#34: Questions, questions, questions

And there is no answer that is right.

No long preamble this time, no sparkling bits of insight or nonsense. It’s a holiday week coming up, so let’s get right into the meat of this thing. Beginning with questions from the audience as usual, starting out with a trifecta from Ray Cornwall

1. I *love* the Marvel Unlimited service- the idea of getting to read all of the great Marvel comics for one low price is fantastic. However, there are some gaps in the comics offered on the service, as there still are some Marvel comics that haven't been digitized yet. Specifically, it seems like most of these undigitized comics were published in the early 90s. For example, one of my favorite runs, the JM DeMatteis/Sal Buscema run of Spectacular Spider-Man, isn't on the service at all.

As someone who was editing comics in the pre-digital age, do you have any insight as to why comics in the early 90s may be harder to digitize than, say, comics from the 70s or 80s? I know you don't do any work for Marvel Unlimited, but since you have pretty much done everything else for Marvel, I thought you might have some insight.

I don’t think it’s particularly any more difficult to early-’90s comics than anything else, though they may present some unique challenges, given that that’s the period where computer coloring was coming in and those books tend to be chock full of color hold and the like. But really, I suspect this has to do with the fact that a lot of that material hasn’t ever been collected in print form. When we first stocked up the Marvel Unlimited service, we drew from materials created initially for our assorted collected editions, as they were already in a usable digital format and required little additional work. Since then, we’ve added material regularly. But there were a lot of books published in the 1990s, more proportionately than at any other time. So i think this is really just as simple as we haven’t gotten around to those outstanding books yet.

2. While I'm thinking of Sal Buscema, do you have any anecdotes of working with Sal? One of my favorite books about comics was TwoMorrows's biography of him. I think he's a fantastic artist; his work was so expressive.

I can’t say that I have any particular anecdotes about working with Sal, though I did do so on a number of occasions. He was a thorough professional of the old school, which is to say that he took everything seriously as a job, but didn’t have any really strong attachment to most of the material he was working on apart from the technical. The one bit of odd serendipity that I can mention is that it turns out that Sal lives in the same Over-55 community as my in-laws.

3. And finally, since a lot of your recaps of old comics lately seem to involve Gil Kane, I was wondering if you ever worked with him or heard any interesting stories. There's some really interesting stories about him, and I've read parts of his interviews with Gary Groth in the Comics Journal and other books, so he certainly seems to have been a character.

Gil was definitely one of the medium’s great thinkers, even if he could never quite seem to marry his theories to the work with any regularity. But he was definitely a pioneer about what it was like to work in the industry—his interview in ALTER EGO #10 in the 1960s was a lot more frank than anything else that had seen print up to that time. And while neither one really worked out for him, his attempt to establish a beachhead outside of traditional comic books with HIS NAME IS…SAVAGE and BLACKMARK is worthy of remembrance. Unfortunately, the more negative sides of Gil’s legend are true as well, that he would routinely liberate other people’s original artwork from around whatever set of offices he’d be visiting and sell it on the burgeoning market for such material to bring in some additional cash. I believe it was Marvel’s late production manager John Verpoorten who, upon catching Gil red-handed on one occasion, remarked to him, “Let us print the damn thing before you steal if, Gil!” I only worked with him once or twice, and on very small jobs right at the end of his career, so I don’t really have much more to offer up on him apart from that.

Matt asks:

Speaking of the editorial transition, what's the story behind this letters page blurb from Bobbie Chase's last issue of FF?

"Yes, the Silver Surfer is dead. His first appearance (alive) was FF #48, from March of 1966. We will mourn his passing."

I seem to recall that that had something to do with either a story that was in progress at that moment or else one that was pending. But without knowing exactly where that quote saw print, it’s difficult to follow the thread back. Might have been a reference to SILVER SURFER REQUIEM by J. Michael Straczynski and Esad Ribic, which would have been coming out around that time, in which the Surfer dies at the end. That story was later declared to be out of continuity, but if it was either begining or in progress at that moment, I can see Bobbie saying something like that in a letters page to keep things looking consistent.

