#57: Time is a Bastard

The Circle Of Life Never Stops Rolling.

So this week at Reading Circle at Marvel—which is a weekly meeting we have where we read some comic book, old or new, and then analyze, discuss and dissect it—the book of the week was SPIDER-BOY TEAM-UP, one of the second wave of Amalgam titles co-published by Marvel and DC back in 1997. It was selected by another editor rather than me. But I did ask the room a fateful question at the start of the session: how many of the people here weren’t even born when this comic book first saw print? and the answer was, more than a few—and even more were only a couple of years old at the time, certainly too young to have ever bought the book new. Which is a good thing to face every now and again, the way the passage of time makes all nostalgia cyclic. In the 1970s, there was a big wave of nostalgia for the 1950s in films such as AMERICAN GRAFFITI (technically set in 1962) and television shows such as HAPPY DAYS. But an equivalent show produced today would be set in 2003! 9-11 is now older than the nostalgia curve, and if you were one of those people who started reading comics in the 1980s or 1990s (or the 1970s, like me), your nostalgia period might as well be the stone age to the next generation. This is the circle of life. Time is a bastard.

As I’m sure you must know by now—the evidence is all around you and has been so for a year’s worth of Newsletters—I read an unreasonable number of comic books. Some of that’s simply part of the job. Rarely does a day go by in which I don’t read and give feedback on at least two or three comics that are in production, if not more. And that’s not even taking into account reading scripts for upcoming comics, or pitches for upcoming storylines and the like. But even apart from that, I still place an order every week and drop a decent chunk of change on new books and collections and the like. And while I can’t read everything immediately, when it comes to the periodical comics in particular, I do try to stay more or less up to date on things. Now, you might think this would all get tedious given the tremendous amount of material involved. And there can be points where a given comic might become underwhelming or not to my liking. But the whole effort is worth it on those occasions when you discover some great new gem of a series. Something that provides a satisfying hit of dopamine in a way you’ve never quite experienced before, something that makes you sit up and take notice of the creators involved. As much as anything else, those hits are why you continue to read this stuff, looking for another moment when you’ll feel the way you did when you were just a child coming into contact with this medium for the first time. Recreating those moments that made you a fan of these stories and characters in the first place. And there’s plenty out there that can do this. I don’t know that there’s ever been as wide a range of material available to a searching customer before, and so there are always new things to be discovered and embraced. I mean, nobody’s going to point to me as a positive person, but I’m largely sick to death of videos and pieces talking about why somebody doesn’t like some comic or other. It all seems like a lot of misplaced effort spent focusing on something that you don’t care for. I’d rather see more of a pivoting towards the stuff that you like, that you’re excited about. Because there’s stuff out there that would excite you, if you’d give it half a chance.

Got one bit of business to get out of the way before we segue into this week’s questions. Last time, I wrote a bit about how I always dislike it when people attempt to bolster their positions on comic book matters by invoking the past masters who are no longer with us and insisting that they would agree with whatever position is being put forward—most typically put forward as, “Name of Genius must be rolling over in their grave!” I find this disrespectful as a rule. Well, apparently at least a few of you thought that I was talking about a fellow named Bill Field. but I’m here to tell you that this isn’t the case at all—I’m only dimly aware of Bill, and only aware of the connection after he reached out to me, upset, after people had pointed out that piece to him. I guess he’d posted something a day or two beforehand showing how a page from X-MEN #1 is expected to sell at auction for a six-figure sum and expressing how Jack Kirby would likely have felt about that. Now, Bill did use the spinning in the grave analogy, and I don’t like that in principle, but he at least knew Kirby personally. And the stuff that I wrote wasn’t about him in the first place. So this isn’t really an apology per se, but it is a clarification to anybody who may have needled Bill about my column that you’re off-base this time. So if you’ve got either love or beef with Bill, it’s nothing to do with me. Wasn’t about him at all.

Okay, let’s go to the phones!

JV

The mention of the initial Winter Soldier arc as well as Sleeper just reminded me how much I enjoy Ed Brubaker's work. Anything he writes is an automatic buy from me. Love his creator owned work but would also love to see the occasional return to Marvel (even though that is highly unlikely).

