#73: Drinking
I don’t drink. Pretty much never have. I don’t like the taste of alcohol nor how it makes me feel. I can remember being quite young when, at or after some party, by Dad gave me a sip of some drink that he said, “Tasted like chocolate” and which utterly disgusted me. And I would drink from time to time in college, typically when I was attempting to ingratiate myself to some girl I was chasing. But I never liked it, and so I just don’t do it, pretty much ever. This means that the typical “bar con” scene at most conventions where creators and company employees get sloppy and start gossiping about whatever has been on their minds is a loss to me. But in thirty-four years, not being an active player in that scene doesn’t appear to have hurt anything in my world, so no big loss.
But I can tell you with some certainty about the last time I did drink. It was in 1995 while I was attending a Spider-Man Retreat with the Spidey editors and creators. This was during that strange post-Tom DeFalco year when Marvel Editorial had been subdivided into five separate units. I was in the Spidey group with Bob Budiansky, who had first hired me and for whom I’d worked ever since. We were there to chart out the new era of Spider-Man, in which Ben Reilly, who was on the cusp of being revealed as having been the actual Spider-Man the whole time and not just a clone, would be taking over while Clone-Peter and Mary Jane left Manhattan to go out into the world and have their spider-baby. And yes, that storyline would make anybody drink, but that wasn’t at all the reason.
The reason was John Romita Jr. John had just returned to take up penciling the adjectiveless SPIDER-MAN book and he was one of two artists who were a part of the meeting (the other being Dan Jurgens, who was also writing his material.) Our meetings were an all-day affair with certain breaks built in for meals or just to step out of the room, and they ran until around 9:00 in the evening. So at one post-dinner break, a bunch of people, mainly the young assistant editors and a few writers and John ordered some drinks from the bar. Which is maybe not a great idea when you’re not finished with the day’s work, but whatever. People had started doing shots, and realizing that I was abstaining, John became the ringleader in an effort to peer-pressure me into doing a shot as well. It wasn’t motivated by nastiness or anything, John just wanted everybody to come together in that moment and hoist one. And so, in the end, I acquiesced. I don’t know that it was especially potent, but I could feel the alcohol in my system for the rest of the evening.
I can’t remember for sure whether it was my idea in the first place or whether I just liked it and championed it vigorously, but when we came back together and began to discuss Dan’s plans to use Mysterio as one of his main villains, we wound up redesigning him to get rid of the strange bowl-mask. Mysterio is one of those characters whose look was incredibly effective in his first story and thereafter suffered from “costume drift” because later artists didn’t realize what all of the bits of his costume were about. And in the mid-90s, it was all the rage to redesign the classic characters in an attempt to make them cool. So we wound up giving Mysterio instead a smoky head, which seemed like a good idea. But in practice, it wound up making him look too similar to Dormammu, and so the design was quickly dropped. I can’t say that my passion for it was caused by slugging back that one drink, but it can’t have helped my judgment in that moment. And I don’t think JRJR ever wound up drawing that design, so Dan was the one who wound up taking the hit for it.
Haven’t drank since.
We had lots of questions this week—the drought of the early years of this feature has seemed to be broken. So let’s get into things!
Chip Zdarsky
okay that explains your public animosity with Nick Lowe but what about your public animosity with me
Well, Chip, that’s really just common sense, ennit?
Nacho Teso
"So the concern was that a hero with the Marvel name needed to represent the whole of Marvel in some manner."
Do you feel that has been accomplished with Carol Danvers as Captain Marvel? Or was that something left behind when the change happened? Either way, i like her as Cap and for me she is The Captain Marvel, so I'm glad that ended up happening.
That concern ceased being a concern at a certain point into the process, Nacho, so it wasn’t anything that carol especially had to live up to. But we did want to position her as a powerful and self-sufficient hero on the level of any of the greats, which is partly why editor Steve Wacker added the legend Earth’s Mightiest Hero above her logo on her covers for the duration of the run. We got a bunch of mail from certain fans who were upset by that line, whether they wanted us to remember the Hulk or Thor or whomever, thus missing the point entirely. But everything worked out well, and she’s become very nicely cemented into that role, in no small part due to becoming such a player in the films.
