#162: Butch and Buzzi

Word’s been going around the Internet for the past couple of days that artist Jackson “Butch” Guice has passed away. I worked with Butch quite a number of times over the years, beginning on DEATHLOK at the very start of my career and on into CAPTAIN AMERICA years later and INVADERS years after that. But for all that, I can’t say that I knew him terribly well. I do remember buying his first published work on the independent series THE CRUSADERS, which became SOUTHERN KNIGHTS with its second issue. Guice was only involved in the first issue, having made the jump to full pro right afterwards, but I spoke about it at length here.

Somebody who knew Butch a lot better than me was writer/colorist and former Marvel editor Gregory Wright. Greg shared this drawing and these thoughts over on his Facebook page, and hopefully he won’t mind too greatly if I amplify them a little bit here.

My favorite piece of (Guice’s) art has likely never been seen by anyone but his family and a couple people in the Marvel offices. It was a cartoon note of himself ranting at me for wanting him to finish up pages on time. It was meant in good humor which is how I took it, but if we didn't have the relationship we had, he could never have done the piece. I'm CERTAIN he and may other creators can totally understand the need to vent in this manner, but never dared for fear of alienating themselves from work. Far from it, this endeared Butch to me even more and is a treasured piece of art. This is a bit of art from Butch that many people might never have seen. I hope you enjoy it and it lets you see a more complete picture of this amazing artist. I will miss him so much.

I also want to take a moment out to mark the passing of comedienne Ruth Buzzi this past week. She was a multi-talented force in the film and television industry, but to me, she’ll always be best remembered (much to her disappointment, I’m certain) as the wacky android Fi in the 1975 children’s series The Lost Saucer. I loved this stupid program as a kid.

On a more positive subject, I hope that everybody got to experience Free Comic Book Day for themselves yesterday. I made a trip out to the local shop here, Main Street Comics, and came back with a few things beyond the requisite free releases. Time was, you’d find me in a comic shop without fail every Wednesday picking up the latest releases, but like so many others, the COVID lockdown broke that pattern for me. I got into the habit of ordering my books shipped to my home, and it’s proven to be so convenient that I’ve continued doing so even once the lockdown was lifted. Which means that I only get to go into a comic shop every once in a while. Which in a way is a shame. I have a lot of good memories of shopping at different stores across the country over the course of my life. But being old, and having hit the point where I’ve pretty well got most everything that I might want in terms of back issues and collections and so forth, that once-driving need isn’t there in the same way for me. But FCBD motivates me to make the effort and see what’s going on firsthand.

Boy, I must have scared a bunch of people with my comments last time, because there were a ton of people who came out in support of this feature and who asked that I not stop producing it. And not to worry, I wasn’t actually genuinely considering it, but your comments were all appreciated regardless. A side-effect of this extra effort is that we got more questions even than we usually do. So I’m going to try to do as many of them as I’m able to, but it’s possible that I’ll run out of steam before reacting to every single one. Sorry about that. Here goes.

Joe West

Any chance of Dani Moonstar leading an X-team in this new era? Maybe even a solo book? Or at least joining a team? Loving her in Magik and just want to see more of her!

Well, as you say, Joe, she’s in MAGIK at the moment. But this possibility has been leaning a little bit more likely in recent months. so stay tuned.

Clive Reston

It's often hard for readers to identify excellent editing, because by its nature it's pretty much invisible. But I'd love it if you could shout out a couple of particularly good editorial decisions made by other editors during your time at Marvel--choices that were especially far-sighted or ingenious or elegant.

This is a tougher question than you might realize, Clive, in that I don’t have the same level of recollection about other people’s decisions as I do of my own over the years. But in most cases, this question comes down to somebody seeing something in a particular creator, and then championing that creator’s work until they caught on with a wider audience. So Axel Alonso using Jason Aaron to fill in for Reggie Hudlin on three issues of BLACK PANTHER, for example, and then continuing to find places to give Jason work until he became Jason Aaron might be one. It’s also about championing those projects or approaches that are a bit apart from the norm and not guaranteed to work out. So that might include Wil Moss pushing for Ryan North to write UNBEATABLE SQUIRREL GIRL and Erica Henderson to draw it, or more recently Wil and C.B. Cebulski lining up Peach Momoko to do ULTIMATE X-MEN. Looking backwards a bit, it’s pretty amazing how well Bob Harras kept the entire X-Line stable, functioning and popular even as many of his top artists left Marvel to form Image Comics. That’s no small achievement either.

CG

Are you able to give us some BTS tidbits about pitches and approvals. Especially when it comes to characters that maybe aren’t considered A-list X-Men anymore. Do they (writers) pitch you an outline just through email or do they do a PowerPoint presentation for you and the editors? Do you approve titles or do you have to run it by the execs up top first? How long does that process usually take for you when you receive pitches and you vibe with them? Am I incorrect in believing that a title should just take three months to create? Is it usually shorter or longer than that?

Lots of broad questions here, CG, so I’ll answer what I can. In every case, it’s different, but typically somebody will pitch me an unbidden idea through email. It may not even quite be a full outline, but instead just the core of the idea, enough to either interest me or not. From there, once I give people whatever feedback there might be, they would go off and put together a more fleshed-out outline, and depending on how well they built it, we might move forward from there or not. Any project that we want to do needs to go through a P & L process, which involves working out the costs to produce and guesstimating the likely sales result to make sure the project will make the margin that we’d need it to. And all projects need to be given the green light by the Editor in Chief as well.

Lucas

is there something for iceman & nightcrawler in their respective books that you could tease for their fans or could you just confirm if they're sticking around in their respective books especially now with some characters being shelved after their books being canceled

I don’t know that I follow why you’d think that other books being wrapped up would mean that characters would be sidelined in books that are not, Lucas. But you’ve no need to fear, Iceman and Nightcrawler will still both be appearing on the regular.

Mark Paglia

As a process question, how do you approach editing an issue at its various stages of production (i.e. editing a script vs editing a fully drawn page)?

