#45: Hats!

As Healthy As They're Handsome!

Hello! We’ve got another fine Newsletter assembled for you this morning! But first, a word from our sponsor:

So we’ve begun doing some testing for a return to the Marvel offices, and this week it was my group’s turn to give things a dry run. Which meant that, for the first time in three years, I had to wake up at 5:00 in the morning and make the long commute into Manhattan—a solid two-and-a-half hours door-to-door each way. Despite not having done it for a long, long time, I fell into the rhythm again relatively easily. But I’m woefully out of shape, and traipsing across town in a mask just about killed me more than once. It’s still too early to tell how all of this is going to work out, and even if we do return to the offices regularly how often it will be. But it does signify a definite shift in the routine is impending. It was also weird to look upon our old cover wall at a flight of titles that we released three years ago.

Two other minor things before we get down to answering some of your questions. The first is that I’ve continued to look at assorted online videos in my quest to find more comic book criticism that I thought was worthwhile. And I’ve found a few things that fit the bill, which I may talk about at length once I reach a resolution about them. But one video in particular gave me a different perspective on something, and so I wanted to speak about it a little bit. It was a long retrospective on Dave Sim’s CEREBUS and its assorted controversies. I was a massive, massive fan of that book back in the 1980s, though I grew less enchanted with it as it move into its final hundred issues. I did read it all the way to the end, however, having invested the time in the front end. Looking back, I chalk it up to youth and not really knowing any better how easily I accepted some of the frankly appalling behavior Sim had Cerebus get up to—I don’t think I yet had the life experience to truly comprehend the issues being dealt with. But this video suggests that Sim’s changing position on women and his growing misogyny may have been in part caused by his untreated mental illness, and that was a perspective that I hadn’t considered before. But it does make a certain kind of sense. None of that really makes it forgivable, of course, but it does help to provide some greater context and understanding for what may have been going on as he crafted later issues in his storyline, reversing some of his earlier mythology and thereafter climbing deeper and deeper into a hole of his own making. Sim was a profoundly talented individual who was also deeply, deeply flawed, and I think I never fully grasped just how flawed until now. So that was a good piece of comics journalism.

The second thing I wanted to share was this link pointed out by Scott McCloud in an interview with the Cartoonist Kayfabe team of Jim Rugg and Ed Piskor. It’s a link to a strip done by the French cartoonist Boulet, in which rather than working in still images, he instead crafts his page online using gif, thus incorporating bit of motion and rhythm into it in a very effective way. I love the way that this stretches the comics form in the digital space while not turning it into a badly-animated cartoon. This is still comics, but comics that you can only fully experience in this manner in a digital space. Pretty cool.

Okay, we seem to be warmed up now. Let’s see what you guys had to say this week, starting with JV:

Brings to mind a question in regards to the Shooter era - he definitely had an eye for talent - I mean look at his editorial line up - growing up in the 80s as a comic reader and looking back now I see how most of the editorial staff were also working on the Marvel titles as writers on long runs - what are your thoughts on this?

I heard it was to supplement income, as well as an incentive to work at Marvel, good training for editors to see how they put a comic together..etc.. which would sometimes work and sometimes backfire (Shooter mentions how Denny O'Neil would spend more time writing than editing). It was cool to see some editors be able to do it all: guys like Hama and Milgrom could write, pencil, layout, ink, color, etc. very cool skill set to have in a crunch I'm sure.

This seems to have stopped at Marvel (and DC) - why is that? Do you think this was a flawed process? Would you ever do something like this again?

Not a complaint as some of my fave runs were by writer/editors ; Nocenti on DD, O'Neil on DD, Gruenwald on Cap and Quasar, Mackie on Ghost Rider, Stern, McDuffie, Larry Hama, etc..

