#17: Intangibles and Tangibles
Things you can Touch, Things you can Feel
People sometimes ask me how I can do so much, get so much done (most of it, albeit, relatively valueless.) And there really isn’t any sort of a trick to it. I’m just disciplined when it comes to the work, for all that I’m pretty lazy when it comes to anything else. I realized long ago that a freelance life just wasn’t for me. I prefer the regular regimentation of a 9-5 gig. I like a certain amount of routine, and for all that I’m happy to experience other places vicariously through media, I’m a lousy traveler (as my wife will tell you.) So what this amounts to in practice is that I know what I need to get accomplished on any given day in order to keep up with all of the stuff that I need or want to keep up with, ad I’m disciplined enough to actually pound away and do it. Thus, I am here on a warm and slightly oppressive Saturday afternoon pounding away on the keyboard to provide you with something of marginal interest to read on Sunday morning, or whenever later on you happen to get to this post/page. I don’t need to go anywhere, I don’t need to talk to anyone, I just need to bang away at the keyboard until the job is done. So let’s see how I make out, shall we?
This past week, in addition to doing the first part of the yearly Marvel Philosophy talk for the editorial staff as I mentioned last week, I also hosted an hour-long “office hours” meeting in its aftermath, ostensibly as a place where those who attended could drop in and ask me any questions about any of it they might have—or, really, anything about anything at all. I’ve realized that, not having been in an office environment for over two years now, we have a whole crop of young editorial hires that really don’t know me apart from as a header on an e-mail or a blobby face on a zoom call. It’s difficult enough to maintain connections with the people who do know you, for those that don’t, establishing those bonds takes a whole lot more effort. I want to be seen as a resource that the younger editors can turn to when they have a problem, as I often was when we all shared the same physical space, rather than just a big mouthed guy who says a lot of stupid and inappropriate stuff in meetings. But barring a full-time return of everybody to an office space, that’s going to require some additional effort and some cleverness. This first open forum seemed to work well, it was decently attended and people did have questions that they wanted to talk about. But it’s also a novelty the first time. We’ll see if I can create any lasting value for the team over the course of the next couple of weeks.
Fortunately, a bunch of you had questions to put in front of me this week, which means I don’t need to vamp any longer for material. So to start with, regular reader Evan “Cool Guy” had this he was wondering about:
I feel like as an editor you must face a lot of last-minute panic. Any particular stories about projects coming right down to the wire, whether they ended in terrific success or spectacular failure?
It’s not really a question of panic per se, Evan , as it is a need to get something done by a hard deadline. So, sure, I’ve faced plenty of instances where I had to split work on a given book to get it out the door (memorably, having a different inker on every single page of the back half of the IRON LANTERN Amalgam book back in the mid-1990s.) And typically, that situation comes about because you gave a creator whose work you like too much rope, and they wound up being not able to deliver for either a very good reason or a very bad one. Back when we still worked with physical boards, there was a bit of a race on Friday night, as the package that would be sent out to Marvel’s separators would be sealed up by a certain point on Friday night so it could be taken to Fed-Ex. If you missed that seal-up moment, your book wasn’t going to make shipping and you were in for a world of hurt, and different editors had all sorts of tactics intended to stall the manufacturing department (or to plead with them) in order to hold that line until their material could be included in the package. My old Assistant Editor Gregg Schigiel used to refer to any book that had gone out or was ready to as being “in the box”, and I’ll occasionally confuse people today by dropping that same term.
Kevin S asks:
What are your thoughts on prequels/stories that re-explore previously explored territory? Obviously there is no shortage of examples from over the decades. If a creator were to pitch that model of story to you, do you have certain hurdles the idea has to clear in order to get the go-ahead?
Well, as a matter of course, I don’t tend to like prequels as a rule. I don’t think they work most of the time. But I don’t think that’s what you’re really talking about here. It sounds to me like you mean projects that revisit earlier stories or events and view them through a different lens, yes? Like anything, I feel that such stories can be done well or done poorly, and the difference is often down to personal taste as well as how connected the reader feels to the source material. For example, SPIDER-MAN: BLUE by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale is pretty universally beloved, and it holds up well. But as it was coming out initially, it frustrated me as a reader, because I was familiar enough with the period of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN that it covered to know whenever Loeb and Sale changed the order of certain events, and otherwise play around with the source material. They did it for effect, and it largely worked, but as somebody who knew those comic backwards and forwards, it bugged me. Along similar lines, I was sympathetic to Joe Casey and Steve Rude’s X-MEN: CHILDREN OF THE ATOM project, but again, I was bothered by the details within it that simply didn’t jibe with my recollections of the era and my take on the personalities of the characters. So anybody pitching a similar project to me (such as, say, Casey and Scott Kolins’ AVENGERS: EARTH’S MIGHTIEST HEROES limited series) had better have some manner of story hook that connects with me and makes me interested in moving forward with it. I do think that, over the years, I’ve become less concerned about a rigid adherence to continuity, especially continuity that is 60 years old—I haven’t abandoned the idea that the Marvel Universe is a single consistent fictional reality, but I have become a bit more pliable in terms of what I might allow in terms of bending established canon. Comes from getting old, I expect. (I firmly believe that current me and the me of, say, three decades ago would hate one another and the manner in which we approached the job.)
