#7: Long Long Man

Let's see if we can get through one of these without an obituary.

Hello, everyone! Got something a bit different to kick off this week with. I pulled it out to share with some of our Marvel editors this week—and now I’m going to do the same with you.

The link below should convey you to a video of a series of Japanese commercials for Sakeru Gummy, a brand of gummy candy. There are a bunch of them in the sequence, and I would suggest that you watch them all through from the beginning without skipping ahead, because not only do they tell a serialized story across what must have been months of an advertising campaign, but the story wraps up with one of the absolute best payoffs I have ever seen. Seriously, this whole thing is tremendous—anything else that I might tell you about it (apart from the fact that, the next time I get back to Japan, I will definitely be picking up some Sakeru Gummy) would detract from the perfection of the experience. Trust me, this will be worth it—the best six minutes you’ll spend all day.

LONG LONG MAN

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Behind the Curtain

Here’s some more crap from my assorted files. This was a handout that I was given at the beginning of my Marvel internship in the summer of 1989, illustrating how a book needed to be assembled and copied before being sent out to the printer.

I’m pretty certain that the Evan referenced in this sheet was my old friend Evan Skolnick, and that he wrote this page up when he was briefly the Editorial Assistant before being hired as an Assistant Editor (which was a better position). As you can see, whereas today our books are all assembled and sent to the printer digitally, in those days we were still working on actual bristol board paper and sending all of the materials out of house to be first color separated and then eventually printed. The difference in timing is significant. While today our books get transmitted to the printer around three weeks before they’re on shelves, in 1989, a book needed to go to print a full eight weeks before its on sale date. That meant that you always had to be at least two issues ahead of the book that was then on the racks.

Coloring, as we talked about previously, was being done on copies of the artwork in Dr. Martin’s dyes or similar—prismacolor markers became the big thing there starting in the very early 1990s. And each color needed to be “coded” so that the separation house would know which combination of the relatively limited number of available colors was intended. It’s all pretty primitive stuff compared to today, and even back then, it was largely antiquated technology. But it still took another decade-plus for this approach to be retired permanently. The copies that are to be dropped off for Joyce and Len refer to to of Bullpen head Virginia Romita’s assistants—I don’t remember Joyce’s last name after so many years, but Len was Len Kaminski, who would go on to write MORBIUS and IRON MAN and assorted other things. I didn’t know Len well, but he was a friend of a friend even before I came to Marvel, so I felt a certain kinship with him. Those copies were intended to be sent to the Comics Code for their sign-off. In the earliest days, the Code would get the actual boards and make whatever changes they deemed necessary right on the original artwork. By this point, as editorial largely understood where the boundaries were, it was enough to send a copy to the Code when a book went to print. Occasionally, the Code would come back requesting some alteration, and an editor needed to either convince them that the change didn’t need to be made, or else hastily put together a revision and get it sent to the printer in time for when the book would be plated and run. Since it took several weeks for each book to be color separated, this wasn’t quite as desperate a scramble as it sounds.

As an intern, and even later as an editor, I assembled and copied plenty of books in this manner.

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Pimp My Wednesday

A bigger week this time out, with three releases from my office.

First up is the 10th issue of THE MARVELS, which is Kurt Busiek and Yildiray Cinar’s Tom Clancy novel set across the Marvel Universe, touching upon a wide assortment of characters from different families as well as establishing some new players and revealing some hidden history. It feels a bit different from just about anything else that we’re putting out, and I expect that there are a lot of lapsed fans in particular who would dig it. That said, I don’t know how absolutely friendly to entry it is at issue #10 out of 12. Might be best to pick up the first Trade Paperback collection first, which reprints the initial six issues, and see how that grabs you. I should also mention the beautiful covers and design work contributed by Alex Ross to the project as well.

Next is FANTASTIC FOUR #43, the latest chapter in the intergalactic “Reckoning War” that writer Dan Slott has been building to. Dan and I first started talking about the Reckoning War, and laying track for it, many, many years ago, and over the course of that time, it’s grown so vast in terms of its assorted ideas that it’s proven to be a tough beast to wrangle into shape as we moved into this storyline in FANTASTIC FOUR. The artwork is provided by Rachael Stott, this time backed up in certain sequences by Andrea Divito. A whole bunch of story threads from over the prior decade and a half come together in this one.

