#70: "Obviously"

He Sees You When You're Sleeping...

Greetings, Hatketeers! And welcome back to another session filled with personal nonsense only vaguely relevant to any other human being, a smattering of comic book history and some plugs for upcoming releases of which you should certainly avail yourself.

I’m not sure quite where I’m going with this first bit, but I wanted to start by talking about a thing I ran into on social media a few days ago. I get copied in on all sorts of topics when different fans are unhappy about different things, based on my job title and the fact that I’m maybe more likely than most to respond. In this instance, it was a bunch of fans who were unhappy about recent developments in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN concerning Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson—developments that didn’t serve to undo the disillusionment of their marriage, now gone fifteen years. In particular, there was one fellow who opined that the death of Ms Marvel in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #26 constituted a last minute change, that Mary Jane was “obviously” the one intended to die in that story, but the fan blowback was too harsh and so the book was quickly reworked at the last minute to sacrifice Kamala Khan instead—a fact that apparent thanks to the “clear” art changes that had been made. Now, fans having their own theories on what has gone on behind the scenes is nothing new—they’ve always had them, and they always involve a certain amount of projection, giving motivations to the creators in question that may not exist in any way outside of the fan’s perspective.

So in this instance, I made the perhaps ill-advised choice to step in and indicate that the book in question was in no way changed at the last minute, and that as much as anybody might like it or not like it, that was the book that was intended to be put out. Those clear art changes were nothing of the kind. And I think if you take a step back, that’s pretty obvious. I mean, (SPOILERS) Kamala just came back in the HELLFIRE GALA #1 special released this week, and we’ve made public announcements about the new, upcoming MS MARVEL: THE NEW MUTANT series already. And I think it’s apparent that we couldn’t have had that entire plan worked out and those announcements locked and loaded if that ASM issue had been some last minute ad hoc change of direction.

But as soon as I responded and made that statement, all sorts of irate Spidey readers started turning up in my feed. Each one of them was upset but each one of them had a slightly different view on matters, both on what had happened and what they thought should have happened, and each one chose to interpret what i thought was a clear and direct statement about one specific point—that AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #26 was not changed around in any way at the last minute—as meaning whatever they needed it to mean to support whatever their personal position and belief happened to be.

Here’s the thing: we’re all attracted by conspiracy theories. We all want to think that there’s some organized idea behind much of what happens, good and bad, in the world. And we want to feel like we’re one of the special ones that discerns the truth. But this sort of thinking creates a vast amount of confirmation bias and is detrimental to critical thinking. It maybe lets you feel good about what you choose to believe, but in a way that is further and further divorced from objective reality. I think this entire approach is dangerous.

So if you’re a reader who didn’t like some story we did, some direction we took a favorite character in or the way some storyline played itself out, I think that’s entirely your right. Not everybody is going to like everything we do. And I think there’s a way to express that, respectfully. But maybe be careful about not conflating the characters for the people making the stories. To my experience, there are very few mustache-twirling super villains working in comics, and an even smaller amount that “hate” fictional characters that they spend hours working on for money. You can dislike the work without disliking the people behind it. And for my part, I’m going to attempt to refrain from answering more of these seemingly-simple questions going forward, since the return on investment just seems to now be an unending mountain of crap that has very little to do with me directly—I didn’t edit the comic in question, let alone write it. But I do support and stand behind the efforts of those that did. Even Nick Lowe.

But I will still answer your questions here. And to prove it, let’s get into what you all were wondering about this past week:

Craig Byrne

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?

I’m sure that there are other logos from the past that I’d like to use should the occasion warrant it, Craig, but it’s not like I have a list to hand or anything. Typically, I’m not a huge fan of changing the logos, especially on long-running perennial series. But sometimes, it seems like a good move to make in order to signal to the audience that something has changed here, and that this book is now different from the way it was when you last looked at it. That was the reason for moving to that alternate logo on AVENGERS, to help distinguish Jed and C.F.’s run from the Jason Aaron era that came right before it. Typically, on a title that has some history behind it like AVENGERS, there are alternate logo treatments from the past that I like, and so resurrecting them is far easier than attempting to craft something new. I’ll do that too should the situation warrant it, but an existing old logo is already road-tested and will hold some nostalgia for a small segment of the older readers, and that’s a benefit I may as well capture.

Alex Segura

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.

