#32: Never-Ending Story

Beware! There are Clones here!

It’s another week where I find that I don’t have a whole lot to say in terms of a preamble. We went out and bought a car today. Now that my son has gotten his license, it’s time to pass along one of the Cruisers to him. For us, we bought a Hybrid, used, only a few years old. that’ll hopefully be more reliable and more comfortable for us old folks over long distance trips than the current vehicles—especially when we’re traveling with a full entourage.

Fortunately, to save you all from a whole lot more useless information like the above, you readers came through in a big way on questions this week. See? It’s good for you and it’s good for me. So let’s start by addressing a few of those—beginning with one that’s about the entire process of asking questions, from our old friend Nacho Teso:

Regarding questions, I feel like if I ask too much myself I end up putting a spotlight that shouldn't be there on my own person. I love asking questions, but I don't wanna overdo it. If more people feel like me, maybe that's why there has been less this week.

Nacho, couple things here. First of all, have you met me? The spotlight isn’t really being put to good use regardless. And in this instance, I’m actively asking for any questions that you and everybody else may have. If there’s anything that I don’t want to answer, if there’s anybody who I feel is being too insistent in asking what they want to know, I can deal with that as need be. But if you leave me to my own devices too much, and this column is going to be filled with accounts of what I had for dinner and how my new shoes are feeling. So help me to help you.

But, anyway, I'm going to ask a question. One that I actually asked you back in 2018 on Twitter and that you answered saying "Immortal Hulk". Here it is: One book you feel people should be paying more attention to?

See, this is always a good question, Nacho! And there are a couple different things that are both coming out now or which are in the offing that might fit the bill. But at this specific moment, I’m going to say Ryan North and Iban Coello’s upcoming FANTASTIC FOUR. As I’m sure we’ll talk about a bit later, I’m honestly not sure whether this run is going to work because it’s so distinctly different from what has come before. But I think it’s pretty great, and its aggressively newcomer-friendly, so even if your knowledge of the FF begins and ends with that Josh Trank film of a few years ago (and if so, what is wrong with you?) I feel as though you should be able to hop into the mix and still get the maximum amount of enjoyment out of it.

Reader Zack had a few suggestions to make about read-worthy sites that review comics and similar media:

Off the top of my head there's: 3x Eisner winners WOMEN WRITE ABOUT COMICS, the online magazine PANEL X PANEL, GUTTER REVIEW, SHELFDUST, COMIC BOOK HERALD, and COMICSXF (who I'm associated with). All of whom do the kind of analysis you're describing. There's also sites like SKTCHD that do fantastic work in on long form articles outside of reviews. There's truly a glut of great work out there!

Zack, I checked out these pages, and while they aren’t all created equal, this was a really good batch of suggestions. I’ll be keeping my eye on a number of them, and I’d recommend that anybody who felt similar to me in terms of the state of criticism in the field might want to give some of these a look.

Along the same lines, JV had this to say:

The Cartoonist Kayfabe channel on youtube is a fave of mine - granted they mostly analyze older work but do so in an entertaining and informative way as both fans and creators.

I’ve looked at a couple of their videos and thought that they were all right. But to be honest, that’s not really the format in which I like to get my comic book feedback. In part, because it simply takes more time than if the same information was written down. Now, that’s specific to me, so for other folks who are happier watching such videos, this may be a good place to turn. I also find that I sometimes don’t agree with those guys and their point of view, but that doesn’t mean that you won’t.

Makes me ask - are there comics you cannot enjoy due to being 'behind the curtain'? I read X-men now and can only think how they wanted Jean to survive, how Sabretooth was to be Logan's father, the original Mr Sinister plans, etc...the books are still great but my relationship to them has changed (my fault of course but also an indirect result of the wonderful access we have know to comic creators and history). Has this happened to you? Common for editors or can you escape into the books?

