#175: Break's Over

Well, hello, everybody! It’s nice to see you. You’re looking well—how have you been?

Me, I spent the past two weeks traveling across the country for a series of events, leaving you mere breadcrumbs while I’ve been gone. So this week, we’ll be back to full fighting strength. But before we move on, let me tell you a little bit about what I’ve been up to.

So among other things, I attended the big World Premiere of FANTASTIC 4: FIRST STEPS held at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. It was a big, crazy night, with a bevy of comic book creators associated with the FF hobnobbing with the filmmakers and other guests.

That’s me and Marvel EIC C.B. Cebulski with the movie’s Executive producer Grant Curtis. Grant was a huge help and a driving force in our recent FANTASTIC 4: FIRST STEPS prequel comic.

Speaking of which, all of the attendees were given a commemorative copy of that selfsame comic upon entering the Pavilion, which was pretty cool.

I’m told that Mark Buckingham and I wound up being front-and-center in the opening of Disney+’s live coverage of the event, though the camera wisely and swiftly transitioned to more interesting subject matter. But here’s a look from the second floor balcony.

A few days after that, we made the drive to San Diego for this year’s Comic Con. For some reason, I wound up doing a bunch of memorial panels for creators now gone. This photo’s from the Jim Shooter memorial, which was held on Thursday night. The panel itself was relatively sparsely attended, with only one person on it who had worked directly with Jim, but the whole thing had to be pulled together fairly last minute, so that’s understandable.

We had better representation on the Peter David memorial panel on Saturday, including writer Glenn Hauman whom I first met in childhood. I also had the somewhat surreal experience of helping to carry George Takei up the short flight of stairs to the podium level.

Sunday night, it was back to Los Angeles for more meetings and the like. But while we were there, we made it a point to stop in and experience the stunning Jack Kirby exhibit now running at the Skirball Museum. The couple of photos that I show here really don’t do the show justice. If you’re in the area, go.

I also wound up signing the gift shop’s stock of copies of the FANTASTIC FOUR: PANEL TO PANEL hardcover for which I wrote a section. So for anybody who covets a signed copy, well, the Skirball’s got ‘em.

Me and my best enemy, AMAZING SPIDER-MAN editor Nick Lowe, pose with Kirby fingers.

We also debuted this video at a couple of our San Diego panels, which recounts the trip some of us took over to Pinewood Studios to see the making of FANTASTIC 4: FIRST STEPS in progress. Now that it’s been made available publicly, I can also share it with you here.

But enough about me. There’s two weeks’ worth of reader questions to get through! Just a note to start things off: I’m going to continue to avoid answering questions that ask for spoilers about upcoming appearances and the like in the X-books. Those have become a bit more prevalent of late, so it seems like a good moment to spell things out: I want you to read the comics, so I’m not going to be giving away those secrets ahead of time.

MixMat

Have you ever given any thought to what the trajectory of your life would have been, Tom, if the coin toss had gone the other way and Joey Cavalieri and Glenn Greenberg had somehow both been chosen by the Powers-That-Be to remain on staff at Marvel during the period you write about so many times already and you were given the Axe instead of Joey Cavalieri?

Would you have tried to apply for a job at DC, Dark Horse or Image, or left comics editorial altogether? Or have you never asked What If?

My guess, Mix, is that I would have wound up doing something else outside of the field. At the time of those lay-offs, while I’d been at Marvel for around six years, I hadn’t yet done anything worth writing home about, so I can’t see another outfit being especially eager to pick me up. There’d almost certainly not be a Newsletter like this one.

Martin Gray

On the subject of the likes of ‘damn’ and ‘hell’ being banned in comics, how do you feel about the widespread use of !*&?* etc these days (it seems more common at DC than Marvel)? To me, it invites you to hear much stronger words than damn and so on. I find it pretty tiresome… yes, if this was real life, people would likely eff and blind on occasion, but we had decades of Marvel and DC comics without the device. It gets boring very quickly; space in comics is precious, let’s hear some more interesting words.