Well, like almost anything, JV, it was a situation fraught with both good and bad. Certainly, many notable careers began during this time, and many good comics were published. But I do think that having most of your writing staff be composed of your editorial staff lends itself much too easily to abuse, to nepotism, to glad-handing. “I’ll let you write a book in my office if you let me write a book in your office.” I think for those writers who weren’t a part of the Marvel editorial system during those days, who were working elsewhere and possibly hoping to one day get a gig at Marvel, it made the place seem unwelcoming, like a closed shop. And for all that some good people got their start in this way doesn’t entirely balance out for all of the woefully-unqualified or underqualified people who got to write an absolute mountain of irredeemable crap during those days. I count myself among those numbers, I in no way was ready to compete on a level playing field with other authors in the field, and yet I got to write not just one ongoing Marvel super hero title, but two. So yeah, I think it’s flawed, and I think the place is better without it, at least in terms of the general competence of the writing on average. That entire system is simply too easy to abuse, and when I was a young editor, my peers and I complained about it regularly, right up until the point where it began to benefit us. Then, we somehow rationalized it to ourselves, that we weren’t doing the exact same thing that our predecessors had done, that we still had integrity. But we didn’t, not really.

Next, one from Mortimer Q. Forbush:

Your mention of Peter Parker's graduation got me wondering about Marvel's "Sliding Timeline." Do you know when the concept was adopted as the defacto "official" operating procedure among the staff? When the term got coined? When the concept/term was shared with the readers?

I know the sliding timeline is "good enough" even if it doesn't hold up to intense scrutiny, but do you think there is a point at which the sliding timeline concept will stretch so much that it will break? Or do case-by-case revisionisms like Siangcong seal cracks as they are needed? Was the Siangong concept all Mark Waid's apart from Stan's original invention?

(You had mentioned the Magneto problem before and it made me wonder whether it couldn't be similarly solved by a time travel plot point: shunting Max and Magda forward in time after fleeing from Auschwitz, but before their life under assumed names in the Carpathian mountain village. Maybe driven by the desire to escape the insanity of the period and via external assistance. Surely time-travel is such a common theme within the X-Men mythos that it wouldn't be out of character for the franchise, even as a subplot-point of a larger X-Men story to avoid the "comics about comics" syndrome. I refuse to believe that I'm either the first or only person to have considered something like this over the years.)

The first time that I can remember hearing about the Marvel Sliding Timescale was in interviews with John Byrne back when he was writing FANTASTIC FOUR. At that point, the amount of time being slid was approximately only seven years (a number that John clung to well after it had been expanded, causing some occasional internal friction). It was something that I as a reader had never worried about, and hearing him articulate it, I hated the idea on the face of it. But by the time I came to actually work at Marvel, I had seen the merits in it. I believe it was first codified around 1980, and I would hazard a guess that Mark Gruenwald was likely involved in both its creation and large-scale adoption—it feels like the sort of thing that he and Roger Stern and one or two others would have come up with, thinking about the mechanics of how this fictional universe worked.

Is there a point where it won’t work any longer? Possibly—though again, most readers are the way I was, they simply don’t worry about such things. Put another way, does it trouble you when watching the Simpsons that those characters are the same ages that they were when the show premiered back in 1990? Probably not—because you accept that lack of aging as a part of the fiction you’re consuming. So long as that can happen, and we can tweak the stuff that truly doesn’t work any longer on the fly as we’ve been doing, I think this approach can go on indefinitely. Al Ewing even wrote it into the structure of the mechanics of the Marvel Universe in his ULTIMATES run. Ad yeah, maybe you could fix the Magneto thing that way, but it feels like adding an ill-fitting bit of sci-fi nonsense into the part of his life that was supposed to be before he got involved in all of that stuff, so I don’t know that I love it. But who knows, someday, somebody might.

Clive Reston asked:

A lot of remarkable comics have come from creative teams who have figured out unorthodox ways to work together. (Simon and Kirby's who-knows-who-did-what inventions, the plot > pencils > script "Marvel method," Frank Miller and Klaus Janson's script and layouts > finishes and colors dynamic on Daredevil, and Ian Akin and Brian Garvey's joint inking all come to mind.) Are there current or recent Marvel creative teams with a particularly unusual or interesting collaborative process?

I’m sure that there probably are, but I don’t know that I can think of any offhand. Which is a terrible answer, but it is what it is, I’m afraid. Sorry, Clive.