I’ve had this problem in other areas, JV—for example, I SPY was a favorite television series of mine, and today I can’t bring myself to watch it after the revelations concerning Cosby’s horrific history and pattern of behavior. With comics, though, it’s a little bit easier, at least for me, to separate the practitioner from the work. You don’t actually have to look at the person involved, so it’s not quite as an immediate experience. But again, this is me, and so I can certainly understand how, say, people who feel that write Orson Scott Card holds some egregious beliefs that he’s quick to give voice to may not be able to read his ULTIMATE IRON MAN stories or whatever and derive any pleasure from them.

Abd over to Colin McKenzie for a broad question:

Another thing that's been bugging me-- DC heroes are always doing stuff for charity (it's practically a full-time job for Bruce Wayne alone!), even Flash spends a lot of his super-speed time doing little things to help people. At Marvel however, even those heroes that aren't Hated And Feared, like Spidey and the X-Men, don't really seem to do anything for the average man, aside from saving the world annually. Even Tony Stark and Reed Richards, whose technology could ostensibly change the world, aren't really allowed to do that, because a changed world would be too different for the readers to identify with. So, without going into an Alan Moore "Superheroes are fascists!" rant, the question becomes, What good are Marvel heroes to the average person? They cause destruction to whole city blocks on a weekly basis, regular people can't contact them to help with their problems, so really, what good do they do?

I kind of disagree with a portion of your premise, Colin. So let’s begin there. It’s become de rigueur in recent years to tar super heroes with the broad brush of “they cause more problems than they fix” and I don’t know that I really believe this. This comes from the somewhat-absurd notion that the various super heroes are somehow responsible for creating all of the threats and menaces against whom they battle, which really isn’t the case. And while there is sometimes (often) damage caused along the way, if those heroes weren’t involved, in most cases that damage would be even greater. It’s like arguing that if we just did away with all law enforcement, crime would stop. Doesn’t really work out that way in real life. But really, this line of thought comes from trying to apply real world adult logic to a fantasy construct that was designed initially to entertain younger readers. As such, there are precepts built into it that don’t really work—the whole idea of the super hero, for one. But it’s those very elements that make it fun! Sure, as you say, you could have Tony Stark or Reed Richards’ assorted inventions change the very fabric of human society—but all that really leads you to is a speculative future such as the one in MIRACLEMAN. And that’s interesting for a single series, but as the backdrop to an entire contemporary line, not so much. So yes, it’s a contrivance, but it’s one that’s there for a good purpose. Anyway, I do think that our writers today sometimes forget to have our heroes actively working to save people and help people, so it’s become a common refrain when talking about story plots. There has been a tendency over the past two decades or so for the Marvel Universe to turn into this insular world of Super Hero Soap Opera in which the Super Heroes talk about their Super Problems with their Super Friends and have their Super Affairs with their Super Colleagues in between fights with their Super Enemies, and no real human being is involved anywhere. I think that’s a mistake and something to avoid. By the same token, it’s also undeniable that the readership as a whole becomes more interested in, say, Pepper Potts when you put her in a suit of armor, or in Thunderbolt Ross when you turn him into a Red Hulk. So to some degree, these characters and this world gets distorted by its own success. But it’s something that we need to constantly be on guard against.

Finally, one last under-the-wire query from Hat regular Evan “Cool Guy”

I'm sure a lot of comic fans imagine having your job. Which parts of it would be a dream for them, and which parts would they probably hate?

I think the full answer here is that it would depend on the individual in question. But if you were to poll Marvel’s editorial staff, I would imagine that most of them would tell you that the reality of the position has proven to be much different than what they imagined. I will say that the sorts of opinionated, loud-mouthed fans who talk about how they’d straighten everything up and make everybody toe the line would be a lot less belligerent when the rubber actually met the road. To my experience, the guys who talk a loud game are the guys who turn into creampuffs when faced with an actual conflict situation (especially one where they can’t hide behind a pseudonym.) So those gun-crazy yahoos who are ready to fire everybody and replace them with whomever their favorite geniuses are would be more likely, I expect, to choke when the time came to actually pull the trigger.

