#141: It's Okay To Complain, Baby!

Better than staying silent!

Having a hard time getting motivated to write this evening, so we’ll see how long and how in-depth this particular release winds up being. Fortunately, I did my self a favor earlier in the week by setting up a bunch of stuff pulled from other places with which to entertain you.

To start off with, this week there was an internal thread at Marvel in which people talked about the music they’d been listening to this year, which gave me the opportunity to share this video from the Japanese band, the Ulfuls. I discovered them earlier in the year, and I’ve been steadily consuming their strange and distinctive work bit by bit. I find that it helps to have a translation of the song lyrics to hand, as often the joke in most of their songs is the disparity between what a tune sounds like and what it’s actually saying. So I don’t know how well the attached will communicate to people here. But hey, the Marvel crew seemed to like it well enough.

Also this week, former Marvel writer and staff member Scott Edelman forwarded me the image below:

It’s from a story by cartoonist Ron Kasman from a 2006 issue of NEGATIVE BURN. And it describes my life to perfection.

At almost the same time, retailer Mike Sterling (who writes a thoroughly engaging blog) posted the above photograph, a snapshot of part of a collection he’d just purchased. And that’s what it looks like when I close my eyes.

Finally, the Chicago Sun-Times last week posted this piece speaking with Eve L. Ewing about Exceptional X-Men and its Chicago setting.

And we’re off into the land of questions and answers!

Neon Frost

I have no idea how promotion and advertisement works for comics but I’d love to see more for Exceptional X-Men. It’s so far my favorite of the FtA books. Writing, art, all fantastic. I love the characters, both new, Melee topping that list, and established, Emma topping my favorites list, and I’m hoping it gets a long run.

Well, Neon, we were just featured in the Chicago Sun-Times, how about that? Beyond that, every person working on every comic in the line, from the best-selling to the most unknown, will always say that they aren’t getting enough promotion. It honestly isn’t possible to ever have enough promotion. But I don’t know that I feel as though EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN hasn’t been getting its fair share. That said, I wouldn’t turn down more!

Jeff Ryan

There used to be one "Marvel style" of art: now you can be a Tradd Moore or a Mike Allred or a Mark Bagley and be a Marvel artist. Are there any art styles that you feel CAN'T work as a Marvel comic? (Assuming you don't put, say, Simon Bisley on Squirrel Girl or Gurihiru on Deadpool vs Carnage.)

I would argue that there’s never been one “Marvel style” of art, Jeff—certainly John Byrne and Frank Miller don’t draw anything like one another. And nobody would mistake Bryan Hitch for Bill Sienkiewicz, or vice versa. What there has been is a certain set of guidelines that communicate what makes for a Marvel story. But in a world in which Peach Momoko is a huge deal working for Marvel—an artist whose style is seemingly worlds away from the four people I’ve already mentioned—then it seems as though a wider variety of artwork can be filtered through the Marvel philosophy and find a connection with the audience. I don’t think that you can use any artist for any assignment and have it work, but I also think that just about anybody with legitimate talent and aptitude could be put into some place within Marvel where they’d be able to excel.

David Pierce

any chance Marvel will establish an official presence on BlueSky?

I’d imagine that we will at some point, David, if it continues to grow its user-base.

David Brazier

I know you like Dr Who, but just wondered if you had come across Blake’s 7, and I am sure you know Terry Nation, the writer, created the Daleks (although Tony Hancock gave him the idea apparently). Finally, have you read Nation’a terrific children’s book, ‘Rebecca’s World.’?

I’m very aware of BLAKE’S 7, David, and watched it when it was brought over to the U.S. in the back half of the 1980s. In fact, I dedicated a segment of my web page to analyzing what I think are the five best episodes of the series, which can be found at this link. In my area, there were multiple overlapping PBS stations, and they had a sort of a bidding war for DOCTOR WHO seasons and then anything else that remotely resembled DOCTOR WHO, once they realized how much money the show brought in to their stations during pledge drive time.

David Lowe

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.

I’d imagine that we’ll see more of both the Inhumans and the Eternals eventually, David. Though it may take as much time as it did since the last time we put a push behind them before the most recent ones.

