#140: Vacation No Vacation
Two years ago, back in Newsletter #28, I wrote about taking a week off and how it reduced me to an aimless, goalless wretch. And here we are, two years later, and I have learned nothing, the same has been true this past week. I decided to take the couple of days before Thanksgiving off both because we’d arranged to double-ship all of our books last week in order to eliminate stress from this short week, and also because I still have a ridiculous amount of vacation time left to me—including two “floating holidays”, which don’t carry over into the new year. So I figured that I should at least use those up, even though I didn’t have anything particular planned for the week. And I was fine for a day or two. But by Wednesday, I wound up spending around three hours remotely plugged into my work computer going through accumulated e-mails and sorting and filing and routing new pages that had come in during my absence. This won’t relieve my burden completely come Monday when I’m back in—there are still a stack of new scripts to be gone over and a few books’ worth of lettering that similarly needs to be gone through. But it’ll be of some benefit. Otherwise, I’ve very much been at loose ends. I did some reorganizing of the Library, sorting out five more boxes of redundant collected editions that I can get rid of. (Another of my many First World Problems is that I have a surfeit of collections that I need to get rid of, without having any clear method of doing so. I used to donate them to my local library back before we moved, but I haven’t yet located a similarly accommodating system where we are now. Plus, with the sheer volume of material to be dispensed with, I’d rather that somebody come to me and take it off my hands rather than needing to spend a back-breaking afternoon getting it all hauled out to the car and then needing to haul it all to whomever might be ready to accept it. Not a real problem, I know—but a real problem.) People wonder why and how I can write so much stuff all the time, such as this Newsletter every week, and the reality is that I do it all to remain sane; that without some goal to be powering through, I become a bit of a nervous mess. Turns out that I need something to do beyond just reading my enormous collection of comics and watching a variety of media. So retirement seems like a bleak period just waiting out there in the future determined to one day challenge me with more idle time than I can stomach. Joy.
All right, with that preamble out of the way, let’s dive into this week’s selection of questions from the audience!
Joe West
have there been any discussion about more cosmic-heavy events for the future featuring the Guardians and other space heroes? You don’t have to confirm if anything’s been greenlit or not, just wondering if it’s been discussed. I just miss the renaissance we had in the late 2000s DnA era when there were these grand cosmic epics every year. They took that corner of the universe really seriously and poured a lot into it.
Well, Joe, the difficulty with doing a lot of cosmic-based events tends to be that it makes it difficult for more Earth-centric titles such as AMAZING SPIDER-MAN to tie in. We have done, in recent years, both EMPYRE and AXE: JUDGMENT DAY. both of which had a strong cosmic element to them. And I’m sure that we’ll do other similar things in the future. Would we do an Event series solely for the purpose of relaunching some of our cosmic series? Well, you never know. But so far it hasn’t happened in a long time.
Mark Coale
As a devotee of the Silver Age Flash, do you have a favorite member of the Rogues?
I don’t know about a favorite per se, Mark. But simply because of the issues that I got first and the stories contained therein, on a very basic, primal level I tend to think of Captain Cold as the Scarlet Speedster’s number one foe. And so I was a bit flabbergasted on a couple of occasions in the late 1970s when that title was given to the Mirror Master—a Rogue I hadn’t seen all that much of apart from in multiple Rogue stories. Either way, I also always had a strong fascination with Professor Zoom, the Reverse Flash.
Evan “Cool Guy”
I have to ditch my planned question to ask how the Clone Saga would have/should have ended before people got cold feet! You've probably answered this but I don't remember right now.
I don’t know about “should have” because if things had gone that way, it’s more than likely that they still would have been reversed at some point, Evan. But the original ending was meant to be relatively straightforward: after a conclusive test, it’s revealed that Ben Reilly, the guy we’ve thought has been the clone, is actually the real Peter Parker. Consequently, the guy we’ve been following as Peter and his pregnant wife MJ exit the series to go off and raise their kid, leaving Ben with both the responsibility of being Spider-Man once again and in place to re-adopt his true name as Peter Parker. (How they were planning to explain the sudden disappearance of Peter’s wife I couldn’t tell you.) And now we’d have a young and single Peter Parker again, but one who also had a mysterious five year blank spot in his background from which new stories and characters could be pulled in the manner of Wolverine. But of course, right at the moment the reveal issue was being readied, people got cold feet about the whole thing and immediately tried to double back, with disastrous results. The SPIDER-MAN: THE FINAL ADVENTURE limited series that I edited was intended to conclude with the birth of Peter and MJ’s child—and when that was no longer possible, I refused to have them have a miscarriage as the ending to that series.
