#145: Superman is my Religion

Welcome back, everyone! It’s a new year, which means another arbitrary new starting point! Hope 2025 is treating you well so far.

It occurred to me over the break, brought to mind by all of the chatter surrounding the release of the first teaser trailer for James Gunn’s upcoming SUPERMAN film, positive and negative, that my intrinsic belief system has been inarguably influenced by the Man of Steel and all of the other costumed heroes who followed in his wake. I’ve never been an especially religious person, this despite spending my formative years going to mass every Sunday with my mother and attending onerous weekly religious classes after school until I was 11 or 12. The obvious disconnect between what religion said and what was done in its name being just too obvious for me to ever ignore. So whatever passes for my morality, my understanding of right and wrong, good and evil, honor and justice stems from comic books. In a very real way, Superman is my religion. I certainly believe in what he stands for a lot more than just about anything else that’s on offer. Consequently, I’m an easy target for the new film (especially after suffering through the bait-and-switch of MAN OF STEEL a decade ago.) So I’m certainly rooting for it to both be good and a big success.

On to other things. I saw this a few weeks back and was absolutely knocked out by it. I’m not certain exactly of the context in which this was done, but this crew of performers produced a live action homage to the opening and ending titles to the original RANMA 1/2 anime. It’s a show and a strip that I really like, and so this all completely floored me.

Questions! It’s been a while since we tackled any of these, and so some of the ones below are quite old now. Hopefully still of interest, though. Let’s go!

Biggu

Hey, Tom. I have to say one of my most favorite characters to date has to be Paul Rabin from spider-man comics. He’s such a cool dude and he makes great chicken korma. My only complaint is that Paul only appears in the Spider-Man side of things but I’m an avid x-men reader. I’m not getting enough PAUL! So what if, hear me out, what if it’s revealed that Paul is a mutant! That way Paul can appear in spider-man AND the x-men side of things and we can have more Paul! Maybe we can even have a really awesome story where Paul and Jean Grey get stuck in space together and then Jean cheats on Cyclops and breaks up with him and then everybody acts like HE’S the bad guy for wanting to save her. Fans will love it. Maybe we can even have a team book lead by Paul. Here’s some names it can be called P-Men, P-Force, or maybe even P-treme P-Men.

I get the sense that maybe you’re putting me on here, Biggu. But look for a key appearance from Paul on Free Comic Book Day—may it be all that you dreamed.

David Brazier

can you tell what happened with the Ultraverse? Did Marvel purchase it to ‘can’ it or was there a greater plan? I remember the Black Knight and Sersi travelling there after the superb Gatherers Saga in the Avengers. I liked many of the Ultraverse characters (although not Prime). Do Marvel still own them? Thanks as always.

I can’t tell you much, David, as everything is still protected by NDAs that are still in force. But I can say for certain that it wasn’t bought with the intention of shutting it down, far from it. An almost unreasonable amount of effort was expend on trying to save it as the industry bubble collapsed. Marvel does still own all of that material—but I can’t really get into things any deeper than that.

Ryan Pratt

I know that sometimes 2 separate ideas thought of at different times can accidentally align somewhat, but I remember reading No Surrender as it came out and Valerie 'Voyager' Vector was rewritten into the Avengers past history and wondering how anyone could have possibly forgotten that Mark Waid had just done the same thing with Cressida as Avenger X at the beginning of his run. I know that there were subtle differences, but that story element still felt so recent that it always irked me and years later I still can't force my mind let it go. Was it just overlooked or was it consciously decided that No Surrender's idea stood on its own merits?

Two different stories with two different characters introduced for two different reasons, Ryan. So it was never really a concern when we were working on the weekly.

Neil Bradbury

I have been a big fan of webcomics since way back in the pre-social media days where you had to go to each artist's site separately. At the time it felt to me like lots of these writers and artists would end up working for Marvel in some capacity but it seems Ryan is the only one who's made it on a regular basis, aside from odd gigs for Chris Hastings and the like. What do you think it is about Ryan's writing that allowed him to make the jump when so many other popular webcomics people didn't? Is he just a better writer or is there something about his style of writing specifically?

Well, first off, Neil, I don’t know how many of those online creators ever had it as a goal to work for Marvel at any point. So much of what many of them do is very different to what Marvel does. In the case of Ryan, however, he was interested in working on mainstream super hero titles, and he was able to successfully adapt his storytelling strengths to operate within the confines of the Marvel Universe.