Next, Steve McSheffrey wondered:

The Attack of the 50 Year Old Comic Books blog recently covered Warlock #5 and that wound up reminding me of how much I miss Starlin's Warlock. I am eagerly awaiting Lim and Marz's upcoming mini (Eve Warlock? It's so obvious but only Marz came up with it!) but was wondering if there's any chance of Starlin returning to the character any time in the future. I know what the comic press has said but I find most of their output so inaccurate I pretty much just read Brian Cronin's columns anymore. Since most of the deluxe OGNs already read like an alt timeline, I personally don't see how it differing from official continuity would attract from the excellent way Mister Starlin writes both Thanos and Warlock.

I’m really the wrong person to ask about this, Steve, as my dealings with Jim Starlin have turned out to be decidedly unpleasant on more than one occasion, so if he were going to come back to do something at Marvel, it likely wouldn’t be with me. And the sense I got after his last “I’m leaving here forever!” proclamation was that maybe this time it was going to stick, unlike the many other times he’s done such a performative flame-out in the past. So, you never know—and Jim is a talented creator for certain.

James Shields wanted to know:

You've had a storied career at Marvel, including a possibly unbreakable streak editing the Avengers. What are some of the managerial and leadership skills that have contributed to your success?

Dumb luck? Geez, I don’t know. I don’t think that I do anything that’s especially extraordinary, or that any other editor shouldn’t know to do and be able to follow up on. I’m reasonably good at getting back to people, so if you’re a creator and you send me a question or just submit a page of work, you’re liable to get a response in short order. I make it my business to make sure that everybody gets vouchered for every week on the work they’ve turned in, and I have no patience for anybody who doesn’t make that a priority. I play for the team, which means that I will often come up with thoughts or ideas that will turn into something in other people’s hands. I fight when I need to fight, and compromise when I need to compromise. I try not to fight over stupid stuff, like turf. I don’t care where the answer to a problem comes from, only that the problem gets resolved. And when I have to shoot someone, fire them or deliver bad news to them, I try to do so straight up and to them directly, rather than avoiding the issue. Plus, I’m a goddamn delight.

Brandon Schatz asked a long question from a Retailer point of view:

At the top of post #43, you spoke a bit about Weaponized Nostalgia, and it's place in the market. As a retailer, I've had my eye on the growing number of nostalgia series that Marvel are running - to great success at my shop, and I'd assume, the industry at large. That said, I do have these titles siloed as limited audience books - ones that serve the existing audience, not really concerned about growing past that. There's nothing WRONG with that - those are numbers that I have, and can trust as a foundation. They help me take risks on the books that push out to new audiences.

At a guess, that's why Marvel and these production studios run programs of Weaponized Nostalgia - and why I sell those books in store. They feed blood to the machine, the machine keeps running. I'd even say it dovetails into your point in reply regarding the volume of titles happening right now. My interpretation sees a mass of titles as satisfying several different needs. First: you can't make comics if they don't make money. Second: you have a base that has communicated a want to return to the days of old. Third: you know you can't reliable direct all efforts looking backwards and expect to satisfy the whole "comics need to make money" thing in the future.

Am I off base? Is this part of the balance in numbers and more of a conscious choice when it comes to the line make up, or is it more of a "needs as they arise" situation? Or none, or both? I feel like I can peg a function, or intended function to almost any book in a line - it is important to do that as a retailer, and I would suggest that as an editor, that's important at a grander scale - and when I see the array of titles published by Marvel or DC, I don't see books published without purpose. Just maybe without a purpose that some retailers are equipped to navigate with the ideas and structures they cling to.

I think the basics of what you’re saying here are very much on the money, Brandon. We’ve had some success with throwback limited series over the past couple of years, stories involving classic creators that harken back to their runs on a given series from years ago. As you say, there’s definitely an audience out there for such projects, and thus we’ve continued to do them. And yes, while we try to craft those books so that they can be enjoyed by anybody, our expectation is that the natural audience for them is largely going to be made up with readers who were fans of the original runs and who might want a drop of nostalgia, rather than completely new fans in general. And yes, it is important to keep up a diverse product list, one that services different demographics even within a store like yours (I assume). As you say, we never publish any title for no reason whatsoever, but the reason may be one that isn’t readily apparent to everybody who is outside of that decision-making process. But it’s a certitude that if something performs well, we’ll endeavor to do more of it, or more things like it. We’re relatively shameless in that regard. Also, just out of curiosity, where is your shop?