Brandon Giles
I’m sure there’s not a one-size-fits-all answer here, but what do the discussions usually look like re: changing or emphasizing a character to bring them in line with an adaptation’s version of them? I’ve noticed at Marvel this tends to happen in a pretty soft way (for example, Jed MacKay’s phenomenal MOON KNIGHT run coming on the heels of the show, but not incorporating anything from it other than retconning Layla into Marc’s past) which makes the times it’s done less delicately (Kamala Khan, for example) stand out all the more. How do you know when a character or a line just needs emphasis and when they need (or don’t-see again Kamala Khan) to be overhauled in a more significant way to match their MCU portrayals?
It all really just comes down to gut instinct, Brandon. And sometimes, people guess wrong. But even then, there’s always the possibility of some new story that will make everything all right. In general, though, once you become aware that a global audience that absolutely dwarfs that or ours in publishing is about to experience a character in a given way, then it becomes almost inexorable that certain elements of that depiction are going to wind up seeping into future stories—either immediately or over the long haul as creators who grew up with that interpretation of the character being central to them come into the field and start to write the stories. Say what you want about the Kamala Khan situation, but it’s a stone-cold fact that far, far more people relate to her as having weirdo hard light powers than embiggening herself. So you could choose to fight that, to swim upstream against public awareness. Or you can work to bring about a unification between the two in the best way possible—without throwing out everything that came before.
STILES
do you have any plans or have you thought about the possibility of bringing together all the new mutants from From The Ashes in a single book?
I’m sure that the Outliers and the Exceptional X-Men will meet at some point (to say nothing of the newly activated adult mutants that Jed has been featuring in X-MEN), Stiles. But our books are still in the single digits, so I’m not in any rush to bring everyone together right away. Heck, we’re only now just putting the Alaska and Louisiana X-Men into the same story for the first time. So sure, I know that there are fans who are excited to see it, and I’m sure we’ll get there, but it isn’t anything I feel a need to rush towards.
JV
since you seem to have reprints in multiple formats of classic Marvel - what is your favourite? Omnibus, Epic, Masterwork, etc?
I am looking to buy some classic runs from the Bronze Age (mid 80s specifically) and was curious as to what your preferred format is? On my end I want something that emulates the feel of the originals that I read back in the day (no major recoloring, completeness, etc).
If you’re talking primarily about books from the 1980s, JV, then I think the Epic collections are the books for you. They provide good value for the cost—they’re really quite thick. And the paper, while not being crappy newsprint, isn’t especially glossy, and the colors are true to the original books.
Jordan L
Paper quality aside, I'm curious about your thoughts on the Ghost Machine comics that you've read.
I’ve liked most of them for the most part, Jordan. Which is no real surprise, as I’ve liked just about everything that Geoff Johns has done over the years. The one book that it was clear wasn’t for me early on was ROOK, and HYDE STREET left me cold, though I’d still checking out the second issue. But I’ve been reading the rest of them regularly, at least so far.
Gregory Wright
I would have loved to have an out of continuity version of Ellis's idea...lol. Beating a dead horse, I'd be shocked if Evan put that spread on the dartboard...yet as he says in his proposal. the IDEA of it seemed very lame to him as well, and Fabian took it with Mark Bagley and made it sing. What's really funny about your struggle with hiring Evan (who did a great job with the series I thought) is that I TOO had a struggle over hiring...EVAN. When he was my assistant...and I'm not sure if you were still our intern or if you'd gone back to schooI... was in this odd position called MANAGING EDITOR...basically a junior editor who had a senior editor supervising them. In this case... BOB BUDIANSKY. But unlike previous ones, I came fully loaded with my own titles, and edited them WITHOUT his supervision while working on other titles and projects that he DID supervise...at any rate...Tom DeFalco was aware of my irritation at not being a full editor despite doing more than the usual editorial workload (but to be fair there was specific way folks became editors and I technically was not senior enough...)and decided to test my mettle. He came to me and asked if I would edit ROBOCOP. Oddly, Dwayne and I were originally slated to WRITE the book earlier...and when Don Daley was going to edit it for about 2 seconds he indicated that the book was ours if we wanted it...So my immediate foolish reaction was...Oh...but "we were supposed to be writing that book". Now Dwayne was IN the office with me when this occurred as was Evan. Tom looked at me directly and said..."OK. Your choice you can decide to be an EDITOR or you can write the thing." And walked out the door. Dwayne looks at me and says. "You have to edit the book. You won't get the full editorship otherwise. And you can't hire me. You have to do this right, it's a test." As I'm agreeing Evan pipes up.."You should hire me to write it!" To which I point out that there is a rule that an editor can't hire their assistant to write a title full time, only a fill-in issue. Evan argues with me but I say no...walk out the door and find Tom to accept editing the book. Now I go abut the task the same way you did and sure did get a bunch of terrible submissions from staffers and other creators. And sure enough despite my telling Evan I would NOT hire him as the writer (surefire way to prove I'm not ready to be a full editor) he gives me a proposal anyway. Now, I had solicited a proposal from Alan Grant...I felt his work on Judge Dredd would be perfect. When I read through the slog of proposals...3 rise to the top. Alan Grant's, Bill Mumy and Miguel Ferrer's and...EVAN's. Alan's was EXACTLY what I wanted. But Evan's was REALLLLY good. My dilemma was going to be...what if Alan says NO to the offer? Luckily Alan said yes...but Evan naturally didn't like anything we were donig on the book...mostly thanks to Orion Pictures demanding we...never mind...but I did ask Evan to write me a fill -in. Which he did. And eventually it was drawn by Herb Trimpe when I left staff and the book went to Bobbie Chase...and she had hired me as the new colorist...so I colored Evan's story. Evan and I would later compete for the TERMINATOR series that Marvel never did. Evan's proposal beat out mine.
