#12: Move The Pencil Faster

If you want to get it done, get it done.

There’s a famous anecdote concerning the great Marvel artist John Buscema that came up in conversation this week, so I thought I’d share it with you. John had been brought into the Marvel offices in the late 1970s to give a “chalk talk” to the younger artists and to explain how he went about breaking down a story in the Marvel style. Since Jack Kirby’s departure, John Romita and John Buscema had between them become the embodiments of the Marvel approach—but Buscema was far, far faster than Romita, often turning out three or four comic books a month. It was also rarer to see him around the offices, as he would routinely mail his work in from his home on Long Island. So the talk was well attended by young artists who were then beginning to put their mark on the business. At one point, one of these tyros asked John about his prodigious productivity, and how he could improve his work-speed to be able to similarly generate more pages. John deadpanned: “Move the pencil faster.” And he was dead serious. His other linked bit of advice was, “Throw your eraser away.” This is what Buscema had absorbed from his ten-plus years at Marvel—he had no time to go backwards, no time to rethink. And he was a strong enough draftsman to be able to pull off just about anything a writer might ask for. That said, his best work was often saved for his warm-up period—turn over any piece of John Buscema original artwork from this period and you’ll often find far superior drawings on the backs of pirates, gladiators, ladies, swordsmen and all manner of other subjects. Buscema wasn’t especially interested in super heroes, but he loved to draw, and in these drawings, he was able to indulge himself.

I neither knew Tim Sale very well nor worked with him for any length of time. He did a few covers for me, and wrote and drew a short Captain America story for an anniversary issue. And I filled in keeping an eye on CAPTAIN AMERICA: WHITE while actual editor Mark Paniccia was dealing with a family emergency. So I don’t have much personal to relate about his passing earlier this week. But it goes without saying that his work was top-notch, very much of the Alex Toth school of minimalism, where he’d convey worlds with a simple line or a well-spotted black area. And so I wanted to at least mark his passing this week, even though I don’t particularly have any stories to share about him. For those interested in Sale’s work, I do recommend Richard Starkings’ book TIM SALE BLACK AND WHITE, which can be ordered from Amazon here.

And now, a few more questions from this feature’s illustrious readers. To begin with, Jason Holtzman asks:

1. Are there any problems you see in the business that tend to surprise or “sucker punch” new editors/interns that you wish more could know about before starting their careers?

2. Have Marvel editors returned to their offices yet? Because of remote work in the COVID-19 era, and because most writers/artists/inkers/letters/colorists work online anyways, do you think comic book editors for big publishers might soon be staying remote as well?

1) It’s difficult to boil this down to a single thing, as every person who enters the field is different, and the problems typically stem from their own personalities and outlooks. I would say in general that many new hires are ill-informed about just what the job entails, thinking that they’re either going to be a fannish overseer handing down story directions and character developments from on high like a cartoon mogol or else a simple functionary whose job it will be to get material from point A to point B. But the reality lies somewhere between these two extremes. I do think that most people coming in don’t realize just how rapidly everything is done. We’ve all heard stories about movies whose stories were taken apart and put back together a dozen times on their way to the silver screen. In comics, you don’t really have that luxury, because the typical measurement of time is the month—on the whole, most titles ship monthly, so there are only 30 days in which to get everything completed and perfect and wonderful. And this is why mistakes creep in.

2) Marvel’s editorial staff is still working remotely, and its’ unclear when and to what degree we’ll ever return to an office environment. In this, we are perhaps the victims of our own success, as we’ve proven for such a long time that we can keep the comics coming out even remotely that there isn’t as much of a driving need to re-assemble everybody in one set of offices again. On the other hand, with the staff so spread out, I do think we lose a certain espirit de corps that defines Marvel. At this point, we have a whole generation of young editors who have never worked in a Marvel office nor met many of their fellow editors in person. That has to have an impact on the culture, and that’s the aspect that’s been the most affected by working remotely, I believe.

Sergio Flores asks:

Question for you, Tom. The Marvel Age started with its comic line geared at younger readers, and the main slate of books today are definitely geared towards adults - do you think there could ever be a time when the pendulum swings back to being geared at younger readers? I’m not sure there’s any other medium that has gone through that cycle.

