#87: Chex Mix

There really is very little in this world that’s more enjoyable to me than having new episodes of DOCTOR WHO, so I’m pretty well giddy to see the show come back in such fine form this past Saturday. I mentioned online that an impending episode is just about the only thing that gives me the same kind of thrill that comic books did when I was a kid—and I look for the same sort of experience from it each time I start an episode. As I typically do, I posted my thoughts and immediate reactions—not a review per se but more a free-form collection of thoughts and observations—over at my Blog as I typically do. I expect you’ll find a link to the piece down below in the appropriate section. But to tide you over, here’s a link to the show’s new and budget-heavy opening titles, which remind me of nothing so much as the opening ot STAR TREK: VOYAGER. The show’s been a particular tonic for the end of this Thanksgiving week, a week that I largely took off from work, so every day has felt more like a Saturday than anything else. Now, at last, we can progress to Sunday, and then a return to Marvel on Monday. And even better, there are yet two more episodes to come in the weeks ahead, so I’ll get to experience this sensation a few more times in the coming month.

One of the key signs that we’ve moved into the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday season is that my wife begins whipping up batches of her miracle Chex Mix, widely hailed as the greatest and most addicting substance on Earth of a legal variety. And so much do I think of you that I’m going to share teh secret formula with you right now.

As you can see from the recipe above, it’s patently simple stuff, but you’ll be amazed at how good it tastes if you go ahead and try it our yourself. And you can switch up the delivery system to your liking, adding or subtracting different items to your taste (although Chex are always a good idea, as they absorb the mixture very well.) She made me up a batch last week that was entirely pretzel rods, and it was incredibly wonderful.

All right, that’s enough from me, let’s see what you’ve got to say.

Chris Sutcliffe

Would you also be able to share the answers to the ones I didn't get? I've spent literal hours and multiple approaches to find the answers to them.

I suppose if I’m going to do that, Chris, then I’d better post that photo of my bulletin board again.

So, beginning at the top left, you correctly identified the first quote as being from JUSTIFIED, which I was watching at the time. Top middle comes from the tenth DESTROYER paperback entitled “Terror Squad” in which Remo Williams and Chiun once again encounter the Master’s evil nephew Nuihc in the Place of Dead Animals. Top right is a famous quote from MAD MEN, which I am presently rewatching. Second line, first position is a quote from Earth Captain Gideon prior to the Battle of Saturn in the forty-fourth STAR BLAZERS, as he marshals Earth’s defense forces without authorization. Second row middle is the motto of TENESSEE TUXEDO, the can-do penguin whose eyes are often large than his stomach. Second row right also comes from JUSTIFIED, where “pull” is often-used slang for drawing a deadly weapon. Third row left is from REMO WILLIAMS, THE ADVENTURE BEGINS, the film based on the aforementioned DESTROYER books. Middle is from the second episode of RED DWARF, “Future Echoes” after lead character Dave Lister has learned that he’s fated to have a long life rather than dying in a soon-to-come accident. Third row right is a famous line from Tom Baker in the DOCTOR WHO serial “City of Death”. And finally, lowest right is Peter Capaldi from his final episode of DOCTOR WHO, “Twice Upon A Time”, bottom middle is from the last season episode of NYPD BLUE “The Vision Thing” in which Detective Andy Sipowicz is visited by the spirit of his dead partner Bobby Simone, and bottom right is from the origin episode of HAVE GUN, WILL TRAVEL, “Genesis”, in which Paladin states his personal philosophy. I’ve added a couple more in the intervening time, so maybe we’ll have to do this again at some point. In any event, Chris, while it’s likely to take me a short while because I’m naturally lazy, look for something to be coming your way in a little bit.