Well, you never say never, JV. And Ed and I have discussed a final Winter Soldier idea he has as being something that we might wind up doing at some future point. But Ed’s already phenomenally busy with his television work and his creator-owned projects, so the stars would have to align perfectly for any such thing to happen. But I’d be glad if they did.

JV

Tom - what do you think goes into a successful anniversary issue? I really enjoy the oversize issues with back up stories from past creators (like the recent Cap solicits for issue 750 with stories by JM Dematteis and Dan Jurgens). Do you like for issues like this to look towards some pats creative highs? Do you lobby for certain past creators ? Any examples of great anniversary issues (Cap 600, JLA 200, Detective comics 1000 and 1027 all come to mind) that you really enjoyed?

Well, it depends on the series I think, JV. I’ve just sent FANTASTIC FOUR #700 to print this past month, for example, and like issues #600 and #500 before it, it was entirely written and illustrated by the current creative team. And that feels right to me in this instance, as FF doesn’t feel like a property that particularly lends itself to the multiple short stories approach. By that same token, CAPTAIN AMERICA certainly does, and I put out a few different CAP Anniversary issues (either centennials or actual yearly anniversaries) that ran multiple stories by a variety of hopefully-interesting creators from the past and the present. I don’t think that either approach necessarily fits every circumstance. In general, what I want out of a centennial issue is a story that is just a little bit special, that either kicks off or wraps up some ongoing storylines in a big way, and that celebrates the tenure of the title. I came up as a reader during a time when we got any number of really excellent anniversary issues: ACTION COMICS #500, DETECTIVE COMICS #500, FLASH #300, JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #200, FANTASTIC FOUR #200, AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #200, THOR #300, UNCANNY X-MEN #137 (which was, of all things, the 17th Anniversary issue) and so forth. But especially when I’m jockeying with an anniversary issue that’s going to contain multiple stories by multiple creators, the book I tend to measure my efforts against is SUPERMAN #400, containing an absolutely astounding collection of creators telling stories about how Superman is remembered in the centuries to come. It’s my pick for the single best issue of the title ever produced, and only somebody with editor Julie Schwartz’s respect and rolodex could have pulled it off. For those unfamiliar with it, I wrote about it extensively at this link. A bunch of other anniversary issues are also talked about in that Perfect Game category over at my website, for those who might be interested.

David Baroldy

How much competition is there between editorial offices for getting creators assigned to books? While everyone is playing for the same team, I have to imagine that the desire to tell the best, and best-selling, stories possible must drive at least some amount of vying for the same high profile/hot creators’ time. Any past takes you can share about situations where creators were sniped by another office or certain offices having dibs on certain creators?

Well, David, this used to be a problem in the past, especially during that year when editorial had been split up into five domains each with its own editor in chief. At that point, everybody was effectively working against everybody else, competing with them as you say. And because their titles sold better than anybody else’s, and thus generated a greater amount of incentives for the creators, the X-MEN books always had a bit of an advantage when it came to wooing talent. These days, though, we do things a bit differently. To start with, we’ve got an entire Talent Management team, run by Rickey Purdin. What they do is to track the assignments and deadlines of every creator working for Marvel and when they’ll next be coming available. They also have optics on which creators are under contract to the company, and therefore are both key resources and guaranteed work, to make sure that those conditions are met. So when it comes to casting a particular project, they are there to provide the editors with key optics. For example, if I needed a new artist on AVENGERS, there might be somebody whom I thought would be good on the series. But Rickey and his group would be able to tell me what that artist was currently working on, when they were expected to be completed, and even how fast their productivity has been. They can also bring up the names of other artists who may be coming free within the window in which I’ll need somebody—again, with an emphasis on creators whom we have a contractual obligation to. From there, and with the feedback of EIC C.B. Cebulski, it’s really up to me to make a decision or put forward an option—and depending on the circumstances and the timing, what impact it might have on other assignments (if, say, the artist in question would need to come off of his current project sooner in order to insure that they could get through the entirety of the storyline on AVENGERS.) In those cases, we weigh what is most beneficial to Marvel as a whole—which means that sometimes I can’t have whomever I might have had my eye on, because their other commitments put them out of the running. So it’s a group effort, though in the end, from a creative point of view, the decision most concretely rests upon the shoulders of the editor.