I think that pendulum has swung, Sergio, though not in the format that we might consider the traditional comic book. But comics aimed at kids and younger readers is one of the fastest-growing categories in the world of graphic novels and YA publishing. And often, we’re seeing releases with the same characters that are featured in the monthly comics, just handled in a manner that is more likely to connect with those new readers. But the truth is, most new readers aren’t going to be buying their first comics in the Direct Sales market, which is geared for established collectors, and so it becomes a wasted effort to try to aim material of that sort at that distribution chain. You’re pitching to the endzone, not in the right game or the right stadium at all. In the mainstream at the moment, as can be seen at any booksellers, there is an absolute avalanche of comics material suited for young and developing readers, much of which is really good.

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Behind the Curtain

.This is a cover sketch done by Marie Severin for the cover to MARVEL TALES #28, which reprinted an early AMAZING SPIDER-MAN issue. These are the sorts of sketches that are typically produced prior to a cover being drawn up—since the cover is considered the most important page of the comic and the thing that will sell it to a prospective buyer, they are scrutinized more than pretty much any other page.

As you can see, there’s a handwritten note on the side indicating that the piece should be reversed, with the Molten Man in the triumphant position and Spider-Man entangled in his own webbing. At certain point, there was a belief that seeing the hero on the ropes was more compelling to a buyer, who would buy the comic to see how he survived the situation. At others, it was considered better to see the hero holding his own or on top of things. This particular sketch was clearly feeling the influence of the former attitude.

And here is the final cover art, which was penciled by Marie Severin and inked by Bill Everett. It carries their combined signature of 7-EV (Sev and Ev). At this time, Marie was producing cover sketches for virtually every book in the line, but this was a cover she got to fully execute as well. It’s a really nice, really interesting inking job, where there are pretty much no areas of spotted black at all. The bolder lines on the figures pop them against the background which, though heavily hatched, is all made up of thinner lines. The final colored version, while fine, loses a lot of this distinction, with the colors swamping the linework.

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Pimp My Wednesday

One book directly edited by me this coming week, and that’s MOON KNIGHT #12, the end of our first year on the series. This series has so far outperformed all expectation, and will be continuing indefinitely, a fact that I attest almost as strongly to interest in the Disney+ show as to the efforts of this creative team. Still, Jed MacKay has really made the character his own, synthesizing all of the earlier takes on the Crescent Crusader into a unified whole. And most important to me, making him a bit aspirational again, rather than just a violent nutcase who just happened to beat up mostly bad guys. Newcomer artist Alessandro Cappuccio has grown by leaps and bounds across this year as well—he’s a lot more confident in his approach than he had been, backed up by the expert colors of Rachelle Rosenberg. This issue wraps up Moon Knight’s running year-long conflict with Zodiac, a character that Joe casey and Nathan Fox introduced in a limited series I edited back during DARK REIGN a decade ago. I’m always tickled when some older thing that I worked on comes back into play years later like this.

Also in comic shops this week is the first PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL entitled BLITZ and edited by my associate editor Annalise Bissa. When we set out to do this new run on PUNISHER, given that each issue has contained 30 pages of story and art, we realized that it was going to be difficult to maintain a monthly schedule. So we decided to build in a series of “skip months” where, rather than an issue of the main PUNISHER series, we’d put out a WAR JOURNAL that would feature a side-story that would be reflective of Frank’s overall journey. So this is a stand-alone adventure written by Torunn Gronbekk and illustrated by Lan Medina that showcases the Punisher simultaneously in the past and the present, taking on the sort of reprobate that you’d expect and backed up by the forces of the Hand. Even if you haven’t been following the main PUNISHER series, this stand-alone ought to be new reader friendly enough where you can dive right in and get an enjoyable ride.

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A Comic Book On Sale 80 Years Ago Today, April 10, 1942

Eighty years ago, World War II was raging in earnest, which meant that a lot of the better comic book artists were either enlisting or being drafted. But comics were selling in prodigious numbers, in particular to servicemen abroad, as they represented cheap and easy reading material that could be carried in a pocket or bag.

