#61: Carlini Awayyyyy

Ow, my eye!

The news broke earlier this week that Mike Carlin, the onetime Superman editor and editorial head of the DC line has retired. For the past dozen years, even before DC’s move to the west coast, he’s been out of comics and working on DC’s animation projects—but for years he was pretty much the face of DC in the 1990s. He’ll best be remembered, no doubt, for having overseen the massive event that was the Death of Superman, but I think his real triumph was in organizing the four Superman titles into a weekly serialized single story that still allowed their individual creators to do the material that they wanted to. Those books made for a very strong line creatively in that post-John Byrne period in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and having done some work that was similar, I can tell you that this was in no way an easy thing to manage.

If memory serves, the first time I met Mike was while working on the first wave of Amalgam titles, those books that both companies did as part of the larger Marvel vs DC event that smooshed assorted characters together in novel ways. (Fun fact: it was supposed to be called Rival rather than Amalgam, but there was a trademark conflict with that name.) But I didn’t really get to know him until a year later, when the unexpected passing of Mark Gruenwald, who had been Mike’s close friend and mentor when he worked at Marvel, meant that I wound up overseeing Marvel’s Amalgam books in that second wave. Mike had something of an intimidating reputation, but we hit it off well from the start, in large part because we spoke a common language through the intermediary of Gruenwald. He was also relatively up front past a certain point that he wanted me to come work for him at DC, and I wound up taking a lunch to that effect with him and Paul Levitz at a certain point in the late 1990s. But I never made that jump, I was too well-situated where I was at the time. Plus I also suspected that if we were working together, we’d inevitably tear one another apart, with me likely getting the worst of it. Mike’s temper was no joke—I can recall seeing him completely dismantle a Marvel Associate Editor who didn’t even work for him when the guy was disrespectful and dismissive towards Carlin’s comments on the Amalgam book he was doing. The guy had it coming, but it was a real thunderbolts-from-the-heavens moment, and so it stuck with me. That said, I never really had a cross word with him on the assorted crossover projects we were both involved in, even when we didn’t necessarily agree on something.

I don’t think that I’ve seen Mike in person since the company moved out west, but before that, we’d wind up having the occasional lunch or meeting as applicable. He wound up taking over the tail end of the DC side of the JLA/AVENGERS crossover after the previous editor was let go by DC, and had he been there from the beginning, I have no doubt that the back end of that project wouldn’t have gone so off the rails as it wound up doing. So I can’t say that I’ll miss him, as he hasn’t really been a presence in my world for over a decade. But his retirement definitely signifies a changing-of-the-guard and the end of an era for DC.

Elsewhere, closer to home, the news has been making the rounds of a GoFundMe that’s been set up to help out writer Len Kaminski, who has fallen on some genuinely tough times. I was going to offer to tell what is perhaps my funniest and least-appropriate Len Kaminski story if the followers of this Newsletter could help get the campaign to meet its goal, but it already did that during this past week. But it looks like now they’ve raised it, and I have little doubt that the situation requires these additional funds. So if you’d like to do your part (or you just want to hear a weird and singular comic book story involving Len) you can check things out and donate at this handy link.

Also, it’s come to my attention that former Marvel Editor in Chief and Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada is starting up a Substack Newletter of his own. it looks to be very similar to the sort of thing that we serve up here, though it will doubtless be a lot more entertaining and insightful. I’d encourage you to go subscribe to the thing, but let’s face it, he doesn’t need my help, most of you will have done that already. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Joe’s already got more subscribers than we do here. And why not? He’s done a ton of stuff, he’s a great raconteur and he can draw like a bandit, so he’s going to have a lot to say. Anyway, for the three or four of you who may be holdouts, you can sign up for Joe’s very first release here at this handy link

All right, the opening preamble is finished, time to move into this week’s set of Reader Questions!

FabNic

"For years, the chain mail on Captain America’s costume was sort of partially faked in, until John Cassaday decided to regularly draw each and every link of it. And then that became the base design. So these things all evolve over time."

John was not the first to do that, Kevin Maguire was in the Adventures of Captain America limited series. Many of the touches in John's work (specifically facial expressions) were influenced by Kevin's work (all in a good way, John's an excellent artist).

Just please don't deny Kevin the insanity that cost him the ability to finish the original job, but he was the first.

