#170: The Sun is Shining, But the Ice is Slippery

Hey, it’s a rare week when I actually have something to promote—well, apart from that week’s new release comics, of course. It’s a rare thing for me to have something get published outside of my regular editorial duties—but this week, there’s not just one release, but two.

I just received some comp copies of SPIDER-MAN: PANEL BY PANEL, a follow-up to FANTASTIC FOUR: PANEL BY PANEL which was released a number of years ago. Like that volume, this book takes each frame in the first three Spider-Man stories from AMAZING FANTASY #15 and AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #1 and blows them up to full-page size, giving each moment a completely new feel. I think this volume is an improvement on every level on the earlier FF book, mostly because this volume is able to include a look at the original artwork for the first Spider-Man story as well, thanks to the originals being a part of the Library of Congress’ permanent collection. I gave the publisher permission to use two of the essays that I wrote concerning the creation of Spider-Man and AMAZING FANTASY #15 and also wrote a page-by-page walkthrough of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #1 that is entirely new. So it’s about as forthcoming a look at the creation of the popular wall-crawler as has ever been released in an official Marvel-sanctioned publication. The book goes on sale this coming week.

I also went ahead and ordered myself a copy of JACK OF ALL COMICS, an anthology volume in which a variety of writers discuss all of the different series that Jack Kirby originated and worked on throughout the 1960s and 1970s. You’d expect that I would have written about one of Kirby’s Marvel series, but the competition for those chapters was fierce. So instead, I wound up reminiscing about FOREVER PEOPLE, the most underappreciated of Kirby’s Fourth World titles. I haven’t yet gotten an opportunity to read over the rest of the book, but at a glance-through, it seems like a nicely personal take on Kirby’s legacy and creations. This one’s available now.

There are also a few releases from other people that I wanted to draw your attention to:

Former Marvel promotions person Jim McCann has started his own newsletter here, where he talks about writing, his assorted projects, cheeseburgers and a variety of other comic book related subjects.

And my brother Mighty Joe Castro just dropped an acoustic cover of the song Hope and a High Road, which you can listen to yourself at this link.

For those who were interested in last week’s look at the classic AMSCO MARVEL WORLD playset, I’ve come across a great walkthrough of the thing at this link, as well as an extensive article about the thing that can be read at this other link

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I spent a good portion of the preceding week revisiting the 1994 film adaptation of The Shadow. This was in no way a good film, but it had a really beautiful look to it, the set design and cinematography were all top-notch. As was the soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith. What lets the film down ultimately is its script and tone. It’s very much a product of its time, which means that the filmmakers weren’t able to take their subject matter quite seriously enough, leading them to mix a great big dollop of camp into what was otherwise intended to be a straightforward and atmospheric pulp film. Literally, the tone shifts from sequence to sequence, which is incredibly frustrating, as the movie has some pretty terrific moments and set pieces scattered throughout it. Just take a look at this introduction to The Shadow, inspired by the opening of the first pulp novel story to feature the character. It’s pretty spot-on perfect (though in the intervening years, it’s become increasingly more difficult to separate Alec Baldwin’s Lamont Cranston from his 30 ROCK character Jack Donaghy.) This, though, is counterbalanced by scenes in which Baldwin and his arch-enemy Shiwan Khan, played by John Lone, chew through scenery something fierce, unable to commit to the heightened reality in which their characters exist. Possibly the nadir of the whole production is an extended sequence in which poor Penelope Ann Miller and Sir Ian McKellen chase and are chased by a runaway rolling atomic bomb through the corridors of a high-rise skyscraper. But there are still bits of this film that I see value in revisiting. The production, in essence, created their own version of the Shadow, drawing upon elements of the contradictory pulp magazines and radio series to come up with something new. It was excised out of the final cut of the film, but there’s a line in the trailer that I still think about, and feel would make for a great basis for a character: “I do what I do to fight back the evil inside me…but some part of it is still there.” Anyway, this video essay makes a compelling case for a re-evaluation of the film by looking at it in black and white.

Time once again to hit the ol’ mailbag!

Joe West

Is there any way Marvel Max and Red Band titles can be made available on Marvel Unlimited? I’ve been trying to read the most recent Blade and Werewolf by Night books but I can’t buy them anywhere digitally and my LCS doesn’t have them.

