#16: Clever and Foolish

Kayak, deed, rotator, noon, racecar.

This is the week when Comic Con International kicks off in San Diego, as all eyes in this and related fields turn their attentions towards that city. Myself, I won’t be attending SDCC this year, nor have I now for several years. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, I was there every year (even before Marvel started to send me for actual work stuff.) But after a notoriously difficult return trip around 2008, I’ve become more of an infrequent visitor. I think the last time I was there was in 2015, when I bumped into Peter Capaldi on the street. Or maybe it was the Doctor.

Even then, the show had grown into a multimedia extravaganza in which comic books played a relatively small part in a lot of what was going on. Still, it was always chaotic and crazy and fun, and so there’s always a small pang of regret about missing it.

What I’ll be focusing on instead this week is the annual Marvel Philosophy talk that I give to our young editors once a year. The purpose of which is to impart a lot of basic knowledge and information that we’ve accumulated over the years, but that the organization is often bad about passing along to the younger generations. I started doing this in the mid-2000s, and at that point the outline for the talk was a page and a half in length. As of Friday, it was five and a half pages long as more and more items have been added to it (I added a few for this year), to the point where I now need to break it up into two weekly sessions. Otherwise, it’s just too long and unwieldy. For the past decade or so, I’ve scheduled it for the week of SDCC figuring that the more senior editors who will be attending the convention don’t need to hear it again, and that because so much of our creative talent will be focused there, it’ll be a week with just a bit less going on. We’ll see how that works out this year.

For a taste of what this talk is like, I recorded a series of videos this past year covering some of the same material. They’re available on the YouTube Channel here. A few people have asked me to continue to the sequence, notably uber-Editor Diana Schutz—and you kind of have to do what Diana says. But I found in my experiments with YouTube that I couldn’t overcome the site’s algorithm. and so I would get less traffic and attention for pieces that took a lot longer to prepare and shoot. I still haven’t managed to balance that equation, but since Diana wants more, I’m going to need to crack this at some point, or just suck it up and get it done.

In the meantime, seems like the least I can do is to answer a few of the questions that you good folks have thrown my way in answer to my desperate pleading. This first one comes from Karl Kesel, a triple-threat writer-penciler-inker with whom I’ve worked frequently.

Out of curiosity: what's your schedule look like? And I mean including how you fit in time to watch the shows and read the comics that you do— in addition to your job! Have you given up on sleep? Do you ever see your family?

Hey, you’ve met me, Karl, my family is glad to have a respite from my presence. Marvel is still working remotely at the moment, at least on the publishing side, so I’ve reclaimed a lot of the time that used to be spent on commuting in which to do other things. So during the week, a typical workday will start at around 8:00 AM in the morning and run through about 6:00 PM. With no commute, I can thereafter have dinner and fit in a certain amount of reading and/or watching before eventually crashing out by around midnight. On the weekends, you won’t see me out of bed before noon, but I tend to run later, until 2:00-3:00 AM in most cases. And almost every night, some reading will get done before bed, typically prose of one sort or another.

In terms of these Newsletters, so far the workflow goes something like this: Once I wrap up a given week’s installment, usually on Saturday afternoon I almost immediately set up the template for the next one. This includes downloading and placing the covers for my upcoming week’s releases, which I tend to gather on Monday mornings when the work-week starts. I’ll also do a sweep using the ever-handy Mike's Amazing World Newsstand to find a comic that I think it would be good to talk about that was released on that upcoming date, and another that I put out on that same date in the past. Depending on how much I’m feeling my oats, I might also make a selection for the Behind the Curtain section, too. This is all visuals at this point, nothing is yet written. From there, as the week goes on, I’ll jot down the name of anything new that I watch during the week that I might feel like talking about. Occasionally, there might be some thought about some of this stuff that I’ll dash off, often in shorthand, so that I’ll remember it when the time comes to do the actual writing. This process continues through Friday night, by which time there’s a lot of skeleton in place, but very little actual copy. That gets done on Saturday afternoon, typically in one marathon session straight onto the page. The result might be better if I did more drafts, but hey, you get what you pay for. Eventually, the entirety of the column is written up, and I get it scheduled to be sent out and go live typically around Noon on Sunday morning. And then I open up a new template and the whole process starts over again.

