#99: Boomerang

I’ve got a fun story to tell this week, but it’s actually down below in one of the other categories. So I’m at something of a loss as to how to kick off this week’s madness. So maybe we just jump right in and get to it, hey?

Thank heaven for the questions from you readers, or I’d be struggling to fill this space every week. So let’s see what we can do to dispense with some wisdom and/or some opinions about some stuff:

Zach Rabiroff

My question this week is a matter of great social and political import, which I hope will be a valuable contribution to the record of comics history. As you've been sharing stories from your earliest editorial credits, I'm curious about your earliest listed writing credits, too. According to the internet, which has not yet failed me, these were 1990's Count Duckula #14 and #15. What can you tell us about your experiences with this first assignment?

I’m pretty sure that I wrote about this somewhat in an earlier installment of this Newsletter, Zach. But sure, just to recap, I was hired by my buddy Evan Skolnick to write the licensed COUNT DUCKULA comic book, based on an animated series that I had never seen and had no particular affinity for. This was based on Evan having seen a number of fan strips that I had done with my partner Mike Kanterovich, who also co-wrote with me on DUCKULA and everything else. As it was an outgrowth of the star Comics line, all of the scripts for COUNT DUCKULA had to be produced using “visual scripts”—in essence, I would draw out the entire story crudely, so that the images and the pacing were locked in even before the proper artwork had been drawn. We were paired with artist Howie Post on the series, a longtime veteran who took it upon himself to improve our work by changing dialogue as he drew the story. This pissed me off to no end at the time, but it’s entirely likely that Howie’s version was better than what Mike and I had done. The gig only lasted for two issues and was being read by few enough people that when I did a gag final page to the last issue just to see if I could get a reaction out of Evan, he loved it enough that he added a page to the book and used it for real (albeit toned down.)

Jeff Ryan

One of the greatest aspects of the 2000s-ers Ultimate Universe was it was limited to four books a month. If you had to set up an Ultimate Universe for the Distinguished Competition, what four titles might you initially focus on?

Well, Jeff, I think the first three have to be Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, don’t they? So the fourth slot is a bit of a toss-up. I once, just for fun, worked out an Ultimate-style approach for Green Lantern, so let’s go with that—especially since you could make the Ultimate version John Stewart and avoid the entire line being whitewashed.

Ramon T

After months of the George Perez covers being available at cover price, the last two are not. Which was a (frustrating) surprise to me. I guess my question is why the change, and will this be the new standard for those covers going forward?

I’m not sure what you mean, Ramon, though it could be that I’ve simply not been paying enough attention to these covers as a group. But so far as I know, the cover price for any of our variant covers never changes. What does sometimes change is the requirements for purchase from the Retailers, the relative rarity of a particular cover. And each Retailer can price any cover at pretty well whatever they want to, based on their overhead and cost to procure. Point being that so far as I know, all of those George covers will still have the same cover price as the regular edtions.

JV

My question relates to what do you think about how an audience follows a character or 'adopts' him or his symbol in a way a publisher did not expect.

I know some fringe elements have taken on the Punisher skull but David Choe also noted how the Punisher is the quintessential New York hero of the 80s/90 that people love. You cannot control your audience but do you retire the hero/symbol because of some fringe elements (and taking it away from others who enjoy it)? or do you carry on knowing it is something you cannot control?

I think this is a long and complex question, JV, and probably not one that I can do justice to in the space available here, sorry. But I didn’t simply want to ignore you here, for all that I don’t really have a good response for you. All I will say is that situations such as the one you’re speaking of usually have more moving parts to them than you may be aware of, and so we as an organization make the best possible decisions that we can make at any given moment based on the entirety of the circumstance. Sure sounds like double-talk, I know, but it’s the best I can give you.

Montana Mott

How much do poor (or positive!) sales influence the decision to hire a given creator back again for another title? Are sales outcomes affected more by factors like the characters involved/timing/overall market more than the individual creative quality of a book?

Well, there isn’t a formula to these things, Montana, so different creators will have different experiences based on their relationships with the people they’re working with. But certainly, if a given creator’s presence on a title tends to result in that title sinking into oblivion, they’re likely going to eventually find it difficult to get work. Your track record is all that you have to go on as a creator. Speaking for myself, I’ll typically hire people based on my liking something that they did previously, and I’ll try to put them into position to succeed. But it isn’t my ultimate job to make them succeed, that falls both to them and the millions of factors that come into play And eventually, I’ll wind up pivoting away from even creators that I like whose work hasn’t gotten sufficient traction, because there are always new people waiting for a shot. As an editor, one of the things you need to accept is the fact that you can’t save everyone—and you may not be able to save anyone.