Tom Morhouse
Can you speak to some of the challenges of bringing old Epic books like Epic Illustrated and the like to Marvel Unlimited or even physical reprints? Thanks!
Sure, it’s a pretty simple difficulty, Tom: much of that material was creator-owned, so Marvel doesn’t necessarily have any ongoing rights to it. So in order to reprint, say, a run of EPIC ILLUSTRATED issues, we’d need to successfully negotiate with the owners of all of the stories that ran in it, which is a herculean task. The same is true for most series published under the EPIC imprint, such as DREADSTAR or COYOTE or whatever. Marvel doesn’t have the rights to unilaterally reprint that work, so any attempt to do so would been to be negotiated out separately. In most cases, given the limited interest (or even awareness) in a lot of those properties today, it hasn’t seemed worth the hassle.
JV
Makes me wonder why they did not go with Monica Rambeau as the main Captain Marvel - who had more of a clean slate past (daughter of a firefighter!) - would love to hear Tom's thoughts on Monica (who was an Avengers mainstay in the 80s but then seemed to be pushed offstage after her creator Roger Stern left Marvel).
Monica was already on her way out of the Avengers when I started as an intern. There was definitely friction around the character between her creator Roger Stern, who had just left the book, and AVENGERS editor Mark Gruenwald and his assistants. As I recall, there was a feeling that, under Roger, Monica had been portrayed as too perfect, too all-powerful, incapable of making a mistake. Right or wrong, there was a desire to introduce some fallibility into the character—an effort that Roger balked at after he’d given it some thought. Once she was out of AVENGERS, Monica sort of went into comic book limbo, only re-emerging whenever Marvel needed to produce a one-shot to keep hold of the trademark to the name. Dwayne McDuffie attempted to overhaul her powers to make her more manageable as a solo earthbound character, but that didn’t really take. And eventually, Ron Marz introduced Legacy who would go on to inherit the Captain Marvel name, saddling Monica with a string of lesser codenames thereafter. Personally, I liked the character well enough, but I could see the point. And her era of AVENGERS was during the period when I’d stopped reading the series, so I never really connected with her in a big way.
Rob London
You may recall Nightwatch, an early-90s Terry Kavanagh creation who hung around the Spider-books for a while, participated in Maximum Carnage, and, oh yeah, looked exactly like Spawn. In the first issue of his solo series, he gets a technological upgrade to his costume that has the added benefit of making him slightly less Spawn-like. This apparently came out late enough in the game that the first issue’s original cover, which is reproduced in the book, has the character’s original, Spawn-ier look. I’ve always heard rumours that the redesign came about thanks to legal action by Todd McFarlane - is that true? Or was Marvel just pre-emptively avoiding liability?
Of course I remember Nightwatch, Rob—though I don’t recall there being a big design change. And as I wasn’t directly involved in any of those books, I don’t have any particular knowledge concerning what went down. It’s possible that Todd McFarlane or his people reached out about the character. Its just as possible that those costume shifts were done because the character was getting his own series and somebody thought he’d look better that way. I don’t really know in this instance—sorry.
Joseph Hedges
Question- Speaking of Fury and Punisher, Garth Ennis has carved out a wonderful overlapping ‘Nam history with the two characters over many stories with another series announced some years back called, “Get Fury”. Last I saw was that it was written and drawn but hasn’t popped yet.
Not yours direct, I know, but any rumblings around the campfire that it might see the light of day?
Because it’s an evergreen project—meaning that it isn’t tied to whatever might be happening in the present of the Marvel Universe, GET FURY is a project that it’s easy to push back for other more moment-specific fare, Joseph. We still intend to publish it, and have it earmarked broadly for the first half of 2024. But that supposes that there’ll be space among everything else that we’re doing. So if it doesn’t show, it’s likely for that same reason, that it was the simplest thing to push back when we found ourselves with too many releases in a given month. But it’s still coming.
