at least the plot, had best be ready to be drawn around fourteen weeks before the issue goes on sale. But all of these dates are relatively fluid as we often don’t quite hit them all, and there’s a cascade effect from one month to the next as work runs late.

Mark Mosedale

I just read The Last American, first published by Epic, and subsequently had a look at the list of Epic titles and was impressed by how many heavy-hitters were on the list. Do you have any thoughts/insights on why the then-very-new Vertigo imprint made it through the end of the early '90s bubble, while Epic didn't (barring a couple of brief revivals)?

Well, VERTIGO was an outgrowth of a bunch of already-successful titles that had been launched just as a part of the DC line, books that had a certain common sensibility to them: SWAMP THING, SANDMAN, DOOM PATROL, ANIMAL MAN, etc. So VERTIGO was about putting a label or a brand on an already-existing publishing philosophy. EPIC, meanwhile, was designed from the start to be a more eclectic place, and so there isn’t really much of a consistency of vision across most of its projects. What defined them more often than not was that they weren’t Marvel super hero comic books (except for those occasions where they were.) And what retailers as a whole seemed to want from Marvel wasn’t innovation so much as a reliable commercial product that their customers were interested in buying. So EPIC always struggled under the weight of not being Marvel in a way that VERTIGO never did.

bic

How come you were doing the sketch cover of Exceptional X-Men #3?

I thought that would have been handled by the writer/artist of the book.

I do a lot of cover sketches and the like, bic, some of which I’ve shared in this feature. And that’s because I have a certain amount of artistic training, and that it’s easier for me to doodle out an example of what I’m taking about and to get a good result back than it is for me to simply describe an idea and get the same result. In almost every one of these instances, though, the artists in question improve on my goofy drawings a thousandfold, because their skills are way better than mine. What those sketches are about more than anything is communicating a visual idea to them. And for that EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN sketch, I did that before there even was an artist on the book, or a writer. It was one of a couple that I did to illustrate a few key series points.

Mike M

Reading your thoughts about the original conception of New Warriors as activist heroes and why it worked, and how you wanted to get back to it, reminded me of your exchange with Fabian on Twitter earlier this year where he said he would bet $5 that the new X-Force book wouldn't be a return to what X-Force is supposed to be and you asked him what X-Force is supposed to be, and he said (and I quote):

"A proactive middle ground offered to young mutants to counter the 'polarization' of Charles/Magneto. Fight First. Fight hard. Fight both sides equally as needed. 'Adult Black ops X-Force' is to the concept what Ellis was to the Thunderbolts. Fudging Around the edges of the DNA."

I haven't started From the Ashes yet as I prefer to read in chunks (I will definitely be checking out all the books), but you mentioned how your Champions book was sort of like what you thought New Warriors should be, and while the above is Fabian and not you I was wondering if any of the new books present anything like what Fabian says X-Force should be because it sounds like a book I want to read. I would guess from what I know that Exceptional would come the closest?

Also, you know, what are your thoughts about what Fabian said as to what X-Force is "supposed to be"?

I don’t think that Fabian was wrong, Mike, at least in terms of the X-FORCE that he was writing back in the day. But I will say that defining your premise as being the middle ground between two poles that aren’t the key poles in the line any longer isn’t all that likely to work today. As we were moving into a world in which mutantkind as a whole had moved on from the leadership of Professor Xavier and Magneto, trying to define a third position in relation to the two of them doesn’t seem like it really works, does it? I also tend t think that in recent decades, X-FORCE has very much come to be seen and identified as “the X-Men’s kill squad.” As I don’t really think that the X-Men should have a kill squad, that too couldn’t exactly be the premise of the book. I don’t know that any of the existing X-Books are exactly Fabian’s X-FORCE concept—but that isn’t really surprising, as the conversation has moved on from the poles that Fabian’s concept set itself in contrast to. In a lot of ways, I suspect that Jed and Ryan’s X-MEN is probably the closest to it.

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Off The Wall

This page by Dante Bastianoni and Ralph Cabrera sits on a wall in my work space. It’s from the one and only Fantastic Four story that I ever wrote (alongside my writing partner Mike Kanterovich). FANTASTIC FOUR had always been my favorite Marvel book, so getting to do this story in FANTASTIC FOUR UNLIMITED #8 was a big deal for me. Also, it was doing this story that got the whole team asked to take over the ailing FANTASTIC FORCE pitch—even though FANTASTIC FORCE #1 came out before this issue did. So I paid my price for it. Once the original artwork was returned, Cabrera gave me this page and one other from the job, which is in another area of the house.

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I (Don’t) Buy Crap

Sometimes, I go to buy some stupid thing and the universe gets in the way. Case in point.

