#65: Stripped Down For Action!

No Time To Dodge, Only Time To Talk About It--!

As I mentioned last time, I’ve got a wedding to go to this weekend, which means that I’m presently working to get this Hat Newsletter wrapped up on Friday evening after a full day’s work. Accordingly, I anticipate that the results are going to be a bit more stripped down than they might typically be. For one thing, I don’t really have an opening topic that I’m dying to talk about. So while I might usually just start with any old thought and build something out on the fly, tonight I’m going to cut straight ahead to the Q & A portion. As always, I’ll remind you that this service is free, and that you get what you pay for. I don’t expect that what you’re about to read is going to be a train wreck or anything, it’ll just be a bit less involved than it usually is. Stripped down for action!

Fortunately for me, while I’d usually lament a week where the number of questions directed my way went down, this actually fits perfectly into my plans for this week. So here are some responses to the relatively concise number of things you guys had on your mind these last seven days:

Rich Johnston

Can I do my “if you like Black Mirror, you might REALLY like Inside No 9” post. Another anthology show with its roots in comedy but often going into horror or terror. It’s not a tech focused show, but it shares DNA with Black Mirror, every episode is different but is written and stars the same two, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton. Constantly inventive, it restricts each episode to one location which for some reason or other is always numbered ‘9’. Could be a house number, a hotel floor number, the number of a submarine, a no 9 bus, a room no 9... whatever. They are always inside it.

I’ve heard from a number of people over the years who really, really liked INSIDE NO. 9, Rich. And I gave it a sampling, watching the first three or four episodes at a certain point. But it never quite grabbed me enough, and I wound up as I sometimes do wandering away from it. Depending on how the next few weeks look for prospective TV viewing, I’ll maybe try to give it another shot.

Glen Cadigan

Wolverine. Punisher. The redesign of Black Widow. But I get what you're saying -- he didn't have runs on those characters.

Hey, Glen, you don’t need to convince me, but this was what John said and how he felt.

JV

A simple 'lost project' question - I had heard rumours of a Kilraven mini by Robert Kirkman and Rob Liefeld - anything you can share with why that never happened and what is was about?

There was a KILLRAVEN project plotted by Robert Kirkman and penciled by Rob Liefeld that was started more than a decade ago—I forget whose auspices it started under, but it wasn’t mine. This was a complete reimagining of KILLRAVEN that was set in the future of the Marvel Universe and which used a number of familiar characters along the way. But at some point, it petered out—again, I’m not entirely certain of the circumstances. I can tell you that all of the existing materials ended up in my files eventually, and that every once in a while somebody potentially looks to reactivate it. But I don’t know how likely that is to happen. It doesn’t seem probable that Robert is suddenly going to be fired up to script five issues of a series that he’d originally come up with ten-plus years previously, and while a good portion of the book was inked and colored, all Marvel ever received on those pages were jpgs rather than full-size printable files. If Rob still has those color files, that might be something that could be worked out—but the point is that there would be a number of hurtles to get past in order to finish the thing, and the specific creators involved make it a bit more challenging to do so than might ordinarily be the case.

Mortimer Q. Forbush

I seem to recall you mentioning an editor's reading circle a few times. I have to imagine that its not just a bunch of people patting each other on the back. I assume there is no shortage of criticism involved — constructive criticism, I presume, but maybe not sometimes. Long question short: do you have opinions on what kind of criticism you think is fair game versus what kind of criticism is over the line?