Brendan T
On the subject of Amalgam stuff, is there a reason Marvel has pretty much withdrawn from inter company crossovers, either new or reprinting classic material? While we're seeing DC engage in some and licensed properties in a lot, aside from the Perez tribute JLA/Avengers trade there hasn't really been any North American publisher collabs since New Avengers/Transformers in...2009? It leaves some weird gaps in Marvel's own publishing too (like the Marvel Zomnibus missing the Marvel Zombies vs. Army of Darkness mini).
I think it’s pretty simple, Brendan. When Marvel and pretty much all of the other major players in the comic book industry were essentially small shops, it was relatively easy to get everybody on board and to do these sorts of crossovers. But in a world where we’re a film studio and owned by a big conglomerate and they’re a film studio and owned by a big conglomerate, the number of hoops you have to jump through to do anything like this is exponentially greater. And in most cases, it simply isn’t fiscally worth the effort—even if a new Marvel/DC crossover sold really well, you’d still be splitting the profits with the other company. So even if such a book sold twice as much as either company’s top seller, both firms would only be taking in as much as they could make on their own—and doing so with double the headaches. So I don’t know that Marvel is forever out of the inter-company crossover business, but if such a project were to happen again, it might be more likely to be in the worlds of film or television, where the return on the effort is likely to be greater. But even that seems very unlikely.
Anthony
A question about a book you didn't work on, so no idea how much insight you can share... do you know what happened with the relaunched What If line that kicked off with a fancy new logo and Chip's excellent Spider's Shadow? If memory serves at the time it was announced as a new line with more stories to come, including another Chip book, but as far as I know there hasn't been a word about it and no new stories since.
That other Chip project is one of the projects I alluded to in the recent past, Anthony, though enough time has passed since SPIDER’S SHADOW at this point that it probably doesn’t make sense to brand it under the same WHAT IF banner. Especially, as you noted, now that we’re doing more traditional WHAT IF product as well.
Murewa Ayodele
Your announcement of moving to the X-Office was truly shocking and gave a whole lot more meaning to your answer to Nick Mercurio’s question (from post #69) about how your X-men book would look like. I love the fact that you’ve been foreshadowing the move and many (including myself) didn’t notice.
As for my question(s), the Avengers have been your baby for so many years. From an interview of you I can’t particular recall where from, you spoke about your love for working on Spidey books, but you would have to leave the Avengers to move to the Spidey Office. That didn’t seem like the decision you desired then.
So, what has changed? Why the X-men? And how much do you think you will miss working on Avengers characters?
I wasn’t foreshadowing anything, Murewa. When I answered Nick’s question, I had no idea that any of this was going to happen. It was just pure coincidence. And as I said in the piece that set off all of this speculation at the start, what’s changed now is that I’ve been asked to do it, and I like to take on a challenge of this sort. I’m sure it will be weird to read Avengers material that I don’t directly oversee—though if it’s still being produced by Jed MacKay and C.F. Villa, I’m sure I’ll be fine with it, since I put that team together in the first place. But that’s the circle of life as a comic book editor. You must always keep in mind that somebody edited these characters and properties before you, and somebody will edit them after you are done.
John Austin
I wanted to ask you about is three comics that aren't on Marvel Unlimited but I was wondering if they might be getting added soon. It's two comic series and one graphic novel that I'm wondering about. The two series are Savage Avengers and The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones and the graphic novel is Captain America/Ghost Rider: Fear.
Thanks for your interest in all of these books, John. I don’t know that I have super-definitive answers for you on all of them, but I’ll tell you what I can. On SAVAGE AVENGERS, you are absolutely right that because we no longer have the rights to Conan or his characters or world, we can no longer reprint that material. And that includes having it available in digital formats. I’d say THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF INDIANA JONES might be dependent on any further Marvel Indiana Jones project, which is something that gets brought up quite often with us and Lucasfilm, but the right moment hasn’t yet materialized for such a thing. And i don’t know why CAPTAIN AMERICA: GHOST RIDER: FEAR might not be available on Marvel Unlimited. My guess would be that, as it isn’t a part of any specific series, it just hasn’t gotten digitized yet. But that can change any time. Am I right in thinking that it was collected in a recent Epic collection, either of Cap or Ghosty?
