#169: Ten Masterworks
I had an old post from my long-ago Marvel blog of the late 00s come up on my timeline the other day, and it reminded me of a thing that I did there that I think it might be fun to replicate here. The idea was simple: to try to come up with a list of Ten Masterworks: ten indisputably classic Marvel stories. The ground rules, the same as they were then, are simple; anybody can nominate any story that they like from Marvel’s whole history. We’re talking about stories here rather than runs, so you could put forward Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s “E For Extinction”, for example, but not Grant’s entire run on NEW X-MEN as a whole. But the other half of this is that anybody can veto any suggested choice for any reason. So the idea is to try to end up with a list of ten stories that nobody objects to. Think we can manage that? I’ll be watching the comments in the coming week to see how things go.
In the meantime, I have a fun bit of history to share with you all. Back before he became a notable animator and director, Brad Bird licensed the rights to do a film adaptation of Will Eisner’s character The Spirit. This would have been back in the early 1980s—I can remember hearing about this project when I was just a fan and reader. Anyway, the film never got made, but Bird and his buddies did produce an extensive pencil test as a sort of proof-of-concept to show to the studios in an effort to get financial backing. That footage can be found at this link, and the very fine Cartoon Brew website has an article about the entire project (including some afterpost comments from others who worked on the test footage) at this link. This is well worth a few minutes of your time.
All right, time to turn to this week’s mailbags and see what trouble we can get into.
Andrew Albrecht
Any word on when we can expect Kamala back in the present day?
As you mentioned in the rest of your post, Andrew, Kamala is right this moment starring in the GIANT-SIZE X-MEN cycle of specials. So until that’s finished, I wouldn’t want to spoil any aspect of it by telling you about any future projects of which she might be a part. You’ll just have to wait and see.
Emmanuel Cabahug
Just read Giant Size Dark Phoenix Saga # 1 and the bonus story by Steve Foxe and artwork by Lucas Werneck. I remember you mention about Scott Summers and Jean Grey theory in an interview before. I presume this is the June surprise you spoke about?
Yes, this is it, Emmanuel, or at least a very stripped down version of it.
gwenole BASIC
Will Jonathan Hickman be in charge of a post-Imperial title? Or will his sole mission be to bring the cosmic aspect back into focus with this event?
Jonathan is writing IMPERIAL and will be co-writing the assorted IMPERIAL WAR one-shots that come out between issues #3 and #4. But that’ll be it for him thereafter, gwenole.
Evan “Cool Guy”
For some reason, I could have sworn that the Trapster finally went back to his old nickname of Paste Pot Pete. I personally thought this was a great move! But now upon doing some research, I think maybe it didn't actually happen after all. Do you know why I thought it did?! Or did I completely make this up. If I did, I still think it should happen! Everyone talks about it whenever he shows up anyway, and I think at this point it has a certain retro charm.
I suspect that you were dreaming, Evan. Paste-Pot Pete was a fairly lame identity even when it was created back in 1962, and today it’s even less relevant as nobody much uses paste-pots in the putting up of wallpaper any more.
Jeff Ryan
Has an editor been turned down for using a character in a story but then gone forward and used the character anyway?
If you’re speaking about deliberately, Jeff, then no, not really. But sometimes there are miscommunications, and on other occasions somebody doesn’t check something that they probably should have—I got dinged online for some developments concerning Mysterium this past week that I was completely unaware were happening in a non-X title, and that’s not really supposed to happen. But comic books are made by human beings, and so errors happen.
HOXOR
If the Captain Britain role isn't the best for Betsy's long-term, wouldn't it be better to allow a 5-issue mini (or one-shot) freeing her from the mantle?
That’s an interesting approach to take in terms of getting a character you like a limited series, HOXOR. But no, I don’t think this requires anything to be done about it—not until there’s a creator with a story to tell that we think has merit. I generally don’t want to do projects with the sole purpose of straightening out some bit of continuity that I don’t care for, I don’t think that the audience as a whole is very into such stories.
