#177: Lookwell

Welcome back, heroes! I’ve got a fun little video to share with you this week. I first saw the Lookwell pilot during its one and only network airing back in 1991. I watched it based entirely on the fact that it starred the great Adam West and because its premise—that West played a former television detective who took the honorary police detective citation he’d been given back in the day seriously—seemed like it was perfectly rife for comedy. In those days, I wasn’t yet aware of who Conan O’Brien and Robert Smigel were, but they were the team behind this show. The pilot was the lowest-ranked show for that week. Seriously, I may have been the only person who watched it. But I thought it was brilliant, and I’ve been delighted to see if get a renewed lease on life over the years, as both its creators and West himself have had their place in popular culture reappraised. So here for you now, at this link, is the one and only episode of Lookwell.

And now, some reader mail:

Jeff Ryan

You mentioned Joe Quesada was trying to (to use a wrestling term) "push" Squirrel Girl into success and prominence via New Avengers. And it worked!

Are there any characters you have "pushed" over the years, thinking they have breakout potential?

I think saying that Joe was trying to push Squirrel Girl is overstating things a bit, Jeff. He’d just had a few encounters with fans at conventions who had talked about the characters, so he thought she’d be a good fit for what Brian was proposing to do. And I’ve certainly mentioned characters to people over the years where applicable, though I’ve never insisted that anybody use any character in particular.

JV

I really love the Arkon stories. Any plans to bring Arkon back (deep cut question I know :)?

I remember some chatter around the Busiek or Johns era of Avengers that Arkon was being considered as a member - any truth to that? Info on how it would have played out?

Kurt Busiek answered you on this already in the comments, JV, but just to reiterate what he had said: yes, Kurt had talked about potentially bringing Arkon onto the team as a member at one point, but we never got there. When we last saw the character, he was off in Weirdworld, which maybe makes it either more or less likely that he’ll turn up again.

Ray Cornwall

Since it’s 60 years later, do we know the page rates of all involved? I wouldn’t ask the rates of current talent, but I’m assuming it’s safe to ask about these rates. And was Sinnott’s higher rate really what kept him from getting the FF assignment until #44?

I don’t have good enough intel to give you page rates from that period, Ray, but they weren’t any great fortune. And yes, the difference in the rate is what made it feasible for Joe Sinnott to come on board; he was making that amount working over at TREASURE CHEST, his main account at the time, so the boost allowed for him to take on the assignment without proportionately losing money on the deal. He had inked issue #5 during a lull in his workload and had started on #6—he inked a couple of figures on the opening two pages—before having to turn it back due to better-paying work having come in.

Cian McDarby

just for our peace of mind: You know how long Age of Revelation is, right? This isn’t like a Clone Saga thing, where we’re all blindly blundering forward? I’m perfectly cool with not knowing, but it’d be nice to have confirmation you know.

On to a second question, will we be seeing more genre books coming to the X-Line? Frankly, it feels to me the most memorable books are sometimes books that try to meld in a second genre, like PAD’s 2nd X-Factor being half detective noir, JLI being a sitcom, Moore’s Swamp Thing’s horror influences or the post modernism of Morrison’s Doom Patrol. When a book really commits to trying to be more than just a standard superhero book, it really makes it something special. I’d love to see something like that in the X-Line.

Yes, Cian, I know how long it will take AGE OF REVELATION to play out, don’t worry. Unless it’s a monster hit, in which case it will never end. And I feel as though that’s very much what we’ve been trying to do across the X-titles since I started, give each release its own flavor and distinct patch of ground to occupy.

Manqueman

The famously shelved issue with Janus was drawn ad rejected. That story was drawn by Kirby soon after the Trib piece.

I pulled this one bit of information out of your longer comment, Manqueman, because it’s demonstratively wrong. The story that was recycled into FANTASTIC FOUR #108 had been drawn by Jack as issue #102 right at the end of his tenure on the book. What saw print as #102 was drawn by Jack as #103. So it didn’t have anything directly to do with the Tribune piece.

