#53: Undeclared

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Hello, everyone! Welcome to the beginning of year two! As we start off with things this week, I feel the need to address, however unsatisfyingly, the elephant in the room. Some of you have had questions, in certain cases rather pointed ones, about what is going on with Marvel at the moment. However, as I’m sure you can understand, it’s not for me to be making any announcements or any statements about any of these issues, and so these are questions that I’ll need to take a pass on answering for the time being—as much because I don’t necessarily know the answers yet myself. Who knows, if this Newsletter lasts long enough, then maybe you’ll be able to get the full story out of me in a decade or two, all right? But for right now, there isn’t really anything that I can tell you.

So instead, let’s dive right into the rest of your questions and comments, as you had a number of them and a couple may require some lengthy answers. To start with, writer Kurt Busiek wrote to correct my mistake last week concerning a Stan Lee biography:

TRUE BELIEVER is the Abraham Riesman book. I only made it about halfway through, because it’s so grindingly negative — but it’s still waiting on my Kindle for the day I gather enough strength to get through the back half.

The Spurgeon book is STAN LEE AND THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN COMIC BOOK.

Kurt is, as always correct. And I would have echoed his sentiment as regards Abraham Riesman’s book TRUE BELIEVER. It’s well-researched, but it wears its position on its subject matter, its slant, on its sleeve, and that can be off-putting to those of us who had firsthand interactions with Stan over the years. While the man was hardly a saint, neither was he the scheming villain that Riesman’s book obsessively paints him out to be. Seriously, in these pages, Stan Lee never simply ate a sandwich, he inevitably ate a sandwich evilly, or with malice, or because it really was somebody else’s sandwich that he had made off with. As Tom Baker one said, “The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don’t alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views.” So as these things go, there are certainly readers who love the book to death, and who praise its excoriation of its subject matter, but I am not one of them, and I can’t really recommend it to anybody.

JV

You mention how you like obscure golden age characters - did you have a hand in bringing back or referencing some classics like the Hurricane (who turned out to be Makkari in a cool tie in) in the Marvel Age series by Roger Stern? Or the 1950 avengers/Agents of Atlas?

Or the John Steel character that Ed Brubaker brought back in Secret Avengers (did not know he was an existing character until later which was cool)?

Or even the recent Black Mask character that Al Ewing brought back in Marvel 1000 and the Defenders mini? Al Ewing did a great job of referencing Marvel Comics issue 1 and bringing in some stories into the modern era.

Stuff like this adds so much cool texture to the Marvel Universe. Lots of fun!

I was involved with a few of these, JV, including Roger’s MARVEL UNIVERSE story, Ed’s John Steele resurrection and Al’s Masked Raider reinterpretation. I also worked alongside previous letter writer Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco to bring back the Avengers of the 1950s in AVENGERS FOREVER before wiping them from the pages of history, though I wasn’t involved in any meaningful way with Jeff Parker’s later AGENTS OF ATLAS revival of them. So, yeah, as you can see, I do like the characters of the Golden Age, although those fields in terms of the Timely books of the 1940s have been pretty thoroughly plowed at this point. There’s very little left to bring back or play with.

I recently read some essentials of Marvel two in one and was wondering your thoughts on why the Thing is no longer as popular as he was in the 60s and 70s? He seemed along with Spidey to be the Marvel icon across comics and cartoons.

My own half baked theory is that he represents a boomer era archetype (the tough guy, WW2 vet, cigar chomping, big hearted, etc guy (Ala Jack Kirby) that we just don't see that much of anymore.

Your thoughts?

