#67: Fifty Years of Comics

The cover you see there is for SUPERMAN #268, a thoroughly unremarkable issue to anybody but me. The cover was drawn by the great Nick Cardy from what must have been a relatively complete sketch by National Periodical Publications’ Publisher Carmine Infantino, who designed many of the covers that were then being done. The book was released on July 5, 1973, which makes it more than fifty years old today. And it’s consequential because it was the first comic book that I ever bought, which means that, as of this writing, I have now been a regular comic book reader for half a century.

I’ve told the story before, but just to reiterate for anybody who may not have heard it: growing up in the 1970s, my father was a heavy smoker. That nicotine addiction was one of the things that would contribute to killing him at the young age of 41 years. But that was still well off in the distance in 1973. Anyway, in order to keep up with his habit, he would routinely stop by the local 7-11 in our neighborhood to pick up cartons of cigarettes, Pall Malls, his brand of choice. At the time, I was only six years old, not yet in school but relatively bright for my age. And on that day, for whatever reason, the 7-11s spinner rack had been moved from its usual location towards the back by the magazine racks to instead up towards the front, where the register was set up. So it was that my attention was caught by the bright colors as we waited in the short line to purchase smokes. Little realizing the dire consequences of the decision he was about to impulsively make, my father took note of my interest and asked me if I wanted a comic book. He may as well have asked if I wanted a first hit of crack. And so I quickly scoured the rack—I can still recall other covers that were on it that day, most notably JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #107—but I wound up going with a safe choice, the issue of SUPERMAN that you see above. While I had never to my knowledge watched the character on television or anything, you couldn’t be six years old in 1973 and not know who Superman was.

Anyway, we bought the book, and I read it with the help of my mother. I could already read at this point, but a comic book’s vocabulary was still a bit beyond my grasp. I also didn’t have any patience for captions, they seemed like a waste of time to me, and so I skipped them routinely. Even when bits of the story made no sense to me, I would never go back and check out the captions. This was the sort of contrarian reader that I was. And while the book contains a completely forgettable pair of stories, I was somehow totally hooked, and began asking for additional comic books whenever the occasion presented itself.

I’ve written about this issue more at length over at my website at this link and a bit more about that first purchase here. And now it’s been an incredible fifty years since those events took place, which is amazing to me. To put it in perspective, at that moment, Superman himself had only been around for 35 years.

Speaking of the Man of Steel, I devoted a decent portion of my time off this week to expanding upon a pet research project of time. I find the story of the early years of Superman enthralling, especially how in a pre-mass media era the character exploded everywhere almost at once, becoming an all-consuming fad that changed the very landscape of children’s media. Because of the manner in which Superman was appearing simultaneously in comic books, as a newspaper strip, on the radio, in cartoons and elsewhere, it can be difficult to pull together an accurate picture of how the character and the strip developed. So I’ve undertaken a research project where I’ve been charting every street date, every piece of surviving correspondence, every air date and putting them all into a comprehensive timeline that encompasses Superman’s development over his first twenty years, from 1932-1952. As just a hint of the flavor so you can get a sense if it, here’s a brief excerpt covering May of 1940:

May 1 – Whit Ellsworth sends Jerry Siegel a letter complaining about recent artwork. He requests a cover sketch for SUPERMAN #6

May 2 – Jack Liebowitz sends a letter to Jerry Siegel, including a payment of $520. Complains about the recent artwork and mentions that “the new artist” (Jack Burnley) has started working. Mentions that rights have been sold to Repubic for $8000, and that Macy’s is spending $15,000 on a Superman balloon for the parade

May 3 – NICKEL COMICS #1. Bulletman debts

May 8 – Chicago Daily News prints “A National Disgrace” excoriating the content of comic books and calling out Superman semi-directly.

May 8 – Jerry Siegel writes Jack Liebowitz asking for another page rate increase for Superman in view of its tremendous success, Siegel also wants his and Joe’s 5% of all other exploitation increased to 25%

May 10 – SUPERMAN #5. Luthor. Luthor has gray hair in this story rather than red. First mention of Superman’s costume being indestructible, made of a special fabric he invented. Superman uses his ability to reshape his features for the first time. Paul Cassidy and Wayne Boring ghost for Joe Shuster. Assistant Editor: Murray Boltinoff

May 11 – NEW YORK WORLD’S FAIR COMICS #2. First cover featuring both Superman and Batman. Story drawn by Jack Burnley. First Superman story drawn outside of the Siegel & Shuster shop.  Editor: Whit Ellsworth

May 13 – “The Unknown” Strikes begins in the daily SUPERMAN Newspaper strip

May 13 – Buffalo Hills begins on the Superman Radio series. Superman uses Telescopic Vision.