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Behind the Curtain

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #97 was a landmark issue, the middle portion of a three-part storyline in which Peter Parker’s roommate Harry Osborn got himself hooked on pills and suffered an overdose, a storyline that was requested by the FDA, but which the Comics Code at that time would not approved—any mention of drug use being prohibited by the Code. Stan Lee went ahead and published the stories anyway, without the Code, and this led to the first real overhaul of the Code since its inception. And today, we’re going to look at a few relics from that story.

What you see above is the color guide to an unused cover for AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #97 by Gil Kane. This cover was pulled once Marvel got word that the Comics Code had an objection to the story, and while some revisions were later made to it in order to try to get it to pass muster, it was eventually discarded in favor of a much more generic Spider-Man fights the Green Goblin cover produced in-house by John Romita. As you can see, far from concealing the content of the story, this cover goes out of its way to spotlight it. And this cover mock-up still had a Code seal on it at the upper right, at least as the point where this copy was made to put together color on. .

And here’s the original artwork for that unused cover. As you can see, as Stan and the Bullpen attempted to bring things into line, they actually cut away the entire lower right corner of the cover, with Harry’s hand holding the bottle of pills (and with Gil Kane’s signature, coincidentally) and had John Romita replace the missing art with Harry’s hand open. It wasn’t unusual to cut into a piece of board in this manner when making a correction, but it also wasn’t something that was done lightly, even then. It’s also telling that the Comics Code symbol has been pulled off of the cover by this point. I have no real sense as to why this cover wasn’t used outside of possibly somebody (Martin Goodman, still Marvel’s Publisher at the time seems a likely candidate) getting a bit spooked by all of the pushback from the Code and wanting to hedge his bets by having a completely neutral image on the book that didn’t reference the drug story even obliquely. And that’s what John Romita provided.

And here is that replacement cover that Romita batted out. Even though they must have been in a rush with things, this didn’t stop Stan or Martin from having a bunch of dark areas in the brickwork (in particular the vertical section directly behind Spidey’s figure) corrected so that they were open for color and the figures silhouetted clearly. It’s a nice, clean, exciting cover, but just a little bit on the generic side—and nowhere near as memorable as the discarded piece.

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Pimp My Wednesday

We’re back to having another sizeable number of releases this week. So here they are!

AVENGERS #62 by Jason Aaron and Javier Garron brings the “History’s Mightiest Heroes” storyline to a close and sets things up to go right into the “Avengers Assemble” arc that will run across both this title and AVENGERS FOREVER and close out Jason’s five year run on the title. It’s also a focus on Agamotto, one of the last remaining Avengers of 1,000,000 BC whom we haven’t done a spotlight for. It’s weird as you’d expect.

AXE JUDGMENT DAY OMEGA #1 is the absolute final piece of the AXE JUDGMENT DAY storyline, and it focuses almost entirely on the fallout of the adventure for the Eternals, laying out what is next for the immortal champions. It’s written by Kieron Gillen and illustrated by Guiu Vilanova, the team responsible for AXE DEATH TO THE MUTANTS, and it’s very much of-a-piece with the events of that predecessor series. Kieron really did a nice job in coordinating this series across a number of different titles, and also in making sure that it was about something a bit greater than just a bunch of guys in funny outerwear punching one another.

And here’s the aforementioned FANTASTIC FOUR #1 by Ryan North and Iban Coello that you were warned to keep an eye out for! Don’t tell me you’d forgotten so soon! As if you could! Alex Ross provides covers as well as the swanky new FF costumes that the team will be donning in a few issues. And it’s very much a break from the kinds of stories that the title has been focused on of late, with a renewed focus on the central four characters (plus a lot of good use of Mrs Grimm, Alicia Masters.) But most importantly to me, it’s a very clever book. Ryan is finding ways to experiment with the graphic format of the story and to push sequences in novel ways. So it’s a very smart series. And as though in response to what Colin McKenzie was complaining about a few thousand words ago, there is a renewed emphasis on the Fantastic Four interacting with real human being people. So give it a look and let me know what you think, yeah?