The problem that we have with including MAX and Red Band books on Marvel Unlimited, Joe, is that there doesn’t seem to be any easy way to keep them out of the hands of younger readers who are perhaps not yet ready for their contents. Since that platform functions as an open digital library, every subscriber has access to all of it. It’s a problem that we haven’t licked—so for the moment, we refrain from including our most hardest-edged material there.

JV

This was a fun thought exercise (top ten Marvel stories) Tom - do you have a top ten DC stories you would like to share?

I can’t say that I do, JV, or that I’ve even thought about it in these terms. But we could always try to arrive at such a list once our current polling is completed.

Sev

Now that we've had a stripped down version of your unified theory of Scott and Jean, can you PLEASE share with us the longer version? At least a little bit?

I’d kind of rather not do that, Sev, not until such a time as it can make its way into an actual story. But you may be in luck. I just did a podcast with X-MEN HOROSCOPES and at a certain point in that conversation, we got into it a little bit. That episode hasn’t been released yet but ought to be along in a week or two.

Jess Nevins

Pete Petruski went back to "Paste-Pot Pete" in Unbelievable Gwenpool #21 (Dec 2017), on the grounds that it made people underestimate him.

Good pull there, Jess. Though I doubt that Pete kept things that way after that appearance.

Stefan

How about combining the Spinner Rack with the Pimp My Wednesday feature, with every current release being accompanied by an older comic that has some sort of connection, be it thematically, historically, behind-the-scenes/business circumstances, or otherwise?

Do you have some sense of the point of diminishing returns for "#1s sell better", or could it plausibly reach the point where every issue published is a #1?

That first idea of yours sounds like work, Stefan. So it’s not to say that I won’t do it, but that I’d at least need to give it some thought and consideration beforehand. Not every comic book has a good story associated with it. In terms of your second question, we aren’t really all that far away from that point now, though I don’t think that we’ll get there. But so long as a #1 produces demonstratably better results than any other number, you’re likely to see a disproportionate amount of them being put out.

Patrick Williams

Force Works members: Vibraxas, Psi-Lord, Huntarra (or is it Huntaara?), and the reddish-purplish Deviant kid.

I hate to break it to you, Patrick, but not a one of the characters you’ve listed here was a member of Force Works.

Kurt Onstad

I don’t see Avengers Mansion in any of the pictures, despite both you and the box mentioning it as one of the features. Was it on a completely different section, or is it hidden behind all the other buildings?

As you can see here, Kurt, Avengers Mansion was around back.

Jeff Ryan

who's your favorite Marvel character?

The Thing.

Neon Frost

is there any chance with the increased focus that we get a solo mini or ongoing for Emma hopefully by Eve?

There’s always a chance, Neon. Though with us currently doing the Retro series, it’ll be a while most likely before I’d want to put a similar present-set project on the schedule.

Alex

1. Are there any current discussions or plans to undo the AXIS retcon?

2. Do you personally reflect on the importance of the Magneto–Wanda–Pietro family dynamic?

3. Could revisiting Wanda’s mutant heritage — especially with her “Pretender” status — open the door to powerful, character-driven storytelling?

1. Not on my part, no.

2. I don’t think it has any greater importance than any other character relationship.

3. Not any more or less so than revisiting those relationships given her current history and status quo.

I have a different perspective on this issue than a lot of people, Alex, in that when I began reading, Wanda and Pietro weren’t related to Magneto at all—they were the children of the Golden Age heroes Miss America and the Whizzer. That was a bit of Roy Thomas fan service, but the idea that Magneto was their father was a retcon long after the fact. And the reality is that it was a relationship that only came into play incredibly occasionally.

Plymouth

would you ever write a book?

Well, I’ve written parts of some, as seen at the start of this week’s Newsletter. But not while I’m working for Marvel, Plymouth.

Zee

What is the reasoning behind cancelling a book before even the first trade is out? I'm not going to pretend to know the sales numbers, but as far as I'm aware, people I know who read comics without following monthlies do so via trade - between that and how DC lets books that don't have good sales keep going if they have legs on a critical success standpoint, where does Marvel stand on the matter?

