Our Comics Decade: 2009

Ben
In 2000, I walked into a comic shop for the first time in years, not really sure what had happened to the characters I had once loved and unsure if these trips would be a regular occurrence.

Nine years later, not only had I immersed myself in the comics industry about as thoroughly as one can, I was going to be responsible for putting one of those bad boys on the shelves.

Editor Bill Rosemann was one of the first guys I became real friendly with at Marvel upon becoming their company contact. It made sense, as Bill had recently inherited the cosmic titles from the departing Andy Schmidt and thus held the fate of Nova and the Annihilation franchise in his hands, but he was also just an outgoing, welcoming dude who was always happy to talk comics. To this day, Bill remains one of the most enthusiastic folks at Marvel, a guy who genuinely enjoys being able to work in our medium and who has guided those aforementioned space-based books to levels of success never before seen by the company. Bill’s also a fellow pro wrestling fan, so we hit it off pretty immediately and are never at a loss for things to talk about.

I had actually interviewed for the position of Bill’s assistant editor only months before I got the Marvel.com offer in 2007 and was pretty sure I was going to get it, but ultimately did not. Still, Bill and I vowed we would work together some day beyond just the capacity of me e-mailing him for art to run a story on the new issue of Guardians of the Galaxy (and now would be as appropriate a time as any to mention that I am 95% sure Bill stole the idea for Darkhawk to be part of a secret society of Shi’Ar assassins from an e-mail I sent him without necessarily realizing it, a claim writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning back up as they say he presented it to them “seemingly out of nowhere,” but that he still half-heartedly denies).

Once Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited got up and running and particularly after we worked with Brian Michael Bendis and Leinil Francis Yu to produce the official prologue to Secret Invasion, I was consistently on Bill’s case that we should do some sort of digital “extra” for one of the cosmic events. I pitched stuff like doing a Front Line-esque series for Annihilation: Conquest and a series of one-shots highlighting solo members of the Guardians of the Galaxy, but for one reason or another road blocks always came up.

In late 2008, Bill let me in on the plans for the War of Kings event and I finally had my opening; I suggested that since the series would have such a huge cast, an accompanying online series would be the perfect opportunity to spread the wealth of the spotlight and he agreed. The only hurdle was that both Bill and his assistant, Michael Horwitz, were too busy with the print end of the project to handle the full brunt of this idea, but with a sly smile I suggested that perhaps I could be of assistance. Bill and the powers-that-be agreed to let me and Michael do the day-to-day on what would come to be known as War of Kings: Warriors (a title Bill enjoyed coming into my office and yelling out ala the 1979 movie’s battle cry) while he supervised closely.

(In the interest of full disclosure, Michael ended up doing way more than I did on the back-end both because he actually knew what he was doing and because he’s awesome, but still, this was my shot at the big-time and I was very excited.)

We decided we would focus on four characters over the course of what would be two regular-size comics, but come out as eight bi-weekly installments online. I let Bill choose the stars of the books and he went with Gladiator, Blastaar, Lilandra and Crystal (I of course could not help but chuckle to myself on that last one as I can’t stand Crystal, but never let Bill know that).

I proposed two writers who I was eager to work with and who I thought would be good fits for the project: Christos Gage and Jay Faerber. As I’ve recounted before, I had met Christos back at WonderCon in 2006 and stayed in touch during his rise to prominence with books like Avengers: The Initiative, while Jay had made e-mail contact with me after I complimented his Image series, Noble Causes in a Wizard online review and we’d also kept up with one another. I was looking to get both guys doing some digital work and this presented the perfect opportunity. Chris is a natural with larger-than-life action and digs big monsters so Gladiator and Blastaar were his, whereas Jay knows his way around the ladies (when it comes to comic book characters…and life), thus we gave him Crystal and Lilandra.

On the artistic side, as Bill had far more experience with Marvel’s stable of talent there, he mostly made the selections, but I was certainly pleased with who he got; Mahmud Asrar would handle Gladiator—kinda neat because he normally did Dynamo 5 with Jay, but here he’d work with Chris—Adriana Melo was on for Crystal, and Carlos Magno came aboard for Blastaar. Originally, Timothy Green II was lined up to finish things off with Lilandra, but when he had to bow out due to scheduling issues, we were fortunate to land Ramon Perez.

