#39: I Believe...

Seasons Greetings to everybody!

For some of you readers, you’re receiving this on a holiday, Christmas Day. For others, it’s simply Sunday as usual. But either way, I wanted to make certain that there was something new for you to look at, either today or at some less chaotic portion of the week. Having suffered through my share of interminable family gatherings, I also understand the need for ten or fifteen minutes’ worth of relief from the relatives. And so, here I am once more.

This past week, the exciting thing to happen in my family is that my brother was able to digitize and share a bunch of old home movies shot by my grandparents on both sides at different times in the 1950s and 1960s. The transfer technology these days is really amazing, and so the final restored films were in beautiful fidelity. In particular, I had never seen or known much about my father’s life growing up, since he died long ago and didn’t have any photographs or similar to mention. So it was wild to see him as a teenager, cavorting around with his brothers and sisters and his parents in the home where they grew up. Likewise, my grandfather on my dad’s side passed when I was only two years old, although I do have a distant memory of him, so seeing him brought to life as well was a pretty wonderful thing. To say nothing of the rest of my grandparents and my Aunt and Uncle, who were in most of these films about the age that I am today, which is a weird thing to think about. Time will get us all in the end.

As you can see, I haven’t changed materially since the late 1960s.

I also had a piece of business that I’ve been thinking about writing for a long while, but which I’ve always put off—concerned that it was too preachy or too haughty or just too whatever. But it feels like the kind of thing that fits this season, somehow, and so I’m going to go ahead and do it.

I find that I’m frequently dismayed about the state of the world and the state of discourse within it. In part that’s because, over the past half-a-decade or so, all sorts of bad actors have felt empowered to come forward and reveal their true colors, their hidden beliefs, without fear of repercussions. I frankly cannot fathom most of these beliefs and how they’ve grown within the hearts of these people. But the problem there may simply be that I myself am too naïve and too stupid to see it. In any case, I wanted to take a few moments to outline my position on things in the broadest sense. This is the sort of thing that I resist talking about on social media, both because all it ever seems to do there is to make one a target. And maybe that’ll be the end result here as well. But, hey, this is my space—and if some of you are put off by the stuff you’re about to read, well, you know where the digital door is.

So, to begin with: my life philosophy essentially boils down to, “Do as thou wilt, that it harm no one.” In other words, I don’t need to like or agree with what you’re doing or how you’re living or anything necessarily, but so long as doing so isn’t hurting anybody else, it’s fine with me. Of course, I get to define what “harm no one” means from my point of view, just as you will from yours, so even within this context, not everything is permissible.

So, as a few quick examples:

I don’t care who you choose to love, who you choose to spend your life with, and who you yourself choose to be. The recent anger and attacks on Trans people baffles me in large part. I expect it stems largely from ignorance and the fear that grows out of it. As I’ve talked about in the past, I grew up in an utterly white area of Long Island in the 1970s (the town I was in had to have been redlined, not that this was a term I was familiar with then.) So my experiences with people of different backgrounds and orientations were limited to the little bit I would see in mass media. It really wasn’t until my family relocated to Delaware when I was 14 that I started to come into regular contact with black people. My High School was desegregated, which meant that a whole bunch of kids of color from the city were bussed in every day to attend school alongside the locals. I kinda felt bad for them, having to get up earlier and make that long trip every day before school even began, but apart from that, I didn’t have any problem with any of them, apart from on an individual basis. Similarly, I don’t know that I even understood what being Gay was in any real way until I was well into College and could come into contact with LGBTQ students—I had been exposed to all of the derogatory Gay jokes over the years, of course, because they were pretty omnipresent in the late 70s/early 80s. But I genuinely didn’t follow what they were about. I think it would have been easy for some bad experiences or mentoring to have turned me into somebody who disliked all of those folks, but fortunately, my Parents were relatively morally upright people, and I got the rest of my morality largely from comic books. (Take that, Doctor Wertham!) So wear what you want, be what you want, it’s all fine with me. The one caveat here is age of consent. No taking advantage of children!