I take what is perhaps an old school position on this, Martin: when dealing with character that were created for children and that still have a broad potential audience of kids, I don’t see any reason to give parents a reason not to let their kids read the books. So that means being responsible with the language that we use. I don’t mind the wingdings per se, tiresome or not

Venus

1. Have you seen any Studio Ghibli films and if so, do you have one you enjoy quite a lot?

2. Have you ever read a manga or watched an anime that maybe influenced or inspired a story you've worked on?

Probably my favorite Miyazaki film, Venus, is one he made before Studio Ghibli was a going concern: LUPIN III: THE CASTLE OF CAGLIOSTRO. Back when it used to play in obscure cinemas in Manhattan every year, I’d typically drag a bunch of Marvel staffers to see it time and again. Of the Ghibli entries, I’ve always been partial to LAPUTA. And there are dozens of manga that have influenced what I’ve done in a variety of ways, too many to adequately cover. At the moment, I’m reading the whole of VINLAND SAGA in those enormous hardcover volumes, which are really great books. But I’ve been involved with the anime and manga scene dating back to the early 1980s.

David Lowe

With Age of Revelation and X-Men of Apocalypse coming out around the same time was there any thought given to delaying one or other to avoid confusion? While it's easy enough to know they are different stories it's taxing for the reader to context switch from issue to issue when series are similar.

I don’t disagree that it can be a bit confusing, David, but that’s just the way that things happened to work out. The anniversary of AOA was the instigating factor that got us thinking about both projects, but it looked for a while like X-MEN OF APOCALYPSE wasn’t going to come together in time; this led us to build out AGE OF REVELATION around that same anniversary period. Then, when XOA did wind up happening, we couldn’t at that point move AOR as it spanned too many titles and too many projects. So we’re just going to have to count on our readership being smart enough to distinguish one from the other.

Jeff Ryan

it’s now 2036, and Superman is now in the public domain! Do you suspect that Marvel will have him start showing up? Or that Disney will stick to occasional licensing deals with Warner Bros for "their" Superman?

Well, you never know, Jeff, but I think it’s unlikely that Marvel would start using Superman at that point, simply because protecting your own specific interpretation of the character once he’s a public domain figure can be a bit challenging. And why would you invest resources in a character and a property that you can’t readily use safely across all lines of business?

ComicbookDad531

I recently found a bunch of Marvel Masterpiece cards from the 90’s and there were so many great artist that did cards. Do you have a favorite card or where certain character’s cards that you collected?

I worked on the earliest sets of the MARVEL MASTERPIECES cards, Dad, so my perspective on them is a bit different from most. So I didn’t collect them, I helped make them. And in particular, most of the art choices on the second set, the one that featured multiple artists, were assigned by me. There were some good images in that set.

Oscar

I wanted to ask you at the time was there any discussion to keep dr doom as the infamous iron man after mister Bendis finished his run on Iron man or that idea was always doomed

That’s the thing about villains, Oscar. Several of them have become so popular that they’ve switched over to becoming headliners on their own to one degree of success or another. So it’s not impossible that we might have gone further with a reformed Doom. By that same token, especially with FANTASTIC FOUR coming back, you kind of want their most classic villain to be a villain once they’re back in play. This is also sort of the situation X-MEN faces right now, after half a decade in which their most well-known and popular foes were essentially their next door neighbors. At a certain point, you want to see them fight Magneto, or Apocalypse, or Mister Sinister or whomever again, you know?

KyleKatarn

I'm curious to know why was Phoenix not at all acknowledged during Marvel's Next Big Thing panel during the conversation about the new cosmic line of books?

For the exact same reason why DEATH OF THE SILVER SURFER or THOR weren’t, Kyle—because that panel was about announcing new things, not reminding people that things they already know about were still out there.

Bully

I wonder when we can learn about any future plans about Jean Grey/Phoenix?

Might I suggest the pages of future comics, Bully?

X of Alex

Age of Revelation looks huge and imposing, with lots series making up its body. Is there a particular Age of Revelation title that has come together really well and that readers should pay special attention to?

I think that readers should sample whatever looks to be of interest to them, Alex, that’s about it. But we’re doing a whole bunch of books that have a wide variety of perspectives on the landscape and entirely different casts of characters. So follow your bliss and check out whatever catches your fancy.

