#29: Pining for the Man of Steel

Even Though You Were Raised As A Human Being, You Are Not One Of Them.

I quite often get asked in interviews about, given the long tenure of my editorial career, what additional stories I’d most like to tackle. What obscure characters I’d like to bring back, what history I’d like to untangle or whitewash away. What is there left that I’d like to do. And I typically answer by saying that I don’t really have anything like that driving me per say, that if I did have an old character I wanted to bring back I’m in a position where I can do so, legality permitting. But in thinking about this question more broadly, I find that I do have an answer—albeit an answer that is unlikely to ever be fulfilled.

I’d really like to take a crack at editing Superman.

It’s pretty clear that, while he’s not my favorite super hero (or even my favorite DC super hero) I’ve got a lot of love and affection for Superman. And I also feel as though, particularly in media, people have been getting the character and the property wrong for at least two decades, if not longer. So having an opportunity to guide the destiny of the Metropolis Marvel in the manner that I have assorted Marvel properties over the years would be very appealing to me. As opposed to many of my other DC favorites, where I’d have fun playing with them but they aren’t especially in need of my services, I feel as though I could honestly do some good for Superman. It doesn’t really seem all that hard from my perspective to craft Superman stories that would resonate with readers today, that would help to restore the character’s luster, and that wouldn’t give in to the need to “fix” him by changing the central attributes that make the character work. Now, that said, I’m sure there would be plenty of people who would hate my Superman—if nothing else, I’d need to come up with a workable strategy for dealing with the events of the past few decades, as the Superman I would want to work with would not be married nor have kids, and his secret identity would still be a secret. I think there was storytelling merit to all of those decisions but that inexorably they’ve cumulatively helped to shift the character further and further away from teh central metaphors that make him work. But I can understand that the fans who love Superman and Lois together or who are invested in Jon Kent (a fine character whom Tom Taylor has been doing some very good work with) might have a problem with what I’d do, and rail against it. But I’ve been there before, I can handle that.

Fortunately for everybody, this is a scenario that isn’t likely to ever happen. For one thing, with DC now safely and permanently on the west coast and me still on the east, I am absolutely not going to relocate to take such a gig. And honestly, I’m very happy at Marvel and the long association I’ve had there. So even if tomorrow Marie Javins or Jim Lee offered me the SUPERMAN books and the ability to work remotely, I’d certainly turn it down. But as a fan, it’s fun to think about. And unlike most of my peers, I have gotten to play with the character a tiny bit a couple of times over the years—in the INCREDIBLE HULK VS SUPERMAN crossover (though it was really Glenn Greenberg who put together the nuts-and-bolts of that book before I took it over following his departure from the company) and of course as a part of JLA/AVENGERS. But those were about using the existing Superman in a specific story context, not in helming a direction and a vision for the character and the line. (also, none of this is meant to knock the work of anybody who is working on the SUPERMAN titles at the moment, creatively or editorially. I’m speaking abstractly here, just as I did years ago when I made it known that the next time FANTASTIC FOUR was going to shift offices, it had better come to me or violence would be done. )

There’s a bunch of other DC stuff that it would be fun to play with, though I suspect that the statute of limitations has maybe run out on a lot of what I liked about the DC Universe in times past, so much has been changed around in the last decade. But Superman, though—that’s the gold standard. It’d be fun to try to restore some more of its luster.

Okay, time then for a few reader questions and comments, beginning with Michael P:

I hate to be this guy, but it's "AuBrey Plaza."

You are correct and that’s something that I knew, but whether this was a case of autocorrect making a fix or me just spacing out when I was typing away, the end result is the same. So go back to that write-up of EMILY THE CRIMINAL in your minds and substitute in the actress’ correct name. Sorry about that.

Manqueman wonders:

I’ve presumed for years that FF 25 and 26 was essentially a Kirby plot with minimal input from Lee. For those unfamiliar with it, 25 is a rematch between the Hulk and FF and ends with three of the four essentially off the board, so to speak, with only Ben still “in play”. And we’ve known that Hulk is much stronger than Ben -- Ben doesn’t have a chance against one on one. This was absolutely mind blowing at the time.