Joe Regan

Currently have the two Golden Age volumes, an old ('90s?) hardcover set of Cap 1-10, a Marvel Comics #1 h/c—the Decades with Torch/Namor is on its way, hope to pick up Marvel Firsts WWII this week and if I can get my hands on a used copy of the All-Winners Masterworks with the two Squad appearances, I feel like that should cover me. Am I missing any biggies? :)

Well, Joe, it all depends on what you might consider biggies. Speaking for myself, I’d think that you’d want the big book-length Human Torch/Sub-Mariner battle that was later dramatized in MARVELS #1 from HUMAN TORCH COMICS #5. I reprinted that issue as a stand-alone one-shot in the late 1990s, and it was also collected in the appropriate Golden Age Human Torch MARVEL MASTERWORKS volume. Oh, and the Red Skull story from CAPTAIN AMERICA COMICS #16 is pretty prime as well—it’s been reprinted in the MARVEL VISIONS: STAN LEE hardcover that I helped put together as well as a few other places.

Cathal

Is Avengers Inc. over with #5? I’ve been enjoying it so far.

Unfortunately, Cathal, there weren’t enough like you, so we will be wrapping up the series with issue #5.

Zach Rabinoff

when *you* were a young'un, were there any inaccessible old comics that you longed to read because they seemed especially important to the books you liked? And what did you think of those stories when you finally did get to see them?

There were probably loads, Zach. But I can point to two specifically, both of which I first saw the covers to in THE STERANKO HISTORY OF COMICS Volume 1. ALL-STAR COMICS #17 had a great cover showing the Justice Society of America all miniaturized to tiny size and about to be stepped on by their now-colossal foe the Brain Wave. I eventually purchased a copy of that book in the very early 1990s at the San Diego Comic Con. And a few years later, I did the same with DAREDEVIL #42, in which the hero’s true identity was exposed to the world and the series began to pivot more in the direction of a crime and kids adventure series. And I can also remember seeing certain covers on my earliest trips to stores that carried back issues, including AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #2, FANTASTIC FOUR #14, JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #100, DAREDEVIL #2, FIGHTING AMERICAN #3 and many, many others. Oh, and the cover for THE FLASH #153 haunted me for years after I saw it at our local mall’s yearly craft show but couldn’t afford to buy it. I wouldn’t read that story until decades later.

Paul Constant

is there any feature or service that you’re especially happy to see when walking into a new comics shop?

It’s kind of hard to say, Paul, as I am not a typical comic book shop shopper. These days, I like any shop that’s well-organized and well-stocked. Probably the very best comic shop that I’ve encountered in recent memory was UP, UP & AWAY in Blue Ash, Ohio, which was enormous and beautiful. Seriously, the place was practically more museum than comic book store, with wall-high recreations of vintage comic book covers done in Lego and memorabilia positioned around the enormous store floor. I’ve no idea if it’s still there—I visited it in 2016—but I certainly hope that it is. Otherwise, I still have dreams about the kinds of comic book stores that I would visit in my youth, in a time when the Direct Market was just getting started. These places could pretty well all be best described as shitholes, situated in the dangerous “low rent” areas of town, and certainly not places fit for a ten-year-old boy to travel to. But their haphazard stock, often contained in cardboard boxes and bagged using whatever materials were at hand, would often turn up the most extraordinary finds. Of course, that was also at an age where I had read far fewer comic books. Today, for the most part, my drive towards collecting back issues of any sort is minimal at best, and I own just about every comic book that I might desire. So what I’m really describing is nostalgia more than anything else.

Evan “Cool Guy”

Were there any stories/ideas/characters etc. that you had in childhood or young adulthood that you were able to fulfill later at Marvel? A sort of “Childhood dream come true” type of thing?

Not really—not in the manner that you describe here, Evan. There were certainly characters that I loved, and I certainly had (and have) opinions about a lot of them. And I still have a bucket of ideas for how to approach, for example, any number of DC characters such as Superman and Green Lantern, since I haven’t had much of an opportunity to work on any of them. But most of the similar thoughts I’ve had about the Marvel characters have all largely been employed over the years in one form or another, and they weren’t stories per se so much as bits of business or tone or approach.

kek-w

Oh a more upbeat note: I'd never seen that Avengers: The Origin cover before. Wonderful! Made me laugh out loud! :-)

Yeah, that’s a good cover by Phil Noto. I love it, very memorable.

