#35: Thursgiving

Genius Inspiration Overflow

So I’m writing this on Tuesday, although you’ll be reading it on Sunday, and consequently, it feels as though I just finished one of these—because I did. So for those in the proper geographic location, I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving. And for those who aren’t, I hope your Thursday didn’t suck too much.

It’s a bit difficult for me to accept that it’s already November. In some ways, it feels as though this year only just started. Part of that, no doubt, is that we at Marvel are still mostly working remotely, so there’s less face-to-face contact and less change of scenery. The days all sort of blur together past a certain point. I’m sure some of it, too, is simply age, as days seem to pass a hell of a lot faster than they used to, a byproduct of the fact that each day is proportionately a little bit less of your total aggregated lifespan. Anyway, assuming that I make it there and back, this Thanksgiving excursion will be the first long-distance trip that I’ve made in a few years—hopefully, I’m still up for the six-hour drive. If not, let this serve as my eulogy.

But first, let’s hit up a couple of questions that have been asked since our last release. Beginning with this one from Alan Russell

Tom, on the subject of Marvel Unlimited, how likely is it that longer runs of more obscure titles like the Marvel Western books or Millie the Model will appear at some point? Or even things like some of the Marvel sci-fi material.

Honest answer here, Alan, is that unless there’s some reason to restore and digitize that material for some other purpose, it’s unlikely to find its way to MARVEL UNLIMITED any time soon. There’s simply too much other material that more people are likely to be interested in—that Marc DeMatteis and Sal Buscema run on SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN, for instance. As we’ve been doing those Omnibuses based on the release month of certain key comics, it’s likely that the other stories in those will eventually make their way to UNLIMITED, though.

And one from JV:

Another story related question this week (if you can answer): at the end of the stellar Cap Reborn mini (By Brubaker and Hitch), Steve Rogers sees a vision of the future that seems to show a war/invasion. Some 'war of the worlds' style tripods and the death of the Winter Soldier..was this story ever told? I seem to remember the tripods being teased in a few series but i never saw it addressed (or i missed it). Anything you can share?

A future avengers team vs Martians was teased a bit in avengers Forever (Killraven, older Tchalla, etc)..would love to see that expanded on.

As I recall, that teaser was meant to set up a story that Ed Brubaker was planning on doing in SECRET AVENGERS, but he wound up leaving the title before that could happen. So we sort of awkwardly connected it to FEAR ITSELF on the fly.

And to wrap up things for this week, one from Zack:

When did it begin to be an active practice at Marvel to decrease emphasis on franchises like Fantastic Four and X-Men who's media rights were outside of Marvel Studios?

Covering similar grounds, there was a huge push starting in Infinity to raise the profile of the Inhumans. While there were successes with some new characters like Moon Girl & Ms. Marvel, it seems like readers as a whole didn't connect to the Inhumans. Thoughts on why?

I think certain things tend to get overstated, Zack, conjectured by somebody semi-in the know and thereafter repeated and referred to thereafter as fact. So while there was a movement to emphasize characters and properties away from the X-Men (and less the Fantastic Four, who had their own problems), it wasn’t really at a cost to the X-Men. We continued to publish a whole fleet of X-titles all throughout the period when we were supposedly de-emphasizing the X-Books, typically by top-flight talent. In the case of FANTASTIC FOUR, the sales on that book had really begun to drag to a dangerous degree, so when Jonathan Hickman pitched what would become SECRET WARS, it seemed like a good opportunity to put those characters on the shelf for a little while and let a desire for their return build up so that a new launch might find better footing.

Alternately, the big push on the Inhumans was in the service of attempting to build up another corner of the Marvel Universe, another property that was likely going to have legs in the worlds of film and television (as it did, in the form of the short-lived TV series.) As for why it didn’t work, I think that just comes down to us not hitting the ball right. Sometimes, it’s possible to do everything correctly and still not win. This is why I say that making comic books isn’t a science, where 1 + 1 always adds up to 2, but rather alchemy, where a combination of elements sometimes makes 1 + 1 add up to 3, or 27, or L. And it doesn’t always work the same way every time. The Inhumans have a built-in problem for me in that their a separate monarchist society, and so the core characters are very much at a remove from the typical lives of our readership as a whole. It isn’t really a surprise to me that the Inhumans who clicked the most—Ms. Marvel, Moon Girl, etc—were the ones that were situated less at the heart of that whole Inhumans set-up but rather lived more regular lives in recognizable environs such as Jersey City and Yancy Street.

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Behind the Curtain

.Got an old bit to share with you this week.