Alvaro

With Storm having a solo book, I recall you saying that you want her to be as big as, say, Spider-Man. Does that mean that Storm will now be Marvel’s leading lady moving forward instead of, say, someone like Carol Danvers or She-Hulk?

That isn’t really up to me, Alvaro. Rather, it all ultimately comes down to the audience’s response to the character. So if people feel that way about Storm and that sentiment continues to grow, it’ll become a self-fulfilling prophesy. But you can’t force people to like a character.

Callie

Have you been reading Kieron Gillen's The Power Fantasy? If so, what are your thoughts on it generally? And more specifically, it's the kind of book that could never work in the marvel universe, but do you think there's a place in the marvel universe for stories with that style of tension>action storytelling?

I have been reading it, Callie, yes. And I think it’s a very Kieron endeavor, very savvy and smart. Could you do something like it in the MU? Perhaps. Though I think one of the important aspects of it is that Kieron and Casper control every aspect of his world and by extension the impact that his five superhumans have had on it. That would be a much trickier thing to pull off within a shared universe construction. I also don’t know how universally popular such an approach would be to a Marvel audience that shows up as much for the pyrotechnics as anything else. You could certainly adapt lessons and approaches from it to Marvel stories, though.

Jeff Ryan

The Justice cover you included had a full page of real text behind it. Do you think the editor wrote that themselves, or reached out to a writer to craft it?

If I’m remembering correctly, Jeff, the text of that news story was written by Fabian Nicieza for that purpose, and was in hand by the time I took the project over, so I never had to ask for it or anything. But the pattern of creating actual news pieces for such situations was popularized at around that time by Kurt Busiek in MARVELS, who did the same thing on a bunch of occasions throughout that project.

Gwen

there is a specific reason for why Stephanie is using so much of Thor/Asgardian mythology in PHOENIX instead of Phoenix own mythology? Like, we had Perrikus, Gorr, the asgardian zombies, the other dark gods and now the Warlock Eye

Those are simply the stories that Stephanie has chosen to do, Gwen, nothing more to it than that. In looking for things on a level to give Jean difficulty dealing with, going to Thor mythology would seem to make sense, and would be something that most readers would have a familiarity with.

Carlos

I don't know if you've put any thought into your future successor as Fantastic Four editor...

But I hope it's Nick Lowe!

I don’t really get to choose my successor, Carlos. But you really know how to hurt a guy.

MADMan James

1) Was there ever any in-universe explanation for why Frigga started going by Frejya? It just seemed to appear out of the blue in the Thor title. I know there's a lot of reason to think the myths of Freyja and Frigga might be about the same goddess, but of course the comics aren't the same thing as the myths. It was very confusing to me at the time, especially since there was already an Asgardian character named Freya (even if she never showed up very much).

2) This was long before you ever joined Marvel, but do you know why Roy Thomas left the title after Thor #299? I know he left Marvel entirely a year later, but from what I can tell he was off Thor well before that happened. It's a pity, because he had one of the truly great runs on the title (up there with Kirby, Jurgens and Simonson for me) but left right as the big conclusion to the storyline happened.

1. I think that was just a choice that writer Matt Fraction made in order to simplify matters, James. But he could tell you more about it than I can.

2. And Kurt Busiek gave you as good or better an answer to this one in the comments, so i don’t really have anything further I can add here.

Siddhanta Roy

Before you became the editor of x-books, I have really liked AXE Judgement Day that you once edited before. Especially the A.X.E X-Men issue with Logan and Jean. It really highlighted him even as supporting character. May I ask if you can give more stories like this?

Maybe, Roy? it sounds to me like you’re looking for something very specific, as certain fans tend to, and I can’t guarantee that I’m ever going to serve up exactly the dish that you want exactly how you want it again and again. But we’ll see. Glad you enjoyed AXE at the very least.

yoyo

so while rearranging some old fantastic four comicbooks i was gifted by some relatives, i came across a rather odd mini series ff4 1234. My question is as follows i would like to classify my ff4 books according to continuity/canon 616 in cardboards which for the most part i was able to but this particular mini series i am not sure where it goes after reading it, i am tempted to classify it together with my other AU/what ifs /non canon books, of course i may be wrong. So here i am asking for a little bit of advice if possible.

FANTASTIC FOUR 1234 was a Marvel Knights project, yoyo, and so was at least broadly intended to fit within continuity, though not at any specifically defined point. So I don’t really know what to tell you in terms of where you might want to file it. I’d say put it where you think it goes best (which you’ve in all likelihood already done.

LE

can we get a "Wolverine & Phoenix" series? Do you reckon such a thing would have a decent chance of sales success?