Evan “Cool Guy” asks:

I was wondering what the state of “DC vs Marvel” was these days. Not in terms of competition but relationship. I was just reading about good old Marville (any comment on that is welcome too, haha) and man, things sure seemed acrimonious then! One quote that stood out was a DC executive saying that crossovers may resume one day “when Joe Quesada left Marvel.” Hence my question.

The day may come when I talk about MARVILLE, Evan. But it’ll be after a lot of drinking.

These days, the relationship between Marvel and DC is distant, and by that, I mean both geographically as well as spiritually. Every since they relocated their offices to the west coast, most folks in Marvel publishing have had only limited interactions with their DC counterparts, typically at industry functions of one sort or another. I can’t say that I really know much of anybody who is working in editorial at DC these days, except for Marie Javins (who was a longtime Marvel editor before that) and Jim Lee. All I know about their staff is what little I might hear from creators. And the reverse is true as well—nobody over there knows me, except from whatever I might say in public in places like this Newsletter. It seems like what you’re really asking about/hoping for is the likelihood of another Marvel/DC crossover, and I have to tell you that I think it’s pretty unlikely that we’ll see such a thing at this point. That said, the two companies did come together recently to put out the new printing of JLA/AVENGERS in honor of George Perez, so clearly we can work together when the need arises. I just think at this point, while we may seem very similar from the outside, the objectives and goals and even businesses of each company are radically different from one another, so finding common purpose is much more difficult than it might have been in the past. Honestly, I tend to think that the next Marvel/DC crossover will take place in the world of film, since that’s where the big money is and it’s the next logical escalation from all of the Multiverse stuff that everybody is playing with right now. Such a thing seems maybe even more unlikely—but so did a film starring three generations of Spider-Men before they went and did it. So who knows?

All right, one more, this one from Colin McKenzie:

It must be said first, that I come from the Comics Code Authority, Pre-Punisher, four-comics-for-a-buck days, when ALL the superheroes were completely "good guys", but in modern comics, when and how was it decided that Captain America would become the Moral Center Of The Universe, rather than say, Reed Richards or Spider-Man? I can understand Superman's being the moral center at DC-- he's so powerful, we should HOPE he's the Good Guy. But I wonder how Captain America's depiction as Absolute Good plays in other countries, that may not have the best experience with America's foreign policy?

I don’t know that this was ever a decision that was ever in question, Colin. Going back to his earliest appearances, Captain America was depicted as the living embodiment of certain virtues, virtues that people associated with the United States (or what they wanted the United States to be, at the very least.) That only grew more pronounced in the 1960s when Stan and Jack Kirby resurrected Cap for the new Marvel era. As the new characters all had personalities and problems, they needed to recast Cap in that context—and so they landed on making him a “man out of time” whose values didn’t reflect the contemporary America, but rather a nostalgia for an earlier time (that wasn’t necessarily actually all that wonderful.) And that continued to be Cap’s defining trait. There were other leaders in the Marvel Universe, other brave fighters and determined combatants. But Captain America always embodied a certain fighting spirit and the desire to live up to a set of abstract principles, more so than any other Marvel character. In that regard, he was more a symbol than a super hero, so it was inevitable that he would crystalize into the kind of position that you reference. Even in those Comics Code days, Cap was considered a cut above most any other character in that regard.

And one last question from Clint Brady:

I was wondering what, if anything, you know about any “ lost” Ghost Rider stories Dick Ayers is said to have produced for M. E. before the title and company folded in the late 1950’s?

I’d be interested as well in your thoughts on Marvel’s appropriation of some of the M. E. Characters for their western comics ( ex: Iron Mask)? 

I’m unaware of any such material, Clint. But your question does remind me that, unless I’m mistaken, I wrote the very last Ghost Rider stories that Dick illustrated, which ran in the back of the final issues of THE ORIGINAL GHOST RIDER reprint series in the 1990s. (They were Phantom Rider stories by then, but essentially the same thing. ) During that period, Dick made no mention to me of any unused stories or material he may have done in those bygone days. Sorry I can’t tell you more.

As to your second question, I wrote a bit about the many times Marvel adopted characters from other companies here.

