#77: Short-Term Stopgap

Well, folks, like I mentioned last week, I’ve got some stuff going on this week that’s going to prevent me from pulling together an entire new Newsletter this week. It’s nothing to worry about, just a commitment that’s going to take me away during the period when I’d usually be writing one of these pieces up. But so that you didn’t feel abandoned this week entirely, I did whip up this short placebo edition to hold things over for another week. Call it a Short-Term Stopgap.

We’re going to need to dispense with most of our usual features, as at the time I’m writing this, we haven’t yet received any new questions on last week’s column, because it hasn’t gone live yet. Nor do I have the time to dig into a wide variety of older back issues and tell stories about them. But what I can still do is this:

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Pimp My Wednesday

Yeah, that’s right, I can still shill for my upcoming titles, which you’ll get to experience for yourselves this Wednesday. So please avail yourself.

UNCANNY AVENGERS #2 continues to push forward with the themes of FALL OF X as Captain America’s ad hoc new Unity Squad attempts to bring the new Captain Krakoa and his Mutant Liberation Front to heel and prove that his attack on Washington was not mutant-sponsored. Gerry Duggan provides the events and Javier Garron makes them all look cool and dramatic, and if you think this series might hold some clue as to what I might do with the X-MEN line moving ahead—well, it really won’t, but it is a great read in and of itself, so check it out anyway.

And this week sees the release of the final installment of AVENGERS UNLIMITED, #65. Next week, we start something new. But before that, you’ll get to experience the end of Captain America and Moon Knight’s battle with the Fixer and his Captain America 2.0 construct. It’s written by Mat Groom and drawn by Caio Majado and it’ll bring this run to a very nice finish. I’m quite pleased by the number of different characters and sorts of stories we were able to feature over this 65 episode run, but I’m also looking forward to seeing how readers react to the thing we have coming up next. So a question to those of you who’ve been following AVENGERS UNLIMITED every week: which stories were your favorites from throughout this run?

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Behind the Scenes

Several years ago, in an attempt to liven up Marvel’s convention presence, I inaugurated a game show format that we’d typically put on on the Sunday of the show. It was a way to create some audience participation and to give away some swag and get people feeling like part of the extended Marvel family. So armed with a variety of prizes that we’d pulled together for the show, typically including some signatures and artwork that I’d prevailed upon friends and colleagues to donate, I would host Prize or No Prize. We did this for a little bit over two years before the bit got stale and we moved on from it.

Here are a few photos of us doing a session at a Wizard World Chicago back around 2007 or so. C.B. Cebulski and Jim McCann are fulfilling the roles of the Prize Monkeys here, while I host. The way the game worked was pretty simple: each round would begin with a general question to the audience. Whoever was able to answer that question correctly would get to come up and sit in the “Hot Seat” where they’d be given questions from any of a number of different categories. For each question they got right, they would win a prize, with the specialness of the prizes escalating in value and specialness the longer they were able to go on. Each contestant could stop at any time and walk away with what they had won, or risk it all by attempting another question. But should they get an answer wrong, all of the prizes that they had stacked up so far would be taken from them, and the question would then go out into the audience. Whoever got it right could then take their place in the Hot Seat and either continue to answer questions or else walk away with their winnings. The whole thing was pretty fun.

So what I’m going to share with you now are the various questions and categories that we used over the course of the game. Not every category was used in every session, we tended to rotate them to keep things fresh as we did this again and again in different venues.

This first section lists our initial broad toss-up questions to the audience, in order to find a candidate for the Hot Seat. These tended to be relatively easy—in some cases so much so that I didn’t bother listing an answer on these sheets, since I knew I could pull the right answer out of my mind on the fly.

For the second year, I worked up a second set of initial questions, figuring that some of the fans who came to the panel multiple times would otherwise have an advantage. The answers to a number of these questions would no longer be true today, such do things change within the Marvel Universe.

Now we come to the actual categories. The contestants were given their choice of category, not really knowing what each title actually meant. So for example, in this first one, BABY’S FIRST WORDS, I would read them the dialogue from the first balloon that a notable Marvel character had ever spoken and they had to identify the character in question. The Namor one in particular was especially confusing and brutal.

I PUT A SPELL ON YOU was pretty simple. I’d name a particular Marvel character, place or item and the contestant would have to spell it correctly.

FIVE’LL GET YOU TEN was all about lists of things, asking the contestant to name a series of things from a given story.

FOOM! was all about Marvel acronyms. I’d give them the acronym and they had to tell me what it stood for. For some reason, H.A.T.E. was the entry in this category that routinely tripped people up.

COLOR ME CONFUSED was questions concerning characters who had a color as part of their name. I’d read the description and the contestant had to come up with the character.

ONE VERSUS A DOZEN was an improved version of the FIVE’LL GET YOU TEN category, where each question asked for progressively one more item as a part of its answer. So the second question asked you to name two things, and so forth. I especially liked stupid questions like, “Name ten members of the Fantastic Four.”

We did I’VE GOT A SECRET IDENTITY both ways, with the contestant being given the super hero and needing to provide the civilian name, or the reverse.

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And that’s going to wrap things up for this special shortened version of the Newsletter for this week. With any luck, we’ll be back to standard operating procedure next time—so keep those questions and comments coming in!

Hat’s all, folks!

Tom B