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Spidey Time
2008-10-07 18:22:29
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It seems like I can’t write anything on this blog without people in the comments section trying to make it about Spider-Man, or drag Spider-Man into it, or just complain about Spider-Man. I could post about the weather and HiddenVorlun would respond that the sun hasn’t shined since Mary Jane went away.
And yet, I’m about giving the people what they want, and what it seems like a bunch of you want at the moment is to talk about Spider-Man. So let’s go. We’ll use the standard blog rules on this one: each poster gets to post no more than two questions, and any poster can veto any question for any reason. We’ll collect whatever survives this culling process up towards the end of the week, and then I’ll answer them over as many days as it may take.
A few obvious caveats: I’m not going to reveal anything that spoils upcoming storylines, so there are going to be some areas that you’ll want answers on that I’m not going to be able to give you much on. And, as always, let’s all try to stay civil. There’s no need to insult any creators directly here; let’s maintain some decorum.
Other than that, all you irate Spider-Man non-readers, lay ‘em on me.
More later.
Tom B
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Five Year Rule
2008-10-06 16:15:40
Back in the 1980s, there was a general guideline at Marvel that said it wasn’t wise to refer to continuity more than around five years old. There were exceptions, of course—typically relating to the origins of the characters. But when it came to typical storylines, if it was more than five years old, forget it—the readership had.
The theory was that even among the hardcore audience there was enough turn-over so that, by and large, any stories that were more than sixty months old had been forgotten. And while you wouldn’t go out of your way to contradict that stuff, you also couldn’t count on anybody remembering it.
This led to their being a vague line of demarcation within the Marvel Universe, one I’ve become aware of when talking to people who started reading the books during this period. They really don’t remember much of anything before 1980 or so, and their vision of the characters is based fundamentally on this decade.
Nowadays, however, it seems like the awareness of the audience has grown a bit, at least in general. There are more people who remember the ins-and-outs of stories published a decade ago, and any number of readers who had been following Marvel in the 1990s, dropped away for a number of years, and have since returned.
But all of these groups tend to operate under what I like to call “selective continuity.” Put simply, if they didn’t read it, to them it was never published. If a character returns from the past, and they have no idea how that character changed from back-in-the-day to what he is now, they become irritated, and expect the new story to cover that ground again (or, from their perspective, to cover it for the first time.)
MARVELS was really the first project in a long time to buck this trend, to actively put elements from the past back on the radar as story points. And the success of MARVELS made brought the use of vintage continuity back into vogue, at least for awhile. But this led to a different problem: while it was fun to connect the dots over forty years, very few readers remained who’d been there for all of the gyrations, and this use of the extended continuity often made it difficult to figure out who the characters were supposed to be. Continuity started to become an ankle-weight, rather than a springboard to new stories.
These days, we tend to walk the line a little bit, but we definitely hew a little bit more closely to the five-year-rule. But at least once a month something gets brought back from much earlier, and re-established on the canvas. So it’s a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B.
Of course, nowadays, many readers are equally confused by the different lines with their different continuities, and by the fact that some projects don’t quite fit into any of them. But that’s part of the price of dragging 45 years of history behind you.
More later.
Tom B
Martians!
2008-10-02 17:26:33
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Just because I happen to have it on hand, here, direct from an obscure comic book called AMAZING FANTASY #15 is a short fantasy story by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.
More later.
Tom B
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Harvey Awards
2008-10-01 15:20:35
As many of you know, this feature was nominated for a Harvey Award this year. The awards ceremony took place this past weekend at the Baltimore Convention--and here's some footage of the relevant presentation.
More later.
Tom B
Cats, Nuts and Comics
2008-09-30 17:54:35
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There’s been all sorts of excitement around these parts since I returned from the Baltimore Convention.
It began this morning with a stray cat that Cory Levine and Aubrey Sitterson found abandoned by the side of the road. Casting about for a home for this proud feline, they prevailed upon Steve Wacker to open his family’s doors to the little wunderkind. Cory brought the cat in this morning, and it was thereafter trailed by a bevy of cooing editors, assistants and interns, who couldn’t get enough of its cuteness. Turned the office into Grand Central Station for a few hours until Wacker’s family arrived to take the little beastie home.
Later in the day, my former assistant Greatest Assistant Gregg Schigiel sent along a scan of the attached little cartoon drawings. I saw Gregg in Baltimore, where he was set up at a table along with Mini Marvels’ Chris Giarusso and former bullpenner and Skullboy Army creator Jacob Chabot. During the brief conversation, it came out that part of the inspiration for Chris’s Mini Marvels cartoons had been this drawing I had done ten or twelve years ago, that I didn’t remember at all. So here that is.