What you see above is a Hot Wheels release from a few years ago. It’s a replica of the car that Superman smashes on the front cover of ACTION COMICS #1, his first appearance. What a wild thing to exist—especially as the vehicle has been covered with black ink lines in emulation of Joe Shuster’s pen shading. So, having become aware of this wonder, I promptly bought one for myself on eBay. As the week went on, I got a couple of updates from the shipper: the package has been sent, the package is in transit, the package has been delivered. Except that the package never showed up at my house. I’ve had this happen before when parcels have gotten delivered to the wrong address—the house next door has a very similar number to mine, for example. But it’s been a few days since that delivered notice and there’s no sign of the package. So I expect that this point, it’s gone for good. And that means that I now need to weigh whether I want this stupid thing enough to shell out for it a second time, and change the gods of delivery standing in my way once again.

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Behind the Curtain

This one’s a bit of a classic, and something that every professional artist worth his or her salt has a copy of already.

The page above was assembled in the late Wally Wood’s studio by his assistants at the time, including Larry Hama. It was in response to Woody’s constant dislike of the scripts he’d be given to drawn and how he’d educate his young apprentices to make even a dull, talky sequence visually interesting. So while Wood didn’t assemble this page, everything that’s expressed on it comes straight from him. And it’s absolutely a useful cheat sheet for artists to have on hand when they wind up stuck with a boring stretch of panels to work out.

Add to that this rebuttal by James Turner, a terrific little parody of the above. Can’t really argue with his decisions here at all either.

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Pimp My Wednesday

Admit it, what you’re going to want for your post-Turkey coma is a little bit of exciting reading material to speed digestion on its way! Well, never fear, we’ve got the stuff for what ails ya this Wednesday.

That’s just a lovely cover by David Marquez, isn’t it? Look at those expressions! UNCANNY X-MEN #6 puts the spotlight on our new young mutants as they’re forced to attend school in New Orleans. Plus, Jubilee and Nightcrawler get up to some trouble! And Wolverine gets kicked by a horse! It’s by Gail Simone and swing artist Javier Garron!

And Assistant Editor Martin Biro has put together DAZZLER #3, in which special guest star Lila Cheney attempts to take Alison Blaire away from her troubles, only to find that they follow to where the pair has gone—Japan. It’s written by Jason Loo and illustrated by Rafael Loureiro!

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A Comic Book On Sale 80 Years Ago Today, November 24, 1944

In 1944, the pinch was being felt in the comic book industry as many of the best writers and artists were in the service, doing their part for the war effort. But the demand for cheap, portable entertainment on the part of our troops was a boon to he business at the same time, even if the overall quality of the material tended to slip a little bit. DC was, at this point, two separate companies, National Comics and All-American Comics, each one owned in part by Harry Donenfeld. Harry had made a fortune publishing during prohibition, and his acquisition of Superman from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster made him wealthier than ever. As the publishers of superman, DC had a reputation to uphold, and they instituted their own in-house guidelines about what wasn’t permissible in their comics well before any outside Comics code was formed. In any event, by 1944, DETECTIVE COMICS, the comic book whose initials had given DC its trademark (though plenty of people dispute that, indicating that DC actually stood for Donenfeld Comics) had shifted its contents away from purely detective fiction. Still, you got a lot of reading for your dime in those days. In this particular issue, Batman becomes officially deputized by the Gotham City Police Department in a story written by longtime DC editor Mort Weisinger. They even give the Caped Crusader a jewel-encrusted badge shaped like a bat, which would turn up from time to time over the years. Slam Bradley was still being featured, although his strip was no longer being produced by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster—they had Superman stories to focus on, after all. Without them, Slam became a much more pedestrian private eye series and eventually was discontinued as page counts shrunk. Possibly the most stylish-looking strip in this issue was Air Wave, illustrated by George Roussos. George, nicknamed “Inky” for he way he’d aggressively use blacks on his pages, had started out as an assistant on Batman but had blossomed on this feature. Air Wave was a costumed hero who used radio as his secret weapon. He’d also race around town by skating on the telephone lines, no joke. There’s also a good-looking Boy Commandos story in this issue from Joe Simon and Jack Kirby that seems like a strange feature to be running in DETECTIVE COMICS. But the war was on, and it was an extremely popular series during this period.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

