#94: Mortality

So I’m afraid that I need to begin this particular Newsletter with a bit of an indulgence. It’s not without connection to the sort of thing that we typically speak about around here, yet it’s likely to be of interest to relatively few. Nonetheless, I need to write about it, so I’m afraid that you’re all stuck for the next couple of paragraphs.

Last weekend, I learned that a good, close and longtime friend of mine, Frank Strom, had died. It wasn’t entirely unexpected—he had been in and out of the hospital over the last year and a half. But I had spoken to him just after Christmas, and for the hour-plus that we were on the phone, he seemed very much his usual self. But that’s the way of things, isn’t it? Past a certain point, all that you can look forward to is the people you’ve known falling one by one around you—until it’s eventually your turn.

I first met Frank in the pages of TRELAINA, an Amateur Press Alliance moderated by Brian Cirulnick and dedicated to STAR BLAZERS/SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO and other Anime of the day. Frank showed up several issues into the run in a section that he shared with a couple of friends who were known as the Bostonians as they all lived in the New England area. He immediately made an impact as the best artist in the thing—he certainly outperformed me in that regard. I met him face-to-face at the 1985 Lunacon, which was held on Long Island, and which I sold a number of rare comics in order to attend—the only time I’ve ever done such a thing in my life. And the show was a bit of a bust; after traveling up to the shabby hotel and scoping out the place for an hour or two, I was ready to declare the entire thing a bust and take off. It wasn’t my scene. And then, I happened to bump into Frank, who immediately greeted me with, “Hi, Tom.” in that quiet voice of his. From that point on, and with the assistance of the other Bostonians, Mike Kanterovich and Dan Parmenter, the whole thing turned around.

That’s Frank on the right, Jack Kirby in the middle, and me on the left, from the 1992 San Diego Comic Con. You can see Roz Kirby, Mark Evanier and Steve Buccellato in the background.

Frank was a different sort of animal than I was, but there was enough of an overlap in the Venn diagrams of our interests that we were easily able to find common ground. He had a lot of passions that he shared along the way: Archie Comics (especially the work of Dan DeCarlo), John Romita’s AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, all of the work of Rumiko Takahashi up to that point but particularly URUSEI YATSURA, just about everything Jack Kirby ever did, the assorted works of Go Nagai, Monkey Punch’s wild LUPIN III manga, and all sorts of other things. He loved monster movies, Planet of the Apes films, classic wrestling of the 1960s and 1970s, martial arts films, afternoon soap operas, punk rock music, Tokusatsu heroes, Jack Benny radio programs and a ton more. He also often became the defacto leader whenever our group would get together despite it being an uncomfortable fit for him. But he had the strongest, most dominant personality, and so everybody else tended to defer to him when there was a decision to be made.

I was a weirdo growing up, a perennial outsider with only a small group of tight friends. There wasn’t anybody else like me, not even close. But Frank and Mike and Dan were no different. They were each an individual weirdo, but we all somehow harmonized well. So much so that, on one occasion up in Boston when we’d stopped off to buy some Italian Ice, the girl at the counter asked if we were brothers. And the truth is that we were, in all the ways that count.

Frank had aspirations of breaking into the field professionally, and he operated on the fringes of it for many years, but was never quite able to find that break that would make it a full time vocation. He wrote a ton of issues of the licensed ELVIRA comic book, he had a short-lived series in Fantagraphics’ X-Rated Eros line in the 1990s, CHEETA POP, SCREAM QUEEN, and he wrote one story for Marvel. That one I commissioned from him especially; it starred the 1940s/1950s character Venus who was a fascination of both of ours, and guest-starred both a number of the girl comics stars of the 1950s but also a small bevy of Marvel’s pre-hero monsters. I was able to convince Dan DeCarlo, Frank’s favorite, to draw it. Eventually, though, he settled into a routine day job. As his interests shifted away from comics and more into music, we spoke less and less often, as people do. Thinking back on it, I can’t remember the last time we met in person, but it had to have been more than a decade prior to his passing. But I’m lucky, in that when he first went into the hospital, I was able to help him out with some money—I remember him always being casually generous back in teh days when I was an impoverished college student and he was working a regular job, and so I welcomed the opportunity to even that score a little bit. And I was able to speak with him in depth on what turned out to be his last full day on Earth.

So no big lesson here, no grand conclusion to impart to anyone. It just messed me up for most of this week a bit, so I felt the need to share. Speaking of sharing, Frank did make one request of me on that last phone call. He had a list of five songs that he wanted played at any service or funeral that was held for him, and he couldn’t trust his next of kin to be able to follow through on this request. Frank didn’t actually have a funeral per se, just a small private ceremony. So I’m going to share that playlist here instead.