This sort of question comes up every once in a while, Alex, and it’s a flattering question to be asked. And a tiny bit of it has—my contribution to FANTASTIC FOUR #1 PANEL BY PANEL, for example, was rewritten and expanded from pieces that I’d run over at the site. But the big problem with making a book out of even a portion of what’s collected over there would be clearing the rights for the visuals. When you’re talking about comic book stories, it helps to have pictures—without them, the text doesn’t carry as much weight, especially when so much of it is a reaction to the individual issues being experienced. And I think such a book would need to reproduce more images than most of the rights-holders would be willing to permit. If there’s a book on comics to be written by me, I’ll probably need to start that project from scratch, even if it overlaps with some of what I’ve written about before. And in any case, any such project will have to wait until I’m retired from my regular job of editing new comics day in and day out.

Jeff Ryan

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?

Some of it is certainly speed, Jeff, that and the changing tastes of the audience that demands a greater level of detail in their comic book pages than they used to in the past. But also, in terms of building a career, anybody who evidences a certain level of aptitude and popular support is going to be offered larger and more prominent assignments—assignments that may be better-paying, if only because they will circulate more highly and thus generate greater amounts of incentive payments. But really, the thing that stands in the way of long, unbroken runs these days is the fact that it now typically takes an artist around six weeks to do a book—and those books ship monthly. You can see how something is going to have to give somewhere with that math.

Tony Tower

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?

Well, Tony, it tends to come down to a couple of pretty basic factors: how important the project is to the company at that moment fiscally and what the impact might be from delaying it in order for the same creators to be able to complete all of it. As an example, CIVIL WAR was a massive hit right from the start, selling well in excess of initial projections and raising the numbers on all of the tie-in books that the storyline impacted as well. So when problems came up in terms of being able to get the later issues completed on schedule, it was relatively easy to look at the situation and conclude, “We’re already ahead of where we expected to be. So we can let this ride for a bit.” Whereas on other projects, on most projects really, especially ongoing monthly titles, there’s a constant need to have issues coming out within the month where they were solicited so as to meet the organization’s financial requirements. So if you’re facing a situation where one of those projects has hit the rocks, you wind up needing to triage—sometimes well, sometimes poorly, sometimes just throwing bodies at the problem until the requisite number of pages is completed. It’s not something that anybody involved relishes doing—especially considering that these issues aren’t quite as disposable as they were once thought to be, where a lousy art job would be gone and forgotten a month later. These days, all of that work lives on in collected form. But needs must.

Chris Sutcliffe

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.

As an overall rule, Chris, we estimate a typical Infinity comic release as being approximately 30 frames in length, which is calculated as the equivalent of six 5-panel pages, and paid for accordingly. There are occasionally ones that are longer or shorter than that—sometimes even within ongoing series when a particular artist has chosen to pace things out more leisurely. But that’s the overall metric.

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Behind the Curtain

.The week of the San Diego Comic Convention is a pretty exciting time in the industry—unless you’re one of the people who isn’t attending. In that case, it tends to be a relatively quiet week, as books have been completed ahead of time to free up editors and talent to travel, and most of the bigwigs who might do something to make you need to scramble are otherwise occupied. So there’s a bit more time to mess around.

And so, you get things like the STEVE WACKER logo shown above, adapted by me from the classic SLEEPWALKER logo using my very sketchy photoshop skills (which are extra sketchy in this case, as photoshop wasn’t among the programs used, most of this was done in basic Paint.) The idea was put into my head following a conversation between Associate Editor Annalise Bissa (Hi, Mr. Bissa!) and Editor Darren Shan that pointed out the word similarity. From there, it was a thing that I picked away at for an hour and a half in-between other things.

But I didn’t stop there. No, I took this new logo and added it to an old headshot of Steve that I’d had in my files. (For those not in the know, Steve is a long-tenured figure at Marvel and in the industry, who for years edited the Spider-Man books. ) And that brief bit of work was worth it to get a laugh out of Steve and a bunch of the other folks who worked closely together while Wacker was on staff.

This is the latest in a string of “Bad Photoshop Theater” pieces that have been worked up by one or another of us over the years. Above is one done of me a dozen years ago, following a Chicago convention where we did a dinner with fans in a high-end restaurant. That led to a whole running bit about me starring in a CSI-style television series in which I’d solve crimes involving food-related homicides. Nobody else has seen any of this stuff publicly so far as I’m aware, so it all lives up to the “Behind The Curtain” branding—even if it is mostly stupid and dopey and a waste of time.

