#56: Let The Dead Be
Slash Your Tears Away!
Somebody did a thing that pushes my buttons again today, and that means that you fine people get to hear the brunt of it. There are probably more things that do this than I’d like to admit, but one that will raise my ire every single time is when some know-nothing idiot invokes the names of the dead to bolster whatever opinion about whatever it is that they don’t like about modern comic books they happen to be putting forward. I think it’s perfectly fine to have any take on any of this stuff that you want to, but I also find it disrespectful in the extreme to ascribe those same feelings to the dead, to those who cannot speak for themselves—and some of whom were people I knew and friends of mine. And I tell you, most of those people don’t relate to this medium and this industry in any way the way that you do. (I’ll give you one for free: if asked virtually any question about the state of the industry, or of storytelling, or of the types of super hero stories being produced, or whatever, John Buscema’s reply was likely to have been, “Why should I give a f@#$?” These people are not in your corner simply because they did things a certain way in their time and things may be done a different way today.) So if you ever find yourself wanting to punctuate your argument with., “Classic creator is rolling over in his grave!”, stop and take a step back. You don’t know that—that’s just you trying to prop up your opinion by tacitly having it endorsed by people you’re thinking of only as names in a credit box rather than flesh-and-blood individuals. Don’t try to put words in the mouths of the dead. It’s weak, and it’s disrespectful. Cut it out. Let the dead be—speak up for your own opinions.
Anyway, on to more pleasant things before we head into the Q & A round:
The postcard above was sent to me this past week by Rainbow Rowell, who came across it in her travels. And to be honest, it was a little bit of a revelation. I knew that there were a couple of Brevoort Hotels in New York dating back decades, but I had no idea that there was also one in Chicago. Nice looking place, based on these images. Don’t know that it’s still there today, but it’s something I’ll need to check out the next time I’m in town for C2E2 or whatever.
Okay, questions!
Clive Reston
As I understand--and please correct me if I'm wrong--the (really fun) Leah Williams/Marco Castiello Giant-Man miniseries from "War of the Realms" came about because word had come down that Marvel should really publish something called "Giant-Man" to keep its trademark current! Are there some other examples of comics that have worked out nicely whose origin was "we need to publish something with this title"?
There is occasionally a need to publish something in order to maintain a trademark, though these things don’t typically require a full-on limited series such as what you’re speaking of. For example, just the other week, we did a variant cover for I AM IRON MAN #2 that featured War Machine, despite the fact that he doesn’t appear in that issue. And the reason for that was that we needed a cover logo usage of WAR MACHINE to keep things up to date with the Trademark. The same thing is true of an upcoming cover featuring the Great Lakes Avengers. There have ben times when a one-shot or limited series was called for in order to do the same thing, but to be honest, those instances don’t tend to loom large in my memory. Like this Giant-Man example, once the decision is made to go ahead with such a project, the focus changes to making the best and most interesting and hopefully most commercially successful story and project that you can.
Mortimer Q. Forbush
Is there an obstacle to collecting Peter David’s 1980s Spider-Man stories — many of which have never been collected or available on Marvel Unlimited?
I find his writing on those titles to be enduringly emotionally resonant; adept at comedy, tragedy, and everything in between; whose readability remains through the stylistic shifts in storytelling in the intervening years. Whereas most people know of “The Death of Jean DeWolfe” and “The Commuter Cometh,” so many people don’t know about the atypically great writing he gave the Wasp early in his run, the Blaze stories, that outstanding “Point of View” story where Spidey has it out with Jameson, that tragic “Ashcan” story, the entertaining Rashomon “Eye Witness” story, and so many more. I suspect that had all of PAD’s work appeared consecutively in Amazing, he would be regarded as highly among Spidey writers of this era as say, Roger Stern.
