News! per Tom Breevoort's Substack

[Alex_Of_X]

It legitimately hurts to learn that they were considering a third year of Untold Tales of Spider-Man with Peter in college written by Roger Stern, best writer since Stan Lee.

Especially considering the other comics at the time, and what was coming with the Mackie/ Byrne relaunch.

This is doubly interesting cause Harras seems to have had warm feelings for Mackie, going as far as suggest Mackie does Ultimate Spider-Man!

“He (Harras) was mocked by Joe Quesada for recommending the likes of Howard Mackie of[sic] Scott Lobdell to write Ultimate Spider-Man for Bill Jemas, only for Joe Quesada to suggest Brian Bendis – a move that may have made Quesada’s career. But at the time Bendis was the risky choice, Mackie the safe one.” —Rich Johnston, 2010, https://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/20...ry-in-collage/

And ofc, Mackie had work at DC after Harras became EiC

[Bruce Wayne]

Mackie, Lobdell, Nocenti and Liefeld all seem to be his go-to people judging by New 52. Especially Lobdell.

[gurkle]

Mackie was also good friends with John Byrne. When he was "Avengers" editor he managed to persuade Byrne to write the books (and draw West Coast Avengers), which was a huge coup though like many Byrne runs, it ended suddenly. That probably made him the obvious choice among Spider-Man writers to work with Byrne on the Spider-Man relaunch, but we all know how that era turned out.

According to Brevoort, Harras didn't care for Bagley's art, so the Ultimate Spider-Man book ended up as almost the opposite of the kind of book he liked to put out. His thing, which worked well on the X-Men line until he was no longer editing it personally, was to find an artist with a new approach that the fans could get excited about, like Jim Lee or Joe Madureira, and pair them with a writer who was less individual and fit more into the overall editorial plan.

[Bruce Wayne]

His thing, which worked well on the X-Men line until he was no longer editing it personally, was to find an artist with a new approach that the fans could get excited about, like Jim Lee or Joe Madureira, and pair them with a writer who was less individual and fit more into the overall editorial plan.

Is it true that he was in general distrustworthy of superstar writers because of this attitude?

[Alex_Of_X]

After a few dry weeks, we're back, gang!

Per the last newsletter (#79):

1) Hickman's GODS...but also Tom's?

Asked about editorial shifts on GODS after the Brev-X-it, Tom says "I’ll continue to be handing G.O.D.S., Mark—first issue on sale this week, bring a hand truck to help you carry it home!"

2) Who variants the variants?

Chris asks the big question: How do you decide how many variants each issue should get?

Tom: "The number of variants and what titles they go on is largely worked out across the line by the Sales department. I couldn’t tell you exactly the formula they use to determine this, apart from constant feedback from the retailers and a desire to maximize the return on effort on our part."

3) Jim Starlin's "INFINITY EXIT FROM MARVEL (2004 edition)"

"I had first come into contact with Jim while working on the CAPTAIN MARVEL series with Peter David, which starred the son of the original Captain Marvel, Genis. At a certain point, we realized that we were going to need a fill-in to spell regular artist Chriscross and Peter suggested that we maybe get Starlin to draw and contribute to it.

From there, having established contact, Jim was interested in doing more, in particular with the characters he’d either created or adopted during his earlier tenures at Marvel. We did a couple of projects together; INFINITY ABYSS, the forgotten fourth INFINITY series that was largely dedicated to Jim invalidating any Thanos appearances that he didn’t work on, and MARVEL: THE END, which was by definition a series set in a What If timeline but which Starlin treated as canonical to his particular stories—he had done it, after all. And that all led to this, THANOS #1. This was a period where Marvel was needing to launch a bevy of titles because our overall title count had fallen so low, so it was an easy thing to propose and get approved. And it was an easy series to run in certain respects. But I did find that Jim rather puckishly delighted in sneaking hidden messages into the backgrounds of his art and text, messages that might have gotten somebody fired had they made it to print. I asked him to cut it out, but he just laughed puckishly—nobody had ever really gotten Starlin to do anything that he didn’t want to do.

In any event, things were going smoothly until one day when Jim came back from a convention appearance in Boston, where he’d run into Marshall Rogers. The two had gotten to talking, and Jim reached out to me to tell me that he and Marshall would be collaborating on a new WARLOCK series that he would write. Now this was a problem as, at this time, Greg Pak was already working on a WARLOCK project, a sort of restart ore reimagining of the character, though it would take a little while to make it to the stands. On top of which, Jim wasn’t empowered to just go ahead and add projects to Marvel’s publishing schedule. When i told Jim that somebody else (I left Greg’s name out of it) was already working on a WARLOCK project, he exploded. He felt that Warlock was “his” character—that while he hadn’t actually created Adam, he was the one who brought him to prominence and popularity. And he had a point there. I seem to recall that what followed was an irate conversation where Jim called up Marvel EIC Joe Quesada, and when Joe wouldn’t acquiesce to his demands to be allowed to do WARLOCK with Marshall, Jim quit."