Lastly, at the very end of the day, Cory Sedlmeier stopped by to show off his newest prize: an actual copy of MARVEL COMICS #1 from 1939. As part of our big 70th Anniversary plans, we’re going to be doing a number of reprints and reimaginings of MARVEL #1, and so there was a need to lay hands on an actual copy of this incredibly rare book. (We paid five figures for this copy, that’s all I’m saying.) This particular issue was a file copy that had been kept in a bound volume by one of the operators of Funnies Inc., the packaging house that actually produced the contents of MARVEL #1 for Martin Goodman to publish, so it’s got an extra-special pedigree to it. And it’s one of the rarer first printings with the October cover date. (MARVEL COMICS was an experiment on the part of pulp publisher Martin Goodman, a new field to move his money into. Initially, he did a very conservative print run of something like 70,000 copies. When his advance men told him that they had all sold out in a week, he went back for a larger second printing more in the neighborhood of 700,000 copies. Those second printings carry a November cover month.)
More later.
Tom B
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Trust
2008-09-26 11:37:39
One of the things you need to learn in a position of managerial authority is to trust your people. This can be a very difficult thing to actually do, though, especially when what they propose to do differs from your own inclinations. But assuming you buy into the notion of hiring smart, talented people and then letting them do their thing, it's an absolute necessity.
Among the most wonderful things that happens at a comic book company is that every so often a new idea or series comes out that strikes some sparks. It may not be the best-selling title in the line or anything, but it's a "buzz book", something that a dedicated and devoted audience finds something in that they can't get from any other book. These titles are usually the product of somebody's enthusiasm and trust, and it's terrific when one of them works out--especially when it's a project that I would never have thought to do that way myself.
I love it when something like INCREDIBLE HERCULES, which by all rights shouldn't work at all, becomes a minor hit. I love it when CAPTAIN BRITAIN AND MI-13 finds a vocal and supportive audience. I love it when IMMORTAL IRON FIST gets nominated for awards. And so on and so on. Putting aside the particular skills of these creative teams, these books are a testament to their editors, who had faith in the ideas and their execution, and in the talent involved.
I like to do a wide variety of comic books, and to try different things, and it's great when one of those works out and sticks. But in some ways it's even better when one of these things comes out of the office of a middle-tier editor, and helps to define them. Speaking just for myself, I produced two separate IRON FIST limited series during my time at Marvel, neither of them really better than mediocre. But I love it that Warren Simons cracked the code and together with Matt Fraction, Ed Brubaker and David Aja was able to create one of the best series at Marvel. And I'm particularly impressed that he's been able to keep the series going strong even through the departure of all three of those creators. I've lived through that experience; it isn't easy at all.
One of the classic mistakes the folks in power at assorted comic book companies make is in falling into the trap of thinking that they and only they know the secret to making a good, successful comic book. And especially when sales begin to slide, these personality types tend to clamp down harder, enforcing broad, dogmatic directives, or simply moving the goalposts every ten seconds because they can't figure out where the win is. And that approach almost never works.
There's no guarantee that letting your people do what they want will work either, but from what I can tell, the chances of success increase dramatically.
I'm off to the Baltimore Comic Convention tomorrow, so we'll pick this up next week.
More later.
Tom B
Time
2008-09-24 19:03:42
A few more ruminations concerning continuity in comics. Let’s talk about the passage of time.
This is one of those areas that really is best left unstared at, in that examining it inevitably makes everybody’s head hurt in one way or another. But, being fans, we simply can’t not think about it, and the problems it creates over the long haul.
Let’s start off with a broad axiom: time passes differently even among different titles set within the same fictional universe. There’s no easy way to make it consistent, and it’s really not worth the enormous backflips you have to go through to try. (When it was launched, one of the conceits of the NEW UNIVERSE was that the stories all took place in real time. This meant that two-part stories were just about impossible, that the equivalent of thirty days had to pass between each issue, and that the standard cliffhanger needed to be avoided. It was far more restrictive than the benefit was worth.) So this means that Kitty Pryde can age five years in the time it takes Franklin Richards to age three. That’s simply the way it works.
Worse still is what the passing of time does to characters who are rooted into a specific event in history. Captain America, at least, has a built-in get-out-of-jail-free card, in that he was in suspended animation since World War II. But because of the sliding timescale (Cap himself is only in his thirties, and has only been Captain America for twelve years or so) this means that Cap was unfrozen when Bill Clinton was President—which can really mess with your mind if you think about it too much.
Other characters are forced to update their backstories as time goes by. There was a series of stories in the mid-70s in which Nick Fury was jealous of Cap because he’d grown older having lived through all the years since the War, while Cap was in deep freeze. But a few years thereafter, once somebody realized how old Nick would really have to be today, the idea that he would regularly imbibe the “Infinity Formula” to remain young came into play—thus negating the motivation for that earlier story. (Strangely enough, nobody ever really addressed the other Howlers such as Dum-Dum Dugan or Gabe Jones, who are at least as old as Nick if not older. They can’t all be taking the Infinity Formula…)
This is the reason why Reed Richards and Ben Grimm never served in World War II, even though some very early FANTASTIC FOUR stories said that they did. The passage of time made those situations impossible, and it was more crucial to keep the characters young and vital in the present than it was to maintain a minor crossover with SGT FURY in the past. At this stage, we’ve seen that Reed’s grandfather was active in WWII.