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Behind the Curtain

Going to do a quick one here, since I blathered on so much in the opening portion. As original art collectors know, often some of the best drawings done by your favorite comic book artists are on the backs of the pages. Some guys would use that space to “warm up” in the morning before tackling the actual work of the day, others might procrastinate from what they should be drawing with illustrations of things that they wanted to be drawing. In any event, the backs of the pages are a treasure trove of seldom-seen images. And I’ve got one here to share with you.

Dave Cockrum was an artist who often did elaborate sketches on the backs of his pages, in particular if he needed to design something. Thos image of storm in a formal gown is on the back of the splash page to X-MEN #106, a fill-in issue for which Cockrum only provided a framing sequence page at the beginning and end. It isn’t a new design, Dave had come up with it for the X-Men’s visit to Scotland a few issues earlier. But for whatever reason, whatever purpose, Cockrum felt like doing a drawing of Storm in her formal wear, and so here it is.

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Pimp My Wednesday

Big, big week of releases this time, larger even than last week. So let’s hit them!

First up, the latest chapter of “History’s Mightiest Heroes” in AVENGERS #58 introduces yet another new character from the past, the Ghost Ronin. He’s based on a legitimate historical figure, though Jason Aaron and Javier Garron make the character their own. I can empathise with that small group of people who feel like this run hasn’t focused enough on the traditional core Avengers, but at the same time, I love the scope and creativity of what Jason and Javier are bringing to the book.

Then we get to the big one: the first issue of this summer’s big Marvel Event series, AXE: JUDGMENT DAY #1. It’s written by Kieron Gillen and illustrated by new father Valerio Schiti, and it does a very fine job of bringing together assorted threads from across the Marvel Universe and building a massive story atop them—a story that has both a point and a point of view. Kieron is a very smart, insightful writer, and he’s working terribly hard to make certain that every issue of this series contains both emotional depth and spectacular imagery. And it definitely doesn’t feel like a story that comes out of nowhere like these Events sometimes can. This is a natural extension of events in several titles. So I’ll look forward to hearing what everybody makes of it.

IRON MAN #21 is a very different sort of a story for Tony Stark, with a much greater man vs nature conflict to it than we’re used to seeing in an Iron Man story. Now that our long Korvac story is finished, writer Christopher Cantwell is working on keeping his next batch of stories more contained. This one also introduces both a new villain to the Marvel U, Switchback, but also a new clandestine organization, Source Control. It’s drawn by Angel Unzueta, who will be illustrating the book regularly. Also, that’s a really fine Alex Ross cover—the book is worth picking up for that alone.

We’re into the third issue of MOON KNIGHT, BLACK, WHITE & BLOOD, which again showcases a trio of creators each telling an interesting and hopefully badass story about the Crescent Crusader. In particular, the opening story by Erica Schultz and David Lopez is really good, with some terrific page and panel design by David. Also, Ann Nocenti’s space-faring story with Stefano Raffaele is just as bananas as you’d expect. Which leaves Jim Zub and Djibril Morissette-Pham as the vanilla slice in this Neapolitan with a tale that introduces a new character to the Moon Knight mythos. And the good part of these anthologies is that you can pick up any issue, any story, and be able to follow and enjoy it without needing a huge deep dive into the character’s history. Also, another cool cover, this one by the fabulous Frank Cho.

My assistant editor Martin Biro has the second issue of the NEW FANTASTIC FOUR limited series that he’s editing hitting the shelves this week as well. I missed covering the first issue as its ship week changed at the last minute, but it’s written by storied writer Peter David and drawn by Alan Robinson, and it unites the Fantastic Four old and new in Las Vegas where they must deal with a growing supernatural threat. Like most of Peter’s work, there’s a strong vein of humor in it, but it never verges into self-parody. And it’s a chance to see the Spider-Man, Ghost Rider, Wolverine and Gray Hulk of bygone years working in concert again. We sometimes refer to these sorts of projects as “nostalgia-grabs”, but this is a bit more substantial than just running the same old bases and hoping to collect your money.