"You Can't Kill Joey Ramone" by the Sloppy Seconds

"Saturday Let Me Down Again" by Muck and the Mires

"Last One Standing" by the Dents

"Are You Drinkin' With Me, Jesus" by Mojo Nixon

"The Great Song of Indifference" by Bob Geldhof

But enough about my sad nonsense, you all want to hear about you, right? So let’s dive into another round of Q & A and see what’s been on your collective minds!

Steve McSheffrey

The first is the almost never used power if Sue Richards to make invisible things visible. Has it been used since the Byrne Terrax issues? Anyways, I've always thought f she could get a bead on the clear portions of an opponent's eyes, she could make them visible and effectively blind them. End of fight.

The other is about Banshee and how someone in the X-Men creative team decided it didn't make sense to him for Banshee to be able to talk and use his sonic scream to fly with so it ended. Honestly, I think the major cut in his interaction with his teammates helped make it easier to edge him out. Well, if his vocal chords were so advanced they could create various effects, why not simulate his speaking voice and the scream at the same time? It's lack of imagination from some creators that have negative effects like teams losing a valuable character or character relationship.

We’ve seen Sue do things like the former occasionally over the years, Steve. The big drawback with moves such as those is that they’re entirely too handy, eliminating tons of drama and jeopardy. From a storytelling point of view, you want to see the heroes struggle to overcome their foes and whatever situation they’re in. That attack is too much a magic bullet that would reduce any fight to a swiftly-concluded skirmish, almost regardless of who the opponent is, so that’s why Sue doesn’t do stuff like that more regularly. In terms of Banshee, I suspect his X-Men days were numbered almost from the start. He had been included in GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #1’s roster when the idea was that the entire story was going to turn out to have been a test manufactured by Professor X to recruit new X-Men, and he’d have been one of the characters who failed the test. But when that aspect of the story fell away—because, let’s face it, reading thirty pages only to find out that the stakes are fake and the drama is staged would have been a lousy introduction—Banshee wound up hanging around simply because he was already there.

JV

how critical do you think the Daily Planet/Newspaper reporter job and setting is to a character like Superman? It can also apply to Peter Parker. I find that it is a trope that dates the characters as that profession disappears and/or becomes less relevant - but at the same time it seems so tied to their characters and supporting casts it seems impossible to update or remove it. Thoughts?

I tell you, that’s a difficult question, JV. I think it’s probably more important to Superman than it is to Peter Parker, but in both cases, news media has changed so much since they were created that the set-up doesn’t really work properly in either case. I started reading SUPERMAN in the 1970s when Clark Kent had transitioned into being a Walter Cronkite-style anchorman for the WGBS News. That didn’t really work for the character (though it never bothered me as a kid.) So I have my own thoughts as to how I would approach an overhaul of the Daily Planet. But I’ll be keeping those to myself, as DC isn’t paying me to solve their Superman difficulties.

Evan “Cool Guy”

How often is the "bake off" pitch style utilized?

Not as often as it once was, Evan, but still relatively regularly. I don’t tend to like teh approach in principle—I’d rather use my editorial acumen to suss out who I think might do a good job and then let them pitch without any competition, and either hire them or not based on the results. But I have gotten some good results from bake-off style situations in recent years—there were bake-off aspects to IMMORTAL HULK and the recent AVENGERS and FANTASTIC FOUR launches, for example, and all of those worked out pretty well. That said, they weren’t a typical open cattle call as bake-offs often tend to be. I do think it’s an absolute requirement that an editor be up front with the talent if they’re inviting them into a bake-off situation. I’ve heard too many stories over the years from creators who put a lot of work into writing and revising a pitch for months, only to find out that somebody else they didn’t even know was in the running with them was getting the book. That’s asking people to work for free, and that’s just not cool. No editor worth their salt or worthy of respect should operate in such a manner.

Nacho Teso

now that you are changing from Avengers to X-Men, does that mean associate editors like Annalise Bissa go with you? Or do they remain in Avengers?

It depends on the editors in question, Nacho. Some of the folks who reported to me are staying in the AVENGERS office, some are coming with me over to X-MEN, and some of the existing X-MEN editors are remaining in place as well. In the specific case of Annalise (Hi, Mr. Bissa!) she’ll be moving over to X with me.