When it came to the stories, I was more hands on plotting some than others. From when the project was conceived and Bill let me know we’d likely be using Gladiator, I locked in on wanting to tell his origin, going so far as to do the research on all his prior appearances both to make sure the story wasn’t already out there and to get the facts on his background straight. Chris was very onboard and we were both pretty jazzed to get the opportunity to give the back-story on a character created back in 1977 by no less than Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum. I gave Chris my idea, he refined it, and we went back and forth a few times, and then brought Bill into the mix. Bill made the great note that Gladiator should be really be a tragic but heroic figure ala Red Star back in New Teen Titans #18 by Marv Wolfman and George Perez, a story we both loved, and we were off to the races.

Chris pretty much knew what he wanted to do with Blastaar already (“He’s a space barbarian…it’s not difficult to find something cool there”), so the next character I really ended up digging into was Crystal with Jay. Since he’s actually quite a fan of the character, Jay shot some ideas my and Bill’s way and I initially suggested he play off her history with characters like the Fantastic Four and Avengers—after the decision to tell Gladiator’s origin, the plan became to set all the stories either in the immediate or distant past—but Bill wanted to play more with her current status quo. Jay came up with a neat idea to do a sort of CSI mystery where Crystal got to show off her elemental powers in a new crime-solving way and I helped him smooth it out and we were ready to go.

With Lilandra, the direction I gave Jay was that it might be neat to do something set in her childhood explaining why she was always so different than her violent siblings and he kinda took the ball from there; the most important thing we agreed on was that this was a character who had always only been somebody’s girlfriend and we needed to show her as a hero. As Lilandra ended up dying in War of Kings and Warriors ended up being her last real starring role, I thought the story took on an extra element of poignancy.

With the plots in place, Bill gave me a crash course in the process of editing a comic book. I learned in short order how to give art notes, make corrections between pencils and inks, place lettering balloons and much more. Needless to say I gained an immense amount of respect for the guys and girls who do this for a living as it is not easy work at all and it’s rare when editors get recognized for their labors unless something goes wrong. As comic book editor has always been a dream job of mine, the experience was both rewarding and also somewhat telling as I enjoyed it but am not sure I have the stuff to do it on a regular basis; time will tell I suppose, but my hat is off to editors.

Bill and I pretty much supervised Gladiator, the first story, and then a good deal of Crystal, before Michael took the lead on Blastaar and especially Lilandra. For the most part, everything went smoothly, although Michael negotiated a few potholes here and there with the grace and dignity only an 80-pound man can muster (I love Michael Horwitz).

I actually caused one “not funny at the time but looking back now, sure” hiccup myself with the covers of the books. At the time, we were not sure in what form these comics would see actual print, though we knew they likely would; however, we were announcing them at the New York Comic Con and wanted some sort of cool art to show off, so Bill put that on me. He had referenced me the talented Jeff Renaud, who has since become quite the accomplished cover artist for Marvel, who I commissioned to produce four painted pieces of the stars of our series that could serve as covers to the individual books and also be put together as one teaser image. Jeff did a tremendous job and the pieces came out great, but one of the Marvel Vice Presidents calmly explained to me later that it probably wasn’t the best idea to shell out a tidy sum for covers of online books when we could have just Photoshopped something out of the interior at for free; well, it ended up fast-tracking the books to print so we wouldn’t waste the covers, so you live, you learn!

One very cool part of the War of Kings: Warriors process for me was getting to promote the book via websites I had relied on to catch me up with comic goings on over the decade prior like Comic Book Resources and Newsarama. I also got to appear on my first panel as a member of Marvel at the aforementioned New York Comic Con, which was a cool 180 from sitting in the crowd at San Diego listening to Geoff Johns, Brad Meltzer and Judd Winick and deciding I wanted to do this for a living five years prior. I thought I handled myself well, but love that the only sound bite of mine that really got quoted was when I joked that we might see the characters from Sean McKeever’s Inhumans series as “cannon fodder” (sorry, Sean).