I certainly remember a bunch of this, Greg, including that ROBOCOP issue that Evan wrote. And I think that you likely made the right call there all around. As Dwayne said, that was definitely a test of your readiness to be an editor and be able to be impartial in your decision-making. So even though it blew up your writing chances, at that moment it was likely the best move that you could have made—unless you were ready to leave staff, which didn’t happen for another year or so.
Evan Skolnick
With regard to the New Warriors dartboard thing. I haven't weighed in on this until now because I have a famously terrible memory, and I honestly don't remember that page ever being on the dartboard. But that doesn't mean it wasn't.
Tom is adamant that it was there, you were utterly convinced that it wasn't, but now seem be giving ground on that stance. When I first read about it in Tom's posting, my jaw kind of fell open in shock. Because while I don't remember it being there, it's also completely believable to me that it could have been. And as terrible a political move as it would have been to put a page from the Editor in Chief's series on the dartboard in full view, doing so would have been in character for my very naïve and politically clueless mid-20s self.
But I don't remember whether or not I actually did -- I can literally neither confirm nor deny. However it would certainly be ironic if I did, considering that I ended up writing the series four years later.
I don’t know exactly who did it, or when, or for how long, Evan. But I swear to you, that spread from the Warriors’ debut in THOR was definitely up there on that dartboard for at least a time. Looking the dates up, that issue came out in September of 1989, so after my internship had ended. So it must have been up there when I returned, either to interview for the job I got in November or else when I started working on staff regularly at the end of December. Could it have been Marcus McLauren’s handiwork? Or that of his departed assistant? That I couldn’t say, but it seems like the only other eventuality.
Chris Sutcliffe
I'm curious behind about the creative choices behind books like Timeslide, that preview future events. How do you decide on what events get teased? Does the creative team get told these moments and gets to fit them in, or do they essentially leave space for a moment that will be defined later?
One of the reasons that I wind up doing these books every year, Chris, is the fact that I’m almost always involved in a lot of the planning for the bigger events across the line, so I already know about a lot of stuff going in (and enough of it is usually being edited by me that I can make sure there is material of merit in each one.) From there, I throw it open to the rest of the editorial staff, asking what I’m looking for and when we’ll need visual reference for it. Occasionally, I have to ask a couple of times in order to get the amount that I think is necessary. But in general, editors and creators like teh opportunity to tease their upcoming storylines and to make them feel important even apart from their own titles, so it’s never been much of a struggle. And typically, the creative team plots out their story with a few blank areas in which we’ll drop in a montage of images—such as Kang traversing the timestream as we’ve done in the past.
Al Kennedy
(I think the artist on the second strip was Joe Phillips though, rather than Quinones).
Oops! You are correct, Al, it was indeed Joe Phillips, not Joe Quinones, who drew that second story in the SLEEPWALKER SPECIAL.
Ray Cornwall
I've always wondered if Marvel owns the rights to reprint old letter pages. I don't own the Taschen books, but I know I don't think letter pages are reprinted in Masterworks. As we get farther and farther away from the publication of these comics, and more readers see this material in various reprint formats, it's a bit sad to realize new comics readers don't get to see those old pages.
We absolutely have the right to reprint old letters pages, Ray, as we’ve done with some consistency in our Omnibus volumes and in the more recent Facsimile editions that we’ve done. The difficulty with running them in more regular collections is that they take up space and are only really of interest to a portion of the audience. So most people would rather have another issue’s worth of story content than those letters pages.
Zack J
Hey you have edited a lot of FF over the years. How do you feel about Deadpool & Wolverine's Johnny Storm saying "She can lick my goddamn cinnamon ring clean and kick rocks all the way to bald hell. In fact, I don't give a shit if she removes all my skin and pops me like some nightmarish blood balloon. If the last thing I do in this godforsaken cum-gutter existence is light that fuck-box on fire, I still won't die happy! [...] I won't be happy until I've urinated on her freshly barbecued corpse and husk-fucked the charred remains while gargling Juggernaut's juggernuts."
Something you would let by without a note?
And more generally, Marvel makes use of grawlix to censor language like that in the comics, while the movies are good with letting language by that would cause my mother to wash my mouth out with soap, including the more kid friendly characters like Spider-Man. How do you as an editor approach that disconnect?