David Brazier
Just read the novel, ‘Kavalier and Clay’ by Micheal Chabon. Have you read it Tom and if so what did you think?
I did read it when it first came out, David, yes, and a very brief quickie write-up of my reactions from 2000 is available on my blog page here. I also had some contact with Michael both before and after he wrote this book—he participated on a few Jack Kirby-related mailing lists that I was on at that time. A few years later, I tried like hell to convince him to write FANTASTIC FOUR, but it didn’t work out. I do still have the “No-Pulitzer” image that I sent him at one point, indicating that there was no limit to the sorts of awards he might pick up were he to take on the assignment.
Manqueman
Glasgow Looking Glass (1825) (https://henryjenkins.org/blog/2020/2/2/tracing-scottish-comics-history-1-of-3-by-chris-murray)
Two questions are raised by this book and the related claim.
The books were of cartoons — think New Yorker cartoons.
Some questions were: Could a book like this qualify as a comic book and, if it does, was it really the first such?
I’m inclined to think there are cartoons and then there are comic strips and the narratives of what comic books have looked like since Day 1.
I haven’t read this book, Manqueman, so I can’t really judge the quality of the argument that it lays out. But in terms of comic books as we presently define that term, I think it’s unlikely. Comic strips or comic panels, sure.
JV
I have been revisiting the Spidey Brand New day era (Tom I believe you oversaw it in an editorial capacity) - lots of fun.
Given its 3 times a month schedule - how far ahead were the various creative teams on issues vs publication? Did you have 'fill in ' issues ready as well? Must have been a hectic schedule - bit it paid off!
This would be more a question for Stephen Wacker, who directly edited AMAZING SPIDER-MAN and the ancillary Spidey titles during this time. But while we started out with a certain amount of lead time, that gradually got eroded away as we ran, and so Steve and his crew had to be on top of their scheduling in order to keep everything running as it needed to. On occasion, that required an issue or two written by somebody from outside of the main Spidey braintrust/web-heads. It was definitely not easy—trying to juggle two 18-issues-per-year X-MEN titles at the moment isn’t nearly as daunting, and it’s still a beast.
Stefan
If you were editing Daredevil, and your writer pitched a story of him meeting the public domain Daredevil that you liked and believed would sell, would there be any other considerations that might give pause to publishing such a story?
I wouldn’t no. I don’t think that Marvel should go around scooping up characters in this manner. Plus, Marvel could only have title to whatever unique expression of that character that was originated in the pages of our books, so anybody else might be able to make hay on what we did there. So, simply put, such a thing wouldn’t be worth investing energy on.
Martin Gray
any chance of a Brian Braddock Captain Britain and Meggan mini-series, set in the UK? It’s so long since they’ve had a spotlight, I would love to see them in a contemporary adventure.
There isn’t a zero chance, Martin. But at the moment, the percentage isn’t really much greater than zero, I’m afraid. Maybe at some point.
Jamison K
who was originally supposed to write the eventual jms/coipel volume of thor (vol 3...?). were the creator shakes ups and behind the scenes shenanigans the reason that book launched when it did (thor return/book launch was secret invasion era i think?), quite some time after all the disassembled business?
Initially, Neil Gaiman had an interest in taking over THOR, but other commitments caused him to step away from it (though he repurposed some of the ideas that he and Joe Quesada had spoken about into his ETERNALS project a few years later.) After that, there was a time when it looked as though Mark Millar was going to take it on, but that was no more than a passing fancy as it turned out. So yes, this is why THOR remained in limbo until JMS and Olivier Coipel were in position to bring it back a bit later on.
Okwaraji
Any thoughts on Daniel Warren Johnson staying on as a permanent fixture within the X-line past his Wolverine milestone story?
I think that’d be entirely up to Daniel, who has a bunch of commitments all across the field. But he did make the time to write a story for FANTASTIC FOUR FANFARE #4 that’ll be out in a few months, with artwork by Tyrell Cannon.