And finally, this week sees the launch of the new iteration of SAVAGE AVENGERS, helmed by relative Marvel newcomers David Pepose and Carlos Magno, whose work you may have seen in the recent KANG limited series. Before he was a writer himself, Pepose did regular comic book reviews, and he was enough of a hardass in terms of his criticism that I became aware of who he was—I remembered his name. That can be a double-edged sword, of course—having been that unrelenting as a critic means that more is going to be expected out of you when it comes time to play the game yourself. But David has done a number of impressive projects elsewhere, most recently SCOUT’S HONOR for AFTERSHOCK, ao I thought it was worth taking a chance on him for this. Carlos, meanwhile, had regularly bombarded my e-mailbox with new sample pages every week for years until I finally got into a jam and tried him out on something. He’s proven to be about as hard-working and fast at his craft as one could hope for. Anyway, like its predecessor series, SAVAGE AVENGERS united a number of Marvel’s big badass characters around Conan the Barbarian, now in the present day Marvel Universe, and sends them off on a crazy adventure! Anybody who enjoyed Gerry Duggan’s last run should be into this as well—but you don’t need to have read anything before in order to jump on board with this new #1—it’s another complete starting point for the book.

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A Comic Books On Sale 20 Years Ago Today, May 15, 2002

Twenty years ago today, the final issue of the original run of THE AUTHORITY finally saw print. I say finally, because the final issues of this series were incredibly late, as they were all supposed to have been illustrated by Arthur Adams, who couldn’t seem to quite get the job done in the time he had. Gary Erskine stepped in for him on this final outing, and while his work wasn’t quite as fan-pleasing, it did the job in fine form of wrapping the storyline up.

THE AUTHORITY grew out of STORMWATCH, a series that Warren Ellis had been writing in the late 1990s. Ellis had some ideas as to how to push super hero comics into a larger scale in order to compete with big budget movies, and after he wound up doing a few STORMWATCH issues with Bryan Hitch, the pair decided to overhaul the entire concept and turn it into something new. The book was a bit of a bombshell when it hit, and even though it to took a bit more time to finish up that a strictly monthly schedule, it made Hitch an artist to watch. As was his wont, Ellis wasn’t all that interested in super heroes long term, so he laid out three arc of four issues apiece, and then left—but not before hand-selecting his successor on the title. This was Mark Millar, who had been doing journeyman work at DC and elsewhere for many years, but had never quite gotten a chance at a book with a big spotlight on it. Together with Frank Quitely, they took over THE AUTHORITY and made it perhaps even more popular than it had been. Like Ellis before him,. Millar envisioned a limited series of storylines before he too would wrap things up—by the time the later issues were coming out, he’d already been headhunted by Joe Quesada to be part of the Ultimate comics line that Marvel was building—Millar and Hitch would team up on THE ULTIMATES, which became the blockbuster hit of that initiative. So while the title didn’t go on indefinitely, it was one of the most influential series of the period.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

Also in stores twenty years ago today, May 15, 2002, was IRON MAN #55, which was also cumulatively issue #400 if you counted all of the different runs (there were fewer of them to count at that point.) This book came out at a time when Marvel wasn’t spending a lot of energy looking backwards, but an issue #400 was still a good opportunity to upsize and up-price an issue, so I went ahead and did it. The stylish cover was provided by manga great Kia Asamiya, whose involvement had been facilitated by C.B. Cebulski (today Marvel’s EIC.) and the creative team of Mike Grell and Michael Ryan produced two stories for the issue—one of which wound up having a bit of an impact on the character’s film incarnation.

Joe Quesada had been talking for a while about how it didn’t make sense to him that Tony Stark would keep his identity as Iron Man a secret from the world, given his wealth, his fame and his notoriety. Rather than shrinking from it, thought Joe, Tony would instead embrace the truth, being arrogant enough so as to almost dare any enemy to come after him. Thinking about the billionaires of the time—and the billionaires of today—that sort of hubris made a lot of sense. So we set up a situation in this issue where Tony would call a press conference and announce being Iron Man to the world. That same idea would be reflected in the final draft of the inaugural IRON MAN movie, where Robert Downey Jr’s version of Tony would come to the same conclusion and do the same thing. Some readers were really pissed that we did this—the worst detractors mischaracterized the story as “Tony Stark gives up his secret identity to save a dog!”—as Tony does rescue a dog in the midst of his press conference. But that’s a bit of a deliberate misreading of the story.

