Seriously, we need to knock it off. Because it seems like every week when I sit down to hammer out a new edition of this Newsletter, somebody else within the industry has passed away, and I feel obligated to say something about them—even though it does no particular good, even though it kicks these things off on a downer note. But human life is fragile, and I’ve come to realize that, as I get older, this is what awaits us all—at least, until the time comes when it’s our moment to go.
So a few brief thoughts about Mike Pasciullo, who passed earlier this week at the age of 50. Most of you likely have no idea who Mike was, he operated behind-the-scenes for teh most part. But he was Marvel’s Head of Marketing for many, many years, and was often visible both at conventions where Marvel set up to display or at media events. In particular, he worked on promoting all of the assorted Marvel TV releases such as AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. For all that we worked together for literally decades, I didn’t know Mike that well. We tended to largely operate in different circles, especially after his job became more focused on television than comics. But he was an affable stand-up guy, always cheery (often under difficult circumstances), always ready to try to do the best he could to give Marvel’s fans the best experience possible in whatever realm he was working. There aren’t too many people about whom I would say this, but Mike was a good guy.
All right, enough violins. Let’s move on to some Reader Questions—or, in certain instances, comments. Such as this one from writer Kurt Busiek:
"A man comes at me with his fists, I'll meet him with fists. A man stands guard at a gate I want to go through, holding a wooden spear, making some Savage Land bucks to support his Savage Land wife and kids, I'll slaughter him like livestock before he even knows I'm there."
Well, sure. As you well know (but which I’m mentioning for the benefit of younger readers who may not) Wolverine was something of an evolving work-in-progress, and one whose eventual code was shaped in large part in response to complaints and concerns from Marvel’s then-EIC Jim Shooter. It was the 1980s and Shooter was concerned about having a super hero who just went around killing people, with nobody (particularly his teammates and housemates) being all that concerned about it. Shooter was the one who insisted that writer Chris Claremont bring back all of the people whom Wolverine had seemingly killed up to that point to show that, while they may have been injured, none of them were actually killed. I don’t think they ever got back to that poor Savage Land guard (though both Claremont and John Byrne pointed fingers at one another about who was responsible for that moment) but they surely brought back all of those Hellfire Club guards that Wolverine clearly sliced and diced. This was all a reflection of the changing attitudes within the Direct Sales comic book market, which wanted more adult fare—”adult” often being a codeword for more violent and scandalous material. Shooter was ultimately defending a set of mores that were going to be less and less applicable as time went on—which doesn’t mean that he was wrong to do so, of course. But you’re right, that late-in-the-day Wolverine speech from X-MEN #140 does show some casual disregard for teh events of issues not that long behind it.
We also heard a bit more from Jason Holtzman:
How does an editor decide when to fight for their creators and the creators’ wants versus when to back what the company requests?
And, perhaps in the same vein as the above question, how much freedom do editors get? Do major character decisions have to get approved by higher ups, or do the different editorial departments hash it out themselves?
On another note, I just finished reading my Avengers Forever tpb and Lo and behold there was art by you! A little clippet of a concept sketch for the issue 8 cover
To your first point, Jason, this can be a balancing act, really. Take the position of the creators too often and too strongly and you risk being labeled as somebody who doesn’t have the company’s back. But cave in too often and the creators will recognize you as a corporate yes-man who can’t be depended upon to put their stories first. So it really boils down to analyzing what is at stake in every instance and attempting to broker some degree of compromise as often as not. You need to pick your battles intelligently and conserve your ammunition for when it is genuinely needed.
On your second point, in terms of the rank-and-file stuff of putting comics together, the individual editors (at least at Marvel) have a great deal of autonomy. But the larger the decision, the more people who may need to weigh in on it. And especially these days, when Marvel’s businesses extend into all sorts of different media beyond just publishing, the decisions that are made in a comic book story could have a serious impact on other lines of business. So it’s not unusual for there to be consultation with people beyond just the Publishing division in these instances. All that being said, those instances only come up occasionally.
And yes, I do sometimes doodle up little sketches in order to get visual ideas across to the creators. My artistic skills have atrophied through years and years of disuse, but I can still pull together enough of a sketch to get an idea across. And you’ve given me an excuse to share the one below—this was for a cover to the first issue of our current PUNISHER series.
