#68: A Dream of Those Long Gone

So this time, I’d like to start off with a dream I had at the top of the week. I have lots of comics-related dreams of course, both work-related and otherwise. I visit lots of strange comic book stores similar to the oddball ones that used to exist in my youth and I attend a lot of strange conventions and seek out bizarre back issues a bunch of the time. Or I’m just doing something with people in the field for some reason. It’s pretty common. But a couple of these dreams are somehow more meaningful and impactful than the rest, even though I’m well aware that they’re all the product of my unconscious mind unraveling the issues of the day.

So. In this dream I had at the top of the week, I was at George Perez’s house along with Kurt Busiek. We had returned from a convention in Toronto—George lived in Florida, so that doesn’t really make any sense, but this was a dream and logic isn’t a pre-requisite—and I was packing up my stuff to head out, off to the airport or back home or wherever. While I bundled away a vast assortment of drawing implements, pens and pencils and the like (and realized that I wasn’t wearing shoes or socks for some reason) Kurt and George continued to chat in the other room. I could overhear their conversation, but I wasn’t directly participating in it. But it felt very nostalgic, the way it had been when the three of us were working together on AVENGERS. At a certain point, Kurt called out to ask me if I’d done something with Marvel to help set up the memorial project for the late Carlos Pacheco that we were working on—and I suddenly remembered that such a project was happening and that I hadn’t yet done the legwork involved. I pulled out my phone, either to write myself a note about it or to send an e-mail about it or to call the office. As I did so, Kurt and George came into the room, still talking about this project. And I remembered that George was going to be drawing a new story for this Pacheco tribute. Filled with emotion, I approached George and thanked him for what he was doing on behalf of Carlos, that it was meaningful to me. And, uncharacteristically for me, I reached out and hugged him. And that’s when I woke up…and remembered.

Okay, straight on into the questions for the week after that metaphysical beginning, starting with this suggestion for a sign-off from Robert Kirkman:

"Hats off to you, my friends."

or just

"Hats off!"

I dunno, just came to me. Leave me alone. They're not all winners.

Thanks, Robert! We’ll try it!

Chris Sutcliffe

To continue with this topic, I'm curious if there are characters you can kill without higher sign-off? Characters introduced in the same run as they're killed off, I would assume?

Also, can you make major character seem dead for an issue, to be reveal alive later, or would there be concern that people would think them genuinely dead?

Most rank-and-file characters can be killed off without any real sign-off, Chris. Most supporting cast members, heroes who never had or no longer have their own series, and certainly villains. And it’s no problem at all to make a given character appear to be dead for a few issues and then reveal that they’re actually alive. That’s just storytelling, and that is accepted as a given at Marvel.

Alex Segura

My big question, though. as a Very Busy Person myself is, how do you do it? How do you do balance what I know is a very intense, taxing job with everything else - this newsletter, family/personal, and side projects like your consistently-updated website and this (new-to-me) Superman project? I get this question a lot, too, more when I had a regular day job - and my response was along the lines of "I don't have any hobbies." With the understanding being that I turned my hobbies - writing, comics, reading, consuming art - into aspects of my "job." Is it the same for you?

I feel like it’s just a matter of commitment and discipline more than anything, Alex. But it is why one of my mantras when it comes to stuff along these lines is, “It’s not a job.” Which is to say, you need to give yourself license not to do something every once in a while when you simply can’t achieve it all. For me, though, for example, most Saturdays work approximately the same way: I get up somewhere around noon and start out by writing that day’s content for the website, which typically boils down to three items. It was four at a certain point, but I scaled it back to three once this Newsletter came along. Assuming that there aren’t any other appointments or pressing matters that need to be dealt with that weekend, that process will usually take me to around 4:00 or so. At which point, my son will likely have come around wanting to do a run into town to get snacks and provisions. He’s old enough now where he can drive, but he likes my bankroll and it’s a thing that we’ll regularly do together. So that gets done. Thereafter, at least in the summer months, I’m inclined to go sit out on my porch and do a bit of reading. This tends to be collected editions rather than single comics for the most part. After an hour or two, I’ll come in and usually watch a little something for an hour or two as we get dinner prepared. We tend to eat relatively late, typically around 8:00. That was a result of my working in the city and the time I would usually get home most weekdays, but it’s remained a part of our pattern regardless. After dinner, somewhere between 9:00 and 10:00, I’ll usually head into the office and start jamming away at the week’s Newsletter, as I’m doing now. It takes close to three hours to put one of these together, so that eats up most of the evening. Thereafter, depending on the weariness of the day, I’m likely to stay up until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning looking at stuff or watching stuff on the computer. Now, not every week is exactly like this—today, for example, I had a dentist visit for a cleaning, so that ate up some time in the afternoon and I didn’t manage to get any reading done. Nor did we go into town for snacks, instead we had Italian Ices delivered to the house. But otherwise, it fit the pattern. It really does come down to knowing what you’ve got to get done and then doing it at the earliest possible time. And I do like a basic routine.

