#38: Adventures in Stupidity

Not-That-Social Media

So I had an event happen this week that I feel the need to talk about and share with people, in the hopes of preventing anything like it from happening again. There’s a guy who follows me on social media that likes to send me samples of his work as an artist. He’s been doing this on-and-off for a while, and while he’s not really ready for Prime Time just yet, I’ve never seen any reason to dissuade him. In fact, I don’t believe I’ve ever responded to a single one of the messages he’s sent me—not the art pieces, not the entreaties to please give him a chance to work at Marvel, nothing. So far, so good. At the top of this week, this person sent over some new art to me again. Okay, still not a problem. At least until that evening. Because as I was sleeping, at about 2:00 in the morning, all of my devices began to go off with a siren that I’d never heard before, waking me from a sound sleep. I quickly stopped it on by phone and iPad, but couldn’t figure out in my bleary state that the siren was also emanating from an older iPad that I don’t really use anymore. By this point, pretty much my whole household was awake. Having turned the thing off, I looked to see what was causing the sound. I was imagining that it was some manner of Emergency Broadcast Signal, as we’d had a bit of snowfall that day and maybe something had gone down. Nope. Turns out that it was my friend, the would-be artist. He’d found some way to call me directly through Facebook, and heedless of the fact that he lives in Israel and I do not, he wound up blasting my household. Once I worked this out, I sent him a strongly-worded message back expressing my displeasure and moved to block him on all of my social platforms to prevent this from happening again. But the damage was done, I got no real sleep for the rest of the night and was a bit of a monster the next day through work. The fellow in question did send me an e-mail through the Marvel gateway, though, apologizing and professing that it had all been a mistake, that he had gone to answer a call from somebody else and had instead wound up ringing me up. I don’t know how likely that is, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt—not that I have any intention of unblocking him any time soon. Now, I feel like all of the people who subscribe to this Newsletter are probably smarter and wiser and kinder and more self-aware than this fellow, and don’t need to be instructed not to do anything like this—to me or to anyone. But just in case we’ve maybe admitted a few people whose intellect falls below that bar: hey, don’t do this, or anything like it—not to me, and not to anybody else!

Switching over to a different matter entirely (in what must be one of the most pronounced subject pivots in the history of this Newsletter) as I noted through those selfsame social media channels, yesterday marked the 25th Anniversary of the release of AVENGERS #1 in 1997—the first issue of the series that I edited. What that means is that I have now been the editor of AVENGERS for 25 years. (I know we went over this back in September, but this is going by actual publication dates.) Anyway, I don’t have a lot more to say about this apart from the fact that I’m old and tired now, but a while back I did write a bit about putting together that first issue with Kurt Busiek and George Perez over at the website, here. So feel free to check that link out if you are interested.

Next up, one brief clarification before we get into some genuine questions. In answer to why the new FANTASTIC FOUR series was lettered using upper/lower case style, Ryan North wrote the following:

If it helps answer David's question more, my desire for sentence case in FF boils down to it giving me one more tool in the box to get across how lines are being said by characters - always valuable in a silent medium. You've got bold italics in both options, but sentence case unlocks all caps as a delivery technique - providing a shade of meaning that's unavailable if everything is caps by default. That's my thinking on it, anyway!

And now, let’s get down to cases, beginning with a flurry of questions from Manqueman:

Just what does the EiC do? Obviously, they’re the face of the company, and I presume they have final say creatively. But beyond that? I presume they don’t have final say on what gets published — that’s for the bean counting department.

The EIC oversees operations for the whole of the Publishing department and is the final say on all questions relating to editorial matters. And while they don’t operate utterly independently, they do decide what does and does not get published. They are responsible for setting the direction of the unit and coming up with a yearly publishing plan that will achieve Marvel’s financial goals for the period, working to innovate on new titles and new talent that could work on them, arbitrating any difficulties between talent and editorial, or between different editorial offices, and generally be the Captain of the ship. The EIC doesn’t directly hands-on edit any particular title, but he or she has a fingerprint on all of them.

For that matter, what does an executive editor do that an editor or group editor does not?

An Executive Editor is the second-in-command of the editorial department, the XO in naval terms picking up that Captain metaphor. So they are responsible for carrying out and implementing the directives of the EIC, of overseeing the activities of a wide swath of other editors, of helping to brainstorm and build projects to contribute to the publishing plan, to troubleshoot any difficulties that come up along the way from any and all quarters, and generally to keep things operating even when the EIC’s attention has been pulled away to some other high-level matter that must be dealt with.