You are correct, Fabian, Kevin was the first one to really do this in the pages of your ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN AMERICA limited series. Though I’d have to say that Cassaday was the one who popularized doing it and made it more of a standard approach for the character. But yes, Maguire did it first. (I’m sure I must have talked about how I wound up putting a hole through one of those Kevin Maguire CAP pages when I was an intern. If not, that’s a story that’s maybe best saved for when he’s got a GoFundMe Campaign going on._

Briann Storer-Goldstein

Off topic, but now the Marvel app has closed are we going to be able to buy marvel trades digitally anywhere?

I've spent a fair amount of dosh on discounted Marvel digital trades over the years, and it was a great way to plug the gaps in my collection, (Amazon is unusable).

I don't expect you to announce your new partners before the deals are ready, but please reassure us that some deals are in the pipework.

Short answer here, Brian, is that I don’t entirely know what our plans are in this area. But I’d be surprised if continuing to offer digital trades through whatever avenue we wind up using wasn’t a part of the plan.

Chris Sutcliffe

I'm currently reading through every Spider-Man issue, and that means every issue he's ever appeared in. As I've put together my reading list, I've noticed that he often appears in either the first issue of a new run, or one of the last issues.

Is this because Marvel try to include popular characters in first issues to lure a fan base over to a new character, or in later/last issues to try to save the series from cancellation? Or is this just coincidence?

Well, Chris, it was almost a requirement during the 1980s and the first part of the 1990s to have Spider-Man guest-star in a new series, typically around the third issue. And that had everything to do with sales—the wall-crawler was incredibly popular and so having him show up in a new book was likely to make readers who might not otherwise have sampled it take a look. I can’t really speak as definitively towards almost-last issues—that isn’t a pattern that I’ve noticed. But my guess would be that the creators and editors involved in those titles were working to try to save their book, and so probably guest-starred Spidey for that selfsame reason.

Rob London

Couldst thou grace us with the guide to Marvel Asgardian grammar dispatched to thine offices by a linguistics specialist, mentioned some newsletters ago? ‘Twould be most amusing to see how badly I hath mangled it in this comment.

I would be happy to do so, Rob, if I still had it. But I believe I passed it along to the next THOR editor after the book came back following its multi-year hiatus, and so I don’t have it any longer. But I’ve internalized pretty much all of the rules that it laid out. (Thy becomes Thine before any vowel or an H…)

Maxapocalypse

Do our views on Marvel Unlimited help a title “sales” wise at all, or do those subscriptions basically not subsidize ongoing series at all?

Every paid reading helps a little bit, Max. Though the ones on Marvel Unlimited may help just a fraction less than the others simply because it takes new issues three months to wind up there, by which point they aren’t truly “current” at all. And for those who had asked, yes, there is a payment to creators when you read a book on Marvel Unlimited, but the formula is a byzantine and complicated one, and it doesn’t amount to a whole lot for a single reader. That said, those pennies can add up over time.

El Feliz

I’ve been really enjoying Ryan North’s FF run, and issue #7 (or 700) was another great issue. I happened to come across a short story Ryan wrote featuring the Fantastix from a “Fantastic Four: Negative Zone” special issue (with art by Steve Uy.) It too was “smart and clever and fun”, as you recently described Ryan’s writing. I was curious if more planned with those characters for the Dan Slott run of the time? They seemed to kind of go away quickly. Not sure there was all that much to do with them (they had a bit of Great Lakes Avengers feel about them) and Ryan’s story could actually have been an ending of sorts, but was just curious. Also, did that short story at all make you think of Ryan when Dan decided he was ready to leave the book? Thanks for all you do!

I think we maybe covered this in an earlier edition of this Newsletter, but it may have been someplace else entirely. So, to recap, the Fantastix characters were initially conceived as something of a response to DC’s series THE TERRIFICS, which had been put together and released during the time when Marvel had no FANTASTIC FOUR book on the stands in an attempt to eat our lunch a little bit. So as can be seen in that early FF issue, the Fantastix are a band of obscure third-stringers who have bought the Baxter Building in the FF’s absence and who are trading on their name and reputation for their own personal gain. Initially, Dan and I had intended to do more with them, but none of it was as important as the other stuff that we kept coming up with, and so they got pushed to the background a little bit and never really amounted to much of anything. Which is perhaps appropriate for a group of characters who were really intended as a joke at the expense of the competition. I did wind up asking Ryan to write that short story with them in that FANTASTIC FOUR QUARTERLY issue—I had the space to do so as its lead story by Mike Carey was actually an inventory script that I had hung onto for almost a decade when we finally slotted it, and it was regular issue sized. Ryan did a really nice job of fleshing out those characters and their ethos in only a couple of pages—and that story wasn’t why I approached him about pitching for FF when the opportunity came up necessarily, but it was the first time that he and I had worked directly together, so on that lever it did have an impact on matters.