That strikes me as much more a Kirby plot than a Lee one. Too, during the middle part of the Lee and Kirby run, Kirby was let’s say the dominant plotter with minimal input from Lee. (See, for example, the Him matter.) So with that as a given, I presumed this Kirby “domination” started early enough to be the case for FF 25, which would have been late 1963 or so.

So, question: do you *know* that I’m wrong to believe what I believe re issue 25?

Not necessarily, no. Though the fact that the second half of that story is a crossover with the Avengers is enough to get me to believe that Lee must have had some involvement in at least the general shape of the storyline, as that kind of cross-title promotion was something that he was then experimenting with. But I’d guess that the agreed-upon plot between Lee and Kirby in whatever conversation they had about it amounted largely to, “Hey, let’s have the Thing fight the Hulk again—readers have been asking for that since we teased that conflict a bunch of issues ago. And maybe we bring in the Avengers as well, since he’s been in that book for a bunch of issues now. Maybe it had better be a two-parter.” I’d guess that all of the specific incident was largely conceived by Kirby while drawing the story. Also, interesting fact about this story: according to folks who’ve tried to put together a chronology of Kirby’s work on his various titles using job numbers and other signifiers as an indicator of timing, this two-parter was likely the story that Kirby was working on when President Kennedy was assassinated—an event that purportedly had a profound effect on Kirby.

And one last one from Steve McSheffrey:

That Puppet Master bit reminded of an Alicia Masters thing I've wondered about for years. Has Alicia looking so much like Sue with just a hair color change ever been a thing ever since?

No, it really ceased to be a thing after that initial story. And even in that, you can make the assumption that, given that she’s wearing a wig and a fake Invisible Girl costume in order to sneak into the Baxter Building, and further resemblance than just relative height and body type may have been exaggerated anyway.

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Behind the Curtain

.MIRACLEMAN is back in the news a little bit these days, what with the impending arrival finally of MIRACLEMAN: THE SILVER AGE by Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham, and the recent MIRACLEMAN #0 that set the stage for it. It’s maybe tough after all these years to explain just how influential that strip, as MARVEL MAN, was to how the medium developed throughout the 1980s. Alan Moore’s work as a writer was revelatory, sweeping, brain-changing. Most domestic readers discovered it first on SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING, but I was one of the lucky relatively few who came across a copy of WARRIOR #1 in early 1982 and so read the first installments of Moore’s reimagining of MARVELMAN as well as the opening to his V FOR VENDETTA in real time. It’d take most other audience members a few years to catch up, to when those works became readily available in the United States and then continued on from where WARRIOR dropped off. Moore was that rare creature: an writer that we followed from title to title, assignment to assignment as though he were an artist. He was perhaps the first superstar writer in the field of comics, Stan Lee notwithstanding.

Anyway, this has all been preamble to showing you this. It’s the first page to Alan Moore’s original script for the MARVELMAN story that first appeared in WARRIOR #11. Much has been made over the years concerning Moore’s hyper-detailed, hyper-dense scripts which would describe every possible detail for the artist in question with an almost obsessive zeal. And some of that is true, there is a bit of excess on display here in terms of the sheer amount of space it takes to describe a single frame. By that same token, Moore’s scripts were also chatty and entertaining—it was fun to read one if you were an editor and I’m sure if you were an artist. This wasn’t a set of simple set of Ikea furniture instructions for the artist to unthinkingly carry out so much as it was an explosive download of all the thoughts racing around in Moore’s mind, the better that the madcap energy of his intellect be captured and reflected on the finished page. I wouldn’t advise other would-be writers to follow in these footsteps—the secret to Moore’s success was that he was brilliant, not that he was verbose, and more isn’t intrinsically better. But for him, this worked.