This issue of MARVEL MYSTERY COMICS is a good example of what was being offered in the anthology series of the era. The cover is by the great Alex Schomburg, who specialized in ultra-detailed scenes of chaos and mayhem, often featuring American super heroes combatting the Axis menace (who were always depicted as grotesque monsters.) This particular issue opened with a strange and self-referential Human Torch story in which the Torch and Toro fly up off of artist Carl Burgos’ drawing board and suggest a story in which Hitler is mocked. After Marvel publisher Martin Goodman gives the go-ahead, the Torch and Toro have to safeguard their creator from Nazi reprisal as they race to get the story completed and air-dropped into Germany. Burgos is about the only original creator still working on the series at this point—the Sub-Mariner stories that comes next is not by creator Bill Everett but rather Carl Pfeuffer, who was responsible over time for giving Namor a ridiculously triangular head. The Vision, The Patriot, Terry Vance Boy Sleuth, Jimmy Jupiter and the Angel round out the issue, which also contains a two-page text story written by Mickey Spillane years before he hit the big time as a crime novelist.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

This second issue of the DEATHLOK limited series was started well before I got to Marvel even as an intern, but I was in place to help carry it to print as the credited assistant editor. It came out on June 19, 1990 and was co-written by Gregory Wright and Dwayne McDuffie, with artwork by Jackson Guice and Scott Williams. This was the last issue of the project that Guice would produce; it had been lingering for long enough that his interest dwindled and other assignments came up to attract his attention away from it. Which is a shame, because I think this DEATHLOK limited series was really strong conceptually, and had it not been plagued by artistic shifts, it would likely be better remembered. This cover was of course produced by Bill Sienkiewicz, and the reproduction on the book doesn’t do the original justice. It had strikingly deep sea blues and was incredibly attractive. The project was ultimately enough of a hit to warrant an ongoing DEATHLOK title to be launched the following year, which became the first series that I ever edited. And, of course, I ran it into the ground with one mistaken decision after another. But here, all of the potential of the character is still largely untapped and unspoiled. This was also the first time that I worked with Paul Mounts, who would go on to color a ton of trading cards and comics for me over the years. Greg Wright was intending to color the series as well as co-writing it, but by the time it was scheduled, he too was buried in other deadlines and needed help. Since this book was painted on bluelines, we needed a colorist with a different expertise than was then typical. When all was said and done. Paul gifted me with two of the bluelined pages, which I still own.

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Another Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

Turns out that June 19th was a busy release date over the years for projects I worked on.

There’s an art to lining up a “Whitman sampler” trade paperback like SPIDER-MAN’S GREATEST TEAM-UPS, which saw print on June 19, 1996. You ideally want to cover a broad range of material while simultaneously servicing the concept of the book. Looking at it after all these years, I’m still pretty happy with what I put in this one. Whenever I was called upon to pull together one of these sorts of books, I would always try to include something just for me, and in this instance it was DAREDEVIL #16-17 in which the sightless swashbuckler teamed up with Spider-Man under the pen of John Romita for the first time. It also includes a favorite dopey story from AMAZING SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL #3 where Spidey is recruited to join the Avengers. But his initiation test is to capture the Hulk, which seems a bit unfair and goes about as well as you might expect. These older stories are mixed with entries of a more recent vintage, including an Erik Larsen issue that paired the wall-crawler with the X-Men’s Beast and a pair of stories illustrated by Frank Miller featuring the Punisher and the Fantastic Four respectively. Mike Wieringo contributed the all-new cover.

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Would You Believe Another Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date?

There was actually a fourth comic that I thought was worth talking about as well, but I decided to cap things at three.

This issue of FANTASTIC FOUR came out on June 19, 2013 and contains one of the savviest retcons to the history of the characters that I’ve ever come across. In fact, it was so good that, a few years later, when we did ORIGINAL SIN, I lamented the fact that we’d already used it here, because it would have fit in perfectly with that event. The idea came from writer Matt Fraction, who postulated that, after the bitter exchange in college in which a young Reed Richards attempted to warn Victor Von Doom about miscalculations in his experiment to contact the dead, Ben Grimm and a few of his football player buddies snuck into the lab and messed around with the machine. So the accident that destroyed Doom’s face may have been Ben’s fault all along, and thus his own transformation into the Thing represents a sort of poetic justice. The clean artwork was provided by the always-professional Mark Bagley and Mark Farmer. But somehow, the revelations in this story didn’t land with quite the impact among the readership that I had anticipated. Maybe we didn’t hit the story properly, maybe it was turning on continuity that was just too long ago for an audience in 2013 to care about. But the idea itself is a grand-slam hit, at least in my eyes.