Jeff Ryan

All things being equal, would you rather a comic have great art but a pedestrian narrative or pedestrian art but a great narrative?

Well, to be a great comic book, Jeff, you really need to have both, as I think you know. That said, in a push-come-to-shove world, I do personally tend to lean more towards being a story guy. This is why any number of beautifully-drawn Image comics during their heyday did nothing for me—they were always lovely to look at, but reading one inevitably felt like earing an air sandwich. On the other hand, I expect that I’m in the minority on this point, and that for many readers, excellent art can elevate a crummy story to something palatable a whole lot easier than a genius story can make bad art appear attractive. Which means that, in practice, I’d be more likely to lean towards the art editorially. Really, though, you need both aspects to be working at an at least decent level to have yourself a comic worth reading.

JV

I heard about 2 series that never saw the light of day - an Ant Man Max and a Deathlok Max series both written (or pitched) by Daniel Way - any background on these? Will they ever see them? or anything new at marvel by Daniel?

Not much that I can tell you about either one, JV, apart from the fact that they did both exist and both of them were almost completely finished when the plug was pulled on them. They were both edited by Axel Alonso, and they were both going to be MAX titles. If I’m remembering correctly, the ANT-MAN series was illustrated by Clayton Crain, and the DEATHLOK book was by Darick Robertson. And what did them in was the MAX content. We discovered as we produced MAX material that it didn’t tend to be ordered in as heavily as we might have liked, given the types of stores that different retailers were running and what they wanted and expected from their Marvel books. And the material was so deliberately hard-hitting that it wouldn’t have been a simple matter to go through them and revise them to bring them in line with our regular books. Axel tried for years to get them published but it wasn’t to be—they were a victim of Bill Jemas’ departure (he was a lot more permissive with what he’d allow in our books—and, indeed, what he wanted to see in our books in terms of edginess.) I’m not even sure that we’ve got the materials for either of them any longer.

Ray Cornwall

any idea why the non-Franklin characters didn't reappear for a loooong time? While Vibraxas has appeared in quite a few Black Panther issues, Huntara didn't reappear until Civil War (and then in Dan Slott's last FF issue), and Devlor got one appearance when Jessica Jones was looking for a nanny. These were some quality characters! I'm not saying we need Fantastic Force: The Re-Force-En-Ing or anything, but someone's got to use them, right?

Well, Ray, the only reason that any character gets used is because some writer or editor wants to use them. And I don’t know that we did anything much with the Fantastic Force members over 18 issues to inspire future creators to want to use them. In the case of Vibraxas, Priest became aware of him through some fans as he was casting around for other Wakandan stuff to use as raw materials. And while he sort of made Vibraxas a bit of a joke (with Queen Divine Justice calling him Nappy ‘Fro Lad and so forth), he probably also did more than anybody else to turn him into a real character. But there isn’t any prohibition on using them or anything, so given enough time, they’re likely to turn up again someplace.

Mortimer Q Forbush

Do editors or the talent department have any tools to help keep track of artists with their visual styles, speed, page rate, or other relevant details? Or is it all managed "up here" [points to head].

My assumption in assigning a project is that the editors will gravitate towards a particular style that suits the story being told, and they have a shortlist of potential artists that might fit the bill, and then its a matter of availability and expense, etc.

We’ve got an entire Talent Management team whose job it is to keep track of such things, Mortimer, and to also be looking for new up-and-coming artists to bring into the fold. And they do very much what you’re talking about, and more. When an editor has a need to cast an assignment, they either have an idea of who they might want to hire for it—whereupon they check with Talent Management to see about the artist in question’s availability and cost—or they don’t have a particular talent in mind and only have a sense of what they’re looking for. In those instances, Talent Management will put forth some options of artists that we have on the bench, who are either idle right then or who are close to finishing up their current assignments. Our editors don’t necessarily need to pull from those specific suggestions, but the Talent team is good enough at what they do that more often than not, that’s the way things wind up going.

