#76: Gum Gum Gatling!

I’ve got to hand it to Panini, and in particular Julian Eme who commented on last week’s story concerning my old Assistant Editor Gregg Schigiel and I flimflamming our way into getting a set of the Biblioteca Marvel volumes that Panini had put out twenty five years ago. Julian had turned up in the comments offering to send me “a few issues” of the new versions of these volume that the company has been releasing recently. Without thinking too much about it, I replied that he could send them to me at the regular Marvel offices, and put it out of my mind. That is, until Thursday, when a massive box was brought to my desk.

In it was a massive assortment of Biblioteca Marvel volumes, once again a complete set of what has been released so far. What you see in the photograph above is just the tip of the iceberg of what they sent—there were so many that I’m going to need to transport them home in waves, there are simply too many to carry all at once. I have to say too that these are really nice volumes with some great production values. The paper stock is bright but not glossy, so the true color shows through well, the reproduction is sharp, and pulled from way better reproduction materials than were available in the 1990s versions. And each volume also includes a bunch of extras in the back. These include reproductions of original art pages, rejected covers and other behind-the-scenes materials and in certain cases, essays about the origins of the specific series. I was surprised to discover that the first Los Quatro Fantasticos volume seen above quotes extensively from some blog posts I had done about how the first issue of FANTASTIC FOUR may have initially been put together. I was also very impressed by the timeline that each book contained, which put the releases in the edition into context with both real-world events and also what was going on elsewhere in the industry at that time.

So this was very generous of you, Julian. Thank you for sending them along to me.

Anyway, enough about free stuff that I got this week, let’s get into your questions—because maybe that way, I can get some more free stuff!

Dewey

Oh, I wasn't asking for a reboot, I'm pretty firmly anti-reboot. My feeling about DC post-New 52 is pretty much the same as you, it's confusing not knowing if things happened or not (Or being told the continuity was wiped only for it to return, as with so much of Rebirth-era Superman). I just wondered, personal interests aside, if Marvel brass had ever considered going that route at some point.

Not really, Dewey, not in any organized way. Of course, back during the mid-1990s when Marvel’s owners had done a deal to outsource FANTASTIC FOUR, AVENGERS, CAPTAIN AMERICA and IRON MAN to Wildstorm and Extreme Studios, there were plans afoot to do the same with pretty much the entire line. Had that happened, the cohesiveness of the Marvel Universe would have been shattered as different properties likely would have wound up in disparate hands. That wouldn’t have been a reboot per se, but it would have created a very changed landscape. Fortunately, cooler heads ultimately prevailed in that instance and so Heroes Reborn became merely a year-long tributary in the Marvel river. There was also some loose talk about possibly Ultimate-izing the entire Marvel line towards the very end of Bill Jemas’ tenure as President, but it was near enough to the end that it was never really acted upon.

Jeff Ryan

Starting in the 1980s, Marvel and DC held line-wide summer crossovers exclusively in annuals: Evolutionary War, Atlantis Attacks, Armageddon 2001, Invasion, Bloodlines, etc. It's a real challenge to come up with a threat for both individuals and teams, street-level characters as well as cosmic entities. Which decades-past crossover do you think offered creative teams the best way to "play ball" and tell the type of story their fans expected?

I don’t know that I really have a favorite among the assorted Annual events that Marvel and DC did for the very reasons you mention, Jeff—they weren’t really all that wonderful a showcase for the individual titles involved. ARMAGEDDON 2001 remains an important cautionary tale, though, in terms of not trying to change your story’s ending halfway through. I tend to think that the best of these weren’t story-connected so much as they were theme connected. That tended to let every title do its own thing while still creating a cohesive package for the audience. So something like doing YEAR ONE was flexible enough to allow for both a Superman story and a green Arrow story that played to the proper level. As I recall, Marvel abandoned doing themed Annuals a lot more quickly than DC did, so there are more options from the DC material. But the quality of the Event always came down to the quality of the stories that each individual creative team was able to put together. Even with a theme such as YEAR ONE, there were a bunch of dogs.

Chris Sutcliffe

who do you listen to know whether a comic you created is good?

Do you value letters, or critics, or other editors, or people reaching out on social media? How to you filter out the thoughts of people who might hate it for unuseful reasons (e.g. it has a woman as the lead, or it doesn't undo a status quo someone dislikes)?