Jakob Kibala

Hi Tom, I guess when you were planning the Captain America run that became Ed Brubaker's, you evaluated what came before it. So what did and do you think of the Marvel Knights iteration of Cap? I remain very fond of the John Rieber issues, although, currently rereading them, they are very much of their time (Not meaning 9/11 references so much as the pacing and the pseudo-realistic aesthetics)

I didn’t really evaluate CAPTAIN AMERICA in that way, Jakob, since it was moving from the Marvel Knights line back into the Marvel Universe proper, so the goals and the approach were going to be different. For what it’s worth, I thought that the Marvel Knights CAPTAIN AMERICA run was a bit of a mixed bag, with some stories and ideas that I liked and some that I thought didn’t hit the mark. And the turnover in creative team past a certain point didn’t really help to keep the series coherent.

Steve McSheffrey

I've always wondered why comic sales figures are such a closely guarded secret. I'm not saying I care to know them but it seems with just about every other media, you can find accurate sales figures if you want to.

I don’t know that that’s really true, Steve. Trying to get any figures on television/streaming is like peering into a black box these days, and even theatrical box office and profitability is largely guesswork as nobody on the outside is going to understand just what was spent at every level on a given film, what costs and overhead were laid against the film, and what was considered profitable. There’s a reason why, by Hollywood accounting measures, no movie has ever made a profit in the past fifty years or so, after all. the real difficulty now is that, given that almost all of the big companies are being distributed by separate people, there isn’t any centralized snapshot of the industry, of what is selling relative to everything else.

Wayne Ree

Back in the early to mid-nineties, why was the font/logo for all the Spider-Man titles changed from the classic Amazing Spider-Man look to something that was, if I recall, similar to Sabretooth's font/logo?

What you’re thinking of is the logo that was based on the one being used on the Spider-Man animated series of the mid-1990s, Wayne. And the reason the comic book logo was changed to follow in the style of that show was that, at the time, we were told that it had to by the big cheeses of the day. Once that series had run its course, the Spidey logo went back more towards the classic version again.

Steve V

Do you have any insight into the Silver Surfer fireside graphic novel vs the two issue Silver Surfer Parable? Having done no research on it (beyond knowing the first was meant to help pitch a movie?), the graphic novel feels like Lee and Kirby playing tug of war with the character. Parable almost seems like Stan getting a redo with Moebius. Just curious if you know more or have your own opinions on the two.

The Fireside graphic novel was produced with the intention of it being the story blueprint for a never-produced SILVER SURFER movie, which was planned to star Olivia Newton John (as Ardina, you fool, not as the Surfer!) Lee set it up through his contacts at Simon and Schuster from the ORIGINS OF MARVEL COMICS series, and he had the book copyrighted in his and Kirby’s names so that they’d have to receive some sort of a payout if said film was ever made—which it wasn’t. And you’re absolutely right, the project was a bit of a mess, with Kirby’s vision for the character clashing with Lee’s and what had been established previously. PARABLE was entirely separate and came about because Moebius was interested in doing an American comic book with Stan. Whenever Lee went to try to do something more substantive past a certain point, he would almost always knee-jerk towards the Surfer, with whom he had done his most high-minded writing. There isn’t any real connection between the two other than that, Stan just felt that the Surfer was a special character for him.

Mike

The John Buscema story was a rough read, I give John tremendous credit for overcoming that criticism.

Would that happen nowadays? As in, how would that issue with art be addressed?

And I might be in the minority here, why was SS such a personal character to these great creators?