Somebody gave a good answer to this in response to your comment, JV, which I’m mostly going to echo. I tend to think that the diminishment of the Thing’s popularity came down to two things, with there being a third factor that probably doesn’t get taken into account enough. First off, when he was introduced, the Thing was among the more dangerous characters in mainstream comics—and by dangerous, I mean that he was unpredictable and violent, that the readers were never quite sure whether he was going to go to far or turn destructive. He had an edge to him, even in the 1960s when the Comics Code kept things from going too far. But by the time the 1980s had rolled around, the Thing had been surpassed in this regard by a wave of new characters who were even more unpredictable and more violent than he was—characters such as the Punisher and Wolverine. That might not have done the trick all by itself, but during SECRET WARS and its aftermath, FANTASTIC FOUR writer/artist John Byrne made a decision that wound up having longer term consequences than he could have thought. Along with Editor in Chief Jim Shooter, Byrne chose to have the Thing remain on the Beyonder’s manufactured Battleworld for a solid year after his fellow heroes returned to Earth. His place in the Fantastic Four was taken up by the She-Hulk, in a move that was mystifying to we readers at the time it happened. (It was really Byrne, following Roger Stern’s lead, who turned She-Hulk into a popular character with fans—before that, she’d been seen largely as a colorless money-grab/copyright protection ploy.) So for a year, the Thing’s adventures took place on an alien world far removed from the concerns of the average reader. And even once that storyline had run its course, Ben didn’t return to the FF upon his return to Earth, but instead struck off on his own. I think what this did in the opinions of some fans was to make him expendable and unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Certainly FANTASTIC FOUR didn’t seem to be suffering from his absence. And once he returned to the team and the book a few years later, the damage had largely been done. The other thing that I think impacted on the character’s popularity, honestly, was the move from the Newsstand into the Direct Market. Like INCREDIBLE HULK, which always carried strong sales in Newsstand outlets, the Thing’s headlined title MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE performed well there as well, and I think for the same reason. Both the Hulk and the Thing were ultimately simple, destructive characters who tended to be featured in a lot of one- and two-part stories, stories that it was easy for casual readers to drop into and be entertained by. Their stories also leaned more heavily on spectacular action rather than intricate plotting—both characters liked to fight and did a lot of it. As the Direct Market became more and more important, the more simplistic stories that the Hulk and the Thing had been appearing in began to fall out of favor with the more hardcore fan audience, who wanted more substantive fare. So all of this put together resulted in a loss of popularity for the Thing that he’s never really recovered from. (The Hulk survived this after a couple of brutal years once Peter David came on board and transitioned him into a more erudite and interesting incarnation.)

Michael Perlman

Speaking of Silver Surfer - do you have any interesting background on Donny Cates/Tradd Moore SILVER SURFER BLACK? This is another favorite of mine. I was the first to ever have Tradd draw Silver Surfer. It was a commission at Heroes Con in 2016. I would share it here but I cannot add images to Comments.

I didn’t work on that series, Michael, so I don’t really have any insight into it that I can share with you, apart from the fact that it was pretty cool. I do remember there being a bit of panic when Tradd’s initial pages came in, as some folks in editorial were concerned by how weird they were—Marvel sometimes has a narrow viewpoint on what is commercial. In the end, though, it all worked out and Tradd’s work proved itself through sales to the readers. The one thing that I do remember is Donny laying out his storyline in one of our Editorial Retreats, detailing how the Surfer was going to journey back to the dawn of time and live through the universe again, and Dan Slott being concerned and upset that Donny wasn’t going to acknowledge the fact that the character had just previously done that at the end of Dan and Mike Allred’s run of SILVER SURFER some time before. I told him that it was fine, that our story was finished and that it really didn’t matter—but that didn’t stop him from feeling slighted by the whole situation.

Jess Nevins

With the proviso that everyone's definitions of these are different, what are your definitions of the Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age, and any other ages of comics? I ask because putting Marvel Boy into the Silver Age surprised me.

You needn’t worry too much about this, Jess, I only really used that headline because the week prior I had featured Captain Comet as the first DC Silver Age hero, and had realized that Marvel Boy was something of a Marvel equivalent to the character. But Captain Comet presages far more of the approach that would be used in the Silver Age than Marvel Boy does. Either way, I tend to use the terms for the different ages casually to begin with, as most of the transitions didn’t happen overnight but rather gradually. So there are going to be periods and books that don’t comfortably fit into one classification or another. it still throws me to this day to see people refer to the comics published in the first half of the 1980s (pretty much up to CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS) as being Bronze Age books, as even then we recognized the Bronze Age as being largely confined to the 1970s. But these terms tend to shift and adapt over time.