Luke Spanton had this to ask:
Since you featured The Marvels #12, I must say that I've been enjoying the series. Kurt's writing has been top-notch, as usual, and Yildiray has been doing a great job with the art. As someone who has dabbled in inking, I have an appreciation for someone who can both pencil and ink a book every month for an extended period of time -- even more so with the level of detail Yildiray puts into his pages. So, I'm disappointed that this is the last issue. I seem to recall the solicitation for #1 saying that it was going to be an ongoing series. My question is simple: what happened?
Luke, it all comes down to the same thing it does so often: not enough readers were buying the series, and so we were forced to shut it down. I expect that’s really down to us—the initial Siancong storyline ballooned up enormously in the telling—we thought it would maybe be six issues at the start, fools that we were. But this meant that, if you hadn’t been reading the series since the start, there really wasn’t an easy place to jump in. I’d initially figured we’d have a structure closer to that of ASTRO CITY, with shorter stories breaking up the longer ones. But we just let the first story get away from us enough that we never got around to any of the shorter stories. (And even then, that final issue feels pretty cramped and abrupt to all of us—we could have used a few more pages.) But so it goes.
Jason Holtzman wanted to know:
What makes an editor’s notes to a creator good or bad? Are any special programs used to put notes over digital/arts scripts?
I’ve seen pictures of old art and scripts marked up with editor’s notes, but in this day and age it seems like editor’s “frightening” red pen is becoming obsolete!
I think that’s because the methodology has changed, Jason. We’re seldom working on physical paper any longer, so the red pen has been replaced by any number of note-making programs. It sounds simplistic, but a good note makes the thing better by the end of it. When it comes to scripts, I’ll often try to not just point out a problem, but to also offer up some starting point that I think might work towards a solution. But I tell my creators regularly that I don’t care whether they use the notion that I come up with to fix the problem or not—only that it gets fixed to satisfaction in some manner. (When I’m feeling long-winded, I’ll point out to them that convincing me that what I think is a problem really isn’t one is a valid solve, too.) On artwork, same thing. I have a little bit of an advantage in that I possess some rudimentary art skills, and so I can make quick, crappy sketches to get visual ideas across quickly, and I have just enough skills with Photoshop and similar programs to be able to manipulate a page or a layout that somebody sends me to help point out a difficulty. I’ll try and see about digging up a few examples of this phenomenon in action for a future Behind the Curtain.
And finally, Ray Cornwall wonders:
So I was reading Jimmy Palmiotti's newsletter, and it made me think about where Marvel's HQ currently is. My Googling leads me to believe this is the current Marvel office: https://www.vno.com/office/property/1290-avenue-of-the-americas/3311697/landing
But of course, the pandemic has changed everything. Are you in-office now? If so, what do you think of the building? What was your favorite place to work at Marvel? If you were starting a company from scratch, what would you think is important in a comics company HQ?
As I mentioned earlier, Ray, we haven’t been working in an office environment now for more than two years, though it doesn’t really feel that long. And even then, we had only moved into a new office space at the top of 2020, and the Pandemic caused the lockdown by late March, so we were only in that space a short time. So it never quite came to feel like home the way earlier buildings had. Over my years at Marvel, the company has occupied five different locations. But when I think of the essence of Marvel, I go back to 387 Park Avenue South, the building Marvel was in when I started, and where it resided for almost two decades. By the end of our time there, the place had been permitted to decay, and the ghosts of all of the people who had been recently laid off lingered in the halls. But in its prime, it’s the one that feels the most like Marvel to me. Our last building at 135 West 50th Street was also very comfortable by the time we left it, after being there for about a decade. (Even though it only contained one tiny set of bathrooms for an entire floor, which wasn’t ideal.) These days, though, apart from the sorts of intangibles that I spoke about at the start of this column, there really isn’t a pressing need for everybody doing this work to exist in the same space. And for all the downsides, I certainly like not having to make a two-hour commute each way every day. I sleep more these days, and have more time with my family as a result. And the digital means of production means that we can work in this fashion indefinitely without having a problem. So while I miss the environment and the intangible sense of Marvel espirit du corps, I’m in no great hurry to start commuting again.
