#78: More Stopgapping

Well, we got in last night well after midnight following an extremely tiring day, so I’m afraid that this week’s Newsletter entry isn’t going to be all that much better than last time’s. But we at least have a few questions to answer, so that ought to be good for a laugh at least. And thereafter we’ll see just how much juice I have left in the tank.

Straight into questions, then. And sorry if these answers are briefer than usual, but it’s been a long day.

JV

Would you ever revisit Untold Tales of Spider-Man Tom? The various 'retro' series at Marvel seem to be selling well and I have hear that Kurt Busiek has one more untold tale that he would like to tell. Or have Roger Stern write some college era Spidey stories - that would be fun.

As a general rule, I tell most creators that it’s a mistake to try to go back years after the fact and recapture lost glories of yesteryear, and I think that probably applies to editors as well, JV. The specific time in which we did UNTOLD TALES is long past—and while I’d certainly see about doing a retro Spider-Man project if Kurt had one that he wanted to do, it’s probably for the best if the both of us face forward and figure out what the next cool thing might be. There are all sorts of other creators who could do UNTOLD TALES if they were of a mind to.

Chris Sutcliffe

I recently read and loved Marvel Age #1000 and have a couple of questions about it:

1) Do you have to get any kind of sign off from the Spidey or X-Men offices for their stories, or do you get a free pass of sorts because they're anthology stories?

2) Was there ever a discussion about the tone of the final story, which depicted Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby as childhood friends?

Obviously these are real people, with a famous history of falling out over money and working practices, and a story like this could be seen as infantilizing or potentially dismissive of Kirby and Ditko's genuine grievances.

And to be clear, in case the tone isn't clear, I'm coming here with curiosity rather than any kind of pointed critique.

Whenever we do anthology stories featuring the characters from other editorial offices we share them with the editors in question as a matter of courtesy and coordination, Chris. So both Jordan White and Nick Lowe got to see those stories before they went to print. As for the JMS tale, I felt like the intention of it was relatively overt—it begins with a line that says approximately, “This isn’t how it happened, but…” So to me, it’s a story about making stories, a fantasy about fantasies and done in a positive spirit. Joe certainly had dealings with Kirby in Jack’s lifetime, interviewing him at lease once on the Hour 25 program he once hosted. I don’t know if he ever had any contact with Steve Ditko, but he certainly did Stan Lee. And really, none of those kids is literally supposed t be any of those creators directly. So I suppose that if Neal Kirby or Mike Ditko were to be upset by it, I’d feel badly about it. But it seemed like a way to underscore the contributions that those three creators in particular made to everything that Marvel has been built upon. And to be clear, those kids are simply avatars, they aren’t literally Stan Lee or Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko. That story isn’t a history lesson, it’s a metaphor.

Craig Byrne

One thing I notice on all of those Biblioteca Marvel covers... and last month with the John Romita Sr. tributes... Marvel books look so much better with a corner box. I know the corner boxes aren't "needed" in the Direct Market, but do you ever think they might come back on a regular basis just for fun?

There’s a certain nostalgia among readers of a certain age for the old Marvel corner boxes, Craig, which is why they turn up every now and again. But as you say, there’s no real need or reason for them any longer, and so all they wind up doing in the end is covering up more of the artwork. You can see this especially on those covers with the John Romita boxes, as none of them were designed with corner boxes in mind as John’s passing was a surprise to us. It’s not impossible that we might choose to try to bring them back again at some point—we did something like this during MARVEL LEGACY as I recall. But I don’t know how likely they are to last the test of time.

Jeff Ryan

With a new creative team and direction and everything, everyone hopes for an Immortal Hulk #1 where the work is great and and is instantly beloved and sells very well. Not every comic is Immortal Hulk #1. In those cases, how do you determine if the project should just end after six issues, or if if can keep going after some retooling of creators or storyline?