Ellis
I hope it's not assholish to ask why Marvel had their No. 1 hero's love interest leave him for another man and over 3 years later has not only done nothing to remotely rectify the situation, but repeatedly doubled down on it and ridiculed readers' frustrations with it.
Wait, Ellis, who did Wolverine’s love interest leave him for?
Ben Morse
Is the spinner rack feature gone?!
Last time I asked about what features people liked and disliked, Ben, the Spinner Rack was one where a couple of people expressed disinterest, so I chose to drop it last time. Maybe I’ll cycle back to it at some point—if nothing else, it was an easy segment to do every week.
Jwala
This is more a broad question about the punisher as a whole as I know you have been the editortial voice on him in the past, along with writing him in a special. I wanted to understand a bit more about the history of canonicity of punisher max vol 7 by Garth Ennis and Various artists. You see I have this theory that Punisher Max was orginally designed to be canon adjacent to 616. It’s one of the few alternate universe to use the main line vol titling. It’s referenced in guide books as canon during civil war. Born in particular is referenced subtly throughout Punisher. It references past Punisher comics like countdown and goes out of its way to maintain Stan Lee’s mantra about the illusion of change.
I was wondering if there was ever a notion of it being canon? And could Ennis’s run ever be canon in certain aspects ( mainly in terms of characterization of the Punisher because I feel like too many just discussion of the Punisher Ignore Max because it’s not canon)?
If you’re asking if that MAX run ever could have been canonical to the Marvel Universe, Jwala, then the answer is of course it could have at a certain point. But that isn’t the decision that was made at the time—it was seen as better to give Garth as much free rein as possible to tell the stories that he was doing, without needing to worry about the rest of the MU. And once that happened, there wasn’t any going back.
Andy T
I can’t open social media without seeing everyone clamoring for a Fantastic Force/Force Works crossover. Can we look forward to a Fantastic Force Works project in 2026?
Not on this Earth, Andy. I’d be willing to bet that most people here couldn’t even name the various members of Fantastic Force.
Mortimer Q Forbush
I'm curious about the relatively new miniseries format that instead of being a single title numbering from 1 to whatever; is instead a title and then a character's name and then continues with a similarly titled comic with a different character's name tacked on. The current Bring on the Bad Guys is a current example.
Is there a specific name Marvel uses for this format? I would have assumed that not having sequential numbering makes it more difficult for a reader to collect the series, but I'm sure I'm wrong since this seems to be an enduring format. Do you have theories why this is a desirable format?
This is hardly going to be a huge revelation, Mortimer, but #1s tend to sell better. so doing a series of #1s is more likely to engender better sales overall than doing a #1-#5 or #7 or whatever. And there isn’t any specific name internally for this kind of project, no.
Off The Wall
This isn’t a piece of original artwork, but it does adorn the wall along the staircase to my home’s second floor. I picked up this poster at one of the first San Diego Comic Cons that I attended back in the very early 1990s. It was shot from a big painting that Jack Kirby had done for reasons mostly lost to time—Jack produced a number of such works, playing with his unique approach to color. It’s a pretty amazing, graphic image, and so I find it a good way to clear the mind by staring at it in meditative contemplation.
I Buy Crap
Following up on my reading of THE GOOD GUYS a couple of weeks back, I went ahead and bought up the run of another short-lived Defiant title from the 1990s, DARK DOMINION. As with the previous series, I can remember reading the first three issues or so and then dropping it. It had some interesting ideas as I can recall, but the execution left me cold, so I’m interested to see what I make of it this time around. DARK DOMINION was the Defiant line’s answer to a series like DOCTOR STRANGE, except rather than being steeped in sorcery, its explorations into other-worldliness were based around quantum theory. And just flipping through these books, the production seems a lot more sure-footed that GOOD GUYS was.
Behind the Curtain
Going for a bit of merchandising nostalgia this time out. I never owned Amsco’s MARVEL WORLD adventure playset, but I always wanted one—a buddy of mine had one that he’d bought back in the day, so I got to see the thing up close. It was an entire Marvel Universe of 1975 in a cardboard box—very limited in what it was, but also wildly innovative and far-reaching for what it had to work with.
