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My So-Called Career pt 2
2007-04-09 16:36:19
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So, yesterday we began the saga of my career at Marvel with my coming aboard as an intern for the summer of 1989, which is where we'll be picking up today. On the left, among other things, you'll find a number of documents relating to the making of a Marvel comic. These explain pretty much how things were done in those days. It's worth mentioning that, in the whole of Marvel editorial in 1989, there was only one computer, and I knew how to use it better than anybody on staff. So all of the production work on the books was still being done by hand--lettering was done directly on the boards (or on vellum overlays that would then be cut out and pasted down on the boards if a job was running behind.) The actual coloring separations were done at the printer, by a crack team of little old ladies painstakingly cutting rubylith masks to match the hand-colored guides that would be produced by Marvel colorists, using Doc Martin's watercolor dyes on xerox copies of the artwork. And there were no scanners or FTP sites or e-mail, so every page had to physically travel around the country, and if you wanted to get ahold of somebody, you'd better have had their phone number or actual living address.
As I said yesterday, I was working for three offices simultaneously as an intern. This didn't break down in any controlled manner--I would be called upon as needed by the folks in those offices to carry out assignments (which sometimes led to trouble--I can remember Craig Anderson and Bob Budiansky getting into an argument, because both had some crucial bit of time-sensitive work they needed me to get done right that instant.) And these were three very different kinds of offices, with very different kinds of people in them, so let me give you a quick snapshot.
Craig and Renee's office was the closest to what we would think of as a regular Marvel editorial office. They had a stable of about five monthly books to get out every thirty days, plus assorted specials, limited series and graphic novels. Craig was the son of Brad Anderson, the creator of Marmaduke, and he'd earned pocket money through college by coming up with punchlines for his father's strip. He also affected a sort of laid-back California mellow attitude. Craig and Renee weren't all that interested in dealing with an intern, so I can't say we had many conversations of substance during that period--they'd mostly just give me some task to carry out, and then go back to whatever it was they were doing.
Bob and Dwayne were the Special Projects office, a catch-all term covering the fact that what they did was rarely standard comic books. They produced all of the movie adaptations, a number of comics based on licensed properties, and all of Marvel's for-sale Press Posters. They were also the editorial office tasked to licensing, so they not only got to approve and sign off on any upcoming Marvel merchandise for character accuracy, but they'd also generate any artwork that a given client would need, whether that be a turn-around drawing of Wolverine so that a sculpture could be made, or box art for Spider-Man bath soap. Dwayne was a colorful guy who, among other things, had written for the David Letterman show. he also had a strong science background and a wry wit, as on the one day we spent testing Silly Putty out on all of the various formats of comics Marvel was then publishing, to see which ones it could lift an image off of. (Silly Putty doesn't work on flexographic printing.)
Greg and Evan were a hybrid office, the most junior office in the place, and theoretically under the authority of Bob Budiansky. Greg was Marvel's only Managing Editor (what we would today call an Associate Editor), meaning he was the most recent guy promoted to the level of editor, and was serving what amounted to a breaking-in period. Right before I'd gotten there, Greg went through a bad period that had left his reputation a little bit immediately soured--he was having conflicts with his previous assistant over what she was doing and how she was doing it. This had resolved itself for the moment with her leaving Greg's office, and Greg taking on Evan Skolnick as his assistant. But this left one big piece of work to deal with that ended up in my lap.
The assistant in the Managing Editor's office was the lowest assistant on the totem pole, and became the defacto submissions editor in the process. One of their duties was to routinely go through all of the piles of unsolicited submissions that Marvel was sent by prospective writers and artists, pull out anything of any merit for review by the more senior editors, and send everybody else one of a series of polite rejection letters. It wasn't rocket science, but nor was it particularly enjoyable.
And the submissions were everywhere. Under desks, in the halls, filling up closets.
The task of plowing through all of these submissions now fell to Evan--which meant that, as soon as I strolled onto the premises, they fell to me. My most basic function to start out with, when I wasn't doing something else, was to work my way through the backlog of submissions. Greg and Evan expected this to take all summer.
I got it done in a week.
If you got a rejection letter that summer, even for work that you'd sent into Marvel in 1988, chances are that it came from me. And don't feel too bad--I even found some of my own samples in the mountainous pile, and rejected them. I did save one submission, unsigned and unlabeled, a pitch for a CAPTAIN AMERICA inventory story, just because it made me laugh. I've included it at the left.
Getting the submissions backlog dug out so quickly (and done right, I might add) increased people's confidence in my abilities, and so I was given greater and greater responsibilities as an intern. I would up doing paste-up mechanicals on a few volumes of the MARVEL MASTERWORKS and all of the balloons for the second issue of the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET black and white magazine (in one harrowing afternoon when the book absolutely, positively had to leave house that day--until it wound up being delayed for 12 months...)
But it wasn't all peaches & cream, and I made my share of mistakes in those early days. Among the slow-burn projects Greg and Evan were working on was THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN AMERICA, a four-issue "prestige format" squarebound limited series by Fabian Nicieza and Kevin Maguire retelling and embellishing the earliest days of Cap's star-spangled career. The book wouldn't see print for another couple of years, at that point after it had passed through the hands of a number of editors, and other artists needed to be brought in to help finish it. But at this point, only a handful of pages had been penciled.