Jack Elving
Mr. Brevoort, I said multiple times in those comments that I didn't subscribe to the opinion about Kamala that was the original point of discussion. You mischaracterizing me this way feels like yet another attempt to avoid dealing with the main thrust of what I have said, which is something of a consistent tactic I've seen in the period of Marvel of the last 2 decades. The tactic of double and triple down, out-stubborn fans, and hunker down in self-righteousness in the face of real arguments which is absolutely not the mentality of Marvel's best editors (Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Archie Goodwin, Jim Shooter, Louise Simonson, Jim Salicrup, Mark Gruenwald, Tom DeFalco). I don't believe you belong in that company, Mr. Brevoort, nor do most of your colleagues, I am sorry to say. Though I do think you have more moments than others.
Jack, I have to say that your long interactions in my comments as well as posts you’ve made elsewhere on the internet make me suspect that you’re perhaps not being as forthright about your position as you might say. But I do sort of admire the unintentional moxie with which you step into my house in order to insult me. I’ve tried to answer your questions directly to the best of my ability, and if you’re unhappy with those answers, so be it; nothing I can do about that. But we’re done here, all right?
X of Alex
Under Quesada, events were a solo-artist affair, and a Career-making one at that! Coipel on House of M, McNiven on Civil War, Yu on Secret Invasion, Immonen on Fear Itself. But then, post 2011, you started seeing a whole slew of artists tacking a story. Off the top of my head, AvX\Age of Ultron took three pencillers, AXIS\Secret Empire four. Now we seem to be trending back to a single penciller per event project (Schiti on Empyre\AXE). As a reader, I welcome the unified artistic vision.
Was this, in its time, a measure meant to expedite the shipping schedule? A necessity, given the length of the projects? Or, rather, a symptom of the abovementioned projects' general troubles in getting out on the page?
I think some of what you’re seeing is aesthetic differences between different Editors in Chief, Alex, as well as differences in the need due to the marketplace. As a rule, I think everybody involved preferred things when a single artist could handle all of a given Event storyline. But one of the things that has definitely changed is the length of time that the audience can seem to sustain their interest in any one story concept. So while CIVIL WAR ran for seven issues (and took maybe nine months to come out), today that isn’t seen as a tenable approach. Our Events have to wrap up in a much shorter period of time, often double-shipping for some or all of their run time. And that, plus the occasional instance when we started work on such a project closer to release time than we might have caused situations where multiple artists became a necessity. In recent times, we’ve taken greater steps to begin on such projects earlier—I’ve mentioned in the past that our 2024 Event series is already being drawn, even though you won’t read it for close to a year. And that’s because it will by necessity ship at a greater-than-monthly frequency in order to give it a shorter overall footprint.
Chris Sutcliffe
There are comics where there are two assistant editors. Often this is where there's a handover from one to the other, but I've noticed a few cases where a series will have two assistants for 6-12 months.
When this is the case, is there a standard way the work is split, on issues that only have one story? Does one take images and the other words? Do they take the first half of pages and the second half?
Would love to know the usual mechanics.
It depends, Chris. Different editors have different ways that they prefer to work. For some, if they have two assistant editors, they may choose to divide the work up among them so that each one has certain projects that are entirely theirs. Others, such as myself, subscribe to an “everybody works on everything” model in which both assistants perform functions on each book. Those functions may not be equal, and may not even be the same from issue to issue, depending on the needs of that particular book. And this doesn’t really happen often. It’s more common to see an Editor, an Associate Editor and an Assistant Editor all working on a book together.
Nick Mercurio
Who came up with the idea to make Bucky the successor to the Man on the Wall role? And does he technically still hold that role in the MU?
I don’t have a clear recall of this, Nick, but I believe the idea probably originated with Jason Aaron. At the very least, he implemented it, and worked out the backstory of the role that was fleshed out through ORIGINAL SIN. And I believe we just saw a recent reference to Bucky holding that role in recent CAPTAIN AMERICA stories—though Bucky really hasn’t seemed to be functioning in that position since the series he headlined immediately after ORIGINAL SIN wrapped up.
