#95: Did I Mention, It Also Travels In Time

Got a long one for you this time, as I field test a couple of new features and continue on with the ones I was doing. You’d think I’d be smarter and not try to do every thing every time, but apparently not, not in this instance. So strap in and enjoy, bring plenty of water and hydrate along the way. Let’s do this thing!

First off, I want to thank everybody for all of their kind words in reference to the passing of my friend Frank Strom. That piece really seemed to strike a chord among people, which is something. Mutual friends have also been excavating his archive of artwork, which the below penciled piece comes from, Frank backed away from the field in the early 2000s as the marketplace changed, which is a bit of a shame, as he had a lot to offer.

Anyway, let’s get into your comments from the week:

Steve McSheffrey

First off, I have to say that title hit me really hard. This past Sunday at about midnight I had a pretty bad heart attack that has me with three stents now. I saw the word and everything else I'm doing just fell away because that word just drew me in.

Yikes! I’m very sorry to hear about what you experienced, Steve! Hope you continue on the road to recovery that you’ve been indicating that you’re on in the comments section. Even with the hordelike number of followers this feature has these days, we can hardly afford to lose anyone. So take care of yourself, hear?

M-SuperStripe

I have a BB28 myself (graded a 1.0) but I've sort of made peace with the fact that I'll likely never afford an AS3. That would be the next goal though, first ever comic book team.

As I mention in this piece from over at my Blog, I bought a copy of BRAVE AND THE BOLD #28 twenty-four years ago, Stripe, at the 2000 San Diego Comic Con. It was all thanks to Mark Waid, who pointed out that the best and most plentiful deals could be found on Thursday morning, before the show floor opened to the public but when exhibitors had access to it. And I paid a very reasonable price for it, especially in retrospect.

Pierre Navarre

According to this list of all the books you worked on as editor at Marvel since the early 90's...

http://www.mikesamazingworld.com/main/features/creator.php?creatorid=2825&credittype=Editor

...is there still some corners of the whole Marvel Universe you haven't worked on at some point ?

I’ve touched on pretty much everything at one point or another, Pierre. But in a major way, the big dark spot is X-MEN, so we’ll be taking care of that in the months to come. Aside from that, I’ve never edited a run on DAREDEVIL—I believe that’s the last major Marvel title that I haven’t contributed to in a meaningful way.

Zach Rabiroff

what's your preferred mode of creator and editor communication these days? The pandemic years saw a general move toward ongoing, online collaboration within comic lines (often much more frequent than the old creator summits), and the X-line in particular was pioneering in its use of a running Slack channel. So how have you been, or will you be, going about this during your tenure? Is the X-Slack still a going concern, or do you have different preferences for that sort of collaborative bull session?

Because I’ve lived through changing times, Zach, I’ve done this several different ways. And often it depends upon what works best with the creator in question. Generally, though, I do most of my interacting with collaborators through e-mail these days. I’ve gotten very good about being able to put the ball on the felt just exactly where I want it to go through a well-worded e-mail. In terms of the new X-Group, while I don’t want to necessarily talk about how we’re doing it, we’ve created spaces where the assorted writers and editors can share both their work and brainstorm ideas. It’s not the X-Slack, we do things somewhat differently (a Slack channel going off constantly throughout the day would distract me too much from everything else that I have to do) but we’re trying to keep the lines of communication open.

Thom B

Two issues of Fantastic Four in the same month is a pleasant surprise! Any particular reason for the anomaly?

On our major titles, Thom, whenever possible we try to ship on greater than a monthly schedule. At the beginning of the fiscal year, I was asked to try to produce more than 12 issues of both AVENGERS and FANTASTIC FOUR during the course of the year, and so that’s what I’ve done, planning the double-ships out with the creators so that they wouldn’t disrupt anything too greatly. We just sent out the announcement that we’ll have two issues of AVENGERS in April as well, which connect to FALL OF THE HOUSE OF X. And there are X-Titles that I’m planning to have ship more often as well once we get into that area of production.