Months came and went, the series went up on Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited to some fanfare and then the day arrived when I could walk into Jim Hanley’s and purchase multiple copies of War of Kings: Warriors #1 with Gladiator streaking skywards on the covers and “Ben Morse” listed inside as an editor. For the little kid who used to hitch rides from his mom to New England Comics in Brookline and even the college student who used to rush to Sarge’s every Wednesday, it was a feeling that could not be matched. Seeing Warriors debut on the Diamond sales charts at #87 was just icing on the cake.

Every year over the past 10 has given me at least one huge reason to be excited as a comic book fan and proud as a member of the industry; I can only hope that holds true over the next decade, and frankly, I’m feeling pretty good about it. See you in 2020!

Rickey
When the decade kicked off, I was 17, and the book I'm closing out this writing experiment with is a title I completely wish I'd read back when I was still too young to buy cigarettes: Black Hole.

When it comes to universally acclaimed, genre-defining books like this subtly dark look at high school, I'm swimming in excuses for why I haven't read them yet. Love and Rockets, all of Bone, Epileptic, Claremont/Byrne's X-Men...the list goes on and on and regrettably on. As recently as October 2009, Charles Burns's Black Hole was on that list until I was heading to Ben's wedding and needed something to read on the train ride up to the ceremony. I had the hardcover edition on hand cause I bought it a few years back and it just sat on my shelf. I chose the hardcover cause my softcover versions of fat collections have a tendency to lose their cohesiveness on the spines and burst apart when I'm around 3/4 of the way through. It held together like the motherfucking Enterprise during a Klingon fleet attack, though.

Knowing that Burns started the book in 1995 and finally collected it in 2005 (its own little decade) is so stunning because his ink-thick, moody style stayed mirror-image consistent THE WHOLE TIME. I don't think I've ever done anything the same for more than 5 years, much less 10. But there they are. All the creepy teens with their horrific STD that causes them to mutate until the ugly truths of who they really are begin to surface as lesions and tails and odd-pattern baldness and skin growths and, in some cases, murderous tendencies. Like trying to explain where you've been to your parents after a hotbox session driving around your cul-de-sac, details of some occurrences in the book aren't 100% clear to readers or the characters. I'm paraphrasing way too heinously, but it's a frightening lesson about life's futility and capacity for triumph, and I can't recommend it highly enough - especially for anyone looking to give a teenager a gift or curious to re-identify with their own teenage years.

But even beyond just identifying with the story, the realization that I can still find surprises in comics - no matter how cynical I can be about them or how much I learn through work and my own genuine rabid fandom - like I did here excites me to no end. There are thousands and thousands of books I haven't read yet even though I've been reading for over 2 decades. And even if I read for 200 more, I still couldn't finish it all. So leaving the 2000's and entering the 2010's, that's the lesson I'm taking away from Black Hole and every other book I've stumbled across in my whole life: Good or bad, I have no idea what's next. But rest assured there IS something next. And that unknown void is ELECTRIFYING as shit.

Kiel
Is it weird that none of us have written about Scott Pilgrim yet?

Look, the five volumes Bryan Lee O'Malley and Oni Press released over the past few years collectively make "the book of the decade" as far as I'm concerned. Do I need to go over the reasons why? OK. Fine. It's funny. It's exciting. It tells a story that's perfect for comics in a way that could only really work as comics. It's cool and nerdy and full of silly pop culture stuff but not in the way that's all "Hey everybody, I'm making a Stone Roses reference. Bad ass, right?" all the time. Most importantly, Scott Pilgrim is built on characters who feel and act like real people with real emotions who really fuck up. And even though you get a little mad at them for being them, you still love the lot of exaggerated brush strokes and the not-so real world they live in. They're your friends.

But I'm not sure that's why I'll remember 2009 as the year of Scott Pilgrim. Because as good as the books are (which you can read about...um...everywhere else on the internet), what really heightened the Scott Pilgrim-iness of the past five years and last year in particular was the passionate, buzzy, "let's dress up like Scott and Ramona" outpouring of excitement that's accompanied each new volume with more and more fervor.