Brian Keene

Tom -- during your tenure, was there ever any discussion of doing away with the sliding timeline, and letting characters age up? For example, a middle-aged Peter Parker who isn't up for web-slinging anymore, so he trains Miles Morales. Franklin and Valeria replacing Reed and Sue. A Steve Rogers for whom the serum finally stops working. A geriatric Frank Castle nearing at the end of his days and for the first time terrified of what the legacy of his war might have actually been? Sort of what DC was reportedly planning with 5G? (And thanks in advance).

Nope! If anything, I think we’ve seen just the opposite: the fact that these characters have proven to be so long-running has made it more imperative than ever not to allow them to get to a point where they’ll become irrelevant to the audience. I’m sorry, I know that this is a thing that bothers some in every generation of readers. But as an editor, my responsibility to the Marvel characters isn’t simply limited to the present day readers, it’s to the readers of tomorrow as well. And that means not allowing any one generation such ownership of them that they are materially different characters when a subsequent group of readers comes along. I think there’s a pretty clear reason why somebody at DC blinked on those proposed 5G plans and reversed course—it sounds good for the moment, but even two or three years down the line, you very well may find that you’ve killed those aspects that have made the characters retain their popularity for so many years. Peter Parker is fictional, and his story is about certain thematic things. And sure, you can do other stories with him—the future is always fun to explore as an exercise. But because Peter is fictional, he doesn’t need to age, doesn’t need to move out of the zone of his relevancy. Which doesn’t mean that you want to just be doing the same stories over and over again, it’s imperative for each generation of creators to find the new angles on the characters that are relevant and appealing to the audience of their times. But in he same way that the Simpsons don’t need to have aged, the same in general is true of Iron Man.

William Outlaw

I just reread The Vision by Tom King and Gabriel Walta and I think it’s one of the best Marvel “evergreens” I can think of.

1. I know King signed his DC exclusive contract in the middle of this run. We’re there any other projects y’all were brainstorming before that? I’d love to see him tackle another Marvel character at some point.

2. What are some Marvel “evergreens” that you think belong on most fans’ bookshelves (such as Daredevil: Born Again)? DC seems to have a lot more that fit that bill, so I’m interested in your answer!

Tom King might have spoken with editor Wil Moss about some ideas at some point, William. But what they might have been is unknown to me. And I don’t know that DC has more evergreen books than Marvel does, really. It all depends, I suppose, on how and what you quantify as evergreen. I don’t really have time for a thorough list, but I would think that if you’re counting BORN AGAIN as fitting the requirements, the same would be true for THE DARK PHOENIX SAGA, MAN WITHOUT FEAR, THE KORVAC SAGA, SIEGE ON AVENGERS MANSION, DEMON IN A BOTTLE, EXTREMIS, THE SURTUR SAGA, INFINITY GAUNTLET, THE TRIAL OF GALACTUS, E FOR EXTINCTION and on and on and on. There’s really no shortage.

Matt

Given that multi-title crossover events have dominated the Marvel & DC landscape almost continuously for nearly 40 years now, isn't it more likely that anyone who doesn't like them either stopped reading long ago, or never got into those publishing lines in the first place, precisely because that paradigm doesn't appeal to them? If so, then a sales drop whenever there is a brief lull in events would make sense, because the remaining audience would then be solely comprised of people who DO like crossover events. I do think many of those who complain the loudest are likely former readers who believe their gripes will be taken more seriously if they pose a "customer you might lose" scenario. And while there could be a point where diminishing returns make the "events + higher cover prices" formula no longer sufficient, it's probably far enough down the road to be a problem for the next round of decision makers.

I’ve heard this sort of argument before in the past, Matt. But I have to say that it sounds a lot to me like simply wanting what you want without there being any universal agreement for that being the proper thing. One of the things that Joe Quesada used to say regularly is that readers voted with their dollars and with their feet. As much as you or I might want things to work a certain way, at the end of the day, the audience gets to decide what works and what doesn’t, what is successful and what isn’t. So saying that the reason that the audience doesn’t agree with whatever you want is because they’ve been programmed not to by years of publishing is, frankly, a little bit steeped in arrogance. You can’t make people buy what they don’t want to buy, and you can’t make them excited by something simply by taking away other options. At that point, their feet will take their dollars somewhere else, to some other place where they’re getting value for their time and money. Plus, not every reader is the same, and likes the same thing. It’s the easiest thing in the world to be distracted by what the fans say, they’re all very vocal and loud. But it’s easy to say things. What you really need to pay attention to is what they do, what books they actually buy (or don’t buy) and why. It’s been said that the surest way to kill your title is by trying to give the fans what they say they want, because they aren’t all of one mind, and because there’s very often a difference between what they say and what they do.