I tend not to second guess the choices that people who are developing the Marvel characters in other media, Zack. And for an R-rated film such as DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE, I really don’t have any problem with this. It was a hell of a funny stinger at the end of the movie, I thought. But that said, just because it gets done in film doesn’t mean that I’d permit the same to be published in our comics. And this does vary with the characters somewhat. I don’t know that I’ll ever get used to Spider-Man saying “shit” in the films.
Mike M
I was wondering if you wished on a genie to get extra hours in the day to be able to hold down your fulltime job, spend time with friends and family, write a blog and a substack, watch all of the TV shows and movies, and read all of the books and comics, and if so, do you happen to know where that genie might currently be and what they might currently be doing? Asking for a friend.
As I tell people whenever they ask about this sort of thing, Mike: the only way to do it is to do it. Anything else is procrastination. You have to want to do it and then follow through on that desire, just like with anything else.
Geo Harriet
I'm getting ready to re-read the entirety of Milligan and Allred's X-Force, X-Statix, and The X-cellent... the latter of which I have never read though I've bought all of these series in monthlies, not trades. Any insight into how these two amazing creators ended up on X-Force in the first place? Your view on the fact that they took a 90 degree whacked-out turn from what the rest of the X-titles were doing? How it's reception has been over time?
When Joe Quesada first came in as Marvel’s editor in chief, Mike Allred was one of the first to congratulate him on the job—the two had become friendly as creators on teh convention circuit. Joe was looking to shake things up a bit, and so he was excited to have Allred working for Marvel. In fact, there was a brief couple of days there where I had to talk Joe out of putting Mike on AVENGERS. I love Allred’s work, always have, but I thought, I believe correctly, that putting Mike there after George Perez and Alan Davis would have been a fatal mistake. Instead, it was Axel Alonso, freshly emigrated over from Vertigo, who lined up Allred on X-FORCE. Publisher Bill Jemas was interested in doing a black ops sort of X-title with stories ripped from the headlines, such as a fictionalized version of the Elian Gonzales affair. Axel had worked with writer Peter Milligan previously, and they contrived to build a series that was a bit more subversive than what had been intended in X-FORCE. You can see that, especially in teh earliest issues, the black ops element is there, but it quickly falls away as the series gets itself established. X-FORCE was lent a bit of additional attention by being the first Marvel title to shatter taboo and be published without the okay of the moribund Comics Code. Marvel left the Code entirely shortly thereafter. And ultimately, as he did so often in so many places, Bill turned against Allred’s approach to the series one day out of nowhere—he spent a month or two insisting that Mike should be replaced by more mainstream artist Salvador Larroca, but Joe, Axel and Milligan were all against this idea and were able to hold Bill off.
Alex Segura
I remember seeing you and Mike Kanterovich's credit a few times while reading comics as a youngster. What's he up to these days?
Mike’s just off living his life in the wilds of New Hampshire, Alex. He gets talked about a little bit in this video concerning controversial SONIC THE HEDGEHOG creator Ken Penders, with whom he also worked.
Glenn Simpson
What kind of feedback do you use to figure out that there might be an audience for a character who currently is only a member of a team? Like how would you know there's a thirst for a Colossus mini-series?
It tends to just be an overall sense of the zeitgeist, Glenn—although a demand for such a project from our Retailers, the people who actually order or books, is usually a pretty strong sign. And sometimes, you just try something because you suspect that there might be some gold buried there. And if you’re wrong, there’s no great harm done.
Emmanuel Cabahug
Thank for answering the question. Can you spell my first name correctly though, as Emmanuel instead of Emmanual? Anyways, now that Lorna Dane is with Alex Summers. What is going to happen to Madelyne Pryor / Goblin Queen and the Inferno Embassy? Will she find another love interest?
Sorry about that Emmanuel, completely my fault. As for what is next for Madelyne, she’ll be seen a bit during ONE WORLD UNDER DOOM, so that series might hold some answers for you.
Rack
Hello Mr. Brevoort! I'd like to talk about a letter you responded to in this week's Uncanny X-Men that I would really appreciate some added perspective on.
I don't really have a way to sugarcoat this -- I find it unsettling and frustrating that you would choose to print a letter that is mischaracterizing and mispositioning so much of the greater plot of the previous era of stories, and I find it more frustrating still that you'd choose to give it your stamp of approval as it shoves many of your colleagues that I admire under the bus. A letter, mind you, that draws an implied philosophical connection from Krakoan attitudes to Trump's MAGA hate group.
Well, clearly, Rack, you weren’t the only reader who felt this way. We got similar comments from Rhys P, Luka, Andrew Albrecht and others. To be honest, I was a little bit surprised when these responses began to come in—enough so that I went and dug out the letters page in question just to see what I had printed that was causing such controversy. Let me share it below for those who haven’t read UNCANNY X-MEN #6. (And if you’re a reader of this Newsletter but you haven’t been reading UNCANNY X-MEN, that’s a moral failing on your part.)