Ben Morse

was there a specific moment/idea from Bendis that won you over on New Avengers, or, kind of as you said this week, was it just kind of a matter of “this is going to work regardless” until it wasn’t?

I always knew that NEW AVENGERS was going to work, Ben. How could it now, given the popularity of the characters that were being brought into the series and how red-hot the creative talent was at the time? So for me, it was more the journey in getting there, which effectively amounted to dynamiting a structure that I’d been building over five years so that something else could be constructed in the rubble.

Alex Redwing

You talk a lot about cover planning (how the Uncanny cover was dreamed up before the story was blocked out, how the “cover copy” or blurb of the covers on the New Warriors issues were your work, a few weeks back when you showed the Exceptional cover drawing you did). How much are editors in charge of what goes on the cover? I was always under the impression that it was up to primarily the artist as to what went on it, but it seems like you do quite a bit of the planning for them and hand your ideas off to the artists. Is this the norm, a misunderstanding, or something of a case by case basis?

The cover is the most important piece of real estate in terms of selling the comic book and attracting an audience, Alex, so it’s obvious that a lot more attention would be paid to it than any other page in the story. So every cover needs to get the approval of both the editor of the series and then either the EIC or one of the two Executive Editors before it can proceed. So while I’ll always ask the writers for both solicitation copy for an upcoming issue and their ideas as to a cover copy, often I will deviate from what they provide if I think I’ve got a better idea. And even then, there are occasions when an artist will turn in a sketch and not quite hit the mark—and in those cases, I’ll often do a little doodle to convey what I’m envisioning.

Evan “Cool Guy”

Isn't it kind of weird that the cover to Action Comics #1 seemingly depicts Superman as a crazed maniac terrorizing the city?

I don’t know that this description is entirely accurate, Evan. Superman is certainly smashing a car on that first cover, but there isn’t any city to be seen. And the guys who are running away from the carnage in panic aren’t obviously bad guys, but neither are they obviously good guys either. What’s being sold there more than anything else is this colorful strongman figure who is so mighty that he can heft a car over his head and smash it to pieces. Against the more sedate cover images of the period, which were often better drawn from a technical standpoint, it’s no wonder that the cover to ACTION COMICS #1 captured the attention of kids everywhere.

Craig Byrne

It seems like almost every comic has at least one or two variants when it comes out - has it ever been considered to use a variant to test-market a new trade dress or logo, or anything like that? (I know DC had the "Superman Comics" variants from 1987 or so, but that's it.)

Not as such, Craig, not really. We’ve used alternative dress on certain variant covers, but not with the intention of that dress becoming a line-wide standard or anything.

Christopher Orrell

I'm currently reading through Civil War for the first time (as part of a years-long effort to read Spider-Man from the start) and I have a couple of questions about it that I'm hoping you could answer!

In one of the 'Road To' issues (I think it was a Spidey one...) there's what I can only call an editorial argument that take place over a page or two as a narration. It's played for laughs in the comic, but I'm wondering how accurate it is. Was there an division in the office over the Registration Act and the political themes of the event?

Also, I'm wondering how the characters were split between the different sides? Was there a particular effort to 'balance' particular sides so that there wasn't one overwhelming group, or did it happen fairly naturally?

Finally, I'm finding it interesting to see the narrative reasoning for why characters chose a particular side. The only one I'm struggling to understand is Captain America. Maybe it's just my perception of him, but I thought that Cap was the quintessential government hero given his origins, so the way he suddenly seems to escape the helicarrier and join the resistance seems really out of left field to me. So, to make this a question, I suppose that I'm wondering what the logic behind this was from a behind the scenes perspective. Was it always clear that it was going to be Cap vs Iron Man, or did that come later?

As has been recounted a bunch of times over the years, Christopher, the spine of CIVIL WAR was worked out at a Marvel retreat as something of a desperation play, as the storyline we were going to be doing in that timeframe hadn’t had enough lead time yet to properly cook. The core concept of it was Mark Millar’s, and he was the one who put forth the conflict as being between Captain America and Iron Man. But Mark had them configured as you lay out above, and I was the one who piped up and said that that was wrong. Captain America has almost never been presented as a “my country right or wrong” kind of a figure. If anything, he’s more sympatico with the FDR “New Deal” agenda. So him choosing to throw in with hunting down other heroes felt like a misrepresentation of the character. Iron Man, on the other hand, was a futurist as well as somebody who had a long history of working with the government in building armaments, so it made more sense to me that Tony Stark would see Registration as a necessary step and put his weight behind it. From there, in general Mark worked out who would be on what side based on his needs for the story, with input from me and the assorted other editors and writers. And we certainly attempted to keep things reasonably balanced between the two sides.