Nick Mercurio

How much does critical reception--most notably the Eisners--play into a creator’s prospects for more work? Similarly, does that kind of reception play into the decision of whether or not to continue a series? And if so, can it offset sales to any extent? I go back again to the Thompson/Casagrande Black Widow series. It seemed like it got the axe not long after the Eisner win for Best New Series.

I tell you, Nick, awards are always lovely to win. They’re like a little back-pat from the industry. But awards don’t tend to have any real bearing on the sales of a project, and you can’t pay the electric bill with them. So while winning an Eisner Award wouldn’t have no impact whatsoever on the fate of a given project, by itself it wouldn’t be enough to insure that project’s survival if its sales were tragic. Awards are nice, but money pays the bills.

Pierre Navarre

Is it true 70's Bill Mantlo intended that the first Carrion would be none other than Norman Osborn (hence his "Zombie Goblin" look) ?

Yes, Pierre, that is true. I wrote about it a little bit here.

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Behind the Curtain

.Okay, here’s my big story for the week.

A couple of days ago, I got a message on social media from a guy that I didn’t know. He wanted to send me images of some artwork. Typically, I avoid such inquiries, as they tend to come from would-be artists whose work isn’t yet up to snuff, and if I start doing reviews for every one who reaches out in that manner, I wouldn’t ever do anything else. But there was something in the way this fellow phrased his reach-out that made me click on the links to the images in question. And then I did a double take.

I asked him where he had gotten them, telling him that I’d had a break-in many years earlier. But he told me that he’d bought them as part of a lot of items at a Flea Market in a particular part of the country. And that’s when the penny dropped. Because my old partner Mike Kanterovich had lived in that area, and he had cleaned out a house within the past couple of years. So these boards must have come from there, and wound up at that Flea Market in some roundabout fashion.

I explained to the fellow just what he had, and he volunteered to send them back to me. (He was worried that I’d think he was the burglar from that long-ago instance, but I assured him that wasn’t the case.) He had found my signature on them and looked me up online. I offered to pay him a fair market price for them, but he wouldn’t hear of it, he thought it was just a cool story that he’d be able to tell from now on. And so the package from him turned up a few days ago.

And now I’m going to share them with you.

What you’re looking at here is the original artwork from my Christmas Card for 1991, drawn and executed on the backs of a pair of Marvel boards scavenged from the office. It was done as a fold-out card—the eventual printed two-sided version would be folded up, and each side being opened would give you a larger and larger set of images, all the way up to the full size cast shot. It’s a decent example of my meager art talent being in active shape—I couldn’t reproduce any of this at the moment. The text all comes from Walt Kelly’s great feature Pogo, a holiday poem that he’d run close to Christmas for a bunch of years.

So it’s wild to me that these boards have come back to me after 32 years. And I’m sending my benefactor back a package of goodies and rarities in reward for his thoughtfulness and generosity.

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Pimp My Wednesday

The beat goes on, and so do new releases from my office. Here’s what’s coming your way this Wednesday.

G.O.D.S #5 puts the spotlight on Mia De Maria, the magic girl, as she takes a few more steps into a higher world and learns the price for such adventurous behavior as she encounters the Black Swans. It’s another supernatural cosmic whamma-jamma from Jonathan Hickman and Valerio Schiti.

And in the digital space, in AVENGERS UNITED #20, the Avengers finally get to confront the truth behind the conflict they find themselves in the middle of, and need to work out what their reaction is going to be. This wraps up Chapter Four of Five of the 25 part saga by Derek Landy and Marcio Fiorito.

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A Comic Book On Sale 55 Years Ago Today, February 18, 1969