Daniel Sherrier

So, if your first comic was generally unremarkable, what's the first remarkable comic you remember reading? Was there any particular issue or title that marked a shift toward comics becoming a lifelong passion rather than just a passing childhood hobby?

I was hooked pretty much right off, Daniel, despite the fact that my first book was so generic. But there were a few other early comics that had a big impact on me and made me more of an avid reader. And I’ve written about all of them over at my website. There was this FLASH 100-Page Super-Spectacular that introduced me to the character and to the work of John Broome and Carmine Infantino, there was this issue of THE FLASH that I got in a 3-bag after having missed it the first time, and whose Flash/Green Lantern team-up with the Reverse Flash as the villain electrified my imagination, and in a way there was also this Treasury Edition that reprinted ACTION COMICS #1 that gave me an interest in the history and heritage of the medium.

Manqueman

And where did McNiven return from?

Steve McNiven had done the covers for the first five issues of MOON KNIGHT, Manqueman. So he returned to do that of #25 as well.

Kieron Gillen

"I also didn’t have any patience for captions, they seemed like a waste of time to me, and so I skipped them routinely."

6 year old Tom is a smart one.

This reminds me of a story that I think came from Will Lieberson, the Executive Editor of Fawcett Publications back in the 1940s. He was riding the train to work one day, sitting next to a kid who was reading an issue of CAPTAIN MARVEL ADVENTURES. And Lieberson noticed that the kid was reading it strangely—he’d go across the top tier of the pages left-to-right, not moving downward through the rest of the page. Thinking to be helpful, Lieberson pointed out to the child that he was meant to read the story a page at a time—to which the kid replied, “Aw, it’s too slow if you do it that way!”

S-shield

you mentioned sticking with the old Republic serials. Any recommendations? I’ve seen the original Superman and Captain Marvel ones, but are there any other, maybe more specifically Raiders-esque ones you can point out?

Well, S-shield, the specific serials that inspired RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK are the two that feature Rod Cameron as government operative Rex Bennett, SECRET SERVICE IN DARKEST AFRICA and G-MEN VERSUS THE BLACK DRAGON. I have a real soft spot for MYSTERIOUS DOCTOR SATAN, the serial that was reworked from a proposed Superman serial that never happened. And almost any Republic serial that featured Linda Sterling was worth a watch, with MANHUNT OF MYSTERY ISLAND, ZORRO'S BLACK WHIP and THE CRIMSON GHOST all being worthy of consideration. That all said, these were relatively formulaic chapter plays that weren’t meant to be consumed in a single sitting, and which were directed at young children, so you do need to be able to approach them on their own level. None of them is going to be anywhere near as sophisticated as a Spielberg film.

Jeff Ryan

Without naming names, has anyone in comics purposefully been told incorrect information, so that if/when they spread it around it wouldn’t actually spoil the storyline? (This is what they did to David “Darth Vader” Prowse, a nice man but incapable of keeping Star Wars plot points secret.)

Not really, Jeff. It’s a lot more difficult to do this sort of thing with comics, because you’d actually need to create the misleading material, not simply talk about it. Most people who leak stuff do it with photographs or images from the book. I’m sure that somebody has tried this somewhere, but it’s not really an effective method of catching a leaker.

Will Shugg

I had heard awhile back that Paradise X was supposed to have one last issue that never came out because of low sales. Is this true? I know we had Marvels X not too long ago celebrating the Earth X universe, any chance a last Paradise X would ever come out?

I didn’t work on EARTH X or its sequels at the time, Will, so my memory on this subject is kind of vague. But my remembrance is that initially, that last series, PARADISE X was going to have a number of associated one-shots just as UNIVERSE X had before it. But when the time came to move into PARADISE X, the sales had declined on it to the point where Marvel wasn’t comfortable doing that many tie-ins, and so they were scaled back. But it wasn’t the last issue or anything, it would have been material along the way—material that Alex Ross and Jim Krueger had to rework into the main series in order to make the story all still work. But Alex and Jim could likely tell you better than I could—as I say, this wasn’t something I was involved with. I did edit the eventual prequel that the team did, MARVELS X, a few years ago.