The set came with cardboard representations of the Daily Bugle, the Baxter Building, Doctor Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum, Peter Parker’s apartment and Avengers Mansion. They were all open in the back, depicting the insides of each structure, so you could position and play with the assorted Marvel character stand-ups that were also included in the set.
Just look at this thing. It’s about the coolest Marvel playground a kid could hope to have had in 1975!
Pimp My Wednesday
Hey, here’s what’s coming at you this week!
UNCANNY X-MEN #16 by Gail Simone, David Marquez and Luciano Vecchio wraps up the four-part “Dark Artery” storyline that reveals the hidden history of Haven House, where the X-Men have chosen to make their home. Luciano helped out by doing a couple of pages when the schedule got tight; he joins our team full time starting with #17 in a few weeks. (And don’t worry, David isn’t going anywhere—with 18 issues to put out a year, there’s a need for more than a single artist to rotate on the assignment.)
And the current iteration of FANTASTIC FOUR wraps up with this week’s #33 courtesy of Ryan North and Cory Smith. It’s the conclusion to our countdown story and focuses on, of all characters, HERBIE. Plus it’s got a truly excellent cover by Josh Cassara. And next month, Ryan returns with a new #1 and new regular artist Humberto Ramos. Gonna be good.
Meanwhile, the third of our GIANT-SIZE X-MEN specials carries Kamala Khan and Old Man Legion to the Age of Apocalypse, for a 90s-style throwdown! It’s brought to you by the team of Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly and C.F. Villa. And the back-up’s a lean-in to the recently announced X-MEN OF APOCALYPSE series by Jeph Loeb and Simone Di Meo. This story’s all new for this release, it won’t be a part of the XOA: ALPHA issue in September.
Elsewhere, new office arrival Assistant Editor Lindsey Cohick has the fourth issue of DOOM’S DIVISION dropping this week as well, focusing on the team of heroes formerly known as Tiger Division in a world now run by Doctor Doom. It’s delivered by Yoon Ha Lee and Minkyu Jung.
A Comic Book On Sale 30 Years Ago Today, June 22, 1995
SPAWN: BLOOD FEUD #1 was another in a series of comics that Alan Moore wrote for various Image partners throughout the strange 1990s. Prior to this, Moore had been something of the poster child for literate and erudite comic book projects, even in his mainstream work. So it was a bit disconcerting to see him lending his efforts to assorted projects during this time that didn’t seem to have a whole lot of ambition or thought behind them. Reportedly, Moore was interested in experimenting with the Image approach of the artwork being a story driver, but it also goes without saying that the paychecks from Image at the height of its initial success were nothing to sneeze at either. And even at his most mercenary, Moore always brought a certain level of basic quality to any series he worked on, regardless of how incompatible the artists he was paired with were or how disinterested the audience he was serving may have found some of his story tangents. it seemed like he was having a good time at the very least. On SPAWN: BLOOD FEUD, Moore worked with Tony Daniel, whose artwork was kinetic and explosive and a bit over-the-top in the style of Todd McFarlane’s, but who wasn’t the most accomplished storyteller. According to an article in this issue, Moore provided page roughs along with his script, providing a certain amount of guidance to Daniel. But at the end of the day, I don’t know how much it really mattered, as what the Spawn audience was largely there for was a certain intensity of visual experience more than anything.
A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date
CAPTAIN AMERICA #7 came out on July 22, 2005 and represented a bit of a necessary break in the ongoing Winter Soldier storyline. In the previous issue, Cap had discovered that the mysterious killer who had been keeping one step ahead of him since the run began just might be his long-thought-dead partner from the war, Bucky Barnes. But having gotten to this point, regular penciler Steve Epting needed a break to get things caught up again—so writer Ed Brubaker came up with this haunting story as a bit of a palate-cleaner before we dove into the second act of the overall storyline.
