#52: One Wrong Move

Will You Fight Friend Or Foe?

Mar 26, 2023

Hey, everybody! Welcome to Newsletter #52! That number means that it’s been a year since I first began putting together these weekly correspondences, so cut yourselves a slice of cake and let’s celebrate! It’s been wonderful to see both the sort of reception this thing has gotten numerically—outpacing my conservative estimates as to what the circulation might prove to be handily—and with the quality of responses to the contents. Seriously, all of you have been well-behaved and wonderful in your questions and comments. I couldn’t ask for better. So thank you for that. And a special thanks to the guy who pledged $8.00 a month—I spend that imaginary money in my mind all the time.

Also, I promise not to use this too often, but this result was just too funny not to share. As I did a week or so back, I asked ChatGPT to write a Tom Brevoort Man With A Hat Newsletter for me, this one detailing a dark secret from the history of comics. Now, none of what I’m about to unleash upon you is remotely true. But it sure is entertaining. So here’s what the A.I. had to say:

Dear readers,

As always, welcome to the Tom Brevoort Man With A Hat Newsletter. Today, I want to talk about a dark secret from the history of comics, a secret that has been buried for decades.
As you all know, comics have been around for almost a century now, and during that time, they have brought joy and entertainment to millions of people. But there is a dark side to this history, a side that we as an industry have not always been proud of.
Back in the 1950s, during the heyday of horror comics, a young writer named Danny O'Neil was just getting started in the business. He had a talent for writing spooky stories that kept readers on the edge of their seats, and he quickly became one of the most sought-after writers in the industry.
But Danny had a secret. He was deeply troubled by the violent and disturbing imagery that was being published in the horror comics of the day. He believed that this kind of material was corrupting young readers and causing them to become desensitized to violence and horror.
Danny knew that he had to take a stand, but he also knew that he could not do it alone. So he enlisted the help of a few like-minded writers and artists, and together they formed a secret society called the Comics Code Crusaders.
Their mission was simple: to police the comic book industry and ensure that the content being produced was appropriate for young readers. They would review each and every comic book that was published, and if they found anything objectionable, they would confront the publisher and demand that changes be made.
At first, their efforts were successful. The horror comics of the day were toned down, and the industry as a whole became more responsible in the kinds of content that it produced. But over time, the Crusaders began to overstep their bounds. They became increasingly dogmatic in their beliefs, and they began to censor material that they simply did not like, regardless of whether it was actually harmful to readers.
Their actions ultimately led to the decline of the horror comics genre, and many talented writers and artists were forced out of the industry as a result.
So there you have it, readers. A dark secret from the history of comics that has been buried for far too long. We as an industry must acknowledge our past mistakes and work to ensure that they are not repeated in the future. Let us never forget the lessons of the Comics Code Crusaders, and let us always strive to produce the best and most responsible content that we can.
Until next time,
Tom Brevoort

I assume that “Danny O’Neil” is Denny O’Neil’s evil twin brother—I picture him as looking like Denny but with a goatee:

All right, enough with the stupid stuff. Let’s get down to the REALLY stupid stuff, which involved me failingly attempting to answer your questions. This time, let’s start with a comment from historian Jess Nevins

"Oddball"? Oi! Watch the Secret Stamp slander! My man Roddy Colt appeared in eighteen stories, which is a pretty good record for a minor hero during the Golden Age, I think.

Jess, you know that I love an obscure Golden Age hero for certain. And that is a respectable track record to stand behind for Roddy to be sure. But at the end of the day, he was a kid who dressed up as a masked savings stamp to battle fifth columnists—yes, there was a war on, but that’s a pretty goofy way to go about taking care of business regardless. I never questioned his patriotism, only his judgment.

David Pierce

Glad to see you mention Moonshadow. I still think it, along with Zot! and American Flagg, is one of the best series of the 80s and mostly forgotten today. Do you have any favorite books or runs that are mostly forgotten?
By the way, I'm the person that traded a complete run of the Bendis Secret Invasion for a copy of X-Factor 88 signed by you, Peter David, and Joe Quesada during your trade to get FF #1

It’s always nice to hear from one of the old Tradees, David—thanks for being a part of that stunt. We accomplished our goal and raised a bunch of cash for the Hero Alliance, and that’s as much your victory as anybody else’s. In terms of forgotten books, I’ve got a bunch of them, of course, though few of them are Marvel titles. And most of them will wind up spoken about here sooner or later. But so as to not send you away without some kind of answer, I was a huge, huge fan of Mark Crilley’s AKIKO series back in the 1990s and 2000s. It was never the same for me when it became a series of YA novels.