What you see above is the splash page to one of the four stories in CAPTAIN AMERICA COMICS #6 from 1941, produced by the team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. It’s one of the oldest pieces of Captain America original artwork to still exist, and the oldest splash page of which I am aware. And it evidences the Simon & Kirby style, which included lot of fine cross-hatching, an effect that they referred to as “hay” and which other publishers, notably DC/National Comics, didn’t like. It’s also a product of its time, thoroughly racist in its depiction of the villainous Fang. Fang isn’t Japanese, but rather a Chinatown crimelord employed by the Japanese to sabotage efforts to convince the United States to offer aid and support to China against the Axis powers. He’s very much a sterotypical villain straight out of the pulps, and he never returned apart from as a brief hallucination decades later in TALES OF SUSPENSE #82.

When this story was reprinted by Marvel in the 1960s in the pages of FANTASY MASTERPIECES, the Comics Code required extensive revisions be made. Here’s a side-by-side comparison. The huge Fang head through which Cap and Bucky are striding is removed, with the inset circle of Fang moved up to help cover the excision. Also, Betty Ross and the slab she is strapped to have been taken out, for obvious reasons. I did a closer page-by-page analysis of the other alterations that were made to this story when it was reprinted in this piece.

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Pimp My Wednesday

It’s a much smaller week of releases again this time, for a very good reason. You see, two or three times a year, we wind up with a month that contains five Wednesdays rather than the typical four. We’ll often ramp up production for those “fifth week months”, but even with that, there tends to be fewer Marvel books on the stands especially in the last two weeks of those months. And so, we’ve hit one of those points again. Doesn’t mean the office isn’t working as had as always, just that there are more release dates to feed than typical.

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE ALPHA #1 is the big one, the kickoff of the ten-part storyline that will bounce back and forth between issues of AVENGERS and AVENGERS FOREVER and which will wrap up the tenure of author Jason Aaron on the series. So it’s the grand finale, one that pays off on story threads laid down since Jason began on this journey in MARVEL LEGACY #1—and even a few that go back further than that, to Jason’s earlier work. The artwork on this special was delivered by Bryan Hitch and Andrew Currie, and it represents the first time that Bryan has worked with Jason and the first time that Bryan has illustrated a Marvel Universe AVENGERS project (though he clearly did the next best thing in his multi-year tenure on THE ULTIMATES). It’s a huge, oversized 40-page issue!

And on MARVEL UNLIMITED, Patch Zircher reaches the penultimate installment of his storyline “The Doomsday Man” which is both wrote and illustrated. It guest-stars Ironheart and the Unstoppable Wasp and features the return of an alien race from comics past and a semi-obscure villain in a new form.

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A Comic Book On Sale 20 Years Ago Today, November 27, 2002

Twenty years ago saw the release of the 13th and final issue of LEAVE IT TO CHANGE, James Robinson and Paul Smith’s delightful adventure series about the daughter of a famous paranormal investigator in a world rife with supernatural horrors who paired up for adventures with her pet dragon, St. George. Robinson and Smith had first worked together on DC’s THE GOLDEN AGE in which they recontextualized a number of vintage DC heroes of the 1940s, paving the way for Robinson’s next hit, STARMAN. This was a super-fun series that has sadly fallen a bit into obscurity due to the fact that it hasn’t been collected in years (and a couple of the issues were never collected at all.) It’s a concept that is rife for adaptation in other mediums as well, as while it certainly contained monsters and ghosts and so forth, none of it was so outlandish that it wouldn’t translate for a more civilian audience. There seemed to be such heat and such love for the book during the period when it was coming out that it’s surprising that it’s mostly vanished from the collective consciousness.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

First off, I’m spotlighting this issue of COUNT DUCKULA which came out on November 27, 1990 as it was the second and final issue that I wrote, representing the end of my first assignment in comics as a writer. The story was an oddball Back To The Future pastiche as I recall, as both myself and co-writer Mike Kanterovich were big fans of that recently-concluded trilogy. So much so that we went to the local premiere for the third one in Boston, where we sat through all three films in succession.