Ben Morse

Tom, if you’re comfortable saying, what made All-New, All-Different Avengers an “abortive run”? (aside from me hating having to type out the full title on Marvel.com)

Sure, Ben. Right after we started ALL-NEW, ALL-DIFFERENT AVENGERS, there was a push to do animation and other media with a group of our younger characters. This eventually saw expression as MARVEL RISING. But initially, the thought was that the initiative was going to be called CHAMPIONS, and that’s why that series was begun a short way into ANAD AVENGERS’ run, pretty much tanking the entire premise of that series. In the end, CHAMPIONS wound up being a better, more focused series, so it was all for the good, but it meant that the ANAD AVENGERS run, which we thought would run indefinitely, needed to be terminated a lot earlier than we’d anticipated.

Seastar

What did you think of the All-New X-Men (2013), or really on the whole idea of taking those original, Silver Age X-Men to the present? I always felt like it was a tough needle to thread but also made for some good stories (maybe even more could have been told with time). I just remember hearing you didn't like time travelers much, or characters displaced in time or space, so I was curious about the All New X-Men era and if you had any thoughts on it.

I’m a bit biased on that story concept, Seastar, as I was one of the people who came up with it a couple of years prior to that. It grew out of a brainstorming session that myself, Axel Alonso and Sales VP David Gabriel were having at an earlier point, and we hung onto the idea until there was a good time to execute it. Brian had heard about it and wanted to be the one to execute it, and he did. So I liked that run just fine. What I don’t love, and what the people who said this were probably thinking about, is the dozens of scattered X-orbit characters who are either doppelgangers of other popular X-characters or time-displaced descendants and the like. The X-Men world is littered with these, and all of them are just about impossible to explain to a novice, their backstories are so convoluted. So I tend to be judicious about fielding characters of that nature.

Jackoyeah

Speaking of FF: First Steps - I’d love to know your thoughts on the film? I don’t recall seeing you mention or ‘review’ the film since its release, but I thought it was great

I’m probably a bit too close to it to be able to judge it objectively, Jackoyeah, but I liked it as well.

Rob Imes

If you were writing the same memo today, what age group would you say is Marvel's core audience? Does Marvel know what demographic is reading its monthly comic books in 2025?

If you’re talking in terms of the Direct Market, Rob, then I’d say that the average age there is a whole lot higher than it was back in the day. if you’re speaking overall, through all channels including collections and digital and so forth, then the audience is a bit more diffuse.

Glenn Simpson

do you think the audiences for LCS monthly direct issues vs bookstore trades would be different? I feel like the book store audience would be more likely to be accepting of changes in characters (like Jane Foster Thor) and would be more interested in MCU synergy, all due to being less "hardcore".

And if that's the case, wouldn't there be some situations where a series could sell less well as a monthly but still be kept around due to strong trade sales?

As a general rule of thumb, Glenn, our experience shows that things that perform well in the Direct Market also tend to perform well as collections, and things that don’t perform well in the Direct Market don’t. This isn’t absolute, of course, but it holds to be true 99% of the time. So the idea that there’s some hungry audience out there for a beloved title that would consume it in mass quantities if only they could eventually get it in collected form turns out to mostly be wishful thinking.

Reader 616

New writers and artists are regularly brought onto books with the aim of providing a fresh new direction and increasing sales. However, one element of the creative team that doesn't seem to change half as often is the editor. Why do you think that is?

If shaking up the writer and artist boosts sales and interest wouldn't shaking up the editor also have a similar effect? They arguably shape the tone and direction more than anyone else.

There are a couple of reasons that you might not want to be playing musical chairs with the editorial staff in this manner, 616. The first is that, on a very practical level, nobody really cares who is editing what; it doens’t have a whole lot of impact one way or another on the marketplace. Additionally, it takes a certain amount of time to get up to speed editorially on a given assignment, so if you’re constantly switching everybody’s workload around, you’re most often going to end up with novices in place across the books, with no chance to grow into the assignment. And third, making wholesale changes in editorial workload is extremely disruptive to the editorial staff and tends to result in poor morale and a greater-than-normal degree of flight as people don’t feel any job stability.