Mike Novello

Loving the shoutouts to Annalise Bissa's dad made me wonder how you think you've grown as a mentor and supervisor over time. Are there skills you've worked most on? Things that are hardest?

It seems like a tough industry to guide new staff through, and like you say here, "every decade you might choose to be at a company like Marvel has its own challenges and difficulties." You've already touched on pieces of this: what rules you teach new editors, what you watch out for in their work, how past bosses impacted you, when you keep people at a distance, etc. I'm just wondering about the experience more broadly over a long career. From what we hear publicly from you and others, you seem like a great manager. Clearly set expectations, limited but genuine praise, and a cordial but professional workplace all sound better than the "Michael Scott bosses" of the world.

Well, I think you’d really have to ask all of the assorted junior editors who’ve worked under me, Michael—and even then, you’d be likely to get a range of responses based on each one’s individual experiences. I don’t know that I’ve been particularly skilled in these efforts over the years, it’s just something that sort of happens in the push to get the material completed and the work done. I maybe try to be forthcoming with the lessons I’ve learned through experience, the wisdom that was imparted to me by creators and editors who are no longer with the organization, so that it will live on and continue to be of value. But apart from that, it’s really not for me to say.

Nicholas Hall

I don't know about other readers Tom, but I can tell you I didn't buy ALL-OUT AVENGERS and I'm not buying AVENGERS BEYOND mainly because I just can't stand Greg Land's art. They only times I've bought books he's worked on is when I really liked the writers already, and I'm just not that familiar with Derek Landy's work.

That’s perfectly fine, Nicholas. I’m a big believer in the notion that everybody should buy what they like, and the converse is also true. So if Greg’s artwork doesn’t do it for you, that’s a completely legitimate reason to give the book a pass. Just ignore my tears.

Devin Whitlock

With all the talk about memoirs and histories, have you ever thought about writing your own? Do you see this newsletter and your blog as a long-form version of that?

Sort of, maybe? In doing this Newsletter each week, what I realized at a certain point was that it wound up being something of a diary, a record of what was on my mind each given week. I don’t know that I have any sort of organized memoir in me—I remember a whole lot of scattered things about a whole lot of events, but I have forgotten more than I’ve retained. There was a point when I had been thinking about writing a book on the entirety of the Silver Age of Comics, but that was before TwoMorrows released their AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES volumes dedicated to the 1960s, which did the job probably better than I would have. So the need simply wasn’t there any longer. For those who are interested, the two 1960s volumes can be ordered direct from TwoMorrows here and here.

Dewey

Here's a question you probably can't answer. I'm about as big a fan of John Romita, Jr. as you're likely to meet. He's has at least one memorable run on pretty much every major Marvel property... Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, Daredevil, Thor, Hulk, Wolverine, Black Panther, Avengers, Captain America and more besides... Except Fantastic Four. I know he did "The Last Fantastic Four Story" and that recent anniversary issue, but I mean a proper run. I don't know how he feels about it, but I've always thought it would be cool if he could complete the collection, so to speak. What do you think are the odds of John getting a year on FF sometime?

I think it probably gets less and less likely as time goes on, Dewey. I would certainly love to see John do an extended FANTASTIC FOUR run—I was able to get him on the recent 60th Anniversary issue, #35, and on that LAST FANTASTIC FOUR STORY project years earlier. But the timing has never quite worked out for him to take on the series on a regular basis. It still isn’t impossible, but as John has been doing this for a very long time, I tend to think he’s got to be nearing the end of the time when he’ll want to work as hard and as steadily as you need to in order to be the regular artist on a monthly title. And he’s already scratched that itch for himself at least a little bit with those previously mentioned projects.

ZC

Here’s my question: is there any beloved comic character who you just don’t get the appeal of?

Or, maybe a slightly more positive alternative: is there any memorable moment where you finally *did* get the appeal of a beloved character?

