15 Comments

Thanks for the shout out, Tom! I'm really trying to get the word out more about this 'Batman' character

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Gnatman you say? Wasn’t that Brand Ech?

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Sounds like an off-brand Dracula. It'll never catch on. We already have Dracula.

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but what I'm proposing is a Dracula ... with a cool belt

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Ooooooooooh.

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I do love the facsimile books, they plug wonderful gaps in my ongoing silver age collection. Many more of those from that era please Tom (and how about a few golden age ones too).

Surprised there’s a Kamala Khan one coming. I own that book and I’d agree it’s a bit too recent really to need a facsimile edition of it.

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Hi, I have a question for you as an editor: Often times when we get a new relaunch or series, an older cover logo is repurposed for the new book. The new AVENGERS series, for example, uses the "Celestial Quest" logo from about 20 years ago which itself seemed inspired by the Buscema/Palmer era logo. The question I guess I have, then, is are there are any other logos from the past of your career that you'd enjoy the chance to use again someday?

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Another great one, Tom. Love the context on SDCC - once it's over, people do tend to forget about it. That did lessen a bit of the sharp FOMO I've been experiencing this weekend.

My question: I love your BHOC site - I find the insights really useful and entertaining. Ever considered...putting it together into a book of some kind? I can't imagine I'm the first person to suggest it.

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Count me in as someone who also remembers the long wait for the last issue of Watchmen. It's usually the first thing that comes to mind when I think about the series.

Regarding the picture of Lilandra, a few observations:

1) Dave had the Starjammers first, and they were always going to be rebels fighting The Dark Empire, which became The Shi'ar Empire. Whether he merged the two Empires or Lilandra was always going to take place in the Starjammers universe, I can't say.

2) Her evil brother, D'Ken, is also in the picture, which goes to show how much of the story Dave had already worked out.

3) That might be "Cockrum" in the alien language on the left, with the 'r' obscured by the wing. Or not. If it is, the capital 'C' is different than the lowercase.

4) There's a version of this picture colored by Dave himself (well, it's mostly colored) that appears in his recent biography published by TwoMorrows (which I hear is pretty good). I point it out because artists didn't always come up with the color schemes for their characters, but Dave usually did.

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"Apparently, there was believed to be some regulation in the second class postage rules that prohibited a magazine from displaying any copy larger than its logo. This sounded like nonsense to me then and it does now as well."

Yeah, this kind of thought coming from anyone at the publisher of MARVEL TEAM-UP, JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY, SUPERNATURAL THRILLERS and MARVEL PREVIEW (to name only a few) does not really hold a lot of water.

kdb

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You mentioning the New Warriors made me think fondly of that run: penciller Mark Bagley stayed for two years before getting called up to the bigs with Amazing Spider-Man. And Bags then spent a decade with Ultimate Spider-Man, before doing 52 weekly (!) issues of Trinity for DC. What's the biggest factor (other than speed: Bags is obviously very fast!) from keeping artists from staying on individual titles for years at a time like that, the way writers do?

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Not to be the "you have to watch x episodes before it gets good" guy, but as a stone JUSTIFIED fan I feel compelled to warn you that the first half-season is largely standalone episodes. Some great (Hi, Alan Ruck) some are just fine. This was due to other work commitments keeping the not-planned-to-be-a-regular-Walton-Goggins from having much of a presence at first.

In other words, barring the pilot, JUSTIFIED isn't really JUSTIFIED until the back half of the first season when the serialization kicks in. But it's well worth your time.

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Jul 25, 2023·edited Jul 25, 2023

Here's a question for next week too: as you say, few remember today that WATCHMEN issues were often late. Whereas the Grant-Zeck PUNISHER mini of the day came out more on-time, but the collected edition today is hobbled by increasingly rushed-looking art and eventually fill-ins. For a more recent example, reading the all-Hitch collections of Millar's ULTMATES (which was frequently late, as I recall) is, for me, a more enjoyable/consistent experience than his ULTIMATE X-MEN with a cadre of very talented artists.

My question is: as an editor, how do you weigh the demands of the ideally-monthly comic versus what one surely hopes will be a perennial collection?

Thanks!

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My question this week is maybe a little inside baseball. How many "pages" is an infinity comic, the ones that endlessly scroll? Assuming that the artist is paid a page rate for such a comic, I'm curious how they are added up.

In part because I'm trying to keep a spreadsheet of the comics (and amount of pages) I've read this year.

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A few quick questions Tom:

Is the X-office still working off of Hickman's bible? I know you hav approximately zero to do with the X-office as an editor, but as an executive editor, do you hear stuff, no?

And for the last few decades, artist teams -- at least for those still drawing on paper -- has been pretty fixed -- Inker A would always ink penciller B and no one else. If y'all remember, there was Tim Townsend's famous career shift.

Which brings us to the next question: What percentage of Big 2 artists make a decent living without, say, having to go without insurance or requiring any sort of public assistance?

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