Look, I’m sorry that you and the others were upset by this, Rack. And you’re right to feel however you like about it. But looking at both the missive above and its answer, I honestly feel like the idea that this is somehow a refutation or mischaracterization of the entire Krakoa era or that it throws any other creators under a bus to be a bit of an overreaction. You can certainly disagree with the sentiment that writer James A.V.C. is putting forward here, but speaking for myself, I don’t think that he’s being disingenuous. I’ve heard this point of view expressed by any number of other readers since taking over the line. And making the leap to it equating Krakoan attitudes (and presumably the attitudes of that period’s fans) to MAGA or whatever strikes me as a bit of a leap. Still, I do appreciate you and the others coming forward in such a reasonable manner (as opposed to some of the people on social media, who’ve been a bit more outspoken and outraged.) My agreement at the end was intended as being much more about the letter’s concluding half, the idea that the X-Men are there to speak to any reader who may feel marginalized in any fashion, and accepting of all. That includes every reader for whom Krakoa and its era was the greatest thing ever as well as those who didn’t like it and fell away from reading it. I don’t think there’s a thing wrong with having loved those stories. But I also don’t think that there’s a thing wrong with having criticisms about them either.
Cory Strode
1) I was already a former retailer when the Clone Saga started, and I always felt the idea that Peter gets replaced wouldn’t work because we’d had over 30 years of “Spider-Man is Peter Parker, who works at the Daily Bugle for J. Jonah Jameson, has an elderly Aunt May, and the best supporting cast in comics.” When the Ben Reilly takeover was done, it was clear the supporting characters just didn’t have a lot behind them, and ALL of the merchandising would have to be changed. It’s OK for a minor character, but for Marvel’s flagship character? It would never work.
2) I also know that they HAVE slowly changed some of the outer level status quo for Spidey. He no longer works for the Daily Bugle (and seems to hop to a new job with every new creative team), Aunt May is no longer dying every three months, J. Jonah Jameson knows his identity, and a lot of the supporting case has been back burnered over the years. With a character that has SO MUCH licensing and other media, do creators tend to keep the status quo rather than deal with the other forces that might have a say in it?
3) One of the things about the X-Men the last few years Chris Claremont wrote it was that the loose plot threads were like Gremlins that had been tossed into the Pacific Ocean. Do you think ANY editor could have reined that in and corrected it?
4) As an older fan, I am EXTREMELY excited about the Fantagraphics Atlas and Lost Marvel reprints. Are there any Lost Marvel volumes you would want to see?
5) A bunch of comics creative folks are talking about thought balloons on Facebook, and MANY of them want them back. What is your opinion on them, and if a writer were to use them, would you talk them out of it?
Okay, Cory, let’s take your questions one at a time:
This isn’t really a question, so it doesn’t require a response from me.
I don’t think that the question of licensing really has all that much to do with the story decisions that get made in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN. After all, it’s not like we’re moving a ton of Betty Brant plushies or J. Jonah Jameson posters or anything. Nor would their absence from the pages of the comic preclude us from manufacturing those items if there were a perceived consumer demand for them.
This assumes that this was an element that needed wrangling. While it was a common complaint about Chris’ X-MEN throughout the 1980s, that was also the period during which the book was the best-selling thing in the field consistently. At which point you have to ask yourself: is what I’m viewing as a bug actually a feature, one that helps make the entire proposition work?
Not really a fair question, in that if there are any lost series that I’d want to see, I’m in a pretty good position to make that happen. So I can’t say that I really have a good answer to this one.
Thought balloons are a tool in a writer’s toolbox, and like any other tool, they can be used well or used poorly. So I’d have no problem with a writer using them, assuming that they were used well. And a couple different writers in the past decade or so, including Brian Bendis and Jason Aaron, have experimented with their use in books that I’ve edited.
Off The Wall
What you see above is the original to the painted cover of THE TWELVE #10, as created by Paolo Rivera. He gave me this original shortly before he relocated to the west coast as a thank you for being supportive of his efforts early on. As I told him at the time, I don’t really think that amounted to any sort of kindness on my part—I don’t hire anybody that I don’t think can do the job. But I accepted his gift nonetheless. And today, it’s situated on the wall directly above the desk at which I’m furiously typing these words on a Saturday afternoon.
I Buy Crap
My missing package finally showed up this past week.
Behind the Curtain
Here’s a bit of an interesting curiosity posted by the super-knowledgeable Dr. Michael Vassolo over on social media.
.This KID COLT, OUTLAW cover was the work of artist Joe Maneely, a mainstay of the Atlas line during the 1950s and one of the fastest artists in the field. He was very tight with editor Stan Lee, and John Romita often said that he learned more about doing comics from having been sent to visit Maneely’s studio for one afternoon than he had across years of formal training. It was published in 1956, just a year before Maneely fell between the cars of a commuter train and was sadly killed at a young age.