Mortimer Q. Forbush

I recently learned Fraction wrote “Marvel style” with Aja on Hawkeye. Are there other modern examples of teams using Marvel style (or something close to it) so successfully that you’d like to highlight?

If I’m remembering correctly, I don’t know that Matt really wrote “Marvel style” on HAWKEYE, not really. He did something closer to it, but it still tended to be very elaborate and detailed scripts that he was turning in. The same thing is true of Dan Slott, who is probably the closest thing there is currently working. But his plots would have been considered extravagant had they been turned in in 1978. These days, just abut the only person I can think of who occasionally works in what I’d legitimately call Marvel style is Tom DeFalco, and then only on occasions when he’s working with somebody he’s extremely comfortable with, such as his frequent partner Ron Frenz. In those instances, there isn’t any need for Tom to do more than that, he and Ron are already enough on the same wavelength that any more would be unnecessary work.

Evan Narcisse

Hi, Tom. As someone who used to be in the blog trenches, I've long admired your dedication to writing about the comics you've bought, read, and loved from the pre-professional part of your life. My question: how do you remember with such detail where you bought those comics, when stories were published, and who worked on them? were you the kind of fan who meticulously catalogued everything?

Well, Evan, it’s not as though I don’t have the actual comic themselves to work on, so I don’t really need to pull story credits out of the air or out of my memory. And like many, I have a strong memory of many of my encounters with the formative comics of my youth. When I started out doing those write-ups, I generated a master list for myself of books that I know I bought and read by moving through the Newsstand over at MIKE'S AMAZING WORLD. That said, there’s a bit of a fudge-factor in all of those write-ups, but one that nobody outside of myself would ever care about. I organized them by release date, and in most cases I would have bought those books on the first day they were released. But not consistently, not always. Still, that gave me a general road map, and from there I was able to fill in the assorted back issues that I remember buying at the approximate times when I would have purchased them—again, working form a calendar and context clues. I mean, this is really no different from the way that I can, say, list from memory the contents of the first 100 issues of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN. This information just tended to stick to my ribs in a way that no school learning ever quite did.

---

Behind the Curtain

There isn’t a whole lot of story behind this next one, but it is still fun.

.What you see above is a print-out of an e-mail sent to me by Stan Lee back in 2001. From that date, I’m guessing that he would just have sent in his outline for the project that was eventually released under the title THE LAST FANTASTIC FOUR STORY. And this little note came unbidden, just something Stan dashed off in a spare second, having looked back on the document that he’d sent and found a typo in it. It’s by far more of a response than any such thing warranted—but it’s certainly funny and charming. And it’s very indicative of the Stan Lee that I knew. These days, he’s become something of a polarizing subject, and there are plenty of people who simply hate Stan for his actions real and perceived. And people do have a point, Stan was certainly not as forthcoming in terms of sharing credit for the Marvel revolution as he might have been. But strangely, he was also far more generous about sharing credit than he needed to be at the same time. He was just a guy, trying to keep his job and put food on the table and stay afloat, in an industry that looked as though it would go belly up any day, and that he got into not through any great love of it, but because it was there. He wasn’t the hero, but he also wasn’t a villain. Dude was a flawed human being, just like anybody else.

---

Pimp My Wednesday

Hey, we’ve got Free Comic Book Day coming up next weekend—that ought to be exciting! When you partake (and I assume that you will) please remember to buy a few actual for-money comics while you’re scooping up the free ones your Retailer has put out for you. They’re free to you, but not to him, so let’s make sure our Retailers have a cash-positive day, all right?

On the Marvel front, we have a couple of different FCBD releases. All of them will be worth your time and attention, but none more so than this one, the UNCANNY AVENGERS/X-MEN book. it contains two all-new stories, the first by Gerry Duggan and Josh Cassara featuring the X-Men and introducing the new Captain Krakoa, and then the second by Gerry again with artist Javier Garron, in which the new Avengers Unity Squad assembles to meet the threat of this new Captain Krakoa. And as an extra bonus, there’s also a short preview of Jonathan Hickman and Valerio Schiti’s upcoming series G.O.D.S. that will make you look at Marvel’s cosmology in a whole new way. This baby is a bargain at twice the price!