When I became Executive Editor many years ago now, one of the things that I innovated was the weekly Reading Circle, which was an hour-long meeting that would take place over lunch, and at which the group of editors (in particular the younger, less experienced editors) as well as any other folks who might want to join from other areas would read and dissect a comic book. Typically, these would be Marvel books of recent vintage, but over the years, we’ve done classic stories from years past and books put out by our competitors that were of note in some way. But the idea is to develop some sort of a consensus concerning what went right and what went wrong and to learn from those experiences as we go forward and make the next month’s comics. In spirit, I saw it as very much a successor to Mark Gruenwald’s old Assistant Editor classes, though without a specific curriculum. And for my money, in that forum, anything goes and anything is fair game, provided that all involved treat one another with some basic dignity and respect. In all honesty, it’s something of a constant struggle to push our editors to be brutally honest about what we’re reading and talking about because nobody wants to create ill will or hurt anybody else’s feelings. But pulled punches in that room don’t help anybody—if there’s some problem or perceived problem in a bit of work, then it’s worth discussing openly so that we can avoid making the same mistakes again and again. The difference when we discuss a competitor’s book is clear and obvious. That’s when the knives come out, because nobody in the room is going to be offended and it’s always easier to adopt an “us vs them” mindset, especially when there are no consequences. Years ago, we tried filming a pair of these meetings with the notion that they might be able to become a feature on Marvel.com. In retrospect, that was a stupid idea, because that made everybody, including myself, even more gun shy about being honest with our criticism—you don’t want to go onto your own platform and slag off your product, after all. But for the curious, those old videos can be found here and here. Just understand that these are a much more cleaned up and presentable version of how these meetings typically operate when they’re working well. But to answer your specific question a but more directly, Mortimer, I don’t think it’s a matter of criticism being out of bounds so much as it is how you present that criticism in an helpful and illuminating way to the creators such that they will take it on board and learn from it, and not be either paralyzed and upset by it or angry and dug in to fight over turf because they simply don’t want to consider that they could be wrong. The idea behind such criticism, at least on an internal basis, is to communicate to each other how to do what we do better, to think about perspectives we ourselves may not naturally possess, and to improve our storytelling abilities. I know for myself, I enjoy it whenever one of my books is the subject of those meetings and I inevitably walk away having gotten some reaction to something in the book that I didn’t expect and which was eye-opening to me. That’s the way it ought to be when it’s done right.

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Behind the Curtain

And speaking of Mark Gruenwald’s old Assistant Editor school classes, what you see below is a sheet that I typed up and printed out as a handout for one of those circa 1991 that dealt with the subject of covers. This particular sheet has hung in my office ever since—or at least it did until the pandemic started us working remotely and I had to clear out the office. But it may yet make its glory-studded return.

.I actually got a couple of facts wrong in writing up this sheet back then, so allow me to straighten some of this mythology out. Back in the day, Irwin Donenfeld, the son of DC’s owner Harry Donenfeld, used to keep a massive book in which he’d chart the sales figures on each individual issue. He’d paste in a small reproduction of the covers, and then list the print run for the book, the initial sales draw, a later sales draw and the final sales draw as copies were returned after the book had gone through its on-sale cycle—resulting in a snapshot as to how that particular issue performed. Again, for those who are curious, I wrote about Irwin’s book and reproduced a bevy of pages from it that I’d gotten copies of over at my website here and here. In doing so, Irwin would notice certain trends in which particular cover images would result in an uptick in sales. The prevailing wisdom in this period was that comic books were an impulse purchase, and what sold a particular comic book was almost entirely its cover, plain and simple. So from these analyses, Irwin came up with a list of seven elements that would increase the sell-through of the books they appeared on—and in general, they seemed to work, at least while comics were largely an impulse buy item. Irwin shared this information with his DC editors as well as Carmine Infantino, who became the head cover designer and who eventually succeeded Irwin in running DC after he was let go. But while Carmine did continue to use Irwin’s list of tricks, he wasn’t the one who came up with it. And before anybody asks, yes, somebody eventually did do a cover that contained all seven elements. That cover was commissioned by editor Mark Waid for SECRET ORIGINS #40 and illustrated by Bill Wray. And as far as I can tell, it didn’t sell any better or worse than any of the issues surrounding it.

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Pimp My Wednesday

No time for preamble—it’s plugulatin’ time!

AVENGERS BEYOND #4! Penultimate issue! Words by Derek Landy! Visuals by Greg Land! Avengers! Caught up battling evil bootleg versions of themselves! Why? Beyonder! Big explosive action! But it Wednesday!

DAREDEVIL & ECHO #2! Taboo! B. Earl! Beautiful artwork by Phil Noto! Including the colors! A mystery in two time periods! Deep dives into both Matt Murdock’s and Maya Lopez’s family histories! All assembled by Associate Editor Annalise Bissa (Hi, Mr. Bissa!) picking up the baton from Devin Lewis!

AVENGERS UNLIMITED! Digital! Non-tangible! Fungible? Beats me! Part two of three! Steve Rogers and Tony Stark competing for the same goal! Party at the Serpent Society! Images by Patch Zircher! Language by Jeremy Adams! Scroll, scroll, scroll!