See? Pretty crappy, but it gets the idea across. In this case, the great Goran Parlov turned it into a brilliant cover—all credit to him, I assure you.
Behind the Curtain
.Decided to show you a pair of Stan Lee-related items this time out.
This is a memo sent by writer and staff member Bill Mantlo to Stan at some point in the mid-1970s, asking him for permission to do a THING/STAN LEE team-up in an upcoming issue of MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE. This story wound up never happening, so apparently (as per Stan’s handwritten response at the bottom) Marv (Wolfman), Roy (Thomas), Len (Wein), Archie (Goodwin) and Etc. (Etc.) didn’t think it was such a great idea. And for sure, it would have been seen as pretty self-serving—but when did that ever stop Stan before? Bill indicates that Stan’s popularity with young visitors to teh office is just below that of Howard the Duck, which dates this memo better than just about anything else.
This second image ran in the pages of FOOM Magazine, and is a summation of the television commercial for Personna razor blades that Stan was featured in back in the 1970s. I can remember seeing the commercial on the air a few times, usually during sporting events—but apparently, nobody seems to have a copy of it anywhere on video that I’ve ever come across. But this was one of the relatively early examples of Stan beginning to stretch beyond just the comic book field to attain a degree of recognition among the public at large.
Pimp My Wednesday
A big one this week, with four different releases. So let’s hit them!
First up, AVENGERS #57 by Jason Aaron and Javier Garron kicks off the next major storyline in the series, as teased and set up in AVENGERS #50. This is “History’s Mightiest Heroes”, and it involves the Avengers taking the fight back to Mephisto by traveling backwards in time—along the way, encountering forgotten champions of several bygone eras (some of whom are depicted on this cover.) This is fun in that it allows Jason and Javier to play around in different genres—this issue is effectively a war story, the next one a samurai period drama, the one after that a super-powered western, and so forth. It’s definitely a flavor that no other book on the stands will give you, and it’s headed towards a massive climax that also involves Jason’s other AVENGERS title, AVENGERS FOREVER. But more on that as we get closer.
This next book is kind of a surprise, at least to me—and I came up with it, so if I’m surprised, you ought to be as well. The whole thing started when the LOKI series aired on Disney+. In a brainstorming session, I mentioned to EIC C.B. Cebulski that given how often the term”variant” was used in that show, we might want to do a project with that title to make sure that we maintained the trademark to it. It took a little while to land on the right character to headline in the book, but right from teh start, I knew that I wanted to do a very different take on a Multiverse story. To me, I think that if you were to meet alternate versions of yourself—versions in circumstances both better and worse than your own, as well as simply different— it would be a profoundly strange and even life-changing experience. And so that’s what I wanted to make the story about. Eventually, a light bulb went on and I thought about Jessica Jones, a popular character whom a lot more people are aware of since her Netflix series but who hasn’t been appearing regularly. And I felt like I knew exactly the right writer to tackle this. It turned out that Gail Simone hadn’t really read many of the previous Jessica/ALIAS stories, but she did a deep dive for research and came back having really made the character’s voice her own. It’s not the same as Brian Bendis or Kelly Thompson, it’s its own thing, but it’s of a piece with what those two previous writers had done, and it feels incredibly natural to me. Of course, Gail was horribly busy working on stuff outside of comics, but I had the good fortune to have already lined up Phil Noto to illustrate the book—and gail was enough of a fan of Phil’s work that this overcame any reasonable concern she may have had about schedule and sleep time. So it’s a very different take on a Multiverse story, and it’s a very Jessica Jones adventure. And hopefully people will dig it.
Elsewhere, my Assistant Editor Martin Biro has two books coming out this week (it was three, but then the first issue of his NEW FANTASTIC FOUR limited series with Peter David and Alan Robinson was pushed up on the schedule at the last minute, which is why it didn’t get covered by me last week.) The first is this IRON MAN/HELLCAT ANNUAL, which picks up on the story thread of Tony Stark’s proposal to Patsy Walker from IRON MAN #20. Like the regular Shellhead series, this Annual is written by Christopher Cantwell, who has become one of my favorite people, and is illustrated by Ruairi Coleman. Martin was hoping to get an entire HELLCAT series up and running, so much does he love the character, but for the time being this Annual is all he could manage. But if it sells well enough and gets a good enough response, who knows what might be possible down the line? So pick up a copy and help make a young Assistant Editor’s dream come true!