Rob Masella asked:

I recently read the 'Startling Stories: Fantastic Four - Unstable Molecules' mini series from 2003 on Marvel Unlimited and really enjoyed it.

It seems to be a world away from the stories Marvel usually does now or then.

Can you give us some background on the choice of creators for the series, how it came together, and the thinking behind the Startling Stories brand.

I feel like a terrible tease here, Rob, but the truth is that, as I was researching for last week’s Newsletter, UNSTABLE MOLECULES #2 was one of the books that I passed up covering, which means that the remaining two issues are soon to be at hand. And it’s a project that really warrants a full-on write-up rather than a shorter reply to your question. So I’d ask you to be patient, and hopefully I’ll get to it in the next couple of weeks. All right?

Next, one from Jason Holtzman:

Marvel entertainment currently has a few posted (on the Disney Careers website, if any fellow readers are interested) that relate to the Marvel Comics office, with and editorial intern position being one of them. My question is this, how often does the comic book office do internships? Or there is a set semester-like cycle that occurs across the Spring/Summer/Fall? A current agreement with my student employment job at university has me locked in with them until the end of the Spring semester, so I can’t put my hat in the ring just yet, but would love to if Summer or Fall opportunities open up!

We actually haven’t had much of an internship program for the past couple of years, Jason, due to the pandemic and working remotely. So we started a pilot program recently that involved having interns also working remotely, but I’m not sure how often we’re planning on doing it. Likely, this all depends on when and if and how often we return to the offices. Back in the day, we tended to have something like three flights of intern periods in a given calendar year. But for now, I just don’t know, sorry. Is this the least informative question-and-answer session ever or what?

Manqueman wanted to know:

What about that story the other day about DC cutting writers' pay after the jobs were done in connection with various events. Not to be a d***, I get the part about paying more to the writers "designing" or show running events but, you know, taking the money from freelancers whose work loads weren't eased by the event instead of editorial, please. Given DC's management going back to the DiDio era (IYKYK, and I'm not going to go there), it's much more disappointment than surprise. I also wonder whether WBD debt load cost cutting is a factor. But what really triggered my interest is that I've been wondering about Gillen and Judgement Day. Certainly seems like he had extra work there beyond his scripts...

Sort of speaking of which: For the first time in years, I'm enjoying a couple of writers as writers. The three who are never failing me are Gillen again, Ewing, and Wells. I really like Wells' warmth and really, really like how the Madeline Pryor storyline worked out and ended. So you wanna name your three faves, Tom, or at least those not working for Marvel?

First off, Manqueman, I don’t know about the validity of that reporting, and what was said is actually true, or partially true, or whatever. I do know that stuff that goes on at Marvel is frequently misreported by people who don’t get the whole picture, or who are only hearing about a single, limited perspective, or whatever. But if what is alleged in that piece is materially accurate, then it’s frankly almost criminal behavior and the editors involved should be deeply ashamed of themselves. Anybody who changes the rate of payment, downgrading it, after the work has been done is a rip-off artist, plain and simple. If you need to pay the writers who are overseeing an Event more for those efforts, then that payment should come from the company, not from the other writers. And if you need to set things up in such a manner where the “showrunner” is getting a piece of the writing fee for every book in the crossover, then the writers on those crossover assignments need to be made aware of that and agree to those terms before taking on the assignments and doing the work. That’s only fair, it’s only right. In the case of Kieron on JUDGMENT DAY, he was paid in full for all of the books that he wrote, both of the main series and tie-ins such as DEATH TO THE MUTANTS and IMMORTAL X-MEN. But not for, say, the FANTASTIC FOUR or AMAZING SPIDER-MAN tie-in issues that he didn’t write. Kieron laid out the premise of the scenario and the rules under which the assorted Judgments took place, and he was given a chance to look over the scripts of most of the other writers as they became available to make sure that everything was on point. But any coordination beyond that was left to me as the editor, and the editors of the titles in question.

On your second question, I’m afraid that I’m going to take the fifth here. I don’t think it’s wise to broadcast the names of any writers that I might be looking to recruit before I’ve had the chance to undertake any such recruitment. Why let your opponent know what you’re thinking, right?