Another big question, Mark. But I’ll try to keep this brief. at the initial script stage, what I’m the most immediately concerned with is whether the story is “draw-able”. By which I mean, that the plot all makes sense and has no overriding holes, that each scene contributes to the whole in a meaningful way, that each scene has a strong close and hook, and so forth. But I don’t worry overmuch about the specific copy until we get to the point where there’s artwork to bounce off of, as it’s the interplay between the images and the text that tends to impact the most on that. Accordingly, I do most of my hands-on work at that stage—cutting, adjusting, adding in missing elements (Name the damn characters!), cutting overlong exchanges, and on certain occasions even shuffling the order of pages and scenes for greater effectiveness. All of this is done in conjunction withe the writer of the issue, though ultimately I make the final call if such a call needs to be made. On artwork, if the artist in question is somewhat less established, I’ll usually review layouts or thumbnails before they move ahead to producing finished pages, so that I can avoid any storytelling problems or redraws ahead of time. Still, we hit situations where somebody has drawn the wrong costume or fouled up some element of the storytelling often enough that this process doesn’t take care of everything.

David Brazier

So please keep doing the Newsletter. Perhaps charge for it?

Appreciate the support, David. But charging would be a violation of our guiding principle: Always Free. Occasionally Interesting.

Brandon Giles

I’ve been thinking a lot about supporting casts lately and how integral (IMO) they are to a book, especially a solo series. I’m sure this is case by case, but what do you think the secret is to building a consistent and likable supporting cast for a character, and are pitches that strip that cast away a harder sell for you or is that case by case as well? For myself I’m thinking of the run after IMMORTAL HULK that pretty much immediately stripped away everyone Bruce had become close to in that run, and how much that made me lose interest even though it was by a writer whose work I typically enjoy.

There has definitely been a shift away from extended supporting casts over the past twenty years or so, Brandon. if I had to guess why, I’d say that it likely has to do with the fact that, given that the preferred style of storytelling is more cinematic these days with fewer words in the text overall, many writers just feel as though they don’t have the space to build out a larger cast effectively without sacrificing the main character. But I think that it’s pretty crucial that super heroes have some regular people in their orbit, both because heroes are only heroic when they’re saving or shielding others, and because this provides the necessary contrast that helps to make the lead characters feel special. I tend to hate what I sometimes call ‘Dynasty comics” in which super heroes live in their super headquarters and have their super problems and super affairs with their super friends and super enemies and there isn’t anything even tangentially relevant to the life of an ordinary reader in the mix. So i tend to make a concerted effort to make certain that there are human beings in all of the books that I work on as well as larger-than-life characters.

Craig Byrne

Do you think it's better for a popular character to have only one title, perhaps distributed more, or a family of titles? For example, is a biweekly AMAZING SPIDER-MAN a better notion than the Web of/Amazing/Adjectiveless/Spectacular we had in 35 years ago, or the Superman family of Man of Steel, Adventures, Action, and the main title?

I think the question is “Better” by what metric, Craig? Certainly it’s better for Spider-Man to be headlining in multiple titles from the point of view of generating income and keeping the operation solvent. And that’s been the case for Spidey (and Superman and Batman and a few others) since before I started reading their adventures. I do think that there’s something to be said for one series and one creative team to be handling every aspect of the characters’ fictitious lives—but that simply isn’t possible for the more popular characters given the hunger for more of their adventures.

Scott Ecker

One of the main things I love about the From the Ashes books is that each series has it's own unique pacing. Adjectiveless double ships and is fast-paced with multiple storyline building. Exceptional comes out once a month and takes a leisurely pace (kind of like a hang out vibe). Storm feels thoughtful, deliberate and more heady and emotional. X-Factor would go as fast as the jokes would come.

This might just be the way I'm personally reading these, but I really enjoy that there is such a variety in tone and pace. For me, the four books I mentioned really have a pacing that fits the characters in each.

How do you set-up that type of variety while creating and maintaining an entire line of comics?

That all comes down, Scott, to making sure that each series that you’re doing is doing its own thing, and has a reason for existing beyond just being “more of the same.” I tended to feel, rightly or wrongly, that a lot of the X-Books during the Krakoa period tended to feel similar, given the fact that all of the characters lived in the same place and shared the same environment, so when we were lining up these launches, one of the goals was to spread the characters out so that even in their environment, they’d be dealing with different things and provide a different reading experience.

Chris Sutcliffe

is there a costume in comics that you miss because it changed for some reason?

There’s probably a great deal of them, Chris. But just to pick one right this moment, while I don’t completely hate the current red-and-black Flash costume, I don’t really think it’s any improvement over the characters signature look, and so I don’t see any good reason for the change. By that same token, I’ve never been a fan of all of the additional added lines that were placed all over that outfit either. Some looks are classic and will always work, and I feel like that Carmine Infantino design survived for so long with only minor tweaks and adjustments because it falls into that category.

Joel Zorba

the X-Men #15 fanmail was almost all about how happy fans are with Jed Mackay's Cyclops. :-)

So could you please tell us how likely fans are to get a Cyclops solo series in the next few months? 20%, 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80% or more? Please make it happen! ;-)

I think there’s a better-than-zero chance of this happening, Joel.

Stefan

I thought I was being pretty clear, but to take another stab at it; you mention that you often enjoy "crappy comics" due to their flaws, but you don't think "the basic fundamentals of storytelling" as you see them, might restrict that enjoyability. And I guess firstly, it's surprising to me that you would rank the enjoyability of a comic below "the basic fundamentals of storytelling" in determining the quality of a comic.

Secondly, it's surprising to me that apparent contradiction (enjoying something that doesn't follow the rules that supposedly must be followed) doesn't lead you to question whether those rules truly are "the basic fundamentals of storytelling", or whether they are simply practices that can at times be used to improve substandard stories, but should not be viewed as hard and fast, nor should they take precedence over the more difficult to quantify consideration of "Are we having fun?"