Devin Whitlock

Are there any genres you’d like to see more of in comics? For example, a friend of mine likes sports manga but wonders why that hasn’t really taken off in American comics. And he’s not even a sports guy!

I don’t know that I have specific genres that I’d like to see more of per se, Devin. Only that I’d love to see more great comics of every sort, and that I’m open to reading material across a wide assortment of genres. These sorts of projects tend to be easier to get going in places other than Marvel because our output is so firmly entrenched in the Marvel Universe that it' can be difficult for us to get readers and retailers to buy in on a non-super hero series from us. But most other places, that tends to be a bit easier.

Jaime Weinman

I was wondering if you have any thoughts on when it's effective to make heroes less heroic. I was talking to someone who argued that even if "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" went too far in that direction, the Scarlet Witch's current level of popularity would never have happened if she had been the unambiguous hero in the MCU that she was in most comics, because "WandaVision" takes heavy inspiration from "House of M" and the Byrne Avengers run and other stories that her fans (including me) sometimes gripe about.

And that got me to thinking of how Vision's most popular comic story makes him very morally compromised and turns on his willingness to commit murder -- again, not what Avengers purists would consider in-character, but certainly something that must have struck a chord even with readers who would rather see him as his usual heroic self.

But it can't be as simple as turning a hero into an anti-hero to make them more interesting, because for every success like WandaVision or Vision, there are other stories that make a character go darker without making them more interesting (coincidentally I was in a bookstore the other day where they were selling a new Iron Man collection of "The Crossing"). I don't know if you have any theories on when it adds to a hero's appeal to have some un-heroic stories under their belt or if any examples come to mind of a hero becoming more popular that way (without being unusable as a hero, I suppose).

Well, Jamie, as with most things, it usually comes down to the story being done well and striking an emotional chord with the audience. Even if you didn’t like AVENGERS DISASSEMBLED, for example, you have to admit that a lot of other people did, and the developments that stemmed from that story defined the Scarlet Witch’s personal journey across the next decade or so. And certainly, any time you do something that feels transgressive with a character, you’re going to get some attention, both positive and negative. I don’t know that there’s a definitive formula for what you’re talking about, but I wouldn’t necessarily be the one who would know about it in any case, as that doesn’t tend to be the way I like to take most of the characters who are in my charge. I’m a lot more conservative than that. But there is a reason that people like villains, and having characters do unexpected things or make dangerous decisions is part of the drama that keeps us all reading, isn’t it? The trick, of course, is that the story needs to be good.

Dewey

Here's a random one for you: Do you know how/why the Spider-Man & Jay Leno story that was serialized in the backs of Marvel comics in 2003 came to be? I saw them again recently, and that seems like such an odd thing in general, and a really odd thing for Greg Capullo to briefly return to Marvel for.

if I’m remembering correctly, it was writer Ron Zimmerman who helped to arrange for that story. Ron was well-connected in Hollywood circles and saw an opening for a story that might benefit everybody, and so the deal got done and the project became a real thing. But as I didn’t work on it directly, I was pretty well at a remove from it, so I don’t really have any insider details about how it all went down. But let’s all assume that it all started when Stan Lee beat Jay Leno in a drag race, shall we?

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Behind the Curtain

.Bit of a weird one this time out. In my fan days, I had developed a self-portrait character of myself that I would use in fan communications and goofball strips that was based at least in part on the approach of famed fan cartoonist Fred Hembeck. I wound up meeting Fred for the first time at a New York convention I attended in the summer of 1990, and so I commissioned this drawing from him. I don’t recall what the price was, but it was no great fortune. Fred, though, was a bit uncomfortable with doing a likeness of any sort—I was weirdly interested in how his rendition would compare to my own, which is why I approached him with it. But I made it palatable by having him put me in the role of Brother Voodoo, a character from the 1970s that Fred had adopted as his own strange running gag in his MARVEL AGE strip and elsewhere. That reference to The Geek came from me as well, I think, and was a reference to another obscure series, this one published by DC: Joe Simon’s bizarre treatise on the hippie scene of the later 1960s, BROTHER POWER: THE GEEK. Anyway, Fred’s interpretation didn’t wind up looking all that much like my own, but this beardless caricature wound up hanging on a wall in my office at Marvel for many years regardless.

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Pimp My Wednesday

Ah, comics! Is there anything they can’t do?

