Written by Dwayne McDuffie, John Rozum, Kurt Busiek, Matt Wayne and Adam Beechen; Art by Denys Cowan, Howard Porter and others; Cover by Howard Porter
Don't miss the first meeting of Static and Black Lightning, Blue Beetle and Hardware, The Spectre and Xombi and more titanic team-ups from THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #24-26, plus stories from HARDWARE #16, STATIC #12 and XOMBI #6.
DC Universe 160pg. Color Softcover $17.99 US
That's DC's catalog description of the latest TPB collection of The Brave and the Bold. In this case, it collects a three-issue arc teaming DC characters and Milestone characters, backed up with three single-issue reprints from the Milestone line. My contribution to the volume is the Static issue, one of the two stories I wrote for Milestone (the other being Icon #11). I got to work with artist Neil Vokes, which is always fun, and like we did with Ninjak, we got to do a kind of young-Spider-Man-ish story, with a lot of personality, action, energy and ethical dilemmas, this one introducing the villain (or is he?) D-Struct. D-Struct also appeared in the Static Shock cartoon, though I never actually saw that episode.
I'm happy to see the story coming back into print—it's not that often that you see one-off fill-in issues from 16 years ago get a new life—but this was a story we were pleased to do and pleased with the results, so I'm glad it'll get seen by some new eyes. The rest of the book's good stuff, too.
The Liberty Project was my earliest take on super-crooks redeeming themselves as heroes, inspired by the era of Avengers that featured Captain America and the what-us-villains-that-was-yesterday lineup of Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. The Thunderbolts were the third try.
This was the second, an unsuccessful series pitch I did with Karl Kesel. The "H.I.T." stood for "Heroes In Training," and the picture explains the concept about as well as I ever could. Art by Karl, from a rough and inadequate sketch by me; click on it for a closer look. The guy at the top had nothing to do with the Shi'Ar, but was an Amerind mutant (I think), who had such natural talent that he was cocky and didn't feel he needed to train, which would have been an ongoing source of irritation for Hawkeye.
There was another never-sold series I cooked up about a criminal trying to go straight, Sirocco. But that was inspired by the TV show Alias Smith & Jones more than anything from comics. What can I say? I like redemption stories.
Here's a drawing James Fry, my old pal and collaborator on The Liberty Project and this'n'that else, did for Ann and me, for a "We're Moving!" postcard, back when we bought a house for the first time. I was writing Vampirella back then, see...
While hunting through my files for something, I turned this up. It's my typed notes to myself for the story idea that eventually got used at Marvel (by Roger Stern, John Byrne and Bob Layton) for the resurrection of Jean Grey:
Click on each page for a larger version. But in addition, a few notes:
• This wasn't the first version of the story. The first was entirely verbal, cooked up sometime around May or June of 1980. Richard Howell, Carol Kalish and I had heard through the grapevine about the impending death of Phoenix and then-editor in chief Jim Shooter's rules for what kind of circumstances it would take to resurrect her. We took that as a creative challenge, and came up with resurrection plans. Richard and Carol's involved the holo-empathic crystal Lilandra gave to the X-Men, as I recall, while mine involved the revelation that Jean had never really died. We had a pleasant evening wrangling over the clear superiority of our own version over the other version, and left it at that. It's all we'd really set out to do.
• Sometime between then and May 1982, when I graduated college and sold my first script, I started taking notes for various Marvel series I hoped to write someday, to make sure I didn't forget any of my "great ideas," few of which were great, or even memorable. This document would have been written sometime in there. I can tell it wasn't simply notes on the resurrection storyline, but plans for something more extended, what with that Wolverine plot-bit stuck in the middle, that if I remember correctly, was intended to start of a storyline to get Wolverine to try to stop killing people left and right, under what I thought was the dodgy rationale of, "He comes at me with a knife (while I'm invading his lair), I'll come at him with a gun," or some such. Somewhere I may still have my files of where I would have gone with it all, which I think involved the X-Men becoming teachers to a new generation of mutants. But they may be mercifully lost.
• Nobody at Marvel ever saw this document. In fact, outside of my circle of friends at college at the time, no one else may ever have seen this until now. The plot idea was transmitted vocally—I recounted a version of it to Roger Stern at a convention in Ithaca in 1983, he passed it on to John Byrne over the phone at some later point, and John passed it on to Bob Layton when he heard about the plans for the creation of X-Factor. So this version was never on the table. All Marvel had was the bare concept of how Phoenix could have existed while Jean was still alive at the bottom of Jamaica Bay, translated through a game of "Telephone." Although I do think the idea of the Phoenix Force behind it, which doesn't appear in these notes, was part of my original idea, or at least part of what I told Roger. But at this point I can't say for sure.
Anyway, here it is, for anyone who's curious about what the idea started out as...
I'm stealing most of what follows from a blog called The Hooded Utilitarian, largely because it's stuff I wrote in the comments section a year or so ago that I thought made the point I was trying to make reasonably well, so I wanted to have it over here, too.