Behind the Curtain
Been cleaning out some old files, and so this one is also X-Men related work that I did years ago.
What you see here are costume views, front, back and occasionally side, for different characters in the X-Men line. These drawings were done circa 1992, and were prepared and drawn by me in preparation for the ToyBiz X-Men Action Figure line.
At the time, the principle X-creators, notably Jim Lee, Whilce Portacio and Rob Liefeld, were introducing both a lot of brand new characters and also redesigning some existing characters, giving them more modern looks. When the folks doing the X-Men action figures would want to make toys of those characters or designs, there wasn’t any clear reference for these characters. (Some of them had only made perhaps one or two appearances in print by this point.)
And so, using the three-view template that Mark Gruenwald had created for the OFFICIAL HANDBOOK OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE MASTER EDITION, I would sit down with whatever reference there was for these characters and decide how the costumes worked from all angles. This was especially tricky on Rob Liefeld’s designs, as he would alter them from panel to panel based on whatever looked good to him in that moment. But for an action figure, you need a consistent design that looks the same front, side and back. And so that’s what I drew here.
I also selected Pantone colors for all of the characters’ uniforms, making judgments based on my interpretations of the manner in which the comics were being colored. At the time, the X-line was trying to push the boundaries of what could be done with traditional hand-separation color, and so most X-books carried a lot more strata of modeling and shading than was usual. This made some of the actual colors difficult for the toy manufacturers to figure out. So if you thought the figure colors were off, that was my doing, as I picked them all in the case of these characters.
There’s one sheet that isn’t represented here, the one featuring Deadpool. Yes, I codified Deadpool’s costume based on only his first two appearances in NEW MUTANTS #98 and X-FORCE #2 (and his trading card in X-FORCE #1.) And the reason it’s not here is that, when I found that board in a stack of stuff in a drawer several years ago, I gave it as a gift to then-DEADPOOL editor Jordan White. I’m told he has it framed in his home.
Pimp My Wednesday
It’s another week of wonderment in the Marvel Heroes office—one in a rapidly dwindling supply of them as we prepare to transition to our new assignments. So take heed and check out these masterworks while you still can, before we’re gone!
MOON KNIGHT: CITY OF THE DEAD #2 sheds more light on Leila El-Faouly and her new role as the Scarlet Scarab. It also features a small army of villains who were killed dead by Moon Knight and now see their opportunity for revenge. It’s written by David Pepose and drawn by Marcelo Ferreira, and it’s an essential part of your complete Moon Knight diet.
And DAREDEVIL & ECHO #4 finishes up this saga of the past and present of Matt Murdock and Maya Lopez, as brought to you by writers Taboo and B. Earl and artist Phil Noto, all under the watchful eye of Associate Editor Annalise Bissa. (Hi, Mr. Bissa!) Annalise inherited this project on the fly from an overworked Devin Lewis, whose fingerprints are still on it somewhat, but she made it a thing of her own along the way.
Also this week comes the latest chapter in the CONTEST OF CHAOS slobberknocker, as Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four mixes it up with Johnny Blaze of the Spirits of Vengeance in as weird a throwdown as you can imagine. FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #1 is written by Zac Gorman, illustrated by Alan Robinson and put together by Assistant Editor Martin Biro.
And in AVENGERS UNLIMITED #61, Captain Marvel and Iron Man face conflicts both external and internal as they attempt to save a spaceship under siege by alien warriors that’s hauling a dangerous cargo. Tim Seeley writes and Davide Tinto draws and the scroll is vertical as usual!