Well, on a certain level, Chris, the person I listen to the most is myself. I think i have enough experience under my belt now to know when some piece of work I’ve overseen is objectively good or bad. But I don’t tend to judge these things by the same metric that most fans use. Because I understand that no editor has it within their power to make a particular book good. But the editor can make it better, and they can make it worse. So to me, the yardstick is how much I and my team have been able to improve what we’re going out with. There have been plenty of books that have sold well—and that’s great, that keeps the lights on—but that we were unsatisfied with in one aspect or another. And others that didn’t sell all that great, but that we knew we had improved a great deal, and so I took as a bigger overall win. I listen to feedback from all over the place, both from fans online and other members of the Marvel staff—we do a weekly Reading Circle where we go over some recent book and dissect its good and bad points in an effort to keep from repeating the same mistakes. But ultimately, I know in my gut when something is good or bad, and at that point nobody is going to convince me that it is without merit or that it’s excellent.

Taimur Dar

Might be remembering incorrectly, but I believe a few years ago Rick Remender revealed that Jerome Opeña was originally going to be the artist on the relaunched Captain America book. Know Opeña did a few designs before obviously things changed and John Romita Jr. became the Cap artist and Opeña became involved in Hickman's Avengers. Possible my memory is just shoddy but curious if Opeña was indeed meant to draw Remender's Cap book?

I believe you’re remembering incorrectly, Taimur. Jerome Opena was never going to be working on Rick’s CAPTAIN AMERICA run. You may be thinking about an earlier period when Rick was working on the X-Books, and Opena switched over to drawing X-FORCE with Rick rather than another X-Title that he’d been slated to be on. Jerome did do Captain America costume designs, but those were done for AVENGERS, which debuted first. John Romita Jr had different preferences for how he wanted to approach the costume, and so we wound up compromising and finding a middle ground between the two approaches that would work for both titles. It isn’t impossible that Rick spoke to Jerome about drawing his run on CAPTAIN AMERICA, given that they had worked together before, but Jerome was always on AVENGERS and JRJR was always on CAPTAIN AMERICA.

David Baroldy

I’ve noticed what feels like slightly thicker cover stock on some standard-priced Marvel books, last week’s Blade #2 and Star Wars: Bounty Hunters #37 being recent examples. Is there a chance we’ll see thicker covers on more books soon?

As prices continue to rise, is there a conversation about improving paper stock or a possible return to 22 story pages, or would that just eat any additional profits from higher cover prices?

We’ve been experimenting a little bit with all of these things, David, as we try to provide the best possible value while maintaining the profit margins that we need in order to continue to function as a publisher. But beyond that, I don’t think there’s really much I can tell you about any of this.

Cathal

Something I've been wondering lately due to the regular discussion on comics pricing - What's the process for setting a non-standard price point for a comic? I've always assumed it's a publishing call that can be negotiated to a degree by senior editors and creators with significant pull, but you know what they say about assumptions...

In almost all cases, Cathal, we have a standard price point for each of our standard formats, and so it is used when a particular issue is going to be published at that page count. And unless it’s a publishing initiative of some kind, these price points tend to be standard and non-negotiable, as they are designed to make sure that each release can meet the necessary margin to make it a contributor to Marvel’s health. What is often more open for discussion is the page count and associated price for individual issues that are larger than a standard book. Occasionally, I may be asked when setting up the launch if I could make the first issue larger in size, for example. And whenver an Anniversary issue or one sort comes up, there’ll be a discussion with the Sales group about what everybody thinks the best format for that one issue might be—how many additional pages for what increase in cover price. This is how a FANTASTIC FOUR #700 winds up having 40 pages of content but a MOON KNIGHT #25 winds up with 80, seven or eight of which are reprint material.

Stuart Perks

Can the current owners of the Conan licence print a facsimile edition of a Marvel comic including all the non story content such as inhouse adverts and letters pages ?

Are there any restrictions or reasons that Marvel itself may not reprint a facsimile for instance a letter from little Charley Manson from Ohio or an advert that modern eyes now deem inappropriate ?

Lastly where are all the files/story pages actually held for example are all the Dark Horse Star Wars comics in Marvel's possession or is there an inter company communication when a collection/omnibus is planned ?