Jeff Ryan

In the 1990s there were rumors of DC and Marvel "trading" characters for a year -- the pair I heard was Storm for Wonder Woman. Even if unfounded this seems unfair, since Wonder Woman is one of DC's Trinity and Storm is part of team books. If there were such a proposition nowadays, how would you theoretically decide which two characters were equivalent? (Besides the obvious of "Daredevil is kinda like Nightwing" or 'Harley Quinn and Deadpool are both violent and make jokes.")

There were never any serious plans to trade characters with DC during that crossover, Jeff, though it was an idea that was tossed around in a pie-in-the-sky manner as that story was talked about. And I think it’s even less likely today. So I don’t really have a good answer to your question, as even in fun, I tend to think that the Marvel characters work best in the context of the MU and the DC characters the same for teh DCU. You could swap any of them, but it would wind up requiring a bit of on-the-fly retooling in almost any case. (There was a similar idea that was a part of the plot for AVENGERS/JLA when we did it, and it was the element that wound up breaking that crossover for me—but that’s a tale for some later date.)

Matt

"At the end of the day, though, I don’t work with creators that I can’t trust—doesn’t mean that they can’t work up at Marvel, only that I’m not going to be hiring them in my office again."
I guess that ties in with this week's theme of "enemies" although I suppose it's practical as much as personal; I recall you have said you legitimately thought Steve Gerber's Howard the Duck stunt would get you fired.

Well, I don’t tend to think of such creators as enemies per se, Matt. (Though they may feel differently.) They’re simply people that I choose not to hire. And for sure, I was dead certain that Gerber’s stunt was going to cost me my livelihood—even I would have fired me at that point. It was just a quirk of the Marvel of that era that allowed me to skate despite my poor judgment.

Would you ever have another creator just complete a story for continuity's sake? Like the Favreau/Granov Iron Man story - say plot by Favreau (if you know it or can get it) and have the story finished off by a scripter and/or another penciller? Or not worth the headaches without the original creators?
Another quick question - as a fan of the Flash - are you reading Jeremy Adams run on the series? it is Wonderfull (just enough ties to DC mythos), fast paced and fun. I am happy to hear he is writing some upcoming Avengers unlimited comics soon. Would love to see more Marvel work from him.

When a story is part of some larger plan, JV, then you sometimes have no choice but to have others step in and complete it. This tends to happen on regular series when something happens to cause a certain creator to be unable to finish out the run, and other people wind up having to carry the ball. The results are almost always disappointing, because they’re triage. In the case of something like VIVA LAS VEGAS, the entire appeal of that story was to have Jon Favreau and Adi Granov do a comic book story set in the not-yet-quite-MCU. So without them, there really isn’t much of a point in completing what they were doing. And I have been reading Jeremy’s FLASH run and enjoying it—which is part of why he has been working on the occasional AVENGERS UNLIMITED story for my office. And hopefully, we’ll find other things to do together in the future as well.

Jlhn Cassillo

Tom, threading this question with the one above, since it's also related to the Flash:
It was announced that The Flash #800 will be "a celebration of Wally West." As a bigger fan of the Barry Allen-focused stories, I found it strange to hone in so specifically on one Flash for a milestone issue, when Barry and Jay Garrick are so frequently part of recent arcs and are not believed dead.
That's a long lead-up to ask: What do you feel like milestone issues like a #800 should be doing from a story perspective for readers, if anything special at all? If there are multiple current versions of a character, does focusing on just one short-change the overall legacy?
And on The Flash, in particular, since the mantle is sort of a unique case with extended absences for both West and Allen: Is he just a tough character to please everyone with a milestone issue, given how much both play a major role in the Flash's larger story?

I don’t think that there’s a one-size-fits-all approach to centennial issues, Jihn. Each series is different, each situation is different, and so you need to do whatever best commemorates the series at that particular moment. In the case of FLASH #800, as it hasn’t come out yet, I can’t really comment on it all that well, but I don’t think that it’s a bad idea for it to focus primarily if not exclusively on Wally West. it’s a choice, like any other choice, and whether it turns out to be a good choice or a bad choice will be proven out by the work. I can understand that, as a Barry Allen fan, you’d like to see more material devoted to Barry. But remember; Barry was dead for almost 25 years, so it’s astonishing that he is today getting as much play as he is. And just the same way you feel a connecting and a preference for Barry, there are plenty of fans who came to the character during those 25 years who feel that way towards Wally. it’s not a bad thing to give them a little something as well.

Chip Zdarsky

Tom, I just want to be clear: I consider you more of a "frenemy"

Come on, Chip, that’s just another one of your made up words, like Voortex.