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Pimp My Wednesday

It’s August, already! Where does the time go?

This week starts off with a very special, slightly off-kilter issue of FANTASTIC FOUR by Ryan North and guest artist Leandro Fernandez. This Alex Ross cover should give you some sense as to just how odd it is. It reminds me of some of the one-off stories that John Byrne did on the title years before, if that helps at all. But I’m really happy with the way that this one turned out. Ryan really took a risk here.

And in MOON KNIGHT, Jed MacKay is joined by swing artist Federico Sabbatini as the focus switches to Hunter’s Moon and a mission he undertook to Subterranea while the events of the oversized #25 were transpiring. Oh, and those cover blurbs about GODS indicates that these are among the issues that include all-new pages relating to the story that also set up characters and situations for that upcoming Jonathan Hickman and Valerio Schiti series. There are nine or ten of these in total, and while the pages can be read individually (and none of them are absolutely 100% necessary to enjoy GODS #1) they add up to a bit more if you peruse them all.

And in AVENGERS UNLIMITED #58, Kate Bishop joins forces with Runa the Valkyrie to solve a mystery in Asgard that’s caused the disappearance of All-Father Thor. It’s written by Kalinda Vazquez and illustrated by Alba Glez, and was edited by Annalise Bissa (Hi, Mr. Bissa!)

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A Comic Book On Sale 80 Years Ago Today, July 30, 1943

It’s a mostly forgotten series today, but when it debuted and all through the wartime years, BOY COMMANDOS by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby was a sales juggernaut, selling in the kinds of numbers that only SUPERMAN and BATMAN matched at DC. The Boy Commandos were another of Simon & Kirby’s “kid gang” strips, a genre that they’d instituted starting with the Young Allies at Timely and thereafter the Newsboy Legion at DC. But the Boy Commandos made the concept more immediate and relevant to the readers of that period. Their gang was a junior commando unit serving under Captain Rip Carter, and they didn’t merely battle spies and saboteurs on the home front like so many others—the Boy Commandos went right into the heart of the conflict, albeit without any particular loss of life. This fourth issue, released in 1943, must have read like something of a fever dream when it first came out. It was a rare book-length story, broken up into several chapters, that predicted the D-Day invasion of Europe by Allied forces. As you get from the cover, it was one of the most spectacularly visual comic books that Simon and Kirby had put out up until this time, fifty full pages that took the fight back to Germany and the Nazis’ own homelands. The genuine D-Day was still a year in the future when this book hit the racks, but it almost doesn’t matter. This is high adventure patriotism at its finest, with excitement and drama and energy and entertainment value. A movie on paper, but better than a movie, because it could visualize anything that Kirby could illustrate.

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A Comic Book On Sale 55 Years Ago Today, July 30, 1968

I’m spotlighting this issue almost solely for its cover, with it’s absurd cover copy to get across the situation. But this cover does highlight another change that had come to DC in recent months, and that change was Neal Adams. One of the first new young faces to enter the industry, which had been something of a closed shop for a decade or more, Adams came in with a great understanding of printing technology and a sense of his own value. He was immediately a more illustrative and dramatic artist than anybody else at DC, and proceeded to revolutionize the flavor of the line simply by his influence. It’s likely that the sketch for this cover was done by Carmine Infantino, who had been promoted to Cover Designer in an attempt to halt the erosion of DC’s sales, and who went on to become Editorial Director and then Publisher in short order. He and Adams had a good working relationship, though they occasionally clashed on policy—Adams was more progressive than Infantino or really anybody else in the business at the time, and inclined to push ahead and ask “why not?” more forcefully than others, and so get his way. He also just drew better than anybody else at this moment. It’s perhaps tough to see the influence he had, as so much of what he brought to the table has been subsumed by the generations that followed him, but Adams was a revelation. Even with Adams’ lush rendering on display here, the cover image and its attendant copy is fully in editor Mort Weisinger’s style—a style that tried to outline every situation such that the youngest reader could understand what was going on. Storybooks rather than sequential artwork. Here, Superman doesn’t have enough time to stop himself before colliding with the force-shield enveloping Stanhope College and destroying it—but he does still have enough time to utter a run-on sentence explaining the fact that he’s not going to be able to stop in time. This cover actually illustrates the Supergirl back-up story in this issue, and for those who may be wondering about the resolution, rather than attempting to stop himself, Superman instead speeds up, fast enough to break the time barrier and so avoid a fatal collision. As these things go, that’s really a pretty clever solution to this problem, so kudos to Weisinger and writer Cary Bates for coming up with it.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