Well, Mike, it all depends on what you mean by the “issue”. And that all comes down, I suspect, to whether you think that Stan’s judgment was right or wrong in that moment. The truth is, it’s always easy to make the right choice in retrospect. But when you’re faced with a situation in real time, you make the best decisions that you can. Also, none of us were there, we don’t know the context for what was discussed, nor what other external factors might have played into Stan’s mood—the fight he had with his wife that morning, or the dressing down he’d gotten from Martin Goodman earlier that day, or whatever might have happened. And it’s pretty easy for Stan to have changed that opinion after a decade of time—especially when the story had been selected for inclusion in a collection of best stories. But sure, today, if an artist sends in a page that I think is awful or that does something wrong or gets something wrong, I’ll ask them to change it, the same as any editor. And usually, that’ll be the end of it (unless the artist can’t consistently hit the bull’s eye where I’m concerned, in which case they’ll probably stop getting assignments from me.) As for the Silver Surfer, Kirby came up with the character and had an investment in him in that there was a story that he was telling with him, and revelations that he was building up to. So to lose creative control of the character mid-step was fairly traumatic for him. And for Stan, he fell in love with the character once he began scripting him and saw that he was able to write about some larger subjects about humanity through the Surfer’s eyes—and in 1968, Stan was looking for legitimacy as an artist, which he tried to attain through the vehicle of the Surfer’s stories. They seem dated today, but at the time they were a lot more intellectual and high-minded than just about everything else that was being published in the field. Which is perhaps one of the reasons the series failed to find sales success.

Caleb Wong

May I know if Marvel would release some character polls for audience and fans to choose which character they want to see more of? Marvel used to do that back in the 90s so that the editor could understand that those characters who have higher demand would start to bring some creative team to write those characters.

I can’t really recall any time in the 1990s when we would do such a thing in any serious fashion, Caleb, so I’m not sure what you’re thinking of here. Occasionally, an editor such as Mark Gruenwald might ask the readership of, say, AVENGERS who they might like to see join the team in a sort of straw poll fashion. But it was all done ad hoc without any sort of a master plan behind it (nor with any binding authority, either.)

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Behind the Curtain

.Here’s a very specific though not very noteworthy bit of behind the scenes content. What you see below is Chris Claremont’s copy for the opening section to the letters page slated to run in UNCANNY X-MEN #136, the penultimate chapter of the Dark Phoenix Saga.

I’m not certain why this text didn’t run on that page—my best guess would be that Chris delivered it too late, after the page had already been written and typeset. But that’s just supposition on my part. Nevertheless, as you can see below, it was instead replaced by a quick note from editors Jim Salicrup and Bob Budiansky acknowledging the same anniversary. It’s also possible that Chris’s version would have just taken up too much space had it been included.

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Pimp My Wednesday

New comics! New comics! New comics! Get ‘em while they’re new! Get ‘em while they’re comics!

And the noose tightens around the neck of Marc Spector in this, the penultimate issue of MOON KNIGHT, #29. Written by Jed MacKay and illustrated by Federico Sabbatini, it’s the culmination of plotlines that have been brewing in the series for several month, and includes the reveal of the true identity of Black Spectre. Next issue, Moon Knight dies, for real and for true. And after that, things get even more interesting…

Associate Editor Annalise Bissa (Hi, Mr. Bissa!) has the second issue of MARVEL ZOMBIES: BLACK, WHITE & BLOOD dropping this week, and it’s another doozy, featuring a Reed Richards story by Gail Simone and Dale Eaglesham, a Beta-Ray Bill adventure by Erica Schultz and Nelson Daniel, and a tale of X-Force from Doug Wagner and Juan Gedeon. And it’s all terribly violent and sad-making, in the best way.

And in AVENGERS UNITED, the battle against the Fear Teacher goes poorly for the Avengers. And what’s worse, the injured Captain America has to fend off an assassination attempt on the alien Ambassador at the same time! Derek Landy and Phillip Levy bring it to you in the vertical scrolling format.

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A Comic Book On Sale 65 Years Ago Today, November 26, 1958