Elsewhere, writer Paul Levitz wraps up his sojourn into the Marvel Universe after a multiple-decade career with the competition in the final issue of AVENGERS: WAR ACROSS TIME. It’s a final showdown in the far-off future as only Alan Davis can depict it, featuring guest appearances from ore Avengers of different eras than you can shake a stick at (if you’re the stick-shaking type.)

And at the request of artist Alessandro Cappuccio, Venom has stopped by the Midnight Mission to play a few rounds with MOON KNIGHT in this 23rd issue! It’s the team-up that you never knew you needed, and Alessandro leaves it all on the page in artistic tour du force. The words by Jed MacKay aren’t bad either, especially if you pronounce them in his native Canadian accent.

And in what used to be called cyberspace, the Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy redouble their efforts to recapture a stolen weapon of mass destruction in an intergalactic casino, courtesy of David Pepose and Ze Carlos. This particular AVENGERS UNLIMITED chapter focused primarily on the Black Panther and Gamora, but it’s only the second or six, so there are still plenty of thrills to come.

---

A Comic Book On Sale 80 Years Ago Today, April 30, 1943

I really only selected this issue to focus on this week due to its killer Word War II-era cover, one of only a relatively few SUPERMAN covers to directly address the war itself. It’s a really terrific piece by Jack Burnley, one that speaks to just how truly terrifying the Man of Steel could come across in his earliest years. Of course, it also shows a Superman who maybe doesn’t quite have his priorities in order: “I could save that sinking ship, but I’d much rather bash in the heads of the Nazis who sunk it!” Women and children first, Superman! This issue contains four adventures of the Man of Tomorrow, the first of which provides yet another explanation for why Superman doesn’t involve himself in the war effort. The real reason, of course, is that if Superman did get involved, the war would end almost immediately—but that wasn’t about to happen, and with any number of fathers, brothers, boyfriends and relatives off fighting in the conflict, any such resolution would be considered insulting. The daily SUPERMAN newspaper strip had gotten around this by having Clark Kent attempt to enlist in the army but flunk out when he accidentally uses his X-Ray vision to read the eyechart in the next room. Why this should keep Superman as Superman from lending a hand is anybody’s guess, but it was something to quiet complaints. In the story in this issue, “America’s Secret Weapon” by Don Cameron and Sid Citron, Superman agrees to participate in training war games at Camp Towne. Made an honorary Colonel for the duration of the mock battle, Superman finds himself on the losing side as the regular G.I.’s on the opposition succeed in winning the mock battle, despite his involvement. Thus, Superman decides that the American fighting man needs no special help from him, that our boys can handle the job on their own. This somehow feels more comforting with hindsight, given that the United States was ultimately on the winning side. Otherwise, it was business as usual in Metropolis: Superman prevents an incarcerated professor from killing all of the witnesses against him,. puts an end to a ring bootlegging designer dresses (clearly a job only Superman could handle, especially during the war!) and helping out a star pitcher whose ability to throw has been compromised by drugs slipped to him surreptitiously by crooks. You could be forgiven for not even realizing there was a war on from these other stories—which may have been intentional, given that a good portion of the magazine’s readership was now soldiers stationed overseas and in the thick of things. They’d want a respite from the conflict, not to see it dramatized on cartoon form.