A simpler question from JV:

Can you tell us what the general premises of Avengers World in Chains was going to be? I have heard it mentioned a few times over the years and it has me curious.

For those unaware, AVENGERS: WORLD IN CHAINS was a project conceived by Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco, which wound up being skuttled when another similar series launched. The pair did AVENGERS FOREVER instead. And, sure, i could tell you, but I feel as though that isn’t really my story to tell. I can’t recall Kurt giving out any details of it publicly, so I feel as though that’s his decision there—it’s entirely possible that an opportunity will turn up at some future date for him to still do something with it. So, sorry to disappoint you, but in this instance, I need to back the creators.

And one from Nacho Teso

What's your comfort comic? What book do you go back to read when you need to feel better? For me, I think it could very well be any Astérix book available at the moment. Those stories have been with me since I was a little kid, just like Mortadelo & Filemón. Maybe that's why I can just dive in and instantly feel better. That and the obvious reason of Astérix being a great series most of the time. Which makes me think of one last candidate: Calvin & Hobbes.

I don’t know that I have one, to be honest. And there are enough unread new comics of varying sizes and formats stacked up over here these days that my opportunities to indulge in rereading older material (at least that hasn’t been reissued in some new collection that I’ve purchased) are relatively few. I will occasionally do things like jam through a half-dozen MARVEL MASTERWORKS collections as I did a week or so ago. but these were all new collections of material that I had mostly read before. And I’ll occasionally pull something off of the spinner rack in my office that’s filled with doubles of random old comics and read through it whenever the mood strikes me. But I like enough different comics and have material stacked up everywhere around here to such an extent that there’s no need to have one particular go-to; there are a multitude of options at all times. At the start of the pandemic lockdown, I did spend a few months buying random old DC 100-Page Super-Spectaculars from the 1970s as a sort of comfort food purchase, if that counts.

And a question from Evan “Cool Guy”:

I'm sure you've shown up quite a few times in comics, whether you were just drawn into the background, or given a more prominent role like the example you've shown. Do you have any favorites, or any particularly memorable times you've appeared in comics?

Not really. I’m actually not all that big a fan of showing up in comics, to be honest. It seems a bit to self-aggrandizing and narcissistic to me. So while it isn’t something that I’ve particularly ever shut down or stopped from happening, it also isn’t something that I’ve wanted to see happen. Still, there are a couple that were memorable. I made a two-panel appearance in the Director’s Cut edition of FANTASTIC FOUR #500 in a gag strip that the late Mike Wieringo drew not for publication so much as just for a laugh. But I surprised him by wanting to print the thing—it was late enough in the game whereby it was reproduced from his pencils and never inked. And I did manage to buy the original art for that board from his art agent as well, and it’s framed on a wall in the hallway. There was the time in FF #10 where Matt Fraction and Mike Allred included the entire creative team as characters in the story as a homage to the original FANTASTIC FOUR #10. Mike and Laura Allred gifted me the original to that page along with a beautiful color print of the finished color page, and it too is on that same wall. There was a story in FANTASTIC FOUR #543 that I wrote about here where Stan Lee wrote me into a story, with him providing all of my dialogue, a weird experience. I bought the original artwork to this page as well, but as a wedding gift for Associate Editor Molly Lazer, who was also on the page in question. But probably the most noteworthy was my unexpected appearance on a variant cover for FANTASTIC FOUR #16, which was my last issue as editor after a record-breaking run. To commemorate this, Marvel brass including publisher Dan Buckley, Joe Quesada, Axel Alonso, David Bogart and George Beliard secretly arranged to commission and create a piece of artwork from Alan Davis that depicted me among the extended cast of the series. They revealed this to me at the Cup O’ Joe panel at that year’s New York Comic Con—but I must admit that I found out about it ahead of time. We’re not very good at stealth work around the Marvel offices. Still, it was a lovely gesture. And since then, I’ve returned to editing FANTASTIC FOUR again, so the moment it was marking isn’t quite so significant any longer. And, yeah, I’ve got this piece up on that same wall as well—makes me seem pretty egotistical, doesn’t it?