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A Comic Book On Sale 75 Years Ago Today, June 25, 1948

Shelly Mayer is one of the greatest and most forgotten figures in the history of comics. He came into the business around 1936, working alongside M.C. Gaines, among others. Gaines is the person credited with working out the basic package of the comic book as a way of keeping his firm’s printing presses running, and he wound up working a number of jobs around the industry. Mayer wanted to be an artist primarily, but for a lot of years he was Gaines’ editor and production man (because staff work was more secure and paid more regularly that cartooning freelance.) One of Shelly’s early claims to fame was that he was around when Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster submitted their Superman samples to the McClure Syndicate for consideration as a possible newspaper strip, and Mayer went completely bananas for it. Maybe it was because he was a young guy relative to those around him, but he just got Superman, and advocated for the strip at every opportunity. And when the strip was finally placed in ACTION COMICS and became a huge hit, Mayer went along with Gaines as the latter set up his own comic book company ALL-AMERICAN COMICS with financing borrowed in part from Harry Donenfeld, the owner of DETECTIVE COMICS INC. ALL-AMERICAN was a separate outfit, but they also carried the SUPERMAN-DC bullet logo and partnered on paper contracts, ensuring them a supply of paper during the wartime rationing. And for their part, they came up with a number of key characters; The Flash, Hawkman, Johnny Thunder, Green lantern, The Atom, Dr Mid-Nite, Wonder Woman, Wildcat, Mr. Terrific and the Justice Society of America. All of them were innovated under Mayer’s editorship and direction. Additionally, Mayer was a mentor figure to a whole generation of young cartoonists just breaking into the business, including Joe Kubert, Carmine Infantino, Frank Giacoia and Alex Toth. Now the thing of it is, Mayer was a cartoonist himself—he had started out writing, drawing and selling his own strip before shifting into the editorial side of the business, and it was his first love. He created his series Scribbly about the adventures of a boy cartoonist in the pages of Dell’s POPULAR COMICS, where it ran for a few years. It was clearly a tremendously autobiographical strip that starred Mayer’s alter ego himself. Scribbly would draw all over the place, his answer to the problems of his world, and he desperately tried to land and keep a newspaper cartoonist’s job. The strip would often feature Scribbly’s own comic-within-a comic, “Why Big Brudders Leave Home!” Later, as Mayer transitioned over to Gaines’ operation, Scribbly got a new lease on life in the pages of ALL-AMERICAN COMICS beginning with the first issue, and it ran there through #59. When super heroes became the hot new genre, Mayer had one of his supporting characters in Scribbly don an makeshift costume with a pot over her head and become the Red Tornado, a brash send-up of costumes crimefighters. Anyway, by 1948, Mayer had had enough of life behind the editor’s desk and he quit his job to go back to freelancing. To keep him in the fold, DC created a couple of titles for him to write and draw. One, THE THREE MOUSEKETEERS, was exactly what it sounds like. The other was a revival of SCRIBBLY, the first issue of which saw print 75 years ago today. This later incarnation of SCRIBBLY was riding the rising trend of teen humor books inspired by the success of ARCHIE, so this version of the character worried about his cartooning job less and his girl problems more. But it was still a very entertaining feature. In time, after fifteen issues, SCRIBBLY would come to an end. In its absence, Mayer devised a series that was his answer to the wildly popular DENNIS THE MENACE strip by Hank Ketcham. This was SUGAR & SPIKE, which lasted for well over 15 years into the early 1970s. Mayer was still doing new SUGAR & SPIKE stories for the European marketplace up until his death in 1991 at the age of 74. And in the book’s 30th issue in 1960, he gave Scribbly one last bow, having him make an unannounced guest appearance in SUGAR & SPIKE. I wrote about that last story here.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