There is the philosophy, of course, of "rules are made to broken" and the notion that dogmatically trying to apply an unchanging set of rules to creative endeavors may result in products that are technically flawless but also somewhat antiseptic and consequently, less fun. In concert with that, many would say it is the flaws that make things interesting, so while of course we wouldn't try to deliberately insert flaws, perhaps there's a point where the process of ruling out all potential flaws leaves the final product lacking something vital.

That's not to say that your approach of developing a firm set of rules and ensuring your projects adhere to them hasn't led to high quality comics over the years. Certainly your longevity is testimony to the career wisdom of such an approach, as it avoids many potential pitfalls. But perhaps because it is alchemy as you say, the greatest successes are not achieved by following the rules (or else everything that followed the rules would meet with such success!).

I have to say, Stefan, I think you’re making a little bit too much out of some abstractions here. I can enjoy junk comics without any need or desire to emulate them—this is the classic definition of something being “so bad it’s good.” And I don’t feel that I’m so inflexible with whatever rules I abide with that I stifle creativity. But, for example, I don’t think you can point to a story on the fact of the Earth that would be better if the characters weren’t named in it. I don’t see that as stifling, I see that as basic storytelling craft. If the audience can’t understand or follow your story, then they can’t enjoy it, right?

Sat

there is any possibility that Emma comic becames a permanent solo series?

Also, also, also there is something in the near future for Shang-Chi that you could say? Us Shang-Chi fans reeeeally miss him! If you could say anything in that regard it will be great!

That EMMA FROST limited series is designed to simply be a limited series, Sat. But that doesn’t mean that we might not do a similar project with the character set in the present at some point. As for Shang-Chi, he’s going to be showing up in a book in the near future.

Mark Coale

Interesting to hear your anecdote about the Shocker. I was emailing with Mark at the time and he mentioned at some point he had pitched doing something involving the SSOSV at DC. I had figured that idea was ended up as Wanted, so it’s interesting to learn he had a similar idea for something at Marvel, as the two ideas do seem to form the core of Wanted (as I remember it).

I had thought that it was ideas for his SSOSV pitch that Mark had reworked into THE SHOCKER, Mark, but I suppose that it could have been the other way around. In either case, it’s sort of irrelevant, as neither project wound up happening in that form.

Paul F

when a book produced in the 70's/80's had an American penciller and a Filipino inker how did it work time wise and with costs? And by that I mean how much lead time did a book like the John Carter of Mars, that had Carmine Infantino and Rudy Nebres on art, take to produce from writing to coloring and lettering? Was it a longer lead time than normal as the art work had to travel back and forth to the Philippines? And did the costs of shipping the art raise the costs of such a book being produced? Would it be Marvel that paid for such things?

Such books wouldn’t have had any longer a lead time, Paul, as they were mostly coming out monthly just like everything else. But it did mean that the time to ship pages to and from the Philippines had to be factored in on those assignments. And yes, Marvel and presumably DC would have paid for the additional shipping costs. The Filipino artists were working so cheaply that I expect that it still represented a substantial savings, even with that additional cost.

Yliaste

Was Doug/Revelation's design changed because of backlash?

No, Yliaste. And in fact, Revelation’s design hasn’t really been changed at all.

Michael

Have you read the Bobby London Popeye strips? HIs is my second favourite Popeye run, and I was very happy when IDW collected them, including his final three weeks of strips which had been pulled from distribution and replaced by reprints.

Yes, Michael, I read the Bobby London run, including all of the strips that were censored and got him taken off of the assignment. And I enjoyed that run, though it was a very different thing from what Segar did with the character in the strip’s formative years.

Kurt Busiek

Oh, there very much was such a rule -- I can attest to it. It wasn't "get rid of all the bold words," but it was "use bold words sparingly." I ran into it when I started writing POWER MAN & IRON FIST, and Denny O'Neil told me that Jim didn't want bold words used very often. I specifically remember him saying that his sensibility had been to hit about one bold word a phrase, for rhythm of speech, but Jim wanted no more than one per balloon, and preferably none unless it was really needed. As an Englehart devotee entering the business, this felt very wrong to me, but I tried.

I also remember the justification was that novels don't use italics all the time, which I thought was silly, because comics aren't novels.

As far as "Tom hates the fans" goes, I occasionally advised Mark Waid to think of the internet as one big letter column, and to stick to letter column answers when tempted to sarcasm: "A provocative idea there, NAME, but here's another reader who feels the polar opposite!" rather than saying, "Yeah, I think that's a bad idea." But I don't think you're interested in doing that.

Oh, and of course there's the team that started out as my idea for what to do with POWER MAN & IRON FIST after issue 100, then became a creator-owned pitch, then crossed your desk as SUPERSTARS INCORPORATED (I think), then became an Image pitch, and finally turned up in print as THE POWER COMPANY at DC.

Boy, Jim Shooter had some weird ideas sometimes, didn’t he, Kurt? On your other points, when it was pitched to me, THE POWER COMPANY was already called THE POWER COMPANY—I think I may still have the proposal around here somewhere, along with STRIKER Z and a few others. And if you’ve read any of my letters pages, I think you’ll find that they very much resemble this section in terms of what gets said and how it gets said. But yes, I do remember your advocacy of that approach.

Malachi Wells

What's the current status of Handbooks? There used to be multiple ongoing series and themed one-shots during 2000s and early 2010s, but in recent years there's barely been a handful. Are they seen as less relevant with online sources such as Wikipedia and Marvel.com readily available to summarize character history and powers?

We don’t seem to be doing a whole lot in the way of Handbook-style material at the moment, Malachi. Some of that effort is no doubt being diverted into the new Marvel RPG. I don’t know that they’re less relevant, but they’ve certainly been less commercially viable in more recent years than they once had been.

Tom Galloway

Nice looking Popeyeverse figures, and they're reaching the point of deep dives with Roughhouse, Toar, and even Castor Oyl (now when they hit Ham Gravy...). But a few things you didn't mention. The company doing this line is Boss Fight Studio and their web page for all their Popeye figures is at https://www.bossfightstudio.com/collections/popeye-classics?page=1 and you can buy them from them there.

