#66: Long Week's Journey Into Work

So I’m grabbing a little bit of rare time off this coming week thanks to a quirk of the way in which the local July 4th holiday has fallen. It’s on Tuesday, which meant that pretty much everybody in the office was going to want to take Monday off, because what’s the point in coming in for Monday and then having another day off—better to stretch that into a four-day weekend, right? Given that this was only going to give us all three days to get all of the week’s books completed, we made a tactical decision several weeks ago and built a double-ship week into our schedule—a week in which we sent two weeks’ worth of titles to the printer rather than just one. The end result of which is that I’m now looking at a week where nobody was going to be around on Monday and Tuesday anyway, and at a point where I had still maxed out my vacation time. So I figured screw it and decided to take the rest of the week off as well. Which will represent something of a challenge on a certain level, as I’m apt to get bored and listless without something to work on, especially for that much time. Just today, I blasted my way through three books I had stacked up, and while there are always plenty more where they came from, there is a limit to just how much reading one can do in a given week. I’m also intending to do a bit of a clean-up on the comics room which I’ve allowed to fall into disrepair during the pandemic. But I’m simultaneously dreading it, as my ability to shift long boxes around has diminished as I’ve gotten older, so it’s not impossible that paramedics will find my lifeless body buried in a collapsed run of ROM: SPACEKNIGHT or some such. But these are my totally lame and privileged problems.

As I mentioned last time, my wife and I went off to a wedding last weekend. it was actually a comic book wedding between two people who had met while working at Marvel, so I wound up seeing a bunch of familiar faces—most of whom I haven’t been in physical proximity to in literally years at this point. The entire affair had something of a comic book theme, and that extended to table assignments. In order to locate your seat among the dining spread, you had to dig through a box of comics to find the book that had been selected for you—and your place-setting contained a message on the back of it from the bride and groom about how they came to select that particular book for you, which was a pretty fun idea. (Not everybody in attendance was a comic book person, which made this even more interesting.) And I bring this up because the book that they’d pulled for me was SUPERMAN ANNUAL #9, the classic Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons story edited by Julie Schwartz in which Mongul attaches the Black Mercy to Superman’s chest, allowing him to see what his life might have been like had Krypton not exploded. Now, I had bought this book new when it had first come out, but as the pair explained as they did their circuit of the guests, while they figured that I must have already had it, it was the perfect selection for me, as the story was titled “For The Man Who Has Everything.” They were very happy with that connection and I must admit that it was clever. (For the record, my wife received an issue of AMETHYST—only because they couldn’t locate a suitable story with Clayface in it, in reference to my wife’s pottery work.)

On an unrelated note. Alan Davis asked me to post a correction on a previous item. A few weeks back, I made mention of the fact that Alan was retiring from doing comics, and that isn’t 100% accurate. While he’s not doing any regular series work, Alan is certainly still open to taking on covers and story assignments that strike his fancy. He mentioned that he’d heard from a couple editors in passing that he was now completely retired who had read that in this feature, so time to set the record straight. Fellow editors of the world: If you have cash in hand and you’re able to contact him with a job that he’s interested in, you may still be able to hire Alan Davis.

Time to hit up a few questions, I think:

Martin Hajovski

Hey Tom, after reading this, I went back to read The Twelve, and it brought up a question I have for you.

When the Twelve are captured by the Nazis in the siege of Berlin, there is a panel after they’re all unconscious where the head Nazi looks at Claire Voyant/Black Widow and the drawing shows him fondling/groping her breasts. Of course, this might well be what a bad guy would do, but I was wondering how the editing questions or discussions go (or in this case went) about whether it’s a scene that should be shown. Certainly, this is a situation, and the mind doesn’t have to stretch much to find even worse ones, that could happen anytime a hero is captured, female or male. But I suppose the editing question would be, “Does it have to be depicted in the context of telling this particular story?” Looking at that scene, I felt it did not meet that test, and instead was included for exploitive, prurient and/or power fantasy interests only. But that’s me. Were there discussions of that type when editing the book? Is that sort of discussion a common one?

I was curious about this once you brought it up as well, Martin, so I went into my files and excavated the script for that issue to see where that moment had come from. And here’s what I found:

PAGE NINE

PANEL ONE

It's later, and eleven of the twelve have each been put different cloth-covered gurneys.            Electro still stands off to one side.      Several of the gurneys are already being pushed into translucent cylindrical cryonic tubes.       Various german scientists and uniformed soldiers walk around them.