Zach Rabiroff

You've been active on your blog for years positing theories to solve some of the mysteries behind Silver Age Marvel: positing that the first issue of Fantastic Four was cobbled together from stories originally slated for multiple anthology issues, for instance, or working out the publication process behind Amazing Fantasy #15. So at this point, are there any lingering mysteries or historical question marks from comics past that you want to solve, but never have? Is there any episode in particular that you'd most want to get to the bottom of if you could?

I’m sure that there are dozens of them, Zach, but I’d be hard-pressed to point to just one. At the moment, though, I’ve been doing a bunch of deep dive research on the timeline of events regarding the development of Superman from around 1932-1952, building an elaborate and detailed timeline. And there’s a key moment in there that I’d love to have greater insight on. To put things simply, the McClure Newspaper Syndicate turned Superman down on a number of occasions, but its employee Max Gaines passed the samples over to Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz when they were looking for a lead feature for their new ACTION COMICS. And almost as soon as Siegel and Shuster have sold the rights to the character, McClure is suddenly interested in syndicating it as a newspaper feature. So something shady was going on, but as far as I’ve been able to find, there isn’t any existing paper trail on any of it, so we may never know whether there was more to what went on there than is commonly known. So that’s one I’d love to get some sort of answer to at this particular moment.

M-SuperStripe

What comic did you pay $1,400 for?

It was a copy of ALL-STAR COMICS #3, the first meeting of the Justice Society of America.

Phillip Carson

Are there any series out there, tv, film, comic runs, where you have a pet ending? A place where you just turn off the tv or close the book and say “That’s it. The End” while the story goes on too long?

Bonus Question related to Mad Men. Are you a Commentary Track guy? If so, do you have any favorites? The Mad Men dvd commentaries are a highlight for me, almost like a free masterclass in storytelling, where the creators break down the decisions they made while writing the stories. I can also recommend The Simpsons and Community for the same reasons.

I don’t think that there is, Phillip, not to the degree that you mean. I do feel that way in certain cases, I suppose—I don’t know that I ever needed another SWAMP THING story after Alan Moore wrapped up his run, but even there, Mark Millar subsequently took the character to the end of the line, and since then I haven’t had much interest in any subsequent SWAMP THING project. But that’ll only last until some future creator comes up with a Swamp Thing story that knocks my socks off. As for your bonus question, I don’t tend to listen to creator commentaries for the simple reason that they take too long. I like teh idea of the behind the scenes info, I just wish it was written down rather than oral in real time. Because I could read a commentary track in a fraction of the time it takes to listen to it. I just don’t have the hours to spare.

Jeff Ryan

How easy it is to change a book's ship week? And if it happens, is it usually for a multipart story to arrive at LCSes in sequence, or because a department was running late?

Depends on when you do it, Jeff. Before anything is solicited, we do a “load balancing” of the month, to make sure that we don’t have all of our titles coming out in the same week, that there’s a relatively even spread. And at this time, we will typically shift a book that’s running behind back a week or two, to allocate more time for the creative team. This is the reason why most Event series such as AXE JUDGMENT DAY tend to ship their first issue in the first week in the month and their last issue closer to the last week of the month—it’s a simple way to create some elbow room. After the issues are solicited, it’s still relatively easy to shift the release week assuming that the Final Order Cutoff hasn’t been reached yet. And that tends to happen when some circumstance causes the work to fall behind—somebody getting sick, or some other life event transpiring, or there being a need for some manner of content change.

Cathal

Has there been any recent pushes for a group of incumbent scriptwriters ala the early-10s ‘Architects’ or the line artist-focused ‘Stormbreaker’ groups? Maybe I’m wrong — it came just before I got into comics with AvX — but it felt like the Architects push resulted in Marvel being able to create some buzz around interesting creators and canonise a number of ongoing runs while they were still in progress. (Though obviously lots of people still carry their own list of current ‘hot’ creators in their head.)

Not as such, Cathal. Even that Architects promotion met a swift end for the most basic of reasons: every writer of any note who wasn’t one of the Architects was upset that they hadn’t been included. That list of creators was meant to be reflective of their roles in crafting the AvX series, but it was taken as something much larger by people when it was rolled out, and proved to be more trouble than it was worth.

Dammit Damian

I'm real curious what your favorite X-Men storylines are your favorites? When you think back favorably on the older books, what springs to mind? What are your personal favorite stories?

