Awesome newsletter, Tom! I really appreciate your insights into comics, pop culture, and the like. And I love your work for Marvel. My Pull List keeps getting bigger every week and quite often I see your name on the comics I'm buying. Have a great week! I'll look forward to receiving your next newsletter and to buying more Marvel comics when the upcoming issues are released!
Thanks for another great newsletter! I love reading your perspective and all the great stories you share about working with Marvel. Your answers to Bryan Stratton got me thinking about something I’ve long wondered about: What would it take for Marvel to reintroduce the Ultraverse characters they acquired from Malibu so long ago? I’d love to see them again!
I have very fond memories of that RAWHIDE KID Christmas story, Tom! I can't remember who recommended doing something with the Kid— I assume you— but I know I'm the one who dragged in the idea of using a classic Marvel Monster type of antagonist. There's something niggling in the back of my mind that the addition of Tony Stark's ancestor came pretty late in the game— but it was also the "AHA!" moment when the whole story came together. And Patrick/Patch's art kicked my silly story up a noticeable number of notches. A great book that I was (and still am) proud to have been a small part of!
QUESTION: How much of your job— editing comics— is instinctive, and how much is a learned skill? I've been thinking about this a lot lately for what I do— writing and inking— and am curious how it applies to what you do, too.
For me, in very broad stokes, everything start Instinctively— an idea or image or scene or line of dialogue sets off my "spider-sense"/excites the "fanboy" in me— and then as I start refining things, more and more Skill takes over as I connect dots and fill in gaps. But even then I will often be stopped cold by something that simply "doesn't feel right." I have a few strategies to get me past this (the most useful is "do the exact opposite": have a character be angry instead of happy, leave instead of stay, or have a different character do the action; it's surprising how often this approach works) but I usually spend far too much time trying to figure out what's "wrong" and how to fix it. In this regard I deeply admire Kurt Busiek's ability to instantly analyze story problems and just as quickly see a workable— and usually excellent— solution.
Even inking— there are panels or even single figures that I look at and INSTANTLY know how they should look in ink. These are cases where I don't feel I'm inking as much as I'm simply revealing what's already there (to my eye, at least). But there are other times I simply have to rely on what I've learned for how to ink well— line weights, light sources, textures, depth, etc.
I feel like the Charlton characters have been well-integrated into the DCU over the decades since COIE... Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, Question, Peacemaker all holding their own series, being members of the Justice League and other teams, and so on. Even Nightshade and Sarge Steel managed to embed themselves into the DCU in various capacities. I'd say only Judomaster and Peter Cannon failed to catch on despite several attempts to use them. Maybe none of them are A-list, but these characters remain enduring presences.
The Quality heroes remain a solid tier down from that, with the constant reinvention of the Freedom Fighters (Uncle Sam, Human Bomb, Miss America, Doll Man, Black Condor and the much less used Neon the Unknown, Magno, Red Torpedo, etc). But even still, DC's use of them has kept many of these characters from becoming utterly forgotten. (Thanks Roy Thomas!)
The reason why these worked is because A) most of them filled previously unfilled niches in the DC ecosystem (mostly with the Charlton heroes) or B) could be used successfully as crowd-fillers, Golden Age throwbacks, or lesser-known teams (the Quality heroes).
Meanwhile, the attempt to integrate the Wildstorm heroes fails because they stem from a distinct set of sources and form their own specific ecosystem, some of which are obvious reinterpretations of DC heroes. What do the WildC.A.T.s bring to an Earth that's already teeming with aliens and has no room for Daemonites and Kherubim? What does Majestic do when there's already plenty of Superman-level knockoffs? Is there room for Stormwatch or the Authority when DC already has Justice League and Suicide Squad and so forth? I don't think so. These characters work best as a unified lot on their own world, where they can be special, not derivative or redundant.
DC's always been a grab bag of defunct publishers and has a long, long track record of assimilating them (going back to the '70s with the Marvel Family and Fawcett characters.)
Marvel, much less so, which is why it feels so weird when they try to integrate other creations into their universe. I can't even imagine how they'd bring Miracleman into the mix, because in the regular Marvel continuity, he's nothing special or exciting at this point.
Thanks for the reply and info. Another question, when comic projects take years to come out, with significant gaps between volumes, is there consideration that goes into collected editions and matching previous sets? I’m thinking about Miracleman Silver Age and hoping that it’s collected edition will sit nicely beside the previous volumes Marvel released.