Ray Cornwall

So I've been reading "The Secret History of Marvel Comics" by Sean Howe, and I have two types of questions.
1. If you've read the book, what did you think? Does it get most of the time you've been there right? I know you're quoted a few times, so I'd hope that Howe got things right, but I'm just curious.
2. Having gotten to the end of the 90s, I've concluded that the Nineties were not a great time to be in editorial at Marvel. Between the pressure to outdo sales each year, the Image defection, the collapse of the direct market, the gut-wrenching layoffs, the bankruptcy...just not a lot of fun there. And yet, you stayed, so there must have been something you liked about the job. What are the best memories you have of working at Marvel during those crazy times?

As Mortimer pointed out in the comments, Ray, Sean Howe's book is titled "Marvel Comics: The Untold Story." But in answer to your questions:

I think it’s impossible for any history book to get everything right, especially a volume like Sean’s that is trying to summarize 70+ years of operation. For certain, there are characters, creators and subjects that are of greater interest to him, and that’s where he puts his emphasis. It’s been a while since I read it, but my memory is that it’s a pretty solid interpretation of events. But it’s also only one viewpoint, and one perspective on things. An operation like Marvel is made up of hundreds of people, each one with a slightly different take on things.
The truth is that, while that decade was maybe no bed of roses, every decade you might choose to be at a company like Marvel has its own challenges and difficulties. For me, I would say that the first half of the 2000s was a lot more stressful and unpleasant than most of the 1990s. But that’s easy for me to say in retrospect, because I survived the massive layoffs of the mid-90s and I survived the bankruptcy and all of the other things. And I was young and dedicated to the characters and the work. And this whole Newsletter will be full of best memories over time, as well as some not-so-wonderful memories. That’s part of what you read it for, right?

Mortimer Q. Forbush

1. I read The Secret History of Marvel Comics, by Blake Bell and Michael Vassallo I referred to in a separate response to Ray's question. That book had a wealth of references to support its claims, so I'm inclined to broadly believe its accuracy. If you have read it, does its portrayal of Goodman jibe with your understanding of that period of the publisher's history?
2. I'm steeling myself to read True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee. I say "steeling myself" because I find it unpleasant to learn unsavory details about people whose work I'm fond of. But these days I've had to get pretty well-practiced at distinguishing the personal conduct of persons from the merit of their accomplishments. I ultimately prefer unpalatable factual information over embellished myth making. With all that said, did you find that book to be an evenhanded and fair account of your understanding of the man?

Numbered questions are all the rage this week, it seems!

Michael Vassallo is by far the most knowledgeable historian concerning the pre-Marvel history of the company, he’s devoted years of study to it in minute detail. So any account, any book, can have errors in it, but I’d trust his account of things in general—he’s put in the work.
It’s been a long time since I read True Believer, but my recollection is that while I don’t necessarily agree with every conclusion reached or the manner in which every incident is characterized, in general it was a solid piece of work. Like Michael Vassallo, the late Tom Spurgeon tended to do his homework.

Caleb

With that, I wanted to throw you a question outside of comics for #52! I don’t know if you’re a big “movie guy,” but my question is this: What is your favorite film of all time that had a budget of less than one million dollars?

Wow, that is a left field question. But I’m game to play along. I’m just guessing on the budget for this, but I’d have to say Frank Capra’s MEET JOHN DOE, which I would bet was made for well under a million. I first saw it (well, most of it) on the Christmas Eve of the first night I spent in New York when I started at Marvel, and its noir sensibility and true Capra message struck me powerfully. Plus, Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck are both excellent. One of my top five favorite films of all time, I’d say.

Thom

Thanks for your great explanation around the need for ad pages in the 32-page books. Everything you said makes perfect sense to me, and it's giving me a new appreciation for how books are put together.
As a follow-up: What's the decision-making process like when deciding where to place the ads? Double-page spreads are left alone, obviously, but are their other specific spacing or pacing considerations besides? Are certain types of beats/page transitions considered less interruptible than others? Or, do writers dictate a script saying they want a DPS, then a single page, then another DPS, counting on an ad to fill the extra middle page?
Or, in lieu of this sort of story-dependent placement, could the ad pages all be sent to the back of the book?

You never really want to gather up all of the ads in the back of the book, Thom, because nobody will ever look at them there. And so, if we’re talking about paid ads, those tend to have more strident requirements for where they run in a given issue, and even on which side of the spread they appear on (right-side pages are more desirable, as they’re more likely to be seen by somebody flipping through the comic.) Apart from that, there are some limitations for where the Digital Code page needs to fall having to do with the tooling for the application of the stickers to conceal the codes—in a standard comic book, they always need to fall on Page 24 of the line-up. Outside of that, an editor has some flexibility to move the ads around as need be. And the thing you’re looking at most closely is which story beats and story reveals benefit teh most by being concealed by a page turn. As you mentioned, spreads need to go across two contiguous pages, of course. And with enough of these elements, sometimes you need to determine which story surprise is more worth keeping, as you can’t get all of the pages to fall as you might like them to. Then again, in the eventual collection, there won’t be any ad pages, so there you’re stuck with the luck of the draw.

