#8: It's Not A Job

Remember to enjoy what you're doing, and not let it cause you any stress.

I have a feeling that we’re going to obliterate that Gmail copy length this time out, as I have a bunch of stuff that I want to cover and a bunch of images that I want to include. So if this particular installment does stop before the end for you, sorry—you’ll just have to shoot over to the Substack web page to read the rest.

So, to begin with, I wanted to start by sharing this GASOLINE ALLEY original that I came across, illustrated by the great Frank King. It’s set during World War II, as Skeezix’s wife Nina is waiting for news of her husband. What’s amazing to me about this particular strip is that King creates all of these images without any outlining. Every object is defined by hatching or stippling, without the usual holding line. This gets across some of the feeling of the entire neighborhood being covered in snow. It’s also something of a virtuoso performance in terms of the cartooning skill involved. A beautiful piece of work! And even without the rest of the run for context, these four panels communicate a strong emotional experience.

I’d also like to give a shout-out of thanks to EIC Stephen Wacker and the team over at 3 Worlds/3 Moons for their recent plug and for inviting me to stop by and answer a few questions for people. As I’m sure you know, 3W3M is Jonathan Hickman and Co.’s experimental comic book world-building exercise, and already one of the most successful entries in the comic book section of Substack. Definitely recommended for process-junkies, fans of intelligent science fiction, and the morbidly curious.

Hey! The FANTASTIC FOUR No. 1 PANEL BY PANEL book that I contributed an analysis to has been nominated for an Eisner Award! This was completely surprising to me—and though I don’t think that we’ll ultimately win (there are too many other strong contenders in the category) it’s enough for me just to have gotten this far! There’s only one book its up against that would upset me if we lost to it—but because I want to keep this Newsletter a place for positivity, I don’t intend to say anything further about that. Thanks to everyone who was involved in the nominating process!

For those who may be interested, the book is still available for purchase at Amazon. I know that plenty of people don’t like to order stuff through Amazon, so if that’s you, rest assured that it should be available through other bookdealers as well.

Also, after last week’s piece on the final issue of THE AUTHORITY, I heard from Bryan Hitch who wanted to clarify one point:

“In the interests of keeping my record as straight as it can be, my 12 issue run on Authority was relentlessly monthly and on time, (the only time until about the last six years I had been). Millar’s run with Vin and Adams was all over the schedules. A record I admittedly sought to beat with Ultimates…!”

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Behind the Curtain

.Got a fun bit of process to share with you all this week, which I pulled off of Ken Landgraf’s feed. What you see below are three stages of a DEFENDERS cover in progress.

We start with artist Gil Kane’s cover sketch. Because the cover is the most important aspect of selling the book, much more attention is paid to it than any other image. It’s typical for there to be a number of sketches done for each cover. At this time, Kane was doing a lot of covers across the Marvel line, and so there may have only been this single sketch, if it was approved. But that isn’t typical. It’s also a very tight sketch, with a lot of the underdrawing already worked out.

Here are Kane’s finished pencils for this same cover. While today it’s typical for the artist drawing the cover to do the sketch, in the 1970s when this piece was done, that wasn’t the case. Often, a staff artist such as Marie Severin or Dave Cockrum or Ed Hannigan would design the sketch and pass it off to another artist to execute. Since they worked in the office, it was easier for them to work with the editor to get an image that would be approved. These days, the instantaneous communication of e-mail has made this largely unnecessary. Kane has penciled this cover tightly, but there’s still a lot of room open for interpretation by the inker.

The inker in this case was John Romita, who also functioned as Marvel’s Art Director. In that role, he was often tasked with taking a strong hand to keep characters looking on-model and attractive, especially on the covers. John was called upon often to make adjustments to covers he otherwise didn’t have anything to do with,a duty he performed with some reluctance. In this case, he’s done a lot of reinterpretation of Kane’s image in the inks, especially as regards the four floating heads of the Defenders as well as that running Yondu. Dr. Strange, Valkyrie and the Hulk have all been shifted more on-model here. John also changed Charlie-27’s head completely, and added the costume details to Vance Astro where presumably Kane didn’t have the necessary reference.