I don’t care what you want to be called, what pronouns you prefer, what the appropriate terminology is. I may—hell, I will—foul this up from time to time, as I’m an old guy learning about a set of cultures that tend to shift rapidly between what is considered right and what is considered wrong. But if I foul up, I’ll try to make it right. I don’t need to understand it to respect your wishes in this regard.

I don’t care who or what you want to worship. I don’t care who you want to support politically. There is a bit of a caveat on this one, which is to say, I also don’t want to be subject to your efforts to convert or recruit me to your cause or deity, or be maligned against the standard of your belief system. And there are certain parties, certain bad actors, whose behavior has been so consistently abusive and derogatory and, frankly, awful, that I frankly cannot countenance any reasonable person supporting them. And so, if you are one of those people, I kinda don’t want to know you. I’m sure you’re lovely apart from the quiet bigotry, but life’s too short.

I believe science is greater than belief. Which is to say, I’ll back a learned person with expertise in a given situation over somebody who only has vague “feelings” or beliefs to go on. It’s absurd to me that we’ve managed to allow Polio, a scourge that was finally brought to heel, to return simply because a bunch of not-so-smart people decided to believe something stupid rather than what the science showed. This is crazy to me.

I believe that this nation needs some sensible gun control laws. I’m not looking to take all of your firearms away or anything, but I also don’t understand why any private citizen feels the need to own an assault weapon, a device whose sole purpose is to end the lives of other people. And I get that people want them, and I also get that some of those people are thoroughly responsible owners of such ordinance. But enough of them have proven not to be that we’ve had an absolute epidemic of public shootings over the last couple of years. My nephews were involved in one of the Colorado school shootings (and isn’t it terrible and horrifying that I need to add the clarifier “one of”) and so I got to see firsthand how that experience affected them long-term. This thing where we’re teaching our children how to hide in their schools for when gunmen come to shoot them is traumatic, and doesn’t actually solve the problem. Fewer guns, in particular assault weapons, would be a step in the right direction. And please, spare me all of the rhetoric that you’ve refined about “what about knives?” or “good guy with a gun” or “this won’t solve everything”. I’m sick of the justification that allows innocent people, often children, to face death, injury and lasting harm to appease the desires of a particular group of citizens. To me, this crosses the line of “harm no one.”

I believe we need the fairness doctrine reinstated. As the broadcast of information has become more and more tainted by big business interests and political favoritism, the ability for common people to get an accurate picture of the state of the world has become fractured. If we’re going to restore a sane world, we need to get back to a time when you couldn’t simply broadcast propaganda 24 hours a day, you needed to give equal coverage to the other side. We need to stop weaponizing the news and information.

I believe we need the sensible regulation of big business, in particular, the multi-national corporations that have made themselves all-but-immune from punishment for bad behavior. I’m not looking to tank the economy, but if they only way that you can make money is by stepping on other more unfortunate people, you don’t really have a viable business model.

I believe that in a country with as much wealth as this one, no citizen should be without basic health care and no catastrophic health situation should destroy the finances of the afflicted. And I’ve come to believe in the notion of a basic minimum income such that every citizen can afford shelter and a hot meal or two every day. As the world becomes more automated and technologically driven, the need for human workers is going to inevitably decline. So work as a pure survival function needs to change to reflect the new situation.

I feel as though most of these beliefs stem from simple and straightforward common sense. On some of them, you may feel differently, and that’s all right. I want to think that we can still be friends based on our shared interests and beliefs, and debate those things on which we disagree. Again, on some of them, there is a line-of-no-return for me, just as I suspect there is for you, but as long as we all accord ourselves with civility, it shouldn’t be a problem.

But maybe I’m wrong.

Whew! Well, that was heavy! So let’s get back to more normal service around here by answering a couple of questions. To start with, here’s one from Jeff Ryan:

I recently read Venom: Along Came a Spider, which you edited in the 1990s. There was a second ~book-length symbiote story included in each of the four issues, written by Evan Skolnick, but not featuring Venom. Were they always intended to run together?