Kevin S.

Re: Superman... "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." That character has certainly had his share of "bold new directions" compared to others who have been around as long. Maybe sales figures led the Powers That Were to look for some kind of shakeup, but when I think of what I'd personally call the best Superman stories, they all involve just regular ol' Superman. What are your favorite iterations of the Man of Steel, from your fan and/or pro days?

I have a lot of them, really, Kevin. I grew up with the Superman of the 1970s, as written by Cary Bates and Elliot S! Maggin and Marty Pasko and largely illustrated by Curt Swan and edited by Julie Schwartz, so that’s very much down in my DNA. I love the really early Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster Superman, before everything had codified itself into a set formula and they were pretty much making it up as they went along. I love the gonzo zaniness of Mort Weisinger’s Superman titles of the 1960s. I love any of the Alan Moore Superman stories. It wasn’t entirely to my tastes at the time, but I see a lot of value in retrospect in the John Byrne Superman relaunch. And the “triangle” era where editor Mike Carlin coordinated the efforts of multiple creative teams to deliver what was a defacto Superman weekly was an excellent period. And I like most all of the more modern Superman classics that get mentioned a lot, such as Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s ALL-STAR SUPERMAN and SUPERMAN: FOR ALL SEASONS by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale. Pretty much any Mark Waid Superman story. Geoff Johns’ assorted runs. Kurt Busiek’s run, mostly with Carlos Pacheco. And I love the 1978 film, and the 1950s television show (particularly the early black and white episodes) as well as the radio series. And all of the Paul Dini/Bruce Timm animation—to say nothing of the 1940s Fleisher Brothers shorts. So I like a decent variety of Superman flavors, so long as the essence of the character rings true to me.

Devin Whitlock

Thanks for another great newsletter! Your Superman project sounds fascinating. I’m a big fan of the character and also interested in how he developed, especially in the early years. Have you read Superman: The Unauthorized Biography by Glen Weldon? I found it very informative. Thanks again!

I have, as well as dozens of other books on the subject—including things like Jerry Siegel’s never-published memoirs. But every time a new book drops, I inevitably race out and get a copy. I just recently finished VOICES FROM KRYPTON by Edward Gross and WITH THANKS TO SUPERMAN by Brian McKernan.

MADMan James

So, I'm a year late to this party, but I've somehow only just discovered this newsletter and am working my way through. For my money, the best "last issue" would be Thor 382. Walt Simonson wrapped everything up - Hela's overreach, the frost giant invasion, and did it all in highly entertaining style. Thor breaking Loki's arm at the end was a perfect cherry on top. I certainly haven't read every run of every superhero comic (although I have read quite a few), but of the ones I have read, I think Walt's run on Thor was the best.

It’s never too late to jump in, James! And I agree, that final THOR issue by Walt and Sal Buscema was pretty great. It turned out to be the first issue of the run that I bought new, having given up he title shortly before Walt took it over some years earlier.

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Behind the Curtain

.Here’s a bit of a relic that has only become more of a forgotten item as time has gone on, but which used to be a thing that every reader was at least aware of and marginally familiar with.

What you see here is the principle text of the Comics Code Authority, the outside self-regulatory group that reviewed all comic books that were slated for publication to weed out any material that was deemed to be too violent or sexual or dangerous to young minds. The Comics Code was set up in the earliest months of 1955 by the publishers themselves as a way to stave off any genuine regulation from the government, as televised Senate subcommittee hearings into the link between comic book reading and juvenile delinquency were then airing. The Code put a lot of publishers out of business, and drained a lot of interest out of the material for a very long time. By design, nothing stimulating was really supposed to happen in the pages of a comic book, which is why super heroes for so long couldn’t really throw a punch or have a fistfight, but instead had to solve puzzle problems and mysteries and safeguard their true identities. The Code was revised and relaxed a couple of times before it eventually dissolved as an entity in the late 2000s, its usefulness long since past.

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Pimp My Wednesday

Again, another small week, in part because there were some shipping problems that wound up pushing a few releases back a week.

MOON KNIGHT: CITY OF THE DEAD is a new limited series by David Pepose and Marcelo Ferreira, and which spins indirectly out of last week’s massive MOON KNIGHT #25. But it’s it’s own thing, it’s own story, the connective tissue being the Marvel Universe introduction of Layla El-Faouly, the Scarlet Scarab, who was featured in the Marvel Studios streaming series on Disney+. Our version is very much the same but also very much different, and you’ll get to see her as an active participant here for the first time. Look for the very cool Rod Reis covers such as the one above.