Regardless of whether new collections are in the offering or not, PAD fans might want to know he’s had some health scares lately and since he’s at the mercy of the US healthcare system, he could use some help. https://gofund.me/9bb4120f
There isn’t any particular obstacle to collecting any of that SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN work, any more than there is all of the WEB OF SPIDER-MAN issues or the adjectiveless SPIDER-MAN series. But there is only so much classic Spider-Man material that the marketplace can absorb at one time, and most of the really key stories have tended to take place in AMAZING. Which doesn’t mean that we’ll never collect Peter’s SPECTACULAR stories—it simply means that they’re also vying with the Marc DeMatteis SPECTACULAR stories and the Mantlo SPECTACULAR stories and the Conway SPECTACULAR stories and so forth.
Ray Cornwall
I'm having a Mandela Effect moment. I swore I thought DC ended up printing a trade paperback of the Cancelled Comic Cavalcade books sometime in the last 20 years. Apparently, I'm wrong, unless someone knows something.
Would there be anything other than market demand that would keep DC from printing a collection of these stories? I realize the market wouldn't be huge despite the inclusion of top talent- Ditko, Kirby, Jim Aparo, Starlin, etc- but they could probably get enough orders in the Direct Market to justify the work, couldn't they? I'm assuming everyone got paid in the 70s and DC has the legal rights to publish the material. Just curious.
While DC has reprinted individual stories that had only previously seen print in CANCELLED COMIC CAVALCADE in assorted appropriate collections, they’ve never done a full collection dedicated to just those two issues. And I can understand why—there isn’t a whole lot of interest in a lot of those strips in the Direct Market of 2023, as so many of them are genre work. By that same token, DC did somewhat bafflingly put out a hardcover collection of the complete run of FIRST ISSUE SPECIAL, a book that I cannot imagine that there was a whole lot of demand for. So you never know what they might choose to do in the future.
Devin Whitlock
Thanks for another great newsletter! I’ve been curious about this for a while: I know you work very hard to make sure every Event is the best it can be, but is there anything you do to combat “event fatigue” in comics? I hear about that a lot from people who are hesitant to pick up Big Two superhero books and I wonder how that looks from your side. Thanks again for everything!
People have been complaining about “Event Fatigue” for at least the past 15 years, Devin, and I have no doubt that they’re being genuine about it. However, on a few occasions we’ve chosen to go a year without doing any big Event series—and unfailingly, whenever we take that approach, sales decline. So for all that there are seemingly a lot of fans who aren’t interested in Events and who resent their intrusion upon the titles they’re following, there is also apparently a large contingent of readers who are only driven to check titles out when there’s something large and noteworthy taking place within the stories. So it’s a bit of a Catch-22. The reality is, of course, that what everybody wants is a good, high-quality story. So long as you feel as though you can deliver that, an Event isn’t a detriment to sales, if anything it’s a boon to them, at least in aggregate.
Get_It_Away
Tom, was the original plan for Secret Invasion to end with the Skrulls winning and taking over Earth? At the time there was a series of house ads running the "Embrace Change" tag line showing Skrulls and humans together which seem to hint at that.
As Mortimer pointed out to you in the comments, Get, I did address a question very similar to this in a recent Newsletter. But just to reiterate: no, there was neve any plan to have SECRET INVASION end with the Skrulls taking over Earth. The ads in question were meant to be an attention-getting way of reflecting the sort of propaganda that the Skrulls were spreading to the inhabitants of the Marvel Universe starting at the midpoint of that series.
Behind the Curtain
What you see below is the back of a menu from a Marvel talent dinner held in Los Angeles right before the Wizard World LA convention likely around 2005 or so. The menu is only quasi-interesting in and of itself, but the back of this one has a bit of a small story to it.