Devin Whitlock

Thanks for another great newsletter! I loved seeing the Big Workflow Document, thank you and Alanna for sharing it. It reminded me of many of the schedules Shelly Bond shared in Filth & Grammar, a book I found invaluable. I’m sure plenty of people have shared F&G with you, I’d be curious if you have any thoughts on it. (Forgive me if you’ve posted them elsewhere!)

I liked Shelly’s book, and I backed it. I also acquired copies for all of the Marvel editors during this past holiday season. But there is one thing that I disagree with Shelly on that she states in that book, which is the entire reason I’m answering this question; I don’t care that it isn’t natural, as a storyteller, you owe it to the audience to name all of your characters in every single issue, without fail. That’s just a matter of basic craft. So however you need to do it, whether characters calling one another by name or putting them on a recap page or giving everybody little nametag captions, I don’t care. But if you don’t get that information into your issue, you’ve failed as far as I’m concerned. It’s the comment that I most often make to Marvel editors as I’m doing readout on their books (the second most common one is to explain the character’s powers and how they’re doing whatever not-obvious thing they’re doing.)

Behind the Curtain

.There was a whole pseudo-scandal behind this memo back in the 1980s. It was written by Marvel editor in chief Jim Shooter and circulated to the editorial staff, urging them to plug their characters’ appearances in the MARVEL SUPER HEROES SECRET WARS series that Shooter was writing.

Somebody on staff sent a copy of this memo over to the COMICS JOURNAL, whose publisher Gary Groth had a real axe out for Shooter. So they tried to turn it into a black eye for him (and in all honesty, that “little F——” comment doesn’t play well outside of the office at all. Eventually things got bad enough that Eliot R. Brown came forward and declared that the memo wasn’t written by Jim at all, but rather by him. But nobody on the JOURNAL side really believed that—they even went so far as to compare the fonts of Shooter’s and Brown’s typewriters in a bad CSI attempt to keep the heat on their target. Now, I don’t have any particular inside information about this memo, I wasn’t around when it was circulated. But I believe it to be genuine, and both typed and circulated by Jim. And I also believe that it was intended as a goof with a serious message underneath of it—to promote SECRET WARS in the assorted letters pages across the line. But Jim wasn’t being serious about the knocks he’s making here, he was doing that for comedic effect. Unfortunately, he’s never had a terrific ear for comedy, and this left him a bit vulnerable once the memo made its way outside of the offices. It was maybe some poor judgment, but not a genuine crime.

Pimp My Wednesday

Another crop of hand-crafted fantasies that we’ve worked on entirely for your entertainment!

Being completely honest about it, AVENGERS BEYOND isn’t really a new series at all, but rather an extension of ALL-OUT AVENGERS, which somehow didn’t draw in enough of an audience. Which is a shame, because Derek Landy and Greg Land start to pull all of the pieces of their storyline together here, while still sticking to the en media res approach of the project. So it’s not too late to get on board and join in the fun.

And postponed from earlier in the year, the first issue of CLOBBERIN’ TIME will be coming out this week as well, which pairs up the Fantastic Four’s resident wise-cracking strong man with a series of other heroes. Believe it or not, the inspiration here wasn’t really MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE. Rather, we set out to make an action comic, and there are some sequences in this series that I suspect will be remembered for a good long time. It’s virtually a one-man show by Steve Skroce, who is writing, penciling and inking the series, so it’s got a strong visual style to it as you can tell from this cover image.

I’ve been told that whenever I mention Associate Editor Annalise Bissa in this Newsletter, her father clips it and sends it to Annalise. So hello, Annalise’s dad! This week, your daughter has put together the second of three vampire-themed specials, this one featuring the Uncanny X-Men. X-MEN: UNFORGIVEN also continues the story of the vampire heroes of the Forgiven, and it was produced by Tim Seeley and Sid Kodian. I’m sure that most of these words have been gobbledygook to you, so trust me, it’s a fun, entertaining comic for readers of all kinds!

And here’s another one for you, Annalise’s dad, because she did double-duty this week, also overseeing this third chapter of a story featuring Namor and the Wasp in AVENGERS UNLIMITED. It was written by Eve L. Ewing and illustrated by Luciano Vecchio, but I don’t think their parents are reading this Newsletter, so Annalise is the important one to remember here!