May 21 – ALL-AMERICAN COMICS #16. Green Lantern begins.

May 23 – ACTION COMICS #26. Art ghosted by Paul Cassidy and Paul Lauretta

May 27 – Alonzo Craig, arctic Explorer begins on the Superman Radio series

May 29 – Writing work commences on ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN Republic Serial

May 30: ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN is shown on Republic’s yearly upcoming release schedule

The actual timeline is color-coded in a manner that isn’t possible to duplicate here. I’ve still got a ways to go to get everything completed, but it’s a lot closer to finished now than it was at the top of the week.

Anyway, enough about me. Let’s take a look at some of your questions from this past week.

Jeff Ryan

When I got hard copies of a magazine I'd edited, I always hated to flip through it. Either I wouldn't find something wrong, or (with the cursed goggles of impotence) I'd find something, and it'd be too late to do anything about it. We fixed that v16 typo in v17...but then sent the v16 file. A typo jumps out. Image captions have been switched, a font didn't load, insert your own worst-case scenario.

What do you do when you receive hard copies?

Well, Jeff, working remotely as we’ve been doing for the past couple of years, I don’t typically get to see hard copies until much later on in the process. Marvel will ship me out a set of comps once a month that’ll include a copy of pretty much every comic and collection we put out. But in the days before Covid, I was a bit of a terror, especially to the folks who put together our collected edition. Through some fluke of luck, I seemingly had the ability to pick up any new collection, open it to a random page, and turn right to wherever the mistake in that volume had been made. Seriously, I did this again and again, much to the consternation of the folks putting those books together. For my own releases, though, I’m always happy to receive and to flip through the printed copies.

J. Kevin Carrier

Your response to Glen about KILLRAVEN made perfect sense, but it also broke my heart a little. I guess this is why I'm a fan and not a pro, but to me, new McGregor KILLRAVEN is a no-brainer, especially if there was a chance Craig Russell would come back to draw it. Has there ever been a case when you thought a project had questionable marketability, but you went ahead and did it just because you thought it was so good? Conversely, are there pitches that you passed on for logical reasons that, looking back, you wish you had approved?

I would say, Kevin, that the best example of a project into which a whole lot of effort and time was spent that probably would have been better saved was in the completion of the Steve Gerber and Kevin Nowlan MAN-THING graphic novel. The project had been begun back in the mid-1980s, but there were a series of reasons why work stalled out on the thing. And every once in a while over the intervening years, some editor or another would attempt to get it moving again. They might even have a little bit of luck for a moment or two. But then it would stall out again. Finally, it was editor Mark Paniccia around 2012 who put his mind and his back into it and got the project completed. By this point, Gerber himself had passed on, and there was as little interest in Man-Thing as a character as it’s possible to imagine. So the book, divided into individual issues in an attempt to recoup some of the project’s costs, sold poorly and then vanished without a trace. It’s still a gold star on Paniccia’s resume as far as I’m concerned, but that is certainly a case where people may as well have not bothered—the moment for that story had passed. In the same way that I’m afraid the moment for more McGregor and Russell KILLRAVEN probably has. It’s a noteworthy strip, but one that is largely forgotten today apart from a relatively small pool of hardcore older fans.

Chris Sutcliffe

A question for you: A writer that you work with and trust comes up to you with a story that involves the death of a major character. Not title-character big, but an impactful character; think an Alicia Masters or a J Jonah Jameson. The story they pitch is brilliant and the death would be worthwhile.

What are the next steps for you as an editor? Are major changes like deaths run up a flagpole? Do you work with the writer to ensure the death has an "out", to bring the character back if needed? What are your considerations?

I think you’re maybe stacking the deck here a little bit, Chris, in order to get the response that you’re looking for. But we’ll go with it. I don’t know that anybody could easily convince me that killing off Alicia Masters would end up as anything other than a net loss for the series regardless of how good that one story might be (see the death of Aunt May in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #400 for another example like this one). But if I was committed to doing it, I would let people up the chain of command know about it through Editor in Chief C.B. Cebulski. And if there were something crucial going on somewhere in some other line of business that concerned Alicia Masters, we’d become aware of that and then work out how to proceed. But for the most part, if I wanted to kill off Alicia and I thought the story was worth doing and could convince others that my thinking was sound, that would pretty much be the end of it, and she’d be toast. And no, we wouldn’t necessarily be worried about building in a way for her to return—while you might do that if you knew that the death in question was a temporary situation that you planned to reverse at some point (like the death of Steve Rogers after CIVIL WAR) then you might do, but for a death that you intended on being final, you woulnd’t do any such thing. At the end of the day, in the world of comics there’s always a way to bring characters back again if you want to hard enough.