Well, Damian, I have a bunch of stuff that I like. But I came in at the very beginning of Claremont and Byrne, so that era plus the Dave Cockrum run that preceded it tend to be my real X-Men sweet spot. I also have a soft spot for the original team, in particular the Lee and Kirby issues. I stopped reading the book for a number of years after Paul Smith left. Of late, though, I’ve had the opportunity to read a couple of MARVEL MASTERWORKS volumes of that Claremont and John Romita Jr. era, and I found that they were a lot better than I remembered them being; I found a lot of value in them. In more recent years, I really liked Grant Morrison’s tenure as well as ASTONISHING X-MEN by Whedon and Cassaday. And I thought that HOX and POX were great, a magnificent re-envisioning of the entire property. Beyond that, there are additional stories and projects here and there. I think the Claremont and Miller WOLVERINE limited series is about as immaculate a thing as was ever constructed and I use it as an example pretty regularly. And I don’t know that Chris ever better summed up the entire oeuvre of X-MEN better than he and Brent Anderson did in GOD LOVES, MAN KILLS. Also, Alan Davis’ EXCALIBUR was pretty cool, as was Lobdell and Bachalo’s GENERATION X.

Kevin S

Re: the X-Men... I never understood the "hated and feared" motif even as a kid coming in at the tail end of the Byrne/Austin run. If they were the only powered beings in the world, sure, but in the Marvel Universe? Vision, Scarlet Witch, and the Thing are good in the public's eyes, but Storm, Colossus, and Nightcrawler are scary? The Beast is bad on a mutant team but cool on the Avengers... when he looks even stranger? It made even less sense (again, to me) in the Lee/Kirby era, where they looked like standard heroes in their matching uniforms. I thought this might be adult overthink, but I do remember once planning a childhood letter to Marvel asking why the popular heroes didn't just hold a press conference vouching for the X-Men — "Being born with your powers doesn't make you a lesser hero than getting them from a nuclear accident."

Here’s the thing, Kevin, and just one look at the world around us, especially on social media, will prove this to be correct: bigots aren’t sensible. By its very nature, bigotry is unreasoning, emotional, and often fear-based. So we can certainly point out that hating mutants but not super heroes doesn’t really make any sense—but the same can be said about hating dark-skinned people, or trans people, or Jews, or the Gay community, or Muslims, or whatever group you want to make out as the “bad people”. And nobody holding a press conference ever put an end to prejudice.

Jim MacLeod

Mad Men is the best. There is a small character in season six named after me (Jim MacLeod, the guy Richard pretends to be when he meets Joan).

That’s pretty cool, Jim. But why were you late for your meeting with Lou and Joan?

EvilNinjaPhil

I have a question on the Marvel Deluxe editions of the mid 90s; I was reminded about these when reading through Peter David's Hulk run on Marvel Unlimited when issue 426 had 'deluxe' next to the issue number. There's nothing really on the internets when I give the topic a google, so thought I'd ask at the source as I'm interested to know how much the decision behind doing this was artistic (better printing so the art looks better) compared to pragmatic (can charge more money for a superior product)? I think that comics would have naturally evolved away from newsprint as computer based desktop printing techniques became more advanced, but did these deluxe editions help or hinder that process? I imagine artists started 'aiming' at the deluxe edition rather than the standard newsprint edition, kind of like how HD television affected that industry.

The decision to go to that two versions approach was almost entirely competitive, Phil. At that time, Image had launched, and their books all had better paper, better color and higher cover prices, and that made the Marvel books look a bit second class. So in order to compete in a more one-on-one manner, this approach was hatched. The idea was that the regular editions would be for the Newsstand market where teh lower cover price was seen as more important. But the Direct Market, which was already showing that it would buy the higher-priced Image titles, wasn’t likely to blink as the same improvements in the Marvels.

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Behind the Curtain

.What we’ve got here are three photographs of a trio of white boards that were worked out as the aforementioned Architects (Brian Michael Bendis, Jason Aaron, Matt Fraction, Ed Brubaker and Jonathan Hickman) broke down the AVENGERS VS X-MEN crossover along with myself, Nick Lowe and Axel Alonso. As opposed to meeting in New York as we typically did, this particular editorial retreat took place in Portland and Bendis’ home. We all flew out there (except Brian, Ed and Matt, who were all local) and spent three days talking through the story and breaking everything down. From these notes, the writers built their scripts, fleshing out these ideas and coming up with new ones as they worked their way through the storyline we had all crafted. Brian was a lovely and accommodating host, who enjoyed showing off his extensive library of graphic novels, which was quite impressive. He was also, it turns out, a bit of a crazy driver on the roads, and so when we’d head out to get lunch or to go back to the airport, it was often a nail-biting experience (especially for me, who inevitably road shotgun.)