Finally, Kurt Busiek and Yildiray Cinar wrap up THE MARVELS in a final issue. I suspect that all of us would confess that we could have used a few more pages for this finale—the story grew in the telling a bit more than we had anticipated. But hopefully, everybody will be satisfied with how we wrap up the story of Siancong and the hidden Marvel war. Worth pointing out, I think, that Yildiray went twelve-for-twelve on this series—there wasn’t a single fill-in art job on the entirety of the project. Fans tend to complain when the art assignment on a book switches up too much, but are often a bit complacent when somebody is able to produce a long string of issues in a row. It may be that there’s a perception of greater value among readers for an artist who can only manage an issue every once in a while. But to an editor, we’re always happy to find somebody like Yildiray who can be depended upon to deliver the goods issue after issue.

And in the digital realm, we’ve got the fourth installment of “The Black Ledger” dropping on the AVENGERS UNLIMITED track on the MARVEL UNLIMITED service. It focuses on Nick Fury, and reveals his role in everything that’s been bedeviling the Avengers for the past three releases. It was written by David Pepose and illustrated by Farid Karami, who kicked off this adventure. And if you’re a Marvel Unlimited subscriber, it won’t cost you nothing but time.

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A Comic Book On Sale 20 Years Ago Today, July 17, 2002

Spurred on by the release of the entire series in two fat omnibus collections timed to the short-lived Hulu series, I just got finished rereading Y THE LAST MAN. And while it was a bit more meandering and unfocused than I had remembered it to be when I was reading it month to month, it was still a smooth and pleasurable reading experience. Y THE LAST MAN was a bit of a departure for Vertigo when it first came out, a series that didn’t really traffic in any supernatural or fantasy elements, which had largely become the brand’s stock-in-trade over the years. What it did have was a strong and immediately accessible hook: a sudden event (the cause of which is a mystery throughout much of the series) kills off every man on the planet, save one: Yorick Brown, would-be escape artist and slacker. As the Last Man on Earth, some want to kill Yorick, some want to possess him, and some want to dissect him to try to figure out why he survived when everybody else didn’t, the better to be able to repopulate the species. Things are made more complicated when Yorick’s mother winds up being promoted to President of the United States following the sudden demise of everybody ahead of her in the chain of succession. And his sister, Hero, has joined up with a tribe of man-hating would-be amazons who would strike Yorick down as soon as look at him. It’s a series that’s about a lot of things, with relationships between people being right at the heart of it, and it’s able to speak through metaphor about any number of tricky subjects. This was writer Brian K Vaughan’s big breakout series. Prior to this, he’d been one of two or three graduates of the “Stan-hattan Project”, a class in comic book writing conducted by Marvel editors Matt Idelson and “Professor” James Felder. Vaughan did some haphazard fill-in work for Marvel, then worked on a SWAMP THING series for Vertigo that focused on Alec Holland’s daughter Tefe. It was a good book—it got my notice at the time thanks to my then-assistant Gregg Schigiel—but it couldn’t quite find enough of an audience, readers wanted more of Holland, it seemed. But it did build Vaughan the connections he’d need to pitch Y, so it all worked out. I don’t mean to be underselling the contributions of Pia Guerra in this write-up, I just don’t know her as well s i have less that I can say. But she was an integral player in conceptualizing these characters and this world, and the book made as much a star out of her as it did Brian, at least within the field. The success of Y THE LAST MAN helped to increase the range of the sorts of projects that Vertigo felt comfortable approving, and laid the groundwork for books like Jason Aaron’s THE OTHER SIDE. But it really made Vaughan somebody to keep an eye on, and primed the pump for the juggernaut that is SAGA. The show, sadly, was disappointing.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

There’s an obvious limitation to this format that I’ve only worked out recently: because of the way in which calendars work, as this is a weekly Newsletter, comics that came out on this date that I worked on are always going to come from a small number of potential years—the years in which Wednesday coincided with the date in question. This means we’re pulling from a much smaller set sample than I had thought, and I may need to find a way to mix up my approach here. Or else all of my stories are going to be about events from 1990 or 1996 or 2002.