ComicbookDad531

Hi Tom, I love the newsletter and I was wondering if you would ever run the editor game like you did on Tumblr ( I think it was Tumblr?) I don’t know if I would be creative enough to participate in it but I thought it was a fascinating business experiment while providing insight into how the comic biz works currently.

I tried doing a version of this game over at the website a while back, Mike. You can read the results for yourself starting here. What I found was that the decrease in move frequency from daily to weekly really impacted on the game play in a negative fashion. The whole thing simply took too long. And I don’t have the time or energy left to me to run this sort of scenario on a daily basis like I did on the earlier Marvel.com Blog games (nor do I have the same massive and dedicated audience as I did there.) So while it isn’t impossible, I would really need to some up with some new way to approach it to make it less time-consuming and more interesting and entertaining all around.

Jimmy Callaway

Hi, Tom, apologies if this has been answered before, but: I enjoy the Infinity comics on Marvel Unlimited, but I wonder why the current Blade series seems to be dropping at a rate of one a week, yet the new Brute Force series (sidebar: !!) seems to have dropped all at once. No big whoop, just curious.

Well, Jimmy, we release different stories differently depending on the needs and expectations for them. I don’t really know why these were done that way, but if I had to hazard a guess, I would speculate that people may have felt that BRUTE FORCE was an obscure enough property where it wasn’t going to have as easy a time bringing readers back week after week for an extended run, and so the decision was made to release it all at once. Whereas Blade is a bit more of a known quantity and may have seemed more likely to be able to draw an audience back to itself week after week.

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Behind the Curtain

What you see below is another lost cover image, this one by Olivier Coipel and Mark Morales and intended for NEW AVENGERS ANNUAL #1.

.Now that’s a super-nice Coipel piece, right? So why didn’t it get used? Simple enough. The big event that was going to take place in NEW AVENGERS ANNUAL #1 was the wedding of Luke Cage and Jessica Jones, picking up from their status quo at the end of THE PULSE series. That wedding was something that readers were interested in, and it became the hook of the marketing on the book. So we had Olivier do a new cover image centered on the marriage, and that became the eventual cover. I think we intended that we might use this cover someplace else, but as sometimes happens, no good place to use it ever turned up—it’s a bit too story-specific for that. I can remember considering using it as the image for the recap page but essentially not wanting to waste it there.

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Pimp My Wednesday

Not too many new releases from us this week. But what they lack in number they make up in size.

Case in point, our 25th issue of MOON KNIGHT is a monster, featuring a 70 page all-new story by writer Jed MacKay and artists Alessandro Cappuccio, Alessandro Vitti and Partha Pratim. It’s effectively a graphic novel, and it introduces the MU version of Layla El-Faouly to the comics world. it also sets up next week’s limited series MOON KNIGHT: CITY OF THE DEAD. And as a special bonus, it also includes a classic Moon Knight tale from back in the day by Doug Moench and Bill Sienkiewicz. Steve McNiven even came back to execute the cover for this one. Who would have thought that our new MOON KNIGHT series would las this long and still keep on going?

And over on AVENGERS UNLIMITED, we feature the unlikely pairing of he Black Widow and Wonder Man, as Simon Williams shadows Natasha as research for a role he’s hoping to take on. It’s written by Sean Kelly McKeever and illustrated by David Baldeon, and this is only chapter one, so expect to hear more about it in the weeks to come.

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A Comic Book On Sale 20 Years Ago Today, July 9, 2003