.At this dinner, I wound up sitting next to J. Michael Straczynski, who was at the time writing FANTASTIC FOUR for me. This was right before CIVIL WAR was about to roll out, and at this particular dinner, Joe Quesada and a few other folks talked about what the story would entail. And at a certain point, after regaling me with stories about meeting Rod Serling at a campus event when he was just starting out, JMS flipped over the menu and jotted down the above story concept, passing it to me to take a look at. It was an idea for the FANTASTIC FOUR CIVIL WAR tie-in story. We wound up doing more than just this idea, since the series ran for so long, but this particular beat was reflected in the stories that Joe wrote for his tie-in issues.
Also, I have no idea what made the Mashed Potatoes in this restaurant Super, or what separated Super Butter from just regular old Butter. Possibly, it was us.
Pimp My Wednesday
Comic books! They’re a-comin’ your way this Wednesday! Would it kill you to buy a few?
The second issue of AVENGERS BEYOND features a star turn for Janet Van Dyne, the Wasp, as well as a guest appearance by Mayor Luke Cage. It’s the work of Derek Landy and Greg Land once again, and moves our ongoing storyline ahead a bit further while simultaneously opening up in the middle of the action and blasting towards the story’s conclusion.
Similarly forward-propulsive is the second issue of CLOBBERIN’ TIME by writer and artist Steve Skroce, in which Ben Grimm is called upon to give a lecture to young mutants living on Krakoa and in typical fashion finds himself embroiled in a particularly gross and gooey mission alongside Wolverine. This cover by Steve gives only a hint at the visual insanity that is contained within this issue.
And Associate Editor Annalise Bissa has the concluding chapter of her MONICA RAMBEAU: PHOTON limited series dropping this Wednesday, in which Monica learns some truths about herself and has to prevent the unraveling of the cosmos all by herself. it’s written by Eve L. Ewing and illustrated by Luca Maresca.
And over on AVENGERS UNLIMITED, a new multi-part storyline begins, this one teaming up Earth’s Mightiest Heroes with the Guardians of the Galaxy just in time for their third film! It’s written by David Pepose and drawn by Ze Carlos and it can be found on the MARVEL UNLIMITED service, formatted for the phone or other screen of your choice.
A Comic Book On Sale 80 Years Ago Today, April 23, 1943
CAPTAIN AMERICA COMICS #27, on sale 80 years ago, isn’t an especially noteworthy issue in the run of this title. Due to shrinking page counts thanks to the rationing of paper during the war effort, this book featured only two Captain America stories: “North of the Border” by Ray Cummings and Syd Shores, which took Cap and Bucky to Quebec, and “Blitzkreig to Berlin” with an unknown writer and pencils by a young Carmine Infantino, in which the Star-Spangled hero and his pal head off to Germany to dance with Der Fuhrer once again, aided by some French undergrounders. They’re both preposterous adventures packed to the brim with action. Sandwiched in between is a Human Torch story, “The Man-Hole of Death” with artwork possibly by Paul Reinman, that sees the Torch and Toro solve the mystery of people disappearing into the sewers. And the book ends with a story of the character Jess Nevins championed, the Secret Stamp, in which Roddy Colt solves a mystery and a murder as drawn by Vince Alascia. In-between, there’s the usual assortment of single page filler gag strips and a text story that virtually nobody read. With Stan Lee in the service by this time, Vince Fago is listed on the masthead as Managing Editor, with Syd Shores credited as Associate Editor. Many of the better cartoonists had already been drafted or were on the verge of being so, which meant that the overall quality of the series began to dip as younger and less experienced hands were called upon to do more and more of the work.
But the reason I chose to spotlight this issue is that its Alex Schomburg cover was the one chosen by artist Steve Epting to form the background to our CAPTAIN AMERICA #14, the issue that brought the initial Winter Soldier storyline to a momentary conclusion. I liked that classic Golden Age logo well enough that, a year or so later, after Steve Rogers had been gunned down and Bucky took over the mantle of Captain America, I brought it back while he was the headline character.