A lot of this depends on the specifics of the licensing agreements involved, Stuart. But as a general rule, nobody else can reprint material with Marvel characters in it without Marvel permission (and potentially participation depending on the deal.) But on something like CONAN, the rights-holders ultimately have title to the material being produced and can reissue it in the future as they like, though they need to eliminate any Marvel trademarks from it. I don’t know offhand whether the Conan rights-holders might be able to issue a facsimile edition of Marvel’s CONAN THE BARBARIAN #1, but I would doubt it, as there is plenty of Marvel-owned imagery in the ads and editorial content of that issue apart from the main story. And while Marvel keeps some manner of reproduction material on everything that we publish, copies of those materials may be provided to the licensor as the books are done depending on what the agreement specifies. Otherwise, somebody looking to reprint old material may need to reconstruct it from the printed works, just as we occasionally have to do.

Manqueman

Question regarding the story: As we all should know, the story was inspired by North's falling into some sort of hole while walking his pup. Had a dying phone, posted online a request for info on how to get out of the hole (which, obviously, he eventually did). Question is: How much of this month's issue reflected that event? Just how autobiographical was it? For that matter, how did North become a science smarty pants? (Yes, I'm aware of his book.)

For those who are unaware, several years ago now, Ryan North and his dog got stuck in a skateboarding park after a rainstorm that left the walls slick and unable to be easily climbed. Having scant resources apart from his phone, Ryan live-tweeted the entire event, and other Twitter users suggested things he might try, eventually hitting on a workable solution that allowed both he and his dog to escape their trap. The whole thread is still archived here for anybody that wants to experience it. But the story in FANTASTIC FOUR #11, while perhaps inspired in part by those events, doesn’t really mirror them in more than a cursory way. There were fewer super villains involved in the real event, unless you count the rain. (Stupid rain!) And I assume that Ryan came by his science smarts by being inquisitive and reading and studying a lot. I don’t believe that any gamma ray bombardment was involved.

Anthony

Thanks for sharing the breakdown on covers, that was a great read. Coincidentally I am reading the Waid/Wieringo FF run at the moment and I noticed that there's a long stretch of that run with really generic covers. Not bad covers at all, just relatively standard shots of the team that don't relate to the story at all, eg. Authorative Action has shots of the team in New York when that arc takes place in Latveria. I know this is work from almost 20 years ago but I was wondering if there was any background you could share here? And while I'm asking about this run, what led to Karl Kesel co-writing some of the later issues before Waid took over full duties again at the end?

As I’ve mentioned in the past, Anthony, over time Bill Jemas developed a number of unrealistically narrow parameters for how covers should be done. Not only was he a proponent of the notion that the cover didn’t need to reflect the story on the inside of the issue, but past a certain point he only wanted covers that featured a single character, even on team titles such as AVENGERS, X-MEN or FANTASTIC FOUR. And ideally, that character would be a woman, and ideally, she’d be bending over something. I don’t know that I ever made him madder than when I did the cover to FANTASTIC FOUR #68 which followed the letter of all of his cover requirement commandments while ignoring or circumnavigating the spirit of them. But that’s why those Authoritative Action covers are mainly solo character shots—because that’s all we were permitted to do. And Karl Kesel co-writing on the Frightful arc was simply a matter of both Waid and Ringo needing some catch-up time after being ejected from the book and then brought back to it. Karl was a natural person to help in those instances, both because he’s both a great writer and a huge Fantastic Four fan, and he was already an extended part of the creative team as the inker.

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Behind the Curtain

.What I’m about to show you wasn’t ever meant for public consumption, and it was produced in a less enlightened time long ago. So please bear that in mind and grade this thing on the curve.

What you see below is one of Mark Gruenwald’s annual editorial office quizzes, in which he poked fun at the members of the staff and what they’d gotten up to in the course of the preceding year. A lot of these questions and answers aren’t really going to make a whole lot of sense to anybody that wasn’t there—this is real inside baseball stuff. But it is a good example of the sort of pointed silliness that Mark and Marvel used to engage in on the regular.

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Pimp My Wednesday

It’s morning in America, or so I am told, and so the promise of fresh new comic books on their way to stores on Wednesday is coming true even as we speak.

AVENGERS INC. is a different sort of an Avengers series from the minds of Al Ewing and Leonard Kirk. In some ways, it grows out of the events of Al’s recent WASP anniversary series, and in others it builds upon ideas towards approach that he’s been honing for years in different AVENGERS titles, like when first Luke Cage and later Sunspot as Citizen V both wore nicely-tailored suits in their roles as Avengers leader rather than costumes. While it’s a super hero comic book it’s also an investigation procedural, with Janet Van Dyne and her new partner the mysterious Victor Shade called upon to solve super-powered mysteries across the Marvel Universe all while struggling to solve the riddle of Shade’s own creation. So it’s a pretty fun quasi-noir sort of an affair, one that is reflected on the cool Daniel Acuna covers. And like PLANETARY, we aren’t going to have a standard logo treatment but will instead adapt a different text approach for each individual issue. This one is a bit of an out-of-the-box gamble, but it’s worth trying to push the envelope on these properties from time to time.