A Comic Book On Sale 15 Years Ago Today, August 20, 2008
NEW WAYS TO DIE was the first extended story-arc in the BRAND NEW DAY era of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, a period that saw the title’s release schedule accelerated to coming out three times a month, and being written by a group of writers known collectively as either the Spidey Braintrust or the Web-Heads depending on when you were asking. The decision to make ASM a three-times-a-month series was mine; in the immediate aftermath of inheriting responsibility for the Spidey books, I figured that since ASM was always seen as the primary home of the character anyway, that three issues of ASM would sell better on average than an issue of ASM, an issue of SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN and an issue of FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN, or whatever the specific series tiles had been at that moment. I didn’t edit AMAZING SPIDER-MAN directly at any point, though—for that duty, I hired Steve Wacker, whom I had worked with on JLA/AVENGERS, away from DC where he’d been heading up their weekly 52 series. I figured his experience there with a similar team of writers working on a weekly schedule would prove to be invaluable, and indeed it was. At the jump and for the first several months, the longest individual storylines the book ran were three parts in length, in part to allow the machinery of the title to begin to jell before testing it more heavily and because of the lead time it would take to get a single artist through all six chapters of an extended arc. It was John Romita Jr. coming back into the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN rotation that made NEW WAYS TO DIE possible, both because he could get started on it earlier than any of the books other regular contributors and also because JRJR was a hard-working man and extremely fast and reliable on top of being great. All of the Spidey Braintrust writers wanted to work with JRJR, but it was Dan Slott who grabbed this first opportunity largely by being quick on his feet and finding ways to both give Wacker the things he was looking for in the arc while also keeping al of the team’s running subplots percolating. In a lot of ways, though nobody knew it at that moment, this was probably the point where Dan became the most primary of the ASM writers and eventually the person who would head up the series solo after this experiment had run for three years. One of the main ideas that led to the creation of NEW WAYS TO DIE came from Wacker himself. He’d had conversations with somebody in Marvel’s action figure division, likely Jesse Falcon though I don’t know that with any certainty. Whoever it was, this person told Steve about how hot they were for new characters who were spins on already great-selling toys, and Steve came away from this conversation wanting to do a thing he called White Venom. To whit, a Reverse-Flash style version of Venom who would be predominantly white-costumed with a black spider-insignia. The other thing that NEW WAYS TO DIE represented was the first time that AMAZING SPIDER-MAN could really reference and deal with the ongoing DARK REIGN status qu that was happening across the Marvel Universe. In the aftermath of SECRET INVASION, Norman Osborn had rocketed in popularity when he and his Thunderbolts took out the Skrull Queen Veranke. This led to Norman replacing Tony Stark as the top cop of the world, the head of the SHIELD replacement organization HAMMER. This was all going on, though, while issues of ASM that we had prepared well ahead of any of these developments were continuing to come out, and so it was impossible for the book to reflect these developments in a major way. Until this story. Slott really hated the name White Venom—he kept joking that it sounded like an alcoholic beverage. But he realized that he’d already put certain pieces on the board that would allow him to transform Eddie Brock into the desired White Venom—namely Martin Li, the head of the F.E.A.S.T. Center who was secretly the underworld figure Mr. Negative. Eddie had been established as dying of cancer, and Dan reasoned that if Martin Li used the healing touch that he possessed in his civilian form on him, not only would he be able to cure Eddie of his ailment, but perhaps this would supercharge the remnants of the symbiote that were still in his system, transforming him into Anti-Venom. In his new role, having been saved by what seemed to be an act for God, Anti-Venom became a seemingly pious crusader, albeit still an extremely violent one. The title NEW WAYS TO DIE was a bit of nonsense on Slott’s part. It sounded really good and evocative, like a Bond movie title, but it didn’t really mean anything particular. Because of the need for Norman Osborn and the Thunderbolts/Dark Avengers elsewhere, including Mac Gargan as Venom, Spidey couldn’t actually decisively take any of them down. But this did allow for Norman to make a big impact in the ASM world, his appearance sending his son Harry’s life into a tailspin and his resumption of his Green Goblin identity, however momentarily, both giving fans what they wanted while raising complications for the new Goblinesque mystery threat who’d been running through the BRAND NEW DAY period almost from the beginning, Menace. After NEW WAYS TO DIE proved that it was possible, Steve and his team would set up further extended storylines in the months to come, typically centered around the biggest and most commercial story ideas that they had in the hopper. But NEW WAYS TO DIE was the first, and it was a smash hit that helped bring a bunch of former Spidey fans who had sworn off the series in the wake of ONE MORE DAY and the disillusion of the Peter/MJ marriage to check the series out once again.