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Monofocus

Got caught up on the new season of FOR ALL MANKIND this week, which is maybe the best drama currently airing—the only real competition for it is BETTER CALL SAUL, which is on hiatus at the moment. FOR ALL MANKIND envisions an alternate history in which the Soviet Union was the first to put a man on the moon, and thereafter the space race continued. So it’s THE RIGHT STUFF the series, only set (this season) in the 1990s, with everybody now competing to establish a colony on Mars. Throughout, the writing had been super-sharp, especially in how the disparate threads of a given season dovetail together expertly in the finale. The first two episodes of this latest season are as tense as ever, with a crisis aboard the world’s first “space hotel” and a third power entering the race to Mars. But they also embody the spirit of adventure and exploration that used to be part-and-parcel of the space program when it was still a going concern.

Apart from that, about the only other new thing I’ve been watching isn’t new at all, but an old classic. I stumbled across the fact that somebody had posted the entire original japanese series of SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO on YouTube, subtitled, and so despite the fact that I’ve seen these episodes in a myriad of different formats over the years, I’ve taken to watching these uncut and unexpurgated episodes once again. The animation is crude by today’s standards, and you need to just not worry about a lot of the science—the buy-in is that a WWII-era battleship can be transformed into a starship and sail through space, so if you’re okay with that, you;ll be fine. But the music is still excellent, and the emotional toll of the long journey to the far-off world of Iscandar to retrieve the only device that can repair a fatally-poisoned Earth is still strong. For those who may be interested in sampling, the episodes can be found here.

In comics, I’ve mostly been dedicated to collected editions, having rapidly worked my way through the new JUNE 1962 Omnibus. Like the earlier AUGUST 1961 volume, this book collects every single comic book Marvel put out during the month that Spider-Man, Thor and Ant-Man all debuted. I’ve read most all of it previously, but it’s interesting to see it all together like this. None of these stories were intended to stand the test of time, they just weren’t built for it. But the humor material in particular shows its age the most, as editor and scripter Stan Lee uses many of the same corny punch lines he’s been tossing off for decades, and all of the women are vapid and thinly-developed. But these were only supposed to represent a momentary bit of entertainment, and on that level, they still fulfill their function. It is interesting to see just how much more fully formed Jack Kirby’s mystery and even romance is than his super hero jobs at this point. It feels as though he hasn’t quite committed to the idea that the super hero strips are going to be a lasting concern, and so he’s putting more effort int othe genre work. That begins to change at around this time.

I also gave a read through IDW’s collection of the 5 issue DC comic book tie-in series for CAPTAIN ACTION, which contained some very nice work particularly from Gil Kane. It’s definitely a product of its time, but it’s interesting to see how the strip changes creatively as it migrates from the editorial office of Mort Weisinger to that of Julie Schwartz. These weren’t comic for the ages—they were designed to help sell a toy, after all—but they are still a great deal of fun.

Finally, I worked my way through the second Y THE LAST MAN COMPENDIUM, as I hadn’t read the series since it was first being serialized, and the two volumes that DC released in order to capitalize on the short-lived TV series were very nice. Reading it all in a chunk, it isn’t quite as consistently strong as I remembered—could be that the passage of 30 days between installments was a necessary part of making Yorick and company’s journey across the globe really feel earned. But it’s still a very smooth read, with writer Brian K. Vaughan helping to define the modern comic book style by eschewing any sorts of captions or thought balloons or anything apart from dialogue, really. The artwork by Pia Guerra is suitably open and accomplished—it’s very direct, and a good match for the series. I have the PAPER GIRLS complete volume sitting in the same stack, so I expect I’ll likely be on to that next.

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And I think that’s all I’ve got for this week. I’d like to try to start mixing things up here more so that we don’t fall into a rut with the same sorts of features al the time. But this requires me to come up with workable alternatives, alternatives that also don’t step on the content that I typically run over at the website. I know, my problems are truly awesome.

Back in seven.

Tom B