And this is the cover of TWO-GUN KID #49, published three years later in 1959, two years after Maneely’s passing. As is obvious, it’s the same piece of artwork, with alterations made (likely by production man Sol Brodsky) to turn Kid Colt into Two-Gun. Why did this one cover image get randomly reused? No idea. It might have been a cost-saving measure, though based on similar circumstances that came up during the Marvel Age, I suspect that it’s possible that publisher Martin Goodman didn’t like whatever cover editor Stan Lee had prepared for this issue, and reusing this altered old piece was something that could be accomplished quickly.
Pimp My Wednesday
As we race towards the end of the calendar year, here we come again!
X-MEN #8 starts off our first little crossover storyline, “Raid on Graymalkin”. It’s a bit more reserved than X-crossovers have tended to be, involving only two issues of X-MEN and two issues of UNCANNY X-MEN. So we’re trying to walk before we attempt to run. It’s written by Jed MacKay, in consultation and collaboration with Gail Simone, and illustrated by Ryan Stegman with some design support from David Marquez. Sadly, the cover image, dreamed up before we had the story entirely nailed down, doesn’t actually happen in this issue. Hopefully, there’s enough else going on that you’ll be able to forgive us for this oversight.
If you missed it when it was being serialized a couple of months back (or refused to pick up eight random titles across the line just to follow it) DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE: WEAPON X-TRACTION has been collected in its entirety in a single issue for you. What’s more, writer Ryan North did a little bit of a spit-polish to help eliminate some of teh joins between chapters, so hopefully this version reads a hair more smoothly all at once. And Javier Garron gave the visuals his all, as well as contributing this completely new cover.
And elsewhere, Associate Editor Annalise Bissa has NYX #6 coming out, in which Dazzler’s world tour hits the Big Apple and Mojo crashes the festivities. It’s a bit of a sidereal crossover with DAZZLER #4, but each part of it is designed to be read as a stand-alone story on its own. It was written by Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing and illustrated by guest-artist Michael Shelfer.
A Comic Book On Sale 50 Years Ago Today, December 1, 1974
Throughout its publishing history, Charlton was regarded as something of a bargain basement outfit. It paid the worst for material, printed on the crappiest paper, and had the worst distribution. What it had going for it that evened out those scales for a long time, at least in the sense of being profitable, was that the company owned its own printing press. So Charlton would not only produce their own material, they would print and distribute the books as well. This meant that the presses needed to be kept fed—it cost a ton of money to shut them down and then start them up again—so they needed a constant influx of new material to print. At certain points, notably under the editorship of Dick Giordano in the mid-1960s, Charlton produced some noteworthy material. But none of it tended to stick around for long. The culture of the place seemed to prefer one-off stories that didn’t have anything to do with anything apart from themselves. Anyway, by the mid-1970s, both Marvel and DC were publishing their own in-house fanzines, FOOM and THE AMAZING WORLD OF DC COMICS respectively. A group of fans and would-be comics creators known as the CPL Gang (CPL standing for Contemporary Pictorial Literature, of course) arranged to produce a fanzine/portfolio dedicated primarily to Giordano’s “action hero” line that included a complete unpublished issue of Steve Ditko’s BLUE BEETLE series. This apparently went over well enough that Charlton hired the CPL Gang to edit a regular in-house fanzine, called CHARLTON BULLSEYE. This first issue appeared at the very tail end of 1974, and contained, among other things, the first half of an unpublished Steve Ditko issue of CAPTAIN ATOM. The editor of CHARLTON BULLSEYE was Bob Layton, future writer, inker and publisher, and his assistant editor was Roger Stern (who wound up scripting the unfinished Captain Atom story, working under the pen name Jon G. Michels for some reason.) That story was inked by a young John Byrne, who began picking up art assignments from Charlton at around this same time. One can only imagine how excited he may have been at the prospect of inking prime Steve Ditko work. CHARLTON BULLEYE lasted for five issues before Charlton’s usual disinterest ended the experiment. I don’t really know how many true-blue Charlton fans there were at the time who may have supported such a fanzine. Still, it did its job, putting Layton, Stern, Byrne and others more into the minds of those within the New York comic book scene who might be in a position to hire them as professionals.