This issue of STAR SPANGLED WAR STORIES from 1969 is a bit of an off-beat pull, but the reason I’m spotlighting it is that it’s got a story behind it. As you can see by comparing the in-production cover art to the final printed cover, something has changed. But even before getting into that, it’s amazing that a DC comic book of this vintage would call out the names of artists on the cover in this manner, given that DC was only then just beginning to credit creators on the insides—and then haphazardly. But new editor Joe Kubert certainly must have felt that a story illustrated by Alex Toth was worth crowing about, even if it might not be likely to increase sales all by itself. Toth was already by that time an acknowledged master of the comic book form, and he had history with Kubert going back to their earliest days working for Sheldon Mayer at All-American Comics, half of the firm that would eventually become DC. Toth was also a bit of a curmudgeon, and could be difficult to deal with. He maintained high standards, both for himself and those with whom he dealt, and few were able to live up to them across the long haul. Not to cast any aspersions, but Toth has always struck me as a profoundly lonely individual. In any case, Kubert reached out to Alex and got him to agree to take on this Enemy Ace story written by Robert Kanigher. Being fully aware of Toth’s penchant for changing around any story elements that he didn’t like (Toth often lettered his own work as well, which was apparently the case in this instance.) Kubert was direct with him: this was a good story, don’t deviate from it. Alex apparently agreed, tacitly or otherwise, and a few weeks later, the completed job came into the office. Kubert opened the package up, and immediately hit the roof. Toth had done exactly what he said he wouldn’t do, he changed the story around to fit his own preferences. Incensed, Kubert rejected the entire job out of hand and sent it back to Toth. It represented a couple of weeks’ work for which he would now not be getting paid. But Kubert had his own problems. The book was due to go to print and the lead story needed to be completely redone. On top of which, the cover was already at the printer with its blurb touting Toth’s involvement. Joe was able to land the help of Neal Adams, who was then relatively new at DC, and who stepped in to pencil the story from the original script in Kubert’s own style. (Kubert reportedly said of Neal’s job, “It was like he had crawled inside my head.”) Kubert himself inked the resulting pencils and got the book off to the printer in the nick of time. He’d also sent along a replacement blurb to be stripped in over the existing Toth one. So this is how Neal Adams got his first-ever cover credit—at a time when most readers would have been asking themselves “Who?” s for the original Toth version of the story, nobody knows how good or bad it may have been, as no copies of it were ever shot. Angered at the entire situation, Toth refused to even take the returned package out of his car trunk, and over time, the elements eventually destroyed all of those pages and all of his hard work. A bit of a loss, even if the story had been rejected. In the aftermath of this incident, Kubert and Toth weren’t on speaking terms for the next decade or so.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

Well, not really. I oversaw production on THE PULSE #1, but it was actually edited by my Associate Editor at the time, Andy Schmidt. The book saw print on February 18, 2004, and was devised as a more mainstream follow-up to Brian Michael Bendis’ successful MAX title ALIAS. Even with the acclaim that the series had garnered, one of the difficulties that it had pulling in sales was the fact that certain retailers had difficulties in stocking the MAX books due to their content and local laws concerning obscenity. They had to keep such books hidden behind the counter, which made it difficult to sell them. This wasn’t a make-or-break problem, but when Brian realized that he’d come to a bit of a turning point with Jessica Jones in ALIAS, Joe Quesada suggested that they retire that title and instead bring Jessica more into the mainstream Marvel Universe in a book that wouldn’t have the same restrictions. Brian’s concept was to have Jessica retained by Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson, who would be launching a new supplement dedicated to superhuman activities called The Pulse. Also involved would be a number of other Bugle reporters including Kat Farrell, who had then-recently starred in DEADLINE. Brian’s regular ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN collaborator Mark Bagley took on the assignment to draw the initial arc of the series despite the fact that ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN was being produced at the exact same time, a herculean effort from Bagley. THE PULSE only lasted for 14 issues, but it set the stage for a number of elements that would find larger expression in the pages of NEW AVENGERS, including the relationship between Jessica Jones and Luke Cage and the development of Norman Osborn within the greater Marvel Universe.

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Chasing the Dragon

As a reader, I was always on the lookout for a series that would bring something new to the table, especially in the genre of super heroes, and CONCRETE certainly fit that bill. And in fact, it wasn’t a super hero series at all, for all that it had some of the trappings. Rather, it was a bit more of a slice-of-life adventure series, at least at the outset. As it went on, it became more interested in ecological messaging. CONCRETE was the creation of Paul Chadwick, an aspiring cartoonist who had gotten into doing storyboard work as a more reliable source of income than doing comics. He worked with Archie Goodwin on the last batch of issues of DAZZLER in the early 1980s, and despite that powerhouse creative team, the stories were throwaway and forgettable and just a little bit stupid. But Chadwick’s opportunity to do something more meaningful came when he was approached to be a part of the start-up of a new independent publishing company, Dark Horse. They were going to be rolling out their new venture with an anthology series, DARK HORSE PRESENTS, and Chadwick made a deal with them to do a feature that would run regularly in its pages and which would rapidly be spun off into its own series. CONCRETE was about the adventures of political speechwriter Ron Lithgow, who is abducted by aliens during a camping trip and who has his brain transplanted into one of the aliens’ massive stone bodies. With the help of a friend, Lithgow escapes his captors, but he’s now trapped in a stony form that is incredibly strong and durable, but which feels a bit like being trapped inside a tank. He’s set apart from humanity by his circumstances and forced to come up with a new life for himself. The Government, wanting to keep the truth of the aliens under wraps, sets up a cover story that Concrete is the end product of a failed experiment to create cyborgs, and he’s aggressively marketed so as to make him ubiquitous to the public. But beyond that set-up, there isn’t a whole lot of super hero style adventure to be found in the book, no super-villains to be vanquished. Instead, Lithgow attempts to use his newfound condition to attempt extraordinary feats that he can thereafter write about, such as swimming the Atlantic Ocean or climbing Mount Everest. These exploits are depicted matter-of-factly, the situations based largely in real world science and not heightened for dramatic effect. In his various adventures, Ron is accompanied by two supporting characters; Dr. Maureen Vonnegut, a biologist who probes the secrets of Concrete’s alien body and with whom Ron is smitten (despite no longer possessing genitalia of any sort) and Larry Munro, a grad student who is hired on as Concrete’s administrative assistant. Like the character himself, there’s a great stillness to CONCRETE as a series. It’s reflective of the human condition, drawn in an attractive, open style and not often becoming melodramatic or overdone. As an alternative to much of the comic book fare of the era, it was a sensitive and rewarding series.