A weird issue to focus on, am I right? But only because I know something about its contents that isn’t readily apparent on this cover. ADVENTURE COMICS #256 featured three stories in the style of the time, an era in which the prevailing theory was that a comic book needed to have multiple stories in it so that the kids buying it would feel like they were getting more value for their money. I don’t know where this opinion came from, certainly not for actually talking to kids, I wouldn’t think. But it was a strongly-held belief up at DC for years and years. Even when the firm would begin to experiment with doing issue-length stories, they would always break them down into chapters so as to give the impression that there was more to each issue. Anyway, the Superboy adventure, the one that likely sold most of the copies of this issue given the enormous popularity of the Man of Steel even in his boyhood incarnation, was typical of the era. Produced by writer Otto Binder and artist Al Plastino, it concerned a criminal who impersonated the Smallville Chief of Police and who issues an All-Points Bulletin for Superboy’s arrest. The law-abiding hero has not choice but to turn himself in until he could discover and expose the truth. The middle slot was given over to an Aquaman story, a character who likely got to keep his berth while other more popular super heroes fell by the wayside because he’d been created by ADVENTURE COMICS editor Mort Weisinger fifteen years previous. Despite some lovely-if-restrained artwork from Ramona Fradon and a serviceable script by Robert Bernstein, this story of the Sea King being stranded by criminals in the middle of a desert isn’t especially memorable. No, the noteworthy story in this issue was the final one, featuring another of Weisinger’s creations, Green Arrow. And in fact, it revealed the origin of the Emerald Archer—there had been an earlier origin story given for the character in 1943, but it had been long forgotten by this point. The story was produced by Ed Herron and Jack Kirby. Some believe that Kirby was the driving force behind this story, with Herron only contributing the final copy. While there isn’t any real tangible evidence to support this notion, it is known that, even when he was given scripts by other people to illustrate, Kirby would routinely improve them, injecting them with his own ideas as well as his electrifying visuals. It’s really Kirby’s approach that makes the story noteworthy, and as such, it’s been reprinted a dozen times over the years. What’s more, it became the underpinning for the entire ARROW television series, which built out its mythology of wealthy Oliver Queen being marooned on a desert island and teaching himself archery in order to survive. Which is a pretty significant impact for a seven-page story to have six decades after it was initially produced. But that was the Jack Kirby magic in a nutshell—the man was way ahead of his time.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

By November 26, 1997 when this issue of VENOM: FINALE came out, the comic book marketplace was in a bit of a tailspin following the bursting of the speculator bubble that had inflated comic book sales year after year throughout the first half of the decade. Consequently, even VENOM, a series that once posted some pretty incredible sales numbers, reached the end of the road here—at least for a little while. I had started editing VENOM when Bob Budiansky was given control of the Spider-Man line of books a few years earlier, when Marvel editorial was divided up into five individual sub-companies. It was not a great fit. The character wasn’t really geared to my sensibilities, and I had inherited the “series-of-limited-series” format that necessitated that every story be between three and five issues in length. While I and my assistant editors did some fun things with the character—including backing into running a regular fan art showcase rathe than a typical letters page—it wasn’t ever a title that we were especially passionate about. And honestly, while I did my best with it, I didn’t yet have the skills necessary to find a way to turn VENOM into something greater than what it had been, in the manner that Devin Lewis has done with the series in more recent years. I did have one lucky break going for me, though: right before I inherited the title, Larry Hama came on board as the regular writer for the series and the character, with the format of an ever-changing creative team being at least partially sidelined. As a former editor himself, Larry was well-respected up in the Marvel halls—everybody knew that he knew how to put together an exciting comic book story. They trusted Larry. And so, more often than not, I tended to let Hama run, trusting that he’d keep everything operating within bounds. His self-styled “gonzo” sensibilities were way more in line with Venom than mine were. One of the best things about working on the series with Hama is that at the beginning of every limited series, we’d meet at his favorite Chinese Restaurant, Mister Leo’s, for a long lunch at which we’d brainstorm on what the hook of our next story was going to be. Often, these hooks came from myself and my assistant, though the stories Larry built around them were entirely his own. But eventually, the sales began to run down—and Bob Harras, who had become the new overall Editor In Chief, was tending to axe books that he just didn’t care for unless they were really bringing in bank. If it had been an X-title, VENOM likely would have gone on longer, but Bob axed it when he could, and I really couldn’t blame him. He was uncomfortable with promoting a character whose catch-phrase had become, “I want to eat your brains!” as a hero and a role-model, and in all honesty, so was I. So it wasn’t a termination that I particularly argued against. This final arc was illustrated by Mark Pajarillo, and I must confess that I remember very little about it from a story standpoint, apart from teh fact that we needed to wrap up some of the running plots, such as Venom having been recruited as a government agent. I will say that, looking at that cover again, it drives me nuts that the word balloon clips the side of Venom’s head like that. Poor design—I should have had that adjusted before it went to print.