A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date
NEW AVENGERS #1 came out on December 1, 2004, and became the flagship title of the Marvel line for many years thereafter. The core concept for the series had been brainstormed at one of the regular Marvel summits, at which writer Mark Millar wondered aloud why the Avengers team was being made up of primarily second-string characters rather than the biggest heroes in the line, most notably Spider-Man and Wolverine. Brian Bendis, rather than Mark, would up with the gig to write NEW AVENGERS (as well as the final issues of AVENGERS that would set it up by destroying the standing team.) The artist was David Finch, fresh from Top Cow, who had collaborated well with Brian on a number of issues of ULTIMATE X-MEN. Brian fulfilled the mandate of the new series in his own way; in addition to Spider-Man and Wolverine, he also brought in Spider-Woman, Luke Cage and the Sentry (and further down the line Iron Fist, Doctor Strange and others.) Still, as expected, the book was a sales juggernaut right from the start, a stylistic midpoint between the traditional Marvel Universe and the tone of the Ultimate Universe that had been largely developed by Brian. It was also at around this point that Brian and I became aligned on the series—up to this point, I’d been as much an impediment as a help, as it was my work on AVENGERS that was being detonated to make room for this new incarnation. Still, all the way through the profess, I always knew that NEW AVENGERS would work. How could it fail, given its premise? From here, and across the next eight-plus years, Brian became the central architect of the Marvel Universe, writing most of the stories that became the line’s big events and which wound up impacting on other series up and down the line. It couldn’t go on forever, though—nothing named New ever can—and once we brought back the regular AVENGERS title for THE HEROIC AGE in the aftermath of SIEGE, a sense began to grow that it was time to move on. In the aftermath of the AVENGERS VS X-MEN crossover, we executed a round-robin of assignments that saw Brian exit for the world of the X-Men. At a later Marvel Retreat as his final issues were coming out, I presented Brian with this memorial award for his years of service on the title.
The New Warriors Chronicles
The first issue of NEW WARRIORS that I edited was this one, #53. It had been started under the auspices of outgoing editor Rob Tokar so the book was well into production by the time that I got to it. All I really did was to bring it to completion. Rob had designed and implemented the triangular design aesthetic for the NEW WARRIORS books as well as the cover frame—both were elements that I’d go on to downplay moving forward, not liking how much they tended to overpower the artwork. That cover copy was mine as well. In those days, based upon some market research that indicated that a cover containing copy would be looked at for a fraction of a second longer than one without, as a prospective buyer’s brain quickly read what was being said, pretty much every issue of every Marvel book was required to have cover copy of some sort. Some editors were better at coming up with pithy or fun or interesting things to say that would accentuate a cover image. I think I’m not bad at this now, though I was still figuring out what worked and what didn’t (and what only worked within my own mind) at this point. But I don’t hate this copy given the guts of the story—which involved Mathemanic of Psionex having trapped everybody in a Groundhog Day-style time loop in which they were re-living the same events over and over again.
I did make one editorial decision early on after taking over editing this issue. It contained a two-page sequence in which some hikers up in the woods near Speedball’s hometown of Springfield, CT came across the dead and decayed body of Robbie Baldwin. This was the set-up for a story that Fabian and artist Richard Case intended to do starting in issue #54 in which it would be revealed that Speedball wasn’t really human anymore, he was instead a packet of extradimensional energy that had absorbed the mind and persona of Robbie Baldwin. The human Baldwin had been killed in the accident that made up his origin, not empowered by kinetic energy. There was already a cover done by the time I signed on for #54, showing Speedball flexing while standing on a pedestal, with copy proclaiming him the most powerful super hero in the Marvel Universe. It was all seemingly very SWAMP THING-inspired—but I didn’t think that it was a good idea. Especially with Fabian leaving the book, he wasn’t going to get to tell that story, and I didn’t want to saddle the incoming writer Evan Skolnick with having to make something of it. So I cut those two pages. For years I had copies of them in my files, but I couldn’t turn them up when looking for them in preparation for this column, nor any images of the unused cover. So, sorry about that.
When I inherited it, NEW WARRIORS was also in a pretty deep schedule hole, so I didn’t have a whole lot of time available to me to fool around with. Nevertheless, feeling that it wasn’t quite right to put out a book that was two pages shorter than it should have been, and figuring that it might be a good idea to try to hook the current NEW WARRIORS readers somewhat on the new writer’s direction, I asked Evan to write up a single page teaser that we added to the end of the story. It’s not much of a teaser, really, it just sets up the new villain Protocol, who isn’t even named. Today, I expect that we’d have been able to come up with something a little bit more enticing—the idea here, I think, was better than our execution of it.
This was Fabian’s broad strokes outline for what he planned to do during his fifth year writing NEW WARRIORS. The notes written on it are likely from my predecessor as editor, Rob Tokar.
Monofocus
It was a busy week for watching things as I had a lot more free time due to having taken the week off. So plenty to cover here.
First off, based on a recommendation in an article on Comic Book Resources, I began watching the new anime 365 DAYS TO THE WEDDING. And it’s a nice little show, very warm, very comfortable and easygoing. Every episode has conflicts, but the stakes are usually pretty low and the anxiety level is contained. The show is about two workers at a travel service whose company is setting up a new satellite branch in Anchorage, Alaska. somebody from the firm is going to be assigned there to set up the new shop, with single employees being the most likely to be selected given that they’d have no elaborate life to uproot. In an attempt to keep from becoming the unlucky people chosen, introverts Takuya Ohara and Rika Honjoji do the obvious thing when in a sitcom and this kind of situation comes up: they tell everybody that they’re engaged to be married. And from there, events continue to spiral out of the pair’s control as the people in the office react with far greater enthusiasm to this news than either one of them thought would happen. Even though my analytics show me that only a relative few of you ever avail yourself of them, I’m still going to provide you with a link to the show’s subtitled trailer.