Pitches. You’ve touched on it somewhat, but: Does the editor seek creators? Put out the word that solicitations are sought? When a writer’s run’s getting close to an end, does an editor get an idea what they’d like to do next with the book and seek a writer in synch with the concept? Like, who had the idea for Aaron’s Avengers run to go hugely big? Do creatives give proposals without knowing that a new writer’s sought?

The global answer here is “a little bit of everything you just said.” Speaking for myself, it’s rare that creators show up knocking on the door with a fully fleshed-out pitch for an existing title. They are more likely to show up with something new, something that isn’t being published right at that moment (even if it might usually be featuring pre-existing Marvel characters.) More usual is that if a creator has a particular interest in a given title, they’ll let the editor and/or the EIC know about it in the eventuality that the book becomes open. But are creators aren’t really Hunger Games-ing against one another on their current assignments. It falls to the editor of an ongoing series to build a plan for a new creative team on a given title whenever an outgoing team makes that fact known. So in conjunction with the EIC, the editor will begin to attempt to cast the series. In my case, in most instances over the past couple of years, I’ve written up an analysis of what I think the series needs, what sort of an approach I’m looking for, and any other salient ideas that are worth knowing, which I can then share with a prospective writer candidate so that they’re not pitching blind, but have some idea of where my head is at. We’ve printed a couple of these in collections here and there—probably the one I wrote for what became IMMORTAL HULK is the easiest to locate if you’re interested in seeing what that might look like. But those documents are not absolute, and certainly what I sent to Al Ewing wasn’t IMMORTAL HULK yet—it was Al who came up with that approach. But he was guided in that direction by what I gave him to begin with. In the case of AVENGERS with Jason, there wasn’t any written document I shared with him. But I told him that we were interested in having him write the series, and that my intention was to try to bring it back to a more core-classic line-up after several years where the mainstay Avengers had been often split up among different titles. But all of the stories he has done came from him, as did some of the specific heroes who became a part of the team.

FF: How did Ryan North come to write it?

Same sort of thing. I had spoken with a couple other writers along the way, but for one reason or another, what they had come up with didn’t satisfy me—I didn’t think it was the right approach. So I reached out to Ryan to gauge his interest, and I sent him the document I had written up for FANTASTIC FOUR. That document included a story idea that had been kicking around for almost 20 years at that point, that I’d had in my back pocket since Mark Waid and I had come up with it while he was writing the series years before. Ryan pulled together his own pitch, based on the four principles that got detailed on the Fan Page in the first issue, he incorporated a number of elements that I had included in my write-up, but spun them in his own direction, and added in an abundance of additional story concepts. I liked what Ryan laid out, so he was hired to do the job, and we were away to the races.

Judgment Day: Sort of ditto. Kieron’s on record saying that it grew from his Eternals run. Still, apparently issues 13-19 grew into an event (and one of the best is some years).

We needed an Event story for that year, and given that ETERNALS was about to debut as a film, C.B. Cebulski threw out the idea of doing something called A.X.E. We talked through some of my concerns (which largely stemmed from the fact that we had done A4: EMPYRE not long before) and then I reached out Kieron’s way to see if he had any story notions that might be expanded into an Event. I knew that Kieron had been building towards an eventual Eternals vs X-Men conflict built around the idea that mutants might qualify in the eyes of Eternals as Deviants, and so that became the initial crux-point of the story. But Kieron had things he wanted to express within the story and theories about how to craft a meaningful Event series that he wanted to put into play, so once again, the actual story is virtually all his.

Breakdowns of editors: what level does what?

I feel as though we’ve covered this before, but to repeat the info: in theory, the responsibilities of individuals at each title level vary depending upon the editorial office they are working in and the needs and aptitudes of the main editor of that office. But the hierarchy goes:

Assistant Editor’

Associate Editor

Editor

Senior Editor

Executive Editor

Editor in Chief.

Feige is ultimately responsible for publishing. Has he done anything? (Yes or no will do.)

Yes.

And a DC question, if you know: Back in the day, how much say did editors have in selecting the artists who’d draw their books? I’m going back and thinking about Schwartz’s 60s work. Read something (in one of your blog posts? Can’t remember) that Sol Harrison assigned the artists.