AVENGERS BEYOND #3 puts the cover spotlight on the Black Order, the minions of Thanos who were introduced in Jonathan Hickman’s INFINITY Event and who thereafter became world-famous when they appeared in the AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR film in one of the swiftest turn-arounds from comic book page to big screen that I’ve ever been involved with. Writer Derek Landy has a strange attachemnt to them as well, as he wrote a limited series featuring this crew a few years back. So here they are, ready to mix it up with the Avengers and the Beyonder as dramatically depicted by artist Greg Land.

And writer/artist Steve Skroce pairs up Ben Grimm with the sorcerer supreme Doctor Strange in the third issue of CLOBBERIN’ TIME. We don’t tend to put out that many comics that are as much of a one-man show as this book is, and both its plot and its ridiculously extreme artwork are singular in their execution. It’s big kinetic fun dynamite for your senses!

It’s kind of hard to believe that it’s all over, but PUNISHER #12 wraps up the yearlong story that Jason Aaron, Jesus Saiz and Paul Azaceta have been telling about Frank Castle, transforming him in unexpected and frankly somewhat divisive ways. I feel like they stuck the landing on things pretty well (though there was a point early on where I argued that the story should have ended last issue, with Maria shooting Frank as she did there. As he did with Jane Foster, though, Jason Aaron came up with a conclusion that overcame my concerns.) I’ve never been all that much of a PUNISHER guy, but this project was a real joy to work on throughout, thanks entirely to the high quality of effort put out by the entire creative team. Hope you enjoy how it all winds up.

And there’s a new story starting up on AVENGERS UNLIMITED, courtesy of writer Jeremy Adams and artist Alan Robinson. And it all starts when Rick Jones’ locker is delivered to Avengers Mountain. Where did it come from? What does it contain? The answers will surprise and bedevil you as this latest serial gets under way.

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A Comic Book On Sale 60 Years Ago Today, May 28, 1943

A bit of a wild card choice this week, as we look at ZIP COMICS #39 which introduced the final major super hero introduced by the publisher MLJ, who would soon after change their name to Archie Comics. This was Red Rube, who was MLJ’s answer to Captain Marvel and a clear knock-off of the Captain. Created by writer Ed Robbins at the direction of editor Harry Shorten, Red Rube was orphan kid Reuben Reuben—yes, seriously, that was his name. Reuben is an orphan who runs away from the orphanage that he was brought up in, and coincidentally finds his way to an old castle that had been owned by his ancestors. There, an old man gives him an elixir that allows Reuben to contact the ghosts of his ancestors. These ghosts allow Reuben to channel their strength and wisdom and courage as needed—all he has to do is to shout the magic words “Hey Rube!” and he is transformed into an adult super hero, Red Rube. (“Hey Rube” was, of course, the oft-quoted cry of carnival roustabouts whenever some drunken or misbehaving guest needed to be ejected from the proceedings.) While not an out-and-out comedy, the adventures of Red Rube tried to channel some of the same whimsy that had made Captain Marvel a top seller. Archie was going strong by this point, and the future of the company seemed to be headed in more humorous features. Alas, Red Rube never really caught on—might have been in part because he was shirtless in his super heroic identity, which looked a bit ridiculous. Seriously, the guy wore a cape but no shirt, who does that? Or it could simply be that he was so close to his inspiration that even the young readers of the period could see the connection—and why buy the knock-off when the original is in plentiful supply? He was also one of a very few golden age MLJ heroes who wasn’t brought back in some capacity in the 1960s or 1980s, when Archie was excavating anybody with a costume in response to a spike in interest in super heroes. Consequently, he’s been largely forgotten today.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