MOON KNIGHT reaches the pinnacle of the slowly-building storyline featuring the Tutor, the vampiric Structure, and the twin assassins Grand Mal and The Nemean. And it’s got a colossal goof on this cover that I let stand. See, when cover artist Stephen Segovia got his instructions for the image, he read (or it was mistranslated for him) the Nemean as being an actual loin. So that’s what he drew! When he piece came in, I thought about going back and having him change it—but the lion attacking Moon Knight just seemed too cool not to use. So all you lion fans who are disappointed when you crack the covers, don’t blame Jed MacKay or Alessandro Cappuccio. This was all my doing, ultimately.

This next book started with me, but most of the work on this particular issue was actually done by editors Wil Moss and Michelle Marchese. But enough of it started with me that I’m including it. DAMAGE CONTROL continues to be a sitcom set within the Marvel Universe, the work of writers Adam F. Goldberg and Hans Rodionoff and artist Nate Stockman. It’s broad and fun and hopefully clever, and as this cover indicates, this issue segues over into the question of super-villainy. I quite like this Patch Zircher cover that Wil and Michelle got done.

And in the land of ones and zeros, on the MARVEL UNLIMITED service in the AVENGERS UNLIMITED track we’ve got the 20th release, the second part of a two-part story pairing up Namor the Sub-Mariner with T’Challa, the Black Panther. You might suspect that we were aware that there was a film that was going to be opening at around this time! Anyway, the work’s by Tochi Onyebuchi and Ray-Anthony Height, and it’s the perfect confection to tide you over while you’re waiting in line for your WAKANDA FOREVER tickets.

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A Comic Book On Sale 20 Years Ago Today, November 6, 2022

One of the really good things about the Bill Jemas/Joe Quesada years of Marvel is that the company tried out a wide variety of different ideas and approaches. And while not all of them worked out, some of them were quite memorable. I don’t know that EDEN’S TRAIL is particularly remembered much—I know I haven’t seen much talk about it since it came out. But it was a unique series, in that it was something that you couldn’t have imagined Marvel publishing just a couple of years earlier. EDEN’S TRAIL was the brainchild of artist Steve Uy, who had a unique and memorable style—he wound up doing assorted issues of titles such as AVENGERS: THE INITIATIVE for me, and I always enjoyed his work. EDEN’S TRAIL was a science fiction/fantasy adventure with no connection to the Marvel Universe and no real super hero elements to it whatsoever. If anything, it was closest in spirit to a Hayao Miyazaki production, with appealing young characters, a sweeping, epic adventure and some genuine peril. At the time, Marvel was experimenting with a format that Bill and Joe had named “Marvelscope.” It wasn’t anything all that radical, all it involved was trimming the comic book package along the long ends rather than the short ends. This meant that you wound up with a book that was formatted closer to one of those collections of GARFIELD comic strips, long in width and short in height. It made for some excellent panorama opportunities. Marvel tried a couple of X-MEN Annuals in this format before committing EDEN’S TRAIL to it. This turned out to be a bit of a mistake, as retailers didn’t like the format. The longer books tended to flop open on the stands, and many shop owners didn’t have a good way to rack them without incurring damage to them, since their racks were all formatted for standard books. Consequently, the sales numbers weren’t that great. Retailers would maybe put up with the format a little bit for a proven quantity like X-MEN, but on a new property? Forget it! There was another bad bounce in this project that I recall, though as I wasn’t directly involved in making this book, I don’t really know all of the ins and outs. But while EDEN’S TRAIL was Steve Uy’s pitch and his idea all around, for whatever reason (I assume based on whatever sample materials he’d submitted to pitch the project) Bill and Joe decided that he wasn’t up to the task of scripting the final book in a manner they were comfortable with, and so they lined up Chuck Austin as a co-writer and scripter. I have no idea how Uy felt about this one way or the other, and Chuck did a perfectly fine job with the dialogue. But I can’t help but feel that the end product would have been more true to itself if Uy had been permitted to do the whole thing himself.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