That’s almost always up to teh audience, Jeff. It’s less of a risk on a series such as INCREDIBLE HULK, which is a perennial, having run in one form or another consistently since the 1960s. So there’s more of a sense that numbers will hold together long enough to get at least a halfway decent run out of almost any credible launch. For titles that don’t have that sort of built-in longevity, it’s entirely a crapshoot. Which is why it’s often work building such projects in shorter, tighter terms. If your big, cool reveal is in issue #10, that’s not going to do anybody much good, as the odds are that you may never get to it, and even if you did, only a fraction of your readership will ever see it. So it’s more important than ever to get down to what you’re doing. Long-form storytelling is great, but planning to tell a long-form story on a series that doesn’t have that built-in longevity is a short path to failure.

Taylor Murphy

Hi Tom, love your newsletter sir! I’m curious about letters pages and what factors in on deciding whether to include them in a series or not. I love reading them in the collected editions of silver age Marvel books, but it seems like there are far less of these in Marvel books these days than there used to be. Are less letters being sent on the whole (and how many on average does Marvel see per issue of big titles like Amazing Spider-Man vs smaller titles)? Is there just less of a drive by the creative teams to include and answer letters, and less of a push from the top down for teams to include than there used to be? Are there more toxic than not letters these days that make it hard to select ones that you’d actually want to print? Does the more commonplace relaunching of titles to #1’s than we saw back in the day make this trickier?

Well, Taylor, I’m a proponent of the idea that every editor, especially the younger ones who are just starting to develop their skills should put together at least one letters page a month, so that they can grow comfortable with communicating with the audience in a direct fashion. But letters pages have become a haphazard thing for more than two decades now., And part of the reason is that they no longer serve the same purpose that they did in the pre-internet and social media days. Print is just slower in terms of making your opinions known, and while there’s always something a little bit cool about having your letter printed, I don’t know that it means the same thing to the readers of today, whose every thought sees “print” on a temporary basis at least. And letters pages take a certain amount of time to put together—and a lack of them won’t hurt your sales or anything. So it takes a certain type of person to want to put forward that effort for no appreciable reward. And it tends to depend on the series. I’ve run a letters page in FANTASTIC FOUR for as long as I can remember because, as the first Marvel series, having the Fan Page there feels like a bit of continuity with the past to me. The same is true of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, where Steve Wacker brought the letters page back and made it a bit of a destination spot and Nick Lowe has continued that tradition up to the present. And not making any promises, but I’d expect that X-MEN will grow a letters page again when I take it over. But the problem isn’t that there aren’t enough letters. Especially if you start running a letters page regularly, the readers will respond and start sending letters in to you, even if they didn’t before then.

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Pimp My Wednesday

Okay, so here’s a very quick look at what my office will have in stores this week.

Here’s a really good example of best intentions. I think this cover of the Scarlet Witch battling The Dead of the Ashen Combine by Stuart Immonen is pretty excellent. It grabs my attention. The problem here is that, the way the story wound up developing, Wanda and the Dead are hardly in this issue, as other conflicts take more center stage in it. So some readers may feel ill-used if they pick up the book to see this battle and don’t get it—and that’s totally legitimate. But hopefully, the material that Jed MacKay and guest artist Ivan Fiorelli have prepared will make up for it. And if not, we’ve been running a letters page thanks to Assistant Editor Martin Biro, so readers are welcome to send in their brickbats and maybe we’ll address them there.

On the other hand, the scene on this Rod Reis cover does actually kind of take place in this story, so there’s no worries here. Writer David Pepose and guest artist Sean Damien Hill have you covered as Moon Knight battles a horde of his formerly-demised foes as time begins to slip away for the boy he’s come to the underworld to save. It’s the same Mon Knight you love in his regular solo series, but with a bit of a change of venue, playing more to the character’s spiritual and metaphysical side. So it’s a great counterpoint to his main book.

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Behind The Scenes

Since it’s a relatively easy lift, I’m going to share a few more pages with you from the booklet of cover idea prompts that I assembled for Marvel Editorial some years ago. There are a couple of pages of explanatory stuff, then a few pages here of covers grouped by theme. So let’s see what we shall see.

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That’s going to have to do it for this week, I’m afraid. But with any luck, we’ll be back to normal operations next time. So keep your powder dry until then, and Sunday will be here again before you know it.

Hat’s All, Folks!

Tom B