The first THUNDERBOLTS Annual saw print on June 25, 1997 and marked the end of the first “book” of the series unexpectedly-long run. Several months earlier, Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley and myself had launched THUNDERBOLTS as a new team of super heroes who would be stepping into the gap left by the seeming deaths of the Avengers and the Fantastic Four )who had been removed from the Marvel Universe proper to be reimagined by Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld as part of their HEROES REBORN initiative.) We were able to keep the actual premise of the book mostly under wraps until the first issue shipped—wherein those readers who checked it our were shocked to learn that these new super heroes weren’t really heroes at all. They were all long-established members of the villainous Masters of Evil, and they had adopted these new guises to maneuver themselves into a position of trust and authority from which they could further their ambitions of power and conquest and wealth. That surprise hit readers like a freight train, and its success made us realize that this strange series that we’d cooked up was going to have a future—though again, nobody yet quite knew how much of a future it would turn out to be. In any event, because of the way the story was structured, the Thunderbolts appeared in issue #1 as a fully-formed unit in their new heroic guises, with no origin or backstory given (apart from a few off-handed words from the team’s leader, Citizen V, who was actually the nefarious Baron Helmut Zemo.) This first Annual came out shortly after issue #5, and in it, we decided to spell out all of that backstory we had skipped over. The in-story excuse for this recap was Jolt joining the Thunderbolts. She wasn’t a villain at all, she had been rescued by the T-Bolts and gained powers along the way, so she naturally wanted to join the group. The Bolts had no choice but to go along with this until they’d be able to get her away from public eyes and eliminate her, which added another complication to their situation, as Jolt had become quite popular with the public. So when she asks Citizen V about how the team came together, Zemo feeds her a sanitized version of events while the readers got to see how everything really went down. And this played itself out over a number of chapters, each one focusing on a single member of the Masters of Evil and each one illustrated by a guest artist. It was a pretty killer line-up we were able to put together for this book. Not only did Mark Bagley make the time to draw the framing sequence, but we had chapters along the way illustrated by Bob McLeod, Tom Grummett, Ron Randall, Gene Colan, Darick Robertson, Chris Marrinan and George Perez. If I’m not mistaken, this was the first time that Kurt and George worked together, presaging their run on AVENGERS by a number of months. So it was a pretty good package all around, and it came together at the point where it became clear that this wasn’t a title that was going to vanish in three or four issues, and that we’d at least be able to get through our first planned year. As things turned out, we were able to keep the series going for a much, much longer time, and even after its eventual demise, it’s continued to come back again and again. And now there’s a film in the works—and while it likely doesn’t have much to do with our original concept, I somehow take a bit more pride in its impending existence that I do even things like the CAPTAIN AMERICA: WINTER SOLDIER or CIVIL WAR movies, which were also inspired by stories I worked on but whose characters and premises I wasn’t involved in coming up with. THUNDERBOLTS was a thing that started with Kurt and Mark and, to a lesser degree, me.

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Another Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

Another series I worked on that was like THUNDERBOLTS in that it was something of an unlikely and surprise hit was YOUNG AVENGERS. The creation of Allan Heinberg and Jim Cheung, YOUNG AVENGERS introduced an entirely new cast of characters who functioned as sort of the NEW TEEN TITANS to the AVENGERS—the sidekicks and proteges that they never had before. Of course, there was a lot more to the premise and unfolding of the series than just that, but it was another book that everybody in the public had scant hopes for and figured would just sink like a stone, and which massively surprised them. But the difficulty for me was that, as far as I was concerned, Allan and Jim were YOUNG AVENGERS—the thing that made the series function and connect with people was their particular combination of talents. But Allan had a far better-paying career as a television and film writer, and Jim’s services were also in demand all over the place. So when the original run of the book ended, there was always a hunger for further YOUNG AVENGERS material, but without those creators in place, I wasn’t ready to start up another iteration of the series. (There was a brief moment when Jeph Loeb and Ian Churchill were going to take over when Allan and Jim wrapped up their run, but that fell apart largely because Jeph was hoping that Allan would be around to co-write—the two shared a writing studio during that period—but it just wasn’t possible.) Instead, for the longest time, I would stopgap by doing limited series that were usually connected in some respect to whatever Event series we had going on at the moment, produced by other people. So Zeb Wells and Stefano Caselli did CIVIL WAR: YOUNG AVENGERS AND RUNAWAYS, for example, and the RUNAWAYS editorial team got to return the favor during SECRET INVASION. There was also a DARK YOUNG AVENGERS limited series during DARK REIGN that introduced a whole bunch of new characters who were akin to the Dark Avengers that’d been assembled by Norman Osborn. That project was written by Paul Cornell and illustrated by Mark Brooks. Anyway, I kept holding out for another series by Jim and Allan, which I’d eventually get in what was released as AVENGERS: THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE a few years later. But the fans of the series were definitely getting peeved at me, just wanting more of what they wanted and not understanding the particular limitations that was preventing me from giving it to them. In any event, as we headed into the post-DARK REIGN era, there was another demand for further YOUNG AVENGERS projects. And not being able to get Allan and Jim to step back into the fray, this time I decided to go a different route. Rather than a single creative team, our six-issue series would have six. The book would be YOUNG AVENGERS PRESENTS, and each issue would spotlight a different member of the group and be produced by a different writer and artist combination. A bit of a challenge to assemble, but it seemed like a workable angle to me. And we god some very good people to work on YAP. But the issue that everybody seemed to enjoy the most was the last one, which came out fifteen years ago on June 25, 2008. It was written by Matt Fraction and illustrated by Alan Davis, and it represented the first full adventure shared by the new, young Hawkeye Kate Bishop and her namesake, Clint Barton. Nobody quite realized it at the time, but this issue was effectively like a quasi-issue #0 for the HAWKEYE series that Matt and David Aja would go on to produce together under the guidance of editor Stephen Wacker. This issue doesn’t quite have the same flavor as that later series, but the manner in which Clint and Kate interact is an obvious prototype for what would come next. Oh, Jim Cheung did do the covers for all six issues, each one of which featured the issue’s star Young Avenger in front of a montage of images of their inspiration from throughout Marvel history. Rather than do the easy thing and assemble these images from existing pick-up art, Jim challenged himself and duplicated all of those images by hand. That’s right, there isn’t a Don Heck or John Byrne or Jack Kirby or John Buscema line on that cover up there. It’s all Jim perfectly swiping their work to a flawless degree. That technical prowess knocks me out every time I think about it.