I don’t really have all that much to say about ATOMIC AGE #1, which came out on November 6, 1990, other than that it was one of a number of Epic Comics projects that I worked on during my first month as a Marvel employee when I operated as the assistant editor for Marcus McLauren. ATOMIC AGE was the creation of writer Frank Lovece and artist Mike Okamoto and it was set in the 1950s, during the time of Sputnik and the space race. Most of the characters are regular people from that era, but one is Nimbus, a strange alien from another world who winds up coming to Earth. ATOMIC AGE was one of those neither-fish-nor-fowl project from Epic that I’ve spoken about in the past. It wasn’t a super hero book, but it used a lot of the iconography of super hero titles to try to make itself appealing. So it wasn’t quite offering something completely different and novel, either. And in the $3.95 squarebound “Prestige” format, it didn’t have enough appeal to attract enough business to make it totally viable. Epic was in a weird position by the end of the 1980s and the start of the 1990s, in that it was created to publish creator-owned works through Marvel, but once the Image exodus took place, most creators with any sort of regular following took their ideas there. Especially after Archie Goodwin left for DC (which happened during the time between my internship and when I came on staff) the line didn’t really have a chief advocate whose taste and salesmanship could be depended on. Carl Potts did his level best when handed the reins of Epic, but his tastes were always just a bit left-of-center, and he couldn’t seem to find that one property that would hit the bullseye and become a signature series for the line, making it appealing to other creators. Epic published a lot of material, some of it very good, but little of it finding any great commercial success.