Yes. When I inherited VENOM, it was set up as a series-of-limited-series for some reason (likely related to wanting to sell a new #1 every couple of months) rather than as an ongoing title. And it was up-priced to make it possible for the cover of the first issue of each series to be enhanced in some way. To me as a reader, that wasn’t a great bargain, and so I lobbied to do away with the enhanced covers and instead make the book larger—48 pages per issue. This began with my first series as editor, VENOM: SINNER TAKES ALL and ran for a while, until that extra page count was shaved back out of the series. But for two or three arcs, I was able to commission back-up series for the book, each of which connected in some way to Venom’s world. That Hybrid story that you’re talking about was one of those.

The sharp and brilliant Jess Nevins asks:

Are the days of the continuity-heavy story gone forever, do you think? It's just changing audience's tastes, I know, but in some respects I miss the stories that dipped heavily into Marvel's past. Or am I wrong about them being gone at all?

I think it all depends on what you mean by continuity-heavy stories. Certainly, there are still writers working at Marvel who will pull characters and situations out of the past and make them material parts of the stories they’re crafting in the present. Al Ewing, for example, does this kind of thing very often. But what has largely fallen by the wayside is the sort of writer embodied by Roy Thomas or Steve Englehart or Mark Gruenwald, ones who view the entire history of Marvel as a tapestry that must continually be sewn together and reinforced, who would build whole storylines around exploring and explaining the connections between disparate earlier stories. At this point, even the most die-hard and evangelical supporter of this approach must surely see that we’ve gotten to a point where it’s simply not possible in the same way any longer. The amount of history that the Marvel Universe is dragging along behind it is just too great to make everything fit together, unless that was the only function of the stories you were telling. At Marvel, we often refer to those as “stories about stories” and they don’t typically have a whole lot to offer the general audience in terms of emotional power or effectiveness. And so, we largely tend to avoid indulging in them.

Jimmy Callaway wondered:

Quick q: I noticed in the pages of Avengers Assemble that Kid Thanos is now Young Thanos, and though in no way does it affect my enjoyment of the book, I was just curious about why the change?

Well, the character’s name is Thanos, everything else is simply a descriptor to help clarify the fact that this is a Thanos from out of time before he’d matured. For a while, Jason was using Kid Thanos to describe him in scripts, and then at some point he switched over to Young Thanos. No particular reason for the change as far as I know. But in either case, the character’s real name is simply Thanos—Kid and Young are merely descriptors.

One from Clive Reston:

The 1978 "Silver Surfer" book that Fireside originally published was the final Lee/Kirby collaboration (and arguably one of the very earliest graphic novels), and it seems to have been reprinted only once, 25 years ago. All the rest of Kirby's '70s work for Marvel has been more or less available over the past decade (aside from "2001," which I imagine has some licensing problems); has the Surfer book stayed out of print because of rights complications, or for some other reason?

The short answer here is that I’m not certain, Clive. The copyright and trademark on that book was originally set up strangely in 1978, which made it difficult to reprint for many years until the rights to all of the Simon & Schuster Marvel books of the era reverted to Marvel in the 1990s. Since then, there isn’t any reason why we couldn’t reprint it again, just as we did in those two instances. But we’ve got a massive back-catalogue to keep in print/put into print, and that book is something of an oddity, existing outside of regular Marvel continuity. So this could be as simple as there just not having been another instance where we’ve felt that demand has warranted a new edition.

Dewey had this query:

I've been reading all of Spider-Man over the last couple years, revisiting my collection and reading the stuff I missed for the first time. I'm currently revisiting the Vol. 2 era, late 2000, almost to the end of Howard Mackie's tenure. His time on the relaunch seems to have been fraught with changes behind the scenes just from reading what was published, with things like MJ's stalker and the long-running Senator Ward plot pretty visibly changing course repeatedly, or Peter's job at Tricorp introduced and basically abandoned. I was wondering if you had any memory of what was going on that caused the book to change direction so often that you cared to share.

I don’t think the series really did change direction all that much during that time period, Dewey. It was written by the same person, edited by the same person, and drawn mostly by the same two or three people. Some of what you’re talking about may have been caused by John Byrne coming off of the series at a certain point—Byrne was contributing a lot to the plotting along the way, and it could be that there were elements introduced that were things John was invested in that Howard was less so, or vice versa. But that’s only a guess. But Howard could really speak to this far better than I can. While I was around for that time period, I wasn’t really involved in any was with editing those titles, so I don’t have any strong memories of what you’re asking about.