Next, a question from James Shields:

A question: Has Marvel consciously moved away from a "world outside your window" or has that been more of an organic process?

To elaborate: As a kid when I was reading, it always seemed like yeah sure there may be alien invasions, undead creatures running amok, advanced fictional nation-states planning running ops on US soil, etc. but aside from all that Bill Clinton is president and Seinfeld is on TV.

Now, not only there events in the fiction that should be having big impacts on the fictional society (e.g. Krakoa producing miracle drugs and resurrecting kids) but also real world events aren't really incorporated into the world (e.g. it's been almost three years and I don't think the pandemic was mentioned in any of the titles I follow. Did it happen?).

Not complaining, just wondering if this was a deliberate choice. Or maybe I'm imagining something that isn't even there?

Well, James, there have always been big things going on in the Marvel Universe that ought to more greatly alter the shape of society as a whole but somehow never do. That’s all part of keeping the landscape of the books similar to the world that our readers live in, to give them greater verisimilitude. But apart from that, we do tend to try to reflect the actual reality of the moment.

The pandemic is a special case, in that it’s been going on for three years now with no real end in sight. And so we talked about this early on, and determined that the best course of action—especially given that nobody working on comics could know with any certainty what the situation on the ground was going to look like by the time those stories hit the stands—was to not really do any material on the pandemic until the thing was over. Even one story in one book would be enough to cement that event in time within the Marvel Universe, and that would mean that either everybody would have to social distance all the time while battling villains and such, which would be no fun, or else the pandemic would have been something that was dealt with off-handedly by Reed Richards or somebody, which seemed like a potential slap in the face to any readers who themselves or their loved ones might be feeling the effects directly. The difference between the pandemic and, say, 9/11 is that, as traumatic and horrific as 9/11 was, the attack happened and then it was over. And in the aftermath, you could tell stories about what happened. Covid, on the other hand, is still going on, and so it seems like the sort of situation that our audience wouldn’t necessarily like to be hearing about in their escapist fare, and which would run a greater risk of being insensitive, especially given developments that were impossible to predict. But once the situation is entirely stable, I’m sure you’ll start to see reference to it in the books, albeit likely as a thing that happened rather than one that is still going on.

And to wrap up this section, a couple of questions from Jason Holtzman:

Reading older books, (even some that were not so old, circa 2007s), I came across something you never see any more - advertisements! How come? Are they not profitable for comic companies, or do advertisers not deem comics a wide enough market? As the cover prices of books continues to rise, could reimplifcation of advertisements serve as a way to stay the tide?

Not really, Jason. And the reason is that advertisers have determined that they’re better off spending their dollars elsewhere. There are exceptions, we do run paid ads from time to time. But most ads for Marvel-based products are thrown in as a value-added proposition for the licensing deal in question. Nobody is stopping anybody from advertising in our books, but print advertising in general is a bit of a relic overall. So I can’t really envision a sudden outpouring of ad revenue suddenly falling from the sky to such a degree that it halts or reverses inflation on cover prices.

Similarly, though perhaps not as notable, a couple of the older single issues even had page numbers in them. Why don’t we see that too much either?

This one’s pretty simple: we know that virtually every page that we print is going it wind up in a collected edition, typically more than one given enough time. And so it doesn’t make sense to strip in page numbers for one printing that you have to strip back out or change to new numbers for the next printing, ad infinitum.

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Behind the Curtain

.Speaking of seldom-seen pieces by Alan Davis, today’s insider sneak peek is of an unused cover penciled by Alan and inked by Mark Farmer for AVENGERS #15 back during the FEAR ITSELF event.