And lastly (whew!) one from Y. Lu:

Seeing some of the comments in this week’s post made me wonder: When did the Marvel Method stop actually being the primary method of scripting at Marvel, as opposed to full script? I know it was probably a gradual shift over time, but was there any particular catalyst or cause, to your mind? Tom King credited it in a podcast to the success of Kevin Smith on Daredevil paving the way, but what’s your perspective from behind the curtain?

Full script became the default method of scripting Marvel books under Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada. As I’ve mentioned on prior occasions, Bill in particular liked full scripts, he could understand and follow them more easily, and so he insisted that virtually everybody switch over to that format. Not everybody complied right away, but in the end, most did. So we’ve been working in that manner for around two decades now, with positive and negative results. And Tom King is at least slightly off base there, as while Kevin Smith did write his scripts for DAREDEVIL in a screenplay style, it was Joe Quesada who paced them and broke them down into pages as a part of his process. So it wasn’t Marvel Method by any means, but it still put a lot of the decision-making in the hands of the artist (who was also the defacto editor.)

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Behind the Curtain

Another lost cover from the mists of time.

As you can see from the set-up, this Mike McKone cover image, showing the Thing battling the Hulk was commissioned for FANTASTIC FOUR #536. And the problem with it should be apparent for anybody that remembers that run of issues. For those who don’t, a quick recap. this was in the period of time immediately prior to CIVIL WAR, the planning for which was going on behind the scenes as these issues were being prepared. Initially, as it was first discussed, the storyline in which the Thing would battle the Hulk in Las Vegas was meant to run for four issues, from FANTASTIC FOUR #533-536. However, this changed on the fly—both because shooting the Hulk off into space was a key part of the set-up for CIVIL WAR, and also because there was a need to bring back both Doctor Doom and the hammer of Thor to similarly put pieces into place for that Event series. And so, writer J. Michael Straczynski shortened this storyline by one issue so that we could get the ROAD TO CIVIL WAR issues completed in time for CIVIL WAR proper to synch up. The unfortunate bit in all of this is the fact that at least two of those earlier issues had generic team shot covers that didn’t have anything specific to do with the story at all. Had I known this was going to happen, I’d have swapped this piece off for one of those earlier covers. But by the time it became apparent, there wasn’t anyplace for this piece to run, and so it stayed in my files ever since in the hopes that such a moment would present itself. But it hasn’t..

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Pimp My Wednesday

Once more into the breach, new comics!

AVENGERS: WAR ACROSS TIME #2 is the second installment in Paul Levitz and Alan Davis’s revisiting of the earliest days of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, a tribute from Paul to the creators of that era and the work that he loved so much as a reader. It’s a deliberately throwback sort of a comic book, with all of the action and personality that you associate with that bygone Marvel age. And it’s funny, we built this story around Kang back when we started on this project around 2019, having no inking that the pandemic was going to delay it so long. So now, we seem like real genuises, having a big Kang story on the shelves just as the malevolent master of time is about to make his big screen debut in a few weeks. Total fluke.

And this week also brings the wrap-up of Christopher Cantwell and Pasqual Ferry’s future world NAMOR THE SUB-MARINER: CONQUERED SHORES. As is typical of Chris’s work, this one’s got some really nice character moments in it as it brings the series and its themes to their natural climax. And Pasqual does a brilliant job of designing just about everything in this flooded future time.

And over in AVENGERS UNLIMITED on the MARVEL UNLIMITED service, “Key To A Mystery” also reaches its climax courtesy of Jim Zub and Caio Majado. As you’d expect, there’s a big ol’ cataclysmic battle with a bevy of foes—can the Avengers pull out a win this time? (If not, that’s going to make it a lot easier getting issue #33 done…)

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A Comic Book On Sale 20 Years Ago Today, February 5, 2003