I edited the whole of the 1990s GREEN GOBLIN series, though I didn’t initiate it. The book was created and set up under Spidey editor Danny Fingeroth. When Marvel was split up among five Editors in Chief in 1995, I would up in the Spider-Man area and ended up overseeing GREEN GOBLIN through its launch and run. But the real credit for putting the book together goes to Danny. It was a fun series, an attempt to expand the roster of Spider-Man titles in a different way. At the time it was launched, Norman Osborn had been dead for more than two decades, and there was no chance that he was ever coming back (how little we knew…) Additionally, the couple of replacement Goblins who had worn the rubber mask hadn’t quite had the same staying power. So why not make the new Goblin a good guy? Our lead character was Phil Urich, the nephew of DAREDEVIL’s Daily Bugle reporter Ben Urich, who would function as Phil’s “Uncle Ben” in this series. In a typical comic book origin, through a series of circumstances, Phil find an unused Osborn Goblin lair and gets doused in a variant of the formula that gave him his powers. As an add-on to increase the range of this heroic Goblin’s abilities, Phil’s mask also granted him a "sonic “lunatic laugh” that could be employed as a ranged weapon. The series was launched by writer Tom DeFalco working in tandem with artist Scott McDaniel. McDaniel had a more modern design-oriented style that had been showcased on DAREDEVIL, and I believe the hope was that being matched with such an artist would make DeFalco’s work feel a bit more contemporary. But the book never quite caught on, and by the time of this issue, #12, it had been slated for cancellation. Scott had received the offer that would lead him to move onto first NIGHTWING and then BATMAN over at DC, so he departed after issue #10. Taking his place for the final three issues was Josh Hood, a young artist with a bit of a Todd McFarlane influence in his work. The final issues were also a bit more difficult to work on, as not only was this one a tie-in to the ONSLAUGHT storyline that would take the Avengers and Fantastic Four out of the regular Marvel Universe to set them up for their new Heroes Reborn incarnations, but by this point we knew that Osborn would be coming back, and so it was incumbent upon us to bring Phil Urich’s story to a close, to clear the decks of any rival Goblins. We didn’t want to kill him, so instead we depowered him, shredding the mask that triggered his powers. Later creators, notably Brian Vaughan, C.B. Cebulski and Dan Slott, later brought Phil back and did a variety of other things with him. This particular issue hit the stands on July 17, 1996, and wrapped up a month later. It’s mostly forgotten today, a bit of a footnote in Spider-Man history.

But really, focusing on this book was really just an excuse to tell one of my Tom DeFalco stories again. I posted this on Facebook several years ago, and it came back up in my memories again recently. And since it’s already written, I can cut and paste and you get some prime new content without a lot of effort on my part. Win-win! I do want to point out that GREEN GOBLIN wasn’t the series this anecdote refers to, it happened maybe a year after GG bit the dust. But it involved DeFalco, so that’s connection enough.

So, I don’t know, this seems like a good time to tell my Tom DeFalco story. Not the only one I have, but the one that was of the most help to me. I started at Marvel when DeFalco was EIC, and consequently he was a pretty intimidating figure to me. Eventually I figured out my coping mechanism: Tom would sometimes stammer when he spoke, so if I just talked fast enough, I could outmaneuver him. But we became friendlier after he left his staff job and went freelance. Worked on books like Green Goblin together. And we’re both in the Spidey office in the Clone Saga days. Tom would call me up after big group conference calls to make sure he wasn’t crazy. He wasn’t. So anyway, Marvel went into bankruptcy, and we got a succession of short-term new bosses, each of whom would change direction radically, bringing in their own guys. It was a chaotic time. At one point, a new art director was brought in, He was a talented guy, but tough to get along with. He seemed to think he was above the EIC and going to clean up Dodge City. I had a few dust-ups with him. So on one particular day, this art director comes into my office and tells me that he doesn’t like the artist I’ve got on one of my books. Says the guy is now forbidden from working at Marvel ever again. I’m hot under the collar and pissed off, and not quite sure what to do. My own support network is gone, so I’m kinda on my own in the organization for the first time. DeFalco happens to come by that day on a routine trip to the office. He sees that I’m upset and he asks what’s wrong. And I lay out the whole situation to him as unto a priest in confession. And I ask him for his advice on what I should do. Tom thinks for a second, and asks me, “Is he the editor?” A bit confused, I answer “No”... And Tom replies, “Then fuck ‘im!” And it’s like a light bulb goes on over my head, and I repeat, “Of course! Fuck him!” In the end, I make no change on the book, I keep hiring the guy—and weeks later, when the artist comes into the office, he and the art director get along and the art director recants. I don’t have any further trouble with the art director after that point, because I’ve realized the limits of his power. It’s a lesson that was a bit of a turning point for me as an editor, and I really owe it all to that moment with Tom.