We’ve talked a lot about Marvel’s ill-fated EPIC Comics rollout of 2003 in the past couple of weeks, so I don’t really want to beat a dead horse on this stuff. But I just couldn’t let this first issue of TROUBLE pass without telling you the little bit that I know about it. The story was that TROUBLE was a crazy idea pitched to publisher Bill Jemas and editor in chief Joe Quesada by the creative team of Mark Millar and Terry Dodson, an attempt to bring back the genre of romance comics in a modern idiom. And that, inspired by their efforts, Bill and Joe decided to make TROUBLE not a Marvel book but instead the opening rollout title for their new EPIC line. The problem is, this story is almost entirely false. I’m not sure who came up with the initial idea for the story that became TROUBLE—it may very well have been Mark, though it’s equally likely to have been a notion that caught Joe’s fancy. I remember him being really enthused about the idea. He was always attracted to any idea that seemed a little bit dangerous and transgressive, and so the notion that May Parker, Peter’s doting Aunt who had taken care of him all these years, was actually secretly his birth mother was an idea that sparked with him, wherever it came from. And I believe it was Bill who decided to make it the first EPIC book—largely because he wanted a big commercial hit to kick off the new line, which would be mostly made up of submissions from newcomers outside of the usual Marvel system. This was a way of giving those books some legitimacy. As opposed to those applicants, however, Mark and Terry were of course paid their regular Marvel rates for their work on TROUBLE, not the flat lump sum that was being offered the newcomers. The covers to this series, which had nothing to do with the contents, can only be described as troubling. I can remember that there were proof sheets from the photo shoot with these two barely-legal models floating around up at the offices, making at least some of the folks there feel a bit queasy. In the end, too, the creative team blinked, having gotten enough pushback from the fans as they became aware of the likely outcome that the final issue of the project was changed so as to make it clear that this was all happening to some other group of people somewhere else, and had nothing to do with the lineage of Spider-Man at all. Mark, I know, doesn’t talk about it much, and while I don’t want to put words into his mouth, that seems like a sign that it’s not a piece that he’s especially proud of or attached to. The thing is, the actual story execution isn’t really all that terrible, for all that it turns on being shocking and transgressive. So it wasn’t a bad project per se, just maybe a misguided one. And it was a square peg hammered into a round hole for reasons having little to do with its reasons for being.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

At the same time as TROUBLE, I was putting out my very first centennial issue of FANTASTIC FOUR, #500, which also saw print on July 9, 2003. This was the climax to “Unthinkable”. the big Doctor Doom story masterminded by the creative team of Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo. I’ve been told by more than a few readers over the years that it was this storyline that really put the Waid and Wieringo run on the map with audiences. It was a deliberately upsetting sequence—we were constantly being pushed to make the material more and more intense and unsettling during this period, more likely to garner some attention by pushing the boundaries. That wasn’t really what Mark and Mike were trying to do in general, but we definitely availed ourselves of the greater environment of permissiveness to push certain elements in that direction. But I still feel like it’s a comic that I could give to any FANTASTIC FOUR reader in good conscience, regardless of age. Anyway, this issue gave me the excuse to restore the original issue numbering, which had been broken back when the Heroes Reborn project started half a decade earlier, and I took full advantage of that opportunity. In addition, as a way of bringing in a bit of additional revenue for the outfit, we also put out an upscale Director’s Cut edition of FANTASTIC FOUR #500, released at the same time. While the regular book carried the lovely Paolo Rivera painted cover you see above and contained the full story, the Director’s Cut instead featured an all-new Mike Wieringo foil cover of Doom, and contained and additional 16 pages of behind-the-scenes material. This included bits of changed script and altered pencils, character designs and commentary from both Mark and Mike, a two-page Fred Hembeck celebratory strip, Stan Lee’s synopsis for FANTASTIC FOUR #1 from 1961 and a throwaway gag strip starring me and Dragon Man by Ringo that was done so late in the process that we didn’t even bother to ink it. The original to that strip hangs on a wall in my home to this day. I also got to produce a feature that I repeated again and again in future anniversary issues where I took several pages to reprint the covers of all 500 issues of FANTASTIC FOUR. Mind you, they were pretty tiny due to space considerations, but they were all accounted for, good, bad and indifferent. So the regular version of this issue is fine, and contains a strong and vibrant story. But I feel as though the real gem here is the plussed-up Director’s Cut package. I didn’t have any idea that I’d be around on the book long enough to get to do both #600 and #700 in later years, so I packed this one with every bell and whistle that I might have wanted as a reader.

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Monofocus

Among all of the other organized nothing that I did this past week, I watched and wrote a great many things. Here are a few of them.

I saw INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY, which I found to be pokey and plodding without any of the genuine danger and thrills to be found in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. By that same standpoint, while I was interested in seeing it (I’m as susceptible to nostalgia as anyone), I am probably not the target audience, as I kind of believe that every one of the films following RAIDERS has been a letdown, including the one(s) that most people like. for me, though, as a filmgoer who saw RAIDERS in theaters, each of the sequels have been a half-hearted attempt to replicate moves and moments from the first film, almost as though they were knock-off properties rather than sequels. And DESTINY is no different in this regard. Despite being largely set in 1969, it wants to have Indiana Jones fight Nazis because fighting Nazis is what Indiana Jones is intrinsically about. Rather than updating the action, the film hopes that you simply won’t have the temporal sensibility to be able to tell the difference between 1945 and 1969—hey, it’s all old stuff, right? And I thought the direction never rose above competent, especially when it came to the assorted action sequences. There is chase after chase in this film, and none of them contain anything approaching excitement. And the third act twist feels ill-earned and ill-executed. There do seem to be plenty of people who really seemed to enjoy it (or at least enjoyed that they found it better than CRYSTAL SKULL, another great dud) so your mileage may vary. For me, I’ll stick to the actual Republic serials.