Over in the digital space, Moon Knight has arrived to assist the abducted Captain America survive the Fixer’s deadly gauntlet. It’s the second part of this AVENGERS UNLIMITED story by Mat Groom and Caio Majado.

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A Comic Book On Sale 60 Years Ago Today, September 10, 1963

It’s tempting to think of the Marvel Age of Comics as something that arrived fully-formed to take the world of comic books by storm. And in some respects, that’s an accurate description. But there was an awful lot of trial-and-error involved, especially in the early days when any of this stuff might not have lasted the test of time. Take Iron Man for example. He made his debut in TALES OF SUSPENSE #39 in the last days of 1962 and was immediately being reworked just an issue later—painting his original battleship gray armor a golden hue to help make him look like more of a super hero. Editor Stan Lee and his various collaborators including Jack Kirby, Don Heck and Robert Bernstein kept monkeying around with the specifics of the series, trying different types of stories and introducing supporting cast members such as Happy Hogan and Pepper Potts. But somehow, Iron Man just wasn’t taking off. A greater refresh was needed. As he had on Spider-Man and would do again on the Incredible Hulk, Lee turned from his superstar artist to his secret weapon: Steve Ditko. By all accounts, Ditko wasn’t that interested in the Iron Man strip—he found the motif of the character’s injured heart too limiting. But he did produce a string of three issues that totally re-envisioned the character. This was the second of the three, and it transforms Iron Man from a larger, more robotic character to something more recognizably a super hero, giving him the recognizable look that he maintains to this day. While it was Jack Kirby who drew the new armor on this cover, it was Ditko who designed it, slimming Iron Man down and making him appear more streamlined and colorful than ever. This change combined with an increased emphasis on soap opera and melodrama—Lee began scripting the series himself rather than having less adept writers such as Bernstein handle it—eventually did the trick, and Iron Man’s sales began to go up to safe levels. But if this hadn’t worked, Iron Man might have been cast to the wayside in time, as Ant-Man eventually was (though that hasn’t hurt his movie prospects some fifty years on.)

There’s a bit more of a story to this issue, as you can see from the cover negative reproduced above. In the published issue, Iron Man battles a villain known as Mister Doll, who uses a voodoo-like fetish of different people to control their action in the manner of the previous Puppet Master. However, this was apparently a last minute change forced upon Marvel by the Comics Code. As conceived, the character wasn’t Mister Doll at all—he was Mister Pain, and rather than directly controlling his victims, he coerced them into doing his bidding by causing them intense pain through his voodoo doll image. Apparently, the Code found this all a bit too sadistic, and so portions of the dialogue had to be rewritten and the character renamed. If you read the finished story with this in mind, it makes a lot more sense, especially how Mister Doll holds Iron Man at bay with his fetish in the likeness of Tony Stark. These sorts of Comics Code mandated changes weren’t uncommon throughout the 1960s and beyond, though the impact of that body has largely been forgotten today. But they asked for a lot of pretty meaningless adjustments—this one is a bit more defensible than most, though. A change that didn’t get made on this cover, though, is the corner box, which here has a note on it indicating that Lee wanted to update the figure to reflect the new design. This wouldn’t happen until the following issue, so somebody apparently talked him out of it.