Jeff Ryan

You mentioned a Bill Sienkiewicz Deathlok cover, which didn't reproduce as well as the original. Is that always an issue with painted covers? Would an Alex Ross original look radically different from what we see reproduced on Fantastic Four?

I don’t know about radically different, Jeff, but there’d certainly be some degree of shift. There always is when you transfer an image to different paper stocks with different absorbencies of ink and so forth. Alex has been doing this a long time, though, and he tends to fine-tune the scans of his images precisely. But even then, once you get them on press, anything can happen.

Kevin S

Is there official or unofficial canon re: what the general Marvel Earth public — not gov't agencies — knows about the heroes & villains running around outside their windows? People hating the X-Men implies it's common knowledge who's a mutant and who isn't, otherwise they would just be another costumed team. But how about in a broader sense? I'm not asking about secret identities, rather a general public "who's who" understanding beyond "Hulk destroys things" or "the FF live in the Baxter Building."

It’s always interesting to me, Kevin, when people ask about an “official position” on something. It’s indicative of an intangible belief that what we’re doing is reporting on events happening somewhere far away, about which we’re simply reporting. Rather than what we actually do, which is make it all up. But anyway, the average person in the Marvel Universe likely knows as much about the assorted Marvel characters as they hear about on the news. In the real world, there are certainly different places that report differently on the same events, so I’d expect that the same would apply to the Marvel Universe. If one lived far away from Manhattan, it’s entirely possible that they’ve never really come into contact with a real life super hero or mutant or alien or whatever. So what they know is what’s reported. The X-Men have made no secret of the fact that they are mutants, quite the opposite. So depending upon how their exploits are seen and reported, people may have a colored viewpoint on what they’re all about and how dangerous they may be. And almost none of the real specifics about any of the characters is so widely and accurately reported that most people would be aware of it. (Plus, how many people even care all that much if their own lives are largely unaffected?)

CG

I guess my question is how does editorial balance trying to make a line that sells but also giving the fans moments with lesser known or popular characters? Sometimes years go by without seeing characters or certain team dynamics that fans love. Would it not be okay to allot one shots or mini series for some of the teams that fans want to see together for even one mission? Like once a year.

As you pointed out, CG, the X-Men line has been around for a long time, and in the course of all those years a lot of characters have been introduced—with new ones being added all the time. When I first started sinking my hands into the X-World, this was one of the factors that I had to grapple with. Literally every character was somebody’s favorite, and yet there were certainly mutants who were a lot more popular and mainstream than others. It quickly became apparent that you could never please everybody—there are simply too many characters to field all of them in a meaningful manner at once. So in large part, a lot of who gets used comes down to the preferences of the creators, which characters speak to them the most. We’re trying to assemble our regular casts from across the entire history of the franchise, to “use the whole Buffalo” as the old saying goes. But that doesn’t mean that everybody can get an equal representation at the table, at least not all at once. Some characters are going to have to wait for their moment to arrive (if it ever does.) So, sure, we could do one-shots for some of the groups that you listed, but only if they’re meaningful to the larger line. It’s better to not use a character than to use them badly, or in a manner that makes them more generic in a role that could have been filled by anybody else. And obviously, the more popular characters stand a much better chance of being seen more regularly—a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Pedro J. Caro

The reason I've decided to ask something is that I just remembered the (relatively) sudden departure of Dan Slott from the FF and checked Marvel's online available exit interview with him, in which he clearly stated that he had further plans for the cast and the title. Which makes me guess that this was, among other things, an economic decision, with readership not showing in sufficient numbers to justify his continuing. Now that it's been a couple of years, I was wondering whether you're in a position to further elaborate on the reasons behind. 

My take as a reader is that I was very sorry to see Dan leave the title, as I was one of the however few we were who actively enjoyed his run, and was looking forward to getting an issue #50 and a Legacy issue #700 from him in a space of a few months, but I also felt that he wasn't helped by the rotating art team. A more regular and consistent art team would have helped sales, but at the end of the day, this is just backseat driving and I really don't want to do that. Just wondering whether you can give some further insight apart from "My feeling at the time was that the title needed a change". Thanks in advance! 