Andrew Albrecht

I was disappointed when I read Giant Sized Issue 2. THE moment I’ve been waiting for happens, and the book just ends. There is no discussion about it, the book ends where I wanted it to begin.

Can we please see more of Kamala interacting with her family and her friends in Jersey?

Sorry you were disappointed, Andrew, but you were hoping for something very specific and that just wasn’t the story that was being told there. So you’ll sadly have to wait for Kamala’s next appearance to determine what story we wind up focusing on there.

Paul from ASM

Any chance we see more of Loiuse the vampire from Wolverine Blood Hunt and Benjamin Percy's Wolverine? She was a really cool character would love to see more of her!

It certainly isn’t out of the question, Paul. But given that it was Ben who came up with her, I’d guess that she’d be most likely to turn up in DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE, the series he’s writing. Though there are no current plans for that of which I am aware.

Gwen

Tom, i would like to ask if you can give us some info about the Binary comic? We know it will replace PHOENIX in the event, but we don’t know yet if it is about Jean or If she will be in it at all.

That’s true, Gwen, you don’t. But as I’ve said in prior weeks, there’ll be more information about these books coming out as we draw closer and closer to their date of release. And I don’t really want to give everything away about these books ahead of time. If I did, what would X-fans such as yourself talk about in the meantime?

Mark

To the best of your knowledge, have the higher ups at Disney/Marvel ever commissioned any serious modelling on whether profitability could be enhanced through shuttering Marvel publishing and licensing out the IP to other comic companies?

I can’t speak of this with any absolute certainty, Mark. But from all available evidence, the higher ups at Disney recognize that what we in publishing do is a very specific skill set, one that provides the raw materials for the rest of the organization, and they’re respectful of that. If you were to simply license out the IP, you’d lose that fundamental fuel for everything else, and those other branches of the company would stagnate.

Chris Sutcliffe

I have recently read, and loved, the Daily Bugle issues from the 90s. I'd love to hear anything you might have to say about them: where the idea to center civilian characters came from, how they were received, etc.

Well, Chris, I believe that the idea to do DAILY BUGLE came out of a brainstorming session about creating other extensions of the Spidey line. I’m not certain that it was me who proposed it, but I was the one who wound up executing it at any rate. The big idea of it, as I recall, was to try the series in black and white, as an experiment to see if eliminating the need for color might make it easier to turn a profit. On that front, the lack of color was a non-issue. What I remember the most about it was that it was a chance to work with Paul Grist, whose crime comic KANE I was a huge fan of, and who brought a similar sensibility to the DAILY BUGLE limited series.

Mark Paglia

With an eye towards Age of Revelation, how do you approach setting up an event when it's going to be in conversation with and compared to a previous one? Are there specific pitfalls you try to avoid?

On a practical level, Mark, past a certain point I don’t really worry about it. For sure there are going to be people who compare AOR to AOA, and in that instance, it’s virtually impossible for the new project to compete with the nostalgia for the old one. But the two stories are actually quite different, so I simply focus on making the new work as legitimate unto itself as it can be, and assume that the readers who are going to be unhappy that AOR doesn’t live up to their memories of AOA are likely to feel that way regardless.

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Off The Wall

I had this page all selected before the recent situation surrounding the latest BLOODSHOT revival came to light, but I still almost wound up bumping it back. But I’m going to count on the fact that everybody here is sharp enough not to conflate one with the other. Now, I’ve never worked on BLOODSHOT (or any Valiant property for that matter.) But what I did do was to give artist Lewis LaRosa an early break when I hired him to illustrate a CITIZEN V limited series. That project wound up being a somewhat rocky affair, in part because Lewis was new to the business and hadn’t yet developed enough stamina and experience when it came to keeping up with deadlines. Years later, he sent me this page from his then-current assignment, BLOODSHOT #13, as a bit of a thank you for giving him that initial inroad and being generally supportive. (In other words, I didn’t kill him when he was late.)