Jess

I am loving reading From the Ashes X Men via Marvel Unlimited, my preferred platform for big two comics atm (for monetary reasons more than anything else), however I'm a bit worried about their release schedule on the app. I notice several series are releasing much quicker than the usual 5 ish month delay and, furthermore, not consistently month by month. Is this expedited digital release schedule permanent (I hope so!) or a short term thing designed to entice readers to buy the physical mags?

Our release window for new books on Marvel Unlimited continues to be three months, Jess. Occasionally, though, if there’s a promotional reason for it, we may choose to make certain releases available more rapidly than that. Most often this has to do with the release of a film or a game or a TV show. But not always.

Andrew Albrecht

Where does the idea that Kamala is now more relatable because of her new powers come from?

I don’t know that it comes from anywhere, Andrew. That’s certainly not what I’ve been saying about them here.

Bob Fifteen

Looking at a list of Marvel's Indigenous Australian characters, I see the majority are under X-Office stewardship: Bishop, Gateway, Manifold, Jack Mead (seeing him reappear in Alex Paknadel's "From the Ashes" Infinity Comic was a nice surprise), Nancy Nuke who turned up over in Deadpool...

In fact, the only other Indigenous Australian characters I can find in the Marvel Universe are Dreamguard and the original Talisman. And I think it's fair to say they both reflect the time when they were created, as neither hero has really been revisited this century.

So... any chance we'll see some of them showcased in Marvel's Voices sooner or later? Those anthologies have been great for getting lesser-known characters from diverse backgrounds updated (where relevant) and out there to an audience that'll appreciate them, but so far there hasn't really been any Australian presence in them.

I suppose that it’s possible that we’ll do a Voices anthology dedicated to Indigenous Australian characters, Bob, though I can’t say that I’ve seen any huge outpouring of desire for such a thing among the fan base as a whole.

Chris Sutcliffe

At the end of Spectacular Spider-Man #2, Marvel teases "The Mystery of the TV Terror!", which we never get to see because the magazine gets cancelled.

As a comic historian and person who has worked at Marvel a long time, do you know anything about what this issue was supposed to be? Does any of it exist? Did any get used in other stories?

There was a point in the mid-1990s when my assistant Glenn Greenberg and I attempted to track down whatever had been done on that project and try to finish it, Chris. And what we discovered was that there really weren’t any materials to speak of—despite the fact that former Spidey editor Jim Salicrup had announced plans to complete the story as an Annual in 1987. Despite reports at that time, we learned that there didn’t seem to have been any pages completed back in the day, and so only the core nugget of the story idea existed. Marie had started breaking down a new version of the story for Jim, but had only done three or four loose pages before the plug was pulled on it. About all we know for certain is that John Romita recycled the villain design that he’d come up with for it, turning it into the Prowler soon after SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN was discontinued. John no doubt remembered the basic ideas as to what the story was going to be about—I seem to recall that it had something to do with an unscrupulous television pundit accruing power for himself as a demagogue. Stan’s approach to SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN, since it was a magazine, was to try to make the stories and the villains a little bit less overtly comic -booky, so this would have been along similar lines to Richard Raleigh in the first issue.

Paul from ASM

The Wolverine and Phoenix titles for from the ashes are NOT GOOD. WE demand a CHANGE in creative teams. Or watch your line crash.

Paul, who do you think you’re talking to here, Nick Lowe? First off, don’t say “we” when you mean “I”, it’s not convincing. Speak for yourself. And if you don’t like those books, there are plenty of others that you can choose to read. But the chest-bumping here is really unnecessary. So, point being, I’m not going to be changing anything in terms of the creative teams on those titles. Read them, don’t read them, it’s entirely up to you.