A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date
The collected edition of SQUADRON SUPREME was first released on August 20, 1997, and it was pretty much only produced in order to pay homage to the late Mark Gruenwald, who had passed away several months before and who was a beloved figure among Marvel’s staff and creative community alike. At the time of his death, Mark had been talking to me about writing a follow-up series to SQUADRON, though he passed before he could get into it any deeper than a couple of notions for where the story would go and what the theme of the work would be. I’d always considered SQUADRON SUPREME to be Mark’s best work, a series that was ahead of its time in terms of the way it thought about super heroes and their effect on the world around them. For all that it looked and read like a typical Marvel series of the era, SQUADRON SUPREME went deeper than that, and took some storytelling risks that most wouldn’t attempt with the more crucial Marvel characters. SQUADRON SUPREME was simultaneously a bit of fannish fun—the Squadron had always represented thinly-disguised versions of DC’s most popular characters, and Gruenwald steered into that concept harder than anybody before him had done—to the point where there was a reach-out from DC’s legal department at a certain point and some boundaries being put into place. But there was no question: this was a Marvelized version of the classic Justice League of America, both in terms of the individual characters as well as how their world operated and the history behind it. It’s very difficult to sum up Mark Gruenwald for anybody who didn’t know him, as he was simultaneously nerdily bookish about certain subjects and also puckishly fun-loving and a bit of a joker on the other hand. He was Marvel’s self-appointed morale officer, a task he took on with gusto, and even spread to Marvel’s convention presence. Any fans who ever attended one of Mark’s game show sessions will know just what I’m talking about. To give you a sense of the man, here’s a YouTube Link to a quickie one-minute video I spliced together several years ago from footage shot by Mark and his cohorts circa 1984, in which Mark performs two acrobatic tricks.
Mark lived his life like a piece of performance art, and nowhere was that more evident than in his last requests. Upon unsealing his will, Mark’s widow Catherine learned that Mark had left instructions that he wanted his body to be cremated, and the ashes mixed into the ink for a comic book, so that he would become part of the medium he loved forever. It was a bit of a macabre request, but Mark was beloved enough by all that the folks he left behind found a way to get permission to do it. I spearheaded the efforts along with my assistant Glenn Greenberg to put together a collected edition of Mark’s masterpiece, SQUADRON SUPREME, that would contain not only the entire twelve-issue series (and its one CAPTAIN AMERICA tie-in issue) but also testimonials from creators and editors who had been close to Mark, to help contextualize his legacy. And this was the book into which Mark’s ashes would be mixed.
Most of this process flew beneath the radar, but once the book came out, things started to happen. Somebody at the Associated Press heard about it and thought there was a cool, salacious story to be told here. That photo above of me holding both a copy of the book and the “temporary container” that had held Mark’s ashes ran in something like 150 newspapers around the country. For years, it’s the image that would come up first if you googled my name. We had to keep Mark’s ashes in our office for several weeks before they were ready to be transported to the printing plant at press time, and so Glenn had affixed a photograph of Mark to the outside of the container. We’d dutifully say hello to “Mark” every time we came into the office. I still have that temporary container—it’s looking down on me as I write these very words. For years I kept it in my office atop a carton of copies of that SQUADRON SUPREME collection, calling it the greatest concentration of Mark Gruenwald left in the world. Which maybe seems morbid, but Mark would have gotten a laugh out of it, and that’s all that matters to me. As the story of Mark and the SQUADRON SUPREME collection began to circulate, we were obligated to send out a series of stickers to all of the outlets where the book was being sold, as in the photograph at the top of this page. They indicated, in a semi-tasteful way, that this was the book that held the ashes of a Marvel editor as had been covered in the press. The initial orders for this collection hadn’t been especially strong, but the news coverage caused demand to skyrocket, causing Marvel to need to go back for two additional print runs. One of the strangest alterations I’ve ever had to make to a collected edition was adding in a legend at the end of Catherine Gruenwald’s introduction in these later editions: Second Printing. Contains No Ashes.