As I’m sure most people realize, we often need to get the covers for our books done well in advance in order to solicit them, often way ahead of when the scripts themselves have yet been written. And so, as an editor, you are somewhat at the mercy of your writers in terms of them being able to tell you what is going to be happening in the issue in question. On AVENGERS at this time, Brian Michael Bendis was really good at a lot of things. But he was terrible at being able to predict which issue of a given title was going to have what scene inside the story in question. He would mis-estimate constantly, which would occasionally wind up with us having a cover image on an issue that didn’t have anything to do with the contents of the book itself. (Brian is far from the only creator to have difficulty managing this problem.) Accordingly, I often found myself at the last minute juggling the running order of cover images, moving what was solicited as, say, #9 onto #8, and what was on #8 onto #10, and getting some new piece done for #9. And every once in a while, we’d wind up with a piece that didn’t fit anywhere and that we simply had to eat. This cover is a good example of that. Early on, having spoken with Matt Fraction about the shape of FEAR ITSELF, Brian had brainstormed on a sequence that would feature Ms Marvel, Monica Rambeau and the Protector in South America, facing down some of the new hammer-wielders. But as the issues around it were firmed up, both on AVENGERS and FEAR ITSELF, the beats didn’t fit properly, and the entire idea was discarded. And unlike other similar covers that have hit the dustbin, this one featured such an eclectic group of characters, in such period-specific costumes (all three characters had costume changes not long after this) that there wound up being nothing to do with this piece save to simply hang onto it and admire it. Which is what you can do here!

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Pimp My Wednesday

A more reasonable number of releases this week, all of them AVENGERS-based. So let’s go:

ALL-OUT AVENGERS #3 continues the non-stop action-heavy juggernaut of adventure with a story that pits the Avengers, including both Captains America, against an entire army of Red Skulls. Written by Derek Landy, drawn by Greg Land, fun and excitement is the name of the game here, as always.

Over in AVENGERS FOREVER, the Pillars storyline reaches its climax as events focus on Robbie Reyes, the car-driving Ghost Rider who has fulfilled his destiny and become the prophesied All-Rider. What does that mean? Find out this issue, courtesy of Jason Aaron and Jim Towe. And special note must be made of Aaron Kuder’s super-cool cover on this issue. It’s a very simple idea, but it’s done with such style and panache that it’ll catch your eye from halfway across the store like a good cover should.

And over in AVENGERS UNLIMITED land on MARVEL UNLIMITED, Patch Zircher shifts things into high gear for the second chapter of “The Doomsday Man” in which the Avengers encounter an enemy from the back-pages of the Marvel Handbook and enter into the deadliest of conflicts with them.

A Comic Book On Sale 20 Years Ago Today, November 20, 2002

THE TRUTH, written by Robert Morales, illustrated by Kyle Baker and edited by Axel Alonso, was an important book in terms of representation in the Marvel line. It grew out of an idea that had originally come up in conversation between Mark Millar, Joe Quesada, Bill Jemas and a few others about The Ultimates. To wit: if the United States Government was experimenting on human beings in the very early 1940s in order to develop a super-soldier to win the war against the Axis, wouldn’t their likely test subjects have been African-American soldiers who whose lives would have been considered expendable, rather than Steve Rogers? In the final analysis, this notion to make Captain America a person of color was deemed too much of a departure for the Ultimate line (though that line of thinking did lead to Nick Fury becoming black in those books.) But it was a notion that Axel really grabbed onto. He saw an opportunity to tell a story that was metaphorically about the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which several hundred unknowing black men were deliberately exposed to syphilis as guinea pigs in order to study how it affected them over their lifetimes, a horrific breach of ethical standards. This study continued for several decades, past the point where an effective treatment for the disease had been discovered, and most were rendered blind, psychotic or just died outright. Axel tossed the idea to Robert Morales at some point, with whom he’d worked on material when he was still over at Vertigo. I’m honestly not sure how development of the idea went from there, but I do know that EIC Joe Quesada was excited by the idea of an unknown WWII-era black Captain America, so much so that he wound up designing the character. More controversial was Axel bringing artist Kyle Baker on board for the series. Kyle had a long history with Marvel, having been on staff there and done a lot of inking while he was in art school. But since that time, he’d shifted his art style in a more overtly cartoony direction, one that caused some problems with Retailers and even internally for how far off-model for a Marvel comic book it seemed to be. But somehow, Axel was able to convince everybody to let him proceed with what he was doing, possibly thanks to the accolades Baker had been earning for his graphic novel work in the interceding years. THE TRUTH was a pretty fascinating project, one that gave voice to the experiences of people of color in the WWII-era and beyond. It felt authentic, perhaps too authentic given that some seemed to have a strong negative knee-jerk response to it. But the biggest problem with it was its timeline. The idea of the story was that its protagonist, Isaiah Bradley, would have been the one successful prototype for the experiment that created Captain America. But most of the story takes place after Pearl Harbor is bombed, and it had been established concretely that Captain America was active before that event. On the fly and haphazardly, Bradley had to become the one survivor of attempts to re-create the formula that made Steve Rogers Cap, a somewhat less meaningful distinction. The story was the product of a moment where it seemed as though there was no limit to the kind of material that Marvel would allow to be showcased under its banner—before that stylistic freedom began to contract once again towards a more typically mainstream overall style.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