The reasoning, Zee, is that it takes more than good wishes to keep our lights on; it takes income. And so if a project isn’t performing well enough to make the needed margin, then like it or not, that project has to go. Also, while I understand your way of thinking, in 99 and 44/100th instances, a title that sells poorly as single issues will also sell poorly as a collected edition. The idea that there’s a massive group of trade-waiters sitting out there ready to turn a publishing failure into a hit simply doesn’t have any basis in reality. Once in a very rare while there’s an outlier, but it isn’t a situation that can be relied upon. so a book that isn’t making its nut as a periodical is likely not going to better its fortunes as a collection.

Jordan L

Was Havok always doomed to fail as the leader of the Uncanny Avengers? I remember feeling excited that he was finally being called up to the big leagues. But while I enjoyed that run, his tenure ended in huge disgrace relatively quickly. Were there ever any discussions of a different, more positive outcome for him in that series?

The point of UNCANNY AVENGERS was to tell stories, Jordan, not to rehabilitate Alex Summers in some fashion. So no, not really. There wasn’t some plan to make him fail, there was just the development from story to story to story. That’s very much been Havok’s core personality: he’s kind of a bit of a screw-up who constantly exists in his older brother’s shadow and who has different attributes than Scott does.

ComicBookDad531

I wanted to ask a question about my favorite non-team The Defenders. Do you think they can work in the modern age or do you think they are like Marvel Team Up and Marvel Two in One relics of the past?

While it’s always possible that the right creative mix could make something happen, having tried DEFENDERS again and again and again over the years, it certainly doesn’t seem likely, does it? I think that’s in part due to the fact that the original series didn’t really have a strong working core concept, so while there’s nostalgia for certain runs and the platonic ideal of a Defenders team, in practice you wind up building your structure on a foundation of sand.

Deborah

1) I didn't see any mention of Resurrection sickness in your AIPT interview. Will any other characters succumb to this, or is Max the only one? If so, that seems weird, given that he was only resurrected by the Five once.

2) I've been re-reading the Utopia era of X-Men recently (one of my favorite eras) and really enjoying the X Club. Any chance of an X Club reunion in the near future?

1. Disease isn’t really known for playing fair, Deborah. Beyond that, you’ll have to wait and see what the future holds.

2. No particular plans for X Club, but that’ll only be the case until some creator comes up with a killer idea.

Chris Sutcliffe

I notice that Spider-Man & Wolverine is a co-venture, executive edited by both yourself and your arch-rival Nick Lowe. I'm curious why it ended up with the X-Mention page (rather than the Spider-equivilant). Is it simply that the main editor comes from the X side of things?

SPIDER-MAN & WOLVERINE isn’t a co-venture, Chris, it’s edited by Mark Basso in my group. But of course both Nick and myself keep oversight on it for the specific characters in our worlds. And it “ended up” with us because we were the ones that proposed it in the first place.

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Ten Masterworks

Okay, here’s where things stand at the moment in last week’s quest to try to come up with a list of ten incontrovertible masterpiece Marvel stories. Just as when I did this years ago, there are some folks who are unhappy with the ground rules and the unfairness of the situation. In some cases, people have put through alternative conditions for victory. Well, that’s all well and good for them, but in terms of how this game is being played, the original rules can and will continue. Just to summarize them once again:

1. Anybody can propose any story for inclusion on the list. We’re looking for specific stories, though, not entire runs.

2. Anybody can veto any story for any reason. There is no limit to the number of vetos any one person can put forward.

3. Any story that is vetoed cannot be put back onto the list by a subsequent vote.

Yes, these rules make the proposition exceedingly difficult. But that’s the whole point, comic book fans are by their nature contrarian, and so trying to reach a consensus is meant to be difficult. We couldn’t do it back in the late 2000s, but I’m going to keep this running for at least another week to see if we have any better luck this time.

So, based on all of that, assuming that I’ve tracked all of the responses properly, below is the list of stories that are still up for consideration. I’ve eliminated a few things that were runs rather than stories, but everything else on this list is still in play. And it’s a much longer list than 10 items, so we need to pare it down a great deal to get to what we’re looking for.

Daredevil: Born Again by Miller and Mazzuchelli

Fantastic Four: Galactus Trilogy by Lee and Kirby

X-Men: Dark Phoenix Saga by Claremont and Byrne

Spider-Man: Kraven's Last Hunt by DeMatties and Zeck

X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills by Claremont and Anderson

Amazing Spider-Man 229-230- Nothing Can Stop the Juggernaut.