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Monofocus

It’s mostly been a week where I’ve been focusing on episodes of my new favorite, EXTRAORDINARY ATTORNEY WOO as they drop every Wednesday and Thursday, and filling the rest of the week barreling through other older Park Eun-bin shows. I’m just about through with HOT STOVE LEAGUE, which became incredibly compelling, especially for a baseball series in which there is precious little baseball. I’m thinking that I may move on to the much earlier OPERATION PROPOSAL next—though I’m torn as to whether I want to sample the Japanese series it’s based on, PROPOSAL DAISAKUSEN, first. So we’ll see.

Domestically, the only other drama that consistently hits at the same level as FOR ALL MANKIND is back for its final run of episodes, and it came in with a corker. I’ve said this before, but let me reiterate it again: I think that BETTER CALL SAUL is a better, more polished show than its progenitor, BREAKING BAD. I know that BB is more original and utterly beloved and respected. But SAUL’s cast, pound for pound, has been better, and the writing and direction is similarly on sharp point. (There are no Skylers or Walt Jr’s here to make you start to watch the clock.) Now that the show is in the endgame, events are speeding up as the parallel worlds of Jimmy McGill and Gus Fring/Mike Ehrmantraut inevitably begin to collide. And creator Vince Gilligan is really smart about the ways in which he uses the fact that the audience knows that, because of their future roles in BREAKING BAD, certain characters are functionally bulletproof in this series, against the audience. Seriously, this team is often making tension out of nothing at all. It’s gripping, and almost finished, so these final episodes need to be savored.

Elsewhere, I’ve started the second season of LOVE AND ANARCHY/KARLEK OCH ANARKI, a Swedish series whose first year was tight and inventive and just a hair transgressive. It’s about a divorced outside consultant at a book publishing firm who enters into a relationship with a much younger IT tech, based on a flirting game in which each challenges the other to defy societal norms in some absurd but ultimately harmless way. Until, of course, events begin to spiral out of control. So far, the second year suffers a bit from sophomore slump, feeling a bit like the story these creators had for these characters is finished but being obligated to do more with them. it isn’t a train wreck by any means, but it does feel a bit directionless as opposed to the first season, and it’s hamstrung by the need to bring its principle players back into one another’s orbits artificially, which feels clunky. The cast is still fine, and the season is short, so I expect I’ll ride until the end of the line. But this may have been a series better capped at a single season.

I’ve also been working through THE BEAR after hearing from a number of people whose opinions I trust that it was worthwhile. It’s what we in the business sometimes refer to as “a thick sauce”—that is, a show with a very strong, almost overpowering flavor. So long as you like that flavor, the show will work for you. Set in Chicago, THE BEAR is about Carmy Berzatto, a promising young chef who is drawn back to his hometown in order to operate his dead brother’s Chicago Beef sandwich shop. It’s very much steeped in the culture clash between the manner in which Carmy wants to do things and the values the employees embrace. There’s also a larger overarching plotline concerning Carmy’s brother’s suicide and what was behind it. It’s not quite a comedy, it’s not quite a drama, and it moves at a frenetic pace all its own. I’m not entirely certain that I like it just yet, but it’s interesting enough and the style is potent enough that I’m going to keep on watching it.

Finally, Hulu dropped a new season of SOLAR OPPOSITES, so I’ve started to make my way through it as well. It’s something of a placebo show, as it fills the gap left by RICK AND MORTY (which had largely lost its fastball in its last season) STAR TREK: LOWER DECKS and FINAL SPACE (again, which lost its way in its last year a bit) as an inventive animated science fiction sitcom. It’s not really quite as good as any of those other three shows at their peak, but in their absence, it makes for a fine substitute. The opening episode was all right, not a stand-out or anything, but perfectly entertaining. Here’s hoping that the creators can build on what they established in prior seasons and not get stuck on attempting to duplicate past successes or running in place.

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Whew! This wound up being a long one. (I guess they all are—I saw one comment from a new subscriber saying, “Whoa! Are they all this long? For free?” Yes, I’m sorry, I can’t seem to stop.) Anyway, have a good week, be kind to one another, and I’ll see you back here in another seven days.

Tom B