---

A Comic Book On Sale 55 Years Ago Today, April 30, 1968

By any measure, the entry of writer Jim Shooter into the comic book field is a miraculous story. Driven by a need to contribute to his impoverished family’s livelihood, Shooter realized that real people got paid to write and draw comic books while laid up in a hospital as a kid. Having determined that the worst strip in his opinion was the Legion of Super Heroes in ADVENTURE COMICS and inspired by the style of the Marvel comics he had been reading, Shooter set out to write and submit his own stories to editor Mort Weisinger. Weisinger liked his first attempt enough to ask him to send another, then wound up buying all three of them. Here’s the thing: Shooter was only a 13-year-old kid when all of this happened! That’s amazing! For his part, Mort didn’t realize that he was dealing with a minor, he figured that Shooter must be another college student like Cary Bates, who kept submitting cover ideas to him. it must have come as a hell of a shock the first time he called Shooter up to give him an assignment and this kid answered the phone. But whether he was embarrassed about the mistake he’d made or not, Weisinger realized that he’d found a prodigy in young Shooter and kept him fed with assignments. And as Jim’s work became more regular, it also grew more accomplished. Case in point: this issue of ADVENTURE COMICS is the first half of a cataclysmic two-part story that introduces one of the Legion’s most memorable enemies, Mordru the Merciless, a powerful giant of a wizard. At some point in the past, the Legion had defeated him by burying him underground, but as this story opens, Mordru has managed to free himself, and has already annihilated most of the Legionnaires. The only members remaining are the quartet of Superboy, Mon-El, Duo Damsel and Shadow Lass, and they are forced to retreat to 20th Century Smallville. There, they adopt secret identities and hide out, planning their next move. But Mordru pursues them into the past, and it’s a cat-and-mouse game between the hidden heroes and their all-powerful and implacable foe. It’s honestly one of the most legitimately tense DC stories of this era, a time in which the stakes often seemed to be abstract at best. Additionally, while he doesn’t get into it too deeply, there’s also a very interesting beat where Duo Damsel, who has a crush on Superboy, muses to herself that she knows that her affection is useless, that it’s a historical fact not only who Superboy will eventually grow up and marry but also how and where he dies. Which is incredibly morbid if you think about it, but also kind of a cool thing to lampshade. This issue ends on a cliffhanger, with Mordru having smoked out the Legionnaires and about to obliterate them—and the second part was just as good. It’s an almost perfect fusion of the Marvel approach with the strengths of DC, and Shooter wrote it when he was fifteen! An astonishing amount of talent on display here.

---

A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

SPIDER-MAN TEAM-UP was a quarterly oversized title that ran for seven issues in the mid 1990s, with this final issue coming out on April 30, 1997. Spiritually, it was the successor to MARVEL TEAM-UP, a series that the web-slinger had headlined for most of its run in the 1970s and 1980s. But substituting SPIDER-MAN into the title made it more likely to be racked with the other Spidey titles, or such was the thinking. I edited the title from the beginning along with my assistant Glenn Greenberg, and it was something of a mixed bag along the way. For some reason, either because of its size or the infrequency of its release schedule or just a bunch of bad luck and bad breaks, we proportionately had more trouble with this series than most others. We tried full-length stories and running two stories per issue, and each one caused its own problems. So the book never really found its footing. It also, by design, didn’t carry a regular creative team, meaning that each issue had to be cast individually based on what team-up subjects we might want to feature. So with the series terminal already—we knew that this would be the final issue before we began working on it—I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to cross-promote the new book that we were working on, THUNDERBOLTS. At this time, Marvel had made a deal with Jim Lee’s Wildstorm Studios and Rob Liefeld’s Extreme Studios to outsource a number of key titles and characters to them to produce; FANTASTIC FOUR, CAPTAIN AMERICA, IRON MAN and AVENGERS. Accordingly, all of the affected characters had to be written out of the mainstream Marvel Universe for the duration. In the wake of this absence, writer Kurt Busiek worked with my self and artist Mark Bagley to replace them with the Thunderbolts, a brand new team of optimistic heroes who would make a big splash in the Marvel Universe and be embraced by the public in the same manner that the departed heroes had. The trick here—and it’s a trick that went unrevealed until the last page of the first issue of the series—is that the Thunderbolts were actually the criminal Masters of Evil. They’d adopted new fake heroic identities to worm themselves into a position of power and responsibility in the absence of the Avengers from which they could pursue their sinister ambitions. The problem being that, for some of these villains, suddenly being hailed as good guys was intoxicating, and they wavered on whether or not to go through with their evil plans. The book obviously worked out and was a success, but it was anything from a guaranteed outcome, and so I decided to feature the group in this issue of SPIDER-MAN TEAM-UP in concert with the popular wall-crawler in an attempt to potentially get more eyes onto them early on in the series run. This issue came out at around the same time as THUNDERBOLTS #3, so very early in the run. But the big appeal here was that this story wound up being illustrated by Sal Buscema. Sal was a mainstay artist at Marvel, someone whose career extended back into the late 1960s. But his style was a bit out of vogue in these Image-influenced years, and so he found it more and more difficult to pick up assignments. I’m dead certain that it was Kurt who insisted we bring him on board for this story, and he may have made it a condition of his writing the issue as well, since he already had plenty of other work on his plate. Like his older brother John, Sal was mostly doing breakdowns at this point, very open pencils where none of the blacks were spotted. The primary responsibility of the breakdown artist was the storytelling, the composition of the pages and panels, and the dramatics of the story. All of these were things that Sal did instinctively. The book was inked by Dick Giordano, who was back on the freelance market following a stint as DC’s Executive Editor, and whom my office kicked a bunch of work to. For whatever reason, Dick exercised a bit of a feather touch on Sal’s pages, so they were a bit more open than I otherwise might have liked—if the finisher didn’t put enough work in, Sal’s pages could wind up looking a bit “coloring book”. Dick’s pages weren’t quite so sparse, but I felt as though there could have been more of a sense of completeness to them. It was also a difficult assignment for Sal in that the Thunderbolts characters were all new, and had elements to their designs that was a bit alien to his approach. But he did a good job of it, and his character acting was always on point. Kurt found his work easy to script as well. So the final product turned out well, one of our more successful issues of the series, and likely the most reprinted, since it’s been included in most of the collections of the early THUNDERBOLTS material that have been put out in the intervening 25 years.