SPIDER-MAN: HOBGOBLIN LIVES was pretty much a passion project for my assistant editor at the time, Glenn Greenberg. He was very much a fan of the original Roger Stern run on AMAZING SPIDER-MAN and tended to be forceful about wanting to pursue projects that appealed to him as a fan and a reader. During that original run, Roger had introduced a new villain based on an old one—the Hobgoblin, a new spin on the original set-up of the Green Goblin. Like the early Green Goblin, the Hobgoblin’s true identity wasn’t revealed to the audience at first, making it an ongoing mystery in the series. Otherwise, the introduction of this new foe really set off a spark among the readership—the Hobgoblin was hot almost from the get-go and the slow-boil mystery of his true identity was something of regular conversation among the fans. But Roger left the series before the Hobgoblin’s true identity could be revealed (and indeed, before even all of the clues could be laid for it—Roger later revealed that he himself didn’t know who the Hobgoblin would turn out to be at first, but the character’s real identity came to him as he was dialoguing the first stories.) Roger had kept the Hobgoblin’s real name to himself, but upon his departure, he spilled the secret to incoming AMAZING SPIDER-MAN writer Tom DeFalco, also telling Tom that the ultimate decision was now up to him, as he was now in the driver’s seat on the series. Tom, it turned out, wasn’t wild about Roger’s solution, and so he pivoted, deciding that the Hobgoblin would turn out to be another member of the cast instead. And this is how things might have played out, except that at a certain point, the editorship of the Spidey titles also changed hands, and new editor Jim Owsley, today known as Christopher Priest, was either unaware of or didn’t care for the direction that DeFalco intended to end up with this plotline. So things shifted again, with different writers dropping all sorts of clues and zeroing out all sorts of suspects, to the point where the entire mystery became a bit of a clusterfuck, with no available suspects on the canvas who could convincingly be revealed as the Hobgoblin. The finishing stroke was that Owsley himself wrote a SPIDER-MAN/WOLVERINE one-shot that killed off Ned Leeds, DeFalco’s pick to be the Hobgoblin, without having another suitable candidate in mind. In the end, Owsley called upon Peter David, a writer whom he’d given his first real Marvel break to, to come in and pen the issue of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN that would wrap up the mystery. Peter’s story revealed that Ned Leeds had been the Hobgoblin after all, even though he’d been killed in the earlier story, and that the villain formerly known as Jack O’Lantern had taken over his identity and his gear. Sad to say, this revelation went over with a thud, and as a result, much of the Hobgoblin’s mystique had been lost. Thereafter, he became just another jobber Spider-Man villain. But Roger Stern made mention in an interview somewhere that, having read over all of the published stories, there was still a way for his original choice for the Hobgoblin to be revealed, but that pretty much he still hadn’t told anybody who that was meant to be. So at a certain point when we were called upon to generate some additional projects, Glenn was gung-ho to reach out to Roger and get him on board to tell his old/new Hobgoblin story. First, he had to convince current Spider-Man editor Ralph Macchio to let us do it, which proved to be simple enough. More challenging was then-editor in chief Bob Harras, who insisted, rightly, that we needed to know who Roger intended to unmask as the Hobgoblin before approving the story and the project. And Roger did so, telling Glenn that the true identity of the Hobgoblin was Roderick Kingsley, a character who had initially been introduced in one of Stern’s earliest Spider-Man stories in SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN, and for whom he’d taken a bit of heat, as Kingsley was depicted as a bit of a homosexual stereotype in that adventure. Stern had brought the character back a few times after that as a bit of a reclamation project, so he was top of mind when he was developing the Hobgoblin storyline. It’s also easy to see why DeFalco and the later writers moved away from this revelation. Kingsley wasn’t really an important player in Spider-Man’s world, so it’s possible that him being revealed as the Hobgoblin back in the day wouldn’t have been any more embraced than the Leeds/Jack O’Lantern version had. (And, indeed, even at the later date of this series, there were fans who were extremely disappointed by the eventual revelation.) In any event, Glenn was inexorable in his efforts to overcome resistance, and we wound up doing SPIDER-MAN: HOBGOBLIN LIVES as a three-issue series, with each issue containing more pages than usual. John Romita Jr. who drew most of Stern’s original Spider-Man stories was then busy drawing the main Spidey books, but we were able to recruit Ron Frenz for the project, who had been the main artist on DeFalco’s subsequent run and who had worked on the famous “Kid Who Collects Spider-Man” story with Stern. On the inking front, we ran into more difficulty. Initially, George Perez came on board to ink the series, which was a bit of a small coup. George was then in the process of repairing his reputation as an artist who could deliver, and so he was focusing a lot on inking projects rather than penciling them. Unfortunately, even there, he had overcommitted himself and had to bow out after the first issue was wrapped up. At Glenn’s urging, we brought on Jerome Moore to replace him. Jerome was an artist whose work Glenn had liked on the STAR TREK comics for DC. But like Perez before him, the 30 page issues stymied Moore a bit, and he too bailed out after a single issue. Bob McLeod came on board for the third and final issue to carry us across the finish line. The title HOBGOBLIN LIVES was mine, a title structure that I had used before, on a reprint of the Captain America stories that brought back Deathlok the Demolisher. And so this first issue came out on November 27, 1996 and caused a minor stir. Everybody was interested in the mystery of the Hobgoblin again, at least for a few issues. But not long after, the decision was made to wrap up the long-running Clone Saga by revealing that its architect was the original Green Goblin, Norman Osborn, back from the dead after twenty-something years. With the real Green Goblin back, there really wasn’t all that much of a need for the Hobgoblin, so while he’s continued to kick around as a player in Spidey’s world, he never quite again attained the same interest level on the part of the readers.