Well, sort of. THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN AMERICA #1 by Fabian Nicieza and Kevin Maguire first saw print on July 30, 1991, but it had been in the works for several years before that. And in the end, Maguire wasn’t able to complete the series, and other artists were brought in to finish the final two issues. But at least before that, this was a pretty great project, one that could have been truly world-class had it gotten done as intended. it was still good, but those last two issues diminished the quality just enough that it failed to achieve classic status. Anyway, when the book did see print, the editor of record was Mike Rockwitz. But it had been in other editorial hands before that, notably those of Gregory Wright, whose office I interned for in the summer of 1989 some two years earlier. And in the first week of my internship, I had something happen that I was afraid might end the whole thing right there and then—so I cowardly hid the results, which weren’t discovered until well after I was done as an intern, and which were never attributed to me until I began telling this story. In any case, at the time I started, work on this project hadn’t gotten all that far—there were only perhaps a dozen penciled pages to be had at that time. Kevin was drawing the book on graphic novel paper, which is to say original art boards that were larger than the typical 11 x 17 so as to reduce properly for a larger size and to also bleed the artwork to the edges of the page on all sides, something that regular comic book pages still couldn’t do for the most part. At some point during that first week, Greg and his assistant editor Evan Skolnick asked me to make a few sets of copies of the pages for some use or another. The boards were large enough that, even on the large-size copies available at Marvel, they would have to be photographed in halves. This was going to take a bit more time than a regular copying job, and there was already a bit of a line-up at the copier when I went down there—but I had an edge, I thought. I’d already learned that there was another copier upstairs on the eleventh floor, the one occupied by accounting, assorted business types, foreign publishing and licensing. That copier didn’t tend to get as much use, as those divisions didn’t have as much work that needed to be copied. So I took my load of boards upstairs in order to run them off. Now, the copiers of that day were relatively primitive things, and they had lids that would latch down so that the copies would come out clean. But this only worked so long as the boards being copied were small enough to fit onto the bed of the machine, which these boards weren’t. So I was forced to copy them with the lid open. And so I proceeded to work my way through the copies that I needed, rotating each board and swapping it out for the next as I went in the manner of an assembling line. And then, something sickening happened. The hinges on the copier lid were pretty well worn and they didn’t maintain friction well. So it was that at a certain point, the lid slammed itself shut while a page was being copied—driving that latch hook straight through the original penciled page being copied. I was immediately both horrified and terrified as I opened the lid to see the impaled page hanging off of it, and I removed it as gingerly as I could from its perch. It was punctured—not a huge puncture, but enough of one to bring my career as a Marvel intern to a close, I thought. I stood there considering the situation for a moment or two, alone thanks to the fact that I wasn’t using the regular copier and consequently nobody had seen what had happened. And then I moved to complete the copying of the remaining pages, stacked everything back up with the punctured page buried in the center of the stack, and brought the whole thing back to the office, depositing it uninspected into the flat file. It’s not really a moment I’m proud of, and not one that was likely to have resulted in my termination, because accidents happen. Still, I wasn’t taking any chances.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