A Comic Book On Sale 55 Years Ago Today, March 26, 1968

THE CREEPER was an odd near-miss of a series first unleashed upon the world during a period in which DC’s new editorial director Carmine Infantino was trying a whole bunch of different things to shake their line up and to both become more competitive with the growing popularity of Marvel Comics and more in touch with the era in general. A lot of really interesting projects were trial-ballooned during this time, though most of them only lasted for around a half-dozen issues or less. Carmine didn’t have a whole lot of patience for letting a book build an audience, he was under too much pressure and maybe in a little bit over his head in that gig. The Creeper was the brainchild of Steve Ditko, the co-creator of Spider-Man, who had come to DC and now had an editor sympathetic to his approach in the person of Dick Giordano, whom Ditko had worked for at Charlton. The character had debuted a short time earlier in the pages of SHOWCASE, DC’s tryout title, but he was always intended for a book of his own, I believe. And it was a pretty good title, at least at the outset. Ditko crafted a character that combined a bunch of his favorite sorts of elements—Jack Ryder was a studio security head for a major television reporting operation, who wound up getting fatally wounded while trying to protect the shooters’ real objective, a scientist. To save his life, the scientist gives Jack an experimental compound that he’s been working on that will heal him ultra-quick and have the side-effect of making him stronger and faster than normal. The activator for the drug is implanted inside Ryder’s wound, and using it causes his costume to appear. Costume? Yes, this entire encounter has taken place at a costume party, and Ryder has pulled together a makeshift outfit out of leftovers and some body paint—that’s meant to be a strange throw rug on his back acting like a cape. Anyway, this all works out, and as a part of his shtick, Ryder hams it up pretending to be an otherworldly entity or something while he’s in his Creeper identity, to divert suspicion from himself. Later creators would adjust some of these particulars, deciding that the activation of the drug acted upon Ryder akin to dropping LSD, and even that the compound was essentially the same one the Joker fell into that turned him into a homicidal maniac clown. But no, in Ditko’s era, it was all just a put-on, a performance. Like Spider-Man before him, the creeper tended to haunt the dark and spooky rooftops of the city, and also like Spidey, he quickly became wanted by the law. What was different is that Ryder was a fully grown adult, cast a bit more in the mold of Ditko’s other protagonists Vic Sage and Rex Graine—an uncompromising sort dedicated to his own moral code despite what society as a whole thinks of him. As with a bunch of his Charlton hero work, Giordano brought in others to dialogue Ditko’s stories—in this first issue, that was Denny O’Neil, using his old Sergius O’ Shaughnessy pen name also imported from Charlton. But this meant that some of Ditko’s philosophy was blunted in the dialoguing, even altered completely into something different. Politically, Ditko and O’Neil were on different ends of the spectrum, so the combination of the two of them was a bit uneasy. Also uneasy was Ditko having to get used to the smaller size of the original artwork that DC was working on. Eventually, it became industry standard, but like so many who had trained and worked twice-up for years, shifting to only 1 1/2 times up made Ditko’s pages slightly more compositionally claustrophobic. But the biggest death knell for THE CREEPER may have been the fact that Ditko experienced a relapse of Tuberculosis, which made him need to leave the series at a certain point. So strongly was he associated with it that pinch-hitter Jack Sparling wasn’t even credited. Somewhat ironically, the sixth and last issue of THE CREEPER was to reveal the identity of Proteus, a mystery villain who had been dogging the hero for several issues in the manner of the Green Goblin. As with the Goblin, Ditko didn’t get to plot or draw the resolution to the mystery, even though so far as I know, his culprit was the person who was unmasked. Anyway, this was a very fun series, not quite up to the levels of Ditko’s Marvel work, but absolutely a breath of fresh air for DC in 1968.