And in digital land, AVENGERS UNLIMITED #56 brings us the middle chapter of the team-up adventure between master spy Natasha Romanoff, the Black Widow, and pacifist actor Simon Williams, Wonder Man. It’s brought to you by Sean McKeever and David Baldeon and it’s a whole lot of fun mixing and matching the worlds of these two disparate Avengers in a single story.

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A Comic Book On Sale 55 Years Ago Today, July 16, 1968

As sales on super heroes began to soften in the late 1960s, publishers began to cast around desperately, looking for the next new genre that was going to keep the lights on and the presses running. Stodgy, stiff-necked National Periodicals was perhaps the worst positioned for such a thing. It’s true that they were releasing a wider assortment of titles than just about anybody else, with a thriving war line, a new mystery/supernatural line, a romance line that was still doing some business, and a share of teen humor books. But all of their material felt a bit out-of-step with the zeitgeist. It was mainly a lot of old workhorse cartoonists attempting to appeal to a new younger generation whose language they simply didn’t understand. Possibly the hallmark of that generation gap was this series, BROTHER POWER: THE GEEK, released 55 years ago today. BPTG was the brainchild of writer/artist Joe Simon. Simon had been a powerhouse in the industry for decades, the forward-facing half of the popular Simon & Kirby team who had invented Captain America, the romance genre, and a half-dozen good-selling properties for DC. While he’d spent most of the preceding decade working outside of the field, new editorial director Carmine Infantino’s hope was that Simon still had some of that magic left up his sleeve, and could give DC a desperately-needed new hit. Simon, with some penciling help from Al Dare, came up with the story of Brother Power, a ragdoll given life and sentience when it is struck by lightning, and who travels through a hostile world, eventually finding comradeship and community in a hippie commune that names him Brother Power. (All of the Hippies have taken names starting with Brother.) It wasn’t a super hero strip, despite the fact that Brother Power was frighteningly strong, hence his name. It wasn’t really a monster strip. It was something new, something weird. It tried to be a bit of a social satire, but one that was sympathetic to the position of the young Hippie generation. At least in as much as Simon understood it, which seemed to be hardly at all. BROTHER POWER: THE GEEK ran for only two issues, but it wasn’t low sales that killed it, but rather complaints from DC’s most important editor, Superman’s Mort Weisinger. Mort apparently did a end-run around Carmine, going to the National Periodical bosses directly and telling them that he was afraid that the sick content of THE GEEK was going to bring the wrath of the authorities down upon DC’s head. Exactly what content Mort was concerned about is unknown, as THE GEEK was relatively tame stuff. Mort, apparently, didn’t like the general idea of the strip and was perhaps a bit worried about Simon’s track record and how his success might weaken Mort’s own power base within the organization. In the second issue, Brother Power was trapped in a rocket that was shot into space, a cliffhanger that wouldn’t be resolved for thirty years, when he was reintroduced by Neil Gaiman in a SWAMP THING ANNUAL and tied into the mythology of the Earth elementals and the Parliament of Trees. He’s been used occasionally since then, and even entirely reimagined once or twice in the intervening years. So far as I can tell, the government hasn’t particularly minded.

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A Comic Book On Sale 20 Years Ago Today, July 16, 2003