Steve McSheffrey wonders:

Has the Enchantress guy let up on you now that's been a recurring villain in Captain Marvel?

Well, I haven’t heard from him in a while, so hopefully he’s happy with what’s been going on in CAPTAIN MARVEL. But either way, he was never anything more than an enthusiastic fan with a particularly unique and strong center for his fandom, and so it never really bothered me that he was so unerringly monofocused in his pursuit of more Enchantress content.

Rob London wants to know:

Were the old-school editor’s notes (of the “Connors first became the Lizard in ASM #6 - Reptilian Roy” variety) actually written by the editor, or were they put into the script by the writer?

Some from column A, some from column B. When those footnotes started out, they were being written by Stan, who was himself the editor. As other writers in the company adopted them, they would often be attributed to Stan but actually written by the writers in question. And this practice continued in this fashion right up to the present day. I’ve added in some editorial notes on occasion when I’ve felt that some bit of business needed clarifying, but most usually any editorial notes in my books were written by the writers and attributed to me.

KB asks:

It struck me at the time the Avengers were reaching peak popularity in the MCU that there didn’t seem to be a major attempt from Marvel Comics to cash in on potential new readership. For example, I think the Avengers lineup at the time was pretty different from what people were seeing in theaters. Were there conversations about offering similar lineups/characterizations for folks who loved the films but hadn’t picked up a comic?

I think you’re a bit mistaken here, KB, though that’s understandable since it’s now such a long time ago. But at the point where AVENGERS was about to be released in the cinema, the line-up for the main series was much closer to a traditional line-up than it had been in some time. Thor, Captain America and Iron Man were all back in evidence, as was Hawkeye as I recall. But even more directly, we launched the AVENGERS ASSEMBLE series to coincide with the film’s release, and packed it with the exact film line-up of characters. What’s more, we used Thanos as our big villain, having learned that the Mad Titan was going to be teased at the end of that first movie and reckoning that people were going to be curious about who he was afterwards.

Our penultimate question comes from Andrew Sweet:

I have a weird question that may have already been asked, but what qualifications does a writer or artist need to get an exclusivity contract?

You sign a creator to an exclusive contract for one of a number of reasons, Andrew: a feeling of strong potential in them in the marketplace, as a counter to offers from a competitor, or as a way of keeping a standing contributor in the fold. The number of exclusives we offer tends to change year to year depending on what the marketplace looks like. And all that an exclusive contract really says is that somebody is guaranteed a certain amount of work with Marvel, and cannot do work for a competitor without some manner of exception being made. So it’s possible for people to work for Marvel for years and years without such a contract, just as it’s possible for somebody to be under such a contract one day and be gone elsewhere the day after the term expires.

And finally, our last Christmas question from Tyler Tarlton:

I have written a number of issues for a couple comic series that an artist friend and I have self produced and printed. These were based on the artist’s original idea so he’s had the final say in what ends up in the comic. The changes he makes sometimes improves the story but other times...not so much. When looking at prospective writers do editors and publishers (in general) look only at produced comics or do they look at the comics AND the scripts on which they’re based?

I hate to tell you this, Tyler, but as Marvel (and most other companies) do not accept unsolicited submissions, pretty much the only thing that we can evaluate a newcomer like yourself by is the finished product. A writer coming to me and asking me to read a script for a project and avoid looking at the finished project would, rightly or wrongly, send up a red flag for me as an editor. Now, if somebody read the finished book and liked it and contacted you, you might be able to convince them to read he original scripts as well. But that’s relatively unlikely (and, if you’re at the step where an editor is reaching out and contacting you, also likely unnecessary.) Good luck!

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Behind the Curtain

Going to do a simple one for this festive season. Here are a number of vintage Greeting Cards that Marvel sent out to readers, freelancers and business partners in the 1960s and 1970s.

I love that on this 1971 card, Stan still took the space to plug his upcoming appearance at Carnegie Hall. It was, reportedly, a bit of a fiasco. I wrote about it a bit here.

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Pimp My Wednesday

Let’s face it, after the glow of the holidays recedes into the distance, you’re going to need a mid-week pick-me-up again. And what better way to get that charge than by picking up a fresh bunch of new comic books fresh from our editorial office?