Damn near a year ago from when I'm writing this post, the fifth volume – "Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe" – debuted at New York Comic Con, and as someone who was around, I can attest that it was mega, super duper fun. The gang at Oni and O'Malley went out of their way again to make the book's release an event no matter where you were with the tricked out foil cover on the first printing but even the little "this weekend only" touches like the multiple signings and parties and the goofy pink wrap-around on the book helped make people who already really wanted to read that book get their hands on it even sooner (as impossible as that may sound). It was more like they were throwing a party that selling a product.

For me it was fun too to be there and talk to O'Malley for a minute specifically about all that stuff and then watch Jonah chat him up on video like he did the SNL dudes or Chuck D or whoever. Scott Pilgrim is one of the few things where I worry that my covering it will just come off as fanish wanking, but I hope that we did a nice job of sharing that legitimately buzzy, newsworthy craziness of the book owning (pwning?) that show for people who were waiting for copies to get mailed to the Des Moines Borders to pick it up.

I never got way into the thrill so many had following the final Harry Potter volumes hit the stands, but I'm more than pumped that Scott Pilgrim scratches that "read it at midnight on Rickey's couch where I'm sleeping for the weekend of the show and then e-mail all my comic buds to discuss it ASAP" itch. I don't know if I've enjoyed all that stuff more than the Scott Pilgrim books themselves, but some days it feels really fucking close, you know?

And next year, it'll kick up to a new level I'm sure. The final book. The movie full of hip and gorgeous young people doing back flips. The video game. I've been preparing for Scott Pilgrim to hit bigger amongst the people in my life (and in the world) who aren't following comics all day for a while. I've loaned the books to my buds. I bought my 14-year-old brother (who loves video games and whose occasional comic buying is centered around things like Death Note and Bleach) that Borders three pack of the first books for Christmas. I want to see the comics crossover in a way that'll in some respects take the community and love and madness comics folks have built around a really great story out of our hands.

It might not happen of course. The movie might do just all right despite what we all expect to be rave reviews. The books might see a tiny but unspectacular bump in book store sales. The youth of America may not spontaneously start wearing Sloan t-shirts everywhere and saying things like "If your life had a face, I would punch it" at the dinner table to confuse their parents. But things will still be different once the book's run wraps, and for now I'm just really glad to have been along on the ride to see what happens.

Our Comics Decade: 2008

Rickey
It was 2008 when I left Wizard and started at DC Comics. And alongside stuff in my job life, there were all these fragments of changes in my personal life that year that piled up and kinda splintered my memory a bit of what all went down and what all I read. So in that spirit of change, instead of an essay on a single book, here are a few paragraphs about books I read that year that created some impact on me and have remained impactful on me two years (whoopty poop, I know) later.

WATCHMEN - In 2008, as con season loomed, my BFF David Paggi was packing something like 10 themed sketchbooks, all of which were intense ass-kickers (Calvin and Hobbes, Star Wars, Lockjaw, etc.). I decided I wanted to do a theme book, too, and (I think my girlfriend recommended this) I went with a Watchmen book cause it was one of my favorite stories and probably my favorite comic. I also recognized that other than the occasional special commission, there wouldn't be much new art featuring the characters, so collecting it myself from any artist willing to draw it was my only chance to see something new.
I re-read my copy of the trade paperback collection in preparation, fell back in love with it, and decided I'd found the perfect theme for me. It's just a reminder: Re-read your favorite books every few years! It feels good.