The Punisher: Welcome Back, Frank

Dark Angel Saga by Rick Remender

The Night Gwen Stacy Died (Amazing Spider-Man #121-122)

"Within This Troubled Land" from Fantastic Four #84-87

Captain America the Winter Solider 1-14: Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting (and a few others)

Punisher Max 1-6: In the beginning by Garth Ennis and Lewis Larosa (the best action/crime movie on paper I have seen)

Avengers 256/257: Roger Stern and John Buscema: The Savage Land destroyed by Terminus - just pure Avengers action with great stakes and a cool twist ending

X-Men 256-268: Claremont and Jim Lee: Acts of Vengeance with the new Psylocke

Wolverine: Weapon X (BWS)

Punisher: Born

Elektra: Assassin

Planet Hulk

Squadron Supreme

Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules

The Vision

Amazing Fantasy #15

Fantastic Four's "This Man, This Monster"

The first Wolverine miniseries

Avengers: Ultron Unlimited

Captain America The Impostor By Steve Englehart & Sal Buscema (#153-156)

Captain America - The Strange Death of Captain America by Jim Steranko (#110, 111, 113)

Avengers Under Siege

New X-Men - E is For Extinction

Avengers Forever

Uncanny X-Men - Days Of Future Past

Runaways by BKV and Alphona.

Captain America #109

The Surtur Saga

Captain America: The Secret Empire by Steve Englehart and Sal Buscema (CAP #169-176)

Howard the Duck: Zen and the Art of Comic-Book Writing by Steve Gerber and various (HTD #16)

Black Panther: Panther's Rage by Don McGregor, Billy Graham, et. al. (Jungle Action #6-18)

Silver Surfer 5 - And who shall mourn for him?

Amazing Spider-Man 39-40 Green Goblin’s last stand

Fantastic Four Annual 6 - Let there be life

Ultimate Spider-Man: Power and Responsibility

Annihilation

Hulk Future Imperfect

the "Fury Saga" from Captain Britain

The Master Planner Saga

Avengers Annual #10

Early FF Doctor Doom story arc where Doom sends Reed, Johnny and Ben back in time, they become pirates and Blackbeard Ben doesn't want to come back. Goofy fun!

Doc Strange: The Oath by Vaughan, Martin, et al

Immortal Hulk by Ewing, Bennett, et al

Venom: Rex by Cates, Stegman, et al

So that’s 50 stories, and we need to eliminate 40 of them. So we’ll go one more week and see what happens. As before, put any new suggestions or vetos in the comments section.

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I Buy Crap

This is a big one. I don’t typically buy a lot of original artwork. Most of the pieces that I’ve featured in past weeks are pages that were gifted to me over the years. And yet somehow, I couldn’t let this particular piece get away—primarily because I was the one who did the original design for this cover.

This is Ryan Stegman’s penciled cover to X-MEN #10, along with my original cover sketch on a post-it note. I did that sketch at the very beginning of my time overseeing the X-Men, not for this specific cover but as an idea for a cover that I thought would be cool. And when it came time to work out a concept for the cover to #10, I suggested it to Ryan, and then he executed it, improving my crude doodle in every conceivable way.

This particular cover wound up being inked by J.P.Mayer on a separate board, so I got that, too. At a certain point, I decided that I wanted to own this piece, so I asked Ryan to put me in tough with his original art representative. The art rep agreed to hold this cover for me to purchase, and once it became available, he quoted me a price and we consummated the deal. Buying a cover isn’t a cheap investment, but I figured that if I was going to own one cover from my run operating X-MEN, it ought to be this one.

Here’s a close-up look at that original sketch, drawn with a simple pen on a post-it note. I thought the use of big swaths of solid primary red would make for a striking cover image—and it did.

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Behind the Curtain

This is a piece that was penciled by Gregg Schigiel, who was my assistant editor at the time. He did it for MARVEL VISIONS magazine back in the late 1990s, and it shows all of the members of Marvel’s editorial staff at that time as assorted characters of their own choosing. I’m depicted as the 3-D Man, an oddball choice on my part but reflective of the fact that for a while, I had attempted to get a 3-D Man project off the ground that I would co-write with my partner Mike Kanterovich. Never wound up happening, though.