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Another Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

I already talked a bunch about JLA/AVENGERS #3, the issue where the series went completely off the rails for me, in earlier installments of this Newsletter. But I am going to take this moment to regale you with one minor story associated with it, since we’ve now hit the twentieth anniversary of its first publication on November 26, 2003. You see, that wraparound cover that is displayed above was a Sisyphean task on the part of artist George Perez. And it was a self-inflicted pain, as he asked (no, demanded) to do a cover that would feature every last character who had been a member of both the Justice League and the Avengers up to that time. I forget exactly how long the final piece took him to execute, but I want to say a month. He drew it on this massive art board that only barely fit into our office flat files. In fact it was so large that we had to make xeroxes of it in sections, and then tape them together to get the whole thing. Seriously, this thing was a garage door. Anyway, at a certain point, once we’d shot the cover for publication but before the issue had come out, George asked for the original to be returned to him. He had sold it to a buyer for…I’ll just say a five-figure sum (which is well less that it would fetch today.) George was consequently eager to get it back and to complete the transaction. Now, at this time, my assistants bridged two offices: Andy Schmidt, the newer hire, sat in the same office that I did, while Associate Editor Mark Sumerak had been relocated to an office slightly down the hall. That office was also where we were keeping most of our flat files at the time, especially for projects that were going to be longer in duration. So when George asked to get the art back, we dealt with all of the necessary paperwork and then got our intern to very carefully package up the board and get it ready to be Fed-Exed back to George’s home. And that’s what happened—or so we though. The morning after the package had been sent out, I came into the office to find a frantic message from George on my answering machine. He was talking a mile a minute on it, so much so that his usual gregarious and laidback voice instead sounded like one of the Chipmunks. He related that he’d opened the well-secured package to find not the original art to this irreplaceable masterpiece, but rather our taped-together xerox copy of it. Frantic that something had happened to the artwork and that his well-earned payday was out the window, George was reaching out to try to figure out what had happened. What had happened was pretty simple: our intern, having no specific idea what we had been talking about, wound up packaging up the copy rather than the original board. After a few heart-stopping minutes, we found the original safe and sound still in our flat file, and I was able to assure George that it was okay and to apologize for the mix-up. The intern then packaged up the correct artwork, and away it went to George and its new owner. So everything was fine in the end.

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Monofocus

Obviously, my big focus this week and for the next two weeks is going to be the new episodes of DOCTOR WHO that make up the show’s 60th Anniversary celebration. But I covered that already elsewhere.

Apart from that, I’ve been watching SQUID GAME: THE CHALLENGE on Netflix, the survivor-style game show that mimics the fictitious game played with deadly results in the water-cooler Korean drama of a year or two back. Some people have pointed to this production and indicated that it entirely misses the underlying point of the original SQUID GAME—which it absolutely does. But taken on its own, it’s a perfectly solid, perfectly safe elimination game series, of the sort that I tend to like. The fact that the players all compete largely in games that were fatal in the series but only result in elimination here make the entire program seem just a little bit toothless—and so, the effort spent to duplicate the costumes and the sets and the environments from the drama feel just a little bit wasted. It’s kind of like watching Civil War re-enactors or some such, contestants who are playing at being in real jeopardy when it’s readily apparent that there’s no jeopardy to be found. Only greed, the desire for the $4,560,000 prize pot that awaits the last player standing. Five episodes have dropped so far, and I’ve made it through four, but it’s clear that more are on the way, and so I’m not sure how long this is going to run. I’d guess no longer than SQUID GAME’s nine episodes, hopefully.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about Saturday’s premiere of DOCTOR WHO, which was in part adapted from a comic strip produced in the 1970s by Pat Mills, John Wagner and Dave Gibbons.

And five years ago, I wrote about this issue of MARVEL'S GREATEST COMICS featuring the Fantastic Four

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Next time: more DOCTOR WHO! A week that doesn’t feel like it’s comprised of all Saturdays! The usual old stories and comic book history and nonsense! But it won’t be a party without you!

Hat’s All, Folks!

Tom B

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