PLANETES - I guess I just thought manga was mostly boys with hilariously large swords and overly gelled spiky hair fighting each other. Or books with cute animals exploding into stars and candy. Or books about upskirt shots of high school girls or snot bubbles or tentacled monsters assaulting cities. Or books about guys drawn like girls who make out with girls and turn into pandas when they get water dumped on them.
I'd just like to say I'M SORRY, MANGA. I had you UTTERLY pegged wrong.
Other than tasting Akira back when it was released in phone book editions from Dark Horse, I'd never seriously tried the format until Sean passed me his copies of Planetes, a straight sci-fi series about space-garbage collectors and the drama they deal with while working in a stressful new environment. It was human and beautifully drawn and galactic-ly NOT what I thought manga was. After that, the solar paneling opened on the space shuttle of my interest and a whole universe of new, gravity-free books flooded my cabin. Without Planetes I'd have never been interested in smart adult fiction comics like Solanin or 20th Century Boys or Monster. Or smart adult horror/thrillers like Dragonhead or Drifting Classroom or Uzumaki. Or a dozen other fun, completely accessible titles (Gon, Museum of Terror, Disappearance Diary, The Push Man...the list goes on) my ignorance wouldn't have previously allowed me to try. I'm proud of the manga I read now. It feels good.



THE MONKEY & THE CROCODILE - I read this absolutely powerful short story from Robert Goodin for the first time in 2008 and, as goofy as it sounds, it put a lot of stuff in perspective for me that year. It's online here and will take you just you maybe 2 minutes to read and I beg that you do. But don't gulp it down so quickly you miss the lush cross-hatching and inking tones. I like to read it every few months now. It feels good.



CAT GETTING OUT OF A BAG - I think this Jeffrey Brown book about a kitty being cute came out in 2007, but I gave my first copy to my BFF Ryan and his then-new girlfriend Elizabeth because the night I met her they were looking at it together on my comic shelf. I had to buy my new copy at New York Comic-Con in 2008 (from Jeffrey directly, so he sketched a kitty in it!) and then, in 2009, Ryan and Elizabeth were married. :) It feels good.

So, comics comics comics. 2008 was all about feeling good and dealing with new, terrifying adventures. And sometimes it was about a monkey and a crocodile.

Kiel
I don't know now if I can put my finger on it today, but I was feeling a little burnt out on comics by the time 2008 rolled around. Well, maybe not comics really. There were still comics I liked, still comics I recognized were well done and still the occasional comics that really knocked me on my ass. But I was really fucking tired of having to look at every comic I read through the prism of how it related to my job – a job that for various reasons was becoming more and more of a bear to work through with or without comics being involved. By the end of my tenure at Wizard, every superhero comic I read was just a reminder of where our coverage was going. Every indie book an opportunity to try and weasel more page space in the magazine for the black & white contingent. Every web comic a note that told me I hadn't reached my mandatory blogging minimum for the website that day. I know Ben's complained about this before, but sometimes doing the thing you love for a living can work to stress you the fuck out.

Luckily for me, right when all seemed at its worst, Dark Horse sent me fat ass Casper The Friendly Ghost trade.

I'm sure most of the people who read our blog are died in the wool superhero people, and the rest of you are some strange cross section of blogging types and industry commenters. And if I had to wager a guess how many of you gave two fucks about Casper the Friendly Ghost, it'd be a very, very small number of our already paltry readership. But seriously, gang...Casper is totally fucking boss.

I read next to no Harvey Comics as a little kid, having stepped almost directly from "I Can Read" books to newsstand issues of Batman. And the few times I do remember crossing paths with the traditional Harvey characters like Casper, Ritchie Rich and Hot Stuff, I'm pretty sure I just assumed they were watered down kiddie stuff. But by the time I reached "adulthood" (arguable that), I'd grown one of the legion of people who regularly harp on there not being enough good comics for kids on the market, so having 480 pages of what were considered classic kids comics dropped in my lap for no reason was a welcome distraction.

Really though, what makes that Casper volume stick out for me is the fact that when I took it home to read, there was no job function motivating it. There was no way in hell Wizard was going to end up covering reprints of kids stuff from nearly 60 years in the past, even in the more bizarre corners of the web site that I was increasingly being put in charge of. No, I just knew that Jerry Beck, whose Cartoon Brew blog I'd become a regular reader of, had written the intro and that in general, I'd never given old Casper a chance. So I sneaked the volume out one weekend with my Dark Horse comps thinking I'd give it a ten-minute flip before getting back to the real comics.

And that weekend, I ended up reading the whole thing cover-to-cover without even considering picking up another comic.