ALL-OUT AVENGERS #4 is another start-the-action-in-the-middle storyline, this one featuring the irregular team of Captain Marvel, Black Widow, Hawkeye and Spider-Woman, all of whom are trapped upon an alien world with time running out for them to be able to get back home. It’s another electrifying outing from writer Derek Landy and artist Greg Land.

Over in MOON KNIGHT, the Crescent Crusader’s ongoing conflict with the vampiric Structure and its master, the Tutor reaches its final act as Marc Spector and Tigra arrange for a showdown with their implacable foe. Jed MacKay brings the stew to a rising boil while regular guest-artist Federico Sabbatini provides the extravagant visuals. MOON KNIGHT has been something of an underdog hit this past year, and so I’d like to thank everybody who’s gotten on board and been enjoying the series. There’s more to come in 2023.

Speaking of Jed MacKay, he also penned this year’s end-of-calendar special TIMELESS, which was illustrated by Greg Land, Patch Zircher and Salvador Larroca. As it did last year, this issue of TIMELESS tells an all-new story revolving around the time-traveling Kang the Conqueror, one that sets up a big thing that’s coming mid-year. And along the way, we’ll get scattered glimpses of events that will befall our assorted Marvel players in the course of the new year. So it isn’t just a preview book, these glimpses are a spice but not the main event. If you enjoyed last year’s TIMELESS special, expect the same from this year’s.

And not really from me any longer, though I did set the project up and get it rolling, but the final issue of THUNDERBOLTS will also be coming out this Wednesday, edited by Wil Moss and Michelle Marchese. In it, Jim Zub, Sean Izaakse and Netho Diaz wrap up this initial outing of the official super hero team of Manhattan in spectacular fashion.

And over on MARVEL UNLIMITED, Jim Zub is again at work, this time backed up by penciler Mike Bowden for the first chapter of “Key To A Mystery”, in which individual Avengers find themselves in combat with unexpected foes. After a few smaller, shorter releases, this one is a six-part epic that’ll roll out your way all through January.

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A Comic Book On Sale 80 Years Ago Today, December 25, 1942

You know, it’s just about impossible to find a comic book that was released on December 25 in any year. I can tell you that in all my career, I’ve never put out any title with that release date. But that said, I did manage to find two that the Library of Congress gives a release date of December 25th to, despite some evidence to the contrary. And I’m desperate enough for content here that I’ll grasp at these straws.

So first off, here’s WHIZ COMICS #39 staring the original Captain Marvel and bearing a cover release date of December 22nd. But the LOC lists the book as actually coming out on the 25th, so I’m not going to argue. (Especially in the Golden Age and all the way through into the Silver Age, some titles would make it to the newsstands on entirely different days depending on where in the country you happened to be. So December 25 may have been right as far as Washington DC is concerned.) Fawcett’s bread-and-butter character was immensely popular during this time, propelled in no small part by the ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL live action Republic serial that played in theaters throughout 1941. This made Captain Marvel the first comic book hero to be adapted to the big screen, beating Batman by two years. (Batman, it turns out, was the third, as we’ll see.) As an anthology series, WHIZ COMICS carried six features, plus the usual text story and one- and two-page filler strips. So for your dime, you got to see Captain Marvel visit a Utopia and capture a Nazi infiltrator who is poised to ruin it, Golden Arrow have an adventure in the modern west, Colonel Porterhouse, a very funny strip in which the lead character read WHIZ COMICS to some children, envisioning himself as the lead character, send up the preceding Golden Arrow story, Spy Smasher contend once again with his opposite number and recurring enemy, America Smasher, Lance O’Casey have another exploit on the South Seas, and Ibis the Invincible pit the magic of his Ibistick against that of an evil Genie released from a lamp. Most of these characters were popular enough over time that they gained their own solo titles, a far better batting average than most of the anthology series of the era had. Of course, most of these characters are long forgotten today for the most part—and even Captain Marvel had to give up his name in order to survive. SHAZAM indeed!