I’m sure that there are plenty, ZC. For example, even though I edited the series for several years during the 1990s, I can’t say that I ever felt any particular connection to Eddie Brock. He always seemed less a character to me than a collection of shticks. But that changed once Donny Cates came to write VENOM and he delved more deeply into what made Brock tick. Which just shows you what a good creative team can do with the right character. Similarly, ever since Harley Quinn was redesigned for the New 52 era of DC, I’ve had a hard time tolerating the character—the look just strikes me as skeevy in some way. And that’s kept me from watching her animated series despite plenty of folks telling me how good its been.

Mortimer Q. Forbush

To the extent you are comfortable sharing, I'm curious about your impression of the various EIC tenures you've experienced (or of prior EIC's that you've read/learned enough about to comment on).

I'm sure everyone to hold that position has had their own philosophy, set of strengths and weaknesses, and very specific market challenges that were facing the company/industry when they just happened to be in the chair.

More broadly, are there a set of aptitudes you have noticed tend to contribute to better comics, regardless of any individual EIC?

This seems like one of the potentially longer answers, Mortimer. So let’s get right into it. Let me first begin by saying that pretty much nobody gets to the position of being Editor in Chief without a whole bunch of established skills and experience in the field. So every EIC that I’ve worked under has been strong in this area to varying degrees.

Tom DeFalco was the EIC I came into the business under, and consequently, he was perhaps more intimidating to me in that role than he may have been to others. I got to know Tom better once he was outside of that job, when we worked on series such as GREEN GOBLIN and SPIDER-GIRL together, and he’s always been a source of good advice and general support. At the time he came in as EIC, he was seen as a stabilizing force—the editorial staff was still reeling from the chaotic and terrifying final days of Jim Shooter’s era. Tom, though, was a familiar face, somebody who’d come up through the ranks alongside most of the key editors of that period, and so he was a known quantity. He tended to have a preference for the early, formative Marvel books, and even though he would never express it this way, those where the kinds of comics that he tried to emulate. His own work makes that abundantly clear. While he was EIC, Tom espoused a variety of different ideas about what the best way to put together comics might be, including some that I scoffed at, as did a number of the other young editors at that time. I felt like he was out of touch, not tuned in to the changes that the field had been going through since the mid-1980s and the advent of the British talent invasion and the overall move towards more adult material in the marketplace. But now having lived through more and gained more life experience, I find that I agree with him on many of those things, and I struggle to hand down their value to the newer crop of Marvel editors.

I had a unique relationship with Bob Budiansky, who was the EIC of the Spider-Man division of Marvel during that strange year when editorial was divided up into five separate fiefdoms. Bob was the person who hired me after my internship, and who taught me an awful lot of the block-and-tackle of making Marvel comics. Bob was also the only one of the five EICs of that era to accomplish the fiscal goals that had been set out for each EIC—and then he was unjustly laid off despite that, because leadership had changed. And it must be said that he got to his goal by strip-mining absolutely everything story-wise in regards to Spider-Man in a way that probably was not healthy for the line had it continued to go on that way. But the point is that he was given a mission, and he carried out that mission, no matter what he had to do to get there.

Bob Harras was a really terrific line editor when he was running just the X-MEN titles. He had a great eye for talent, and he knew exactly what he wanted those books to be like, what he felt worked and made the characters connect with the audience. He also became EIC during the most tumultuous time in the company’s history, a period in which we would literally have a new Marvel president seemingly every week, with new goals and directives to be carried out, complete whiplash reversals of direction to be dealt with. All during that period, he kept Marvel profitable and strong, which is something that I don’t think he gets enough credit for. Bob was also conflict-averse, which wasn’t a great trait in an EIC, and that would occasionally cause him to act unilaterally when a particular editor happened to be out of the office. I learned that it was always dangerous to take time off, because in my absence, Bob may have decided to change my books all around, knowing that he could make it all fait accompli by the time I returned. But for all of that, I largely got along with Bob fine.