I don’t know, LE. I can’t really see myself moving ahead with such a project. If anything, I feel like the long-simmering something between Logan and Jean has held both characters back, and so I’m much more inclined to move away from it.

Pandoro

Hello! Writer Alyssa Wong mentioned on a panel that another X-Men character they would like to write is Kid Omega. Would it be possible for them to write something (a solo, or mini, or annual) with the character? I love their Psylocke, and as a fan of both characters, and Wong themselves obviously, it would be like a dream come true.

There’s really no reason in the world why Alyssa couldn’t use Quentin somewhere, Pandoro, presuming that they have a story to tell and a place where such a story would fit.

Robert

My copies of Wolverine #3 and Wolverine #4 both say LGY #395. Would love to know what's going on there.

That is what we in the industry refer to as a “mistake”, Robert. Ought to be fixed in subsequent issues. Keeping those Legacy numbers straight is a constant problem—one of the things that makes doing away with them attractive to some.

Dan Gvozden

Is there a title from 2024 that you weren’t working on, from Marvel or other publishers, that you most lost yourself in and could remove your editorial lens and just enjoy?

I enjoy lots of stuff from lots of publishers, Dan, so I don’t think that’s any problem. That said, my editorial lens is never entirely off. It’s simply too ingrained in me to be looking for certain things as I go.

Kevin F

do you have any thoughts on the Captain Britain Corps? Their whole purpose is to patrol the multiverse and timestream, yet they’re often absent from events that seem tailor-made for them.

I think the big problems with the Captain Britain Corps are multi-faceted, Kevin. First off, their concept originates in a strip that wasn’t published in the US and so it hasn’t been read by a wide swath of creators. Secondly, it’s built around a relatively mid-list character in Captain Britain. Even just getting the Captain involved in stories isn’t the easiest thing in the world, let alone a bunch of multiversal doppelgangers of them. And thirdly, the concept just sounds way too much like the much better established Green Lantern Corps (but in multiverses rather than space sectors) which is I expect very much what Alan Moore was thinking when he dreamed it up. You’d really need something to make Captain Britain a hell of a lot more popular and central than they are at the moment to front-burner the Corps in this manner.

Martin

From your description of Cable's series, it sounds like we won't be seeing the time-displaced Young Cable around. Should we assume he went back to his time period?

Far as I know, we won’t be seeing Young Cable any time soon, Martin. I was under the impression that his story was wrapped up at the end of the previous CABLE limited series, but I see that he got drawn into an X-MEN issue after that, quite possibly in error. But as I want to winnow down the number of duplicates and doppelgangers and characters from other future timelines and confusing stuff like that, we’re not all that likely to go back to that well without a very compelling reason. Sorry.

Stefan

How many writers can fit inside your office and still have enough room to write comfortably? I know people are increasingly back to the office these days, but wouldn't it be more efficient to allow them to write from home?

My office is bigger on the inside, Stefan.

Joshua

My question is about iceman, he wasn't in any book this whole year literally he basically disappeared for a year, so my question is how gonna be 2025 for him, is he established in an ongoing series, is he gonna be in the next issues of exceptional that are yet to come 5'6'7, is he gonna be doing something important next year or at least something

I have to say, you Iceman fans seem pretty insecure about Bobby Drake, Joshua. I think this is the third question along these lines I’ve answered since we started talking about him being in EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN. But let me go ahead and say it again: he’s a member of that book’s cast, so if you’re looking for him, that’s where he’s likeliest to show up in the immediate future.

Tim Pendergast

a big downvote for Claremonting the powers. His restating of the obvious was one of the most annoying features of his run, since he always (over)used the same phrases to do so. In this case the better rule is "Show, don't tell."

The thing is, Tim, with a lot of our modern characters, you can’t tell what they’re doing simply by showing it—the powers aren’t immediately understandable visually. And so, it’s much better to say what’s going on than not to and have the audience confused. I’m not saying to do this poorly or ham-fistedly—but I am saying that it’s better to do it badly than not to do it at all and leave the readership lost.

Ray Cornwall

I know there are great books for writers and artists looking to learn how to create comics- How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, Will Eisner's books, Bendis's book, the book by Van Lente and Pak, Scott McCloud's books...is there anything else either targeted at comics writers or fiction writers that you recommend?