I can’t speak as matter-of-factly about DC’s internal workings as I can about Marvel’s, but my understanding is that the essence of this is exactly right. For many years, it was the Production Department that worked out the schedules for artists and technically assigned them. I say technically, because the editors clearly had people with whom they preferred to work, and those assignment for many years didn’t migrate between editorial offices. At Marvel, it was much the same, at least until Jim Shooter established the modern editorial structure. In theory, it was production manager John Verpoorten who would give out art assignments and make sure that contract freelancers were being given enough work. Again here, the big books tended to be more under the sway of the editors in this regard (who were often also the writers) but the mid-list and bottom-tier books were very much the provenance of Production in terms of those assignments.

Okay, new shooter! Ryan M Asks:

You mentioned that Ed Brubaker was able to satisfy all the concerns you had about bringing Bucky back. What does it take for you to be convinced of a major retcon? What are those questions? Are there still events that you hold cannot be retconned?

The questions you’re talking about weren’t generic, all-purpose questions that would apply to any story, Ryan. Rather, they were specific to the instance that we were talking about. And they included practical matters such as: if Bucky is still alive, how is he not a 90 year old man? How is it that nobody has been aware of him or known of his whereabouts? And also more ephemeral questions such as: Bringing back Bucky means giving up the tragedy of Cap having lost somebody crucial to him in the war. So how will this be a net positive? Once this story is over and the initial shock and excitement is dissipated, how will this story leave Cap’s works more interesting and rich, rather than less? That last one might apply to any other retcon somebody might want to do, but everything else would come down to the specifics of the situation. And I think there are certainly events that probably should not be monkeyed with—Uncle Ben’s death, for example. You’d need to have a really killer story to get me to want to let you go ahead and retcon that in some manner.

A quick one courtesy of Devin Whitlock:

Do you have a city that would be your code name if you were part of the Money Heist crew?

Schenectady

And finally, one last one from Jason Holtzman to wrap things up for the week:

In the past, why did some collected editions put entire comic book stories together with no breaks between issues when collecting them? For example, the original “Attack of the Clones” comic adaptation from Dark Horse runs the whole 4 issue story in one go with no breaks between individual issues with the inclusion of individual covers. I believe a hardcover copy I have of Smith and Hester’s “Quiver” Green Arrow book does the same. I don’t really see that too much anymore, books are separated issue by issue, cover and credits appearing every 22-32 pages or so. So sometimes I think reading older books is kinda of interesting, seeing all the covers crammed in the back or in tiny thumbnails, or sometimes just omitted entirely. It’s a different reading experience I feel having the story go continuously -- any particular reason it’s no longer practiced?

All of that was a byproduct of a theory that said that the collected edition was itself a separate product from the serialization, and ought to present itself and read as such. It was a bit of a fool’s errand, as most comics were structured heavily around the need for a cliffhanger at the end of every 20 pages or so (apart from creators such as Dave Sim, who very quickly took to building CEREBUS with the eventual “phone book” collections as the goal, and not worrying so much about where specific issues broke.) I get the sense that some early bookstore chain buyers may have expressed a preference for this approach. But it’s the reason that certain of the early Marvel collections not only dispensed with chapter breaks (and in some instances the covers entirely) and in fact juggled pages around throughout the book, subtracting subplot pages and panels and sometimes adding in new material to bridge some dicey gap. The first collection for the Trial of Galactus in FANTASTIC FOUR by John Byrne did that. And while some readers liked it, other readers who were aware of the work’s origins as a periodical felt like they were being ripped off by not getting everything that had been in the original printing.

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Behind the Curtain

.We’ll be talking a bit more about this book in just a little while. But for now, below is John Romita’s original cover sketch for THE ART OF JOHN ROMITA hardcover book that Marvel released in 1996 upon his retirement.

I was the one who put this volume together, so John did this piece for me. And as was usual for John, he had trepidations about it. He claimed not to know what to do or how to approach it. It also seemed as though he was a little bit embarrassed to have to draw himself on the cover of a book like this—despite the fact that he’d done so previously a couple of times. In the end, we compromised to show John bent over the drawing board in such a way that most of his face is obscured here.

And this is the finished piece, which John executed on some relatively flimsy paper akin to typing paper. It’s a very simple piece, but immaculately executed by Romita, as pretty much everything he ever drew was.