A couple of issues earlier, it had been revealed that among the victims of the Winter Soldier had been Jack Monroe, who had been the replacement Bucky of the 1950s. It was just a throw-away bit of business, but here Ed took out an entire issue to tell of the noir-tinged final days of Jack Monroe’s life. The bogus super-soldier serum that had helped to keep him young and vital for decades was now breaking down, causing him to have bouts of paranoia and hallucinations. It was a potent expression of mental health difficulties, and expertly rendered by guest-artist John Paul Leon, who turned in an absolutely stellar job on it. Cap himself doesn’t appear at all within its pages, but it was an affecting enough tale to make a couple best-single-issue lists at the end of that year.
I seem to recall that there was a hassle with that phone number on the flier on that cover. The 555 exchange had been set up as a non-functioning exchange for use in television and film production, so we figured that we were safe in using it here. Turned out afterwards that despite that, this specific number connected to one of those call-porn lines. Nobody on our end had ever thought to call and check, something we’re a bit better about policing these days.
The New Warriors Chronicles
NEW WARRIORS #67 was the middle part of a very strange three-issue storyline, one designed to write Ben Reilly out of the series as he had now taken over the identity of Spider-Man while at the same introducing a new Scarlet Spider character that people hoped might develop into something. He didn’t, and I’m not even sure that the character ever appeared again after this three-parter.
But first, a bit of backstory. When he was given command of the Spider-Man group as EIC, Bob Budiansky was given a financial objective to meet: he was to grow the line by 10%, a daunting task in an era when the bottom was dropping out of the marketplace. Accordingly, Bob and the group as a whole was under terrific pressure for pretty much the entirety of his tenure in the position. What this meant in practice is that Bob took every possible advantage put in front of him to wring just a few more dollars out of the Spidey line in any way possible. In a very real way, we strip-mined the hell out of it, but given that everybody figured that we’d all be let go if we didn’t manage to hit those numbers, the thought was that there was nothing to lose. (Ironically, while he did achieve that goal, by the time the end of the year came around, Marvel was under different management, and Bob wound up being downsized out of the company, despite the fact that he’d been the only one of the EICs who accomplished their mission. Welcome to corporate America.)
Accordingly, at the suggestion of the very aggressive sales department, who were in a big way running the show during this year, rather than going straight from Ben being revealed to be the real Spidey to him becoming the star of all the titles, we instead wound up rebranding the four existing titles for two months under the SCARLET SPIDER name—so AMAZING SPIDER-MAN became AMAZING SCARLET SPIDER, etc. The idea was to give us a bunch of #1s before we launched the big #1, the Dan Jurgens-led SENSATIONAL SPIDER-MAN #1 that would put Ben into the Spider-Man costume on a permanent basis. All of the other titles would go back to their Spider-Man names—all except WEB OF SPIDER-MAN, which was being replaced by SENSATIONAL.
But those SCARLET SPIDER issues sold well, and so somebody in Sales suggested to Bob that maybe we should keep WEB OF SCARLET SPIDER going for another month or two. That was going to be difficult to do without a lead character, though, so in the course of the preceding issues, a shady federal agent named Joe Wade was introduced. Wade was caught up in the destruction of Doctor Octopus’s laboratory, which caused him to come into contact with some nanotech materials that transformed him into a new metallic version of the Scarlet Spider, one who had an ill-designed monster mode (though Patch Zircher made it look as good as was possible) as well as simply resembling a Norrin Radd version of Ben Reilly.
Because he was in the mix of the Spidey stuff anyway writing NEW WARRIORS, and because as a freelancer he was always looking to pick up other work, Evan Skolnick got selected to write the two issues of WEB OF SCARLET SPIDER that bookended this issue of NEW WARRIORS. So at least there would be a consistency of execution, even though it wasn’t really Evan who came up with a lot of the particulars with which he had to work.