More recent characters have the same problem. We don’t like to think about it much, but if the Punisher was a grown man when he served in Vietnam during the war, that would make him close to sixty years old today. Now, maybe that’s right at the cusp of still working—but a decade from now it’s going to be a real problem. And it’s especially tough in that the Punisher isn’t a character whose oeuvre really lends itself to life-extending superdrugs or magical life extensions. By the same token, the Vietnam conflict is so woven into the fabric of Frank Castle’s make-up that you really can’t pull it away from him. The same thing is true for Magneto, whose situation is even more difficult to reconcile given that he’s got a whole brood of adult-aged kids who also get tied to the timeframe of the Holocaust.
Over the years, I’ve seen many different fannish attempts to reconcile all of this—everything from the notion that the heroes all somehow exude an anti-aging agent that affects both them and the people they most often interact with, to the even-further-out notion that the stories we’re doing now must take place in 1973 if the characters are only twelve years older than they were when the Marvel era began. But to my mind, the best and only way to grapple with this issue long term is to not think about it too much—to simply accept that it’s one of the prices of continuous serialized publication for so many years. Former Marvel indexer George Olshevsky coined the term “contemporary reference” for any element of the Marvel Universe that was applicable at the time of publication (such as the identity of the President, or the number of birthdays or Christmases celebrated by a character) but which would change over time. That’s really what we’re talking about for the most part here. You can try to eliminate all contemporary references from your comics, but it’s next to impossible, and what you wind up with are stories that don’t have any relevance to anybody.
The passage of time—it’s part of the price of doing business.
More later.
Tom B
Scenes from a Spider-Summit
2008-09-23 16:54:58
As has come to be the standard around these parts, I shot a little bit of video during our Spidey Summit last week, and here it is for all of you to share.
In the first video, attending are Jim McCann, Joe Kelly, Bob Gale, Mark Waid and Stephen Wacker. Joe Quesada and Dan Slott hadn’t yet arrived, and Phil Jimenez raced for cover when he saw I was brandishing a video camera.
In the second video, like something out of the first SPIDER-MAN movie (in which Phil “played” Peter Parker’s hands as he designs his costume), here’s a sneak peek at some character doodles Phil made throughout the day as we discussed different story possibilities.
And the last video shows one of our planning sheets, with some actual, factual information on it.
Doing these meetings is always like getting hit by a streetcar in a lot of ways, in that they’re jam-packed and intense, and they inevitably put us behind schedule on the actual office work that needs to be done. The good parts, though, are throwing around story ideas and making something out of nothing.
Now, cue Cool Hand Dave posting a snarky comment about how Spider-Man has been ruined…
More later.
Tom B
Orthodoxy
2008-09-22 10:04:22
I answered an e-mail over the weekend from a fan wondering if a particular project was considered canonical to the mainstream Marvel Universe—and then got a couple of agitated responses when they didn’t like my analysis. It was clearly very important to this person that the story in question be considered “legitimate.”
But that got me thinking a little bit: what is it that makes a story legitimate? I can understand the need and desire to make everything fit together seamlessly—I was certainly an advocate of that position for a long time. But if a story doesn’t fit into the larger cosmology, does that make it worthless? Does that diminish its impact? Does that make it less effective?
Some of this, I think, is a need for our entertainment choices to feel justified. It’s not enough for a piece of work to entertain us momentarily—we need for them to matter beyond the moment to feel our time and money well-spent. This is definitely a point of view that Marvel has fostered at different points during its publishing history, and the idea that all of the assorted Marvel stories form a larger tapestry is an appealing one.
But the fact of the matter is that this was never quite as seamless as it was supposed to be. There were always stories that needed to be jammed in sideways, or whose events had to be revised somewhat, in order to make them fit. And after 45 years of continuous publishing, it’s simply not possible for every single element to join seamlessly.
Also, having been in print for so long, the Marvel characters and situations have transcended themselves, and become iconic. And, as such, there’s something interesting about exploring elements and avenues within those larger legends that the orthodoxy of the mainstream Marvel U doesn’t allow, for one reason or another.
I can remember the need and the desire to have everything “make sense.” But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more open to approaching each piece of work on its own, and evaluating its worth based more on what it is, and less on how it dovetails together with a million other things. Could just be the result of having read too many comics, but there you go. And even with that, there are still elements in such a tale that will bother me if they’re not “right.”
More later.
Tom B
Mister Fish Starts The Week
2008-09-15 18:23:31
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Got a Spider-Man Summit this week to block out and finalize plans for the web-head through the end of 2009 and into 2010--so consequently, we're going to be on Mister Fish time-out time for the next couple of days.
More later.
Tom B
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About this blog:
Ramblings and musings from the mind of Tom Brevoort. "It won’t be clean. It won’t be fun. It mostly won’t be coherent."
 | About the author:
Tom Brevoort is Executive Editor for Marvel Comics, and oversees such titles as New Avengers, Civil War, and Fantastic Four. |
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