This was also the final chapter of a storyline in which Grell and I attempted to replace the Mandarin with a version who was less overtly offensive. The character, Temugin, didn’t take, but I wish he had, he was a good idea. We wanted him to be an honorable anti-hero, drawn into conflict with Tony Stark due to familial obligations but not genuinely wanting to kill him himself. We were inspired in part by the sort of superhuman martial arts practiced in manga such as DRAGONBALL Z. There’s a memorable scene in this issue where Temugin faces off against Iron Man, who is taken aback that a guy armed with just his father’s power rings is about to go head-to-head with him. “This isn’t a fair fight”, says Tony, referring to the obvious advantage he possesses in his ultra-technological armor. Temugin quietly agrees—and then drops all ten of his rings to the ground. And then, as Tony is stunned, he proceeds to beat the crap out of Iron Man with his bare hands. I really don’t quite understand what went wrong and why we couldn’t get readers to buy into the character, but sometimes that’s just the way it is.

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Monofocus

Reading this week has been focused primarily on an advance copy of the new Taschen collection of the first twenty issues of AVENGERS. I’ve read them before, of course, but, as I said about the earlier AMAZING SPIDER-MAN volume, this format is so terrific that it warrants exploring them again. The books are original artwork size, and use paper stocks that accurately replicate the feeling of the original comics. Add to that the letters pages and a bevy of the house ads, and the fact that everything has been scanned and corrected from printed copies of the books rather than rebuilt stats or other reproduction materials, and you have a package that is perhaps the best way to experience these classic stories (at least so far.) The early AVENGERS issues are a bit haphazard and messy—nobody thought they were producing work for the ages, nobody was thinking that anybody would be paying them any attention sixty years later—but they are also a lot of fun.

Elsewhere, an internet meme about television shows that only you remember inspired me to pull out the run of 2007’s series JOURNEYMAN, a time-travel show that lasted for only one 13 episode season, but which was really quite good. The lead character, San Francisco reporter Dan Vasser, finds himself thrust backwards in time at random intervals, where he’s called upon to put right something that went wrong—the show was very much the intersection of QUANTUM LEAP and Audrey Niffenegger’s novel The Time Traveler’s Wife (itself now a series premiering this weekend.) It also had a strong romantic triangle, as Dan is married and has a son in the present, but in the past he is reunited with his former fiance who died several years ago—and who is herself a time traveler. And beyond that, there are the typical complications that come in any drama. Probably the most memorable episode is one in which Dan loses his digital camera when he goes to the past, and arrives in a present in which technology is more advanced. What makes that story memorable, though, is the fact that Dan and his wife no longer have a son, they instead have a daughter—they conceived at a different moment. So Dan is distraught about the loss of his son and can’t make an emotional connection with this girl who absolutely needs him, and his wife is freaking out about his insistence that he needs to go back in time and prevent this all from happening, because from her point of view, this daughter is their one and only child. It’s a really good use of time travel to form the emotional underpinnings of conflict. The show also had a hauntingly lovely title sequence, which I’m linking to here . That image of the birds flying backwards has lingered with me ever since.

The other thing I’ve been watching is the oddball Korean drama THE SOUND OF MAGIC on Netflix, which is genuinely strange. It’s about a downtrodden high school girl left on her own to look after herself and her younger sister after her mother leaves the family and then her father has to go into hiding from creditors when his company goes bankrupt. Her life changes when she had a chance encounter with a strange magician who is living in an abandoned amusement park nearby—the question of whether his magic is genuine or all simply conjuring tricks is a running theme. There’s just a hint of DOCTOR WHO about it, though it’s doing its own thing for its own effect. But the show is wildly schizophrenic in its tone—it gets legitimately dark at certain points. Oh, and did I mention that it’s a musical? Two or three times an episode, characters will break out in song—which can be disconcerting when it comes on the heels of an assault or news of a girl having gone missing. The whole season is only 6 episodes long, I’ve gotten through half of them—but Korean television seems to love a long run time, so each episode is about 70 minutes in length, which makes them a bit of a commitment.

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As always, if you have questions or things that you’d like to see (or see more of), by all means let me know. I’m still finding my way on this a little bit. And all of your support and attention continues to be appreciated! See you next time!

Tom B