I tell the junior editors this all the time, Pedro: the editor’s first loyalty is to the title. And it’s a reality of the world we all work in that there was somebody who worked on it before you and there’ll be somebody who works on it after you. Your time is limited—even if it’s 26 years like my editorial stint on AVENGERS. So in the end, it comes down to me and to the editorial staff in general to determine when a tenure has perhaps run its course, when a book might benefit from a different perspective or a change in direction. Where it seems to be stagnating and not quite connecting with the audience well enough. If you like that run, then it can be disappointing. If you became bored with it along the way, then it’s a moment of potential—depending on who steps in as the new creative team and what they do with the title. Beyond that, I don’t think it does anybody any good to get into the minutia of why any creative decision such as this one was made. Dan did a great job with his time on FANTASTIC FOUR, it was simply the moment where it was time to give somebody else a chance. Oh, and in terms of the rotating artists, I think Dan would tell you himself that a lot of the reason for that came down to him as well, and his difficulties juggling multiple assignments simultaneously. We don’t tend to switch up artists with such a frequency without there being some need to do so.

Charles Ricketts

Just curious. What do you think happened with Marvel Fanfare? I was recently at a comic shop that had a trade with the first issues.

I was probably around 13 at the time it came out and had missed the first 2 issues but finally found them at a convention. I thought they were great. Was even able to get the first issue autographed by Terry Austin and Paul Smith.

But eventually the quality and talent seemed to go downhill.

What was your take?

Here’s the dirty little secret of MARVEL FANFARE, Charles: while it was sold and promoted initially as an upscale prestige series, what it was really there to do was to get orphaned and incomplete stories out of inventory and earning back their production costs. What that means is that, over time, while the earliest issues had a lot of work that was by strong, noteworthy creators, the backlog of such unfinished and unused works was picked over, and so the quality and essentialness of the series dipper. There were a number of stories that were produced for FANFARE, and many more that were finished so that they could run in FANFARE, but generally speaking, most everything that was cover-featured in it had its origins in some other place and had not been completed or used.

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Behind the Curtain

What you see below is the fragment of a signed photograph of actor Scott Adsit.

So this is the story of how I and a number of other people killed a day in 2011 rather than making comic books.

It all started when the popular NBC comedy 30 ROCK aired an episode on Thursday, March 17, 2011 in which character Frank Rossitano, played by Judah Friedlander, deep-fries a copy of AVENGERS ACADEMY #7. 30 ROCK was a popular series with the Marvel staff—a lot of us watched it regularly. It’s also worth noting that Marvel’s Editor in Chief at the time, Joe Quesada, had a desire to try his hand at directing, one that he’d eventually be able to do full scale when AGENTS OF SHIELD was in production.

In any case, Joe saw the opportunity for some free publicity for Marvel as well as to scratch his directing itch, and so he proposed that we shoot a video in response to the episode. Marvel folks had earlier had contact with Scott Adsit, who is a huge Marvel fan, and he agreed to take part in our slapdash production. And so, a week later, on March 24, 2011, Marvel’s response was blasted out across social media. You can see it here at this link

The part that isn’t apparent from the video proper is just how many takes we shot of every piece of this short video. I think we went through at least a dozen photographs of Adsit, each one of which I was obligated to chew up on cue. And these weren’t xerox copies or anything, they were printed on photographic paper, which means that they had fibers running all through them. It was, to put it kindly, gross. By the time we were done, my tongue was literally black from all of the ink. So it was fun to do—but probably more fun for Joe than it was for me. I did save that one fragment above with its signature as a memento, and it sat on my desk for a decade until we had to clean out the offices due to the pandemic. Now it’s somewhere among my disorganized archives at home. But at least you get to share in this long-ago and forgotten production.