On top of that, Martin is also spearheading the second MECH STRIKE limited series, which ties in with a line of very cool action figures. While the first series was entirely technologically based, this sequel, MECH STRIKE MONSTER HUNTERS adds n an element of the mystical to the mix, seeing the Avengers and a number of other heroes not simply donning powered mech suits but also transformed into monstrous creatures—the better to cope with the threat of several key Marvel villains who have been similarly metamorphized. It’s written by Christos Gage and drawn by Paco Diaz, and it’s a whole lot of fun. And while there is a toy tie-in component, we approached this series as we did on the first one—as a legitimate Avengers project, with the same storytelling approach that we’d bring to the actual AVENGERS title. So this isn’t some watered-down kiddified version, this is the real thing.
A Comic Book On Sale 20 Years Ago Today, June 26, 2002
Going over my options for this week, I decided to focus on ROUTE 666 largely because it gives me a chance to talk about its publisher, CrossGen, a little bit. For those who weren’t around twenty years ago, CrossGen was founded by Mark Alessi, who had made a killing in the tech field and was also a big-time comic book fan. Flush with cash, he set out to create an entire company built around a cosmology that he and other members of his family had come up with. But what was more noteworthy about CrossGen was the manner in which they chose to operate. Most of the talent at teh big companies—Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, etc—work on a freelance basis, and they live all over the world. But Alessi pioneered a different model (or, rather, adapted it from the comic book “shops” of the 1940s.) He put all of the creators who worked for CrossGen on staff, and paid them a salary rather than based on their output. The only hitch was that everybody needed to relocate to Florida, where the CrossGen “compound” was located. It was an interesting experiment, though one not without its difficulties—certain creators found it difficult to work under Alessi or within the CrossGen shop system. But for many of them, being able to work alongside their fellow writers and artists was a huge boon, and reaped benefits. When CrossGen folded after a few years, much of their talent base came over to Marvel—and to a one, they’d all gotten a lot better while working in the Studio system. The other thing that CrossGen did was to focus not on doing super hero stories but rather adventure series in other genres (often with a certain amount of a super hero-like veneer.) Their initial releases all dovetailed in some way into the uber-mythology that Alessi had developed, centered around the yin-yang-style sigil that was both the company’s logo and an element that turned up in the stories. But the stories themselves were space opera, high fantasy, sword and sorcery, martial arts, pirate adventure, and so on. Eventually, the conceit of the sigil construct became too constrictive, and CrossGen began to launch titles set outside of its confines. ROUTE 666 was a horror series, one set in the world of Erebus which might as well have been 1950s America (and probably should have been.) Written by Tony Bedard and illustrated by Karl Moline, it concerns Cassie Starkweather, a high school girl who can see ghosts, and who becomes aware of a conspiracy whereby the monstrous agents of the otherworldly “Adversary” capture the souls of people who have died violently. Framed as a serial killer herself, Cassie needs to stay one step ahead of the Adversary’s forces while finding some way to expose their activities to the rest of the world. It ran for 22 issues in total and ended mid-storyline as CrossGen ran out of funding. CrossGen’s output was very consistent across the boards, with a lot of really good art and coloring. The individual issues are a bit slight—this was the era when creators were beginning to construct their storylines with the collected edition in mind, so some of the pacing on the CrossGen titles is a bit on the slow side. And while none of their series ever really broke out as a major hit, they also never really had an out-and-out stinker. This makes the CrossGen titles a relatively safe bargain whenever you come across them in back issue bins.