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Pimp My Wednesday

It’s another big week of wonders for titles coming out of my office! So look for these at your local comic book shop this Wednesday!

For those who are awaiting that soon-to-drop trailer for THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER, this issue of AVENGERS is right up your alley. It’s an issue that shines a spotlight on Jane Foster, recently added to the roster of the Avengers in her current guise as Valkyrie. But it also hearkens back to her time wielding the thunder as Thor. Writer Jason Aaron crafted this issue as an easy-acces done-in-one tale, anticipating that there’d be some interest in Jane in the lead-up to the film. And as usual, Javier Garron went over the top in the amount of detail he crafted into every page.

MOON KNIGHT has proven to be something of a surprise hit! Now, some of that is no doubt increased interest in the character thanks to the Disney + show that MARVEL STUDIOS released. But a lot of it is also due to the manner that writer Jed MacKay has been structuring the series. As we did with IMMORTAL HULK at the start, MOON KNIGHT was set up as a series of interconnected one-off stories, so that a reader could start with any issue and more often than not get a complete reading experience. That said, this issue begins our two-issue “season finale” bringing the ongoing threat of Zodiac to a proper climax. Artist Alessandro Cappuccio continues to get better and better with each successive issue—the amount of growth he’s evidenced since the series started has been amazing. It’s a tight, clever, ruthless package that was built for ease of access—so give it a look if you haven’t done so already!

Finally, the third issue of PUNISHER is on its way out into the world. You know, writer Jason Aaron had the idea of putting pull-quotes from inside the book on the covers, and I think this one really make this cover sing. I regret not having had this idea earlier so we could have done the same on the first two issues. As before, artists Jesus Saiz and Paul Azaceta are giving their all on this project—it’s a great-looking series. It’s a harrowing, horrifying, intense read, and a journey that’s going to reshape Frank Castle for years to come. Even if the Punisher isn’t typically your thing (it isn’t mine as well) this one is worth a look. It’s a special project.

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A Comic Books On Sale 80 Years Ago Today, May 22, 1942

We’re going back eight full decades this week, to revisit a book that’s noteworthy for a new strip. The Boy Commandos by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby had actually debuted the issue before this one, but here the strip is cover-promoted, the characters shaking hands with their famous hosts, Batman and Robin. This cover image is a rare collaboration between Jack Kirby and Jerry Robinson—each man drew his own characters. DETECTIVE COMICS was the flagship of the DC line—the namesake of the company (although insiders will tell you it was actually named DC for Donenfeld Comics, after the firm’s owner Harry Donenfeld) so while Boy Commandos seems like a strange fit in terms of the subject manner, its inclusion sends a strong signal about the company’s hopes for the series. Letting Kirby get in on the cover action is also a show of how much faith DC had in the Simon and Kirby team to sell books. While it’s largely been reduced to a footnote in comic book history today, during the war years, BOY COMMANDOS was an enormous hit for DC Comics, selling at the level of SUPERMAN and BATMAN. Interest died down, as you’d expect, once the war was over, and nobody was quite ever able to figure out what to do with the series in peacetime—without an enemy to fight, it became just another kid gang strip, and eventually ran its course and ended.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

