Classic EBI #47: Indefinite Delays
EVERYTHING BUT IMAGINARY 1/28/04 -- INDEFINITE DELAYS
Indefinite delays
“Delayed indefinitely.”
That was the phrase that awaited people who expected the first issue of the Marvel/MAX Ant-Man miniseries in January. I’d be lying if I said this was a total shock -- while I’ve always enjoyed Ant-Man, the fact is, he’s never been a hugely popular character (no pun intended), and although no official reason was given for the “indefinite delay,” I would bet dollars to donuts that a big part of it is small amounts of pre-orders.
Still, being a Marvel title, I would bet even the pre-orders were much higher than the average sales on a book like, say, Fade From Blue, but you still see that every couple of months, like clockwork. The big companies, as is to be expected, have a much higher threshhold of what makes a worthwhile book to sell, and the sad fact is that sometimes those sales just don’t add up to enough to publish a book, even if somewhere out there, some readers are waiting for it.
Another famous example of this was John Byrne’s classic “The Last Galactus Story,” which began publication in Epic Illustrated, an anthology title that was cancelled, yanking the story out from under Byrne. The ending never saw the light of day, and fans still approach him at conventions and ask how it would have went.
Not every comic book that winds up on the side of a milk carton does so because of low sales, though. There are hundreds of comic book projects that are announced, even solicited by Diamond, and then never make it to comic book shelves. It’s a shame when that happens, but it is not unexpected. Some books are just interminably late due to the creative team -- a perfect example of this is Kevin Smith’s work for Marvel. Two years after the first issue of Spider-Man/Black Cat: The Evil That Men Do was solicited, fans are still waiting for the last issue of this five-issue monthly miniseries. And let’s not forget that only one issue ever came out of Daredevil: The Target, a miniseries meant to spotlight Bullseye just in time for the Daredevil movie... which is now available on DVD, and still no issue two in sight.
Then there are books that are knocked off the schedule due to inter-office politics. Back in 1993, when Image Comics was still a young company, they made a big coup by getting Alan Moore to write a miniseries lampooning silver-age superheroes, specifically the Marvel characters of that era. It was a fun six-issue book called 1963. In this series Moore introduced us to the likes of Mystery, Inc., The Fury, Horus, the Lord of Light and U.S.A.: The Ultimate Special Agent. The books were written and drawn in an amusing style that threw you back to the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby/Steve Ditko era, but each of them had underlying subplots involving time travel and mysterious goings on. In the last issue the Tomorrow Syndicate began travelling the multiverse in search of the missing sorcerer Johnny Beyond, only to wind up in a new world on the last page where they encountered Rob Liefeld’s Shaft -- they had crash-landed in the present-day Image Universe, in a story that would be resolved in the upcoming 1963 Annual!
That annual was never printed. It got shuffled between studios, from Image founder to Image founder, and ultimately fell through the cracks. I don’t know if it was ever even written or penciled, but the story was left with a cliffhanger that couldn’t possibly be resolved today in the way intended, if for no other reason, than because of the shakeups Image as a company has undergone in the past decade. The 1963 characters made one more appearance that I know of, guest-starring in a time-travel issue of Jim Valentino’s ShadowHawk, but we still don’t know the big mystery of 1963. Moore and artist Steve Bissette, who co-created and co-owned the characters, have fallen out, although they have allegedly agreed that there is a way to finish the story. If it ever will be finished, though, remains to be seen.
Not every “delayed” comic is delayed forever, of course. It took ‘em 20 years, but the Justice League and the Avengers finally met -- although none of the pages Gerry Conway and George Perez did for that first miniseries ever saw print. Then there’s my favorite “delayed” comic, a book scheduled for print in 1983 (when I was just six years old and had never read a comic) but that came out in 1989 (when I was twelve and reading them the way a man dying of dehydration gulps water): Fred Hembeck Destroys the Marvel Universe.
Some of you may not know who Fred Hembeck is -- he isn’t as big as he used to be, but in the 70s, 80s and early 90s he did a series of comic strips in a series of publications that goofed on classic superheroes. If you’ve ever seen a drawing of Spider-Man with pupils and a cheesy grin through his mask and spirals for kneecaps, you’ve seen a Fred Hembeck Spider-Man. He still does his “Dateline: @!!?*” comic strip/column in Comics Buyer’s Guide, in fact, and when it appears, it’s one of my favorite features.
In ‘83 he and then-Marvel Editor In Chief Jim Shooter decided to do a spoof called Jim Shooter Destroys the Marvel Universe, which would consist of a framing sequence wherein Shooter would hire Hembeck to write and draw a comic killing every Marvel character -- hero and villain -- and a middle section that would actually consist of that very comic book. Editors shifted Shooter’s name from the title and put Hembeck on, although Shooter, a former DC employee, was still the star. In the story, a DC editor gave young Jim Shooter a post-hypnotic suggestion to one day take over Marvel comics and destroy it. It was funny and goofy, and would have worked great as the two companies got along fine at the time.
Then the JLA/Avengers fiasco happened, the companies cooled towards each other and the playful jab at DC didn’t seem so safe anymore. So Hembeck re-drew the framing sequence so that the culprit was not Jim Shooter, but his evil twin, Tim Shooter, who harbored a lifetime of anger towards his brother because the famously-large Jim Shooter was a half-inch taller than him. All, again, was right with the world.
Then Shooter got fired.
And the book was thought dead until, some time later, editor Jim Salicrup contacted Hembeck to revive it. Hembeck used the delay to change the framing sequence further, showing himself out on the street because of a comic he’d never written, making jokes about the previous framing sequence and how it would have run, without ever mentioning Shooter by name. Then the Punisher showed up, peeved that the Marvel universe was being destroyed and he had only appeared in one panel.
It was funny, funny comic, and if you ever find a copy pick it up. It’s worth it just to see Hembeck watching the Punisher reading a comic book and thinking “His lips move when he reads...”
We’ve all been disappointed at times, friends. We’ve all anxiously awaited comics that were never published. But take heart -- if the work was done and the creators are still working, there’s always hope. Write to the publishers. Write to the creators. Tell them what you want to see.
If there’s hope for Fred Hembeck, there’s hope for anyone.
FAVORITE OF THE WEEK: January 21, 2003
It keeps happening, friends, I’m sorry. If Congress ever gets wind of this it’ll try to pass legislation forbidding Mark Waid from writing such good comic books so that somebody else will have a chance to win “Favorite of the Week” for a change, but until then I’m praising Fantastic Four nearly every month. In issue #508, Waid floored me by killing my favorite Marvel character, Benjamin J. Grimm, the ever-lovin’, blue-eyed Thing. This issue we see how his death has affected the rest of the team and what lengths Reed Richards will go to to bring his best friend back.
I keep thinking that the most powerful ending of this storyline would be for Reed to fail and for Ben to stay dead, but then the fanboy in me screams “nooooooo!” and calls for his mother to tell him things will be okay. Ben will be back. Ben has to come back, and if anyone can do it in a satisfying way, it’s Mark Waid.
Oh, and welcome back Mike Wieringo on the art chores. Howard Porter did a nice job, but for me, ‘Ringo owns this book now.
Blake M. Petit is the author of the superhero comedy novel, Other People's Heroes, the suspense novel The Beginner and the novel-in-progress Lost in Silver at Evertime Realms. He’s also the co-host, with good buddy Chase Bouzigard and Not-On-the-Internet Mike Bellamy, of the 2 in 1 Showcase Podcasts. E-mail him at Blake@comixtreme.com and visit him on the web at Evertime Realms. Read past columns at the Everything But Imaginary Archive Page.