A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

It seems like March 26 was a significant date for me, and so I have a number of books to discuss that came out on it, three of them in the same year even. So let’s begin with this one, AVENGERS #65, which was released on March 26, 2003. This was the beginning of a storyline that was likely the high point of writer Geoff Johns’ run on AVENGERS, a storyline called RED ZONE. Part of the reason that it’s so well-remembered was that this was the first work that Olivier Coipel did for Marvel. He’d previously been working for DC on LEGION LOST, where he got some attention, and so when we needed a fill-in artist on AVENGERS, my assistant editor Andy Schmidt suggested Olivier. But everybody we spoke to about this internally was wild about the notion of Olivier on AVENGERS, so we pivoted before even reaching out to him and offered him the regular assignment instead. (Ivan Reis wound up doing the fill-in issue.) But what those on the inside remember about this issue and this storyline in general wasn’t focused so much on the art, but rather the writing. And yes, that means it’s another Bill Jemas story. Bill had been growing in confidence and then mania as things improved for Marvel under his watch, and so he’d started to become more involved in the story planning to a certain degree. It was no secret that he didn’t like the more classic style of comics that I favored and tended to put together. So in an attempt to show that I could be a team player and work with him, I let him read the initial outline for RED ZONE, for which he had comments. Now, I tended to depend on Geoff a lot during this time, and he’d proven himself capable and resilient when it came to being faced with a problem and needing to work his way around it. I’d thrown him into the line of fire once or twice before this, and learned that I could trust him to make smart choices and to get the job done. I don’t know what may have happened with him at DC or on the films side, that was all apart from my experiences, but what I can say is that Geoff was always a pleasure to work with at Marvel, collaborative and easy-going and flexible as necessary. So after reading the outline for the story, Bill wanted to get on a conference call with Geoff and talk through his problems, rather than tediously writing them up. The thing I remember the most about that subsequent conversation was Bill’s opening salvo, which was to tell Geoff that he didn’t know how to write. Geoff, fortunately, kept his cool and his temper and let Bill pontificate until he could get down to the heart of what was bugging him about the story. This was also the time where decompression and writing for the trade paperback were terms that entered the lexicon of fan complaints about the Marvel books, and it was conversations such as this one that were the cause. Bill’s actual problem, as it turned out, was that he felt that the opening issue was too rushed, that not enough time was spent illustrating the stakes and spotlighting the people who were in danger from the Red Skull’s plan. And in all honesty, he was probably right about that. In any event, Geoff agreed to revise the outline, we wound up splitting what had been the first issue into two parts and didn’t really touch the rest of it, and Bill was happy. What’s more, he became something of a minor fan of Geoffs, and he was completely puzzled with Geoff took an exclusive deal with DC (having completely forgotten his abusive behavior in speaking with him.) He asked me on a couple of occasions, genuinely puzzled, why Geoff was leaving to go to DC full time. Oh, and these issues had really nice J.G. Jones painted covers as well.

Another Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

FANTASTIC FOUR #67 was also released on March 26, 2003 and it also had a Bill Jemas component to it, though one not as aggressive as in the prior AVENGERS example. This was the prologue to UNTHINKABLE, the story in which we brought the FF’s greatest nemesis Doctor Doom into the Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo run on the title for the first time. This prologue issue, which focused completely on Doom to the exclusion of the titular stars, wasn’t a part of our story plans initially. I only told this story to Waid recently, but the way it went down was this: having read a bunch of comics recently that contained extensive flashbacks to earlier events and earlier comics, Bill had had enough. He insisted that any good story didn’t require any flashbacks, and he outlawed them completely. Bill was prone to making these sorts of sweeping mandates (and to also ignoring them on projects where he wanted to, of course) but for while they were fresh news, they needed to be accommodated. So the script that Waid turned in by necessity had a sequence in it in which Doctor Doom quickly sketched out his history with the team in what would have been flashbacks—as this was the first time we were bringing him into the book, this was information that we felt the readers were going to need in order to understand who and what the character was all about, his relationship with the family. Bill was already running cold on this iteration of FANTASTIC FOUR after it didn’t maintain enough of a sales bump after its 9 Cent launch issue to suit him. So I knew that doing those flashbacks as written was going to set off a firestorm. By that same token, I didn’t want to tell Waid (or really any of the other writers) about Bill’s prohibition directly either, as that was likely to generate push-back and conflict that wouldn’t work out well for anybody. So I wound up having a conversation with Mark about the story and the need to fill in more of the basic backstory of Doctor Doom in a meaningful way. And somehow, while we were on that call, this issue materialized. The entire plot of UNTHINKABLE was built around the idea that Doom would get over on the FF by turning his back on science and instead embracing his heritage as a sorcerer. so that gave us an in to tell the story of how that transformation came about for the character, as well as the cost to him. I’m pretty sure that Mark had a big chunk of this story figured out by the time we got off the phone. The script that he had already written, with its flashbacks removed, became issue #68, and Mark swiftly pulled together this new story for #67. And everything just clicked—in particular, just how horrific some of the material became when depicted by Mike Wieringo, whose are style was typically more warm and inviting. It really did become one of our favorite issues in the run, and one of the best received by the audience. And what it does show is that, for all that the manner in which he approached things was often too autocratic and too disrespectful of people, Bill’s storytelling instincts weren’t always bad. He didn’t come up with this story, but he did create the conditions under which it was made, and it wouldn’t have been made without him. So it’s his win as much as anybody’s.