A Comic Book On Sale 55 Years Ago Today, April 23, 1968
By 1968 when this issue of BRAVE AND THE BOLD saw print, the times were changing up at DC/National Comics—but in the case of this particular issue, they were still somewhat stuck in the past, a time of old fashioned ideas and approaches. Following the massive smash of Batmania following the Caped Crusader’s live action television show, he wasn’t entirely ensconced as the permanent star of B&B, but it wouldn’t be long. He was already appearing in its pages more frequently than anybody else, and the writing was on the wall. But it must be said, the stories in BRAVE AND THE BOLD were often a bit weird, a bit off-brand. And that was all down to the sensibilities of two men: editor Murray Boltinoff and writer Bob Haney. While he’s often overlooked today, Boltinoff is highly regarded by the industry people who were around during his tenure. He had an unshakable instinct for what would sell to a casual mainstream audience, such that, no matter what kind of title you might give him to edit, his efforts would almost always be the best-selling ones on the Newsstand. His BRAVE AND THE BOLD was no exception for much of its time, as it routinely outperformed both BATMAN and DETECTIVE COMICS. But while Boltinoff’s books were popular with casual fans, his approach to story and character aggravated more invested hardcore fans. And that’s because he didn’t have any particular truck with continuity. Whatever made for a good story in the moment was all that mattered to him, regardless of whether what was going on was consistent with what had been established about the characters elsewhere. Case in point is this issue, which pairs up the Masked Manhunter with both Wonder Woman and Batgirl, as they attempt to corral the international super-criminal known as Copperhead. But the plot here turns on both Wonder Woman and Batgirl falling hopelessly in love with Batman simultaneously, and in their rivalry for his affections accidentally sabotaging all efforts to bring Copperhead to justice. This all starts out as a ruse to draw Copperhead into the open, but becomes a real problem when the two feminine crime-fighters can’t control their emotions and legitimately fall for the Darknight Detective. It’s the sort of treatment of female characters that would have been right at home on a situation comedy of the 1950s but which was increasingly out of step with the times as Women’s Liberation began to make inroads as a pressing concern. This story was the work of the aforementioned Bob Haney, whose version of Batman in this period was cast in the mold of an international hipster, an Our Man Flint in cape and cowl. It was a very strange, very personal take on the character, one that was seldom reflected anywhere else. His approach to Wonder Woman and Batgirl is to treat them like daffy dames, virtually interchangeable apart from their specific costumes. Haney, like Boltinoff, didn’t care all that much about continuity, and he took extensive liberties in the otherwise well-crafted stories that he routinely pumped out for the series. (Fans began to label these stories as taking place on “Earth-B”, for Boltinoff.) The competent artwork on this issue was produced by Bob Brown, who had delivered a long run on CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN and who would eventually migrate to Marvel for his last couple of years in the field. In a cost-cutting move similar to what Mort Weisinger had begun doing in a few of his books, notably WORLD’S FINEST COMICS, Boltinoff reprinted a twenty year old 3-page story concerning Abraham Lincoln from REAL FACT COMICS in the back of this issue.
A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date
Man, I got in so much hot water for this cover. But I wouldn’t have done it if Mark Waid, Mike Wieringo, Karl Kesel and myself hadn’t all agreed that it was the perfect cover image for this issue, a story that turned on Doctor Doom using Reed and Sue’s newborn child Valeria as his sorcerous familiar. This was the first proper issue of our big Doom storyline that was leading up to issue #500 in a couple of months. And i really must have loved playing with fire. You see, a couple of months before this, unhappy with the look of our covers, which he described derisively often as seeming like a “group grope”, Marvel President and Publisher Bill Jemas had handed down his new absolute guidelines for all covers. He wanted covers that looked more like those of magazines, which was fine. But he mandated that all covers should feature no more than a single character, even when it came to team titles. Additionally, wherever possible, that character should probably be a woman, preferable scantily clad—Bill was very into baiting the whole “bad girls” thing at the time. And if the woman could be bending over something, that would be the best of all. And the thing is, this cover met all of his criteria, while at once eviscerating the spirit of what he was asking for. It really is no wonder that he eventually fired Waid, and a positive miracle that he never fired me—a fact that I chalk up to Joe Quesada having my back whenever the situation got tight. That all said, I still think it’s a great freakin’ cover (I finally worked out how to make the new logo I’d commissioned for the series function properly by this issue). And it saw print on April 23, 2003.