Monofocus
Hulu dropped the entire fourth season of SOLAR OPPOSITES this past week, a show that I would describe as being good but not really great. In this era of pretty terrific animated science fiction comedies, SOLAR OPPOSITES is one of them—not the best but neither the worst. It’s a reliable base hit of a series. The big change this season is that the disgraced Justin Roiland, who co-created the series and performed one of its main characters, the patriarchal Korvo, has been replaced. And the show doesn’t even try to conceal the voice switch-over at all by attempting to get a sound-alike. Rather, they let replacement actor Dan Stevens create his own delivery, and hand-wave the switch away in a very clever, very funny bit of business at the beginning of the first episode. What was interesting to me was that, while Roiland was a very distinctive performer, within about an episode I stopped noticing the switchover and simply accepted Stevens as Korvo. Which is probably the best case scenario that the production team could have hoped for. Anyway, despite having all of the episodes there to binge, that’s not really my way, and so I’ve been consuming them at a rate of no more than one a night.
In print, i also spent part of this afternoon poring over the newly-released FRANK MILLER DAREDEVIL ARTIST’S EDITION. Like the other volumes in this line, the book reproduces an assortment of pages of original artwork from Frank Miller’s tenure writing and drawing DAREDEVIL. To fill out the volume, it also includes some additional pages from the WOLVERINE limited series and one of the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN ANNUALS Frank drew. I was a reader when all of these stories first saw print, and I can recall what a revelation this series of stories was. It’s almost the opposite of the impact that was later made by the Image-era artists, in that it was all about the storytelling, the mood ad the tone, the way in which the pacing and the visuals are laid out. I mean, there’s a 14-panel page in the early part of this collection, and it doesn’t feel at all cramped or crowded. What it feels like is an evolution in the way that artistic great Bernard Krigstein sliced time into discrete units to control the pace of the reader’s experience. It’s very formative work by Miller, who was already a transcendent comic book maker even at this early stage. It also included what I think is the one and only cover Frank ever drew for me, for an issue of MARVEL SUPER HEROES MEGAZINE in which I was reprinting his DAREDEVIL run in the early 1990s. So that was fun to see.
I also enjoyed LUPIN III: THICK AS THIEVES today, which is a second hardcover collection of Monkey Punch’s terrific Lupin III manga from the early 1970s. For people familiar with the character from the assorted anime films and television series that he’s starred in over the years, the manga is something of an odd duck. It’s a lot more gag-oriented than heist-oriented. The best description I can give of it is that it feels like a cross between Sergio Aragones’ marginal cartoons in MAD Magazine and the SPY VS SPY strip in that same publication. All of the characters are the same as always: Lupin II, the world’s greatest thief and master of disguise; Daisuke Jigen, the best gunman in the world; Goemon, a master swordsman in the tradition of a classic samurai warrior; Fujiko Mine, the sexpot femme fatale; and Inspector Zenigata, the implacable and indestructible police officer who pursues Lupin across the globe hoping to bring him to justice. But the plots are thin, and really only there to give some structure to the jokes. and the cartooning is broad and stylized and exaggerated and unique. It’s a really great strip, though the kind of thing that I need to be in the right mood for. Today, I pretty clearly was, and I polished off this latest volume in no time flat.
(Remember to read right-to-left in the style of Japan.)
Posted at TomBrevoort.com
Yesterday, I wrote about Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s short-lived Silver Age super hero The Shield in THE DOUBLE LIFE OF PRIVATE STRONG #1
And Five Years Ago, I wrote about the DC Dollar comics one-shot 5 STAR SUPER HERO SPECTACULAR #1
And that ought to wrap things up for another week. Thanks for coming around and wading through all of this nonsense. If all goes well, we’ll be back to do it all again seven days hence.
Hat’s all, folks!
Tom B
I never realized how much I wanted "Rob Liefeld characters as interpreted by Tom Brevoort" before.
"Of course I remember Nightwatch." Good grief, man. Who *don't* you remember?