And here is Alan Davis’ original art for the pages that was eventually crafted from Moore’s description. As you can see, Davis made some decisions of his own, primarily he knocked together what was described as about three panels into one large frame at the top of the page. The downside to this, of course, is that the panel is now packed with six mostly long captions, which looks a bit daunting. But it’s still a good choice visually, as it opens up what could have become a very crowded and claustrophobic scene. Moore got better as time went on about gauging how much could comfortably fit onto a single page or into a single panel—this was still early days for him. Anyway, if you have never experienced MARVELMAN/MIRACLEMAN before, I would urge you to check out the collections—there’s a new omnibus of Moore’s entire run coming out shortly that can be ordered here. It’s material that I can go back to time and time again, and is an UR-text in the development of the present day fascination with trying to make super heroes work in the context of the real world.

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Pimp My Wednesday

A slightly more reasonable week in terms of releases this time. So let’s see what we’ve got dropping on Wednesday:

AVENGERS #61 by Jason Aaron and guest artist Ivan Fiorelli takes us back into the “History’s Mightiest Heroes” storyline after a pause last issue for an AXE tie-in adventure. This one focuses heavily on Brandy, the new Starbrand—both in terms of what motivates her and how her powers function. So it’s a character study done amidst a time travel action extravaganza, and it helps to set the stage for the big AVENGERS ASSEMBLE crossover that will finish out Jason’s time as the scribe of the series.

In another book whose run is nearing its completion, Christopher Cantwell teams up with artist Angel Unzueta for IRON MAN #24, which pits the Armored Avenger against the black market weapons ring Source Control, whose number include a couple of Iron Man’s old sparring partners. That’s the Cobalt Man grappling with Tony on this cover, by the way.

And another reliable issue of MOON KNIGHT as produced by Jed MacKay and Alessandro Caupuccio. It’s about the Crescent Crusader taking a jaunt down into Chinatown, the one area in Manhattan that the Tutor and his pyramid scheme vampire cabal avoid—and Moon Knight would like to understand why. This cover wasn’t initially drawn to have the logo and trade dress on its side, and I’m still not entirely certain that it works that way. But it’s how Bullpen designer Carlos Lao initially chose to set it up, and I let it stand that way, figuring that it would help the issue to stand out on the racks a little bit more that way.

Over in AVENGERS UNLIMITED, we start a two-part adventure starring Iron Man—or really Tony Stark. It’s the work of writer Jeremy Adams and artist Dante Bastianoni (with whom I worked on FANTASTIC FORCE about three decades ago.) And it involves an A.I.M. attack at Project: P.E.G.A.S.U.S.

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A Comic Book On Sale 80 Years Ago Today, October 16, 1942

Kinda slim pickings this week for historical books, to be honest. But not wanting to leave you all high and dry (and not wanting to break our consistent streak of featuring this bit) I’ve gone with the best option I could come up with.

So CAPTAIN MARVEL JUNIOR #1 saw print on this date in 1942, eighty years ago. That’s a pretty spectacular Mac Raboy cover, too—very clean and simple but eye-catching and attention-getting. That black background likely set it apart from other contemporary releases. (That cover copy is a bit unfortunate from a modern perspective, but it's reflective of the fact that there was a war on. ) The character had been starring in MASTER COMICS for several months by this point, after having been introduced in an issue of WHIZ COMICS prior to that. And like it says in the logo, he was a younger version of the World’s Mightiest Mortal, Captain Marvel. But he wasn’t a precise junior copy. For one thing, his costume was blue rather than red (an obvious things, and something that doesn’t seem like that big a deal until you think about most of the other junior super heroes whose attire tends to more closely resemble the adult hero in whose footsteps they’re following.) Newsboy Freddy Freeman has a bad leg as a result of a Nazi attack that had killed his grandfather, and he’d been granted the power to become a younger variant of Captain Marvel in order to save his life. And in fact, whereas the Captain’s magic transformative word was, of course, SHAZAM, Junior became his heroic self by uttering the name of his hero, CAPTAIN MARVEL. Which presented a problem whenever he had to introduce himself to people, as he couldn’t say his own name without transforming back into Freddy. The art style on the Captain Marvel Jr. strip was also quite different. Where the Captain Marvel series had a broad, open, more cartoony appearance derived largely from the work of artist C.C. Beck, the art on the Captain Marvel Junior strip skewed much more quasi-realistic under the pen of the aforementioned Mac Raboy. Raboy also wasn’t the fastest artist on the block, so he adopted a unique practice: whenever he’d illustrate a particularly good shot of Junior, he’d have a stat made and then add it to his file. Thereafter, when he was drawing some future story and he was called upon to illustrate Junior, he could often find an existing figure that he could simply copy and paste in, rather than drawing a new one. I don’t know how much time this saved him in practical terms, but it does mean that occasionally Raboy Captain Marvel Junior figures would turn up in stories otherwise drawn by other artists. As a solo star and as a part of the Marvel Family, Junior remained in continuous publication until 1954, when his publisher Fawcett decided to get out of the comic book field and settled the ongoing lawsuit with DC/National Comics over whether Captain Marvel infringed on Superman. And as was fictionalized in the recent film ELVIS, the King of Rock and Roll was apparently a voracious reader of Junior’s adventures during his youth, and he patterned portions of his performing persona on him. True story.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