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Pimp My Wednesday

What do we have for you this week? Let’s see…

G.O.D.S. #4 features a mind-bending and time-breaking installment in which Wyn and Dr. Strange try and fail and try and fail and try and fail to save the universe from an agent of Oblivion. It’s by Jonathan Hickman and Valerio Schiti.

In the third issue of PUNISHER, new Punisher Joe Garrison finds himself on the back foot right from the start, hunted by the police and crippled by his own trauma that’s been brought to the fore by Fearmaster, a Daredevil foe from the past. David Pepose and Dave Wachter bring the action here. I like this cover, although I feel that Joe’s face looks just a little bit too young.

And in AVENGERS UNLIMITED, we move into the fourth chapter of our 25-part epic as Earth’s Mightiest Heroes separate to take action against their attackers on Ghesh and get to the bottom of why the moon of Yun-To is inaccessible. Derek Landy and Marcio Fiorito tell the tale.

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A Comic Book On Sale 55 Years Ago Today, January 21, 1969

I wrote about this issue of TEEN TITANS extensively at my blog, which can be accessed at this link. But it’s worth just quickly recapping the situation surrounding this issue, as it’s a bit of dark and unfortunate history that shouldn’t be forgotten. Having previously introduced a Russian super hero in a previous issue, newcomer writers Len Wein and Marv Wolfman intended to use this story to introduce DC’s first black super hero, a character called Jericho. They wrote the story, most of it was completed by artist Nick Cardy—and then there was a changing of the guard in DC’s management. Irwin Donenfeld, the son of DC’s founder, was out, and Carmine Infantino, formerly a key artist and later cover designer was put into place as Editorial Director. Carmine looked at the story and pronounced it unpublishable, rejecting it outright and putting editor Dick Giordano in a quandary, as the issue had to go to print in a very short time, too short to produce an entirely new issue from scratch. Carmine’s take was that the story was a polemic, and not something that DC should be standing behind—and in fact, Wein and Wolfman were both defacto blacklisted from DC as writers for years thereafter. They thought that this all smacked of racism, and they inveigled some assistance from Neal Adams, who read the story himself. Neal didn’t think it was anywhere near as unprintable as Carmine did, but even he was unable to convince Infantino to run the issue as written. So to help out his friend Giordano, Neal wrote and drew entirely new story incorporating as many of Cardy’s pages and panels as he was able to. The black Jericho became the white Joshua, a crime-fighter in the mold of Batman who made only this one appearance. The cover was already at the printer, and so a call was placed to knock out the crowds of rioters in blues and purples so that it wasn’t so easy to see that they were intended to be black. And that was that, the issue came out, and Neal continued his story over the next two. And Wein and Wolfman were out of a job, though things worked out for them long-term as well. So was it racism, or inexperience, or both? I tend to think that it was a little bit from column A, a little from column B. Carmine did eventually allow Neal and his collaborator Denny O’Neil to introduce John Stewart in GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW a few years later, but in 1969 and just having come into his job, he just wasn’t ready to okay what could have been an incendiary story. On the other hand, Marvel was by this time featuring the Black Panther in AVENGERS and would shortly be introducing the Falcon, so the color barrier had been broken already elsewhere. DC, though, as an organization was still very conservative, and wouldn’t give a black character a big spotlight until they launched BLACK LIGHTNING in 1976—and that was almost a very different, very wrong-headed thing as well. You can see a bunch of the unused pages from the original version of the Jericho story at that link above.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

I’m only spotlighting this issue of IRON MAN which came out on January 21, 2004 momentarily here, because Adi Granov’s powerful cover became such an influence on first the initial IRON MAN film and then on subsequent super hero movies that this pose has become an iconic super hero pose whenever a flying her crashes down to Earth again dramatically. It’s a hell of a legacy for a single cover to carry, and that’s all down to Adi’s polished, slick interpretation of the image.