Behind the Curtain
.Got a few different stages of this next item to show you. So let’s start begin with this.
This is Marie Severin’s proposed cover sketch for ORIGINS OF MARVEL COMICS, the 1974 volume that represented a small step into legitimacy for the company and its spokesperson, Stan Lee. For the first time, Marvel stories would be printed in handsome book form and sold on bookstore shelves rather than the less reputable comic book spinner racks. A game-changer, and a volume that introduced plenty of readers to the wonderful world of Marvel. Now, this sketch wasn’t used—though the basic arrangement of it did wind up employed on the cover to the 1975 sequel, SON OF ORIGINS OF MARVEL COMICS. A bunch of these comps were done, searching for a concept that both Marvel and the book publisher Simon & Schuster could agree upon.
Similarly, John Romita, who would be called upon to paint the eventual cover, came up with these two prospective layouts. Neither one was used in the end, though the concept of the Hulk holding up a massive logo was employed a few times over the years on other things.
This house ad shows what I’d imagine was a more polished version of the mock-up that was decided upon. The images of the assorted Marvel heroes are “pick-up art”. figures that had appeared in earlier random panels or covers and isolated for licensing use. A number of folks had a hand in those figures, including Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, John Romita, Marie Severin and others. This comp was chosen as the final composition.
And here is John Romita’s actual painting for the cover. You can see that he did the individual figures on separate pieces of board, so that they could more easily be moved or manipulated as an art director might desire. As opposed to the comp, the Silver Surfer didn’t make the cut and was left off the final cover.
And the final printed cover. In softcover, the book retailed for $5.95—which is just about enough to buy you a single comic book today. It went through a number of printings, and copies are still relatively easy to find even today.
Pimp My Wednesday
After a couple heavy weeks, we’re back down to a much smaller number of releases. So here’s what you can look forward to out of my office this Wednesday.
It feels weird to me to be saying this, but I find myself thinking it as we work on each issue of THE VARIANTS: in just one issue, Gail Simone has crafted one of the best interpretations of Jessica Jones ever. (And I know, given that Brian Bendis and Kelly Thompson are really the only other two writers to have done a real body of work on Jessica, that seems like maybe an easy bar to clear.) Gail’s voice for the character seems spot-on to me, she inhabits Jessica effortlessly And Phil Noto is killing it on the art, using a palette that’s just a bit slicker than what I’m used to seeing out of him. It’s also strangely nostalgic to see him draw Daredevil again after his run with Charles Soule some time ago. The mystery of just what is going on with Jessica and her variants begins to heat up in this second issue, and this crowd-pleasing cover (entirely Gail’s idea) is far from a tease that we won’t see realized in the story. I came up with the core nugget that led to this project existing, but this is one of those books that’s coming together even better than I could have hoped. I expect that it may have some legs as an eventual collection once we get to that point.
And in the world of MARVEL UNLIMITED, the sage of the Black Ledger moves into the endgame in the AVENGERS UNLIMITED track. Having set the stage and put all of the players onto the canvas, not writer David Peopse and artist Farid Karami bring everybody together in this fifth installment as we head towards the climax. I’m very interested in this vertical scrolling format, and we’ve only just begun to play with it, so look for more novel experimentation as we move ahead. But for just a crackin’ good Avengers story, this one’s got you covered.
A Comic Book On Sale 20 Years Ago Today, July 24, 2002
Oh, man. Where to even begin?
Marvel had been publishing MARVEL: THE YEAR IN REVIEW as a magazine for several years. Each release summarized the key events of the past year’s worth of comics. A couple of those years—the most interesting ones from my point of view (and this is despite the fact that I wrote some pieces for them) were when the magazine took a more humorous bent. But in general, it was intended as a one-stop primer on what the Marvel Universe had been up to over the course of the preceding twelve months, and a way of generating some ancillary income. We used to refer to projects such as this as “budget-busters”, as they would theoretically be easy to do and would bring in some much needed additional dollars to help Marvel meet its financial responsibilities. In this case, though, the MYIR was never an easy thing to put together, especially as it became more graphically challenging year after year.