Another Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

Well, I didn’t work on this one directly or anything. But it does represent my very first cover appearance on a Marvel comic (even if, to my eye, I’m a bit off-model), and it saw print on November 6, 1996. That’s editor Ralph Macchio to the left of me and Editor in Chief Bob Harras on the right, by the way. As I’ve spoken about before, the Clone Saga in the Spider-Man titles grew out of two interlocking needs: the demands of upper management for Marvel to produce a story that would garner the same sort of headlines and sales that DC was getting with the Death of Superman and the Breaking of Batman’s Back, and a desire to get rid of the inconvenient marriage of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson, which people had realized pretty much right from the start was a mistake for the character. But it swiftly became a millstone around everyone’s neck, in that it was both a victim of its own success, which caused it to be dragged out for far longer than was warranted, and it was also subject to wild changes in direction, as a succession of different editors and overseers changed their minds as to what the best way to wrap this sequence of stories up would be. For those not familiar with it, the essence of the story postulated that Spider-Man’s clone from an infamous storyline in the 1970s had actually survived and was drawn back to Manhattan by the impending death of Aunt May. After a bunch of adventures, we were to learn that the character we thought had been the clone (who had adopted the identity of Ben Reilly in the interim) was actually the original Peter Parker—and the guy we’d been reading about for the past 20 years, the guy who married Mary Jane and gotten her pregnant, was actually the clone. In theory, this was meant to lead to Peter and MJ exiting the strip and Ben Reilly resuming his life as Peter Parker—an unmarried Spider-Man. But things went off the rails almost immediately, both positively and negatively. The storyline was keeping readers following the multiple Spider-Man titles, but it was also agitating them along the way. At least half of them were checking in every month in the hopes that the whole thing would prove to have been a lie. Additionally, the editorship of the Spidey books went through a couple of different hands in this period, with each successive editor having his own thoughts on what had come before and how to wrap this all up. By a certain point, under Bob Budiansky’s watch as the main Spider-Man editor, the decision had been made to reverse course entirely—which was easier said than done. A whole lot of complex and contradictory evidence that had been presented to the readers concerning which Spidey was the real one was going to need to be untangled before the story could be brought in for a landing, and pretty much each of the different writers working on the Spider-Man titles (and a few that weren’t even working on them) put forward their thoughts on this. But nobody could crack it to everyone’s satisfaction, and before too long, my assistant editor Glenn Greenberg had collected something like 15 different separate documents from assorted parties describing how to end the storyline—some of which were pretty absurd. My own crack at an equitable solution that covered every one of the long checklist of events that needed to happen was to presage the eventual “One More Day” storyline. I forget all of the specifics after so many years, but my thought was to use Mephisto to offer up a deal to Ben Reilly in order to save a dying Peter Parker. And in essence, what Mephisto would do is to take the present day Peter Parker and zap him back into the past, where he’d awaken in the rubble of that first Clone Saga story believing himself to be the Clone. He’d then set off, take on the identity of Ben Reilly, and live out the backstory that we’d already seen Ben live through. So in essence, both Spider-Men were real, because they were literally the same person. This “time loop” concept accomplished everything that was on the want list, but a bunch of folks were uneasy about using a supernatural character such as Mephisto as the key macguffin in a Spider-Man story, so the idea was put aside. Anyway, eventually Bob and the writers worked out a storyline that was going to bring the Event to a close, with the mastermind being revealed as Harry Osborn, back from the dead. But even as that story began to be produced, Marvelcution happened, Budiansky was laid off, and Bob Harras was made Editor in Chief. And he didn’t like the resolution that had been planned, and ordered new Spidey editor Ralph Macchio to change the ending to keep things running even longer. To help offset the loss of revenue from the sales of a Spidey climax that was now being delayed, Bob and Ralph and a few other folks brainstormed the idea of doing a comedic one-shot built around the idea of not knowing how the Clone Saga ought to conclude, and using a number of ideas that had been pitched by the writers. (I suppose I should mention that, so far as I know, none of the writers in question were paid for their ideas that were used in this Special, but at least the ones who were still working on the Spidey titles at the time didn’t seem to mind them being used in such a fashion.) Anyway, Mark Bernardo, who was an assistant editor in the Spider-Man group, was drafted to write the one-shot, with art being produced by Ben Herrera. It’s definitely a time capsule of a particular moment, and in hindsight, it takes some real chutzpah to print a special dedicated to not knowing how to end a story before you’ve actually managed to end it.

And Another Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

Another one that I’ll talk about briefly, but which I didn’t want to let pass. MARVEL DOUBLE SHOT #1 came out on November 6, 2002 and was a mainstream Marvel equivalent to a Marvel Knights series of the same name that had been done the year before. The idea was that each issue woudl feature two stories produced by a wide variety of creators, in many cases guys who you wouldn’t ordinarily see working on Marvel books. I liked that approach, so I stumped to do this follow-up. Joe Jusko did some nice painted covers on the book, such as this one, and this first issue opened with a funky Hulk story both written and illustrated by Rob Haynes, who had a very animated flavor to his work that was appealing. But it’s the Thor story that I want to speak about, as it didn’t originate for this series particularly. You see, a short time before, as another promotional effort as well as a way of potentially finding some new young writing talent, Marvel did a talent search for new writers. Prospective candidates were given the option of submitting either a 10-page Wolverine or Thor story, with the best story being purchased and run in an issue of the appropriate title. (It’s worth noting that the winner on the WOLVERINE side was Jason Aaron, though it didn’t lead to any further immediate work from him. Still, a good first step into the industry.) As I recall it, a lot of the material we had to wade through for that contest was obvious crap, and able to be discarded relatively easily. But eventually, I got my pick for THOR down to two contenders. One was a more traditional comic book story, and that’s the one that I eventually selected as the winner, with writer Jose H. P. Armenta’s story being published in THOR #50. But I liked this other story as well, even though it wasn’t framed typically, Each page was done as a splash page with the text a letter from a young boy to Thor over the course of many years. It was different, and so I hung onto it, looking for a place where I might use it. MARVEL DOUBLE SHOT was just such a place, and so Marlan Harris’ piece wound up in this first issue, expertly and stylishly drawn by Kia Asamiya, a bit of a legend in the world of Japanese Manga. So far as I can tell, neither Marlan nor Jose ever did any other work in the field, but hopefully they got a bit of a charge out of becoming, even momentarily, published Marvel authors.