CAPTION

Most of what happened afterward I was able to piece together from records found later at the site.

(second) Much, much later.

SS OFFICER #1

You're sure these freezing tubes will work?

SCIENTIST

They have worked with mice, monkeys and jews...they should work here as well. We will move them out as soon as things have calmed down above-ground.

PANEL TWO

Another angle as Black Widow is readied to be pushed into the tube.  They're standing above and beside her.

SS OFFICER #1

Good.  It was one thing to SAY we were the Master Race...but after we dissect these specimens and learn their secrets, the next time we shall actually BE a master race, powerful beyond imagining.

SCIENTIST

Do you really think there will BE a next time, Herr General?

PANEL THREE

The SS officer is copping a feel of the Black Widow's breast.

SS OFFICER #1

Oh, yes, Herr Doktor. (second)

For such men as ourselves, there is ALWAYS a next time.

PANEL FOUR

The SS officer is looking at Electro, immobile against the wall.

SS OFFICER #1

And what of THIS one, then?

SCIENTIST

Harmless.  The signal that controls him cannot penetrate this far beneath the ground.    We will disassemble

him before we ship him off with the others.

PANEL FIVE

Good....

SS OFFICER #1

He and the other scientists head out, showing all of the heroes now in cryonic suspension.

SS OFFICER #1

...then we need only hide ourselves, and wait until the smoke clears.

Once the Americans have won here, their attention will waver as they turn to deal with Japan.       There will then be no one to stop us.

PANEL SIX

Past the heroes to the door, the lights off now inside, so that all we have for illumination is the light streaming past the SS officer silhouetted in the doorway, and small colored display lights in the cryo tubes and around the lab.

SS OFFICER #1

Heil Hitler.

CAPTION

They had planned everything down to the last detail, leaving nothing to chance.

(second)

There was only one thing they hadn't counted on.

So the moment in question wasn’t anything that was improvised by artist Chris Weston, but rather had been asked for specifically by J. Michael Straczynski. As JMS noted in the initial pitch that I printed a week or two back, he approached THE TWELVE as being spiritually similar to WATCHMEN—it was a serious endeavor for him—and that was going to mean perhaps a bit more realism in its depictions of violence and sexual content. I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but at a guess, that moment was more about vilifying the Nazis than any prurient interests. That said, at the end of the day, I was the editor, and so it’s ultimately my responsibility that this moment saw print. Would I do it that way today? Probably not. By that same token, while I’m sure there was some reaction somewhere, this is the first time I can recall anybody objecting to it. Which doesn’t excuse anything, or course, but maybe puts the matter at least into some kind of context.

Glen Cadigan

Speaking of unfinished/unpublished Killraven stories, what about Don McGregor's fully scripted (but not fully illustrated) KILLRAVEN: FINAL BATTLES, FINAL LIES, FINAL TRUTHS which he still hopes might be finished one day? Apparently, P. Craig Russell has already drawn some of it.

I’m not familiar with this project, Glen. And I kind of have to assume that if I don’t know about it, nobody else at Marvel does either, given that everybody else is a much newer hire than I am. I have no doubt that Don has more KILLRAVEN stories in him, but if he spoke to anybody at Marvel about doing this, it was doubtless many years ago now. So it would really be up to him to get in contact with folks and to pitch his ideas. I don’t know that there’s a huge and waiting audience for a new KILLRAVEN project so concretely tethered to the 1970s incarnation, but you never know.

JV

In terms of YOUNG AVENGERS - I loved that series and was one of those readers that lost interest when it did not return on the shelves for a long time..do you think it is better to keep a series going with new/fill in teams so as to keep 'momentum' going? Keeping it on the stands and on readers 'eyes'/attention than waiting for a high level creative team to come back?

I’m sure some creators and readers could never follow Stan and Jack on certain Marvel titles but despite highs and lows the comics went on and gave us some classic moments (obviously the industry has changed since then...but interesting trend to get your thoughts on).