Now, the year of 2000-2001 coincides with the hiring of Joe Quesada as Marvel’s editor in chief. And additionally, with Bill Jemas having come in immediately before Joe to take over the company as its new President and Publisher. Bill wasted no time in linking his name with Quesada’s as much as possible in this period, leveraging Joe’s reputation as an artist and a creator to provide some legitimacy for his regime. And Bill was definitely an agent of change in these years, transforming just about every facet of Marvel Comics and how they were made—sometimes in good ways, and sometimes not so much. Bill could be mercurial—we all suspected that he suffered from ADHD, and so projects that he initiated had a way of changing over time, shifting in unexpected directions as Bill got bored with them or new opportunities or needs came up. It was not an easy period to be on staff at Marvel—and in fact, a number of longtime Marvel folks found themselves cast to the curb during the course of this year, creators and editors and staff members alike.
At some point, though we hadn’t done a MARVEL YEAR IN REVIEW in a couple of years, Bill decided that we should produce one. And it is an amazing time capsule of that period. Rather than a magazine, Bill decided that it should be released as a hardcover book with a cover price of $25.99. I don’t know who on Earth he thought was going to be willing to drop that much coin on what was ultimately a puff piece ego stroke, but that’s the format it was eventually released in—and it lost a ton of money. Bill was enamored of the bad boy style then employed by WIZARD magazine, and so this was approached as an opportunity to “out-WIZARD WIZARD”. To that end, Jim MacLauchlin was hired to provide the text, a thankless job if ever there was one given how often it was modified. You see, as things happened in real time and Bill became angry or annoyed with somebody, he would want them stricken from the book entirely, requiring massive last-minute rewrites. There’s a spread in here that’s all about how wonderful Paul Jenkins’ and John Romita Jr’s HULK #25 was, a comic that Bill couldn’t have cared less about and likely never even read. But the piece that was slated for that entry was about a series and a creator who had fallen into disfavor, and so something else, anything else, from that month needed to be featured instead. In particularly galling (especially since the numbers were just made up whole cloth, pulled out of nowhere) was the running tally of How Many Titles Marvel Published This Month and How Many Tiles Bill And Joe Thought Were Good. It’s pretty egregious to insult so many of your contributors in this manner, especially since it was all just theater in the first place. You will be stunned to hear that, by the end of the volume and the close of 2001, Bill and Joe liked lots more of the books then being released. Who could’ve predicted?
As I understand it, Bill had intended for the book to be something of a showpiece for himself, a bit of a resume-enhancement, and to that end, he reserved 100 copies for his own personal use, to give out to clients or people with whom he might want to establish a business relationship. Unfortunately, Bill had forgotten the tight-pocketed company for which he was working, and was shocked to discover that he was required to have each copy signed out like a library book when he wanted to hand it off to somebody, and he was required to get it back and return it as well. So much for resume-building.
Copies of this thing littered the building for years. Eventually, I bought one at one of Marvel’s in-house sales for something like two bucks, and kept it in my office, where I’d occasionally whip it out when the mood struck me and perform a reading “from the Book of Evil” for people.
Twenty years old today.
A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date
Also on sale twenty years ago was the first issue of APACHE SKIES, a rare western series courtesy of writer John Ostrander and illustrator Leonardo Manco. It was the sequel to an earlier project, BLAZE OF GLORY, and it’s really BLAZE that I want to talk about. But we’ll get back around to APACHE SKIES eventually.
BLAZE OF GLORY had been published a year or two earlier, and while I was the one who put it out, it wasn’t really my project to start with. That honor belonged to editor Mark Bernardo, who together with Ostrander and Manco conceived of a four-issue series that would re-imagine the classic Marvel western heroes in a more realistic context. Ostrander was either working on or had just finished working on THE KENTS over at DC and was in a western frame of mind, and during some rare period when more projects were needed, Bernardo was able to get the thing green-lit. It was a real labor of love for all involved, and it could be seen in the detailed pages that Leonardo Manco turned in. They got, I believe, two issues completed and were in the middle of the third when the axe stuck. Mark was the victim of one of the seemingly-yearly rounds of layoffs, and the project was left without an editor or a champion, and it was swiftly abandoned. And that was a shame.
One of the people who also thought it was a shame was my assistant editor of the period, Marc Sumerak. As the pages were eventually written off, Marc decided to see if he could get the project reactivated, given that two out of the four issues were effectively paid for and free. He worked closely with Andy Ball, who was involved with Marvel’s P & L process which determined which projects were likely to make money, and with Andy, he was able to determine a package and a cover price that would make the whole thing viable. So BLAZE OF GLORY was reactivated and completed, and while it didn’t sell a whole ton of copies, it did receive some strong critical praise.