This FANTASTIC FOUR one-shot, released on November 27, 2019, is a good example of why it sometimes pays not to ever throw anything away. Years earlier, around 2009, I had commissioned Mike Carey to write a Fantastic Four inventory story, to be used if the regular creative team ever fell dangerously behind. We were required to commission such stories at that time, but I wasn’t a big proponent of using them any longer. The conditions in the marketplace had changed since the days when you could simply drop in a random one-off story by somebody else and it wouldn’t have an impact on your sales. Consequently, while it was a good story, the script was never used. And eventually, I stopped editing FANTASTIC FOUR, handing over the series to Mark Paniccia’s oversight. Thereafter, the book itself went on hiatus as we discussed briefly at the start of this Newsletter, not being published for a few years. When it came back, I was surprisingly once again at the head of it. It wasn’t a position I advocated for, but my strong connection with the characters was well-known enough that when the time came to do MARVEL 2-IN-ONE as a precursor to the FF’s return, all eyes turned to me and I wound up taking on the assignment. So now it’s close to ten years later, and we decided to do a series of quarterly one-shots featuring the Fantastic Four as well as the ongoing monthly series. If I remember correctly, that project started quite under the gun, with the result being that a trio of artists wound up having to split up art duties on the first one. So to get ahead of the second, I remembered that old inventory script that I still had in my files. Given that each of the quarterly issues was going to be produced by a different creative team, using it here wouldn’t cause any sales difficulty. And the story was both still good and still worked within the present continuity. So I wound up reaching out to Mike Carey, despite the fact that he hadn’t worked for Marvel in some time by that point, to make sure he was good with that unused story seeing print. He was, and I got Stefano Caselli to illustrate it. It also made for an affordable issue as the production costs for the script had been written off years earlier. Since that story wouldn’t fill the whole of the Annual-sized quarterly issue, I commissioned Ryan North and Steve Uy to do a short back-up featuring the Fantastix, a group of characters who had been introduced in the main series with the intention that we’d do more with them, but were never able to find the time to. I figured that this would at least keep them in the public eye. The Fantastix were introduced as a quartet of new heroes who had rented out the FF’s old Baxter Building headquarters in their absence and who were trading on the FF’s name in order to score merchandising deals for themselves. What they really were was a broad send-up of the DC series THE TERRIFICS, which had been launched while the FF’s series was in limbo and which attempted to mirror them in a DC context—the idea being that if Marvel wouldn’t publish FANTASTIC FOUR, DC would. In retrospect, it’s not really a surprise that they mostly got dropped along the way, as they were really just there as a bit of a dumb joke and inside reference. But Ryan in particular did a nice job in characterizing and humanizing them in the small number of pages available to him. This was, I believe, the first time I’d worked directly with Ryan, though I’d overseen other projects on which he worked such as THE UNBEATABLE SQUIRREL GIRL, and I was impressed with the job he did. So years later, when Dan Slott’s time on the title had come to an end, he was somebody I thought about—and now he’s writing FANTASTIC FOUR regularly. See? Never throw anything out.

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Monofocus

It’s only been two days for me since the last one of these went out, so I really haven’t watched anything more than additional episodes of THE FOOD THAT MADE AMERICA (Campbell’s Soup versus Heinz Ketchup!) But I’m listing it here regardless simply for uniformity of presentation—something that Campbell’s and Heinz would have approved of.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

I performed a bit of a hat trick with this latest post concerning FANTASTIC FOUR #32, getting both the hardcore Jack-Kirby-did-everything crowd and the Don’t-steal-credit-from-Stan-Lee people all mad at me for it. So you can experience this divisive Hatfields and McCoy’s write-up here.

And Five Years Ago, I wrote about this random issue of G.I. COMBAT

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Ad that’ll do us again! Sorry if this particular Newsletter is a bit more rickety than usual—I simply didn’t have the time to do my usual nip-and-tuck on it. But it’s only because I didn’t want to deprive any of you, especially Chip Zdarsky, of your Sunday monring pleasure. See you in seven!

Tom B