With no disrespect to any of the creative teams that worked on the series afterwards, pretty much the NEW TEEN TITANS had seen its best days under collaborators Marv Wolfman and George Perez, and after George’s final departure, the series sank down and faded away some, becoming just a shadow of what it had been at its height in the 1980s. This was the best-selling and most important DC title of the era, the one that challenged Marvel on its own terms and was able to compete head on. It was the book that illustrated to readers for whom DC was stodgy and old that exciting things could come out of the firm. But as often as later creators attempted to recapture the magic of that celebrated run, they were never quite able to do it. All that having been said, this particular era, written by Geoff Johns and illustrated at first by Mike McKone came the closest, and was a very strong DC title during the time when Geoff was writing it. It made an interesting reversal of the NEW TEEN TITANS in that the four characters introduced by Marv and George were now the old hand pros, whereas Robin, Kid Flash and Wonder Girl were all younger newcomers to those roles, with Superboy thrown in for good measure. This was a very good run, with Geoff focused on distilling all of his characters down to very simple ideas that were easy to grasp, something that he did routinely and well. He captured the spirit of those earlier times, making the threats legitimate and real and focusing the stories as much on the interpersonal drama of his cast as on the super hero adventures. It all just really worked and was a bright spot in the DC line during this period. Of course, I did wind up semi-accidentally dinging this book a few times along the way. Here’s how it happened. To start with, Barry Kitson was working on an AVENGERS/THUNDERBOLTS limited series for me, one that was intended to relaunch the series after the earlier pro-wrestling take had crashed and burned. Barry was working on the second issue when he called me to say that he needed to drop out after that. He’d been offered a sweet new gig by Dan Didio over at DC (I think it was LEGION OF SUPER HEROES with Mark Waid) But Didio insisted that he drop all of his current assignments and start on his DC work immediately, and the offer was rich enough that Barry didn’t feel that he could refuse. And that pissed me off. This wasn’t the first time that Didio had tried to play hardball like this when recruiting some talent from Marvel. Creators have to do what’s best for them and their families, of course, but i think it’s ungentlemanly to insist that somebody renege on their current commitments and promises in order to come work with you. I didn’t like that behavior. And so, for the next few months, I was on the warpath (as was Joe Quesada, who didn’t appreciate this behavior either.) Every time a new assignment would come up, I’d cast my eye across the DC line and see who might be a good fit for it. And unfortunately, something like three times in a row, it wound up being the person who was drawing this run of TEEN TITANS. I need an artist for JMS’s FANTASTIC FOUR launch? Hey, Mike McKone would be great for that! Somebody needs to finish AVENGERS/THUNDERBOLTS and then do the NEW THUNDERBOLTS series that comes out of it? Tom Grummett, who took over TEEN TITANS after McKone would fit that bill nicely. And so on. I hit that book something like three times in a row—no matter who they chose to take it over, I wound up almost instantly recruiting them for some new Marvel assignment. And i felt a little bit bad about it, because I had always been on good terms with Geoff (I even gave him a copy of the first NEW TEEN TITANS DC Archive when he took on the assignment and was assembling research material.) But his tastes and mine were close enough in this instance that I liked all of the guys he recruited. And I felt as though Didio had started this whole thing in the first place. Eventually, though, DC put Tony Daniel on TEEN TITANS and I decided that enough was enough. The series continued on until Geoff needed to pass it over to other hands, and then a similar slow decay to when George had left happened, and the title lost its regained luster.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

This final issue of OMEGA THE UNKNOWN, one of the strangest and most definitively non-mainstream projects that I ever worked on, saw print on July 16, 2008. OMEGA had been the creation of writers Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes in the 1970s, a very personal work that was dressed up like a typical super hero feature. OMEGA was a subversive title back in the 1970s, albeit one that also suffered from some scheduling woes, resulting in some fill-ins that chopped up the story in unfortunate ways. It was meant to have an eventual ending, but after the book was chopped by Marvel, Gerber and Skrenes swore never to tell anybody what it would have been. So it became a forgotten classic, lost among the piles of four color detritus. Now, in the mid-2000s, right after Marvel President Bill Jemas was sidelined, his temporary replacement was a man named Gui Karyo. Gui was a finance guy, a numbers guy, with no real experience in storytelling. But for a few short months, he was overseeing the whole of Marvel. One of the things he was very interested in doing was expanding Marvel’s talent pool, especially among popular and critically-acclaimed writers from the wider world at large. This led to me approaching a series of writers with whom I’d made some tenuous contact in the past about doing a project for Marvel—in particular, Michael Chabon, whom I tried on at least two occasions to get to write FANTASTIC FOUR to no avail. But at a certain point, Michael suggested that I reach out to his acquaintance Jonathan Lethem, as he knew that Lethem had an interest in comics’, having written a few short stories that used the Marvel characters of the 1970s as elements of the narrative. This led to Joe Quesada and myself having lunch with Lethem at a local restaurant and trying to convince him to do a project for Marvel. Lethem had an idea in mind: as a young reader, he’d been fascinated by the first issue of Gerber’s OMEGA THE UNKNOWN and the potential that it had evidenced—potential that, in Lethem’s eyes, had gone largely unfulfilled throughout the rest of the run. So he proposed to do a remake of that first OMEGA issue and then to carry on the story from there as he had envisioned, running a similar ten issues as the original. He also had an artist in mind for the gritty lived-in feeling that he wanted to achieve: Farel Dalrymple, who had recently done a story for DC’s BIZARRO COMICS anthology. Not a word of this sounded commercial in the slightest, but Joe went ahead and signed off on doing it, and we had a ballgame. And the truth is that Lethem’s story was so set in his mind and his scripts were so tight—he was way smarter than I was—that there was little for me to do on this project apart from keeping the Marvel machine from wrecking or compromising it, which I hope that I did. It was never a huge seller, but it brought the firm some prestige and did all right as a collected edition, so it was definitely worth doing. This final issue, amazingly for almost any Marvel comic, is almost entirely wordless, a weird wrap-up that confused certain readers. But I maintain that it all makes perfect sense if you read it in its collected form. One person who wasn’t at all happy about Jonathan doing OMEGA was Steve Gerber, who expressed his ire on message boards and rebuked attempts by Lethem to reach out to speak with him about it. It was simply still too raw a wound for Gerber, but he pissed about it enough that Lethem almost quit the project entirely. Jonathan did write Gerber an extraordinary twenty-page letter, beautifully written, speaking to him plainly and with some irritation about how Gerber was deliberately mischaracterizing Lethem’s motives and intent in an attempt to make himself look more like the aggrieved party. It was a counter-trolling masterpiece. Jonathan wound up not sending it or posting it publicly after Joe and I both advised him not to. And I felt bad about the whole thing—in particular, because the energy and effort Lethem had expended on that letter could have been channeled into a short story or an essay or something, a work that the world would now never have.