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Misspent Youth

Digging through some old files of mine, I came across an assortment of homemade comics that I did in my youth. As just about everybody who ever wanted to work in the industry did, I worked on my own comics as a kid, most of which were derivative as hell, most of which didn’t showcase any special aptitude for the form. And yet, I love seeing these things, so I’m hoping that other people will as well.

SWISH INTO ACTION was the first full-size comic book I ever made, by which I mean that it was several pages long. Prior to this, the homemade comics I had done were only the length of a sheet of paper folded in half, with a front cover, two interior pages and a back cover. To make this book, I wound up scotch taping several pages of lined paper together, which is why its spine looks the way it does. I was in second grade when I put this together, so I would have been eight years old. As should be obvious, the Swish was my oblivious homegrown knock-off of the Flash, my favorite character in those days. Having read the JLA/JSA team-up story that introduced the Crime Syndicate of Earth 3, I had decided that my own heroes would take up residence there now that the Syndicate had been defeated and left trapped in limbo. This is why the Swish’s co-star is Green Lantern 3—I couldn’t come up with any good knock-off equivalent to the name Green Lantern.

A decade or two later, I brought the character back for a final bow in a Crisis parody strip that I produced for a fanzine. As you’d expect, the Swish wound up dead in that story.

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Behind the Curtain

And as you can see, my drawing hasn’t materially improved since that time. But it’s still good enough, despite atrophy from lack of use, to get across a basic idea. That’s what these two sketches were for—to illustrate my proposed cover design for the IMPERIAL series now running, and to give cover artist Marco Checchetto an indication of what I was thinking of for the first cover. The smaller version on the post-it note was done first, and then I did the larger one to help spell out the image (though I made the ill-advised choice to add some color with what few markers I had to hand, which made it tougher to work out the image. Oops.) I do this sort of thing with a certain degree of regularity, and while none of my sketches are ever going to be worth anything, they are good in terms of communicating an idea visually.

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Pimp My Wednesday

The wheel turns, time marches on, and more new comics wing your way!

Speaking of IMPERIAL, issue #3 drops this Wednesday thanks to Jonathan Hickman, Iban Coello and Federico Vicentini. This is where we pull back the curtain a little bit further on what has been driving events in the story and also set the stage for the five IMPERIAL WAR one-shots that will see print before issue #4 comes out.

And it’s time for our young X-kids to pull on their big boy pants as they’re going to need to undertake a rescue mission to the past to recover their time-lost mentor Kitty Pryde, who has slipped through a rift that’s landed her back in her hometown before she discovered her mutant powers and joined the X-Men. It’s delivered by Dr. Eve L. Ewing and Federica Mancin.

And finally, by far the most fun and action-packed comic book you’ll read all month (if not longer), MARVEL ALL-ON-ONE is a single, massive 50 page story delivered by Ryan North and Ed McGuinness that’s told entirely in splash images and the occasional double-page splash. It involves the Thing returning from a mission in space only to discover that everybody on Earth, in particular all of the other super heroes of the Marvel Universe, suddenly want to kill him. That means that, like it or not, it’s time for Ben Grimm to punch, kick, clobber and chew his way through the opposition, at least until he can work out just what is behind this revoltin’ situation. Ed had an absolute blast on this book and left his all on every page—each one feels like a cover image. And as you’d expect, Ryan’s script is both heartfelt and smart, for all that this is a book about a rock-monster battling it out with everybody in the world.

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A Comic Book On Sale 30 Years Ago Today, August 17, 1995