The moral of the story is: read INFINITY ABYSS/END, they slap

https://tombrevoort.substack.com/p/7...the-chain-gang

[Alex_Of_X]

Uni deadlines be damned, I won't let this thread languish!

Per the latest newsletters (##80-82):

1. Origins of BREEVORTS'S: the watering hole

The titular bar appeared in Hickman's/Schiti's first issue of GODS. Here is Tom's recounting of how that happened:

"...I’m a bit sheepish about the whole thing. I’ve mentioned in passing before I think about my discomfort with editors promoting themselves in the pages of their books. It strikes me as unseemly. But in this instance, Valerio Schiti just went ahead and did it on some pages and turned it in—it wasn’t specified that way in Jonathan’s script, it was simply “a bar” there—and at that point, it was simpler just to roll with it and let it go rather than asking Valerio to go back and change it."

2. Tom's Avengers: end of an era

"And it’s looking as though my final issue of AVENGERS will be #12 in a few months. So start counting down!"

3. The fate of Tony Stark: Director of Defense.

Truncating a lot here, but here is the gist:

"IRON MAN #73 was released on October 8, 2003. This was not a great period for old Shellhead in that there was a ton of creative turnover on the title, and it shifted directions almost haphazardly, often due to outside factors. In particular, it was a book that Marvel President of the time Bill Jemas didn’t really care about, and so it became a ready dumping ground for a number of the new writers he was attempting to bring into Marvel from other fields.

" (...) In any event, this issue began the writing tenure of John Jackson Miller on the book (...) John’s concept was relatively clever: he had Tony Stark, the former arms manufacturer, taking on the job of the Secretary of Defense of the United States of America. Now, this wasn’t necessarily the most exciting place for the character to be in order for super hero stories to break out, but that wasn’t really what Bill had been driving at anyway. He was putting forward the idea, based on the success of the opening of ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN, that the characters could go for issues without putting on their costumes or doing anything heroic, just so long as there was drama there.

"(...) But the direction didn’t really catch fire. And when Bill was shortly thereafter sidelined, the decision was reached to relaunch and refocus the assorted AVENGERS titles under the AVENGERS DISASSEBLED banner, with Brian Michael Bendis and David Finch on the main series. Brian brought Tony’s time as Secretary of Defense to a quick, dark close in those pages, wherein the Scarlet Witch secretly hexes Tony while he’s giving a live interview, intoxicating him and making him seem unfit for office. The whole matter was dispensed with in just a few pages."

4. Hints and whispers from the Marvel retreat

"To begin with, we held one of our regular Marvel Retreats on Tuesday and Wednesday. These are meetings in which pretty much the whole of Editorial and a number of key creators get together to map out storylines across the Marvel Universe for the coming months. What made this one especially noteworthy was that it was the first one we’d done in person in close to four years.

"(...) I was crashed out by the end of the evening, but wound up sleeping poorly, so i was a bit more ragged the second day—which was when I had to go over a big FANTASTIC FOUR-centered thing that you’ll hear about later on in time as well as outline my general composition of the X-Titles for the start of my custodianship of that line."

FF fans, stay on the lookout!

5. P*** Pot Pete

Giovanni Reelgood asked Tom the real question: "PPP’s name was based on the dirty limerick P*** Pot Pete right? If not, it’s a wonderful coincidence."

"It certainly seems likely that Stan, Jack and Larry Lieber were pulling inspiration from that old limerick, Giovanni. I would guess that Kirby at least, given his military service, was aware of it," said Tom.

6. GOTG origins!

"In any event, Fifty-Five Years ago, the first story to feature the Guardians of the Galaxy was released in the pages of MARVEL SUPER-HEROES #18—and thereafter promptly forgotten about for several years more. (...) But let’s look a bit more at the Guardians of the Galaxy. It was the creation of writer Arnold Drake and artist Gene Colan, and for all that it was dressed up a bit to look like a super hero series, it was actually a science fiction adventure. Martin Goodman notoriously didn’t think that SF was saleable in comic books, so there was a need to obfuscate the genre here in order to get the okay to proceed with it.)

(...) As for MARVEL SUPER-HEROES, issue #21 was intended to feature a new character, Starhawk, but like Guardians of the Galaxy, the series was science fiction rather than super hero, and this time Martin noticed. He had the strip spiked—it was never completed, and the book went back to being all reprint, albeit reprints of more recent vintage starring the Avengers and Daredevil and the X-Men at the start."