I didn’t get to work with writer Brian K. Vaughan all that often, but the couple of projects that we did together were choice. THE HOOD started out with a simple premise: what if Peter Parker had been a lowlife? So we’re introduced to Parker Robbins—the first name quite intentional—who has a pregnant girlfriend and a hospitalized mother and who needs to hustle in order to make ends meet, even if that means stepping outside of the law to do so. When he and his cousin John go to rob a warehouse reportedly containing stolen goods, they accidentally walk in on a mystic ritual, and Parker winds up with a cloak-and-hood and pair of boots that had belonged to a demon. He quickly discovers that the boots allow him to walk on air, whereas the cloak renders him invisible so long as he’s holding his breath. Parker sees these newfound powers as his ticket to the big time, and embarks on a career as a super-criminal. THE HOOD was a very fun strip, evocatively illustrated by artist Kyle Hotz, whom I had worked with previously on VENOM and GHOST RIDER and who I brought into the project. It was an interesting hybrid of super heroes and crime fiction. Also, as part of Marvel’s experimental MAX line, it was afforded a greater amount of coarse language and graphic violence than was typically the case. Unfortunately, that MAX label is what doomed it—retailers in certain parts of the country had difficulties with their local ordinances when it came to carrying Parental Advisory material, and so orders remained low. There had been tentative plans for a follow-up series, a PUNISHER VS THE HOOD project, but these ended up not happening. At one point, publisher Bill Jemas told Vaughan that he should just do the book as a regular Marvel title and within the usual bounds. While that was super-good advice, I was extremely proud of Brian for sticking to his guns and saying that the series wouldn’t be the same if we tried to pull it back. This was relatively early on in Brian’s career, so he had everything to lose by refusing to play ball, and I admired him for it. Eventually, after a few years, Brian Michael Bendis would bring the character back as a recurring antagonist in NEW AVENGERS. The Bendis version of the character is the one that most people remember today, but I feel like a lot of the specificity of what Vaughan had created was lost somewhere in translation. Still, the Hood remains a recurring player in the Marvel Universe, and it’s only a matter of time, I expect, before he makes the leap to live action. The character is almost ideally built for that world. This first issue was delivered to the world on May 22, 2002, twenty years ago.

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Monofocus

As I mentioned last time, I tuned in for the initial episode of Steven Moffat’s adaptation of THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE on HBO MAX. And I thought it was all right, but really no better than all right. Part of the problem that the production has is that Moffat already pillaged all of the best ideas from the novel during his time showrunning DOCTOR WHO, and so much of it feels like a watered down version of something he’d already done. There’s also the fact that there are certain creepy aspects of the story that can be glossed over somewhat in prose but simply cannot be avoided when they are presented in real life. It’s difficult to sympathize with the main character Henry when Moffat has six-year-old Claire inadvertently make a reference to grooming, because that is exactly what the character is doing here, time travel notwithstanding. Those scenes with a middle aged Henry standing around naked with a six-year-old Claire are simply uncomfortable, even when they’re desperately trying not to be, and the grand romance between the two that is intended to be the spine of the story instead feels like the slow brainwashing of an innocent child. I honestly don’t know that the show is going to be able to get past this.

On a more pure romantic note, the second season of THE FUTURE DIARY has started to come out on Netflix. It’s a Japanese import, the latest series to strike some of the same sorts of notes that made TERRACE HOUSE so appealing. Meaning that it is terribly Japanese, with all of the participants behaving with the utmost consideration for everybody else. The show builds a storybook romance between two people who have never met before through the mechanism of a Future Diary: a book the participants are given which tells them what is about to happen, including the rules that they must each adhere to. While the first season simply put a single couple through their paces (to some success, it must be said—the pair is still together), this second season has added a wrinkle in that while there is still only one woman, there are two men, who will be vying for her affection. The first episode was like something out of a 1960s sitcom, where Moka had to keep running back and forth across the span of a bridge to have two dates simultaneously without either man becoming aware of it. By the end of the episode, though, everybody is brought together, and the trio is apparently going to continuing the journey together—though only one guy can come out on top when all is said and done. The whole thing is nakedly artificial on one level—the production team is clearly controlling the state of play through the Future Diary the entire time. And yet, everyone involved is so earnest and so open that you cannot help but get involved in their struggles and root for them to win out. It’s absolute feel good television.

I also watched the new two-part documentary GEORGE CARLIN’S AMERICA DREAM on HBO MAX last night. I had intended to only do the first 100-minute episode, but I wound up cannonballing the entire three hours in virtually a single sitting. Carlin is one of those performers who was so good in so many ways and in so many venues that you inevitably begin to forget or overlook some. His command of language is extraordinary, as were his decision to be himself and buck the system when it would have probably been safer and smarter to keep doing relatively inoffensive material in order to make it big. He’s a giant in the field of stand-up, and it was amazing to see all of the behind-the-scenes footage as well as the highlights of his many concert performances. A great primer for anybody who might be interested in the man and his body of work.

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Well, we are definitely over the limit at this point, so if you’re one of the remaining few who are reading this, have a good week and I’ll see you in seven.

Tom B