A bunch of this stuff is scribbled down in shorthand form as we all knew what we were talking about. Once we got back to Manhattan, we typed up these notes into a more fleshed-out document that we were able to circulate among the writers and fine-tune before setting people loose to write their scripts.

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Pimp My Wednesday

Comin’ at ya midweek, with all the power of a hurricane! Or something!

You have no idea how long AVENGERS TWILIGHT has been cooking, so it’s a great feeling to see it finally begin to come to fruition. I began working on it in 2016 as an evergreen project inspired by a conversation that I’d had with then-EIC Axel Alonso and VP of Sales David Gabriel about the huge success DC was then having with DARK KNIGHT III. I came up with the core idea of TWILIGHT then, but there wasn’t a good window for it, so I kept picking away at it in teh background every now and then, occasionally attempting to recruit a creative team to make it a real book. Finally, once SPIDER-MAN: LIFE STORY was finished, Chip Zdarsky was looking to do something similar in my office, and I sent him all of the notes that I’d put together. We rapidly settled on Daniel Acuna as the artist, and got the book under way. That was in 2019, and the intention was to have it released in 2020. But then the pandemic hit, and the whole industry went through convulsions, such that we’re only, finally, getting this project out now. That said, I think it’s a truly super-cool series, one that Chip and Daniel have made their own and which I hope will surprise you. I’m very proud of it, and it’s going to wind up being the very last AVENGERS thing that I edit before handing over the reins. Alex Ross also helped out by doing a series of spectacular covers, each of which is designed to be combined with the others to form a larger group image.

Over in FANTASTIC FOUR, the Baxter Building and the Richards and Grimm kids have returned from their sojourn, so what could be more natural than to do an issue that focuses heavily on them? It’s a bit of a comedy of errors as Valeria creates a universal solvent in response to a class assignment and then realizes that there’s nothing that can prevent the stuff from sinking to the center of teh Earth and causing irreparable harm. Science-based shenanigans ensue! Of course, it’s written by Ryan North and illustrated by guest-artist Francesco Mortarino. And Alex Ross contributes another striking cover here. It’s completely off-beat for a super hero cover, but there’s something about it that I find really striking.

And the third act of our five-chapter AVENGERS UNITED storyline gets released this week as well, as the Avengers plan to journey to the restricted moon Yun-To in order to get some answers as to what has been going on throughout this story.

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A Comic Book On Sale 15 Years Ago Today, January 14, 2009

This issue of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN was the best selling single issue comic book of the decade of the 00s, selling in excess of 500,000 copies across five printings. The driving force, of course, was the excitement surrounding the inauguration of Barack Obama as the United States’ 44th president. Obama had made mention in some interviews about how, when he was a kid, he used to regularly read Spider-Man and Conan comic books. And that was about all editor Stephen Wacker needed to hear. He suggested doing a special back-up story that would be a tie-in with the inauguration in which the Chameleon would attempt to take the place of the incoming Chief Executive. Phil Jimenez provided the photogenic cover above—Wacker wrote the cover copy, as well as that for the additional four printings, each of which got a different joke balloon from the web-slinger. The amount of attention that this issue got was pretty amazing, and all for something benign for once. Not to be outdone, the main cover to this issue was drawn by John Romita Sr, which was something special as well, illustrating the lead story by Mark Waid and Barry Kitson in which Betty Brant attempts to help Peter Parker out with his dismal love life. But the newsworthy back-up was written by current AMAZING SPIDER-MAN scribe Zeb Wells and illustrated by Todd Nauck.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