Thanks for including that link, Tom.

Ben Morse

For perfect last issues, I’ll echo Starman simply because the story was intended to be close ended and (to date) nobody has gone back on it.

From the other end of the spectrum, it might be a dark horse, but as much as I was sad in the moment and it got reversed pretty quick, DnA’s Guardians ending with Nova and Star-Lord getting a Butch and Sundance moment was kind of cool.

Some solid good last issue selections there, Ben.

JV

Someone last week had mentioned GiJoe 155 (the end of the Marvel run) as a perfect last issue and I must agree - Larry Hama hit it out of the park there.

The issue is narrated by Snake eyes in the form of a letter to a young man who is thinking of enlisting - brilliant, emotional and revealing as we 'hear' Snake eyes voice for the first time and see how pragmatic, sensitive and hurt he is (definitely some PTSD in there) but not whiney and no self pity. Just a realistic and at times gut wrenching look at his life as a soldier.

Ironically with art by Phil Gosier (same guy who drew those last Nova issues!)

And a nice pick from you too, JV.

Steve McSheffrey

There's something I generally only think about after reading a story containing it. It's not something that doesn't really affect my enjoyment of a series or story but it's the very odd way different children grow up in the MU. I'm not talking about the way the Richards children were aged up or similar cases because there's an in-story explanation. I'm talking about the way Kristoff was Franklin's age and Ahura born after him and both are now older than him without any mention of artificial aging. I think Cassie Lang and the Power Pack kids might also have aged differently than their compatriots. Is it something you've noticed and had your inner fan boy annoyed at as well? I can't see anyone addressing it honestly because I've seen no sign anyone else is bothered by it so why waste page space. Just curious how you personally feel about it.

That’s simply one of the flukes about having a wide-ranging continuous fictional universe such as the MU, Steve. Different characters in different places (and handled by different creative teams) are going to wind up aging at different rates. The amount of effort it would take to prevent such a thing would be far greater than any possible benefit, so it is what it is. It’s a thing that I bump up against every once in a while—I don’t understand, for example, how Normie Osborn can be anywhere near as old as he’s portrayed in the present. But that wasn’t my choice, and so I just need to live with it.

David Goldfarb

Another comic that I thought had a really good last issue was Al Ewing and Leonard Kirk's Avengers Inc. It was very clear that Ewing had enough story to last through to issue #10 if he'd gotten five more issues, but he managed to wrap things up in #5 in a way that didn't feel crammed or rushed, merely eventful.

I’m very gratified to hear that you thought so, David, as it was an almost impossible task that Al pulled off about as well as was possible.

Brandon Giles

I’ll never understand why Avengers Inc was canceled so unceremoniously like it was. You’d think working on some of the best comics the company’s ever produced would buy Ewing a ten issue minimum.

I hear these sorts of sentiments from time to time, Brandon, and I get where you’re coming from—you’d like to see a thing that you enjoyed be able to go the distance. But everybody operates under the same conditions, and those are simple and unyielding: if a particular project isn’t profitable, it closes up its tent, regardless of how many other projects the creators involved may have worked on that performed better. Nobody gets a free ride.

Karl Kesel

It used to be comics like Miller's DAREDEVIL or Simonson's THOR or Alan Moore's SWAMP THING were THE comics coming out— comics EVERYONE was talking about and paying attention to, comics that were exquisite agony to wait 30 days between issues. Other comics have met this rarified status over the past decades— Jeff Smith's BONE, Possibly Kirkman's THE WALKING DEAD, and most recently Vaughan and Staple's SAGA. But since then…?

It seems to me those days are behind us, that today even a great comic doesn't stand out from the pack or draw as much attention as it once might have. Is it because the market has expanded, and produces so many disparate kinds of comics now? Or that the craft of comics has risen to such a level that there are so many excellent comics (such as Taylor and Redondo's NIGHTWING) that a "masterpiece" is hard to spot? I think both of these could be part of the answer.

I posted about this on Facebook, and someone inadvertently offered up what was, to me, the best possible answer: Collected Editions. They didn't exist in the days of Miller's DAREDEVIL and the like. That meant when you heard about a great comic, you had to grab a copy of it RIGHT THEN. You wait, it's gone (or have to pay outrageous back issue prices for). That gave those runs a much bigger urgency than they have nowadays when, for instance, I know Waid and Samnee's BATMAN & ROBIN YEAR ONE will be amazing, but I can read it… someday, possibly long after the collected edition comes out. In that way the buzz about the book is spread out over months, if not years, and is by definition less intense.

You can see the same thing happening in movies and TV. Streaming means you don't have to rush out to see a movie in the theater, and has virtually eliminated "must see TV" where you have to be in front of your set at a certain time and day in order to have something to add to the water cooler conversation the next day.

This has even led to something new (to me, at least). THE ACCOUNTANT 2, starring Ben Affleck, was not made because the original did so well in the theaters, it was made because the original was the most-streamed (and/or rented; I forget which) movie of (I believe) 2017.

This isn't a complain but more an observation. If I've learned anything in my life, it's that the only constant in this world is change. When I was 10 years old, I thought the world had ALWAYS been like it was right then. When, in fact, it was substantially different 10, even 5, years earlier (and later).

I'd love to hear any thoughts you have on this, Tom. Also: has Marvel ever published a new series NOT based on the success of that character's last series, but on the (unexpectedly strong) sales of the collected edition(s)? Inquiring minds…

Well, Karl, to start with, I think you may simply be looking in the wrong direction for those books. I would advocate that right this second, the books that function as the equivalent to those Claremont/Byrne X-MEN and Frank Miller DAREDEVIL issues are the current ULTIMATE line (in particular ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN and THE ULTIMATES) and DC’s ABSOLUTE line (particularly ABSOLUTE BATMAN and ABSOLUTE WONDER WOMAN.) Easy to miss, but there it is. Beyond that, sure, I would say that the reliability of collected editions definitely impacts on how absolutely urgent it is for readers to seek out the hot new comic of the moment right at that moment. And no, I can’t recall any time when the sales of a collected edition so eclipsed the sale of the serial publication such that we wound up doing more of the same.