A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date
This particular book, HULK: THE END, has a bit of a circuitous history behind it—but hopefully, that means I have some stories to tell concerning it. It was the first of teh THE END projects to be released, I believe, and the first one that got underway. I had come up with the concept for the THE END series of projects after reading Alan Moore’s proposal for his unpublished DC “Twilight” crossover. In it, he postulated that one of the things that prevents super hero stories from becoming like legends is the fact that they are always inevitably stuck in the middle. In actual mythology, we know how the Gods died, how Robin Hood and his like met their end. The lack of an ending prevented the Marvel characters from attaining the same level. This sounded like a cogent point to me, so I pitched a series of projects in which various creators could tell their version of the final story with a given Marvel character or series. I had even thought things out far enough to indicate that, over time, we might have more than one for a given character if the interest was there. Bob Harras was the EIC then (though the book didn’t see print until June 26, 2002, by which time Joe Quesada had replaced him in that role) and Bob thought this made sense, so a green light was given to start developing these projects. The first person off the blocks was editor Bobbie Chase, largely because she had the perfect story for this just sitting there. You see, some time earlier, Peter David, longtime INCREDIBLE HULK writer, had contributed a story to a prose HULK anthology that concerned the Hulk’s final days. Bobbie knew that Peter would be interested in adapting his story into a comics project. And she also had the perfect artist for it at her fingertips as well. Dale Keown had made a smash drawing Peter’s work on HULK leading up to issue #400 before heading off to newly-established Image where he worked on his own character, THE PITT. But he’d recently indicated to Bobbie in some conversation that he’d be open to doing more work for Marvel on the right project, and he was still a very popular artist, especially on that character. So she went ahead and pulled the project together, and usually that would have been that. But not in this instance. For one thing, because the THE END books were by their nature set apart from the ongoing continuity, they were easy to shift back on the publishing schedule. Consequently, they often tended to be completed at a relatively lackadaisical rate. I would guess that it took a bit more than two years for HULK: THE END to be finished, based on its release date and the fact that I know it was started under Harras—and it was only a 48 page book. And this leads us to the second thing: at some point, Bobbie crossed new Marvel President Bill Jemas (which was not difficult to do) and Bill had her fired. (The fact that she had been an EIC herself during that one year when the division had been split into five parts and was consequently still commanding relatively high salary was no doubt a factor in her sacking as well.) With Bobbie gone, many of her projects wound up coming over to my editorial office: FANTASTIC FOUR, IRON MAN, and HULK: THE END among others. I can’t say that I had much of any great impact upon hte final project, though—it was well in progress by the time I got it, and all I did was to shepherd it to completion. But there is one story associated with it that I’m willing to share. The inker on the project had been especially slow in turning around work while the book wasn’t scheduled, but now Marvel wanted to recoup the costs and so wanted it to be finished and printed as soon as possible. So we laid out a schedule to Dale and the inker and colorist—but the inker blew it. Then he blew it again. Things were beginning to get right down to the wire, where I was going to need to pull in other hands to help get the project finished, which rankled me given its long lead time. But the inker wasn’t terribly responsive when I tried to call him. In fairness, he was a popular inker in those days and much in demand. But I suspect he also had a bit of an inflated sense of his own importance. Anyway, one morning I came in to find a message on my office answering machine from the inker. And in it, he left a message with a line that I found so funny and oblivious that I copied it down and had it posted in my office for years. And it was this: he said that, if he could just have three more weeks, he could get the job finished in time. Which, clearly, doesn’t make sense. What’s more, I didn’t have three more weeks to spare—so I pulled the rip cord and brought in other inkers to finish up the couple of remaining pages. Hated to do it, but sometimes that’s all you can do.
Monofocus
This week’s big reading surprise was THE MEN WHO CREATED GUNDAM, a colossal cunk of manga (over 500 pages in this hefty volume) that fictionalizes the story of the circumstances surrounding the birth and development of the anime that launched a thousand plamodels. So it’s a fictionalized account of creative people being creative people, and dealing with hardships and setbacks, all of which are more-or-less true. It’s maybe a weird subject for a manga, but given the cultural importance of Gundam in Japan, it’s perhaps not all that surprising. And as somebody who’s been watching assorted Gundam series since the early 1980s, it hit my sweet spot. It’s primarily the work of Hideki Ohwada, with help from Hajime Yatate and Gundam director (and main character) Yoshiyuki Tomino.