The piece fortunately comes with this handy key at the bottom so that you can tell who is why. And yes, that is DC’s current Editor in Chief Marie Javins as Mary Jane Watson (with her then-assistant Polly Watson as Gwen Stacy, completing the theme. Though it’s a bit strange that Watson wound up as Stacy when I think about it.)

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Pimp My Wednesday

Two big books for the world of X coming your way this week!

Nobody would believe it back in the 1980s, and fans can scarcely believe it today. But Doug Ramsey, formerly Cypher of the New Mutants, is about to be a very pivotal character on the X-Landscape. This journey began in the X-MEN: HEIR OF APOCALYPSE limited series, but it continues in earnest in X-MEN #19 this week. It’s written by Jed MacKay and illustrated by Netho Diaz, and it’s an issue that you’ll want to keep handy in the near future. Plus it featured Bei the Blood Moon and Warlock, and who doesn’t like Bei the Blood Moon and Warlock?

And the big one: X-MEN: THE HELLFIRE VIGIL #1. Just listing all of the creators who were involved in this massive jam special would take the rest of this column, but it amounts to just about everybody who’s been working across the X-Line over the past year. It’s a story about looking backwards and looking forwards, and it will hopefully provide some killer moments that will have fans talking. Of particular note is this really nice cover by Luciano Vecchio, who designed a number of outfits for the story, and who’s hereafter illustrating UNCANNY X-MEN on the regular in rotation with David Marquez. Pretty much everybody is in this one.

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A Comic Book On Sale 20 Years Ago Today, June 29, 2005

SOLO was the brainchild of longtime DC cover editor Mark Chiarello, and the concept for the series was very simple: Mark lined up a series of supremely talented creators and gave them each a full 48 page issue of comics to do whatever they wanted with. In most cases, this led to each issue having multiple stories across multiple genres, with the spotlighted creator often working in tandem with treasured collaborators. Chiarello’s selections weren’t simply big name mainstream artists, but instead creators whose work was individualistic and striking and personal. The entire run was eventually collected in a pretty hardcover edition that’s a great chunk of comics. For SOLO #5, on sale 20 years ago today, Mark handed the reins to the late Darwyn Cooke, who proceeded to produce a whole bunch of notable stories within its pages. Cooke tended to work best when he wasn’t bound by conventional continuity, so this format gave him the maximum leeway. It also freed him from having to worry about being conventionally commercial, as the book was going to succeed or fail on the back of his name along, To me, this was the strongest issue in the entire run, but that may simply be my fondness for Cooke’s work talking. Darwyn built a framing story around a personal pet character, Slam Bradley, and then proceeded to tell an autobiographical story about how he became interested in art, a super-stylish King Faraday adventure done in the style of a 1950s slick magazine advertisement, a spread devoted to short comic strips focusing on a variety of characters such as Angel and the Ape, Zatanna, Roy Raymond, Chemo and of course Harley Quinn, a wonderfully cartooned Twilight Zone-esque tale, a super-graphic Question story, and a reimagining of a classic Sal Amendola/Steve Englehart Batman story which managed to outdo the original it was based on. It’s one of the finest single issues produced during that decade.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