WL Freeman

Wondering if you have any thoughts on the future of American comics in an increasingly manga-fied world. I don’t think I’m alone in noticing in the past five years the manga section has slowly consumed the majority of the comic section in many of my local retailers. While I don’t think this poses any immediate threat to keeping the lights on, as you might say, I wonder what this might indicate on a longer timeline.

Do you think this is an indication of consumer’s drifting toward the contained narratives manga provides versus the ever-shifting mythos of superhero tales? In one hundred years it will be ever harder than ever to provide a Batman reading list (gosh, just take a look at how many different variant lines the Distinguished Competition produces currently!) but there will always be a single version of Naruto to recommend.

While we currently have an increasing amount of “cross-over” material (Deadpool: Samurai for example) do you think there will ever be a singularity point, where we will see some sort of globalized homunculi of manga and comics? (I also have to say the current timelines imposed on mangaka by weekly manga magazines seem quite unsustainable and might be subject to future labor disputes - compared to the, while hectic, much more stabilized American production model).

Also speaking of “cross-over” material have you ever read Naomi Urasawa’s Billy Bat, Tom?

This is a complicated question, WL, so let me tackle as much of it as I can. I think there are some misconceptions in your analysis of the manga marketplace here. Yes, Naruto is always going to have one starting point and a finite number of volumes in its run. But reader interest in that run is going to inevitably taper off after the series (and the anime based on it) runs its course. It’s publishing consistently that keeps a series in the public eye. Certainly the most popular manga of all tile—like Naruto—can be reprinted or collected again in more upscale editions. But pretty much, once it’s done, it’s done. Whereas the advantage of the American model is that it’s constantly renewing itself, contently giving newcomers a place to jump on board—not everybody wants to feel like they need to read 15 volumes of whatever to get caught up. And I don’t feel as though there’s been any lack of people reading Batman stories over the past twenty years, regardless of which of those lines they wind up starting with. In any event, I don’t really view any of this as comics vs manga. Comics and manga are the same thing. So people decrying the fact that certain manga sell so well are missing the point in my opinion. Sure, my books compete with manga for attention, sales and eyeballs, but at the core, while there are cultural differences, it’s all the same thing, all comics. And if Naruto or whatever gets somebody into the store, then I couldn’t be happier—because then I get to compete on the same ground for that attention, sales and eyeballs. We’ve already seen that the influence of American comics and manga on one another growing (it’s been something that’s been there for decades already) and I’d say that these days both are feeling a growing influence from Korean webtoons as well. Will everything eventually homogenize into a single stew/ I don’t think so—economically, there are things that work in one area that won’t translate in another. (For example, the whole reason that manga publishers can afford to put out those reasonably-priced paperback volumes is the fact that the material has already been paid for) And there are going to be preferences that certain readers have for one style or another. But I do think that we’ll see a continuing globalization of the material—Japan producing more My Hero Acedemias that pull strongly from American comics, and vice versa.

And no, I haven’t read Billy Bat. Should I?

---

Off The Wall

One of the first creators to ever give me a piece of original art—the first of several that he’s gifted me over the years—is Karl Kesel. That page above is from SPIDER-BOY #1, the Marvel/DC Amalgam title that Karl wrote and inked and that Mike Wieringo penciled. This was one of the first single comic book issues that I edited, if not the first, where I thought the end product was legitimately great. Everything just clicked into place on this issue. And in this case, the audience seemed to agree—the overall consensus was that SPIDER-BOY and SUPER SOLDIER were the two best of the first flight of Amalgam books. Anyway, this page is framed and displayed in the upstairs main hallway, alongside a bunch of other cool pages that we’ll see in the weeks to come.

---

I Buy Crap

With the news coming out of NYCC concerning a revival of its characters, I’ve found myself revisiting the short-lived ATLAS COMICS line of titles from the mid-1970s. The ATLAS line showed immense potential at the outset, but the plain fact of the matter is that pretty much none of their releases ever achieved a level better than pretty good, with a number of them being just godawful, And even the stuff that seemed to work was overhauled an issue or two into the run in an attempt to make them more overtly like the Marvel books of the period. The company only put out books for about a year, then vanished from sight, seemingly forever. These books were ubiquitous in the quarter bins of every East Coast comic shop throughout the back half of the 1970s and 1980s. And I know that they’re not really any good, but there’s a fascinating comfort to their familiarity. So I’ve started buying a bunch of them up. Some, like the above run of Howard Chaykin’s THE SCORPION, I already owned issues of. But $20.00 got me all three issues, including the third in which Howard’s entire concept was thrown out and replaced with a bad attempt to ape Spider-Man and Daredevil. (Howard got his own back by bringing the character to Marvel and reworking him slightly into Dominic Fortune.)