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Another Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

The first issue of DARK AVENGERS came out on January 21, 2009 and proved to be a monster hit. Which was a bit of a relief to me, as there had been people in the Marvel hierarchy who were convinced that nobody was going to want to read a book focusing on several villains dressed up as other Marvel heroes. But it worked because of Brian Michel Bendis’ ability to delve into the truth of the assorted characters he was writing about and to make their struggles and perspectives feel genuine, even if they were complete psychos. Brian was joined in his efforts by Mike Deodato Jr, with whom he’d previously done a run on NEW AVENGERS. That storyline had been written for Steve McNiven, but McNiv had to step off to do CIVIL WAR, and Deo stepped into the breach. And it wasn’t the best meshing of artist and story, it was a bit of a misfire. But here, having studied how Warren Ellis had approached writing for Deo on THUNDERBOLTS, Brian shifted gears and achieved a smooth and fruitful collaboration with his artist, which was always one of his real strengths. DARK AVENGERS was designed from the beginning as a title that had an expiration date, and when we got to the point where the DARK REIGN storyline was about to climax in SIEGE, the book came to an end. Throughout the run, it had consistently been the top-selling book in the line. When it finished, there were those who advocated for keeping it going, so successful had it been, but in this instance, we held the line and shut it down as planned when the story was over. (There was an ill-conceived attempt to turn THUNDERBOLTS into DARK AVENGERS right at the end of its run in an attempt to pump up sales, the less said about that move, the better.) In any case, this was a prime example of what made Brian’s tenure on AVENGERS so successful for the eight years he wrote it: his willingness to push the envelope, to change things up dramatically, and to give the audience a sense that absolutely anything could happen next. The whole thing was a series of pretty bold storytelling choices, and the run remains a highlight of this era. (Brian was doing similarly good work alongside it in NEW AVENGERS during this same time, but those stories flew a bit more under the radar simply because they weren’t the shiny new penny.)

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Chasing the Dragon

The opening up of the Direct Market in the early 1980s came at just the right moment in my comic book reading life. I had been reading the books for almost a decade at that point, and was beginning to grow bored with the same old thing. This is typical, of course, at one time there was an expectation that any given reader was going to follow comics for a few years and eventually drift away from them as more teenaged interests began to take up more of their time and attention. Maybe the same thing would have happened to me, but the explosion of new books starting up from new companies meant that there was always something with some potential excitement to it being released. Who knew which of these assorted companies might become a legitimate long-term competitor to DC and Marvel? Capital Comics didn’t become that, but it did unleash a number of series on the world that went on to become recurring features at assorted companies. But none of them garnered as much success as their initial offering, Mike Baron and Steve Rude’s NEXUS. Neither Baron nor Rude had done any work in the mainstream at the time that NEXUS premiered—they had collaborated on one story that saw print in Pacific Comics’ VANGUARD ILLUSTRATED, but that’s about it. Baron’s vocation was as a journalist, and Rude was just starting out as a working artist. But the combination of their specific talents, interests, outlooks and tastes resulted in a series that was a lot more sophisticated and modern and fun than almost anything else on the racks at the time. NEXUS tells the story of Horatio Hellpop, the son of an exiled mass murderer whom, after destroying the planet he’d been in charge of overseeing rather than permitting it to fall to insurrection, took his pregnant wife into exile with him, the pair winding up on the mysterious world of Ylum. There, the young Horatio is plagued by dreams of other mass murderers as he grows up. Only sojourns in a special amniotic tank can make these visions bearable. And once they become too intense, Hellpop is driven to seek out and eradicate the subjects of his nightmares as Nexus, the Liberator, who possesses vast fusion-casting powers derived from an unknown source. The mystery behind Hellpop’s abilities and the dreams that drive him are a recurring subplot over the course of the first couple of years of the series, as is his developing relationship with Earthgov operative Sundra Peale. The first three issue of NEXUS were released in an oversized black and white magazine format—a format favored initially by a lot of new publishers entering the industry. Swiftly discovering that the new breed of comic shops wanted product in the same general format as Marvel and DC, Capital turned NEXUS into a color comic with its fourth release. Swiftly, though, it became apparent that Capital had overextended itself, and it got out of the publishing business in order to double down on its original job as a comic book distributor. So NEXUS was gone for a short while, before returning at First Comics, a strong player in the 1980s. The series lasted there pretty much until First’s demise, at which point Mike Richardson of Dark Horse bought the NEXUS copyright and trademark at bankruptcy and returned them to Baron and Rude, an incredible bit of generosity on the part of the publisher. NEXUS was a heady mix of intergalactic geo-politics, science fiction speculation, slapstick humor under a veneer of superheroic adventure. There really was nothing else quite like it at the time. A lot of the appeal came from the artwork of Steve Rude, who drew upon disparate influences including Jack Kirby’s Marvel Comics, Russ Manning’s MAGNUS: ROBOT FIGHTER and Alex Toth’s SPACE GHOST. Eventually, though, Baron and Rude hit a creative impasse, and decided to part ways. Since then, each creator has produced his own continuation of NEXUS, but without their other half, neither version is as compelling as the earlier work had been. NEXUS was truly greater than the sum of its parts.