Seastar

In X-Men #59, there's a really nice scene where Scott and Jean are talking in a cinema together. On the screen, the movie playing is Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. What's interesting is that they used actual photographs from the movie, not drawn art. Was using real photographs a common technique in comics? Did it have a heyday/when did it go out of style, because I haven't seen anything like it in X-Men before or since.

I can’t say that it was common, Seastar, but it was a lot easier in times past when copyright laws were a bit more forgiving of such uses. Today, our Legal department would never permit such a use.

Jim MacLeod

are the logos on the X books getting smaller? Is the idea to decrease the size to enhance legibility, rather than larger logos that have to go behind the art?

I don’t think that they are getting smaller, Jim, not in any sort of organized way. I tend to like logos that have a certain amount of cover presence to them, so my first choice is seldom to go smaller unless there’s a pressing need to do so.

PapaTroll

have you read the book Super Boys by Brad Ricca (detailing Supermans creation)? If so, what did you think of it?

I suspect you’d be hard-pressed to find a book on the creation of Superman that I haven’t read, Troll. And yes, I liked SUPER BOYS just fine.

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Off The Wall

I’m not certain after all these years whether it was penciler Richard Case or inker Bob Wiacek who gave me this page to NIGHTHAWK #1, a limited series that we all worked on together back in the late 1990s. I would guess the latter since Bob was a frequent visitor to the Marvel offices and probably would have picked up his share of the originals in person. This three-issue series was written by EARTH X’s Jim Krueger when he was just starting out, and it’s been pretty much forgotten in the years since it came out. But it dealt with the question of predictive justice as Nighthawk was given the power of future sight, allowing him to see and stop crimes before they happened—which presented certain obvious problems and raised definite moral issues about whether it was appropriate to punish somebody for something that they might be about to do.

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I Buy Crap

This was a welcome if costly release. Years ago, back in the 1970s, I owned a full set of Mego’s Fantastic Four action figures. I can recall a certain sense of humiliation when, after having failed to locate one the previous year, I was forced to ask for the Invisible Girl doll for Christmas one year. I build my crew a bathtub-style Fantasticar out of a discarded shoebox. And I never entirely had the funds to buy a spare Aquaman and Mr Fantastic figures so that I could combine them to make a non-aflame Johnny Storm. But I did think about it. So this Disney exclusive reissue was right up my alley—my original figures are long gone. But these are pretty accurate recreations of them. I’m kinda unlikely to take them out of the packaging this time, though, as they’re displayed so nicely therein. And it’s not like I’m going to play with them, at least not while other people are watching.

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Behind the Curtain

This is a bit of nonsense, but it was also good fun in its way. Many years ago, I hired Alanna Smith as my new Assistant Editor. In preparation for her arrival, I sourced a pair of panels from obscure Adam Strange stories.

This panel got displayed on Alanna’s desk, so as to correctly identify her for newcomers.

And this one wound up displayed on my desk, to avoid any confusion. I can’t tell you how often strange men have tried to kiss me at work, it’s a real scourge.

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Pimp My Wednesday

But of course, even in my absence, the presses never sleep, so here are a few gold nuggets we’ve prepared for you this week.

After a scheduled one-month hiatus, ONE WORLD UNDER DOOM returns with issue #6 in which Reed Richards attempts to put a stop to Doom’s Emperorship of the world by employing reason rather than force. It goes about as well as you might expect, and it’s brought to you by the standard team of Ryan North and RB Silva.

And we’ve got perhaps the least-surprising guest-stars of all turning up in UNCANNY X-MEN #19 this week as writer Gail Simone brings favorites Deadpool and Outlaw to Haven House for some fun and games. All this and David Marquez, too! (Not to mention a full-sized logo!)

And Murewa Ayodele and Mario Santoro unleash the second chapter of Thunder War in STORM #11 as the stakes get even higher and the situation becomes even crazier for Earth’s Mightiest Mutant.