This BEST OF MARVEL 1996 Trade Paperback was released on November 20, 1996 and was the third and last entry in this short series. Every year for the prior two years, somebody had been given the task of putting together a collection of whatever was considered to be the best stories Marvel had published in the preceding 12 months (or at least the best stories that would fit into the book’s page count, a real consideration given the serialized nature of many of Marvel’s series at the time. For whatever reason, likely due to the fact that Marvelcution had just happened and a third of the editorial staff had been laid off, this task was given over to me for the 1996 release. Looking back at it, I think it’s still a pretty decent collection of stories, although I don’t know how well-remembered any of them might be today. Nobody in particular gave me any guidelines as to how to determine what ought to be included, so I simply used my own judgment. I’m sure that I was as biased as the editors who put together the previous books—I remember thinking that the contents of each of them were skewed in some manner not to my liking. But my own picks are likely just as skewed. I did try to represent a little bit of everything, every family, in the volume, but the big push at this moment was the entry into HEROES REBORN, the licensing deal that saw most of the core Marvel heroes exit the Marvel Universe proper to be licensed out to Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld’s studios. So there’s a bit more emphasis on those characters than there might have otherwise been. I also included two Spider-Man stories; the first issue of SENSATIONAL SPIDER-MAN by Todd Dezago and Mike Wieringo, which everybody had loved, and my one ego-move, an issue of UNTOLD TALES OF SPIDER-MAN that I had edited by Kurt Busiek and Pat Olliffe in which one of Peter Parker’s classmates is killed. I also included a THOR story that I didn’t think was all that wonderful as a bit of a political move, as nothing else from that editorial office was included. Finally, I wrapped up the book with the final ONSLAUGHT: MARVEL UNIVERSE book that ejected the assorted characters into the world of Franklin Richards’ blue ball—a story that isn’t all that great on its own, but was of enough significance at the time that I thought it was a necessity. We asked painted Ray Lago to do the cover for the volume. Ray was somebody that we’d first come into contact with while working on the painted Marvel Masterpieces trading cards and who we’d call on semi-regularly for painted work over the next several years. Ray was unfortunately not fast enough to do the interiors for an entire book himself, which was one of the things that I think kept him from really breaking out as a creator. But his work was very nice, even on weird-in-retrospect designs such as “troll” Wolverine and redesigned Thor. I believe ray used the likeness of his studiomate Mark Texiera for the driver of the car being flattened by Wolverine.

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Monofocus

This wound up being something of a documentary week for me, as I watched the old History Channel series THE TOYS THAT BUILT AMERICA on Hulu, and then continued right into the similar THE FOOD THAT BUILT AMERICA. As there are at least two other entries in this series (MACHINES and, I think, MEN) I’m likely to give them a look at some point. Each series features hour-long episodes focused on a particular subject or type ort item or brand, and while the acted recreations of events verge often on the hokey, there’s a lot of good information in these. For example, I had no idea that it was Pizza Hut in the 1950s who popularized pizza as a foodstuff across the United States apart from a few big cities with large Italian populations.