It’s an unconventional answer, Ray, but one of the best books that I’ve read about writing in general is Russell T. Davies’ DOCTOR WHO: THE WRITER’S TALE. I particularly recommend the initial hardcover version (as opposed to the later expanded softcover version) as you get to see what Russell writes on a number of his scripts in real time, including revisions and deletions. It’s not comics, but it definitely applies.

Craig Byrne

Why no Legacy number for Cable? Is it because this is a miniseries and not something ongoing?

If Marvel again ever had the license for Doctor Who, would you want to be involved or editing it, or is that something too sacred to touch?

Precisely the reason for no legacy numbering on CABLE: LOVE AND CHROME, Craig. And I’m sure that I could have fun editing DOCTOR WHO comics should that opportunity arise—though I tend to view most properties as only being legitimate in their native media. Which is to say that while the stories may be entertaining, I don’t look at any DOCTOR WHO stories that aren’t television programs as being legitimate DOCTOR WHO. (And the same broadly applies to all other properties as well.)

Montana Mott

Do you have any interesting memories involving Heinberg creating Wiccan’s powers or other writers approaching them over the years?

No, not specifically about Wiccan’s powers, Mott, not that I can think of. Sorry.

Glenn Simpson

Was recently reminded that a lot of fans think that the Marvel Universe has some sort of official time increment, like 4 years in real time equals 1 year in Marvel time. I tend to think it's not really at all official. It's not like you're all going to come in one day and say "well, time for the characters to start getting gray, it's been 4 x X years since 1960". Can you confirm or deny?

We have a general guideline in that we approach the passage of time in the Marvel Universe based on the earliest sliding event, Glenn, which is the birth of the Fantastic Four. At the moment, and for the past decade or two, we’ve operated under the broad belief that this event happened around 15 years ago, and so everything that’s happened since continually gets compressed into that time period, with specific moments expanding out as needed for modern stories. But there isn’t a formula for it, nor can there be, as the starting point is continually shifting, and we’re not consistently accruing more time within that span. This is fiction, so we want there to be verisimilitude. But we do what’s best for the stories, that’s more important than the continuity, and what needs to be served first.

Murewa Ayodele

In your headcanon, if Santa is a mutant, why didn't he play a bigger role in House and Powers of X or the Krakoa era generally?

In my headcanon, Santa isn’t a mutant, Murewa. He’s more akin to a God like Thor.

Kevin S

What's your fan and/or pro preference: JLA & JSA on the same Earth or different Earths?

At this point, the JSA has been integrated into the same Earth for so long that it would be almost impossible to extricate them from it, Kevin. But having grown up with hem on Earth-2, I’ve always preferred that—if for no other reason than that it allows Superman to maintain his position as the first prominent super hero on Earth, rather than just a really good one who came along decades after other people had been doing the same stuff for years and years. But this isn’t really any sort of sticking point for me these days.

Isaac Kelley

So were the backups considered a failure? Or were the complainers offset by others who were drawn in by the backup? Or is there no real way to tell?

The backups were discontinued, and the problem went away, Isaac. So at the very least they wound up considered more trouble than they were worth.

Lucas

Is Emma gonna be getting a pov issue or the same spotlight that is kitty having right now

And how about iceman I'm kinda lost about his place in the book is he just there for this issue, is he gonna be in the book next issue and in the others after, didn't see in the solicits for futures issue neither in the covers or variant covers, is he quest or part of the past as much as kitty & emma

A comic book series isn’t a democracy, Lucas, so Emma will no doubt get the spotlight at some point in EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN, but the series is never going to be exclusively about her. She’s a piece of it, not the whole. And see what I said earlier to Joshua about Iceman—same thing, he’s a regular part of that book.

Joe

Jeff the Landshark is probably one of the most recent Marvel character debuts that took off that isn’t really tied to a particular team or a mantle. Do you think that there is a place for more of these sorts of characters that aren’t defined by the legacy or the team they originally started on?

Now, Joe, as everybody knows, Jeff the Land Shark debuted in WEST COAST AVENGERS and so is inextricably tied to that team. But that said, sure, there’s always the potential that one character or another will break out and separate themselves from the pack. it simply comes down to the right creators having the right take.

Jackie Laura Dragotta

Is there any chance we’ll see the O5 X-Men reunite for an adventure together whether it’s in main continuity or as a timeless story?

We’ve got no immediate plans for that right at the moment, Jackie, but I think it’s inevitable that we’ll do something with those characters all together at some point, given the long shared history they have with one another.