Awesome newsletter, Tom! I really appreciate your insights into comics, pop culture, and the like. And I love your work for Marvel. My Pull List keeps getting bigger every week and quite often I see your name on the comics I'm buying. Have a great week! I'll look forward to receiving your next newsletter and to buying more Marvel comics when the upcoming issues are released!
Thanks for another great newsletter! I love reading your perspective and all the great stories you share about working with Marvel. Your answers to Bryan Stratton got me thinking about something I’ve long wondered about: What would it take for Marvel to reintroduce the Ultraverse characters they acquired from Malibu so long ago? I’d love to see them again!
I have very fond memories of that RAWHIDE KID Christmas story, Tom! I can't remember who recommended doing something with the Kid— I assume you— but I know I'm the one who dragged in the idea of using a classic Marvel Monster type of antagonist. There's something niggling in the back of my mind that the addition of Tony Stark's ancestor came pretty late in the game— but it was also the "AHA!" moment when the whole story came together. And Patrick/Patch's art kicked my silly story up a noticeable number of notches. A great book that I was (and still am) proud to have been a small part of!
QUESTION: How much of your job— editing comics— is instinctive, and how much is a learned skill? I've been thinking about this a lot lately for what I do— writing and inking— and am curious how it applies to what you do, too.
For me, in very broad stokes, everything start Instinctively— an idea or image or scene or line of dialogue sets off my "spider-sense"/excites the "fanboy" in me— and then as I start refining things, more and more Skill takes over as I connect dots and fill in gaps. But even then I will often be stopped cold by something that simply "doesn't feel right." I have a few strategies to get me past this (the most useful is "do the exact opposite": have a character be angry instead of happy, leave instead of stay, or have a different character do the action; it's surprising how often this approach works) but I usually spend far too much time trying to figure out what's "wrong" and how to fix it. In this regard I deeply admire Kurt Busiek's ability to instantly analyze story problems and just as quickly see a workable— and usually excellent— solution.
Even inking— there are panels or even single figures that I look at and INSTANTLY know how they should look in ink. These are cases where I don't feel I'm inking as much as I'm simply revealing what's already there (to my eye, at least). But there are other times I simply have to rely on what I've learned for how to ink well— line weights, light sources, textures, depth, etc.
I feel like the Charlton characters have been well-integrated into the DCU over the decades since COIE... Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, Question, Peacemaker all holding their own series, being members of the Justice League and other teams, and so on. Even Nightshade and Sarge Steel managed to embed themselves into the DCU in various capacities. I'd say only Judomaster and Peter Cannon failed to catch on despite several attempts to use them. Maybe none of them are A-list, but these characters remain enduring presences.
The Quality heroes remain a solid tier down from that, with the constant reinvention of the Freedom Fighters (Uncle Sam, Human Bomb, Miss America, Doll Man, Black Condor and the much less used Neon the Unknown, Magno, Red Torpedo, etc). But even still, DC's use of them has kept many of these characters from becoming utterly forgotten. (Thanks Roy Thomas!)
The reason why these worked is because A) most of them filled previously unfilled niches in the DC ecosystem (mostly with the Charlton heroes) or B) could be used successfully as crowd-fillers, Golden Age throwbacks, or lesser-known teams (the Quality heroes).
Meanwhile, the attempt to integrate the Wildstorm heroes fails because they stem from a distinct set of sources and form their own specific ecosystem, some of which are obvious reinterpretations of DC heroes. What do the WildC.A.T.s bring to an Earth that's already teeming with aliens and has no room for Daemonites and Kherubim? What does Majestic do when there's already plenty of Superman-level knockoffs? Is there room for Stormwatch or the Authority when DC already has Justice League and Suicide Squad and so forth? I don't think so. These characters work best as a unified lot on their own world, where they can be special, not derivative or redundant.
DC's always been a grab bag of defunct publishers and has a long, long track record of assimilating them (going back to the '70s with the Marvel Family and Fawcett characters.)
Marvel, much less so, which is why it feels so weird when they try to integrate other creations into their universe. I can't even imagine how they'd bring Miracleman into the mix, because in the regular Marvel continuity, he's nothing special or exciting at this point.
Thanks for the reply and info. Another question, when comic projects take years to come out, with significant gaps between volumes, is there consideration that goes into collected editions and matching previous sets? I’m thinking about Miracleman Silver Age and hoping that it’s collected edition will sit nicely beside the previous volumes Marvel released.