I think this inevitably depends on the specific series in question, JV. To me, the specific qualities and point of view that had made YOUNG AVENGERS a series of note resided squarely with Allan and Jim—and so while there still remained a possibility of them returning to the characters and doing more with them(as they eventually did) I wasn’t in any huge rush to just put out any old YOUNG AVENGERS stories in the meantime. Was that a mistake? Maybe. But I feel as though any good will that the series has today is due at least in part from our decision to do so. On the flipside, after Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona and company wrapped up RUNAWAYS, that series continued under a number of different creative teams, some of them very big talents. But pretty much all of that later work has been forgotten and really done nothing to enhance the reputation of that series. It’s the BKV RUNAWAYS that most people think of and have good feelings towards. So I don’t know that that approach served that series any better than what we did with YOUNG AVENGERS served it.

Kevin Hines

Hmmm. I don’t know anything about comic strip syndicated books when it comes to ownership rights, but I wonder if Superman had been a strip first would Siegel & Shuster have owned their character? And/or would it have been as popular without all the other creators who jumped in at DC?

It’s almost 100% unlikely that Siegel and Shuster would have owned SUPERMAN outright had they been able to syndicate it in the 1930s, Kevin. That still wasn’t quite how that business was set up. And in terms of the newspaper syndication, the team did receive more or less all of the revenue derived from the strip itself as a part of their deal, so they wouldn’t have made any more money there. What they might have had, though, was a much larger piece of any further revenue from the licensing or the film and radio productions and so forth. And they would have perhaps had more control over their material, especially after establishing a track record on the strip. And I tend to think that it would have been popular if it had debuted as a newspaper feature first—certainly, way moreso than the comic books of the period, having Superman take flight in the daily and Sunday newspaper so rapidly cemented his public awareness and popularity. It’s really the bit of media that made the character a breakout success. As for the other folks who worked on Superman, at least from an artistic perspective most of those people were hired by Siegel and Shuster as it was .Now, maybe Jerry’s instincts for the character wouldn’t have connected quite so much with a radio audience or some such, but I expect that they would have done fine with it, and hired whomever they needed to in order to maintain production as needed.

Montana Mott

I've read your Blah Blah Blog writing from that time period before Children's Crusade where you were meeting fans demands to see the Young Avengers by having them show up in events and such with creative teams not named Heinberg and Cheung. However, I don't believe you have ever posted any of your thoughts on what led to the decision to launch a full-on Young Avengers run in 2013 with Gillen/McKelvie. By then was it known Heinberg/Cheung were too busy to return again so new creatives were the way to go? Were you still as involved in 2013 with the Young Avengers as you had been in the prior decade?

Well, the big change for me, Mott, was that Allan and Jim had by then returned and done AVENGERS: THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE to finish up their run. So while it was always possible that they could come back to do more, they were for the moment finished with the story that they wanted to do. But that same token, from a personal point of view I felt like the bar had been set at such a high level on the series that I wasn’t enthusiastic about fielding a new team. Which is why I wound up passing the book over to my Associate Editor Lauren Sankovitch. It was Lauren who brought Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie on board, and the work they did together redefined YOUNG AVENGERS for a later generation. Today, when fans enthuse about the wonderfulness of YOUNG AVENGERS, most often they’re speaking about Kieron and Jamie’s work, rather than Allan and Jim’s. So Lauren did a great job with it—a job I couldn’t have done.

Clive Reston

This may be too big a question to address (or you may disagree with its premise!), but: FEAR ITSELF--what happened there, creatively and editorially? It had excellent creators and a bunch of interesting tie-ins, but the central story itself seems to have gone awry somehow; a lot of its major plot points were immediately reversed, and it didn't have anything like the long-term impact of, say, SECRET INVASION or CIVIL WAR. Did something get lost along the way?

You’re right that this is probably too big a question for a Q & A answer, Clive. And additionally, I’d need some more specifics concerning your feelings about what you thought didn’t work about FEAR ITSELF. The generic “what happened?” doesn’t give me enough to go on—there’s clearly some specific stuff that you’re reacting to, but I can’t tell what it is exactly. What I can say in the brief space we have to us here is that, for my money, FEAR ITSELF was at least partially undone by Marvel feeling skittish about the marketplace in general at that time, to the point where the promotion for the series was always well out ahead of the story, to the detriment of the reading experience. Before the first issue even came out, everybody knew that it would involve other characters getting other hammers and even saw who those characters would be and what they would look like in their empowered forms. Since the first issue ends with the hammers falling Earthward, this meant that the audience was constantly frustrated that the story was lagging behind what they already knew was going to happen, leading to the reading experience being frustrating for them.