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Monofocus

Back in the 1980s, when I first became aware of the Tokusatsu genre of live action Japanese super hero action shows, one of my favorite releases was KAMEN RIDER BLACK. The latest in a long line of KAMEN RIDER heroes who had been transformed by evil organizations into bug-featured insect super heroes who rode motorcycles, KAMEN RIDER BLACK was just a little bit more serious and dark than the other shows in its oeuvre—for all that it was still being aimed primarily at relatively young children. It was wildly popular, so much so that it spawned a somewhat-lighter sequel immediately thereafter, KAMEN RIDER BLACK RX. BLACK RX was the series whose footage was culled for the woeful American MASKED RIDER series in the early 1990s. In any event, the recent announcement that Toei was producing a ten-episode modern day remake of the show under the title KAMEN RIDER BLACK SUN for Amazon Prime was of course of interest to me. The ten episode series dropped this past week, and I have to say that I’m a bit baffled, if not saddened, by the result. While I’m sure that everybody involved was well-intentioned, in an attempt to make the new show appealing to a modern adult audience, it’s been transformed into a deathly slog. Seriously, this is a show whose original purpose was to sell toys to kids, and it’s positively dreary and devoid of action or excitement. It also has that problem these sorts of productions sometimes have where they feel a need to explain all of the ridiculous or goofy elements of the original series—things no kid watching the original series thought or cared about, but an adult mind might. So Kamen Rider’s anthropomorphic motorcycle Battle Hopper instead becomes a more realistic bike that the lead hero once raced years before. All of the energy is sucked out of the production, and what is left isn’t really interesting enough to be worth the effort. This side-by-side comparison of the original title sequence and the modern day shot-for-shot remake they did for the final episode of the new show illustrates the point. KAMEN RIDER BLACK doesn’t care that it’s effects look cheesy, it’s trying to be spectacular, and typically succeeds despite its limitations. But KAMEN RIDER BLACK SUN, in comparison, feels as though it’s obeying the speed limit at all times, lest it be pulled over.

In more promising news, while I haven’t yet done any more than to page through it, the latest release in TwoMorrows’ line of books detailing different aspects of comic book history turned up on Friday, and looks like a real winner. Jon B. Cooke’s CHARLTON COMPANION builds upon the foundation that he laid down in two issues of his well-remembered magazine COMIC BOOK ARTIST years ago in telling a comprehensive history of the Connecticut-based shlock house that gave the world Captain Atom and the Peacemaker, among others. It looks to be ridiculously thorough, and I’m looking forward to cracking into the thing. Sadly, I’m still sitting atop four other recent TwoMorrows books that I want to read through more thoroughly, so it’s likely going to have to wait until the holidays for me to be able to find the time.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I shone a spotlight on the postwar BOY COMMANDOS series by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, and in particular this story in which Brooklyn plays Superman.

And five years ago, I wrote about this issue of ALL-STAR COMICS with art by Wally Wood, featuring the Justice Society of America.

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And that’s the ballgame, at least for this week. So don’t forget to get out there and vote on Tuesday. I’d prefer it if you were to vote for somebody who wasn’t trying to take away certain people’s fundamental human rights, acknowledged that objective fact is objective fact, and believed in maintaining the integrity of free and fair elections. But you do you. See you all in seven.

Tom B