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A Comic Book On Sale 60 Years Ago Today, August 3, 1965

I wrote about LOBO #1 extensively at this link, but just to summarize matters for our Newsletter audience: this was the first American comic book series ever published to star a black headline character, and it lasted only two issues before weak sales sent it back to limbo. Which is unfortunate. It’s worth pointing out that LOBO predated the first appearance of the Black Panther in FANTASTIC FOUR #52 by a number of months, It isn’t a great comic book, but it was a fine attempt to do something more contemporary and progressive with the western genre. Sixty-five years later and it still feels like we’ve still got a ton of work to do when it comes to race relations.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

NEW AVENGERS #8 came out on August 3, 2005 and featured the variant cover showcased above. It’s pretty much the entire reason I chose to spotlight this issue. For this storyline, which delved into the secret history of the Sentry, a character whose backstory was meant to date back to the earliest period in Marvel history, writer Brian Bendis had suggested that we do a series of faux covers of old Sentry stories created by comic book greats. In addition to this piece, we also had covers on other issues by Neal Adams, Sal Buscema and Herb Trimpe. This piece, however, centered on the wedding of the Sentry, was illustrated by John Romita Sr. and is a testament to his continuing humility. By this time, John was already well on the Mount Rushmore of Marvel artists, and yet he’d never entirely gotten over his own anxiety and impostor syndrome about his own skill level. So, having taken on the assignment, a few weeks later John called me up in a tizzy, completely blocked on the image. He asked me what we wanted, and in trying to coach him through the situation, I told him, “John, you pretty much invented this kind of cover. Don’t overthink it, just do what you do.” And as you can see above, he did just that. Of those four classic covers we did, this is probably the strongest of the bunch.

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The New Warriors Chronicles

NEW WARRIORS #71 wrapped up the four-part time-tripping storyline, restoring the actual Speedball to life and bringing together the assorted threads that writer Evan Skolnick had been laying out since he began working on the series. This issue featured a new and updated corner box treatment, a reflection of the change in Marvel’s Editor in Chief and his preferences. Unfortunately, this new corner box was a slight bit taller than the last one, and as a result the bottom of the F in FUTURE gets cut off by the UPC box. So our efforts to develop an identifying trade dress for this series-within-a-series was only so-so successful.

I find that I don’t really have all that much to say about this concluding issue. It wrapped up the ongoing plotlines effectively, with the Warriors getting a bit of a do-over to prevent the destruction of Manhattan, the team journeying into tomorrow close to 2099, and the Sphinx returning to play a crucial role in the climax. Plus, once again the Ben Reilly Spider-Man puts in an appearance, the last time we’d see him in these pages. Artist Patrick Zircher had really come into his own, his sense of page composition becoming more polished and confident all the time.

Having gotten to this point, we were continuing to lay out plans for the future, unaware as of yet that the series really didn’t have one. But that’s something that we’ll get into more over the next two issues.

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Monofocus

I’ve been traveling, so I haven’t really been keeping up with a whole lot in terms of media. The one exception has been STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS, which recently returned for its third season. I’ve spoken in the past about how I’ve felt like this is the series truest to the original concept that’s been put together in this latest era, and that hasn’t really changed. And yet, this third year is feeling a bit like the show has fallen into a bit of a rut, that having seen what episodes were the most popular in prior years, the producers decided to double down by making new stories that owed a lot to those earlier entries. In effect, this means that the season so far has been fine, but a trifle stale. I still like the cast a great deal and the fact that the show operates on a more episodic model than most other modern television. But it needs to do a bit more to innovate, rather than playing its greatest hits over and over again—there have only been twenty episodes before this series, not enough to really reach that point yet, I wouldn’t think. Also, they kind of broke the elegance of the opening title sequence with the changes they made to it this year, which is a small thing, but the sort of thing I notice.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about the LAST JOHNNY QUICK STORY

Five years ago, I wrote about a Forgotten Masterpiece from MARVEL TALES #149

And ten years ago, I spotlighted this Great Cover

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My traveling days appear to be at an end for the moment, so you can bet your bottom dollar that I’ll be back again next week with more old time comic book nonsense to enliven your Sunday breakfast.

Hat’s All, Folks!

Tom B