FROM THE MARVEL VAULT: THE HUMAN TORCH AND THE INCREDIBLE HULK #1 came out on June 29, 2011 and had an amazingly circuitous pathway to publication. It was one of about a half-dozen FROM THE VAULT specials that we put out during this time. See, just before this, Marvel moved offices, and in so doing, a bunch of assorted unpublished material cropped up that was mostly completed and which had been written off years, even decades before. Accordingly, these were all books that could be released with only a minimal cash investment in completing the work. I’d always been a long-term thinker, so three or four of these projects came from my files: a THUNDERBOLTS inventory issue, the last unfinished issue of GHOST RIDER featuring Danny Ketch, and this story. I had inherited this one when I had taken over editing INCREDIBLE HULK many years before, and I’d kept the copies of it all during that time. It had started life as an inventory issue of MARVEL TEAM-UP commissioned in around 1983. The original story had been written by Jack C. Harris but the thing that made it notable was that it was penciled by Marvel founding father Steve Ditko. And it had never been completed and never seen print. When I inherited it, clearly at some point previous HULK editor Bobbie Chase had considered repurposing it as an inventory issue, so in addition to the original version, there was a second full script for the story by Peter David. The idea, apparently, was to add a framing sequence to set it in then-current continuity. Peter approached the story along the lines of “What’s Up, Tiger Lily”, his script going for zanyness and yoks rather than drama. Over the years, I’d tried to get this story resurrected as a project with no luck—I can recall once pitching it as a 64 page one-shot, where we’d run three different versions of the story: one with the original script, one with the Peter David rewrite and then a third with a cool contemporary writer, somebody like Grant Morrison was what I was thinking. But it didn’t happen. But now, the time had come, though only in a limited capacity, and that meant that I had some choices to make. I didn’t love Peter’s version, it felt somehow a bit disrespectful to the work. By that same token, Jack C. Harris’s script had been done in a faux bombastic Stan Lee emulation, and I didn’t think it worked either. So I made the decision to set it aside as well and to build something new out of the pages that we had. I reached out to Karl Kesel, who was something of a utility player in my office at the time, and offered him the opportunity to both rescript the job as well as to ink it. Knowing that it was unlikely that he’d ever get another opportunity to ink Ditko’s work. Karl took the assignment. I seem to recall that Karl didn’t know what the original story was about, which seems strange since I’m confident that I had the Harris version, which would have explained the plot. (Peter’s version had thrown the plot out to do its own wacky thing.) Could be that by this point it had gone missing—another reason why I might have engaged Karl to take his own pass at it. Either way, Karl made a nice meal of it, and with a new cover provided by Mark Bagley it was ready to see the light of day. I don’t think that any of us thought that it was the greatest comic ever produced, but it was fun and we made a credible effort at it. And it was an opportunity to work with Steve Ditko in a way, albeit not at all directly.

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Another Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

THE VARIANTS #1 was released on June 29, 2022, and while it wasn’t the first time that I had worked with writer Gail Simone, it was the first time on an extended project. So in a way, as much as anything, this series is the reason why Gail wound up writing UNCANNY X-MEN, as I was super happy with the way that it had worked out. The series started off with an idea from me: the first season of the LOKI Disney+ series had just dropped, and it used the terminology Variants all throughout its story to distinguish alternate multiversal versions of the same individual. I realized that Marvel didn’t have a trademark on that term, however, and so anybody could have potentially used it, effectively sniping it out from under us. So my pitch was to do a limited series that would team up some contemporary Marvel character with alternate versions of themself. I’d been fascinated with the idea of multiple Earths going back to my early days as a reader of Julie Schwartz FLASH and JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA comics, but I also thought about how weird it would be to meet an alternative version of yourself—somebody who knows every dark thought and deed that you’d ever experienced, at least up to a certain point, but who had made some different decision than you did, and either wound up better off or worse off than you did. So either, they’d be a reflection of your own failings, the mistakes you’d made that might have carried you to a better life. Or else, they might pose a threat, being jealous of how you had sidestepped a poor decision on their part that had in some way led to ruin. After bouncing it around a little bit, I settled on Jessica Jones as a perfect lead for this story. Not only did she had a couple of already-established previous identities as Jewel and Knightress, but there was also a popular WHAT IF story that Brian Michael Bendis had done with her in which she’d married Steve Rogers and become the best version of herself. So I knew that there was a good field of options to draw from. Additionally, Jessica was pretty well known, having recently starred in her self-titled television series. And she wasn’t appearing in an ongoing book at that moment. Perfect. I got lucky in that I cast the art side of the series at the same time that I was reaching out to Gail about writing the project. My instinct was that she’d have a really good voice for the character, but she was hesitant, largely because Jessica was so associated with Brian and she wasn’t entirely comfortable with stepping into his shoes (and those of Kelly Thompson, who had recently written a series of JESSICA projects.) The thing that got her to take the plunge was the fact that I had Phil Noto on board to draw the book—and Phil was equally enthusiastic about the possibility of working with Gail. From there, we were off to the races—and this project was being produced under such a tight set of deadlines that we didn’t even do a tight story outline before proceeding, only a more broad overview. What that meant in practice is that I was trusting Gail to make the murder mystery at the heart of this story make sense and come out all right, as I myself didn’t know the identity of the killer until we got to the scripts for the issue in which it was revealed. I don’t tend to recommend this approach—I think you need to know where you’re going so that you don’t wind up building a bridge to nowhere—but I had enough trust in Gail’s ability not to second-guess things. And it all came out perfectly in the end. I also came up with the concept for the project logo, with the repeating V’s in VARIANTS, though it wasn’t executed by me, of course. Also, at a certain point, we were told that we needed to run a JESSICA JONES logo on this series—which was a big problem for a couple of days, as the whole reason I had started it in the first place was so that Marvel could trademark VARIANTS. But we wound up with a really good compromise, and I love the fact that each issue is blurbed as A JESSICA JONES MYSTERY. I kind of want to do another JESSICA project with a different name so that I can do this same thing again.