Montana Mott

I saw you were working on Imperial. A lot of the Wiccan & Hulkling fandom is wondering where they are as previews and such come out. I’ve also seen fans concerned they will be killed off during it. If you’re able to say, can we expect to see those two at all?

Yes, you’ll see Hulkling and Wiccan in IMPERIAL, Montana.

Robert David

There's been a very big issue with the Recent Cloak and Dagger runs and appearances, Cloak has been treated very poorly and barely gets visibility, it's almost as if certain writers don't like him, I just want to ask if you could personally look into it and see for yourself, he kind of doesn't do much of anything anymore, the spotlight seems to be solely on Dagger.

I don’t know that I can really agree with this, Robert. Other than recently during BLOOD HUNT, when Cloak was paralyzed just like the rest of the MU Darkforce users, it doesn’t seem to me as though Cloak has been perennially sidelined.

Stephen

with the Fantastic Four movie on the way what storyline would you hand to someone to introduce them to the characters.

Depending on the person and their familiarity with the comic book idiom, I might give then classic Stan and Jack material, the start of the John Byrne run, the start of the Mark Waid/Mike Wieringo run or almost any issue of the current Ryan North era.

Sergio Flores

I feel like you’ve touched on this topic before, and I think you do something along the lines of what I’m asking about with junior editors, but have you ever used past publishing events or publishing challenges as thought experiments? And if so, any rapid fire thoughts (and I concede that it’s probably a big ask) on how you would have handled these specific events and/or eras if you were given the problems to solve? (And I suppose I’m asking you to cheat and use all the knowledge and experience you have now, plus hindsight.)

- Crisis on Infinite Earths and the subsequent reboot - any strong ideas on how to course correct without a reboot?

- Assuming that COIE couldn’t be stopped:

— how to reconcile the connection between LSH and Superboy

— how to handle a new JLA origin and new founding members

- New 52 - again, were there course corrections that you would have advised to avoid a full reboot?

- Would you encourage the idea of legacies in the DCU?

This again is a very broad question, Sergio. But to try to give you at least a little hint of something: the real goal of CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS was to streamline the DC cosmology down to a more Marvel Universe-style structure, eliminating all of the alternate Earths. Given that goal, I don’t think you could not do the project. But probably the mistake here was in not going all the way with it and beginning everything afresh with a new #1 as was planned at one point. In terms of the Legion, you either need to maintain Superboy as a part of your Superman mythos or completely reconceptualize the Legion without any involvement from Superboy and his world—which, if you’re starting from scratch, you can do. I don’t know that changing the JLA founders was ever necessary—I wouldn’t have made the choice to introduce Wonder Woman in the present, which is where that alteration really came from. And in terms of the NEW 52, same thing: I wouldn’t have tried to keep some things and change others. If you’re restarting everything, then you need to restart everything, all or nothing.

X of Alex

With IMPERIAL and more space-y stuff beyond that, can I hope to see the Light Of My Life, space lawyer extraordinaire Murd Blurdock, aka the Seeing Being?

I can’t really see Murd being a part of IMPERIAL, Alex. Sorry.

James Rhoads

With the discussion of perfect final issues, I have to wonder about final issues that try to burn the place down.

When Power Man and Iron Fist was cancelled, the editor and writer had IF killed off in a meaningless way as a form of protest against how the book was treated at the time.

Defenders ended with 2/3 of the team killed off, including long time characters Valkyrie and Moondragon. The writer Peter Gillis wound up bringing them all back over the next few years. But I wonder if that was a deliberate decision due ot the cancellation.

There was a general philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s that when a series ended its run, it was wise to tie up all outstanding loose ends and retire the characters, James. This was done in many more places than the two that you list off here. So I don’t think these two instances represent outliers, I think they were very much in keeping with the way things were then being handled. it wasn’t really until the very late 1980s/early 1990s that most of those characters were brought back by other creators later on.

Corey

Can you share any background on The Craptacular B-Sides? It seemed really random and by some fairly obscure creators (Brett Weldele hadn't done Surrogates yet), and had a "do you want to see more? Let us know!" message at the end of issue three. Obviously not enough people were interested in seeing more, but was it intended to be a try-out series or something?

I didn’t work on B-SIDES, Corey, so there’s only a limited amount that I can tell you. But Marvel was taking a lot of crazy, wild swings at that point, so doing that project feels very much in line with that era in my mind. The hope, as it is in every case when something like that is done, is that it will attract enough of an audience to become viable.

Will Shugg

Who came up with the idea for Jonathan Hickman’s SHIELD series? Also, I seem to remember there was a big pause in the middle of the second series of it. Assuming I’m not imagining that what caused it?

SHIELD was conceived by Jonathan and Joe Quesada if I’m recalling things correctly, Will. And the gap was caused by Jonathan becoming busy with other projects that were considered more important to Marvel, so he didn’t have the bandwidth for the back half of SHIELD for some time.

Skarr

Will we see Gabriel Summers and Sunspot playing a role in the Imperial event?

I don’t believe so, Skarr. Sorry.

Jackoyeah

What is usually the cause of a character or a franchise receiving a major reinvention? I’m thinking along the lines of Immortal Hulk, Krakoa, or Bendis’ New Avengers - is it almost always down to flagging sales or is it often a decision from editorial that feel, story-wise, there isn’t a lot more to mine from the ‘current’ status quo?

One other question, and I’m sure you can’t answer at all, or at least in detail - but outside of the MCU, might we see a Bob Reynolds appearance sometime soon??

More than anything else, Jacko, it happens because somebody has an idea, whether a creator or an editor. So it’s not flagging sales so much as it is a new approach that seems to hold much commercial promise. And no immediate plans for the Sentry that I’m aware of, sorry.

Alan Russell

Any chance we’ll see Adam Warlock again soon, Imperial maybe?