A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

The final issue of UNTOLD TALES OF SPIDER-MAN, #25, was released on September 10, 1997, some twenty-six years ago. The thing about it is that, while it was being worked on, it wasn’t intended to be the last issue at all. Originally, the plan was for the book to continue onward, and while Kurt Busiek was going to be stepping off of the series due to an influx of other work, including THUNDERBOLTS, AVENGERS and IRON MAN, we had lined up Roger Stern to be his successor. The idea was that at this point, the series would move ahead into Peter Parker’s college years, which is where it was initially going to be set in the first place. Roger even co-plotted this final issue so as to make the hand-off nice and smooth (and to relieve some pressure on Kurt.) But alas, it was not to be. These weren’t great days for Marvel, the company was under bankruptcy protection and new leadership was coming and going on a rotating door basis. Bob Harras had become the sole Editor in Chief, and he had no particular fondness for UNTOLD TALES as a series. For all that he produced his own share of retro-projects (including the UNTOLD LEGEND OF CAPTAIN MARVEL limited series that I wrote, which only existed because of Bob’s weird fondness for the green-and-white incarnation of that character), Harras was rightly more concerned with looking forward, at charting out where the Marvel heroes and their stories should go next. And so at some point relatively late in the game, despite the fact that its sales figures were still profitable, even at the 99 cent price point, Bob cancelled the series with this 25th issue. You’re never happy when a book that you’re working on goes under, and this was no exception—UNTOLD TALES OF SPIDER-MAN was really my breakout title as an editor, the book that put me on the map and started to get people both in the wider world and within Marvel to pay attention to what I was doing. But while I would have liked to have done more with Roger, who was always good to work with, I can’t really say that this was the worst place to bring the series to its end. I don’t know how smart it is to cancel profitable series, though—a bunch of the stuff that Marvel launched after this had a difficult time connecting with an audience in the long run. Since this was issue #25, we had decided to feature the Green Goblin as the big villain of the series, something that we’d avoided up to this point in trying to remain true to the original chronology. There was a sequence in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #40 in which the Green Goblin went through his fight history with a captured Peter Parker that didn’t seem to allow much space for some untold clash between them before that point, and so we’d worked around it for some time, featuring Norman Osborn as a behind-the-scenes power funding some of our new villains such as the Headsman. But for this last issue, Kurt found a rationale that didn’t strain credibility too much, and so we were off to the races. Ron Frenz provided breakdowns for the story as the book’s regular artist Pat Olliffe (Ron’s studiomate) was already off to his next assignment, MARVEL TEAM-UP. Bob McLeod did the finishes. And as this was the final issue of the series, as we’d done some issues earlier, we produced a final continuity chart to indicate exactly where in Spider-Man’s history each of the second year UNTOLD TALES stories took place, including the two Annuals. Those were fun simply because we used original Spider-Man panels by Steve Ditko to illustrate the timeline.

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Monofocus

So this week I finished up watching the back half of the live action adaptation of ONE PIECE, which I thought was just terrific. As I said earlier, the cast is just fabulous across the boards and the production design for the series was excellent, evoking the stylization of the manga while still crafting all of the necessary elements so that they worked in reality. So highly recommended. I’ve also been enchanted by the series’ end song, which you can hear here and which has been playing in these parts quite a bit this past week. I also took advantage of Shonen Jump doing a promotional tie-in to read the first 100 chapters of the original Eiichiro Oda ONE PIECE manga for free, which equates to something in the neighborhood of seven volumes’ worth of content. As the strip has now run for more than a thousand installments, this is only scratching the surface, but I expect that I’ll likely continue unless I get distracted by some other shiny new penny.

This week also saw the start of the new season of STAR TREK: LOWER DECKS, and while I enjoyed watching the first two episodes back-to-back, these seasons are now short enough where I wish they hadn’t double-dipped at the beginning. I’d rather have it run longer. This is a series that’s proven to be divisive among a certain kind of STAR TREK fan, the sort that isn’t easily able to poke fun at themself. But for all that its humor calls for it to be a bit critical of the source material in many of its episodes, I would argue that LOWER DECKS showcases a greater degree of almost obsessive love for its progenitors than any other show in the line. It’s really remarkable how many layers of Easter egg gags Mike McMahan and his team pack every episode with, while simultaneously giving a more general audience a fun adventure that they can understand and relate to even if they don’t know the derivation of all of the minutia along the way. The show was maybe a little bit shaky at the very start, but by this point, it’s a well-tuned instrument and holds a legitimate place within the STAR TREK canon, like it or not.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I pontificated a bit about the 2005 reboot of DOCTOR WHO.

And five years ago, I wrote about BATMAN: FROM THE 30s TO THE 70s, the first hardcover collection of vintage Batman stories.

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I’ve got some stuff in the offing that’s going to make getting a Newsletter done for the next two weeks dicey. So we’ll see if I’m able to put something together for you all. Although, it’s possible and even probable that it will wind up being a bonus feature corralled from already-existing material. Just realize that none of this means that I’ve given up on this feature or you, simply that I’m occupied in other areas.

Hat’s All, Folks!

Tom B