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Monofocus

I was never a regular viewer or anything, but I can remember that period when AMERICAN GLADIATORS was a big thing, with a successful television series and a nationwide tour. So that was enough to get me to sit through all five episodes of MUSCLES & MAYHEM on Netflix, a documentary series dedicated to the creation, expansion and eventual destruction of that series and property. I am inevitably fascinated by how things, especially entertainment products, are made, and this was no exception. As you might guess the early days of the series were haphazard, exceedingly physically dangerous and put together seat-of-the-pants style. And as you’ll no doubt guess, once the show became big business, the performers were left wondering where their cut of the profits were, and getting fired as a result. It’s a very timely tale given recent events, and it’s all told with a fun, goofball sensibility and just the same hint of camp that the series itself had. This was pretty fun.

Speaking of how entertainment is made, I went down a rabbit hole this past week, watching retrospectives of several sitcoms over at the JOSE BIRD YouTube channel. I started with shows that I had watched, such as SCRUBS and CHEERS and then wound up going wider into shows where I might have seen some episodes but I wasn’t ever a regular viewer, such as FRASIER and THAT ‘70s SHOW. I find Jose’s videos to be well thought-through, very comprehensive and very well done. They’re also very long, close to two hours in some cases, which meant that I had to break my viewing up into segments. But if you liked any of the series listed above, or any of the others he’s done similar retrospectives on over at his site, they’re worth a look-at.

The big new series that I’ve been watching the past few nights is 19/20, also on Netflix. It’s a Korean reality series that owes just a hint to TERRACE HOUSE and carries over a lot of its ethos. The premise of the series revolves around the fact that, in Korea, on the first day of your Twentieth year, you are legally considered an adult, regardless of whether your birthday is still months away. So the show gathers up a class of ten students, all of whom are 19 years old but will turn 20 in a week’s time once the New Year hits, and puts them in a living and studying situation designed to get them to develop romantic feelings for one another. Then, a few episodes in, we’ll his the point where the year changes and everybody will suddenly be permitted to engage in adult activities such as dating and drinking. But the show isn’t quite up to that point yet—Netflix is dropping three episodes a week to keep pace with the Korean release schedule. And while this all seems like it could easily be a trashy American reality show (and might turn into that once the year turns) the thing that it’s got in common with TERRACE HOUSE is that it is painfully earnest. All of the young people are taking this experience seriously, for all that they’re surrounded by cameras at all times and that they know what the intent of the broadcast is. But there’s an emotional honesty and purity to the show that I love. Like TERRACE HOUSE, the events are watched and commented on by a panel of otherwise-uninvolved celebrity hosts, and the manner in which they root for these kids is wonderfully genuine as well. Like I say, everything could eventually take a turn for the cynical or nasty, but based on the first three installments, this is a pretty engaging program.

And I know that the second season of FOUNDATION has started but I haven’t yet had a chance to watch the first episode. too busy typing stuff like this.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about the last Captain Comet story from STRANGE ADVENTURES #49.

And Five Years Ago, I wrote about the first episode of STAR BLAZERS.

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Okay then, are you ready for this? Shall we try it? Here we go:

Hats Off to You, My Friends!

How’s that sound?

Tom B