This first issue of the DAILY BUGLE limited series saw print on October 16, 1996, and was an idea that I had generated in order to work with one specific talent in particular. I had discovered and become a huge fan of Paul Grist’s crime comic KANE, and was looking for something he might be able to take on within the Marvel Universe. I’m pretty certain that this limited series got approved right before the implosion of the 5-Editors-in-Chief system that left Bob Harras as the sole Marvel EIC. At that time in the Spider-Man group, we were looking for any idea at all that might be turned into a saleable title so as to achieve the financial benchmark that had been put in front of EIC Bob Budiansky—a task he and we accomplished, not that it saved him from being laid off. Anyway, the idea here was to do a three-issue series that would play out like a Daily Bugle-centric sequence in KANE, with the focus on the Bugle’s cast of characters. The ground rule that we were operating under was that there was to be no appearance by Spider-Man outside of newspaper photos and the like—you can see a hint of Spidey’s costume up Peter’s sleeve on this cover, that sort of thing was a close as we were going to come. Instead, the Bugle had built up a decent cast of reporters over the years, and we’d let them have the spotlight as the core cast. There was one other thing that set this limited series apart from everything else we were publishing: apart from the covers, it was published in black and white. I was interested in trying a B & W project and interested in seeing what removing the color separations costs might do to a particular project’s profitability. If I’m remembering right, this allowed us to make each individual issue 30+ pages in length rather than the typical 22. Those financial calculations were what enabled the project to get approved in the first place. So sounds like a fun, offbeat project, right? And yeah, it maybe largely was. But it was also troubled. For one thing (the main thing, really) the young artist whom I’d decided to put onto this series, Karl Kerschl, simply wasn’t seasoned enough to get this much work completed in the time he had. He was still just an undertested kid who was working (if I remember correctly) a day job in a photographer’s studio and doing comics on the side. And so he whiffed on the schedule something hard—which was made all the worse given the extra length of each issue. By the final issue, we were forced to call in emergency help to get the series completed on time, from an artist who was aware that the quality of work they were going to be able to do under those conditions wasn’t going to be reflective of their real skill level and who therefore asked to be credited as Phil DePages. (I could probably tell you who it was at this point, but I somehow don’t feel like betraying that confidence without an okay from the artist in question.) We also employed a battery of inkers as well. For all of that, it’s still a pretty fun series—it got reprinted a year or two ago in a collection of Daily Bugle stories, something that I really never expected to see happen. And Grist’s story was an awful lot of fun. The black and white interiors vexed some fans who felt like it was a rip off, while others dug the experimentation of the thig. One of the creators who fell into the latter camp was Brian Michael Bendis, who was then working on TORSO and similar crime comics at Caliber. He sent me a big stack of his work-to-date, including copies of A.K.A. GOLDFISH and JINX in the hopes that I might be a simpatico person who would give him a toehold into the mainstream. I kept the books though I didn’t have time to really read them, and so a few years later when Brian made his first visit up to Marvel after he’d been hired to write a DAREDEVIL story by Joe Quesada, he stopped by my office on his tour and got to see his books still sitting in a massive stack of material. Fortunately, Brian had already found his toehold with Joe.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