It hadn’t been all that long since the Rawhide Kid had been featured in APACHE SKIES, the MAX series that I put out, a sequel to the earlier BLAZE OF GLORY project. But now, there was a hot new take on Marvel’s mainstay cowboy hero—one that was intended to be comedic, though no less heroic. In the manner of something akin to the film BLAZING SADDLES, this new incarnation of the Rawhide Kid would be flamboyantly gay (though those words wouldn’t be directly stated anywhere in the project) and yet still the toughest fighter and sharpest shooter in the west. So it was a deliberate subversion of the tropes of the western genre for comedic effect, albeit on the level of an episode of WILL & GRACE. The architect of the project was the late writer Ron Zimmerman, who had a number of Hollywood credits to his name, including most recently at that time the short-lived TV series ACTION starring Jay Mohr. He was a legitimately funny guy, and he somehow attracted a sort of cult of personality around himself despite the fact that he had just a tiny bit of sleaze to his edge (or maybe because of it.) Certainly, a number of people at Marvel were totally enamored of him and his work, and enthusiasm for this project was massive. I can remember Joe Quesada asking me if the Rawhide Kid had ever been shown to have a girlfriend or any interest in women in the old stories, and then pointedly ignoring my answer when it became inconvenient for the project. The book was directly edited by Axel Alonso, who put the cherry on top by hiring the great John Severin to draw the series. While he had never been a huge super hero artist, Severin’s work on genre titles, war and western books in particular, was highly respected, and he had a long history of contributing humorous pieces to CRACKED magazine as well, making him just about the perfect artist to handle this material and the slyness of its never-spoken-aloud joke. (In a rather strange comment reported on at this time, writer Chuck Dixon, who had previously collaborated with Severin, insisted that John had somehow been tricked into drawing the series, unaware of the subtext. As though that would even be possible given the material, to say nothing of any conversations that would have happened between him and Zimmerman or Axel.) While the whole project is ultimately only transgressive in the mildest of ways—it was more silly than raunchy—it stirred up a ton of controversy, both in the public square and internally. It definitely cost the folks that green-lit it a few points, and hastened Bill Jemas’ eventual departure. This was still a period in which any sort of LGBTQ+ representation was all but impossible to find at Marvel, so while this book really wasn’t a step forward, it was still a step forward if you know what I mean.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

That’s right, we’re pulling out all of the hits this week!

NIGHTCAT #1 and only made its debut on February 5, 1991 and sank like a stone, much in the manner of the singing career of its subject, performer Jacqueline Tavarez. You see, as a means of trying to make her stand out from the dozens of other young songstresses who were attempting to break through to the mainstream, Tavarez’s manager had hooked up with Stan Lee with a bit of a daffy plan. He proposed a licensing deal in which Marvel would turn Tavarez into a super hero, and she in turn would wear a real life version of the outfit when she performed on tour and in public. (Her manager, who was at least twice her age, was also dating her. He was, to put it mildly, a bit skeevy.) Stan convinced Marvel to do the deal, and so the assignment to create this book wound up in Bob Budiansky’s Special Projects department, of which I was a member. Because it was a special project, and all of the A & E costs were charged back to the client, we had a lot more money to work with than we ordinarily might, and so some genuine resources were devoted to polishing this turn. To begin with, Jim Lee was paid a boatload of money to design the Nightcat costume, though he didn’t have anything more to do with the series than that. Artist Joe Jusko painted the cover for the book, which was also repurposed as the cover to Tavarez’s first (and only) album. Stan Lee himself dialogued the story, though the plot was contributed by Jim Salicrup and Barry Dutter, and Bob himself had a strong hand in conceptualizing the origin of the character’s super-powers. The book itself was squarebound with a $3.95 cover price at a time when a regular comic book cost a buck—the so-called “Dark Knight Format”. The intention here was that this format was a bit sturdier than the norm, so that the books might be able to be sold at the merch booth during concert performances. But there was a real rush in getting the issue done, as I recall. Artist Denys Cowan agreed to pencil it, even while he was simultaneously working on the DEATHLOK series and other assorted projects. To ink Denys, we brought on a guy who had been helping Mark Texiera as a background inker, Jimmy Palmiotti. It was one of Jimmy’s first solo inking gigs, and he was forced to work under tight battlefield deadline conditions. But the book got completed on schedule. I can recall that, late in the game, the manager showed up wanting us to put in cameos of a number of other record executives and the like that he was trying to glad-hand, forcing us to revise and rework the story some and to deal with their likenesses. Anyway, all of this effort didn’t amount to much of anything apart from a bit of arcane Marvel trivia that gets mentioned with some regularity as an oddity from time to time. Jacqueline Tavarez did make at least one talk show appearance in full costume (which the record company had made at some ridiculous cost) and she had one single that charted briefly, but that was about it. Her album can be listened to in its entirety here, though there’s apparently some belief that the vocals on it weren’t performed by Tavarez but rather ghost-singer Nikki Gregoroff. I don’t know either way, but given how sleazy the entire production seemed to me, i wouldn’t really doubt it.