Until you get to releases such as CIVIL WAR #1, which continues to rack up slow but steady sales as a digital single to this day, this first issue of DEATHLOK, released on May 28, 1991, was the single best-selling comic book that I ever put out. If memory serves, it moved 435,000 copies, which is pretty amazing. But the early 1990s were a different time. it also resulted in the one and only really good payday I got as an editor in that period. You see, in those days, not only did the creators on a given title receive incentives based on how well a given issue sold, but so did the editor. The editorial percentage was a fraction of what the actual creators received, but I took home something like an additional four grand of unexpected income based on this issue, which was incredibly welcome given my low salary at the time. And it was all due to Bob Budiansky, my boss. In point of fact, Bob should have gotten the main editorial credit on this issue. I worked on it, but mostly in the capacity of an assistant editor when I was in Bob’s office. But when I was promoted to Managing Editor (what we now call Associate Editor) I needed a series that I would edit myself, and it came down to a choice between DEATHLOK and NFL SUPERPRO. I absolutely wanted DEATHLOK, as I have no affinity for the world of football at all. Fortunately, with visions of potential Super Bowl tickets in his head, Bob decided to pass DEATHLOK over to me. And he insisted that I take the solo editing credit on this first issue, even though he did a lot of that work (that’s his cover copy on the issue, for example. “He’s mean, he’s a machine, and now he’s monthly!” is very typical of Bob’s style.) And the reason was that, as an Executive Editor, he wasn’t eligible for editorial incentives, and so he figured that I might as well benefit from them, which was incredibly thoughtful of him. On the other side, I could write a book about my experiences in editing DEATHLOK, and how I virtually single-handedly drove that series into the ground over the course of 34 issues. To be fair, it was the first comic book that I edited directly, and I was learning things as I went along. But I made a whole bunch of poor and ill-considered decisions along the way, choices that wound up scuttling the series. Might have happened anyway, but I didn’t make things any easier. This first issue followed up on the earlier four-book DEATHLOK limited series we had done in the squarebound “Prestige Format” of THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. I thought that project, and especially its first issue, was really great, and the Michael Collins iteration of Deathlok—a peaceful man trapped in a machine of war that he needs to keep from killing anybody—played right to the values I liked to see expressed in my comics. So on that level it was a good fit. What was less good was the writing set-up. The original limited series had been co-written by Dwayne McDuffie and Gregory Wright. But along the way, it had become apparent that they each had different directions that they wanted to go in with the character, different aspects that they wanted to explore. at the same time, neither of their perspectives quite lined up with what Bob wanted from the character and the book. So it was a big mess—and the compromise that had been reached was that, after this first issue (so that they could both share in the first issue incentives equally), Dwayne and Greg would thereafter each write the series in four-issue arcs on their own. Which was a bad idea all around, one that couldn’t help but to give the series a sort of schizophrenic and inconsistent tone. The artwork was being tone by the terrific Denys Cowan, who had stepped in on the original limited series when first artist Jackson Guice had dropped out. Denys intimidated the crap out of me, and consequently I didn’t always treat him as well as I might have. Chalk it up to inexperience, but again, my fault. Also, I believe that this was the first enhanced cover that I was involved with, those cables that Deathlok is pushing his way through on the cover were colored in a “fifth color” metallic silver ink. The craze for cover enhancements was still in its infancy at this time, but across its 34 issues, we’d have three enhanced covers on DEATHLOK, which shows you just how prevalent they became. Anyway, this opening issue turned out pretty well, it’s a modern take on a character from the original 1970s Deathlok series, Warwolf. And there was some good material yet to come throughout the run. But nobody knew it yet, but it was already the beginning of the end for the series, because I had stepped up to the plate.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