Goodman the vibe-killer lol

7. Avengers: Too Horny to Reprint

"This issue of AVENGERS, #71, was released on October 15, 2003 and hasn’t been reprinted in its entirety in years. And that, my friends, is a story. So, first off, it’s worth knowing that, as I believe I detailed in a previous Newsletter, Marvel President Bill Jemas had been growing steadily more and more dissatisfied with the writers then working for Marvel (...) I wound up having new AVENGERS writer Geoff Johns speak directly to him, and to get his notes on the long arc we were planning, “Red Zone.” Bill’s opening line to Geoff was typical of him, 'You don’t know how to write.'"

(...) Consequently, Geoff plotted a sequence in AVENGERS #71, the first issue after “Red Zone”, designed to steer into what Bill said he wanted. The issue focuses on Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne, who had been estranged for years but who had been coming back together across the length of this run. The scene opened with a shot of a Las Vegas hotel with shouting coming from inside one of the rooms, shouting that made it apparent over the next few panels that the persons involved were Hank and Jan, and the misdirect was that Hank was striking her as he notoriously had in the past. But at the page turn, we find that Hank and Jan are rather in bed together, and that Hank has shrunk down to his ant-size in order to pleasure her more directly. It’s a dumb, adolescent shock-scene, the sort that really doesn’t have a place in a book like AVENGERS. But when Bill heard about it, he loved it, and pushed for it to be even more graphic and shocking. So these were the marching orders. End of the day, though, none of that abdicates me from my part in allowing all of this, I could have stopped this page at any point.

"(...) by the time AVENGERS #71 hit the stands, Bill was out, and so the shitstorm over this page fell directly on me alone. Fortunately, I had both the e-mails from Bill expressing his love for this scene and the sign-offs from Joe proving that everybody involved had both seen and blessed this sequence before it went to print, and so I wasn’t solely responsible, Marvel had approved the sequence. In the end, the decision was made to drop the offending page from the collected edition, and it hasn’t been reprinted since that initial printing so far as I know."

8. Tom's X-stuff update!

"That first script needed a revision to its finale, the last two pages or so, and now it’s off in the hands of an artist."

9. Miracleman is inevitable (and late)

On the character mixing with Marvel mainstays, Tom is reticent. "As I’ve said in the past on occasion, JV, I think that it’s inevitably only a matter of time before Miracleman and his world mix in some fashion with the Marvel Universe. By that same token, I’m not especially in any hurry to see that happen—primarily because, within the Marvel Universe that has its own rules and vast mythology to it, Miracleman just becomes another Sentry."

The long-awaited DARK AGE, tho, is coming. "Yes, Michael, there is still every intention for us to roll on forward into THE DARK AGE once THE SILVER AGE is completed. But I think we need to do the latter before we can seriously start talking about when the former might be scheduled. Those SILVER AGE issues are getting done, but at a much slower pace than anybody anticipated. Which is the Miracleman story all over, isn’t it?"

[Alex_Of_X]

10. What If: Tom at DC

"I’ve spoken in other recent pieces about how life at Marvel under President and Publisher Bill Jemas had grown steadily more intolerable to me over the course of around 18 months or so. This all led to a crescendo when Bill decided that he wanted to bring in a new approach on FANTASTIC FOUR that he’d conceived and ordered me to fire Mark Waid from the series. Bill had also indicated that I wouldn’t have to edit this new direction if I didn’t want to, a statement that he reneged on after I told EIC Joe Quesada that there wasn’t any power on Earth that would get me to helm the follow-up. When Bill told me that I had, in essence, “failed the test” and that I’d be editing that series like it or not, I finally did something that I had resisted doing for several years: I called up Mike Carlin over at DC about playing for the other team.

"Fortunately for me in the long run but unfortunately for me at the time, while Mike had made it plenty clear that he’d scoop me up in an instant if the opportunity arose, by the time I made my reach-out, he wasn’t running DC Editorial any longer—Dan Didio was. But Mike did me a solid and arranged for me to have lunch with Dan, putting in his good word with him about me. It was, frankly, a bit of a strange lunch, because while dan gave me his time and attention, it seemed that he really didn’t have any particular interest in hiring me at that moment. That said, he was perfectly pleasant and jovial throughout our interactions—and, frankly, he didn’t owe me a thing, so if he didn’t have room in his staff or interest in my skills, that was entirely his purview. But speaking frankly, if he had offered me half what I was making at Marvel at that moment, I’d have jumped for it—and likely regretted it either virtually right away or within a few years when DC relocated to the west coast. "

I'm glad you stayed, Tom, we wouldn't have gotten Slott's/Allreds' Silver Surfer without ya!

https://tombrevoort.substack.com/p/82-shock-of-the-new