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The New Warriors Chronicles

Let’s begin with the obvious: the cover for NEW WARRIORS #68 is a godawful mess. I get the sense that at a certain point I gave up on it, but looking back at it now, it’s a real blemish on the entirety of the run. originally, it had been drawn as a typical full bleed cover by artist Patrick Zircher, which would have been fine. But as a way of attempting to keep sales and interest in the series strong following the departure of Ben Reilly, the Scarlet Spider, writer Evan Skolnick convinced me to give this next four-part story a unified cover treatment to make it stand out as a special event. Evan went so far as to design the cover treatment, which worked great for all of the issues apart from this one. In order to make it work, we had to shrink the cover artwork so that characters weren’t being obscured or overlapped. But this meant that there was virtually no artwork to be seen in the top third of the cover, only empty space meant for the logo. On top of that, it was already a complicated fight image depicting a battle between the Warriors and the Guardians of the Galaxy. We tried coloring it a bunch of times in a bunch of different ways, but nothing seemed to work. There wasn’t a good central focus to the image after it had been reduced down. In the end, given that the ongoing GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY series had itself just been cancelled, we made the decision to knock out most of the image and focus primarily on the main interesting part: Major Victory battling Justice, who were both alternate variations on the same person. But boy, the end result was ugly. Brown isn’t a great cover color to begin with, and the only visual element of interest is as far away from the key “dynamic live area” as its possible to get. It’s probably one of the five worst covers I’ve put out in my career. It’s lousy, through no fault of Zircher.

This entire issue was something of a tug-of-war between Evan and myself, really the one time when we couldn’t quite come to an accord, and so we wound up with a final product that I don’t think either one of us were entirely happy with. Which makes it all the worse that it was the kickoff to the big four-part Death of Speedball story that we’d been teasing for months. But so it goes. The crux of the difficulty came down to this; for several months, Evan had been campaigning to dedicate an entire issue to characterization and character interaction. He wanted to do a story in which the assorted Warriors played RISK, with a bunch of drama bubbling up from their personalities. This kind of approach had done wonders for X-MEN in the past, but I was worried about it, and particularly how we’d be able to sell it. There was still a lot of pressure from my boss Bob Budiansky to make the series more commercial and more tied in with the greater Spider-Man line—a bit more on that in a minute—and so I didn’t feel as though we had the leeway to be able to put out an issue that didn’t have some dramatic hook to it.

On the other hand, ever since inheriting the series, i was interested in doing some manner of crossover with the Guardians of the Galaxy, based entirely around the fact that that series’ version of Vance Astrovik was so different from the character we were showcasing. As I said earlier, I was always fascinated by parallel versions of the same character, and thought there was some Marvel fun to be had. But Evan never quite bought into the idea, especially as time went on and GUARDIANS sales flagged. He didn’t really see the point.

So what we ended up with here is doing both ideas simultaneously and badly. The first half of this issue is dedicated to the Warriors’ RISK game, whereas in the back half, the Guardians turn up for a perfunctory fight, having been pulled to this moment by the time travel shenanigans that would be the focus of our ongoing Speedball story. But neither idea really has the space that it needs in order to truly land its points ,and so the entire issue is a bit of a wreck. The one superstar in it is Patrick Zircher, and you can practically feel the smoke coming out of his ears as he’s forced to produce nine, ten, eleven and twelve-panel pages in an attempt to get all of this story into the issue. Even so, he does a good job of keeping it all from looking cramped.

Below is a photograph of myself and Evan taken by my then-assistant editor Glenn Greenberg in our office at around this time. You can see the template for the Future Shock cover dress on my desk if you look closely, although it appears to be the one for Chapter 3 for issue #70.

Swinging back around to a subject that I brought up earlier: as I mentioned, Spider-Man Group Editor in chief Bob Budiansky was determined to bring NEW WARRIORS more in line with the ongoing Spider-Man Universe, and he had what he thought was a terrific way of going about this. But it’s going to require a little bit of backstory.