The other book Fawcett purportedly released on December 25, 1942 was SPY SMASHER #10, this one carrying a cover date of January 27, five days later than WHIZ COMICS. Spy Smasher was another of the WHIZ COMICS graduates who earned his own series while still appearing monthly in its pages. He was also the second comic book hero to make it into film, following Captain Marvel’s example. The very excellent Republic serial SPY SMASHER ran over three months in 1942, and had wrapped up not long ago. As with Captain Marvel, this helps to account for the character’s popularity at this time. Unfortunately, as opposed to Captain Marvel, Spy Smasher had World War II built into his premise, and he fared less well after that conflict concluded. He took a stab at making himself over into the non-costumed detective Crime-Smasher (A tale I covered here ) but it didn’t really work, and he was eventually consigned to the dustbin of history. Maybe that wouldn’t have been the case if the answer to the question posed on this cover had been different. But when a buyer cracked the cover, they learned that the title of the story in question was “Why I Did Not Kill Hitler” In the adventure, Spy Smasher does seemingly assassinate Hitler, but it turns out to just be one of the Fuhrer’s many doubles of course. And by the end of the adventure, Spy Smasher has relented from his murderous mission, having come to the conclusion that offing Adolf would only prolong the war and make the Nazis fight harder. Spy Smasher starred in three more stories in this issue, but all of them paled in comparison to this opening adventure, and none of them are especially memorable.

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Monofocus

I’ve been making my way through MONEY HEIST: JOINT ECONOMIC AREA, the Korean adaptation of the original Spanish MONEY HEIST/LA CASA DEL PAPEL on Netflix, and while I’ve been enjoying it, I think I’ve finally been able to put my finger on part of why it’s not quite as compelling as the show it was based on. In the Spanish version, Tokyo is clearly the lead character, and often the narrator of each episode—which makes for moments where she functions as an unreliable narrator based on what she does and doesn’t know at any given point. But in the Korean version, no particular emphasis is placed on Tokyo. She’s still doing stuff just like everybody else, but she’s not the focal character any longer, and as a result, the series is a bit more disjointed. The production team also took the opportunity to rework certain aspects of the story based on later developments, and so Berlin’s relationship to the Professor, which was an end-of-season surprise in the original, becomes instead a major plot point right in the middle of the remake. I can’t tell yet whether that’s going to be for the good or the bad—I still have two episodes to go—but it doesn’t really feel like an improvement to me. Overall, this entire production is paced a lot more slowly than the original, and so while I don’t think it’s bad, for anybody who is interested, I would recommend looking at the original Spanish version first, rather than this remake.

I’ve also been watching the UK reality series THE TRAITORS which just wrapped up its run. It’s another adapted modification of the Mafia game, as previously used in the Korean BLACK SHEEP GAME. As in that show, the conceit is that 22 contestants are gathered to play through a series of challenges and eliminations in order to build up a prize pool. But among them, there are a number of Traitors, who work to misdirect the efforts of the main group for their own ends. The biggest difference between THE TRAITORS and BLACK SHEEP GAME is that the UK series was directly up front about who all of the Traitors in the cast were right at the start—BLACK SHEEP GAME wisely showed who one was, while concealing the identity of the other for the length of the show. That said, it still made for some compelling television, even though, in the way THE TRAITORS was structured, there was really no way for the Faithful players to suss out the Traitors among them apart from simple dumb luck. I will say that one of the things the production did well as casting. 29 players is a huge number, but the cast was made up of people of all sorts, with disparate body types and accents, such that it made it relatively easy to learn who everybody was in a short period of time.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

I’m writing this piece early for the holidays, and so I haven’t yet posted anything new over at the site this week. However, here’s an interview with writer Len Wein about the creation of the All-New X-Men that I posted last week.

And five years ago, I wrote about the classic hardcover SECRET ORIGINS OF THE SUPER DC HEROES here.

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And that should do us for this week! For those partaking, I hope you have a wonderful holiday, and for those who are not, a fine end-of-year. With any luck, I’ll have another one of these locked and loaded for New Year’s Day, but that’ll depend on how my various holiday commitments go. So if I don’t manage to make it back here in a week, know that I’m still thinking about everyone, and there’ll be more as 2023 progressed!

Tom B