When it comes to Joe Quesada, there are really almost two different Joes, two separate periods during his long tenure. The first Joe was the rebel, the outsider, the rock and roll bad boy given the keys to the kingdom who had no real idea of what would and would not work, and who wouldn’t have been swayed if people told him anyway. This Joe was the early, fearless Quesada of the beginning of his tenure, where he’d try all sorts of crazy things, bring all sorts of assorted talents on board to to Marvel projects. He also had about as good a set of innate instincts as to what a mainstream Marvel reader was going to respond to as anybody that I’ve ever seen. Over time, Joe settled into his role a little bit more, learned the lessons of projects that didn’t work and refined his approach. The more mature Joe was still incredibly market-savvy, but he was a hair more cautious in his decision-making. He’d become more of an adult, wiser. I used to joke that if you introduced the Joe of his first day as EIC to the Joe of his last day, the two would hate one another and fight incessantly. That’s an exaggeration, but only a slight one.

Like Bob Harras, Axel Alonso’s real great skill was in putting together stories and comics. He was a terrific line editor with a strong sense of what he was looking for, an almost grindhouse theater sensibility. As EIC, he had to follow in Joe’s large shadow, and while he wasn’t quite as plugged into mainstream sensibilities as Joe had been, he made up for that by expanding the diversity of what Marvel was publishing, both in terms of the titles and the people behind them. Rather than blockbusters, Axel tended to produce a lot of artistic boutique books that did better than anybody expected. As much as anything, the Matt Fraction/David Aja HAWKEYE series was emblematic of his tenure, a book that was slightly off the beaten track that took people by surprise. Axel’s big difficulty as EIC was that the EIC doesn’t get to edit any books, and so sometimes he could take too strong a hand on a project ostensibly being edited by some other editor. During his time, one of the duties given to me was to watch over Axel and keep him from editing books, and to ring the bell if I thought he was going too far in this regard. Which didn’t happen all that often, but Axel was a thoroughbred trained to run, and so he’d occasionally strain against the limitations of the position. I expect that his current duties at AWA are a better fit for him.

Current EIC C.B. Cebulski doesn’t have that particular problem, he’s very much not looking to edit anybody else’s comics. Coming from a talent relations background, C.B. has a strong eye for talent and for casting—putting the right creator on the right assignment. He’s also the only EIC in my time with the company who regularly, weekly, still goes to the comic shop to buy new books and to chat with the staff there. C.B. is also more international in his thinking than any prior EIC, a result no doubt of all of the travel he’s done in his lifetime. But it’s a real strength at a time when Marvel has exploded on the global stage thanks to the long reach of the films, and so C.B. tends to both recruit talent from all around the globe and to be at the forefront of the company’s publishing moves into new markets and new formats.

Matt Strawbridge

“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.)”

Hell’s bells! You can’t just drop a beautiful “coulda been” like that and not give more details, sir! That’s like teasing unreleased Beatles album between “Sgt. Pepper…” and “The White Album”!

There isn’t all that much to tell, Matt, given that this was a project that never quite happened. At that time, when Mark had begun working on FANTASTIC FOUR, we had started to throw ideas around for a pre-history exploration of the characters and the group, which we were calling FOURIGIN after the popular Wolverine origin series. And we had a bunch of good stuff worked out for it: Sue being wooed by Victor Von Doom when he and Reed and Ben were in college, Reed attempting to solve the “love equation”, Reed and Ben’s time in military service in Sin-Cong, and so forth. We had spoken about George Perez drawing the project, and I had had at least one preliminary conversation with George about it. But the sales on UNSTABLE MOLECULES caused the powers-that-be to not want to greenlight another series about these super heroes before they became super heroes, and George wound up signing with DC to finish his NEW TEEN TITANS: GAMES graphic novel instead. So it goes.

Clive Reston

Your two-part post on "The Narrative Techniques of Jack Kirby" from a few years back ( https://tombrevoort.com/2019/06/01/lee-kirby-the-narrative-techniques-of-jack-kirby/ and https://tombrevoort.com/2019/06/15/lee-kirby-the-narrative-techniques-of-jack-kirby-2/ ) is really illuminating, especially alongside Jim Shooter's analysis of the same story (http://storytelling.jimshooter.com/strange-tales/). Is there a contemporary artist or two who also has particularly interesting narrative techniques that you might enjoy discussing in a similar way? (I realize that this is less a question than a suggestion for a future post or newsletter!)