And look, it's not like Casper revolutionized the way I saw the medium as a whole or anything. And it's not even that many of the comics were all that great, because some of the early ones were downright stupid. But I became so involved in the trade then because I was able to sit down with something that was generally well-crafted and watch its stories roll out one after another only for the joy of watching them come together. Issue after issue, I saw the animation artists who were moonlighting with the naive little ghost try to pull more and more new ways to tell jokes out of the almost immediately played out "He's a friendly ghost, but people always run away from him because he's a ghost" setup. And they succeeded!

Issue after issue (and by extension, year after year), the Casper creators found new ways to play with readers expectations, expand the cast, tell new stories and restick the landing on old jokes all with a slick, attractive line and a kind of off kilter charm that we almost never see in comics today – kiddie stuff or otherwise. And one of the ideas that came wrapped up in all of this which I was really enamored with was the idea that there was no real limit to what the artists could do. No one was over their shoulder saying, "You've got to explain that Casper isn't a dead little boy, because that will disturb children!" or "You can't have Spooky do anything that would be viewed as morally questionable because he's setting an example!" There's a scene in that book where Casper goes to an amusement part and while on a ride, a man recognizes him as a ghost, whips out a revolver and shoots the kid through the head (it goes through him of course). Can you fucking imagine DC trying to pull a joke like that off in Tiny Titans?!?!?

Those old school Casper comics reminded me that when you're telling stories for anyone, the best kinds of stories to tell are the ones you're entertained by, which I think we forget way too much these days and especially forget when talking about media for children. But more importantly, what it reminded me of was that the reason I got into this game was because I love comics, and if the job I'm doing isn't feeding that passion then it's not me that's screwing up or the comics that are – it's the job. Unsurprisingly, shortly after discovering that Casper trade, Wizard and I went our separate ways in terms of my full time employment (a true blessing, all things told)...and shortly after that, I took Ben up on his offer to write for this blog. And now every time I get a little burnt out on what I "have" to do for work, I shut out all the external pressures around covering comics as an industry and read some comics that no one told me too. You should try it sometime too!

Ben
Like most people, I’m pretty adept at being a big fish in a small pond, but toss me in the ocean and I gotta work a little harder. So it went when I was in high school and juggling all sorts of extracurriculars then went to college and was lucky to lead my intramural football team to a single win or get more than two lines in a play, and so I figured it would probably go again when I transitioned from working at Wizard to working at Marvel.

By the end of my three years at Wizard, along with my two illustrious co-bloggers and a few others, I was part of the group more or less calling the shots on what went in the magazine monthly and had a fairly big voice in the direction we were taking the ship. Making the leap to Marvel meant I was no longer one of the more vocal folks among a crew of 20 or 30, able to play video games in our Publisher’s office and able to turn my dreams of getting original art of the ultimate Suicide Squad into a reality with relative ease; now I was the low man on the totem pole in one of half a dozen departments that made up a huge, international, legitimate company and did not even know the names of everybody on my floor (I still don’t).

That was why when only a couple of months into my new job I received an e-mail requesting I attend a marketing brainstorming session on an upcoming event called Secret Invasion that would include the Publisher, Editor-in-Chief, heads of various departments and Brian Michael Bendis via speakerphone, I was determined to do something to make an impression.

At the time, my then-girlfriend had become somewhat obsessed with lonelygirl15, the YouTube phenomenon that started as what seemed like a video blog from a home-schooled girl then morphed into a strange chronicle of the protagonist and her friends as they were uncovering secrets about and were on the run from a sinister cult. At first, nobody knew if lonelygirl was truth or fiction; once the game was given away and it was revealed that it was indeed a staged series using actors, I used to give Megan a hard time about the cheesiness of it all, but at the same time, I was more than a little impressed at how little the folks creating the show had done with very little and how they perpetrated a pretty cool hoax for quite a while.

I was also sure we could somehow use the same template for Secret Invasion, a story entirely based on deception and the idea of something alien infiltrating normal society.