I also started in on PEPSI, WHERE’S MY JET, which dropped on Netflix just this past Friday. It’s a recounting of the story of a promotion Pepsi offered in the early 1990s where a consumer could collect points on Pepsi labels and submit them for prizes. In their main commercial for the promotion, they showcase a Harrier Jet, available for a ridiculous number of points. Well, there was somebody crazy enough to collect those points and attempt to turn them in for a Jet, and this documentary tells that tale. I remember a little bit about it from when it was playing out, and the kid was appearing on news and talk shows to help promote and bolster his case. The whole thing is only four episodes long, and each one is pretty lively and move along fast.

Elsewhere, I thought I’d talk about a few non-Marvel comic books for a change. I’ve had a really difficult time connecting emotionally with the DC Universe for more than a decade now, pretty much ever since they scrapped all of their continuity for the New 52 launch, then reinstated some of it, then changed their minds a bit, then changed it again, etc. Consequently, I find it a tough line to get into, even though I enjoy selected titles within it. But their hit ratio has been going up just a little bit of late, in part due to certain creators whose sensibilities towards the material are closer to my own. So for example, I found that I really enjoyed BATMAN VS ROBIN #3 by Mark Waid and Mahmud Asrar. Mark is sort of the exemplar of the DCU that I used to be invested in, and so even here, in an Event storyline that builds upon recent developments in other creators’ run, I’m able to forge a connection with the material. It helps, i think, that while Mark’s Batman in this context is just as much of an asshole as he’s regularly portrayed elsewhere (the sole exception being Mark’s WORLD’S FINEST series), here he seems to be aware of what an asshole he’s been, and regretful about it. That alone makes all the distance. I don’t know when it became popular for Batman to be an antisocial misanthrope who can’t even form meaningful connections with his closest allies, but it’s not what I want in my Batman. Here, Waid manages to square that circle.

In that same week’s stack, I was also surprised to find myself really liking THE NEW GOLDEN AGE #1. Which shouldn’t really have been a surprise, as it was written by Geoff Johns and drawn by a bevy of great artists. In particular, despite the new characters that it’s introducing and the new chronology that it’s trying to lay out, the cast—in particular the Justice Society of America—feel like the versions of the characters that I recognize and understand, often despite whatever changes they’ve been put through in the interim. Geoff has certainly become vilified, and possibly for good reason, based on his behavior as an executive in charge of DC film and media properties, but there’s no denying that he knows how to write these characters and make them work.

Finally, closer to home, I found myself watching episodes of the upcoming MOON GIRL AND DEVIL DINOSAUR cartoon for work, and really enjoying it. I feel especially happy for editor Mark Paniccia, who had been trying to do a Devil Dinosaur project for years and who eventually cracked the code and brought forth something lasting in Lunella Lafayette. Mark’s one of those guys whose tastes and ideas are unique and personal and which are difficult to quantify. He’s as apt to throw out the most ridiculous concept as he is the best. But when he hits, he really connects, and so it’s great to see his little brainchild (with Brandon Montclair, Amy Reeder and Natacha Bustos, who did the actual creating) take flight in this new medium. I have no idea when the show will premiere, but the incredibly catchy title sequence can be watched here. I love pretty much everything about it, the designs, the mood, the animation style, the whole package. It’s great.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Just yesterday, I posted this look an an obscure Marvel black and white magazine from 1968, PUSSYCAT #1

And Five Years Ago, I wrote about the first giant-sized issue of JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #139

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That’s our show for this week, you’ve been a lovely audience. With Thanksgiving in the offing for the coming week, it’s entirely likely that next week’s Newsletter will be either a little bit late or a little bit shorter than usual. So hang in there until regular service can resume! And have a good holiday, if applicable.

Tom B