Among other things in those days, I put together a couple of Trade Paperback collections almost randomly along the way. This one, SPIDER-MAN: STRANGE ADVENTURES also saw print on October 16, 1996. This was at the time before Marvel had a consistent book program, where randomly assorted stories or material would be collected in book volumes without a whole lot of rhyme or reason to the selection process. I didn’t come up with the concept for this collection and I don’t know who did. I suspect it was mainly just an excuse to reprint Chris Claremont and Michael Golden’s Savage Land two-parter from teh first two issues of MARVEL FANFARE again. But I volunteered to take it on when I realized that the book’s premise would give me an excuse to reprint HOWARD THE DUCK #1 in its pages. Seriously, this is the whole reason why I put this volume together—I was a big fan of Steve Gerber’s creation and his work on it, and Frank Brunner was no slouch on those early stories. I filled out the remainder of the volume with the three-parter from AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #100-102 that introduced Morbius and in which Spidey grew four additional arms in what must be one of the most bonkers cliffhangers of the era. To round things out, and maybe to help justify that title, I also threw in Spidey’s first encounter with Dr. Strange by Lee and Ditko from the web-spinner’s second Annual. So the stories are all good in their ways, but it’s also a bit of a disjointed reading experience. I don’t know that anybody was especially demanding any of these stories be reprinted in particular. The late Steve Lightle did a really nice cover for it—and even though we wound up having to color Howard’s suit brown so as to conform with the agreement with Disney’s lawyers, we somehow got away with having Howard pantsless on the cover—not by specific design, I don’t think, more happy accident.

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Monofocus

Did a bunch more reading and watching and enjoying this week. So here’s some of the stuff I sampled.

Craig Shemin has written a really thorough book about SAM AND FRIENDS, which was Jim Henson’s original live five-minutes-a-day local Washington television program where he created the Muppets and learned his craft. Only a meager few episodes of the series still exist today due to the fact that the shows were largely performed live and no recordings were ever made. But Shemin soured the Henson archives for scripts, still photographs and information about the series, compiling it all into a wonderfully comprehensive look at that program. I’ve been curious about this show for years, so reading the volume was like diving into a treasure trove of information and anecdotes. For folks who feel similarly, there’s information and a way to order copies of the book here.

I also read through the latest two Viz collections of MAISON IKKOKU, my favorite of Rumiko Takahashi’s many manga works. It’s been many years since I last read the series, and these new volumes are a nice, satisfying size. Each one contains enough material to showcase Takahashi’s amazing ability to maintain the romantic tension in her series through a series of implausible misunderstandings, absurd complications and close-calls-with-resolutions while still keeping the story moving constantly, albeit slowly, forward. The series doesn’t feature any fantasy elements at all, and is rather focused on the efforts of lackluster student Godai to win the affections of his widowed landlady Kyoko. His efforts are constantly foiled by the other oddball characters who also live at the title boarding house, as well as rival suitors both for Kyoko’s hand and who pursue him as well. To say nothing of Kyoko’s lingering feelings towards her deceased husband. It’s a pretty great series all around, and it’s masterful the manner in which Takahashi can consistently balance all of the characters against one another so as to prevent reaching a climax in an entertaining and satisfying way. I heartily recommend it—you can order the first volume here.

And speaking of Rumiko Takahashi, I also checked out the first episode of the new anime version of her first breakout series, URUSEI YATSURA. (In English, that roughly means THOSE ANNOYING ALIENS.) I was never as taken by URUSEI as some of the folks in my circle were, in part because it’s a series that’s very much steeped in Japanese culture—so while the characters and the gags translate in a general way, they don’t always have the same resonance for an English reader. Or at least that was my experience with it back in the day. Anyway, the new show seems pretty faithfully done, judging by just a single episode. For those in the dark, URUSEI is about Ataru Moroboshi, a lecherous high school student whose attracted to his schoolmate Shinobu, but whose wandering eye gets him into constant trouble. But his life takes a turn for the worse when invading aliens arrive on Earth, intending to conquer the planet. In order to do so, they’ve selected an Earthman at random to duel with their champion, Princess Lum, in a ten-day game of tag. And Ataru is the unlikely hero chosen at random. All he’s got to do is to grab Lum’s horns and the Earth will be saved. But as an alien girl, Lum can fly, and her body gives off debilitating electric shocks. Still, inspired by Shinobu’s promise to marry him if he should save the Earth, Ataru digs down deep and, through trickery, is able to win the competition. But in doing so, he declares that he’s doing so in order to be married, which Lum mistakes for a proposal. Before Ataru knows it, the Aliens have moved in to stay, and Lum is both a hovering pain-in-the-neck and a jealous impediment to his prospective romantic conquests. The whole thing becomes progressively stranger and more bizarre as additional characters get added into the mix story by story. As is my wont, I'm going to share the opening title sequence with you here.