CAPTAIN AMERICA #444 introduced the creative team of Mark Waid and Ron Garney for the start of a abortive run that made a big impact at the time, but which was undone by the HEROES REBORN deal that saw a number of titles farmed out to Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld to create. This was also the first time in more than a decade that somebody other than Mark Gruenwald was writing the series. Mark’s run had ended with a multi-issue storyline in which Cap was facing his final hours and did eventually perish. Rather than bringing him back immediately, Waid and Garney instead picked up the ball where it lay, crafting an issue in which the title character doesn’t appear at all, but his presence is felt throughout. The issue is a real statement of intent, even though the run proper didn’t really begin to pick up steam until the next issue, when Cap himself made his inevitable comeback. Garney was head-and-shoulders just a way better and more dynamic artist than most of those who’d toiled on the title for the preceding years—he gave the book a vitality it had been lacking. And Waid was in his prime, evidencing an elemental understanding of the character that was totally different from what Gruenwald had been doing yet which was cut from the same cloth. After a long stretch where the ascendence of the Spidey and X titles and the rise of Image had made the Star-Spangled Avenger seem a bit passe to the readers of that era, Waid and Garney made the title one that readers were hungry to pay attention to again.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

THE ALL-NEW, ALL-DIFFERENT X-MEN SOFTCOVER MASTERWORKS trade paperback was released on August 17, 1993, and was an extension of my work on the regular Hardcover MASTERWORKS volumes. The idea was to break the earliest volumes in two and release them in more affordable editions—prior to this, I had done volumes for AMAZING SPIDER-MAN and UNCANNY X-MEN, and there’s be an AVENGERS volume after this one. Despite having left the company under duress, writer Chris Claremont wrote me a very nice introduction for this new volume. But the big thing that I did—because most of the stories in this book were only 17 pages in length, so the page count was shorter—was to reach out to Dave Cockrum and get permission to showcase a bunch of his early designs for prospective X-Men in the back pages. In the years since, everything I showed here and a lot more has made its way into print, but this would have been the first time that most readers would have seen Dave’s Outsiders team including Nightcrawler that he pitched when he was working for DC on Legion of Super Heroes, as well as Typhoon, Black Cat and earlier versions of Thunderbird and Jean Grey. Unfortunately, the book was marred by a production error, one that wasn’t my fault. Two of the pages in the reprint of UNCANNY X-MEN #97 had their film plates mounted incorrectly at the printer, which resulted in the red and blue plates being swapped. This drove me nuts from the first moment that I got printed copies of the volume, but the powers-that-be didn’t see any point in pulping and reprinting the run, even if they could have gotten the printer to eat the cost as the error was on their end. This was especially galling in that issue #97 was at that time one of the few issues of the run that I didn’t own a copy of (though I did own the hardcover MASTERWORKS printing.) It’s strange to think that this volume is now 32 years old, older than most of the younger editors who are now on Marvel’s staff. I think I still have a copy of this book on the shelves in my office today.

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The New Warriors Chronicles

Last week’s installment received some responses from some persons of relevance, so let’s start things off with those. First up is former NEW WARRIORS writer Evan Skolnick:

Evan Skolnick

Tom, you rightly point out young Dan Slott’s ballsiness in continually ribbing us about my idea of a HYDRA splinter cell having been occupying the secret lower levels of the Crash-Pad all this time. I thought it was hilarious how much this idea annoyed him!

In fact, I found Dan’s comments about the lurking HYDRA agents having to borrow sugar from the Warriors so amusing that I sort of worked the idea into issue #61, wherein one of the then-mysterious HYDRA observers complains to the other about their having run out of sugar for their coffee.

But wow, there was another aspect of ballsiness to this issue that you skimmed right over. Do you remember the villain Mother of Pearl’s original name? I know you do! “Pearl Man”, an oh-so-subtle poke at Ron Perelman, the corporate shark who was running Marvel into financial and creative ruin at the time. As I recall, your reason behind demanding the character’s name change was that you were worried that including “Pearl Man” would get us all fired. Which, hey, it very well might have!

But even beyond that, how could you not mention two of my favorite word balloons of my entire run? At the time of this issue’s development, the entire Marvel editorial team and much of its creative community was reeling from the insulting no-confidence vote shown by upper management in handing off complete creative control of THE AVENGERS and CAPTAIN AMERICA to Rob Liefeld’s Extreme Studios. The infamous “Heroes Reborn” initiative. Everyone ranted about it behind our closed office doors and over our lunches, but of course we couldn’t say anything about it in print. Or could we?