A couple years ago, just before the lockdown hit, the Society of Illustrators had a showing of artwork relating to Spider-Man, and much of what was on display were pages that John had drawn. Walking around the place with some fellow Marvel editors, i was surprised to find the original to this self-portrait adorning one of the walls right by the staircase. The image above is a still from some newscast B-roll that was promoting the show. it is, I think, one of the few pieces in which I had a hand to be displayed in a museum that I had visited years earlier as an art student.

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Pimp My Wednesday

The Holidays are upon us, and so the last couple release-weeks of the year are going to be just slightly lighter than normal.

AVENGERS FOREVER #12 continues the ongoing Avengers Assemble storyline that is zipping back and forth between the main AVENGERS series and this one. But I want to point especially to the artwork of Aaron Kuder on this cover and issue. Aaron has been going above and beyond designing scads of variations of the core Avengers characters, such as this army of Captain Americas, and making them all look distinct and great. He’s doing outstanding work! The story, as usual, is the work of the bearded one, Jason Aaron.

And we’ll reach the midpoint of Christopher Cantwell and Pasqual Ferry’s final adventure of a much older Sub-Mainer in NAMOR: CONQUERED SHORES. This one brings back a character from Marvel history that nobody will be expecting (as well as being a character I had to double-check to confirm we could even still use.) If Namor interested you in the current WAKANDA FOREVER film, this series is a nice easy entry point for you to see what he’s up to today—and tomorrow

And over on the MARVEL UNLIMITED service, the AVENGERS UNLIMITED track closes out the year with a fun-filled one-off adventure starring the Great Lakes Avengers. I love the fact that I can occasionally do weird stuff like this over in that series. The story was written by Kyle Starks, who is one of my favorite current cartoonists (SEXCASTLE!), with artwork by David Baldeon. Next week, we’ll start up another longer multi-part storyline, so consider this a little palate-cleanser before the new year rolls in.

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A Comic Book On Sale 35 Years Ago Today, December 18, 1987

Artist Steve Rude came to prominence in the early 1980s for his work on NEXUS, the wild science fiction series that he’d created along with writer Mike Baron. Originally published by Capital Comics, when they got out of the publishing business the series languished, until First Comics picked it up and gave it a home for most of the decade. It’s a great strip, but the thing that really gave it its zing was Rude’s artwork, an interesting synthesis of a variety of influence, including Jack Kirby, Russ Manning, Alex Toth, Andrew Loomis and many more. Rude made no secret of the fact that he was an enormous fan of the 1966 cartoon SPACE GHOST, on which Toth had been a designer. Rude’s costume for Nexus and the overall milieu of the strip owed a lot to SPACE GHOST.

So it was something of a minor event in comic book store circles in 1988 when Comico announced that they’d acquired the rights to do a SPACE GHOST comic, and that they’d hired Rude to illustrate it. This was a big enough deal that they released the book in the squarebound “Dark Knight” format pioneered by Frank Miller on his famous DC project, which had come to be a signifier of something special (as well as a doorway to an inflated cover price.) The book was written by Mark Evanier, himself a writer with experience in animation, with some plotting help from Darrell McNeill. The story was largely a romp, an excuse for Rude to draw all of the Space Ghost characters that he wanted to. it concerned an alliance of several established Space Ghost villains of old in order to destroy the hero—a perfectly workable premise for a special such as this. The book was well-executed and a lot of fun—Rude in particular seemed like he was enjoying the hell out of it. Ken Steacy colored the work, giving it elaborate painted backgrounds but keeping the colors simple on the main characters to emulate the look of the cartoon. I believe the intention was that this would have been the first of a series of such specials, but having done this one, Rude had gotten it out of his system, and so a follow-up never materialized (though Evanier and Rude did team up again a few times over the years on projects based on characters created by Jack Kirby such as Mister Miracle and the Guardian and the Newsboy Legion.) And honestly, in retrospect, as cool as this book was, it wasn’t really as good as the then-ongoing NEXUS series, so it was probably for the best that this didn’t become a series that disrupted the production of that title regularly.