---

Monofocus

Picking up from the vibe of TED LASSO (which has been wobbling a little bit in its storytelling in this current season, with certain characters seemingly in plotlines for a different show and an unearned redemption in progress) I’ve started to burn my way through WELCOME TO WREXHAM on Hulu. This is kind of the real world TED LASSO story, a documentary series about Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney purchasing the Welsh Wrexham football club, one of the oldest in the world, and attempting to pull it up out of the National League and into a higher level of competitive play. Now, I’m not a sports guy, I have absolutely no interest in watching football matches per se. But I love a sports drama, have ever since my father sat me down to watch PRIDE OF THE YANKEES when I was a kid, so I’m a bit of a sucker for a series like this. It pretty well is TED LASSO, with a downtrodden underdog team being put into the hands of two Americans who are largely unfamiliar with the game and the culture, and who attempt to make things better. So it’s been pretty great so far. What you get a real understanding of from the series is just how important the local football club is to the regular working class people of the town. i mean, fans are fans, but those in the UK take things to a different level, it’s practically a lifestyle. At one point, on a Tuesday night, a few hundred people pile into busses and drive four hours into England to cheer for the team at an away game for two hours before turning around and making the four hour drive back to Wrexham—and then going to work the next day! It’s crazy! But there’s something compelling about it!

I was also delighted to see that Derren Brown had produced a performance film of his latest stage show, DERREN BROWN: SHOWMAN, which aired on Channel 4 in the UK. Brown is one of my favorite performers, a thoughtful and enlightened psychological magician who doesn’t simply produce remarkable effects, but who grounds those effects in an emotional journey for his audience members. I’ve seen him several times in person during his run of SECRET in the U.S. before the pandemic, and I wrote about it here. This latest special is as good as ever, with Derren’s final trick getting the entirety of the audience to disregard and forget several minutes’ worth of events happening directly in front of them. I’m told that the effect of this was far more palpable in person than can be conveyed on television, where there are obviously all too many ways to cheat. But even with that, the whole thing is less about how the trick was done than it is the impact that it has on the people for whom it has happened. Derren has several of his television specials and routines archived at his YouTube Channel, but I warn you that it is a dangerous rabbit hole to go down.

Like sports, I also have only a limited interest in director Tim Burton, which is how I know for certain that this new video essay by Delaney Jordan is excellent, in that it kept my attention for the entirety of its run time. In it, she analyzes and dissects the director’s body of work with both style and skill, and a certain visual panache. I’d plugged her earlier LUPIN III videos, and this one is just as accomplished. Seriously worth a watch, even if you’re lukewarm on the subject matter as I am.

---

Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I shared a memo written by Roy Thomas outlining some of his ideas for a sequel to DC’s CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS.

And five years ago, I wrote about this Modern Comics reprint of CAPTAIN ATOM #84.

---

That brings us to the close of another one. Hope you have a good week, and either way, I’ll see you back here next Sunday (or whenever you open your e-mail.)

Tom B