Manqueman

I stumbled across this:

https://screenrant.com/invincible-creator-interview-marvel-criticism-why-writers-complain/

While I’d never dispute a creator’s feelings, Kirkman’s story here has a lot of trouble passing the smell test, particularly that thing about being given $5,000 to produce... I’m not sure what exactly.

And back to that smell test: I have no idea what the (alleged(?)) program even was.

Tom, can you share any light on this? The more I ruminate on it, the more confused I get.

I didn’t read this piece, Manqueman, but I can tell you with a certainty what it refers to. And that is the Epic Comics initiative that I wrote about here some weeks past. Like Project: Greenlight, Epic was an initiative to give promising new creators an opportunity to do work for Marvel, where they’d be paid a flat packaging fee to produce a project. (It was more than $5000, but I don’t know the context of what Robert is speaking of here.) And it was a fiasco that went pear-shaped almost immediately and required a week’s dedicated time from the editorial staff simply to clear through the backlog of prospective submissions. I’m not surprised that Robert felt burned by the experience, even though his SLEEPWALKER book was one of the few Epic projects to actually make it to print. But that’s what this is all about. There’s a bit more detail in the earlier write-up I did on the initiative if you can just locate it among our sixty-plus back issues.

Jason Holtzman

General college life has actually made me interested in your thoughts on something -- Marvel Unlimited! It seems great for the consumer (in terms of saving money), but I can’t imagine it’s super helpful for new comics overall? It appears to me that success is mostly measured by physical issue sales (with an emphasis on pre-orders), so I’m curious to hear what a comic creator who’s books could be affected by Unlimited thinks about it. Do you think it’s helpful or detrimental, or are their trade offs that make it more of a gray area? Where’s all the money even go?

I can’t speak to this as a creator, Jason, but as an editor, I’m happy to take your money and your time in whatever form you’re happy to give them to me, so in a practical sense it really doesn’t matter whether you buy the single issues, the collection (hard or softcover), the digital copy or read the thing on Marvel Unlimited. It’s all good and it all helps the book. There isn’t any particular downside to reading on Marvel Unlimited.

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Behind the Curtain

.Here’s a piece that I found in John Romita’s files when I was working on the ART OF JOHN ROMITA hardcover back in 1996.

This was a pitch image for a “Spidey Kids” series that John had done up in the late 1960s, circa 1968. At the time, with super heroes waning a bit following the mid-60s explosion of interest in the them, Marvel and other companies were looking for new genres to move into, and kid comics were one of those potential areas. But John said that he could never get Stan Lee interested in the idea, and so the series died on the vine. But it’s still a pretty cool drawing.

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Pimp My Wednesday

Waiting to chase away your post-fireworks doldrums, assuming that you live in the U.S. For other countries, apply your own doldrums as needed.

CLOBBERIN’ TIME #5 by Steve Skroce wraps up this action-oriented and visually spectacular series in fun form. The idea here was really to do a project with a strong visual component to it, but Steve also brought a lot of humor and heart to his story. It looks great, it’s breezy and fun and it’ll remind you of the sorts of comics you used to read on a hot summer day when you were young.

Meanwhile, FANTASTIC FOUR #9 is another experimental issue in a string of experimental issues, courtesy of writer Ryan North and artist Ivan Fiorelli. It’s the second half to our first genuine two-parter, but it’s unique in that this issue is narrated completely by Alicia Masters and is largely told from her perspective. And if you’re wondering how that all works, pick up a copy and find out! Plus, more of the outstanding character find of 2023, Flame-O!

And over on AVENGERS UNLIMITED, Jeremy Adams and Patch Zircher continue to pit Tony Stark and Steve Rogers against one another as they work to recover a purloined computer drive in a story that could only have been called “Civil Score”.