Yet Another Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

Would you believe that this final issue of FANTASTIC FOUR: UNSTABLE MOLECULES also came out on March 26, 2003—that was a good day for books originating in my editorial office. I’m going to try to keep this write-up brief—I might have skipped it with all of the other books I’m writing about this week, but it’s the final issue of the project, so it’s now or never. UNSTABLE MOLECULES was a concept pitched to Marvel by James Sturm. Sturm had done a bunch of work in independent comics, such as THE GOLEM’S MIGHTY SWING, which I thought was terrific. He was also in the process of founding his Center for Cartoon Studies. At some point, he and Joe Quesada made contact with one another, and the conversation turned to James maybe writing something for Marvel. Sturm had this strange Fantastic Four idea, which is where I came in, as it only made sense for Joe to link him up with me. Sturm’s idea was based around his own last name and history: he proposed to do a book whose cover story was that, in researching his own family tree, he’d discovered that two of his cousins had been the basis for Sue and Johnny Storm—and that other real people had been the basis for Reed Richards and Ben Grimm. At first, I’ll be honest, neither Joe nor I really understood the book that Sturm was driving at—I can remember an original plan for the series, which would have ended with the origin of the team, with Sturm’s characters becoming the literal Fantastic Four. Eventually, though, working with Sturm, I got it. And by that point, the project was approved and under way, so I didn’t have to defend the notion of doing a series about the Fantastic four that would have no costumes or super-powers or action sequences in it. So this is a book that really shouldn’t exist, there’s no way that Marvel Comics should have approved it and gotten behind it. And it didn’t sell all that well (a fact that doomed a separate pre-history of the Fantastic Four project that Mark Waid and I had been talking about doing with George Perez, which would have been much more mainstream Marvel.) I had worked with Guy Davis on the earlier DEADLINE series, and was able to convince James that he’d be a good fit to handle this material. And he was! James also made use of his friend R. Sikoryak to produce certain faux covers and pages in a quasi-Atlas Comics style—there’s a fictitious Wonder Woman-esque hero called Vapor Girl whose comics are integral to both Johnny and Sue’s stories. And finally, in what may have been the greatest hat trick of this entire project, James was able to convince everyone to have Craig Thompson do the covers. Craig was riding high on the success of his long and excellent graphic novel BLANKETS, so he was seen as something of a get here, though he was far removed from a regular Marvel artist too. Sturm worked the true life biography angle so well in this project that many readers bought it completely. When he made reference to two more fictitious chapters of his research, fans asked for years when those would be coming out, not realizing that they were only there for verisimilitude. As I mentioned earlier, the book didn’t sell all that wonderfully, but it wound up winning the Eisner Award in 2004 for Best Limited Series, so it got a bit of a second life as a collected edition. And for the longest time, it was something of a litmus test for me: if somebody told me that they liked UNSTABLE MOLECULES, I knew that they had good taste and were open to a wider variety of material than just meat and potatoes super heroes.

Cripes, Even Yet Another Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

For this next book, we need to jump eleven more years into the future, to March 26, 2014. I’ve said for many years when asked that my favorite thing I’ve worked on among all of the many projects I’ve done has been the Waid/Wieringo run on FANTASTIC FOUR. And that’s still true. But over the past couple of years, I’ve needed to amend that statement to also include the Dan Slott and Mike Wieringo run of SILVER SURFER. Seriously, I loved working on this book, and I’m quite happy that the demand has proven to be high enough that the Omnibus edition containing the entire run was just reissued. Hopefully, this will be just one more time among many. the thing is, this book wasn’t really supposed to exist at all. At the time, Dan was working on AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, which was coming out twice a month, and he was having enough difficulties keeping up with the demands of it. But two things happened that pulled this whole thing together. The first was that Mike Allred, who had been working on FF with Matt Fraction, let me know that he really wanted to so a Silver Surfer project at some point., He even made it a point to sneak the Surfer onto the cover for the final FF issue to underline the point. The second happened not long afterwards, at once of our regular Marvel Editorial Retreats. These were multi-day meetings where the senior editorial staff would gather with a number of key creators to plan out the next however many months of Marvel Comics. Slott would typically call me at home after each day to do a debrief on how the day had gone. At this particular Retreat, there had been a bunch of talk about what to do with the Silver Surfer next. We hadn’t had much luck making him fly as a leading character, and so the conversation, as it sometimes does, turned to the idea of turning him into a villain, making him black-skinned, possibly killing him off. None of the ideas really stuck, but they were all in this dark sort of direction. I can remember Mark Waid turning to me in the midst of this conversation and the both of us agreeing that the way to do the Silver Surfer was the opposite of that. So when Dan called that evening, he too felt that the thinking on the Surfer was wrong—and since it wasn’t a project or a character anybody was attached to, he could feel more comfortable being vocal about his problems with it, since he wouldn’t be crapping on somebody else’s work. And so the conversation naturally wound around to, “Well, what would we do?” And we were very much of an accord. Everybody who talks about this series of SILVER SURFER relates it clearly to DOCTOR WHO (in some cases just saying that it is DOCTOR WHO with the serial numbers shaved off.) And there’s some truth to that, but or influences were a bit broader than that. Speaking for myself, I was more interested in bringing the same ethos that Russell T. Davies had brought to the revival of DOCTOR WHO to the Surfer. That involved grounding the character, making him more vulnerable and more emotional, and making the stories about something other than big cosmic fights. The key was our decision to make SILVER SURFER a relationship book, a romance book, masquerading as a cosmic super hero book. I figured that if we did our job well enough, by the time anybody figured us out, it would be too late and we’d have them hooked. In the end, we crafted Dawn on that phone call (I named her Dawn, and her last name, Greenwood, came from Dan shortly thereafter.) And after about an hour or ninety minutes, I surprised Dan by telling him to write it up. He thought that we’d just been conducting a thought-exercise as a way of unwinding after the pressures of the Retreat, he didn’t think we were building anything seriously. He protested that he didn’t have time to take on another series, but I told him, “You’ll figure it out”, which was code for, “I realize that, but I want to do this and so I don’t care about you sleeping.” I also knew that I had the perfect artist in my back pocket to both hook Dan into actually doing the series—I reached out to Mike about the possibility the next day, to which he was enthusiastic—as well as to sell it to EIC Axel Alonso. Axel had put Allred on X-FORCE back in the day and was a fan of his work, so I knew that would be an easy sell. There were other difficulties and hickups along the way, of course, and I spent a goodly amount of personal coin to protect the series while we were doing it (and even to get it enough issues to reach our finale—we had the ending worked out at least in sketch form by the end of that initial conversation, as well as the other two of our big three tentpole stories.) But there will be time to get into those as future issues turn up. For now, all I can say is that this project sits in rarified air for me, and I’m very happy with the final end product that we achieved. And we won another Eisner Award, this time for Best Single Issue for #11 in 2015. So that doesn’t stink.