These were beautiful pages, drawn on the oversized art boards Marvel then-used for its larger Graphic Novel format--this is a key point, so pay attention. Some time within that first week or two, I was called upon to take the existing pages and make xerox copies of them, either for reference, or to give to Fabian or Kevin, or whatever. Now, Marvel's never had the best copiers--we put a lot of wear-and-tear onto them, as you might imagine, copying every page of every book that goes through the office at least once, and more typically multiple times. So the machine in question was pretty battered. It was also an 11" X 17" copier, which meant that these larger pages needed to be copied in halfs, since they were larger than the image area of the copier. Finally, you need to know that this copier also had a little latch on the underside of its lid, to keep the lid closed while it was copying.
So I was at the machine, making copies like an assembly line--one page on, copy, turn page, copy, old page off, new page on.
And at a certain point, I'd put a new page on the copier bed, and turned to deal with the old page, or the copies--and the copier lid, on it's well-worn hinges, slammed down, driving the litle latch-hook right through the page.
Disaster.
I opened up the copier, studied the board for a minute or two, heart racing--then I made an executive decision. I finished my copying, stuck the damaged board back into the stack, brought the whole pile back to the office and put it all back into the flat file drawers.
Yes, I completely ducked any responsibility for the damaged page--and as far as I know, nobody even realized the page had been damaged while I was there (it may even have been one of the book's subsequent editors who discovered the damage.) So shame on me.
More later.
Tom B
Part 1 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
Bonus 1 | Bonus 2
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I knew it was Mike Carlin. The fiend.
Posted by CylverSaber on 2007-02-13 11:14:33
I loved Adventures of Captain America so much as a kid. I haven't reread it in years though, but it always seemed really special to me.
Posted by MattDiCarlo on 2007-02-13 13:02:56
Did any of the submissions you read ever get published?
Posted by IanZL on 2007-02-13 13:17:23
It might have been eighteen years ago but dude, you are so fired.
Posted by Fetsur on 2007-02-13 16:38:52
Whoa! Defiling original art. That was pretty low. And you still work there.
Would you post a scan (original or printed version, it doesn't matter) of the suspected page, for giggles?
I think the worst practice subjected upon original art was the uneven trimming and clipping of edges and corners, and the paste-on ballons. Thank goodness for computer letttering.
Posted by Beta Ray Benny on 2007-02-14 07:09:37
I'd love to hear about the transition from going to intern under folks like Evan and Dwayne to eventually being their supervisor/editor. I mean, folks in the comics biz seem to make those transitions frequently, but it can't be easy.
(I'm also surprised to hear Evan was there so early; I'm probably the world's biggest fan of his New Warriors run. Even got to meet him a couple times. He was very friendly, and basically talked me out of trying to get into the comics business after college.)
Posted by motteditor on 2007-02-14 16:46:08
off-topic: spiderman 3's impending fiasco in
Dear Tom.
Sorry for barging in on an unrelated post and even blog, but as a marvel-man, you just nay be able to help.
I really hope you can be of assistance. After reading the following can you please forward this mail to anyone at Marvel Studios, as high up as Avi Arad. Because the following is about Spiderman's release in Israel, which is a territory close to Mr. Arad's heart, he may find a personal interest in the matter.
I am a film critic for Israel's largest entertainment magazine. The Hebrew equivalent to Entertainment Weekly. (I have interviewed Mr Arad ahead of "The Hulk"'s release here).
A year ago two of Israel's largest distributors decided to ban movie critics from preview screenings. One of those distribs is A.D Matalon, rep for Sony and Fox locally, which will roll out Spiderman 3 in Israel on May 3rd.
Up to this point this ban on critics was annoying but was mostly a non-issue. But as Spiderman 3 is a movie I am looking forward to see, I want to let the people at Marvel know of this so the decision may be reversed.
Now, Israel is a tough territory as far as sci-fi and comic-book movies go. Over here the audience is more adult and the major and influential critics are younger former comics fan-boys (myself included). These are the movies that need critical support here. Ghost Rider went unnoticed here a month back.
The biggest PR tool a distrib has in Israel is a regular magazine feature in one the country's most popular paper, a table listing all movies and the critical marks they garnered from the country's eight major film critics (me included) side by side. It is published weekly. Consistently, and you can easily check this with the international folks at Sony and Fox, films that are not screened to critics are not on that table and they perform poorly at the box office, the audience awareness to these movies, even hollywood tentpole movies, is almost non-existant without a notice on this page.
Spiderman 2 was one of the best films of the year in my column in 2004. I fear that old-school marketing, not savvy to today's audiences, and an oversized ego, cause these distribs to believe that a movie like Spiderman 3 can open here without press (bear in mind: I also file movie reccomendations on Israel's largest TV station, my columns are syndicated on the country's largest news web-site and I write the nation's most popular film-blog - the distribs and their PR people want nothing to do with any of these media).
I feel that these distribs can get aways with mid-20th century ego clashes and ban-the-critics-tactics because the studios they rep here are unaware of the PR mess they are making. I wanted to alert you, and hope that you will pass this info on, because it's not too late to save Spiderman's fate over here. Without the press and the critics I predict it will be an esoteric movie that will open big and than vanish, and not the commercial and artistic success I hope it will be.
I stand behind my words, I do not write this anonomously. And I will leave you my contact info. If you need more information, you may feel free to contact me.
Yair Raveh
Film Critic, "Pnai Plus"
yair.raveh@gmail.com
Posted by cinemascopian on 2007-04-10 08:59:42
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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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