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Off The Wall

This is a page from an issue of SECRET ORIGINS that spotlighted the origin of the Legion of Super-Heroes’ Phantom Girl for some reason (likely because she was going to be playing a role in the present day L.E.G.I.O.N. ‘89 series). I bought it directly from artist Dave Cockrum at a New York show somewhere around 1990 or 1991, and I paid I think $5.00 for it. Dave was having a bit of a hard time then, while he’d been the cutting edge of super hero design and action in the mid-1979s, by the 1990s his work was mostly considered old-fashioned and out of style. I’d always loved Dave’s Legion, so I wound up buying this page almost on a whim, and to do a little something to help him out. It isn’t the most exciting page Cockrum had ever done (which is why it was in that cheap pile) but it does have some good Phantom Girl heads and shots on it. It’s also a nine-panel page that doesn’t seem all that crowded.

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I Buy Crap

Despite having been a fan of the show for 40 years, I’ve never owned a Tom Baker-style DOCTOR WHO scarf. That is, until now. It was gifted to me by my brother Mike and his wife Jeanie for Christmas this year, and I kind of love it.

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Behind the Curtain

All right, enough time has now gone by that I can probably share this with you. What you see below is the text of the first e-mail I ever wrote about how to lay out a new X-Line in the aftermath of the end of the Krakoa era. It was written before the job of building that line had been given to me, but after an hour-long conversation with former X-Editor Jordan White brainstorming what such a landscape might look like. Given that, it’s remarkable on point as to many of the specific titles that we wound up building. Heck, I even had SENTINELS this early.

X-MEN – Primary heroic super hero team. Focused on universal situations whether they specifically involve mutants or not.

UNCANNY X-MEN – Secondary heroic super hero team. Philosophically at odds with X-Men. Focused primarily on mutant situations.

School X-MEN – Kitty and new players recruit new mutants and train them in the use of their powers. Wear modified school uniforms ala New Mutants or Generation X. This book effectively is NEW MUTANTS but it could use a stronger X-centric title.

X-FORCE – The Krakoa Mossad, clinging to the idea and ideals of their destroyed homeland and taking the fight to its enemies.

X-FACTOR – Government-affiliated mutant squad. Freedom Force. If integration is the goal, then these are the most integrated heroes.

WOLVERINE – Wolverine as a solo player. Pick him up living in remote cabin in Canada, where he’s brought back into the fight by somebody?

THE SENTINELS – People transformed into stealth Sentinels. Programmed to hunt down mutants, but they can do more and be heroic as well.

MYSTIQUE – Cool spy/espionage book with a morally ambiguous lead.

“Professor M”? Magneto wheelchair-bound?

Take founders and ANAD characters off the board for a while?

Brotherhood of X

Need fewer active mutants overall, and need to scatter the ones we know across the globe.

New villains. Old villains in new and interesting places. Some theoretically heroic mutants now in villain roles.

Mutants mostly living under the radar/inside the closet. A Red State future. Trying to pry open the door again/regain lost rights and cultural gains.

Mutants have families and friends and lives apart from being mutant super heroes. Not everybody drops everything else in their lives to live as a mutant full time.

Mutants interacting with normal people in society, good and bad.

Build relations between all X-Teams so they’re each in opposition to at least one other faction, providing story grist. So X-FACTOR doesn’t like SENTINELS because they’re anti-mutant but they’re forced to work with them. One team of X-MEN doesn’t agree with the stance of the other team of X-MEN. X-FORCE has a chip on its shoulder for X-FACTOR, whom they consider sell-outs. And so forth. Arrange the factions like on a wheel.

So a few things changed along the way, of course. X-MEN and UNCANNY switched premises, X-FORCE went in an entirely different direction, the founders and ANAD characters were well in evidence, and so forth. But ultimately, this is very much what we wound up doing. And possibly, this memo was one of the reasons why I was handed the job.

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Pimp My Wednesday

We’ve got a full plate of releases for you to enter 2025 with! Want to see what they are?

UNCANNY X-MEN #8 by Gail Simone and Javier Garron (despite the incorrect credit on the above mock-up) brings our short RAID ON GRAYMALKIN crossover to a close, as dueling teams of X-Men battle over the fate of their mentor Charles Xavier. Secrets are revealed, new questions are posited, and the stage will s set for the future, and we’re in and out in just four painless issues, how’s about that?

NAMOR #6 by Jason Aaron, Paul Davidson and Alex Lins sees the ruler of the seas continuing to try to bring an end to World War Sea, a battle to determine the new King of Atlantis. And finally, Namor has to face a duty that he avoided in the past, one that will change his understanding of what it means to be the monarch of the oceans.