The SLEEPWALKER HOLIDAY SPECIAL came out on November 24, 1992. Don Daley, who edited the series, had had some success with seasonally-themed specials featuring the Punisher and so decided to try the same thing with Sleepwalker. The character’s creator was my old boss Bob Budiansky, but given his day job as Executive Editor, Bob was often behind on his SLEEPWALKER deadlines, causing Don to gyrate helplessly. More than once, he put myself and writing partner Mike Kanterovich on stand-by to either jump in and script an issue or to take over writing the series completely. But neither eventuality ever amounted to anything—for all of his aggravation, Don wasn’t about to fire Bob off of his own creation. It did waste a bunch of our time, though, so I suspect that Don assigned us to write this Special as something of a make-good for our efforts. (During the original run of the title, we were the only people besides Bob to have written issues starring Sleepwalker.) Behind a very nice cover by a just-starting-out Joe Quesada, we contributed a pair of stories. The first one was illustrated by Bruce Zick, a storyboard artist who loved comics and whose style was something of an acquired taste. He had a strong Jack Kirby influence to his work, but also used a lush brush line in his finishing. Mike and I had wanted to pus SLEEPWALKER in a somewhat more spooky and horrifying direction were we to take over its reins, so in that spirit, this first story was about Sleepy contending with a modern day Djinn, an evil spirit who was bound by certain rules governing his existence that he needed to operate within, but a monkey’s paw sense of fairness and justice. We literally called him Mister Jinn. The second story was more traditional in its artwork, though a bit slight in its concept. It was drawn by Joe Quinones, and it had Sleepwalker getting into scrapes, disappearing and re-manifesting as his host Rick Sheridan is coping with a bout of insomnia. So it was a perfectly functional Annual, but really wasn’t anything to get anybody to sit up and take notice. And nobody really did.

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The New Warriors Chronicles

Having eliminated the possibility that Fabian Nicieza could be convinced to remain on as the writer of NEW WARRIORS, I was faced with the problem of needing to replace him. Which honestly was a daunting proposition, in that I thought the success of the series up to that time was really down to him and his approach to the material. Even on the inside, I was a real fan of NEW WARRIORS as it was coming out, and it was a favorite title of mine all through this run.

I also had to deal with other people’s desires in terms of the series. For the most part, at the start, my boss Bob Budiansky wasn’t especially interested in the title—he would soon be taking over the Spider-Man books, so he had bigger concerns on his mind. On the other hand, Editor in Chief Tom DeFalco, who had created the New Warriors in THOR with his partner Ron Frenz, stopped by to give me his two cents on the series. Like pretty much everybody, he felt that the cast was too large and unwieldy, and he suggested paring it back down to pretty much just the characters that he and Ron had brought in at the start. That felt a little bit reductive to me, but I didn’t really quite know how much latitude I had in terms of his comments—whether they were directives or merely suggestions.

I was also not terribly seasoned still as an editor at this point. While I had a lot of contacts on the art side thanks to having worked on Trading Cards for so many years, my connections with established writers were slim to non-existent. And so, as I talked about last time, I figured that my best bet to find something worthwhile would be to cast eh doors wide open and let it be known that I would look at a NEW WARRIORS pitch form absolutely anybody with even a smidge of credibility or experience. And I got a whole pile of pitches for the book—most of which I still have in my files today. Looking back at them today with more experienced eyes, I’m astonished just how ill-thought-through and half-assed most of them were, even the ones from established writers. It seemed that most of the people I heard from who wanted to write the book had really never read it, and were just attaching their ideas for whatever else that they’d had in their pocket to some New Warriors characters in an attempt to make a sale. There was a lot of junk, much of it from young writers and young editors who didn’t go on to do much more (and a few who went on to do plenty of good work, such as Dan Slott.)

At the very end of my search, I did get one very good proposal, though. Editor Marie Javins (now DC EIC Marie Javins) suggested that I reach out to a relatively new writer with whom she’d had some critical success retooling the HELLSTORM. This was Warren Ellis, not yet the figure that he’d eventually become but already extremely adept at writing. I called him up and he was interested in taking a shot at a pitch—but he warned me ahead of time that this was inevitably going to be his kind of pitch, so it wasn’t going to be very centrist or traditional at all. I needed something good, so I told him that I was open to at least looking at whatever he might come up with. So Warren went away, and after a while he wrote up a pitch entitled “Live Through This.”

And it was a really good pitch—well thought through, with a clear articulation about what the central theme of the book should be, and how to get there. It also included a new character, a prototypic version of what eventually became Jenny Sparks of the Authority, here called simply Spark.

The problem for me, though, was that it was exactly what Warren had promised: a Warren Ellis pitch. And that meant that his solution to the problem of having way too many New Warriors in the group was to brutally kill off most of them by the end of the first issue, leaving a core team of just six: Nova, Speedball, Firestar, Turbo, Justice and Pretty Persuasions from Psionex—Warren did love his bad girls. And by the end of the first four-part story, Justice would have sealed the deal on the group’s new status quo as a force for change outside of the control of governments or authorities by using his telekinesis to break every bone in Henry Peter Gyrich’s body, either killing him or crippling him permanently, depending on what we could get away with.

If I’d been more of a risk-taker, I do wonder what might have happened if I had moved ahead with Warren’s pitch. But the fact of the matter was that I didn’t really think NEW WARRIORS was broken, so I wasn’t looking to overhaul the property quite so drastically. So I wound up calling Warren up, telling him essentially what I said above, and we parted ways amicably.