Anyway, for those who may be interested in this line, I wrote about SCORPION #1, the best of ATLAS’s initial launches, at that link. And I also went through SCORPION #3’s overhaul in depth at that link. So why am I dropping twenty bucks to get these comics again? Because I am an idiot, that’s why. I also picked up the two issues of THE COUGAR, and am scouting around for other complete sets as well.

---

Behind the Curtain

I don’t only do sketches for covers, I do them for anything that needs to be designed. So when I landed on the idea of having a regular Bullpen Bulletins-style spread in all of the new X-Books, I wound up drawing out the sketch above as a starting point for what the X-MENTIONS page might look like. If you look closely, you can tell that that’s the covers to UNCANNY X-MEN #1, X-FACTOR #1 and WOLVERINE BLOOD HUNT on the right side, abstracted down to nothing. We wound up moving those cover images to the left page in order to make room for the checklist.

---

Pimp My Wednesday

The X-Line is firing all guns this week, it feels like!

UNCANNY X-MEN #7 by Gail Simone and David Marquez, with a bit of assistance from Edgar Salazar, continues the short-but-sweet Raid on Graymlkin crossover with X-MEN, as the two geographically-disparate teams converge on the prison that was once their home, and shenanigans ensue. We’ll inevitably be doing bigger, longer and more involved crossovers between titles in the future, so we wanted to keep things really small for our first effort in this regard.

It isn’t a crossover per se, but the Louisiana Uncanny X-Men guest-star in STORM #3 from Murewa Ayodele and Lucas Werneck. After last issue. Ororo needs a rest-cure, and what better place to get it than in New Orleans where a chunk of her family is now residing? But the arrival of a strange messenger will propel Storm into a new adventure even before she’s quite ready to be back in the field.

And off in the cosmos, events are ramping up for Jean Grey as well in PHOENIX #6, in which the embodiment of fire and life incarnate crosses swords with the consort of death, Thanos, now armed with a new weapon torn from an obscure earlier story. Associate Editor Annalise Bissa put it together, Stephanie Phillips wrote it and guest artist Marco Renna illustrated it.

And finally, DAZZLER #4 contains the wrap-up of Alison Blaire’s world tour with a final show in Manhattan, one that’s attended by the cast of NYX among others. It also reveals the identity of the figure who’s been stalking Dazzler’s footsteps since the series began. Assistant Editor Martin Biro masterminded this one, which was written by Jason Loo and illustrated by Rafael Louriero and Alan Robinson.

---

The New Warriors Chronicles

To being with this time out, NEW WARRIORS writer Fabian Nicieza reached out this week to let me know that the handwritten notes on his outline for the fifth year of the series that I showed last time were written by him rather than editor Rob Tokar as I speculated. Why Fabian’s notes wound up in my files is a bit of a mystery, but as I do have two other copies of that document with other less extensive notes (and Fabian can recognize his own handwriting when he sees it) it must be so.

NIGHT THRASHER was a title that was on the ropes when I came on board as editor with issue #17. As originally conceived by Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz when they were coming up with the New Warriors in THOR, Dwayne Taylor was pretty much just Batman (the 1989 movie was enormous, you may have heard) only black and with a skateboard. As much as anything in that original two-issue appearance, it was Night Thrasher who garnered scorn as being as tone-deaf and clueless a creation as Neal Adams’ SKATE MAN a decade earlier. Nonetheless, the one person who took Dwayne Taylor seriously was Fabian Nicieza, who took great pains to try to make Night Thrasher both plausible and interesting. It was Fabian who first pitched the idea that everything the character knew about his upbringing was a lie, that his faux-Batman origin wasn’t true, and that there were sinister forces behind him having become a vigilante. As this story unfolded in the main NEW WARRIORS series, Fabian and artist Mark Bagley also worked to make the character effective and dangerous. They downplayed the seeming silliness of his skateboard and worked on giving him a more well-rounded personality that that of a hyper-tense black guy who’d lose his cool and need Firestar to calm him down. They did great work on the character, so much so that Night Thrasher got the first NEW WARRIORS spin-off project, a 4-issue limited series. And when that did well, it was a short leap to launching an ongoing series for the character.