Monofocus
Well, as mentioned a week or so back, MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM: THE WITCH FROM MERCURY has come back from hiatus for its second cour, or season. And it’s been a great comeback—the end of the prior set of episodes had ratched up the tension from the seemingly small-scale conflicts of the Asticassia School of technology into something a bit more darker-edged and serious, and even though these return episodes start off back in the relative safety of the School, those elements are still very much in plan, and we’re fully in the ethos of a Gundam series. It also came back with a great new title sequence and song, which you can see for yourself by following this link. Beyond that, most fans were even more impressed by the super-stylish end credits sequence, which are visible at this link. I tend to find most end credits sequences a bit perfunctory, they’re deliberately more introspective and downbeat s a sort of “playing out” action to bring down the tension from the preceding program. But I must admit, this one is pretty sharp.
I also took a dip back into the distant past and started watching JOKING APART, a British comedy series written by a relatively young Steven Moffat and dealing, fictionally, with his own divorce. And it’s definitely a product of its time, with the stylings and flavor of a 1990s British comedy series. Moffat is still finding his voice and his way here—there are occasionally good turns of phrase and clever bits of business, but just as often, the characters are a bit broad and lifeless. It isn’t a great show. But what gives it its added bit of frission is that, at least metaphorically, all of it is true, even the parts that have been fictionalized. As he’d later do with COUPLING, Moffat based his lead character Mark on himself, and he’s pretty merciless in his self-criticism. Later interviews with the cast reveal that occasionally they would even be uncomfortable when realizing that the scenes they were playing out had more or less happened in real life to the person who had written the episode and who was standing right over there, jaw clenched, as they shot it. The fact that it only lasted for two six episode seasons is probably for the best, as it means the buy-in is short enough to carry me through the series, whereas otherwise I might have stopped, my affection for Moffat’s work notwithstanding.
I also found time today to read through the SLEEPER Omnibus, which collects the entirety of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ popular Wildstorm series as well as the POINT BLANK limited series that had provided the foundation for it. I believe that Brubaker and Phillips are likely the most consistent, most diversified creative partnership making comics in the modern era, and this is where it all started. You can see the pair get better and stronger and have more cohesiveness and unity of voice throughout the volume. The story is about Holden Carver, a superhuman in the Wildstorm universe who is inserted undercover into a clandestine criminal organization run by Tao, a character originated by Alan Moore in his run on WILDC.A.T.S. Carver’s mission is to get close to Tao, find out what he’s up to and report back to his handler, John Lynch so that I.O. can bring the whole affair down. But after he’s embedded, Lynch is shot and put into a coma, and nobody else in the world knows that Carver isn’t exactly the criminal he appears to be. So it’s a crime/espionage/super hero story that allows Brubaker in particular to really lean on his noir sensibilities. it’s also a cracking fast, smooth read, as Brubaker and Phillips’ collaborations tend to be, as the copy is kept to a minimum and the art is used to communicate a lot of information about what is going on.
Posted at TomBrevoort.com
This past weekend, I wrote about The First Marvel Resurrection in the pages of X-MEN.
And five years ago, I wrote about first discovering the Charlton super hero characters in the pages of this and other Modern Comics reprints.
And now, the hour is late, so I must bit you all once more adieu. But we will no doubt meet again in one week’s time—so look forward to (or dread) that approaching moment.
Tom B
The John Buscema I heard about wouldn't have used wingdings.
On the First Issue Special front: the premise of Tom King and Jorge Fornes' current Danger Street miniseries is that it involves all the characters who starred in First Issue Special!