NYX #7 by Jackson Lansing, Collin Kelly and Enid Balám, under the supervision of Associate Editor Annalise Bissa brings in one of the more demanded mutants, Synch. He’s got a problem with this whole NYX thing, and he intends to express his dislike but repeatedly punching Prodigy in the face. Discourse is had.

And Assistant Editor Martin Biro is releasing the second of five specials dedicated to revealing what would have happened had Galactus selected assorted other Marvel heroes to be his herald. This time out, the subject in question is Gambit and the story is by Josh Trujillo and Manuel Garcia.

And finally, X-Editor Darren Shan with writer Ashley Allen and artist German Peralta release the first issue of the dark and sinister MAGIK series, in which Illyana Rasputin comes up against an all-new supernatural threat apart from being one of the X-Men. It’s our latest attempt to do something interesting and singular with each of our solo series, so it has a specific flavor all its own.

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A Comic Book On Sale 25 Years Ago Today, January 5, 2000

The final issue of the second MAGE series came out 25 years ago today. As somebody who had been following Matt Wagner’s opus since it had first debuted decades before, getting this second series completed was a bit of an unlikely miracle. Wagner had always maintained that his grand plan for Kevin matchstick was that he’d go through three fifteen-part adventures set at different stages of his development. MAGE: THE HERO DEFINED was the second of these. And while it wasn’t quite as original and remarkable as MAGE: THE HERO DISCOVERED, it nevertheless contained a strong flavor of nostalgia for those of us who’d been around from the start. Even then, getting to eventually experience the concluding series, MAGE: THE HERO DENIED seemed like a longshot at best, but damned if Wagner didn’t come back and pull that off as well in the years in-between then and now. For those who are unaware, MAGE is a take on modern day mythological tales, in particular the heroic epic of Gilgamesh and the stories of Arthur Pendragon. Its lead character, Kevin Matchstick, is a predestined champion, one whose heroic life’s course is set and guided by his encounters with three different incarnations of the Mage, Mirth, as they seek to protect the hidden Fisher King from the nefarious Umbra-Sprite and his children. Wagner based Kevin very much on himself, so there’s also a strong element of autobiography involved in the story. So much so that Wagner created additional champions for Matchstick to meet, ally with and contest against in this series, each of whom was based on another creator in the field. This gave the series an allegorical flavor to it as well, if you knew (or could work out) who everyone was meant to be (and it’s not like Wagner was especially concealing it.) Anyway, the big climax of this second series involved Matchstick going through a transformation, and learning that he was more of an overall heroic archetype rather than simply the Pendragon reborn—his enchanted baseball bat, the symbol of his power, more than just another form of Excalibur, but rather a weapon of need which got transformed into a shield by the time this adventure had run its course. As opposed to Wagner’s other great long-form work, Grendel, which tended to put greater emphasis on the copy, MAGE was more visual-focused, with a lack of thought balloons or narrative captions, more in the style of most modern comic books today. It’s been a while since I read this second series, but as i recall it all holds up really well. There has never been one main set of collections for the whole of MAGE so far as I know, but I really loved the editions STARBLAZE put out in the 1980s HERO DISCOVERED. Hopefully at some point, somebody will produce either a uniform set of all three series or else a huge Omnibus of the entire epic. It’s up there with CEREBUS as a long-form work that was done across decades both written and drawn by the same person.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

INCREDIBLE HULK #77 came out on January 5, 2005 and represented the return of Peter David to the title that he’d made such a success in the 1980s and 1990s. Such a return seemed pretty unlikely even only a couple of years earlier, when Peter got caught up in the whole ridiculous U-Decide debacle. But somehow—possibly because a number of very vocal fans had been demanding it whenever Joe Quesada would make appearances at conventions and such—I was asked to se if Peter would consent to come back for a six-issue run. Initially, even the question of where those six issues would see print was up in the air. It was postulated to me that maybe they’d come out as ULTIMATE HULK, maybe they’d get run within the main INCREDIBLE HULK series, or maybe they’d be released as their own thing. So that made crafting the story a bit of a challenge. We were able to secure the terrific Lee Weeks as the artist, but even at his most productive, he wouldn’t be able to get through six consecutive issues. So Peter built the main story as a five-parter and then followed up with a single issue story that was illustrated by Jae Lee. You can’t say we didn’t back Peter up with some great artistic talent here. In the end, writer Bruce Jones wound up wrapping up his tenure on the series with #76, and in the absence of a better option the series was handed back over to Peter and me temporarily. (I had been editing it prior to Bruce’s run, when it was given to Axel Alonso to manage, a thing he did well.) Now, for years Peter’s fans had been outraged at the manner in which he’d been dismissed from the book after writing it for a decade, and they insisted that all it would ever take to make the series a top-performing title once again was to reinstate him. Peter didn’t necessarily see things that way, but he was certainly going to give the assignment his best effort given the change. And this is why I don’t really take all of those fans who angrily stump for whatever thing they’re hoping to have happen or unhappen seriously. Because we lined everything up about as well as we could have here, we promoted Peter’s return well—and in the end, the sales didn’t change one bit. It’s not like they tanked, but neither did they improve at all. It was a zero-sum game. You can rationalize that in any of a number of different ways, but the reality was that Peter’s moment had passed, and the current audience for the book had turned over. Consequently, Peter’s return was limited to just those six issues, the title was handed over to newly-hired editor Mark Paniccia to run editorially, and he and writer Greg Pak began building what would become the very successful PLANET HULK and WORLD WAR HULK storylines. So this was a fun blip, with some good stories told, but really only just a blip, and one that proved why it’s always dangerous to listen too much to any small group of aficionados.