The problem, though, was that the creative team on the NIGHT THRASHER book fell apart almost instantly. Javier Saltares was supposed to be the regular artist, but he somehow flamed out after only an issue or two, leaving the editors to scramble to find somebody, anybody, to fill in for the short-term and take over the book in the long term. But more critically, this was the period in which Fabian was growing more and more busy—he was writing as many as seven titles a month in those days, plus holding down a regular 9 to 5 editorial job. Something had to give, and it was NIGHT THRASHER. After a year of working on it, Fabian departed with issue #12. Editor Rob Tokar gave Fabian’s former intern a chance to write a two-issue fill-in to buy him time to recruit a suitable replacement writer, a kid named Dan Slott. But there weren’t exactly a line of people waiting in the wings hungry to take over the series.

In the end, Rob was able to entice Kurt Busiek to take over NIGHT THRASHER. Kurt had written the super-successful MARVELS a year or so before, but even after it had come out, he was having trouble picking up any regular assignments at Marvel. Some of this was no doubt due to the fact that he had worked on staff in the Sales Department before eventually leaving to go freelance as a writer full time. There was and is a tendency to pigeonhole people, and in those days, there was a certain amount of distrust between Editorial and Sales, some politics that left people divided. So Kurt wasn’t finding a lot of sympathetic harbors for his work, even despite his recent success. He didn’t take over NIGHT THRASHER because he had any real burning desire to write the character, he was just looking to show what he could do on a super hero title. And so he came in with a very different approach to the series, one that Rob green lit: Kurt’s Night Thrasher would use his great wealth as a super power, to attempt to purchase his way out of problems. And he’d deal with all of the situations where that approach simply wouldn’t work the way he’d intended. Kurt also picked up on Fabian’s set up of Rage, a character that NEW WARRIORS had adopted from AVENGERS. Rage was Dwayne Taylor’s ward following the death of his Granny Staples, and so Kurt decided to make him the Robin to Night Thrasher’s Batman—albeit a Robin who could bench-press a tank.

And so that was about the state of play when I came in. Artwork was being done by Art Nichols, whom Kurt I believe had advocated for. Art was good, but he wasn’t the most consistent producer among artists, and so by the time I picked up the series, it too was in a bit of a scheduling bind. But the first storyline, “Money Don’t Buy”, had been solicited as a four-issue “series-within-a-series”, so it was incumbent on me to get Art through it before we might work to alleviate his schedule burden a little bit.

On the other hand, Kurt and I got along just fine—we had ever since he was still on staff, when I started at Marvel. I knew him from his work on THE LIBERTY PROJECT at Eclipse, of which I was a fan, and I had a good working knowledge of all of the old comics that Kurt had grown up with and liked best, such as Steve Englehart’s run on AVENGERS. (I did once get his back up momentarily by calling him “Kurtis”, something that I refrained from doing again after he pointedly told me that that wasn’t his name.) By this point, though, Kurt was already co-writing NIGHT THRASHER with Steve Mattsson, and so there was a feeling from the outset that he already had one foot out the door. Either way, NIGHT THRASHER was bleeding sales at this point—it was the weakest of the four NEW WARRIORS books that I inherited, and the one that I felt the least connection to. So a lot more of my attention went towards trying to stabilize and improve the other ones, particularly the main NEW WARRIORS title. I don’t know that NIGHT THRASHER was necessarily savable at that point in time, but I certainly didn’t do much to save it.

---

Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about this Charlton fannish Marvel parody story

And five years ago, I wrote about The Five Best Comic Books of 1989.

---

And that’s all we’ve got for you this time! But hopefully, we’ll have a second wind by next week. And even if we don’t, won’t it be entertaining to watch us fail? See you then!

Hat’s All, Folks!

Tom B