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Three Comic Books On Sale 60 Years Ago Today, July 2, 1963

Boy, this is a monstrously important date in Marvel history, isn’t it? Sixty years ago today, the first issues of both AVENGERS #1 and X-MEN #1 made their debut on newsstands around the world. As the story goes, AVENGERS was created as an emergency replacement for another title, DAREDEVIL, which was meant to come out at this point but artist Bill Everett had run into delivery problems. Accordingly, editor Stan Lee and artist and main plotter Jack Kirby put together a team book featuring all of the solo characters they’d come up with so far. Even the villain, Loki, was a pre-existing piece, the better to be able to jam through the production rapidly in order to make the release date. This also explains, in a way, why Spider-Man and Doctor Strange, both of whom existed by this point, weren’t included: they were Steve Ditko characters rather than Kirby characters, and so would have required a bit more coordination than was welcome at that point. But Kirby knew these five heroes intimately and was able to hit the ground running. I wrote about the genesis of AVENGERS #1 a bit more at length over at my website, and in doing so got a bit of pushback on the notion that AVENGERS #1 was conceived after X-MEN #1. There’s certainly a bit of evidence to the contrary, enough so that I can lend the theory credence without necessarily subscribing to it in total myself just yet. As I understand it, X-MEN #1 was created, just as DAREDEVIL #1 was, in response to a directive from Marvel publisher Martin Goodman. The company’s two great success stories, far out ahead of everything else even then, were FANTASTIC FOUR and SPIDER-MAN. Goodman had a publishing approach: find something that works, put out a lot of things like it, make a killing in the short term, cancel everything when sales slow down. So what he wanted from his editor Stan Lee was another FANTASTIC FOUR and another SPIDER-MAN—and that’s what X-MEN and DAREDEVIL were created to be. Not literally, but figuratively, on the surface. The X-Men were a team of heroes in identical costumes who battled a Doctor Doom-like armored enemy and who fit into certain proscribed personality roles, at least at first. And Daredevil was a street-level wise-cracking acrobatic crime-fighter. Kirby and Lee, of course, infused X-MEN with a bit more specificity than that, even if their concept didn’t really get embraced and catch on until the late 1970s and 1980s.As if that wasn’t enough, the very first FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL also came out on this same day. It wasn’t 100% new material—there was an 11 page reprint of the origin of the Fantastic Four from FF #1 (with a bunch of artwork altered by production man Sol Brodsky to make the characters resemble their modern incarnations) but other than that, the thing was all new and represented a big change in the team’s ongoing rivalry with their enemy Namor the Sub-Mariner, who had been resurrected from the Golden Age of Comics as a villain. At 37 pages, it represented the longest single story done by Marvel up to this point, and also included the first double-page spread of the era as well. And it was backed up by a cool gallery of villains, a question and answer section dealing with the four stars, and an expansion of the FF’s first meeting with Spider-Man which had appeared in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #1 some time earlier. It was a hell of a package. Now, Jack Kirby didn’t draw all of this work in the space of a month, he was able to space it out for a longer period of time. But right there is something like 70+ pages of material dropping in a single week. And that doesn’t even include the other books he did that month, like the regular FANTASTIC FOUR issues or covers across the line. truly, the man was a creative dynamo.

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A Magazine On Sale 55 Years Ago Today, July 2, 1968

THE ADVENTURS OF PUSYCAT was a one-shot black and white magazine that collected a number of installments of the strip of the same name that had run in a bevy of Marvel publisher Martin Goodman’s men’s girlie magazines. It was less titilating than Playboy’s Little Annie Fanny but it was meant to be cut from the same cloth—and with comic book publishers beginning to test the waters of the black and white magazine format as a way to circumnavigate the restrictions of the Comics Code, somebody thought it was a good (and cheap, since it was largely reprints) idea. The painted cover was done by Bill Everett and an assortment of artists worked on the interiors, including Wally Wood and Jim Mooney. I showcase it in a bit more detail at this link. Technically, this wasn’t a Marvel release at all, but rather published through one of Goodman’s Magazine Management shell companies. But the work was all done through Marvel, so even without any overt markings, it’s still part of the company’s output of the era. And there’s no missing Stan’s distinctive brand of cover copy. 1968 was a time when Marvel had switched distributors and so the cap on their output that Goodman had struggled with for a decade had been lifted—just in time for the marketplace to go soft. But this is why the split-titles such as TALES OF SUSPENSE spun off their characters into full solo books of their own at this point, why new projects such as the SILVER SURFER series in an oversized format and SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN as a black and white magazine were attempted, and why PUSSYCAT got the green light. It was all systems go on expansion and experimentation for Marvel.