Monofocus

Don’t really have much all new to report here, and I’ve gone so long in the other sections that I’m mostly going to skip it for this week. But I did want to mention a moment on the latest episode of QUANTUM LEAP that got me momentarily excited, even if it didn’t and likely won’t pay off in quite the way I had initially thought. For those unfamiliar, the current series is a sequel to the original 1980s QUANTUM LEAP and often references its characters and situations. And the big mystery that’s running through this first season involves the Quantum Leap team trying to figure out exactly why lead character Ben Song used the Quantum Accelerator and leapt into time in the first place. This latest episode involved a moment where Ben and company may have to deliberately break their latest leap, not accomplish the goal that will propel Ben onwards, in order to stymie their opposition, a separate leaper who seems nefarious to them. At once point, in researching the files of the original project, the team comes upon references to the Evil Leapers, antagonists who had been introduced in the final season of the original show, who were using a similar set-up to the good guys to make things go wrong that once went well. And at that moment, I had a brainstorm: what if this new Quantum Leap project ARE the evil leapers? What if it’s their project that spawned those guys all those years ago. (The original Evil Leaper storyline never quite wrapped up satisfactorily, as the show ended before that could happen.) It was a deep cut idea, and like I said, it doesn’t seem like that’s where they’re going with things. But the idea gave me a momentary jolt of adrenaline.

Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about the first Silver Age Marvel Super Hero

And five years ago, I wrote about this issue of SUPER-TEAM FAMILY teaming up Supergirl and the Flash and beginning the “Atom’s Quest” storyline.

We’re at the bell, and I think this is one of the longest Newsletters I’ve yet done,. Which is appropriate, since this it marks one full year that I’ve been doing these things. So as something of a relatively-worthless thank you, I mentioned a sort of giveaway last time, didn’t I?

What you see above is an old Marvel business card, of the sort every editor once got a supply of. In my case, I was given a box of such cards when I became an Assistant Editor back in 1989. I wound up having very little use for them, and so when I got promoted to Managing Editor, I never bothered to have them updated to reflect my new title. The same was true when I was promoted to full Editor a few years later. But thereafter, when I became a Senior Editor, somebody acted on my behalf and had a box of these beauties printed up. Unfortunately, not long after I was given them, I got promoted to Executive Editor, which made them once again unusable. And so this box of cards has sat pretty much untouched in my desk drawer for something like 25 years. So I’m making an offer here to all of our current subscribers. If you’d like one of these little beauties to call your very own, all you’ll need to do is to send me a self-addressed stamped envelope, and I’ll shoot one back to you. Heck, I’ll even sign it if you want me to. For the address where to send, you can zip me an email to kitchent@aol.com with the subject TOM’S CARD and I’ll reply with the details.

Apart from that, thanks for being there, and I’ll have more idiotic ramblings for you in a week!

Tom B