(I can’t include an inline photo in a comment, so here’s a link to the scan of the word balloons instead: https://tinyurl.com/25kz4k3b)

The fact that you at least let that subversive dialogue through is a testament that you were not without a bit of testicular fortitude yourself!

One more point of trivia straight from the rumor mill of the time. What I had heard regarding Bob Harras’s longstanding grudge against NEW WARRIORS was less about the series potentially interfering with Fabian hitting his X-deadlines, and more about the fact that the team included two mutant characters — Firestar and Justice — over which Bob as X-Men Group Editor/Editor in Chief had no control. My understanding is that this made NEW WARRIORS a constant thorn in his side, which he plucked as soon as he had the authority, despite it outselling other titles that he spared the axe.

I tell you, Evan, after so many years I didn’t recall that Mother of Pearl was originally intended to have been called Pearl Man. But I do think I was right to have you change it. And I did notice the dialogue that you quote when reviewing the issue again, but didn’t feel the need to call it out. It was the sort of cheap shot that was typical of that era, and I wouldn’t let you get away with doing it today, testicular fortitude be damned. For anybody who doesn’t want to be bothered by links, here are the balloons in question:

As for what may have motivated Bob Harras, there’s somebody else who has a different perspective on the situation than either of us. So here’s former NEW WARRIORS writer Fabian Nicieza with his take:

Fabian Nicieza

For the record, and with a little edge on my part you'd think that or say that, the schedule had NOTHING to do with why Bob didn't like New Warriors.
I wasn't late on my plots or scripts. EVER. If anything, the way the X-books were working by year 2 of my stay there, I was plotting 5 pages at a time so Andy Kubert had something to draw, but I couldn't finish my plots because minds (and characters and directions) were being changed on the fly.

I think Bob didn't like NW for the same reason that he disliked the sidekick characters at DC (and was never overly fond of New Mutants either): he thought they diluted the brand strength of the core characters.

Ironic, yes, considering the X-Men's origins, and contradictory, considering he understood and liked Spider-Man, never wanted us to "age up" the X-characters too quickly, and was an integral driving force to that whole Teen Tony disaster.
I would venture to guess that outside of the crossover stories I wrote between New Warriors and X-stuff, Bob hadn't read enough issues of the book to form a fair opinion on it before he became EiC. Because, as we all know, anyone who read NW knew how good it was! ;)

I wasn’t meaning to imply that you were late on anything, Fabian, only that Bob may have felt that way. But your analysis makes sense, and I agree that Bob likely never read any NEW WARRIORS issues apart from the ones that crossed over with the X-Books directly, which he had to review.

If my memory serves, we were just beginning to work on NEW WARRIORS #73 when word reached us about the axe falling on the series, and this necessitated us changing all of our plans for the remaining issues so as to be able to bring things to some sort of satisfying conclusion. So what had been intended as a three-part story featuring the origin of Turbo and a showdown with the Dire Wraith Queen Volx who had been hovering around the background for a while, leading to a status quo shift in #75 that I’ll talk about more once we get to the actual issue, we instead needed to accelerate matters so as to resolve a bunch of ongoing plotlines that we expected to run on for a while longer.

This change did mean that we wound up pulling off one of my favorite bits of storytelling misdirection in this issue. The concept behind Turbo, who had been developed by Evan Skolnick and Dwight Coye as a solo project that never got off the ground, was that the old Torpedo suit fell into the hands of Mike Jeffries, a comic book loving kid who’d use it to become a super hero himself, even though he wasn’t really any good at it. Evan and Dwight were thinking of the tone being akin to the television series THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO. One wrinkle they had was the idea that Mike’s friend Mickey Musashi would occasionally borrow the outfit and use it to travel and see the world, and that she’d immediately be better at using it than he was. I wasn’t the only one who told Evan upon reading the pitch back in the day that the set-up with Mickey was more interesting than the Mike stuff, and so the pitch was eventually retooled to flip the set-up and to make Mickey the main character. The project never sold, but looking for more characters to bring into NEW WARRIORS, Fabian Nicieza asked Evan and Dwight if they’d allow him to introduce Turbo in that series. Figuring that this might improve their chances of getting a green light on the project, they agreed, and the character became a semi-regular in the series.