Writer Dan Slott and I worked out pretty much the entire super-story of the SILVER SURFER run he produced with Mike Allred over the course of one long evening phone call. As a part of that brainstorming session, we had come away with three tentpole stories, each of which would act as a major moment in the developing relationship between Norrin Radd and his romantic interest Dawn Greenwood. The real secret of this run is that we weren’t doing a super hero or space comic book at all; we were producing a relationship story, sneaking it in under the radar as comic book readers can sometimes be a bit resistant to anything that doesn’t run the bases in the proscribed manner. So after taking the first seven issues to set up the premise, bring Norrin and Dawn together and have them set off on whimsical adventures across the cosmos, it was time to have them face a situation that was a lot more dire and a lot more personal. One of the things that always bugged me about Stan Lee’s version of the Silver Surfer, for all that it was well-written and beautifully illustrated by John Buscema, was how regularly the Surfer would pass haughty judgment upon the human race, calling mankind savages who were barbaric by nature and who needed to embrace peace and harmony if they were ever going to set forth onto the galactic stage. This always seemed hypocritical to me, given that the Surfer had spent decades, centuries, leading his master Galactus to planets that the World-Eater would then consume. Where’s your morality, Norrin, and how dare you question ours given the scale of your crimes? So that was the premise for this three-parter: the Surfer having to confront the reality of his past actions and Dawn needing to come to grips with the fact that this very nice alien that she’s been traveling with has a body count measured in the trillions. On top of which, we wanted to do a Galactus story that would make him cosmic and unknowable again—another of my peeves is when Galactus is treated as a big dope in a purple hat. He’s meant to be a fundamental force of the universe, something so vast and incomprehensible that our tiny minds only perceive him as a giant purple guy. And I think that Dan and Doc did a great job realizing all of those initial ambitions. This was already a special run to me, but this three-parter jumped it up another notch and showed that we could go dark as well, even if the surface of the story still seemed bright and poppy. Released on January 14, 2015, nine years ago. Where does the time go?

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The Deathlok Chronicles

I spoke a bit about the squarebound DEATHLOK limited series last time, a project that had been started before I was even brought in as an intern, let alone became the character’s ongoing editor. But here I want to say a little bit more about it, in particular its second issue. DEATHLOK was in development for a very long time. Each issue was 48 pages in length and the project wasn’t on any hard and fast release schedule. Accordingly, while it was something of a passion project for writers Dwayne McDuffie and Gregory Wright, it wasn’t anybody’s top priority. Accordingly, things were a bit stop-and-start on it. In particular, artist Jackson Guice was being called upon to do other things, assignments that were appealing to him. But he was still looking down the barrel of more than a hundred pages of work going into issue #2. Now, this all happened before my arrival, so I don’t really know all of the ins and outs. But ultimately, at a certain point, Guice let it be known that he was going to be leaving the project after he’d completed issue #2. I believe he wound up drawing DOCTOR STRANGE instead, though whether that gig was put in front of him before he jumped or after I couldn’t say. Either way, this created a bit of a crisis. On a prestige project like DEATHLOK was supposed to be, you didn’t really want to be changing artist halfway through. But that’s what was happening, and what happened. And it’s a bit of a shame, as the first book in this series started out so strong. Looking through issue #2, you can see Guice’s interest waning as he cuts corners and cheats on shots to more easily get through the work. None of it looks bad, but if you know what you’re looking for, it’s missing the spark that #1 had. And this left editor Bob Budiansky as well as McDuffie and Wright looking for a replacement artist who could come on board with the third issue and complete the series at the same high standard. I also want to take a second to speak about the cover to this issue, a lovely painting by Bill Sienkiewicz. The image above doesn’t really do justice to the beauty of teh original—and n fact, neither did the printed book. It had a blue color palate to it that was amazing to see in person. One of my favorite Sienkiewicz pieces, but I’m one of the few to ever see it as it was intended. The technology of the day just wasn’t able to capture the intensity of the paints that Bill used here.

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Monofocus

Only one new thing to mention here this week. I watched the two episodes that dropped on Netflix of DELICIOUS IN DUNGEON, an anime that’s about a party of Dungeons and Dragon-style adventurers in a fantasy world who set out on a quest to rescue one of their party from the dragon at the center of an elaborate dungeon, and who must survive by learning to cook and eat the various monsters and creatures that they vanquish along the way, as they have no money for proper provisions. This sort of fantasy adventure series with a twist has become a popular subject matter in anime, with a seemingly endless number of series, often sporting elaborate titles that explain the premise in verbose detail. (THE DAY I GOT REINCARNATED AS A SLIME, or IS IT WRONG TO PICK UP GIRLS IN A DUNGEON for example.) I haven’t really sampled much of the genre, but gave this a look simply because it was readily available. And it’s a bit of a strange thing, with a decent portion of its run time dedicated to preparing the assorted slain creatures for consumption. It’s still kind of fun, but I don’t know if the specific narrow focus of the subject matter is for me.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about Rob Liefeld’s CAPTAIN AMERICA #1

And five years ago, I wrote about the excellent 20th anniversary Tokusatsu series KAMEN RIDER ZI-O

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Well, that’s going to do it for this time. With any luck, things’ll be cheerier in a week. Until then, stay alive, stay healthy, and let’s meet back here again next Sunday.

Hat’s All, Folks!

Tom B