The question at hand was about Batman, and how if he's a self-made man who does what he does on willpower, grit and drive, why shouldn't be come a Green Lantern? Their rings are fueled by willpower, so he'd be the most badass Green Lantern ever.
Since the blog entry was titled "Question for Kurt Busiek or Mark Evanier," it popped up in a Google search, and I threw in my response, which was:
"Whatever in-story answers are offered, the real answer is that Batman works really well as Batman, so he's going to stay Batman. Just like Tony Stark isn't going to build armored suits for all the Avengers as an ongoing thing, and Richie Rich isn't going to hand out millions to his pals even though he'd never miss it."
It was pointed out that Tony Stark and Richie Rich are dicks, and that Batman often doesn't work really well as Batman—bad Batman stories abound. So why not give him a power ring?
I noted that to be fair, the Guardians are dicks, too. And it's not as if there would suddenly be no more crappy stories if Batman had a power ring. I expect there'd be more—if for no other reason than that Batman would have a power ring.
What was really going on, of course, wasn't a push for Batman to join the Green Lantern Corps, a development that I don't think many people think would make Batman stories consistently terrific, but rather the more story-management-centered question of, "Well, if you don't want Batman to have a power ring, shouldn't there be an in-story reason for it?" It's not about giving him a power ring, but about explaining why he isn't given one. In a setting where it would be logical for Green Lantern to hand out rings to his JLA pals, if it doesn't happen, then should you be doing that kind of universe in the first place? If you're not going to do it "right," should you do it at all?
Me, I tend to think the reason Tony Stark doesn't armor up the Avengers isn't because he's a dick, but because it would make both the Iron Man book and the Avengers book less special if you turn all those characters into Iron Man variants (though it did make a dandy issue of What If, way back when). And to the extent that Richie Rich is interesting at all, it's in the contrast between his over-the-top wealth and his friends' comparative normalcy; giving them all millions might be logical for the characters, but would making it more logical actually make it a better comic book for the Richie Rich audience?
So why do that kind of world, if it's not logical? Well, ignoring for a moment that some of those problems still exists even if the books aren't part of a "universe"—Tony Stark could make armor for his supporting cast (and on occasion has, but it doesn't stick), and most of Richie Rich's friends don't have their own series anyway, the answer to the overall question, why put Batman and Green Lantern in the same universe if it creates illogical situations, is:
Because it's fun to have the characters meet.
It's fun to have Batman stories, and it's fun to have Superman stories, but it's fun to have Justice League stories, too. It's not really any more complicated than that. It's entertaining.
The stories are the cake, and the shared-universe stuff is frosting. Things tend to go horribly wrong when people start to think the frosting is more important than the cake, and then get better when they remember that it's about the cake after all.
The real answer to questions like, "Why doesn't the Flash clean up Gotham City, too?" is "It would make Batman's cake lousy. People read Batman because they like crimefighter stuff where Batman's cool, and don't really want to see Superman or the Flash or Green Lantern mess with that particular cake." On the other hand, people who like stories where Batman and Superman and Green Lantern work together have the JLA cake, and some people like both kinds of cake.
But if you start to tie it together with logic foremost in your plans rather than entertainment, then you need to explain why Superman doesn't help all the other heroes almost all the time, and why aren't the crimefighters turned into SF-type heroes to make them more effective, and you end up with everything being JLA cake, and no solo Batman cake left. Or you come to the conclusion that it doesn't work, so Batman shouldn't be in the JLA, which maybe preserves the Batman cake, but it messes up the JLA cake.
So in the end, the answer to all of these questions is: Don't mess with my cake.
Batman cake, when well done, is good. JLA cake, when well done, is good. But if you pay too much attention to the frosting, the cakes all start to taste the same, and that might be logical, but it's boring.
This is also known as the Go 'Way Kid, You Bodda Me school of comics continuity. Shared universes are fun as long as they make reading comics more fun, and not fun when they start to tangle things up and mess with or distort the individual series concepts. When that happens, you can either go with it even though it messes things up, in the name of logic and continuity maintenance, or you can sweep it under the rug and look the other way.
Much as I love continuity, I'm a big fan of sweeping it under the rug and looking the other way. If it serves the X-Men series better to let Kitty Pryde age while it serves FF better to have Franklin age a lot slower, then that's good—that's cake, and both the FF cake and the X-Men cake should be good on their own terms. You just don't have the characters talk about how they're aging at different rates.
And if Batman could solve most of his cases by getting on the JLA communicator and asking Superman or Rip Hunter or someone to use time-travel or super-powers to solve the mystery, then that would make for boring Batman comics, so you ignore it, because that's frosting, and the important thing to do is make it a good Batman cake, not to make the frosting all the same. Batman can do all that stuff with Superman or Rip Hunter in the other cakes, cakes where those flavors enhance the story rather than messing it up.
This isn't unique to superhero comics. Just like readers who don't let it bother them that Nero Wolfe was 40 years old for 40 years straight, or that Linus was in kindergarten when Sally Brown was an infant and later they were in the same class, there gets to be a point where you decide whether you want it to be strictly logical, or whether you want it to be fun.