Now this one is a wild one. This first issue of SILVER SURFER came out on July 30, 2003 and was written by the soon-to-be-wed team of Dan Chariton and Stacy Weiss. It was a series whose overall ethos I had brainstormed, though the specific story and the manner in which it was told was all down to Dan and Stacy. They’d come to Marvel with a screenwriting background, and this series was their first comic book work. The notion I’d had at the time was that one of the things that had gone wrong with the Surfer over the years is that he’d become to pedestrian a character. When he first appeared, and for his first couple of years, he’d been an awesome figure, inscrutable, unknowable, and therefore mysterious and interesting. But a succession of stories had reduced him to being just another super hero, his alien otherness had eroded away. So that’s part of what we were trying to recapture here. This was also the period in which Marvel President Bill Jemas was at his most vocal about wanting to do stories that weren’t simple super hero adventure yarns but rather real stories about real people. Bill would have preferred things, I think, had there been no costumes or super-powers in these stories for the most part. So the focus of the book was on a new character, Denise Waters, whose autistic daughter Ellie is the victim of an alien abduction. to be specific, she’s spirited away by a gleaning figure on what looks to be a flying surfboard. There was a larger storyline that would be spooled out as Denise attempted to find out what had happened to her missing daughter and her search brought her into contact with the Silver Surfer. And the book ran for fourteen issues until those mysteries were all revealed and resolved. But there was a huge gap in-between issues #1 and #2. And that was all down to the artist, who went by the pen name Milx. Milx was a Malaysian artist with a great style, very European-influenced with a hint of manga about it and a nice color palate. He had sent in samples to Marvel and I had hired him for this series based on them. He was a little bit slow on the first issue, but not to a concerning degree. But then, time began to go by and there weren’t any further pages forthcoming. All attempts to contact him led to nothing—he had ghosted us, disappearing into the night without a word being said. I was later told that the pressure of having to produce such work on a regular deadline terrified him when he was confronted by the reality of it, and so rather than say something or face up to his situation, he instead ran. There was a bit of a fire drill when this all came to a head—there was no way to get things caught up at that point, not without resoliciting the issues after #1, which is what we wound up doing. The artist who took over for Milx was Lan Medina, and he did a fine job with the assignment. His work was perhaps not as exciting and electric as Milx had been, but he had the added advantage of actually delivering his pages when he said that he would. Milx would eventually resurface in the American comic book market, producing work both under his real name and his pen name alias for other publishers. But he’s not worked for Marvel since.

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Monofocus

It feels like I watched it a million years ago now since another episode has since been aired, but I enjoyed the hell out of the STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS /LOWER DECKS crossover episode. It began with a premise that really shouldn’t have worked—having characters that originated on the animated STAR TREK comedy interacting in real life with the STRANGE NEW WORLD crew and somehow bridging the tones between the two shows. But the episode pulled the whole thing off. I’d imagine that much of the fun is blunted if you haven’t watched both series as I have—they’re likely my two favorite entries in the recent spate of new STAR TREK series. Of particular note, Jack Quaid seems to be freakishly tall—he towered over most of the SNW cast in a way that his animated character simply couldn’t. in particular, having lost my own father at a relatively young age, the sequence in which Anson Mount talks about having reached a birthday that his character’s father never got to experience struck home for me in a meaningful fashion. I could relate in a big way to that.

I also finally cracked into FOUNDATION, the first episode of this second season at least. And I still like it, though it really has precious little to do with the Isaac Asimov books that it’s ostensibly based upon. And that’s not surprising—the Asimov stories chart the Fall and Rise of the Galactic Empire from the point of view of the Foundation, a coalition of scientists and researchers that Mathematician Hari Seldon has put together to insure that the coming dark ages last only 1000 years rather than untold millennia, as predicted by the predictive science of Psychohistory. Each Asimov story is typically set decades apart from the last, and each one deals with a key crisis faced by the Foundation as it goes about its task, including the interference of the mutant Mule whose existence couldn’t be predicted by Psychohistory and who threatens to destroy the entire plan. There aren’t any real continuing characters per se, which makes doing a television series something of a task. I’m not sure that this production team has really cracked how to approach it, and it does feel as though Hari is hanging around past the point where he’s outlived his usefulness as a character as a result. Still, it looks great, and Lee Pace is as magnetic as ever in his role as Empire. I’m sure that I’ll continue with it.

In print, I spent part of today consuming the single-volume hardcover edition of Charles Soule and Ryan Browne’s EIGHT BILLION GENIES, which was pretty fascinating. I suspect that I was primed for the material in that I just finished up MADOKA MAGICA, which in its own way dealt with wishes and Genii. Anyway, the great thing about EIGHT BILLION GENIES is that the concept is simple and easy to grasp—every person on Earth is granted a genie who will give them a single wish, and what happens to the world and society as a result of what happens thereafter. It’s good in that it doesn’t follow a simple narrative structure—there is no one specific bad guy to be overcome, the story situation is fluid and changes consistently in ways that make sense to the narrative. It wasn’t perfect—as a lawyer himself, Soule has a tendency to aggrandize those in the profession, at least in terms of their proficiency with language and argument. Some of his story twists revolve around this in a manner that doesn’t entirely seem plausible. But overall it was really good, and it held me for a single sitting. Definitely worth it as a unique read.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about this 1966 Newspaper Article about the impact the BATMAN television show starring Adam West had on the comics according to one college-aged fan.

And five years ago, I wrote about the third episode of STAR BLAZERS

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And that’ll bring us to a close for another week! So Hats All, Folks!

Tom B