When Bob and myself came into the Spidey department, the Spider-Man clone storyline had already begun to be published. As a part of that storyline, and as a way of injecting another new element into the series, writer Howard Mackie had introduced the villain Kaine, who would eventually turn out to be another failed and imperfect clone of Peter Parker. As introduced, Kaine was an assassin for hire, one whose twisted Spidey powers allowed him to brand his victims with the “mark of Kaine”, which was essentially an aggressive use of the wall-crawler’s adhesion power on human skin. As envisioned, Kaine was intended to be a truly bad guy, the worst of the worst, and an eventual arch-enemy for the Ben Reilly Spider-Man. But all of that changed when Bob took over.

As I said in previous installments, Bob’s marching orders when he was given control over the group was to raise Spider-Man sales by 10% cumulatively. Consequently, he was always on the look-out for anything that might be developed into a viable spin-off. Bob saw a lot of potential in Kaine, but not as a villain, but rather as a Venom-like anti-hero. He insisted that Howard and the other Spidey writers go back and establish that Kaine hadn’t actually murdered anybody—this despite the character’s profession being assassin—so that, when the day came, the villain could be redeemed enough to headline in his own series. In those days, Marvel was a lot more tentative about making a hero out of a killer.

You can probably see where this is all going, right? Bob’s idea for NEW WARRIORS was to bring Kaine into the book as a new leader for the team. He was taking inspiration, as a lot of people did in those days, by how Cable took over NEW MUTANTS and eventually transformed that flagging series into the phenomenon that was X-FORCE. For my part, I hated this idea. Not only did I have no particular strong feeling for Kaine one way or the other, but in my mind, the whole premise of the New Warriors was that they were a new, young generation of heroes finding their way and making their own mistakes as they try to do things differently than their forebearers did. So making them footsoldiers for an adult character, and a quasi-assassin at that, never sat well with me, and so I pushed back against it. But I was facing an uphill battle here—especially because I didn’t have a better idea with how to keep NEW WARRIORS operating in the Spider-Man orbit. The thing that kept this from happening was the same thing that ultimately killed NEW WARRIORS: after a year, Marvel’s new operators decided to do away with the Five Editor In Chiefs structure, reuniting editorial under a single EIC, that being X-MEN’s Bob Harras. As an outgrowth of this reorganization, there were massive layoffs in editorial, and Bob (as well as most of the rest of the Spider-Man department) was laid off. Somehow, Glenn Greenberg and I survived this culling, but on the other side of it I was a man without a country, as I had no particular relationship with Harras. That would change over time, but for all that we were overjoyed to have survived, that elation was tinged with the fear of heading into uncharted waters.

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Monofocus

I spend this past week powering my way through BLANK CANVAS: MY SO-CALLED ARTIST’S JOURNEY (published in Japan under the title KAKUKAKU SHIKAJIKA, or literally “So-and-So, Such-and Such”) a terrific five-volume autobiographical manga series by Manga-ka Akiko Hayashi that focuses primarily on her up-and-down relationship with her hardcase art instructor while on her journey to become a professional manga artist. This was a pretty terrific warts-and-all series, and Hayashi pulls no punches in her evaluation of her younger self during the time period covered. It’s the sort of comic book story that it’s difficult to find Stateside, so I found it highly entertaining.

Also, I’ve not yet been able to do more than flip through it, but SUPER VISIBLE by Margaret Stohl was just released. It’s an insider’s history and survey of all of the great women who have worked for Marvel over the years, both as creators and in editorial. The book is an outgrowth of the long-running WOMEN OF MARVEL convention panels and podcast, and at a glance it seems thoroughly researched and informative. It’s rare for me to find books that can tell me stuff that I don’t already know about Marvel, so I’m looking forward to cracking into this one.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about a Lost Spirit Crossover

Five years ago, I wrote about the Five Best Unofficial DC Crossovers

And ten years ago, I wrote about a favorite Tokusatsu super hero series, KAMEN RIDER BLACK

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You know, I’m pretty pleased with this week’s Newsletter. So often I get to this wrap-up point and I think to myself, “What the hell did you just write?” But this time, I feel like a good variety of topics were covered and that there’s a little something for just about anybody. You’ll have to let me know whether you agree, though

Hat’s All, Folks!

Tom B