Boy, everybody is wondering about the cast of IMPERIAL this week, eh? But no, Alan, no Warlock in it, sorry.

Andres Felipe Galindo Olarte

I don’t know if you have read them. But I would like to know so far how have you liked the Absolute Comics line from DC? Any takes on their take? Any favourite titles?

I’ve pretty much read them all, Andres, and for the most part I’ve found them well-crafted. I don’t have quite the same emotional investment in these iterations as I do the classic versions, but if they continue to be produced strongly, the current generation of readers may feel differently. I found that I liked ABSOLUTE FLASH #1 a lot more than I expected to, though I didn’t love the second issue quite as much.

Jakob Kibala

are you reading DC's Hush 2 by Loeb and Lee? I liked what you wrote some months ago about the first go-around this creative team had with the Dark Kinght Detective. Now, I don't believe that anyone could have expected Loeb and Lee just reproducing Hush 1 magic effortlessly. How do you approach comebacks like this, as a reader?

As a reader, Jakob, I simply read them and then decide if I want to keep on reading them. I’ve so far only read the first issue of H2SH, but I’m going to keep going with it for the moment.

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Off The Wall

What you see above is the original artwork for one of the Captain America newspaper strips done by Karl Kesel. For one of the relatively recent anniversaries of the character, Karl pitched the idea of producing a daily comic strip in the style of the daily adventure comics of the 1940s when the character was first coming out. It ran in weekly installments in Marvel.com, and then the entire run of several weeks was collected in a Trade Paperback. It’s a relatively obscure work since it wasn’t initially released in print, but Karl had a whole lot of fun with it and seemed to be comfortable with the format. So after all was said and done, he gave me the strip you see above. It’s an odd size, so it lives for the moment inside an art portfolio I have full of stuff that I haven’t got the space to properly display.

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On The Spinner Rack

It’s another turn for my office Spinner Rack, revealing a new set of assorted books on display. Right at the top is a copy of FANTASTIC FOUR #200, a comic that didn’t get distributed in my area when it first came out and which vexed me for months until I could finally purchase a copy later on. Underneath that is the one and only Fantastic Four comic I ever wrote, FANTASTIC FOUR UNLIMITED #8. Below that is the second issue of UNTOLD LEGEND OF CAPTAIN MARVEL, also written by me, and then an issue of the NEXUS/MAGNUS, ROBOT FIGHTER crossover series by Steve Rude. Underneath that is a random issue of CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE FALCON, followed by AVENGERS #1 by Kurt and George. Then there’s a John Byrne-illustrated MARVEL TEAM-UP, an issue of Matt Wagner’s GRENDEL as well as an issue of the spin-off limited series SILVER BACK, and finally UNCANNY X-MEN #300 with a holographic foil cover by John Romita Jr.

The ego rack, meanwhile, leads off with the Eisner-Award-winning SILVER SURFER #11, the moebius strip issue. A later SURFER issue is below that, followed by FANTASTIC FOUR #512 by Waid and Wieringo and AVENGERS/JLA #2 by Busiek and Perez. Next is the anniversary issue of CAPTAIN AMERICA, an issue of UNSTABLE MOLECULES, the HOUSE OF M #1 Director’s Cut, an issue of SHIELD with some cover copy that I’m still quite pleased with (“Hand-to-Face with Dominic Fortune!”), the foil covered first issue of AGE OF ULTRON, and the Eisner-nominated MARVEL AGE #1000.

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I Buy Crap

Having enjoyed the anime so much, I went ahead and ordered the complete run so far of the FRIEREN: BEYOND JOURNEY’S END manga, which I’ve been working my way through one volume at a time. Of the dozen volumes in that stack, I’ve so far finished five. I think the anime is actually stronger than the manga is, but I’ll be happy to get up to the story material that goes beyond where the first season of the anime left things off.

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Behind the Curtain

This is a fun little story, and not really mine, so all credit to Mark Waid who sent me these pictures a few years back when this happened.

The fellow you see above, James Dawson, had stopped into the comic shop that Waid was at the time a part owner of in order to pick up the first issue of Waid’s ARCHIE #1 launch, which was then being released. The year was 2015. And he brought an amazing artifact along with him.

Here’s the letter that James brought along with him. As you can see, some 68 years earlier, he’d won a 25 cent savings stamp having written in to a contest being run in the pages of Archie Comics’ LAUGH COMICS. As you see above, he even still had the stamp (which must have been worth as much as 38 cents after all those years!) Kind of amazing that after close to seven decades James was still reading Archie comics.

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Pimp My Wednesday

Who among you will still be reading the Marvel books seven decades from now? Let’s hope a bunch of you. And here are some new treats to speed you forward on that journey.

X-MEN #16 introduces an entirely new group of X-Men, a team that’s very much at odds with Cyclops’ Alaskan crew. Jed MacKay and Netho Diaz will introduce you to them this Wednesday.

STORM #8 looks on the surface like a typical team-up between Ororo and Thor, but it’s so much more than that. Murewa Ayodele and Luciano Vecchio will take you to some unexpected places in this issue, including a federal lock-up.

And with the feature film waiting in the wings, we’ve asked a bevy of terrific creators to contribute brand new stories of the cosmic quartet in the pages of FANTASTIC FOUR FANFARE #1. In this inaugural issue, you’ll get three all-new tales from Mark Waid and Ramon Rozanas, Alan Davis, and Andrew Wheeler and Sara Pichelli. And future issues are just as loaded with talent, including such names as Hickman, Buckingham, Christopher, Slott, Martin, Zdarsky, Allred, DeFalco, Frenz, Straczynski, Cafu, Weisman, Bagley, Johnson and Cannon. It’s a bumpre crop!