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The Deathlok Chronicles

This is about where I first came in. DEATHLOK #3 was in production when I started at Marvel as an intern, so while I didn’t have much to do with it, I did see it start to come together. As mentioned last time, artist Butch Guice had quit the project to pursue other opportunities after finishing issue #2, which meant that a new artist had to be found for the project. After a bit of searching, Dwayne McDuffie suggested Denys Cowan, who was interested. Over in the comments last week, co-writer Gregory Wright described the search for a replacement artist this way:

Gregory Wright

Oh man, the search to replace Guice was horrible. The book was running late since it wound up getting scheduled before it was ready to be scheduled. That was a small part of Guice leaving...he couldn't make our schedule and do the other projects he was more interested in. I called everyone I could think of whose art looked in anyway similar to Guice. Most of them said the same thing..."I don't want to have to follow Guice on this sort of project, he's way too good." Meanwhile Denys Cowan had expressed interest. Now we all LOVED Denys' work, but it was nothing like Guice's and generally you don't want clashing art styles on a limited series like this. But...we all agreed at the end that it was better to have a fantastic artist who was really excited to do the book, than someone who was maybe a little more similar is style, but just had no real oomph. Denys turned that 3rd issue around in about two weeks and it was brilliant.

My memory is that this third issue wasn’t turned around in two weeks, since it was still in production when I came on staff as an assistant editor at the end of 1989. But it did get produced steadily, which was what was needed to get the series back on track. Rick Magyar was brought on board as the inker and he was a great match for Denys’ style—their pages looked lush and detailed and textured. It wasn’t the same as Guice, but in some ways, it was even better (though probably not quite as commercial in the marketplace.) Like the second issue, Dwayne scripted this issue entirely on his own while it was co-plotted by Greg and Dwayne together. I don’t remember why this happened, I just remember that it did—likely, Greg had some other commitment that was due at the same time, and backed away as necessary.

So it seemed as though the worst of the problems had been overcome, and things were back on track. But that feeling would be short-lived, as moving into issue #4, more difficulties would crop up that would set the stage for the condition the series was in when I inherited it.

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Super Heroes On Screen

I was asked over in the comments section to talk a bit about my favorite treatments of super heroes and comic books in other media, particularly in film and on television. And so I’m going to try a bit of that here and see how it goes.

The very first adaptation of a comic book character to the big screen was Republic Pictures’ 1941 serial THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL. In those days, there were regular Saturday morning matinee showings for young kids, and at a time before television, just about every kid went to them regularly. A typical showing would include a cartoon or two (produced for movie houses and with much more fluid and expensive animation that would become standard for television), a newsreel, a B-western or two, and a chapter of a serial. Serials had become a staple of movie houses in the silent era, when THE PERILS OF PAULINE became a huge and much-imitated hit. Serials, though, were the bottom of the barrel of movie-making at the time, produced on the cheap for an audience of children. They didn’t carry a lot of prestige for all that they could be a strong draw at the box office. By the start of the 1940s, there were several studios regularly producing chapterplays for the cinema. Today, Republic is considered the best of them. They had developed a formula of fast action, furious fights and daredevil stunts aided by the special effects work and miniatures craftsmanship of the Lydecker Brothers. These guys were ILM before ILM was even an idea.

THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL grew out of an earlier effort on the part of Republic to acquire the rights to produce a Superman serial. In 1940, no property was hotter in the children’s market, and Republic and others had found great success in adapting comic strip and radio characters such as Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and the Lone Ranger. Negotiations commenced and a script was even worked on, but in the end, Superman’s publishers wanted approval over the content and Republic didn’t want to give that up. So the Superman serial was retooled into THE MYSTERIOUS DOCTOR SATAN, with the Man of Steel replaced by a powerless home-grown hero, the Copperhead. Hearing that Republic had lost their efforts to acquire Superman, the head of Fawcett Publications reached out offering their firm’s new similar hero Captain Marvel as a replacement. Fawcett was easier to deal with, and so Republic wound up doing serials not only starring Captain Marvel, but also Spy Smasher and Mister Scarlet, though this last one didn’t reach the screen in that form, a more popular character was substituted from another publisher. (There’s also the possibility that Republic’s home-grown flying her Rocketman was inspired at least in part by Fawcett’s similar Bulletman.)

In any event, a deal was struck and THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL premiered in 1941. Just for context, the serial was advertised in WHIZ COMICS #20, super-early in the run. Captain Marvel co-creator C.C. Beck never wavered in his hatred for the serial, stating that it didn’t capture the whimsical nature of the character, but at the time it was written and filmed, there were only six or seven Captain Marvel stories to draw from, and those early adventures were relatively generic and humorless.

THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL is a great serial, one of the best. It’s got action, atmosphere, mood, thrills—and a hero who is positively homicidal, routinely gunning down fleeing enemies in the back with a machine gun or hurling them from the tops of buildings. (When footage from the serial was later reused in the satirical J-MEN FOREVER, the character was aptly renamed the Caped Madman.) Actor Tom Tyler is a picture-perfect Captain Marvel, looking as though he stepped right out of the pages of the comic. And while Frank Coghlan Jr. is a bit too old to be the boyish Billy Batson of the comics, he’s got a youthful enthusiasm to him that’s very charming. The rest of the cast was created for the serial, though a few, such as Whitey, were eventually brought into the comics as well.

The big challenge for the Lydeckers was to convincingly make Captain Marvel fly, and they did a hell of a good job for the era. They created a full-scale dummy of Captain Marvel, slightly larger than lifesize, and then they would rig it on long wires or attach it on rods to a speeding car, and the hero would convincingly sail through the air in pursuit of evildoers.

I’m convinced that THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL was one of the reasons why the Captain’s title began to outsell Superman’s, leading DC to sue both Fawcett and Republic Pictures for infringement. The case wouldn’t be settled for a dozen years, and it led to Captain Marvel being forced into limbo for two decades. it also prevented Republic from doing a sequel to the popular serial. Ironically, in the end DC wound up owning the character that they’d put out of business.

So THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL is a lot of fun and a real favorite of mine. For those who are curious, the super-cool trailer for the serial can be viewed at this link. If you do end up watching the whole of the serial, I’d advise you to parse it out. It wasn’t designed to be watched in a single sitting, and so it grows a bit repetitive and stale if you attempt it that way.

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The Episodes

Another occasional feature that I want to explore, in which I focus in on particular episodes of various shows that I’ve watched over the years, typically the ones that made me a fan of the series and got me to follow it.