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Monofocus

Well, I did wind up seeing THE FLASH, which was a complete mess that still wound up being relatively entertaining, even as it made a series of ill-considered choices. I don’t really want to dogpile on its flaws, though, other people have done so ad nauseum these past couple of weeks. And like I said, for all that it was a mess, I didn’t have any trouble getting through it, and it had a bunch of good moments and beats as well. I maybe wasn’t as wowed by Michael Keaton’s return as many others were—no doubt that comes down to my large indifference to his BATMAN films, for all that they were a major thing when they came out. As much as anything, it was probably my affection for the character that kept things clicking along—that and the fact that Ezra Miller’s take on the character, while not the Barry Allen that I grew up with, had a certain goofball charm to him. (None of which even remotely excuses or mitigates their pre-release crime spree, of course.)

Elsewhere, the revival/updating of THE WONDER YEARS came back for its second season, and I’m happy to report that the first episode again showcased a vintage comic book appropriate to the period. That book was SUB-MARINER #14, in which Roy Thomas and Marie Severin resurrected the original Human Torch’s sidekick Toro before killing him off once more. I find it an enjoyable series, and I have a real fondness for the period that it’s set in (even if it wasn’t such a wonderful time in real life) so i expect I’ll be on board for the rest of the season’s run.

I also spent a portion of the last couple of days revisiting clips from NYPD BLUE, a series that I came to slightly late back in the 1990s but that I enjoyed a great deal for most of its run. I didn’t rewatch any full episodes, but rather I moved from greatest hit clip to clip through YouTube after the one came up for the final season episode in which Jimmy Smits returned for a guest spot as the late Bobby Simone, reaching out from beyond the grave to offer his old partner Dennis Franz’s Andy Sipowicz some much needed advice and guidance. I mean, look at this thing. It’s some top notch work, even if you’re not familiar with the series as a whole. I came into the show during Simone & Sipowicz, and stayed on through to the end, eventually catching up on the earlier David Caruso John Kelly episodes in reruns. It’s a show that I was very much into back in the day, and one whose absence I can still feel today. There’s really nothing airing at the moment that quite scratches that same itch. I’ve started to get a hankering to talk about some of my favorite programs of years gone by, so perhaps that’ll be a new feature that starts up around here at some point.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

I don’t think I wrote anything at the site tomorrow, which is yesterday for you! So here’s the Year’s Best list from December 2022. There ought to be something among it that’s to your liking!

Meanwhile, five years ago I wrote about JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #146 written by Steve Englehart.

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Next time I hope that we’ll be back to regular service around here, whatever that amounts to. In the meantime, keep your powder dry and we’ll look to see you again in a little bit over a week, my time!

Tom B