Meanwhile, in a similar vein, over on Tubi, I sat through the documentary DAVE STEVENS: DRAWN TO PERFECTION about the late cartoonist who created the Rocketeer years ago. Stevens was a hell of a talent, and it’s a shame that he didn’t produce more work—especially since I feel as though he’s become largely forgotten today. This is a nice showcase for his life and his work, even if it did feel perhaps a hair long. If nothing else, it’s a good advert to get people to seek out the complete Rocketeer edition that came out a few years ago for some excellent comic book reading.

Less polished but ultimately fascinating to me as a document was the MEGATON OMNIBUS collecting the eight-issue run of MEGATON published by Gary Carlson during the 1980s throughout the early days of the Direct Market. I was a fiend for all of the new comics that were being put out by smaller publishers during that time, but I never picked up MEGATON for some reason—largely, I think, because I could never find the very earliest issues. And the whole thing is pretty fannish work, but it does contain formative contributions from Butch Guice, S. Clark Hawbaker, Angel Medina, Rob Liefeld and of course Erik Larsen, who is behind this edition. None of this material will change your life but if you’re my age, it will give you that sense of anything being possible in the Direct Market, that any kid anywhere might be able to break into the business and make a go of it.

I also took one evening to sit through the second live action film based on the manga KAKEGURUI (“Compulsive Gambler”). KAKEGURUI 2: ULTIMATE RUSSIAN ROULETTE uses the same cast as the two-season live action adaptation and functions as a kind of extended final episode for the show, as the unbeatable, unpredictable gambling addict Jabami Yumiko duels a dangerous student who had been drummed out of the Hyakkaou Private Academy years before—ending in a three-way game of modified Russian Roulette. As always, the series exists in a strange heightened reality—one that is common in Japanese media and which I equate to SPEED RACER. In the world of SPEED RACER, automobile racing is the most important thing on Earth. In KAKEGURUI, it’s gambling. The entire reality bends to this premise, so as long as you can get on board with that, you’ll be able to have a fun time with its exaggerated characters and absurd stakes. So this was a good stand-alone entry, the perfect way back in after having been away from the show for a couple of years.

There’s no question in my mind that the best, most consistent creative team working in comics these days is Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. Everything they do is top-quality work regardless of storyline or genre, and while there’s a similarity of aesthetics in their assorted projects, at the same time there’s range as well. Their latest is NIGHT FEVER, a one-off original graphic novel about an ordinary, bored man who impulsively adopts the identity of another person while on a business trip to Europe and winds up finding out certain things about himself. It’s a noir story, but with a bit of a paranoid psychedelic sensibility to it, and I enjoyed it a great deal. This is a team where, anything they do together, I’ll be there for, and recommend heartily. NIGHT FEVER is no exception. seek it out.

And finally, after a long wait, i sat through the two premiere episodes of MY ADVENTURES WITH SUPERMAN on MAX and found them to be pretty wonderful adaptations of the core Superman mythos. It’s interesting to me just how far away from the center of popular culture the Man of Steel has fallen over the past three decades or so—time was (like when I was six) he was ubiquitous. But I don’t know that today’s six-year-olds have any affinity for the big guy, which is strange because he remains as appealing as ever if you simply do him right. MY ADVENTURES WITH SUPERMAN, at least so far, gets it right. The designs are good, the animation style is attractive, and the voice cast is charming. What’s also really nice is the interplay between the three main characters, Clark, Lois and Jimmy. They’re set up a bit differently than the traditional, but it really works, so I’m all for it. And Superman in this series is genuinely a good person. He’s kind and bumbling and just wants to live a regular life like his friends, but his powers force him to get involved in things. Not reluctantly per se, because if there’s somebody that needs help, that guy is there. But in a way that maybe makes you feel for him just a little bit. It’s a good start, and I’m interested to see how it develops from here.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about this issue of JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA in which Zatanna joined the team. The conversation in the comments concerning the quality of this cover is worth reading alone. Nine word balloons!

And Five Years Ago, I began to write about one of the most formative series in my development, STAR BLAZERS

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I need a sign-off, right? I get here every week, and then I stumble through a bunch of words to wrap things up, telling you that I’ll be back in a week like you don’t already know that. Something to work on. Not much chance I’ll get it worked out this week, but hey, you never know.

Tom B