It also came into my hands at exactly the right moment, as this was also the week where I was able to see the new Gundam film MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM: CUCURUZ DOAN’S ISLAND. And let me tell you, it is a strange thing. You have to understand that, when it was first broadcast in Japan in 1979, Gundam wasn’t a hit at all. It struggled in the ratings for pretty much the entirety of its broadcast run, and it wasn’t until the first rebroadcast that it started to pick up viewers. As a result, the production team was under immense pressure throughout the series—attempting to balance their creative aspirations against the need to keep sponsors and network executives happy. And at a certain point, a crisis was reached: character designer Yoshikazu Yasuhiko (known colloquially as Yaz) who had been producing an astonishing 2,000 key frame drawings a week, suffered a collapse and had to be hospitalized for several weeks. Seriously, the production almost came apart right there and then, but somehow the remaining animators were still able to get episodes completed. But these episodes varied wildly in quality—so much so that one, Episode 15, was so off-model and so badly drawn that, after his recovery, Yaz asked for it to be pulled from broadcast. It’s not a part of most of the video releases or the rerun packages, and it wasn’t included when the series was dubbed into English in the early 2000s. As a result, this badly-animated, incidental episode attained a level of notoriety among fans, many of whom had never seen it. It’s become legendary due to the circumstances. And so CUCURUZ DOAN’S ISLAND is a remake of that lost episode, expanded to full feature length and with film-quality animation. And, honestly, it’s something of an odd duck. The story has been expanded to help fill out the extended run time (almost two hours as opposed to 23 minutes for the episode) but it’s still a bit thinly plotted for a feature. There’s consequently an awful lot of running in place narratively at a bunch of points. Still, there is something cool about seeing the slightly-ridiculous designs of things like the Gunperry animated so beautifully, and there’s definitely a nostalgia factor at play in spending more time with these characters the way they were all those years ago. So I’m not sure that I can really recommend it to anybody who isn’t already something of a Gundam fan, but I enjoyed it well enough.
Elsewhere, this week saw the release on Netflix of MONEY HEIST KOREA: JOINT ECONOMIC AREA, the Korean adaptation of MONEY HEIST/LA CASA DE PAPEL, the terrific Spanish series which I wrote about here. I’m only one episode in so far—Netflix dropped six all at once, but I’m betting that can’t be the whole of it. The original MONEY HEIST took three seasons to get through the initial caper, so there’s a lot more road to travel. And so far, it’s interesting but not yet captivating. The fascinating part is seeing how the material was adjusted to be made acceptable for a Korean audience. Whereas the Spanish edition had the Professor and his gang ripping the National Mint, JOINT ECONOMIC AREA instead takes place in the near-future, at a time when North and South Korea have come together to establish the titular JEA, which includes a common currency for both. I don’t have a good enough grasp on Korean politics, but this reads to me as though the production team needed it to be effectively a North Korean printing operation that the gang was heisting in order to make them palatable as heroic leads. There are other places where JEA adjusts the circumstances of characters and events. (For one thing, everybody in teh show is clearly Korean, so they all come from either the North or the South, including characters such as Helsinki and Oslo who had been Serbian in the original) it all feels just slightly a bit toothless compared to the source material, but still, it’s only been one episode, so there’s still time for the series to impress me. And either way, it’s still fun to be back with this cast of characters again—even if they’re entirely different this time.
And that’s it for June! After two months, this seems to be going splendidly, for all that it always takes far longer to write these things up than I anticipate. As always, thanks for your support and attention, and I’ll see you all in a week.
Tom B
Again, thanks for the insights!
I’ve grown up with the Marvel movies, so I’ve always known Stan Lee to be a more popular figure than many comic creators are/become. However, I find it kind of surprising that even in the 70s he was well known enough to have been featured in a commercial. I feel few (if any) comic creators would be offered opportunities like that today.
As long there’s space for questions and you feel like answering:
I think the question is relatively simple, but perhaps the answer is going to require a little more depth: What do the different editors do? Credits can list the assistant editor, the associate editor, the editor, the group editor, and sometimes people are promoted as “senior” editors.
Alongside them there’s the collected edition editors. I would assume they make sure the tpbs/hardcovers are put together correctly and fix issues that slipped through in the single issues? I’ve heard/seen the phrase “we’ll fix it in the trades” a few times on social media.
Thanks!