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

WONDER WOMAN had been something of a flagging series throughout the 1960s, but with this issue, a massive reinvention was undertaken. The book had been edited by Robert Kanigher since the demise of the Amazon’s creator William Moulton Marston, and he had guided it in increasingly silly and juvenile directions ever since. It was a series whose disdain for its audience wasn’t even concealed at all much of the time, and in fan circles it was always a the top of any “title most in need of improvement” lists. Plus, the times were changing, and so here was an opportunity to maybe steer into the zeitgeist of the era a little bit. This first issue of the new WONDER WOMAN isn’t actually much of a departure for all that the cover makes this out to be a seismic moment. In the course of the story, Diana Prince goes undercover in modern Mod-influenced gear as part of a mission, and that’s about it. But bigger changes were in the offing a month later. There, the Amazons withdrew to another dimension in order to rejuvenate their immortality, and in remaining behind on Man’s world, Diana was forced to give up all of her superhuman abilities. In their place, she is trained in the martial arts by a blind Asian mentor called I-Ching, opens up a fashionable boutique, and operates as a freelance crime-buster and secret agent clearly influenced by Diana Rigg’s Emma Peel in the British television series THE AVENGERS, which had started airing in the U.S. Oh, and the long-suffering Steve Trevor was killed off, granting Diana the ability to have romantic liaisons with a number of other characters as her adventures progressed. It was about as radical a reimagining of a popular long-running series as had ever been done—it makes Julie Schwartz’s revamp of Batman in 1964 look like little more than a change of clothes. And it worked, at least for a time. The revamp was the work of writer Denny O’Neil and artist Mike Sekowsky—Sekowsky appears to have been more instrumental in it, as he shortly hereafter replaced Jack Miller as the title’s editor and wound up writing most of the subsequent stories as well as illustrating them. And that’s a hell of a strong cover by Sekowsky and inker Dick Giordano.

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Monofocus

I’m very much hyped up for the impending return of FUTURAMA on Hulu in a couple of weeks, as it had been a favorite of mine when it was airing new back in the day. And sure, the mid-2010s revival was maybe not quite as consistently sharp, but the show’s return is still welcome in my eyes. Even at its weakest, it was a very smart, very heartfelt series that showed the dedication of all involved.

In terms of shows that have actually come out already, like everybody else I’ve been enjoying the hell out of the second season of THE BEAR, also on Hulu. And I’m hard-pressed to put my finger on exactly why. Because it’s consistently one of the tensest programs ever broadcast, wither the situation is some dining crisis or a holiday with the family. But the writing is so good and the acting is so strong that the episodes go by in a shot and leave a lasting impression. I’m not completely through the season just yet, but I think it may be even stronger than its freshman effort, which is saying something. And the guest-star-laden Christmas episode was a masterpiece from end-to-end—one that can be enjoyed (if that’s even the right word for it) without having seen the rest of the series. But I was somehow even more affected by the following episode, in which perennial useless fuck-up Richie is sent to work at the literal best restaurant in the world for a week, and find a measure of satisfaction and accomplishment in what he is doing.

And in preparation for today’s series finale, I’ve been cannonballing through a rewatch of the second season (or cour as it’s known in Japan) of MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM: THE WITCH FROM MERCURY, which has been an absolutely stellar piece of work that is both unlike any previous GUNDAM outing and which simultaneously contains a very pure GUNDAM experience. It maybe helps that the show is half the length of a typical GUNDAM series, which means that it needs to move its plot, both physical and emotional, forward at a much brisker clip than usual. But especially given all of the concern for more years than I can count about having a GUNDAM show starring a female lead protagonist, the fact that WITCH has been such a strong success story bodes well for the future of the franchise. (And after several years during which the franchise abandoned stories about the cost and horrors of war for tales of young model-makers competing in virtual reality combat, it’s nice to get a GUNDAM show that’s actually about what GUNDAM is meant to be about.) I find that I am somehow wildly invested in the story of the bright-eyed and borderline-autistic Suletta Mercury and her relationship with the complex and intense Miorine Rembran. And both the opening and closing themes rock—I’ve had them playing as background noise relatively constantly during my working day. Anyway, this is the last Suletta Sunday we’re going to have, so I’m standing by to enjoy the hell out of it in just a few hours.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I did a piece on an article from the LADIES HOME JOURNAL in 1953 about the destructive content of comics books as written by Frederic Wertham.

And five years ago, I wrote about this issue of BLACK LIGHTNING guest-starring Superman.

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That ought to do us for another week, folks! As usual, thanks for stopping by and spending a few moments reading through all of this nonsense. I’ll be back again in another week with more of the same!

Tom B