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The New Warriors Chronicles

The final NEW WARRIORS-related series that I inherited from Rob Tokar as part of the Marvelution reorganization of the company that broke up editorial into five separate family lines was NOVA. It was a book that I had a lot of interest in, as I had been a reader of the original NOVA series back in the late 1970s, and had liked it a lot. It was the second series spun off from the mother title, and the one that I felt had the most potential to make a go of it. However, while it had started out relatively strong, it quickly ran into the same difficulty that NIGHT THRASHER had: writer Fabian Nicieza was in high demand as a writer during this period, especially in the realm of the X-Titles, and so he started having to leave assignments as his workload became unmanageable. So within a couple of issues, NOVA was looking for a new writer.

Rob’s selection to take over for Fabian was Chris Marrinan, who had been working on the series from its start as the artist. Chris’s take on the character and the material was markedly different from Fabian’s, though. If anything, it perhaps had more in common with that of Nova fan Erik Larsen. Fabian’s approach to NEW WARRIORS was to constantly pit the young heroes up against morally grey situations often torn from the headlines, in which they’d be forced to make “hard choices” and deal with the ramifications of their actions. Chris, on the other hand, wanted to do a colorful action-adventure super hero title steeped in the Marvel of it all. And so when I took the series over, that’s what he’d begun doing. He’d worked out an overall outline with Rob Tokar for a series of stories that would run up through at least issue #16, and which involved another mysterious Nova Centurion, called Nova 0-0 (That’s him on the cover you see up there.)

My take coming on board mid-stride was that Chris wasn’t really the strongest or most capable writer that I’d ever seen. He was enthusiastic, and he worked hard, but his actual command of prose and his ability to craft genuine human moments wasn’t really developed. He felt like a comic book writer who’d learned how to write by reading other comic books. So I knew this was a problem that I was going to have to deal with at some point. But to begin with, I was in teh midst of a bunch of ongoing plotlines that had been started up in previous issues, and so I saw my approach as being to help Chris to craft the series into the best Erik Larsen-style comic book we could. Seriously, the guidepost I was using for this run was SAVAGE DRAGON, and I looked to try to guide Chris into bringing that level of energy to what he was doing, and to help him with where his plotting or prose skills might have been weaker.

Like all of the other NEW WARRIORS title, NOVA was in a bit of a schedule hole when I inherited it, which meant that this first issue under my care and the next were guest-penciled by Dario Carrasco, Jr., a young Canadian artist whom Tokar had hired. Dario was super-enthusiastic, but he was also a bit of a novice, and his work was never quite as strong as Marrinan’s. Still, he got the job done, even under some tight conditions. But what this meant is that Chris was now plotting for another artist, which meant that I was starting things out with his weaknesses rather than his strengths.

The cover to this issue used the design set-up that Tokar had developed for the entire NEW WARRIORS line to help it stand out on the comic book racks. It emphasized a triangle motif and featured an inner box frame around the art that I never really thought worked that well. If anything, it tended to make most of the covers feel claustrophobic and hemmed in by the additional pinline border. I did away with that element as quickly as I could, and I never much used the wallpaper of triangular Warriors insignias that had been developed as a graphic element. I was more interested in letting the cover art carry the impact—being separate from the pack was only relevant when you were a product that readers were hungry for; otherwise, those same design elements could function as a warning to stay away. I don’t know how much getting rid of those design elements really helped anything, but I thought doing so made a positive difference. (Chris’s signature is also really too large and prominent on this cover. Were I setting it up today, I would reduce it in size and probably move it to a less conspicuous location, such as behind Nova’s leg by the UPC. But artists were doing this sort of thing a lot in those Image-centric days.)