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A Comic Book On Sale 60 Years Ago Today, May 4, 1965

The spy craze was very much a thing in the early 1960s, kicked off, I believe, by President John F. Kennedy having expressed his enjoyment for the James Bond novels being written by Ian Fleming. That endorsement coupled with the release of the first Bond film DR. NO led to their being a huge interest in spies and high-tech espionage stories all across popular media. On television, THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. was a bit hit, and even the spoof GET SMART was wildly popular. It was in this environment that Jack Kirby suggested to editor Stan Lee that they modernize their popular character Sgt. Nick Fury, bringing him out of his native World War II era into the present day and setting him up as a super hero super-spy. Kirby’s pitch was for a strip titled NICK FURY: THE MAN CALLED D.E.A.T.H., which didn’t fly—I suspect that Lee was concerned that the Comics Code might not approve such a title. So instead, after some brainstorming, Fury was instead cast as AGENT OF S.H.I.E.L.D. and was given the lead feature spot in the flagging STRANGE TALES series. Prior to this, the Human Torch had held that spot, but backed up by lackluster creative talent and weak story directions, even the inclusion of Johnny Storm’s popular teammate the Thing as a co-star couldn’t get that strip to work, and so it was dropped. Kirby only worked on the first couple of S.H.I.E.L.D. stories, turning the series over to other hands, none of whom had quite his explosive imagination. After a strong start, the strip flagged for a bit, until the arrival of newcomer Jim Steranko shot it into the stratosphere once again. Steranko’s design-oriented approach made it a series packed with startling visuals, and once he began writing it as well, he modernized the concept and the character, making Fury slicker, cooler and more contemporary than he’d been up till that time. Interestingly, STRANGE TALES was perhaps the most schizophrenic of the Marvel split books. You can imagine that both Captain America and Iron Man in TALES OF SUSPENSE appealed to pretty much the same kind of reader. Ditto the Sub-Mariner and the Hulk in TALES TO ASTONISH. But it’s hard to imagine that the readers who were into the trippy, psychedelic adventures of sorcerer Doctor Strange saw much appeal in the hard-nosed government ramrod Nick Fury, and vice versa. Perhaps that’s why, when the split books were divided into six individual comics, the first two to be cancelled were NICK FURY and DOCTOR STRANGE. Could be that you needed the audience for both characters combined to be a success.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

MOON KNIGHT #1 came out on May 4, 2011 and was perhaps the most off-beat incarnation of the character that had been done up to that point. Creative team Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev were both big fans of the Bill Sienkiewicz take on the character, but they chose to go in a completely different direction with Marc Spector. For one thing, they moved him to the west coast, where he was working on a television series based around the mythology of his patron god Khonshu. More concretely (and commercially), rather than being plagued by alternate personalities Steven Grant and Jake Lockley, in this series, Moon Knight would channel the aspects of other super heroes that he’d spend a bunch of time with; Spider-Man, Captain America and Wolverine. In effect, he was a one-person New Avengers. At the time, the media rights to Daredevil were held by other companies, so there was a concerted push to elevate Moon Knight into a star with the hopes that the property could eventually be turned into a television series. (At the time, there was talk about launching a second Moon Knight series to be written by Jeph Loeb, but that didn’t wind up happening—though Jeph and Ed McGuinness did use Spector in a couple of issues of their HULK run.) It was wildly different than what anybody expected, but I liked it for the verve of its approach and ideas. Unfortunately, it was one of those periods where the expansion of the AVENGERS line meant that something had to give, and that something for me was MOON KNIGHT. I passed the book over to editor Stephen Wacker after the seventh issue, and Steve saw it to its eventual conclusion with #12. It never quite connected with an audience in the same way Bendis and Maleev’s DAREDEVIL run had, which is a shame. It definitely did its own thing.

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The New Warriors Chronicles

NEW WARRIORS #60 was an oversized special issue. I’m not completely sure why, apart from the fact that it would have been the fifth anniversary of the title being launched. Or it may simply have been a way to justify the cover enhancement of metallic gold ink, which was used on the logo and Nova himself. Either way, this was advantageous as it gave us the space necessary to wrap up the dangling plotlines from the just-cancelled NOVA series and to set up the book’s future trajectory.

By this point, the creative team of Evan Skolnick and Patrick (Patch) Zircher had jelled pretty well, and we were all pulling in the same direction on the series, which made these issue mostly simple to deal with. There was a sea change coming that we were going to have to deal with and incorporate (one that we already knew about when we were working on this issue but which I’m holding of talking about until next time since it’s more applicable there.)

So this issue opens up with Turbo flying onto the scene rapidly enough to save the falling Rich Rider before he could splatter himself on the ground below due to his having deliberately walked off the edge of a building in order to trigger his lost powers as had happened once before. In the aftermath, though, the suicidal nature of Rich’s choice is brushed past pretty quickly—clearly, none of us gave it enough thought—so that we can get back into the crux of the main story, which involved the team having to face down Volx, the Dire Wraith queen who had made her way to Earth along with Rich.

This was also the issue where we made a couple of necessary cosmetic changes. As I mentioned when we talked about issue #59, I really disliked the costume Justice was wearing and so at the earliest opportunity, I had it changed. Vance’s new suit debuted this issue (after he ran around for most of it in the tatters of his old one), designed by Zircher. I really liked this costume and maintain that it’s the best look that Vance has ever had, though I seem to be alone in that assessment.

Similarly, right from the start, Evan and I agreed that we needed to do something about Carlton LaFroyge, Hindsight Lad. He’d been introduced by Fabian Nicieza as a bit of a joke character, a somewhat nasty parody of too-enthusiastic fans. And he was overtly absurd, in a way that made it difficult to take the character at all seriously. Rather than dumping him, we instead gave him a makeover. Evan’s thought was to cast him more in the mold of M.A.S.H.’s Radar O’Reilly, as a guy who could work the system to get the team whatever they needed—as he does in this issue by forging credentials as an official Avengers unit to order equipment for the group, including Vance’s new suit. We also got him out of his Halloween costume with the rear view mirrors on his head, slimmed him down a few pounds and put him into a more utilitarian jumpsuit. Finally, we had him drop the Lad from his name, and started calling him simply Hindsight. I don’t know that it was enough to make him into a fan favorite or anything, but we at least tried to give him a bit of dignity back.