The next thing we wanted, once the series was completed, was to get it collected in book form. Even as Marvel began ramping up its collections program, most books weren’t yet being cycled into collected editions. But Marc and I thought the material had a chance of reaching a different audience in book form than it had as a periodical, and so we kept on trying to find an angle to convince people to do it. It was the proposed launch of the MAX line of Parental Advisory comics that gave us an in. See, when that line was first conceived, built around the Brian Bendis pitch that eventually became ALIAS, there weren’t really that many potential projects. People just didn’t think of pitching that kind of material to Marvel, given our publishing history. So striking while the iron was hot, we proposed doing a MAX sequel to BLAZE that would focus on one of the few characters to have survived the original project, the Rawhide Kid (back before he was outed as a gay man in a later MAX release), as well as introducing a new Native American version of the Apache Kid. And, as kind of a seeming afterthought, we could collect BLAZE OF GLORY and release it at the same time, to cross-promote.
APACHE SKIES wasn’t especially violent or bloody, and it didn’t really use language any coarser than BLAZE had, so as a MAX book, it didn’t really fulfill the mandate of the line, didn’t push the envelope in quite the way the others did. And it’s honestly not as strong an entry all around as its predecessor. BLAZE was intended (and subtitled) as “The Last Ride of the Western Heroes”, so on some fundamental level, having a sequel felt wrong. Additionally, while Leo’s work was still beautiful to look at, he didn’t pay as much attention to the storytelling. I seem to recall that he got a partial plot to begin with, and turned an opening sequence that was meant to be two pages long into a seven page extravaganza. It was cool, but that space had to come from somewhere, and that somewhere wound up being the plot to the story. The whole thing still looks good, but it’s a lot more confusing to follow, and as a result, the story has a harder time connecting emotionally with people. Which is a pretty fundamental failing, I must admit.
There had been some loose talk about doing a third entry in the series, but that never wound up happening. Still, APACHE SKIES is probably worth a second look, as certainly is BLAZE OF GLORY. And if you do look at BLAZE and like it, remember that the person to credit is Mark Bernardo.
Monofocus
This was one of those weeks that was more dedicated to finishing up on series that I was watching than it was to starting new things, so I don’t really have much of value to point to on the streaming side. And I had a small Covid-scare this past week (not positive, it turned out) that has kept me out of the theater—I’ve not yet even seen THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER in an actual movie house, though I’ve watched two different cuts earlier as a part of my job. I’ll get to it soon enough, I hope.
On the reading front, one of the things that I love about the comic book field is that there’s always new stuff to learn about. Even after years of dedicated study, there are still areas that are like virgin territory to me. In that spirit, I’ve been enjoying Chris Murray’s book THE BRITISH SUPERHERO, which charts the evolution of superhuman characters in media and culture from within the United Kingdom. The first chapter, which dealt mainly with turn-of-the-century Penny Dreadfuls was a bit tough to get through, my interest level not all that great at the start. But once the book hits the 1930s, it begins to soar as a guided tour through the assorted strange and off-beat super heroes that sprang up across the pond during and after the period when Superman made his debut Stateside. It deals with characters that I know, such as Marvelman and Robot Archie, as well as a bevy of short-lived features I’d never encountered before. As such, it’s a pleasant bit of additional accumulated knowledge. If this interests you at all, a copy can be ordered from UPress here.
Also, the Taschen AMAZING SPIDER-MAN volume won an Eisner Award last night for Best Publication Design, which gives me a reason to plug it despite the fact that I had absolutely nothing to do with it. It’s a pricey volume with a $200.00 price tag, but the thing is massive, printed at original artwork size and sourced from printed copies of the original comics. The paper stock is designed to mimic the feel of the originals, and it includes the letters pages and a bunch of the ads as well. And it contains the first 19 issues of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN plus AMAZING FANTASY #15 with Spidey’s first appearance and the first AMAZING SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL. It really knocked my out when I got mine, and I think it’s now my preferred volume for revising these timeless stories. And here’s a nice link so you can order one of your very own.
And that brings us to the end once more. It’s now almost 8:30 on Saturday, the afternoon is long gone, and I’ve been working away here on this for I’m guessing about three hours. And that’s with all of the covers and graphics already in place, and the basic structure set. So that’s how much I love you all (or love the sound of my own voice, more likely.)
Keep your chin up, keep working to secure your own intangibles, and we’ll meet back here in a week for more similar stuff. Thanks!
Tom B
oh my god I love every jemas story I've ever heard, probably because I never experienced them firsthand. PLEASE keep them coming, unless it flares up your PTSD too much
Just wanted to say that i love your website and newsletter. Please keep uo with them. My favorite part of the newsletter is when you explain any comics you worked on.