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Monofocus

Even before my time off, I had made a bunch of headway on watching and reading things, so there’s more to comment on than usual.

First off, I finished A MOUSE DIVIDED by regular reader Jeff Ryan, which I picked up from him back in Baltimore. And it’s a pretty good volume covering the early days of the Walt Disney empire and the steady deterioration of the relationship between Disney and his one-time creative partner Ub Iwerks. I’ve read a bunch on this subject over the years, and this volume is a worthy addition to earlier scholarship on the subject.

Everybody on Earth wanted to talk to me about the SUPERMAN Teaser Trailer that debuted a few weeks ago, knowing how invested I am in the character. And while I’m reserving judgment—the MAN OF STEEL trailer of years ago taught me that much—it’s mostly looking good to me. I’m very taken with Corenswet’s approach to Clark Kent (which instantly makes you understand how people can look at this guy and not think Superman) and Rachel Brosnahan is at least visually perfect as Lois Lane. Beyond that, we don’t really have enough information on the film’s story as of yet to draw any conclusions about the finished work. But I’m holding out hope.

Elsewhere, STAR TREK: LOWER DECKS finished its fifth and final season, and I’m really going to miss it. I know that some fans found the show annoying, the way it mercilessly sent up all of the tropes of the franchise. But from where I sit, nothing loves Star Trek more than this show does, warts and all, and it was successful at being both a classic Trek series and also its own new thing. A home run in my book.

And SHRINKING has concluded its sophomore season in great form—its home, AppleTV+ is making the service free to all this weekend, so it’s a good time to check it out if you haven’t yet. A great show from the start, season two was more refined, more focused and more polished. It really is something of a spiritual successor to TED LASSO in the realm of heartfelt feel-good television. And (no great surprise) Harrison Ford is a superstar in it, effortlessly dry and funny and gruff and real. Bring on year three!

I also read a bunch of books while I was away, including REMO WILLIAMS: THE ADVENTURE CONTINUES, an anthology of brand new short stories by a variety of writers about the characters featured in the long-running DESTROYER series. To be honest, the book was a bit of a mixed bag, with some solid entries sharing space with others in which the characters acted a bit at variance with what had been established. Also, as has been the case with a few DESTROYER projects of recent vintage, the political slant of some of the stories was ramped way up. That isn’t a surprise, as the series was always very conservative-leaning in its heyday. But at least to my memory, it was better at painting all sides as equally crazy, even if the left was more often the target of its satire. But in particular here, the last story, in which a thinly-disguised Joe Biden sends a trans woman to infiltrate the campaign of his opponent and assassinate the heroic, humble, plain-folk, wrongly-accused, saintly thinly-disguised Donald Trump, was a bit hard to take.

More successful was RISING SON by Gerald Welch, who has been authoring a quasi-spinoff/quasi-sequel to THE DESTROYER for a few years now. This volume is all about the youth and upbringing of Chiun and his ascension to the position of Master of Sinanju, and it had everything that I like about these stories without all of the stuff I don’t. Threading together events mentioned off-handedly in a half-dozen random DESTROYER books, Welch puts them all together and expands on them well to craft a story that entirely works on its own even without that background knowledge.

I also took the time to read the late Lou Mougin’s final work, SECONDARY ADVENTURE HEROES OF COMICS’ GOLDEN AGE. It’s a sequel to his earlier SECONDARY SUPERHEROES OF COMICS’ GOLDEN AGE, and like that book, it gives an impressively detailed recounting of the adventures and chroniclers of just about every noteworthy jungle, science fiction, adventure and western strip that was published up through the early 1950s. It’s very impressive just as a reference volume—though it’s a book you can’t read for too long at one sitting, as the plots of many of these nascent series all start to run together after awhile.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about the making of MARVEL COMICS #1000

Five years ago, I reposted this piece about the short-lived NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET black and white magazine

And ten years ago, I wrote about the SUPERHERO MERCHANDISE mail order outlet.

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I’m writing this particular Newsletter backwards, so this is the first section that I’ve completed, while on the journey homeward. Hopefully everybody had a nice bunch of holidays and is refreshed and rejuvenated to face the fresh horrors awaiting us all in 2025! See you next week!

Hat’s All, Folks!

Tom B