I don’t know that any examination of storytelling techniques is something that would really fit into the format of this Newsletter—it would take up a lot of space, between the visuals and the analysis. And I don’t know that I have a specific artist that I would target for such a treatment—though the earlier-mentioned John Romita Jr. would be a good subject.

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Behind the Curtain

Here’s another lost cover from days gone by, this one a beautiful piece done by Andy Kubert back when he was drawing THOR for me.

It seems strange to me looking at this piece now that we never used it anywhere, as apart from that fallen dinosaur in the background, it’s not at all story-specific. But then I remember that shortly after Andy departed the series, we changed Thor’s costume in making him Lord of Asgard, and so perhaps that’s why this piece stayed in inventory for so long. But it’s great, evidencing the power of Andy’s compositions and the sort of stylization he uses to such great effect. Andy was a completely different artist from John Romita Jr, who had been his predecessor on THOR, but they both have an underlying similarity in terms of the way they exaggerate the form for heroic effect and the manner in which their work radiates barely-contained power. It was a real shame to lose Andy to DC for so long, though he did some excellent work over there as well. It’s also interesting to me how, like his brother Adam, Andy has integrated his father Joe Kubert’s line-style into his work, but adapted it to make it his own. All three Kuberts ultimately draw very differently, but there is a commonality of line, of the way they spot blacks and use shadows for effect, that I find interesting.

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Pimp My Wednesday

Both of my titles are throwback series this week, something for me to stay aware of. You always want to be pushing things forward and not simply rehashing the past.

AVENGERS: WAR ACROSS TIME is the penultimate issue of this celebration of the early Avengers by DC mainstay Paul Levitz and artist Alan Davis. And it’s a pretty good evocation of the earliest Avengers stories that Paul is such a big fan of. It’s been a little bit weird to work with Paul on this, mainly because in terms of tenure, he’s to me what I am to the rest of Marvel editorial—he’s been in the business practically since I started reading comics, albeit playing for the other club. It probably helped that we paired him up with Alan, who is so comfortable making the classic Marvel characters look as they should.

I AM IRON MAN #2 is also set in the past, but its approach is decidedly unique. Creators Murewa Ayodele and Dotun Akande have a very individual sense of story, and nowhere is that more apparent than here, in this issue. It’s definitely an Iron Man story that nobody has ever read before, and it takes place in the classic 1970s period with what I think of as Iron Man’s “lunchbox era” armor. There are also two big fish in it.

Also out of my office, Assistant Editor Martin Biro presents the efforts of Stephanie Phillips and Juann Cabal on the second issue of their COSMIC GHOST RIDER series, featuring not merely one Cosmic Ghost Rider, but two. And if that wasn’t enough, it also showcases a guest appearance from obscure Marvel character from the 1970s, Monark Starstalker!

And in AVENGERS UNLIMITED, Eve L Ewing and Luciano Vecchio continue their four-part unlikely team-up between Namor the Sub-Mariner and the wonderful Wasp, under the guidance of Associate Editor Annalise Bissa.

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A Comic Book On Sale 90 Years Ago Today, April 2, 1933

Well, April 1, 1933, at least as far as the Library of Congress is concerned. But this is a significant enough book that I decided to bend the rules and the dates a little bit in order to feature it here. And the reason is this: FUNNIES OF PARADE #1 was the very first standard format comic book ever put together. Prior to this, there’d been an assortment of earlier comics in various shapes and sizes, almost all of which were devoted to reprinting old newspaper comics, often as a promotional giveaway. FUNNIES ON PARADE did this as well, but it did it in the format that would become standard for the industry moving forward. Apart from that, it contains an eclectic assortment of strips pulled from earlier Newspaper printings, sort of like getting a Sunday comics section in a slightly more permanent package. Among the features that were included in FUNNIES ON PARADE were Joe Palooka, Reg’lar Fellas, Keeping Up With The Joneses, Cicero, Mutt and Jeff, Hairbreadth Harry, The Bungle Family, Nipper and Holly of Hollywood, most of which have been largely forgotten today. To be honest, the package seems a bit haphazard to me, especially when it comes to the more continuity-minded strips such as Joe Palooka, where you were only getting a random page. The comedy strips fared better, as their punch lines still mostly worked even when divorced from context and the continuity of knowing the characters from reading about them week after week. It was the popularity of giveaway books such as this one that inspired editor Max C. Gaines to experiment by affixing ten cent stickers to the covers of a few issues and leaving them at a local newsstand overnight. When it turned out that they had all sold before Gaines could return, he realized that comics didn’t have to be a giveaway at all, but rather could be a regularly-released product. This was the beginning of regular comic book publishing, and it all leads back ninety years to this book.