Which still left me with a problem. I did have a pitch that I liked, one that was more about continuing in the general direction that the series had been going in while making a couple of key adjustments along the way. The problem was, it was written by Evan Skolnick, who was a friend of mine and whom I had once interned for. And I just didn’t like the optics of that. It was one of the first pitches that had been handed in—Evan had worked for some time as Fabian’s Assistant Editor, so he was on a similar wavelength right from the beginning—so I put it to the side and kept casting around, hoping that I could find something else from somebody else that I liked better and thus avoid hiring a buddy.

You see, at this point in time, it was standard operating procedure for staff members to be writing books for the company—it was expected, even encouraged. And as a young editor, I felt (as did much of the young staff) that this constituted a conflict of interests. It often felt as though the assorted editors would all trade assignments with one another, and not always to the good of the projects.(Of course, hypocrites that we were, we all wound up doing much the same thing when it was our turn to have assignments to hand out—though we all rationalized our behavior by insisting that the people we’d hired had gotten their gigs through merit alone. Self-delusion concealing self-interest, and I was as guilty of it as any..)

Eventually, though, I was plumb out of time, and so I sought out Bob to have a very forthright conversation with him about what I was thinking. I had been among the more vocal young editors decrying the practice of quasi-nepotism among editors, so doing so was difficult for me. (Ironically, Evan had been equally vocal in this regard.) But in the end, Bob told me that if I thought that Evan’s pitch was the best one for the assignment, that I should hire him and not worry about it.

So that’s what I did. And I put up with the pointed comments from others thereafter about the inherent hypocrisy of doing so for some months thereafter.

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Monofocus

This past week, I watched the three-part documentary series THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT on HBO Max (I’m sorry, I can’t get used to calling it just Max) concerning the oft-quoted 1971 experiment where a group of volunteer students at Stanford University were divided up into guards and prisoners, and the guards proceeded to become abusive to the prisoners over the course of six days, at which point the experiment needed to be shut down before somebody got hurt. You will be shocked to learn, I am sure, that the Professor in charge of the experiment, Phillip Zimbardo, who achieved a measure of fame and success in his career as a result of writing about it, fudged some of the facts in his reporting. He put his thumb on the scale, so to speak, to get the result that he wanted. I don’t know that I needed to sit through three whole episodes to arrive at that revelation, but both the archival footage of the experiment and its re-enactments were pretty gripping, and moments where the now-old men who’d been guards and prisoners were reunited on the recreated set to rehash their remembrances of it were pretty effective.

I had also somehow overlooked the fact that September typically marks the beginning of Tokusatsu season in Japan, meaning that there are new live action super hero shows to sample. My favorite discovery is WINGMAN, a show derived from a manga and an anime that was produced back in the mid-1980s. In fact, I had seen a few episodes of DREAM WARRIOR WINGMAN back in my fan days, but without subtitles or a proper translation, I wasn’t able to successfully get into it. The story is about Kenta Hirono, who is obsessed with Tokusatsu super heroes—so much so that he makes his own cosplay costume of his own creation, Wingman, and runs around his school campus dishing out justice to evildoers (and generally being a pest to everyone.) Events take a turn when Kenta encounters Aoi, a bikini-clad woman from a higher dimensional plane called Podreams. She’s escaped into the three-dimensional world in order to safeguard the Dream Note, a powerful artifact that she brought with her. Kenta, though, mistakes the Dream Note for a typical notebook, and he winds up drawing his Wingman designs into it. The result is that Kenta legitimately becomes Wingman—and despite the fact that he’s still a good-hearted but hapless foul-up, he now has to work with Aoi to keep the Dream Note away from the nefarious forces that are trying to claim it to enrich their own power. The thing is, I didn’t know that anybody was even still thinking about WINGMAN at this point. The manga has been finished for decades, and the anime didn’t really seem like it made much of a splash. So it’s a pretty fun reworking of a thing that I was at least passingly familiar with, and I had four episodes stacked up before I realized that it was available. Here’s a look at the opening titles for the show, and just for the hell of it, here are the opening titles to the anime. As you can immediately tell, the show was much more a comedy with the vibe of something like URUSEI YATSURA than a straight action series, which makes me curious just how the new series is going to play things.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about Batman and the Teen Titans headlining in this issue of BRAVE AND THE BOLD.

Five years ago, I wrote about the five Best Comic Books of 1988

And ten years ago, I wrote about this great cover, possibly the most quintessentially DC cover of all time.

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This week is American Thanksgiving, so enjoy yourselves, pardon a turkey if you get the change, and I’ll meet you all again on the other side.

Hat’s All, Folks!

Tom B