“Wings of the Dope” was a third season episode of KING OF THE HILL, Mike Judge’s Texas-centered animated situation comedy. When the series debuted, I was not a fan. I’d found BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD to be positively grating, and KING shared both a similar animation style and many of the same voices. So I stayed away for years, even though the show was ensconced directly after THE SIMPSONS, which my family made appointment viewing for many years. Eventually, though, KING reruns started airing in syndication late night, and it was there that I happened across this episode and got drawn in by the story that was being told.

While animated, KING OF THE HILL is a relatively grounded series. While it sometimes stretches credibility, for the most part everything that happens on the show is within the bounds of what you might do on a live action situation comedy. “Wings” is the one real exception, venturing into legitimate supernatural territory. It’s also really great, and hits home beautifully.

At the end of the prior season, lead character Hank Hill was caught in an explosion at the Mega Lo Mart (which is a hell of a good pun name). While Hank survived, the minor character of Buckley was not so fortunate. Buckley had been Hank’s niece Luann’s no-account boyfriend up to that point. It’s now several months later, and Hank and his friends are drawn to fix up Buckley’s trampoline, which has stood in the Hill family back yard since his passing. At the same time, Luann is struggling with her classes at Beauty School. Her classmates are downright nasty to her, and she doesn’t seem to have an aptitude for the work. But her whole future has been mapped out, she’s going to graduate Beauty School and start her own salon, and so the pressure on her is intense. Certainly the recent death of her boyfriend is a part of it, but it’s something that she hasn’t dealt with yet.

And then, that night, Buckey’s Angel appears on the trampoline. He tells Luann that he’s come with a message for her from Jesus--but while she hopes for something positive, Buckley’s Angel tells her that she’s going to fail her Beauty School exam. This sends Luann into a spiral, one that culminates with her being helped out and rescued by a trip of girls from the local community college. This experience causes Luann to think better of herself, and she gets a refund for her semester in Beauty School and uses it to apply for classes at the College, a positive step towards a brighter future for her. At the same time, having heard the rumors about Buckley’s Angel, the other characters individually begin writing letters of request to the angel, leaving them stuffed into the trampoline. All of this drives Hank, who doesn’t believe in anything supernatural, a bit crazy, until he manufactures a response from Buckley’s Angel effectively telling them all to get over themselves.

The whole thing wraps up in this beautiful little scene, and likely the best-ever use of Dream Academy’s song “Life in a Northern Town” I know I can’t separate the two having seen it. I found the entire episode to be terrifically emotional and funny in all the right ways, and it got me to start watching the show regularly.

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Monofocus

A bunch of reality television this past week, which isn’t typically my thing, but where I can be hooked in with the right premise. So I’ve been taking in THE TRUST: A GAME OF GREED on NETFLIX, in which a typical cast of diverse people are all awarded an equal stake in a common pot of money, and aren’t required to vote anybody out or anything if they don’t want to. But if they do, of course, it means more cash for everybody else. And it’s been interesting seeing how the assorted players start off with an altruistic and almost socialist mindset at the beginning, and how they justify their various turns to be greedy or spiteful or paranoid and to do harm to one another. It isn’t especially deep, but it is fun for ten episodes.

I’ve also been watching the UK second season of THE TRAITORS. I find the show to be flawed in that its basic Mafia-style game where there are secret traitors who are killing off the members of the group doesn’t provide the players with any genuine way to logic out who the bad apples might be. So every episode becomes instead about clashes of personality and dumb luck rather than any insight or skill. But it’s still frighteningly easy to get into. And the format has proven so popular that other local versions have been mounted around the world: I’m sitting on the first episodes of the Canadian and New Zealand editions as well as the second season of the Australian version, and the first batch of episodes of the second American season have also dropped. So it’s doing something right, speaking to some common instinct among the audience.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about a forgotten crossover between Kid Eternity and Plastic Man in the pages of HIT COMICS #32.

And five years ago, I wrote about the FIVE BEST COMIC BOOKS OF 1978

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Next time: hopefully fewer categories as I start to rotate some of this stuff a bit more. But we’ll see! Anyway, have a good week and I’ll meet you back here in seven days.

Hat’s All, Folks!

Tom B