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The Deathlok Chronicles

DEATHLOK #2 was also started by Bob Budiansky as editor, though I wound up seeing the book to print eventually and credited, as I was on the first issue, as the sole editor. That cover copy about the Capturebots is definitely Bob’s wording, and the (wise) call-out to Forge of the X-Men is his as well. This was the first issue of the title to be solo-written by Dwayne McDuffie. As I had mentioned previously, in working on the initial limited series, Dwayne and his co-writer Gregory Wright had found that their vision for the character was diverging, and so they weren’t able to function properly as a co-writing team any longer. So as to not prioritize one over the other, Bob decided that thereafter, they would write the book in four issue shifts—Dwayne would do four issues, then Greg would do four issues. And so on. This was an agreeable compromise, but it was never going to work out in practice. What it led to was a series that was a bit schizophrenic, shifting its point of view back and forth.

In particular, Dwayne saw an opportunity in DEATHLOK to write stories that were relevant to the experiences of being a black man at that time, as Michael Collins, the protagonist, was. This wasn’t something that he was terribly overt about—nobody else involved likely would have really understood that perspective at the time, least of all me. But it definitely factored into his approach to the character. On a certain level, DEATHLOK was a bit of a dry run for the sorts of stories that Dwayne would produce later on at Milestone Media. But at Marvel, he still needed to operate largely below the water line in this regard.

Accordingly, Dwayne’s first storyline introduced the Cybernet, a secret subculture made up of all of the cybernetic and artificial intelligence characters within the Marvel Universe, a group that would share their experiences and assist one another as the commonality between them set them apart from the experiences of any fully human allies or acquaintances they might have. Deathlok is ushered into this community by Misty Knight, who is attempting to track down the person or people who has been killing off members of the community. Dwayne was hoping to make Misty a regular supporting player in the series, but he’d had some beef with John Byrne over a SHE-HULK project he had written. The whole affair was childish and stupid, but it drove Byrne, who was then using Misty in NAMOR, through his editor Terry Kavanaugh to prevent Dwayne from using Misty on a regular basis.

In writing this story, Dwayne was metaphorically speaking towards the duality of identity that came with being black in a white-majority society, and the ways in which African-Americans had to conceal or play down aspects of their culture and identity to assimilate and be accepted by society as a whole. Accordingly, Dwayne titled the storyline “The Souls of Cyber-Folk”, a riff on a seminal book by author W. E. B. DuBois. But Bob either didn’t get his reference or he thought that most of the readership wouldn’t get it, and so he changed the title to the prosaic “Cyberwar” without consulting with Dwayne. As the editor, that was his right—but Dwayne was pretty upset about it when he came into the office and saw the cover mock-up with the new title in place. I wasn’t around for their conversation, but the end result was that Dwayne’s original title was restored prior to publication.

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Posted at TomBrevoort.com

Yesterday, I wrote about the second part of the epic Golden Age crossover between Phantom Lady and the Spider Widow.

And five years ago, I wrote about my very favorite episode of HAVE GUN - WILL TRAVEL, a great piece of television.

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Next time, our big 100th Anniversary release! Will I die? Get a new costume? Will someone come back from the dead? Will I fight a final never-to-be-repeated climactic battle against my greatest enemy? Will I get married—again? Why, anything is possible! But you’ll only know if you tune in—don’t be the last one on your block!

Hat’s All, Folks!

Tom B