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A Comic Book On Sale 55 Years Ago Today, April 2, 1968

Look at that cover! That color work in particular communicates exactly when this book was published, in the psychedelic ‘60s. We’ve spoken previously about how DC had begun to experiment with its content and visuals to stave off competition from the growing threat of Marvel, and this series, SECRET SIX, is another good example of a series that attempted to expand the field a little bit. The creation of writer and DC staff member E. Nelson Bridwell, SECRET SIX wasn’t a super hero book at all, but rather a spy/espionage/adventure series very much in the mold of the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE television show. It involved six talented individuals: boxer Mike Tempest, model Crimson Dawn, stuntman King Savage, physicist August Durant, magician Carlo Di Rienzi, and spa owner Lili De Neuve, each of whom possessed a secret that could destroy their lives being gathered together by a mysterious individual known only as Mockingbird and blackmailed into taking on dangerous missions for him, lest he reveal their secrets to the world. Frank Springer was the artist. SECRET SIX was a very smart, very sharp adventure series, sort of an evolution of series such as CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN or CAVE CARSON or SUICIDE SQUAD, and given a more contemporary flavor and setting. The added wrinkle to the series was that one of the six operatives was actually really Mockingbird, and it became a running game to work out which one that might be. Reportedly, Bridwell didn’t even tell his editor which member of the Six was Mockingbird, though years later writer Marty Pasko revealed that it was Durant who was Mockingbird. Pasko claimed that Bridwell had told him Mockingbird’s identity to him before he passed away, but it’s anybody’s guess how true that is. This particular issue, #2, was only plotted by Bridwell. Charlton mainstay writer Joe Gill provided the dialogue, as he’d continue to do for the remainder of the series in one of his rare instances of working for DC. As was the case for most of the new series that DC put out during this time, SECRET SIX failed to pull in enough of an audience to satisfy new editorial director Carmine Infantino, and so the series was cancelled with issue #7. But this being comics, the characters reappeared along with a successor team of operatives twenty years later in the pages of ACTION COMICS WEEKLY (This is where Pasko unmasked Durant as Mockingbird.). And even later, writer Gail Simone would put together a new team using this old name comprised of DC villains.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

Well, somewhat. SENTINEL was actually put together an edited by my Associate Editor of the time, Marc Sumerak. It was a sort of take on the IRON GIANT set in the Marvel Universe, in which a young boy with an interest in building homemade robots and running them in battlebot-style competitions comes to befriend a malfunctioning Sentinel, the mutant-hunting robots first seen in X-MEN. it debuted as part of the oddball Tsunami launch on April 2, 2003 — Tsunami was intended to be something of a manga-inspired line of books given the rising interest in actual manga as a category, but that designation and approach only came into being after most of the projects were already up and running, which is why diverse series such as RUNAWAYS, HUMAN TORCH and THE CREW were also a part of the launch. SENTINEL was something of a passion project for Sumerak, and he brought in Sean McKeever to write it. Sean had some to our office through Paul Jenkins, I believe, and he wound up writing the final few issues of Paul’s truncated INCREDIBLE HULK run among other things. He had been producing a creator-owned series called THE WAITING PLACE which was entirely devoted to teen drama, so he seemed like a good fit for a series intended to have not a whole lot of actual super hero content in it apart from the titular robot. The artwork was produced by Erik Ko’s UDON STUDIOS, in particular Eric Vedder, Joe Vriens and Scott Hepburn at the start. SENTINEL became a bit of a favorite within the Marvel walls for a short period of time—at a certain point, Bill Jemas attempted to turn the third season of the X-MEN EVOLUTION cartoon, which he hated, into an adaptation of SENTINEL. The book ran for a dozen issues, then came back a short while later for another five. And that was all she wrote for SENTINEL. Around that time, Marc Sumerak left staff to pursue writing on his own. And is often the fate of characters who slip into the limbo of non-publication, Justin Seyfert and his Sentinel later came back in AVENGERS ARENA, where they were both killed off horribly.