I also cracked into MISSION: YOZAKURA FAMILY over on Hulu, which seems to be drafting a bit on the success of SPY X FAMILY by doing something similar. It’s about a high school kid, Taiyo Asano, who has lost his family in a fatal car accident. His closest childhood friend is Mutsumi Yozakura, who becomes his closest companion following his loss. Unfortunately, this leads to greater complications, as it turns out that Mutsumi is the youngest daughter in a family of spies, each of whom possesses specialized personal skills. In order to save his life, Mutsumi has to accept Taiyo as her husband—from which point he’s ushered into the crazy Yozakura family and forced to train as a spy himself so that he can protect his new bride, who is the constant target of assassinations by rival factions. For all that it’s an action-oriented spy series, the show operates a bit more on what I think of as Rumiko Takahashi logic; that is, it’s more about the relationships of the characters and the emotions at play than it is the assignments or the adventures per se. And of course, here’s the trailer.
My big windfall during this break week was the release of the second segment of BE FOREVER YAMATO: REBEL 3199, the latest SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO series. The show will run for 26 episodes, and it’s dropping them four at a time over teh course of months. The story is an updated and remixed version of the 1980 film BE FOREVER YAMATO, a very pretty but also somewhat by-the-numbers outing for the franchise, which also mixes in elements from the SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO 3 television series. And so far, it’s a pretty interesting re-envisioning. For one thing, the show is spending an awful lot of time attempting to sell the idea that the idea that the forces of Dezarium that have invaded the Earth are actually transformed humans from a thousand years in the future—hence the 3199 date. In the original film, this was a half-baked stratagem on behalf of the Dark Nebula Empire, but here, it may turn out to be reality. I suppose we’ll see. Otherwise, these four episodes were pretty engaging, and didn’t fly off the rails in the way that the 2202 series did. They’re available on Crunchyroll, and here’s the obligatory trailer.
Domestically, I finally went ahead and cracked the seal on A MAN ON THE INSIDE on Netflix, the new comedy series from BROOKLYN 99 and THE GOOD PLACE’s Mike Schur. It stars Ted Danson as a widowed professor who taken on a job from a local private investigator to infiltrate a retirement community and help smoke out a thief. As you’d expect, it’s also about a good deal more than that. In practice, it’s a bit like a solo ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING in a tighter package, one in which Danson is almost the entirety of the spotlight. I’ve gotten through about half of it so far, and it’s pretty good. Not life-changing or anything, but good comfort food and very well constructed. Like 365, the stakes are small and personal, and a bunch of Schur’s old performers show up in supporting roles throughout, which is fun.
I also watched, on the spur of the moment, the documentary ROBIN WILLIAMS: COME INSIDE MY MIND that’s available on TCM on the MAX app. And it really reminded me what a bombshell Williams was when he first came onto the scene in the late 1970s, and how much good work he did over teh years. It also reminded me just how long he’s been gone—a decade, which seems crazy to me. The passage of time is strange. Anyway, for anybody who enjoyed Williams’ body of work, it’s a great two-hour showcase, one that doesn’t shy away from the performers personal difficulties as well.
And finally, also as a spur-of-the-moment choice, I found myself watching the classic silent comedy SAFETY LAST starring Harold Lloyd. I’d probably seen much of it here and there over the years in excerpts and clips, but watching it end to end changed the experience completely. This is a hundred year old film that still holds up for the most part—right from the opening shot, which is meant to convince you that Lloyd is a condemned man imprisoned and waiting to be hung before changing perspective and revealing that he’s simply on a platform waiting for a train. Of course, it’s big set piece is the building climb that the iconic image of Lloyd hanging from a clock face comes from. It’s a terrific extended sequence, and I spent a couple of minutes afterwards doing a little online research to see just how some of the stunts and trick photography was set up. Pretty cool for 1923. What do you think, should we do a trailer? Yes, why don’t we?
Posted at TomBrevoort.com
This week, I wrote about my picks for The Fifteen Best Episodes of Doctor Who
And five years ago, I wrote this piece about cover color separation mishaps
That’s going to do us again for this week, folks. But thanks for stopping by. I’ll hopefully see most of you a week from now, when we do this all again.
Hat’s All, Folks!
Tom B
This is probably outside your area, but any chance Marvel will establish an official presence on BlueSky?
What are the chances we'll see another Inhumans or Eternals title in the near future? I know both fell out of favor on screen for different reasons and that the Inhumans fulfilled their purpose as a proxy for the X-Men prior to the Fox Disney deal, but they've both had some great runs over the years (Gillen's Eternals and AXE in particular) so it would be a shame to let them fade away completely.