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A Comic Book On Sale 20 Years Ago Today, December 18, 2002

Twenty years ago, the release of BATGIRL: YEAR ONE first put artist Marcos Martin on the map in a big way. Co-written by Chuck Dixon and former Batman office editor Scott Beatty, BATGIRL: YEAR ONE was a skillful attempt to update and modernize the dominoed daredoll’s origin for a contemporary audience. It was very well done. But the real attraction here was Martin, who after working in the trenches for a while finally clicked into his stripped-down design-oriented style and fully blossomed as an artist. Marcos had been trying to get work in the U.S. for a number of years, and earlier, my assistant editor of the time Gregg Schigiel had attempted to convince me to hire him for the comic book series adapting the new AVENGERS: UNITED THEY STAND cartoon. Marcos even did a few pages of samples in an attempt to get the gig, but I was too conservative and went with the less provocative choice of Derec Aucoin. Which worked out fine, but Marcos might have really been able to propel that book into the stratosphere. (Of course, it’s also possible that he would have cracked under the pressure, based on what he’s related about his first professional U.S. assignment on an issue of BATMAN CHRONICLES.) But right here, everything clicked. And Dixon and Beatty were both skilled enough to give their artist plenty of room to show off what he could do in the course of this adventure. From here, Marcos Martin became an artist constantly in demand.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

Told you we’d come back to this one. THE ART OF JOHN ROMITA was released on December 18, 1996 and wasn’t a comic book at all. Rather, it was a hardcover art book commemorating the life and work of Marvel’s art director as he and his wife Virginia Romita (who had been running the Marvel production bullpen for many years) retired.

This was meant to be the first of a series of volumes focusing on Marvel’s most famous artists—somewhere, I still have an unedited interview that Cefn Ridout did with John Buscema for a volume that never materialized. But the sales on this book were disappointing—not only was the marketplace in a state of freefall thanks to the bursting of the speculator bubble, but most retailers of the time didn’t know what to do with a product such as this one. And so, it flew under the radar a little bit, which is a shame, because it’s really a nice package, despite the limitations that we had to work under. The spine of it is a career-spanning interview with John by the aforementioned Cefn Ridout, done before I became attached to the project. I believe it may have been commissioned and initiated by Richard Ashford, who had been an editor until he was laid off during “Marvelcution.” That interview was copiously illustrated by material from John’s extensive files—the real joy of working on this book was getting to spend a day or two digging through those files to find all sorts of goodies, including a lot of stuff that we simply could not fit into the slim 96 page volume (or that John wouldn’t permit us to run, such as the half-finished pencils for a strip that he and Stan Lee had been asked to do for PLAYBOY.) John saved everything, so there was a ton of material. The book also included two stories, John’s first assignment for Marvel from 1951 (which was shot from stats John still had in his possession and which was run at a reduced size) and John’s selection for his favorite story, which turned out to be AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #109, in which he channeled his love of Milton Caniff’s TERRY AND THE PIRATES into a Spidey adventure involving Flash Thompson’s time serving in Vietnam. When the volume was reprinted internationally by Planeta in Italy, the publishers added 32 pages to it, greatly increasing the amount of unseen artwork by Romita that they could showcase. And since 1996, a number of additional volumes from assorted publishers have spotlighted John to a greater degree that we were able to, including Dynamic Forces THE ROMITAS and TwoMorrows’ JOHN ROMITA: AND ALL THAT JAZZ.

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Monofocus

The big thing that I’ve been watching this week has been writer and now Netflix producer Mark Millar’s new YouTube Channel, Millar Time. Mark’s dropped seven weekly installments so far, each of which involves him simply speaking with a master of the comic book form for an hour or two. And they’re great, just the sort of candid and direct sorts of interviews that I adore. Part of that is that Mark is himself energetic and engaging, his thick Scottish accent a part of his boyish appeal. But he’s also wildly knowledgeable about the history of the field, and has navigated it himself, so he asks the kinds of questions only an insider would know to ask about. Seriously, every single one of these so far has been excellent, whether for the easy camaraderie of fellow-traveler Brian Michael Bendis, the fannish appeal of speaking with creators of a previous generation such as Gerry Conway and Cary Bates, or the unbridled enthusiasm of Rob Liefeld and Greg Capullo. In particular, it’s always a delight to hear John Romita Jr talk about the business, as he straddles multiple generations. Having now burned through the backlog of episodes, I’m going to need to start consuming them in real time, which won’t be easy. Highly recommended.

And as long as you’re maybe heading over to YouTube, it would be worth an hour to pump up your Christmas spirit by watching A MUPPET FAMILY CHRISTMAS, available in its entirety (including vintage commercials) link . This particular video contains the whole of the special, including sections that were edited out of it when it was released on DVD due to the fact that certain characters were then owned by different people. It’s an amazing production all around, bringing together just about every Muppet from every one of Jim Henson’s projects up to that time. Upon seeing it, my little group started referring to it as the Muppet Crisis on Infinite Earths due to how it overlapped the casts of the Muppet Show, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock, the Muppet Babies and more. Jim Henson passed away just a few years after this Special was made, so it’s one of the last times you get to see him performing all of his classic creations (and alongside the original voice actors for the others). It’s annual viewing in my household and has been since it first aired.