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A Comic I Actually Worked On That Came Out On This Date

With the Disney+ series of the same name in the offing, I could scarcely let this one go by. The first issue of SECRET INVASION by Brian Michael Bendis and Leinil Yu came out on April 2, 2008 and was that year’s big Event series for the Marvel Universe. But it really wasn’t meant to be. You see, Brian had secretly been setting up the Skrull invasion in-between the cracks of his run on NEW AVENGERS for several months, unbeknownst to anybody, including me. He knew that the Spider-Woman who had joined the New Avengers was a Skrull the entire time. As we neared that year’s Editorial Summit, Brian realized that he had to come clean with me about his plans, so he called me up and walked me through both what he had already covertly done and what his overall gameplan for the storyline was. And he stressed that, having done HOUSE OF M a year or two earlier, he wanted to keep the Secret Invasion storyline to just his two AVENGERS titles, rather than blowing it out across the line. I told him that I would support him in this effort. So the day of the retreat came, everybody assembled in a conference room to work through the year’s storylines, and eventually the conversation shifted to AVENGERS and what Brian had planned there. And Bendis ran everybody through this story that he was building. At a key moment, I remember that Joe Quesada had stepped away to either take a call or refresh himself in the restroom, so he was absent for what happened next. At a certain point as the conversation went on, publisher Dan Buckley declared that what Brian was talking about wasn’t simply an Avengers story, it was clearly the next big Event series that we had to do. And in an instant I weighed the table and the situation, and then I agreed with Dan, knowing that there was no point in fighting him over this. I’ve chuckled about this occasionally since, but this was a pretty crappy thing to do to Brian, for all that it worked out all right in the long run. I can console myself with the knowledge that, even if I had fought with all my might in that moment, the outcome would have been exactly the same. All the same, I probably should have at least put up some token resistance to support my writer.

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Monofocus

Not much to report on the television streaming side, I’ve still been enjoying most of the same stuff. I do intend to sample Apple TV+’s new drama-documentary TETRIS once I’ve got this week’s newsletter all polished up, so we’ll se how that all goes.

In terms of print, I spent this after noon reading through a very comprehensive book about what was perhaps Marvel’s most destructive promotional gimmick, MARVEL VALUE STAMPS: A VISUAL HISTORY. Those who were around in the 1970s well remember the Marvel Value Stamps that were included for several months on each letters page, with instructions to clip and save them, and redeem the full set for fabulous prizes. Who among us hasn’t opened a back issue from that period that is pristine in every other respect but which has its Value Stamp clipped out of it, thus forever diminishing its value, ironically. More copies of INCREDIBLE HULK #181 featuring the first full appearance of Wolverine seem to have met this tragic fate than anything else. anyway, this new book from Abrams showcases both series of Value Stamps, as well as the prototype set that ran in the United Kingdom’s Marvel Weeklies. It also sources all of the art used in the sets and reproduces the album booklets and the associated advertising. Roy Thomas provides an insider’s history of the entire initiative. it’s probably more information than anybody actually needs about the Marvel Value Stamps, but it makes for a fun tome. If you’re intrigued, copies of the book can be ordered here.

Posted at TomBrevoort.com

This week, I took a look at Fantagraphics’ FOCUS ON GEORGE PEREZ, in particular a long interview with George.

And five years ago, I wrote about this absolutely astonishing issue featuring the untold origin of the JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA and guest-starring just about every super-heroic character DC had title to in the late 1950s.

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Just a quick reminder that I still have plenty of worthless old business cards if anybody wants one. All you need to do is drop me a line at kitchent@aol.com with the subject Tom’s Card and I’ll shoot you back instructions for where you can send me a S.A.S.E. to get one. In the meanwhile, stay safe, stay healthy, and we’ll all meet back here in a week’s time.

Tom B