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Another Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

Just a quick blurb here on this issue of THOR, which came out on February 5, 2003. This was another of those inventory stories that every editor of an ongoing title was ordered to commission at a certain point due to some scheduling jam-up somewhere. The problem I had with my inventory books was that I liked them too much, and so after all interest in them existing had gone away, I looked for places where I could drop them in so that they’d see the light of day. This issue of THOR was like that. This was a period where Marvel was just starting to experiment with double-shipping, and so I volunteered to put out an extra issue of THOR this month, giving me a place to use this story. The creative team was indicative of the era, as it’s a very off-model pairing for an issue of THOR. it was written by Christopher Priest and drawn by Trent Kaniuga, whose more bouncy and cartoonish style isn’t what you normally think of as being appropriate to the God of Thunder. Accordingly, Thor himself really isn’t in this story much at all. Rather, it’s set in a dystopian future in which a young kid finds the hammer Mjolnir and encounters an old, deranged man who claims that he’s the Thunder God. In the end, the guy is taken away by his Doctor, who may or may not be Loki, while the kid decides that he’ll guard the hammer until the real Thor returns to reclaim it. it was a very different story than what the book was then running under the authorship of writer Dan Jurgens, and I seem to recall that most THOR fans were confused by it, with a few being aggressively angry about it. But I liked it, and I liked taking chances such as this one, even if they didn’t all work out perfectly, and so I stand behind it. Strangely, the story was set in the future time of 2026, which is just three short years from now, which seems strange to me today.

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Monofocus

Boy, after a bit of a drought in January, my television viewing has perked way up in the past week or so, thanks to a bunch of new series (or new to me, at any rate.)

Over on Hulu, I’ve started watching the comedy series EXTRAORDINARY, which explores a very British take on the super hero phenomenon. The show postulates a world in which every single person gains some super-power in their late teens/early twenties—everyone, that is, except our main character, Jen, played by Mairead Tyres. Powerless in an entirely powered world, Jen uses this as something of an excuse for some legitimately horrible and self-destructive behavior. But it’s all very funny on a comedy level. It’s not really a super hero series, it’s much more low-key than that—the regular folks who’ve all developed some manner of power are just regular people trying to get through life, including Jen’s friend and roommate Carrie, who can channel the spirits of the dead, her layabout boyfriend Kash, who can rewind time a couple of minutes, and her cat Jizzlord, who turns out to be a guy who transformed into a cat and then got stuck that way for several years. If anything, the show reminds me a little bit of YOU’RE THE WORST, with narcissistic and damaged characters doing awful things but somehow being able to keep your sympathies. Jen in particular recalls Aya Cash’s Gretchen in the way she’s able to behave abominably but you can still see and empathize with her particular damage.

Over on Netflix, I’ve started taking in the Dutch series TOON, drawn in mostly by the title. It’s not what I was expecting, but it is still sort of fascinating. It’s about the titular Toon Vissar, a painfully reclusive and socially awkward jingle-writer whose life blows up around him when he becomes the subject of a viral video showing him performing a song, which brings him instant fame and attention that is both unwanted and intrusive. It’s very much a cringe comedy, as Toon is unable to express himself forcefully enough to make his way out of the jams he finds himself in as bottom-feeders and hungry would-be agents and opportunists show up to try and ride his unwanted coattails. it’s a bit of a think sauce, so I’ve been going through the episodes bit by bit—the show ran for two seasons, both of which are available on the service.