This was also in the service of both extricating Ben Reilly from the New Warriors cast while still cementing the series into the firmament of the Spidey line. The way this played out in the story is that the Warriors don’t realize that this new guy isn’t the Scarlet Spider that they’ve been working with—and guest-star Spider-Man can’t reveal that he was without destroying the illusion that he’s the same Spider-Man that he’s always been. it was all a bit awkward in a comic book fashion, but it worked out well enough. And being a part of a small Spidey crossover definitely helped with the sales of this issue. (NEW WARRIORS #67 included that year’s Statement of Ownership, which revealed that the most recent issue charted had sold 51,850 copies, which wasn’t a great number but wasn’t at cancellation levels either.) You can see it on the letters page as well, which was devoted to mail about #62 in which the Scarlet Spider joined the team. Even the correspondents who didn’t like it seemed to still like it, at least as far as this smattering of reactions was concerned.
Looking back at NEW WARRIORS #67, the big thing that I notice now is how unforgivably the issue doesn’t tell you where the storyline is continued from or really do enough to get a reader coming to it cold up to speed enough. That’s a pretty fatal weakness in a crossover, and not working on the other two chapters, it’s pretty clear that I was much more focused on the book’s own business more than I was the crossover. But otherwise, it does the thing that we’d been doing all along: balancing the book’s own ongoing subplots (this time concerning Speedball’s impending demise, as his powers begin to go a bit haywire) while also servicing the needs of the larger crossover story. But as I said at the start, it was all in the service of nothing in the end, as the Joe Wade character wasn’t distinct enough to make any real impression and promptly vanished into comic book limbo.
That wasn’t my problem, though. My problem was what Bob wanted to do to keep NEW WARRIORS a part of the Spider-Man line. Something I’ll get into next time.
Monofocus
Most of my viewing this past week has been dedicated to ongoing shows that I’ve talked about previously, so no need to bore you by getting into them all again. The one thing I did want to note is that I’m still not sued to the modern length of an anime season, so I was surprised that both MY HERO ACADEMIA: VIGILANTES and MOBILE SUIT GUNDAN GQuuuuuuuX are wrapping up for the moment next week with their twelveth episodes. In my day, a show would run for a minimum of 25 episodes, if not a full year of 50 or so. Caught me by surprise in both cases.
But I do want to enthuse about a really great comic book that I read last week. It was the third issues of ASSORTED CRISIS EVENTS by Deniz Camp and Erik Zawadzki. it was amazingly good, and almost tailor-made for my sensibilities. Each issue of the series tells a stand-alone story typically concerning real people caught up in the events of a typical super hero crossover. So in that way, it’s kind of like ASTRO CITY if it only focused on background players and there were no super heroes to speak of. But this third issue is especially clever and genius at getting its point across. it concerns the inhabitants of the town of Hearth in two parallel universes, one of which is destroyed. The inhabitants of the town are able to save themselves by migrating to the other universe, where they’re treated as displaced refugees. And the problems start from there, as there are now two versions of every citizen of the town, one native and one an outsider—and we get to see how the exact same people react and respond to the same set of circumstances but being on different sides of the issue. It’s a timely tale that’s very much inspired by the current hysteria concerning immigration, and it lands its points exceedingly well. As someone who was raised on a steady diet of Earth-One and Earth-Two comic books, this story was right in my wheelhouse, and I enjoyed the crap out of it. So it’s worth checking out if any of this sounds remotely interesting to you. Look for the cover image below.
Posted at TomBrevoort.com
Yesterday, I wrote about another Predecessor of Superman by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.
And five years ago, I wrote about the Five Best Unofficial Marvel/DC Crossovers
We’re drawing ever closer to July, which looks to be one of the busiest months on record for me. So I’m not certain just how complete next month’s Newsletters are going to be able to be week after week. But we’ll keep doing our best to provide you with the entertainment that you demand as much as possible! See you next time!
Hat’s All, Folks!
Tom B
1 vote for House of x / Powers of x 👍🏻
A masterwork I've yet to see mentioned: Amazing Fantasy #15