This week, I also made time to watch the new special episode of MY NEXT GUEST NEEDS NO INTRODUCTION on Netflix, in which David Letterman took a production crew into wartorn Ukraine to sit down and interview President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It was an impressive production, as the fighting has still not ceased, so this was a legitimately dangerous thing for Letterman to do. Zelenskyy is no stranger to being on television, having himself been a comedian and starred in a series in which his character became President, so he is very comfortable in front of the camera. But even so, even with the performative aspect of what this is firmly in mind, it’s still difficult not to be impressed with the resilience and determination that he and the people of Ukraine display here. And I find that this format suits Letterman well—not having to do a show every night, but instead interviewing and spending time with people that interest Dave tends to bring out the best in him.

In less heady fare, I also downed the four episode reality series RUN FOR THE MONEY from Japan on Netflix. It’s a survival show with a childishly simple premise: 29 people are set loose in the streets of a confined area and are pursued by a number of hunters in real time for three hours. Every minute that they remain at liberty, the prize pool of which they are competing grows larger, like a taxi meter clicking ever upwards. And of course, they are presented with challenges that must be overcome and opportunities to help or hinder one another along the way. But it’s the real time element that I found fascinating. Honestly, the opening episode was a little bit slow, as everybody needed to be introduced and the premise explained and set up. But from there, the stakes continue to rise exponentially, as even the heartiest of contestants is physically exhausted from having been on the go, walking and running, for three hours without any respite. I don’t know that I’d watch it regularly, but four episodes was an ideal length to get me to sample it.

Finally, I wanted to talk a little bit about a collection I read this week, SAVAGE DRAGON ULTIMATE COLLECTION Volume 1 by Erik Larsen. I have a lot of respect for Larsen’s achievement here—ever since Image was founded 30 years ago, he’s been diligently plugging away at his childhood creation, SAVAGE DRAGON, producing in excess of 225 issues. Additionally, I like the premise of the strip, the character and the basic set-up. And Erik knows something about drawing an exciting comic book. But over the years, SAVAGE DRAGON has been a series that I’ve read for short periods and then fallen away from, unsatisfied. And then, Larsen would come up with some story element that would draw me back in, and the process would repeat itself. I had never thought about why this constantly happened at any length until now. And the answer is really, really simple when you get down to it. As a comic book reader, I’m ultimately a story guy. Sure, I definitely want outstanding artwork in my comics, but it’s the story that keeps me engaged and interested and coming back for more—sometimes even when the artwork isn’t all that great. And these early issues of SAVAGE DRAGON, at least, are choppy as hell. They have good story hooks, and some cool action sequences, but the way the narrative skips around haphazardly makes it feel, at least to my taste, like swaths of story material is being left on the cutting room floor to make more room for epic fight that I find I simply am not invested in. It’s entirely a question of the execution, rather than the character or the story ideas themselves. I once told Robert Kirkman that INVINCIBLE was the book that I wanted SAVAGE DRAGON to be, and this return to those earliest issues confirmed that for me. That said, this is a really handsome package, one that’s crammed full of extras and rarities, and so I’d still recommend it, especially to anybody who likes this material more than I do. And inevitably, I’m pretty sure that I’ll pick up volume 2 when it eventually drops myself.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I posted this look at one of my favorite mid-1960s attempts to replicate the style and appeal of the Marvel books of the era, MIGHTY COMICS. The series was once described as reading as though the Russians had stolen a copy of a Marvel book and attempted to reverse-engineer it, an apt description.

And five years ago, I wrote about this unremarkable issue of SUPERMAN FAMILY #182, the first to be published in the Dollar Comics oversized format.

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We are about out of time, so that’s going to be it for this week. As always, if there’s something you’d like to ask, just leave the question in the comments and I’ll try to get to it. I’ve also been intending to open up the chat feature that Substack is now offering as a place where the readership can communicate with one another and ask things that they might want to know. But I’ve not yet had the opportunity to explore the limitations of that functionality. Maybe if I spent less time writing these overstuffed entries, right? Anyway, have yourself a good week as the holidays loom, and I’ll see you back here for a special Christmas edition next time!

Tom B