This first issue of INHUMANS was another book that was a part of the ill-fated Tsunami launch in which an assortment of titles were arbitrarily grouped after the fact and marketed as being “manga-like” in some nebulous way that didn’t really make sense to anyone other than publisher Bill Jemas. It was released on May 28, 2003, and the thing that makes it worth talking about from my point of view is actually the cover. But before we get to that, I ought to take a few moments to talk about the actual series. It was a follow-up to the successful Marvel Knights INHUMANS limited series that Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee had done a bit earlier. In that series, they had introduced a whole crew of new, young Inhumans who had only just gone through Terrigenesis and gained their strange powers. As what Bill was looking for around this time wasn’t super hero stories so much as stories about weirdos striving to fit in among regular people, Assistant (and soon to be Associate) Editor Marc Sumerak and I pitched rolling out an INHUMANS title starring them, figuring that such a book might click better with audiences who’d never entirely connected with Black Bolt and crew. The person who actually pitched the idea was writer Sean McKeever, who was something of a quasi-protege of Paul Jenkins’ and who had done the creator-owned series THE WAITING PLACE which I liked quite a bit. The artist was Matthew Clark, who had a nice, realistic style that fit the material well. The hook for the series was that the Young Inhumans were going to become exchange students at a regular Earthbound college, to promote cultural exchange between regular humans and the Inhumans. Bill at this point was using ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN as his template for everything, and so he wanted to make sure that the storytelling was slow and deliberate—the kids didn’t actually make it to Earth until the end of issue #3, and that only happened because Bill was sidelined and I was told thereafter to get on with it. Anyway, we’d gotten Jae Lee to agree to do covers for the series for us, which seemed like it would be a bit of a coup given his connection with the well-selling series that this was a defacto spinoff from. But that’s where the problem hit; Bill didn’t like the cover. He wanted it spiked, declaring that Jae had deviated from the approved sketch—and he had, just not to the degree that I felt made a bit of difference. What Bill’s real objection was came down to the fact that the character on that first cover, San, was weird and monstrous looking. He was big on the notion that every cover should feature hot women whenever possible, and he just hated the piece. Once again, I fought like a demon not to have to change it, but in the end, this was one that I lost. The cover that you see above was done not by Jae, who left the project as a result, but rather by J.H. Williams. It had originally been intended for issue #2, but it wound up on this issue as a compromise—Bill didn’t really like it much better than the other cover, but it at least had a girl on it, even if she was sort of monstrous, too. Nobody cared much at all when I insisted that the character in question, Tonaja, wasn’t in the issue at all, a fact that drove me absolutely batshit crazy. But to no avail. I said at the time that I’d never be able to look at the printed issue without wincing, and indeed, that’s still the case, albeit to a much lesser degree today. I don’t have a copy of that unused cover any longer, alas, or else I’d share it with you here. Anyway, this turned out to be a pretty fun series—I handed it over to Sumerak to edit relatively early on, I think with issue #3 or #4, and he and McKeever in particular were really simpatico in their approach.

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Monofocus

Not a whole lot new to report on this week, as most of the shows I’m watching are closing in on their season or series finales, and none of the new stuff has started yet. I did want to take a second to talk about the final episode of THE MARVELOUS MRS MAISEL, which I caught an evening ago. It was a good, if perfunctory, episode in which Midge finally gets her big break to perform on the Gordon Ford show where she’s employed as a writer thanks to manager Susie Meyerson pulling a few personal strings. It was a nice episode that in particular gave lead actress Rachel Brosnahan an opportunity to shine. And yet, as I opined a couple of weeks back, it wasn’t as good a series finale as Episode 6, the Susie Meyerson flash-forward roast, would have been. the decision to run the episodes in this order has been relatively baffling to me ever since the Roast episode aired, as it showed clearly what becomes of everybody—to the point where there really wasn’t anything much more to discover about the characters and their destinies. And indeed, the last three episodes are all fine, but they do all feel a bit anticlimactic in a way that they wouldn’t have if they had aired before the Roast. I completely understand why you wouldn’t want to end on a Midge-light episode such as that one, but this seemed to me to be a planning misstep. Nothing totally fatal, though.

And I did tune in for the series finale of THE FLASH, a show that I haven’t watched for the past three seasons, to the astonishment of pretty much anybody who knows me. I’ve made no secret of the fact that since I was a kid, the Flash has been my favorite super hero. And the first three seasons of the series, especially the first one, were really good and really tight. The cast was excellent, no one more so than affable lead Grant Gustin, who found a way to mix aspects of Barry Allen and Wally West into a portrayal that I never had any problem buying into. It was a series with a lot of heart. Unfortunately, as with the other Arrowverse shows, the longer it ran, the more rattle-brained the series became, especially when they had to replace certain characters due to actor departures or misbehaviors, while clearly wanting other characters to stick around and take on an expanded role. This resulted in virtually everybody in the series developing super-powers and becoming super heroes, in almost a parody of what happens so often today in the comics. So this final episode, the conclusion of a four-part storyline, was a big ol’ hot mess from a plotting standpoint. But I did appreciate the fact that the production team dispensed with the menace halfway through the episode, and spent the back half simply celebrating the characters. It wasn’t a great ending, but it was good enough, and it reminded me of why I liked the show in the first place. (Meanwhile, I’m still on the fence about going out to see THE FLASH film, which is also a bit uncharacteristic. But all of those positive responses from those who have seen it keep tugging at me…)

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I shared editor Julie Schwartz’s story pitch for the sequel to CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS

And five years ago, I wrote about the Origin of the Justice Society of America in DC SPECIAL #29

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Well, that takes care of another one of these things. I’ll be back again for more fun and games in a week’s time—unless I take a page from Mike Carlin and get the hell out of Dodge! Find out in seven days which way things end up going—see you then, maybe!

Tom B