Used to be, things sold better when they didn't tie in too much, and nobody asked why the Avengers didn't show up to help out with Galactus or where Spider-Man was that day. Nowadays, it seems like you can't do a big story without it sprawling over most of the other books in the line, and that's selling well...for now. But next year, or five years from now, who knows?
Maybe the individual cakes will be more important. Or maybe it'll be mostly frosting, and Batman will have a power ring.
I doubt that'll ever happen. If it were to happen, though, I'd be happy reading Hellboy and Fables and Scalped and Usagi Yojimbo and Girls With Slingshots and such.
If the frosting gets in the way, there are other good cakes.
What you're seeing above (and click on the image for a closer look) is the final pages of Marvels: Eye of the Camera #6, drawn by the meticulous and amazing Jay Anacleto.
Not the last pages of the story, mind you, but the last pages of art to be finished. It's pages two and three of the issue; it was simply a complex enough shot that Jay saved it for last. It's already been lettered (from a partially-done version*), as has the rest of the issue. And most of the issue's been colored, as well, so once this last spread is as well, the book will be all ready to go off to press, and appear in comics stores and get collected in a nice hardcover and all that. It's been a long, long journey (even longer for this much-delayed final issue), but the end has finally arrived.
[*and I'll throw in here that when the partially-finished version came in, my reaction was, "This is only partially finished? It looks great! Why couldn't we just use this?" And then the finished version came in, and my reaction was, basically, "Guhh. Pret-ty." And that's why the difference; Jay sees more than I do, and then makes it real...]
It'll be weird not to be working on this book any more. We started it in 2002, with the initial idea that it could be a 10th anniversary project, celebrating the original Marvels series. It rapidly became clear there was no way it could come out for the 10th anniversary, and we started making jokes about it being a 15th anniversary book. Which is what it turned out to be—Marvels #1 came out in late November 1993, and Marvels: Eye of the Camera #1 came out in early December 2008.
And the first five issues came out more or less on time. They were moved on the schedule a couple of times, but when they started coming out, they came out monthly. Except this last one, which I suppose stands as a sterling example in the "Why didn't they get it done faster/bring in a new artist/wait 'til it was done before releasing any of them" free-floating Internet argument.
In the end, the quality of the artwork answers the "Why didn't they bring in a new artist" option, at least—this issue looks as gorgeous as the rest of the series, and when collected together it'll be so much better than if there was a sudden stylistic change along the way. Whether there were ways to speed up production or whether it was a feasible option to hold the whole series until now, I couldn't say.
But it looks gorgeous, it's finally done, I'll be proud to have this book on my shelf...
...and after eight years, it'll take some adjusting to the idea that it won't be in my "Current Projects" folder any more.
My pal Richard Howell, writer/artist of Deadbeats (along with many other fine projects over his long career) recently bought this Carmine Infantino/Frank McLaughlin page from the first issue of my 1984 Red Tornado mini-series.
And he kindly sent me a scan of it, so I'm putting it up here. No particular reason, other than that it's a nice page and I thought people would like to see it.
The pencil art on that series was amazing. Had it been inked by, say, Steve Leialoha, Dennis Jensen or Joe Rubinstein, people would still be talking about how good it looked.
As it is, it still looked pretty nice. Click on the image for a closer view.
ASTRO CITY: THE DARK AGE Book Four #1 by Busiek, Anderson, Ross, Sinclair & Comicraft
The final act of Astro City's most ambitious epic begins.
THE WIZARD'S TALE by Busiek & Wenzel
A gorgeous new hardcover edition, redesigned, color-corrected, relettered and with a new epilogue. Printed beautifully, too.
If anyone can rival Tom Brevoort when it comes to their Avengers history, it's you.
I've been trying to identify what comic books the two attached jpgs were taken from. I thought I'd ask the master, as I'm confident that at least one of them was written by you.
Ideally, I'm looking for the exact issue #. But failing that, a rough guesstimate based on likely storyarc will at least point me in the right direction.
Thanks!
In this case, I don't think either Tom or I would have to strain our memories—that first page is page 9 of Avengers vol. 3 #4, by me, George Pérez and Al Vey, colored by Tom Smith, edited by Tom. The second is page 10 of #19, same creators. I'd add in the lettering of Comicraft, but someone's blurred it out for some reason, and what's under the blurring has been altered from the original script anyway (for instance, Thor doesn't speak in our version of panel 2 of the second page).
But the copyright notice for "ScoopThis.com" cracks me up.
Still, there's you answer, Rick. Hope it helps!
ADDENDUM: Rik writes back in to add:
"Both pages are the subject of parodies published on ScoopThis back in 1999 (hence the blurred text), and will be redone properly in higher res for an upcoming relaunch."
He also notes that the copyright notice is from back then, as well, when they didn't really understand what copyright meant.
I've seen the full parody now, and it was pretty funny. I'll post a link here when they're ready for their Grand Reopening.
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