Most of the character’s backstory didn’t get revealed until this issue, and it’s a jam-packed set of flashbacks given that we had to get everything done in a much more compressed span of time that we’d originally thought. The impetus for this is that the issue opens with Dan Brock, the son of the Torpedo, showing up on Mike’s doorstep and demanding his father’s property back. We cut away from this exchange at this point, picking up later as Mike calls Mickey and the two of them both outline their history for the other Warriors and work out what they’re going to do. We deliberately set the opening up so that more attentive readers would realize that Dan Brock was actually Volx in disguise—but we pulled a double bluff that gets revealed unexpectedly at the finale of this issue. The person we’ve been taking for Mike Jeffries ever since the phone call has actually been Volx all along. Mike was killed and replaced between the earliest pages of the issue, and so at the climax, when “Mike” is given the Turbo armor to return to the nonexistent Dan, Volx is able to access its full power and reveals herself and the fact that Mike is already dead. It’s a great sucker punch of a reveal, one that pretty much no readers saw coming. Even the ones who realized what we were doing were looking at Dan and not realizing the switch we had made in-between scenes.

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Monofocus

By a strange coincidence, most of what I’ve been watching this past week has been shows inspired by or reflective of other shows that I’ve watched in the past.

For example, I took in the first four episodes of NECAXA, the new FX series that’s pretty much straight up WELCOME TO WREXHAM but with Eva Longoria taking an investment stake in a Mexican football club rather than a Welsh one. Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney show up regularly as supporting players along the way, making the connection absolutely overt. And so far, it’s been equally entertaining, though the eponymous Necaxa team seems to be going through real hell in the early portion of the show. This is the aspect that you can’t really control in a documentary series, but there isn’t yet the same sense of possibility that Wrexham very swiftly saw, so while everybody is trying to put on a game face, it’s a tougher watch. Part of the fun for me, though, is the exploration of the local sports culture, which is very different from its Welsh equivalent. Also, 90% of the show is in Spanish with subtitles, and I kind of dig the authenticity of that.

I’m also just over halfway through FINAL DRAFT, a Japanese series available through Netflix that’s very much of a kind with PHYSICAL 100. As in that series, FINAL DRAFT features thirty recently retired athletes from a variety of different sports and sports-adjacent professions who compete in a series of elimination-style physical challenges to land on a single winner of a massive prize pot. As in the other show, all of these challenges are obviously grueling, even for most of the players, and you can see that the skills and aptitudes that permit somebody to excel in one arena wind up not especially valuable under different circumstances. So it’s the most versatile competitors who have the best chance, rather than the fastest or strongest players. It also helps that there's a strong sense of good sportsmanship and comradery among the assorted players that feels like an outgrowth of the culture more than anything else.

Also today, having gotten my copy of the hardcover compilation of SUPERMAN’S PAL JIMMY OLSEN by Matt Fraction and Steve Lieber, I sat down and read it front to back. And i have to say, it was a much easier and more entertaining read consumed in a single sitting this way. I can recall reading the series as it was coming out and enjoying it well enough. But I lost track of the complicated out-of-temporal-sequence plot pretty early on when I was having to read each issue with a month’s gap in between it, so it was a lot easier to comprehend and follow events with everything in one place. And as I’ve spoken about in the past, this volume marks my first cameo appearance in a DC title, as I’m among the many spectators in the stands on the wraparound cover inspired by that of SUPERMAN VS MUHAMMAD ALI. I’m even listed in the fold-out key to the cover in the back of the book, which is pretty cool.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about the Second Aquaman Story

Five years ago, I wrote about, of all things, the Japanese reality series Terrace House

And ten years ago, I spotlighted this Great Cover

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That’s gonna do us once again, folks! So keep your cards and letters coming and I’ll see you all back here in a week, all right?

Hat’s All, Folks!

Tom B