Like pretty much everybody else on the planet, I too have been well taken with POKER FACE, the new Peacock episodic series created by Rian Johnson and starring Natasha Lyonne as Charlie Cale, a former Vegas cocktail waitress who is now on the run from her former employers due to a particular quirk she possesses; she’s a human lie detector who can instinctively tell whenever somebody is lying. Having inadvertently used this ability to sort out the murder of her friend by her boss’s son, Charlie is now in the wind, trying to stay one step ahead of a pursuing fixer, and stumbling over murder after murder as she moves from place to place, solving each one in term. The show is very much “What if Columbo was the Fugitive?” with just a touch of the Rockford Files thrown in. Every episode is self-contained, with Charlie in a new place and dealing with a new cast of characters, in the manner of one of those classic 70s detective series. Pat of what makes the show different is that it follows the COLUMBO “Howcatchem” formula, which is to say that the identity of the killer is known to the viewer from the start, we get to see the murder play out at the beginning of each episode, and the suspense isn’t so much about working out who the killer is as it is seeing how Charlie will unravel their story and bring them some karmic justice. (Since she isn’t a police officer herself and in fact needs to keep a low profile, in most cases this resolution can’t be as simple as turning people over to the police with a bunch of gathered evidence.) I found Lyonne to be a bit much in her previous show RUSSIAN DOLL, particularly in the uneven second season, but here her shtick is charming and comfortable. The format suits her well. I do feel that perhaps the network’s decision to drop 4 episodes all at once, literally half the season, was maybe not the best idea. I can see why you’d want to drop two, even three, as the first episode involves a lot of set-up, introducing the cast and the overall scenario and not truly being representative of the rest of the series. But I blew through those first four episodes in short order, and by the end, having experienced that “howcatchem” structure multiple times in rapid succession, it had begun to lose a bit of its luster. Which is to say, POKER FACE was pretty clearly devised as a weekly series, and that seems to be the best way to experience it.

But the best new show airing at the moment is on Apple TV+, and it is SHRINKING. I freaking love this series. It stars Jason Segel as Jimmy Laird, a psychiatrist who has been in a year-long downward spiral since his beloved wife was killed in an automobile accident. Jimmy’s been numbing himself with alcohol and drugs and other vices, leaving his neighbor Liz, played by Christa Miller, to look after his daughter Alice. And he begins to act out at work, crossing ethical lines with his patients and becoming much more involved in their lives and in trying to fix their problems, much to the consternation of his boss Paul, played by Harrison Ford. But what the show really has going for it is its creators, Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein. Lawrence is a master of this sort of form, as witnessed in shows such as SCRUBS and TED LASSO, and Goldstein, of course, plays the prickly Roy Kent in the latter. What this series shares in common with those isn’t its style or tone (it’s far less an overt comedy than they are) but its empathy. For all that all of the characters are coping with their weight of their own individual burdens—divorces, progressive illnesses, empty nest syndrome, anger issues and so forth—there is a genuine sense of caring that permeates the proceedings. And particularly, Segel is great as Jimmy. He’s got this sort of Jeff Daniels thing going on, and is showcasing a great deal more range than one might think him capable of based on his past projects. And, of course knowing me, it’s got a killer opening title sequence that I will share with you here. And in fact, like most other Bill Lawrence projects, SHRINKING uses its soundtrack super-effectively to reinforce mood and tone, drawing on an eclectic mix of deep cut tracks and familiar favorites to expertly back the events taking place. Seriously, it’s almost a master class on using music to enhance the emotion of a scene. Nobody does this as skillfully as Lawrence in this area. I know that some people have expressed that they had a hard time getting into it given how absolutely rock-bottom Jimmy is as the first episode begins, but this is one of those rare instances when I would advocate giving the show a second episode. If it can’t hook you in two, then it’s not going to happen. But the entire cast is uniformly great, the message of the show feels timely and relevant, and the complete production is masterful.

Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I did a deep dive survey of the first year of Batman stories to work out just how often in his early years the character had actually used a gun, as put forth in argument by pro-firearm Batfans.

And five years ago, I wrote about this wacked-out issue of ACTION COMICS:

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All right, another late night is finally at its end as I wrap things up here. How late a night? Well, let’s just say that you’ll be reading it on the same day that I finished it and leave it at that. So until next we meet, keep your powder dry and your umbrella ready, and I’ll see you again in another seven days.

Tom B