A bit closer to home, I’ve been largely enjoying the MASSIVEVERSE selection of titles put together by Kyle Higgins and friends over at Image. It’s in general a good, unique interconnected super hero line, but in particular recent issues have attempted to do some novel things with the format itself. On the heels of the recent issue of RADIANT BLACK in which Higgins told a single story in four different time periods across the entirety of the whole book (which could be unfolded into a single long panel), not to be outdone, Ryan Parrot, Abel and Ze Carlos produced an issue of ROGUE SUN, #7, which is set up as a Choose Your Own Adventure. Now, that’s not all that novel in and of itself, I’ve seen that done before. But what was novel was the fact that (SPOILERS!) at a given point, you and Rogue Sun are given two possible courses of action, each of which doesn’t work out and each of which ultimately brings you back to that choice page. So there seems to be no way to advance—until you just get frustrated and simply turn the page. There, Rogue Sun refuses to be manipulated by his enemy, selecting a new third option instead. So in essence, to finish the story, you need to cheat ,and in so cheating, you reflect the decision that the character comes to. That’s a pretty memorable interplay of format and content, and one that could only have worked that was in physical comics, so I thought it was terrific. Well done, lads.

I’ve also begun watching the very odd series GLITCH on Netflix. I’m not entirely sure what to make of it just yet, but it’s been interesting nonetheless. It’s a sort of Korean X-FILES in which the lead character Hong Jihyo had (or believes she had) a childhood encounter with aliens, aliens who she continues to see out of her peripheral vision. But when her boyfriend vanishes in what seems to be an alien abduction, she winds up joining forces with a group of weird UFO conspiracy theorists to get to the bottom of what happened to him and what she herself experienced in her youth. Across two episodes so far, it’s been strange and interesting, but it’s really going to come down to how the storyline develops to determine how wonderful or not this particular show is. But it has my attention for the time being.

And finally, having stumbled across his REALLY THAT GOOD video series on YouTube while thinking about SUPERMAN THE MOVIE, I’ve been working my way through the various video content posted by Bob Chipman, who goes by the online name Moviebob. He first gained internet notoriety for a particularly savage takedown of the Adam Sandler film PIXELS that he posted, but having learned from the toxicity of that experience, he’s largely directed much of his efforts since towards being more positive. And he’s an intelligent reviewer, one who thinks deeply about the subject matter that he’s talking about and who always has interesting perspectives and insights on the work, regardless of whether or how much he personally likes it. To be frank, I wish there was one comic book reviewer that regularly displayed this much insight and put such effort into their analysis of the material. Heck, I even sat through all four hours (!!!) of his surgical autopsy on BATMAN V. SUPERMAN, a film that I’ve tried to forget about pretty much since the final frame rolled to a close, and thought it had some very strong thoughts on what didn’t work, and more importantly, why. As is typical with my Monofocus, I’m sure I’ll migrate to some other subject relatively shortly—but at the moment, this is where I’m deep diving the most, at least until I use up the available supply of content.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

It’s a week old at this point, but as we’re cruising towards the final outing of Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor on DOCTOR WHO next week, I pulled together a couple of pre-game thoughts about what is to come. Those can be read here. And five years ago, I wrote about this issue of DETECTIVE COMICS featuring Batman and the Elongated Man.

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And that’s the ballgame for another week! As always, thanks for being here, keep your nose clean, and I’ll see you in seven more days with more comic book nonsense.

Tom B