We also took advantage of the fact that the NIGHT THRASHER series had run its course to bring both Thrash and Rage back into the orbit of the series, allying them with the Psionex team that had been the Warriors’ constant rivals since the beginning of the run. They weren’t front-and-center in every issue, but this was better, I think, than letting the characters fade into obscurity. Thrash also gives the ownership of the team’s Crash-Pad headquarters to the Warriors as a parting gift.

And finally, we set up a plotline that we knew was going to play out over the next year or so, as Rina Patel, the future Timeslip, makes another jump into her own future, to a moment where she’s in full costume again as a member of the New Warriors and is holding the just-dead body of Speedball. It’s this vision that causes her to seek out the team, pulling her into their orbit and leading us into the next block of stories to come. Looking back at this now, I’m pretty happy with how the book is juggling both its long-term and short-term plotlines and how all of the characters are getting nice moments to shine. This run has always been a bit eclipsed in the hearts of NEW WARRIORS fans by Fabian’s earlier work, but while it’s perhaps not quite as contemporary, I think it’s pretty polished, especially given the relative inexperience of the creative team.

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Monofocus

This week, for no particular reason, I cracked the copy of HIS TYPEWRITER GREW SPURS that I was given as a Christmas gift several months ago. The slim book is a biography of Fran Striker, the original creator of the Lone Ranger, as written by his son, Fran Striker Jr. I was never a huge Lone Ranger guy growing up. Even the fact that he wore a mask wasn’t enough to get me interested in watching a western as a kid. But over the past decade, I’ve spent a bunch of time reading up on the character and his history, and watching and listening to a batch of his radio and television episodes. From here, I’ve moved into CLAYTON MOORE AND THE LEGEND OF THE LONE RANGER, a volume concerning the making of the poorly-regarded Lone Ranger feature film of 1979 and the efforts made to prevent former Ranger actor Clayton Moore from wearing the famous mask and making personal appearances during the promotion of the film. These are all events that I remember firsthand, though I haven’t seen the film in question since my family viewed it at a drive-in one evening when it first came out.

The other thing that I’ve been doing is working my way through assorted volumes of the DC’S FINEST line, their answer to MARVEL’S EPIC books. Of late, I’ve spent every evening reading through a few undemanding stories from the SUPERMAN FAMILY volume, which collects stories from across editor Mort Weisinger’s Superman line of titles from the very early 1960s. These were stories designed for the youngest of readers, and as such they don’t concern themselves all that much with action-adventure plotlines. Instead, they typically turn on very simple character beats, typically ones in which a character feels shame or loss or fear or embarrassment. The story logic in these tales is beyond ridiculous, but that gives them a lot of their charm, as does the clean, almost diagrammatical artwork delivered by Weisinger’s team of artists.

As an example, let’s take the cover story from this issue, SUPERMAN’S PAL, JIMMY OLSEN #47, a story I’d never read until just this week. It’s the sequel to an earlier story in which Jimmy, having been stranded upon an alien world, became a famous movie monster given that the alien creatures who inhabit the planet he was stranded on find human beings to be frightening-looking. In this story, once Jimmy returns home, the alien movie producer really wants to make a sequel to the popular film that has brought him so much acclaim and wealth. So he winds up hiring a scientist to create sophisticated robots of both Jimmy and Superman so that he can make his follow-up film. The director shoots all of the Superman sequences first, and so, not needing the Superman robot any longer, the producer has it destroyed. Seeing this, the Jimmy robot, which has become self-aware, realizes that it needs to escape from there or face a similar fate. Through the sort of dumb luck that these stories rely upon, the warp gate that brought Jimmy to this planet in the first place opens again, allowing the Jimmy robot to follow him to Earth and Metropolis. Needing a place to hide out, the robot decides through cold logic that what he ought to do is kill the real Jimmy Olsen and take his place. So he waits for Jimmy in the cub reporter’s apartment and captures him. With Jimmy tied to a chair, the robot proceeds to go about dismantling his life—insulting his would-be girlfriend Lucy Lane and learning as much about Jimmy as possible before bumping him off. Looking for a way to get himself out of this mess, Jimmy tells the robot that he couldn’t possibly fool Superman himself—his pal would see right through him. The robot is up for this challenge, though, and so he contacts the Man of Steel using Jimmy’s signal watch to come and pick up a life-size photograph of the cub reporter that Jimmy had made for display in the Jimmy Olsen room in the Fortress of Solitude. Before Superman arrives, the robot forces Jimmy to inscribe the photo to Superman, since he can’t duplicate Olsen’s signature (a flaw in his impersonation right there.) Superman shows up, and sure enough, he seems none the wiser about the robot’s impersonation of his buddy. After he flies off, the robot turns, intending to finish off his captive. But Superman arrives in the nick of time to save Olsen and demolish the robot. And what clever thing did Jimmy do to alert his friend to his situation? Well, when he inscribed the photograph, he wrote “Your fiend, Jimmy” rather than Friend, figuring that this would make the Man of Steel suspicious—which seems ridiculous, but it worked, so there’s no arguing with success! You could never do a story like this one today, teh audience wouldn’t go along with it. But I have to say that I found it delightful in just how daffy it was.

Finally, I don’t usually plug other Marvel books in this feature outside of my own, but I wanted to bring some special attention to the first issue of DAREDEVIL: COLD DAY IN HELL, which I read last weekend. It was really beautiful and really pitch-perfect, with creators Charles Soule and Steve McNiven crafting a well-realized future environment for the now-aged Matt Murdock. I really liked it, and not even the involvement of my best enemy editor Nick Lowe could dampen my enjoyment of it. So it’s a bit of a stand-out, one that I’d urge readers to take a second look at.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about this week’s disappointing episode of Doctor Who

Five years ago, I wrote about an obscure short Marvel horror story from the 1950s

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

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Right, that’s enough of that then. You’re free to go about your business, but only if you promise to reconvene on this spot a week hence, as there’ll be more of the same waiting for you.

Hat’s All, Folks!

Tom B