During the brainstorming meeting, I was nervous as hell with every important person in my new company in attendance and throwing ideas back and forth, but I finally gathered up the courage to speak up when marketing strategies were being discussed and mention the idea I had: based loosely on the lonelygirl series, we’d set up a video blog series about a seemingly normal girl that folks would believe was a real person, but we’d seed throughout that something strange was going on with her brother and drop clues now and again with the ultimate payoff being that this was all taking place in the Marvel Universe and the brother in question was a Skrull infiltrator.

I wasn’t sure how my idea—admittedly roughly-shaped at best at that point—would be received, but Publisher Dan Buckley almost immediately said he thought it had potential, and Bendis liked it as well, so before I had fully digested pitching something in front of such an impressive group, my “creation” had legs.

As soon as I got out of the meeting, I got on my cell phone and called Megan, who made fun of me for using the lonelygirl template after all the shit I had talked about it, but also congratulated me and made one thing clear: she wanted to be the girl in the video. Of course I thought she would be perfect, but at the time I just told her I would do my best.

Over the next several weeks, myself and an expanding group that included marketing gurus Arune Singh and Jim McCann as well as my own boss, John Cerilli, and other folks like Mike Pasciullo and Tim Dillon met several times on the project Tim called—to my chagrin—“Lonely Ben.” We had to act fast as we’d need to get these videos out there ASAP in order to have enough time to build at least some following before the reveal. Cost was also a factor as we could only afford to pay so much to get these done with it being a last minute addition.

Fortunately I had the perfect cast and crew in mind, and I knew I could get them cheap.

In addition to being super cool and rad at making ceramic wings, Rickey’s girlfriend, Sam, also majored in film in college and I knew she could take a project like this and bring it to life in the fashion we were looking easy; besides that, Sam is one of the most creative people I know particularly when it comes to using sparse materials to make something awesome, so if anybody could create the sets and props we needed on a shoestring (and that’s being generous) budget, it was her.

As far as actors, I was fortunate enough to have a lovely and talented girlfriend ready to play our lead, and she enlisted her friends Guy and Ashleigh to serve as the character’s brother and best friend respectively.

I gave Jim—an actual published writer as opposed to a guy who kicks around on blogs and writes silent Werewolf comics—the outline of how I saw the project going and he created an actual script. Jim was also the one who named our intrepid lead Kinsey, after a relative, with Walden as a last name “because it sounds good” (I think). Another thing we tried to do was throw Easter eggs throughout the episodes as to revelations that would be made in the actual Secret Invasion series, like naming Kinsey’s brother Hank (since Hank Pym would be revealed as a Skrull) or using the actual Skrull alphabet Bendis had created on various documents.

Around this time, the idea was put forward that though the Kinsey video series would end as Secret Invasion began, it would be cool to have the character continue to appear throughout the event in comic book form. There was consideration given at some point to Kinsey potentially being the lead of Secret Invasion: Front Line, but Brian Reed had already outlined the series with other characters by then, so we scuttled it. Ultimately, it was decided that this could be the perfect opportunity to try something new with our Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited web comics, as we’d do three one-page updates a week and ultimately have enough material to put a trade out in the end; thus Secret Invasion: Home Invasion was born.

As Jim and I were working with Sam to get the scripts spiffed up for production of the video and approval by Bendis, me and Cerilli also met with editor John Barber, who was going to be heading up the comics end of Home Invasion. John being a smart and quite cutting edge dude, he immediately keyed in on what we were trying to do and set to work finding the right creative team to do the job, which ended up being writer Ivan Brandon and artist Nick Postic. While I never did get to meet Nick, Megan and I both ended up getting to chat with Ivan that year at the New York Comic Con, which was a neat experience that he admitted was a bit surreal as he had been writing a fictional version of a girl he was now being introduced to for quite some time by that point (I would be remiss if I didn’t point you in the direction of Ivan’s excellent Final Crisis Aftermath: Escape or tell you to pick up Nation X #2 for John Barber’s super-fun No-Girl story right now).

The weekend of shooting came and to their credit, Sam, Megan, Guy and Ashleigh got the whole thing done in two days, zipping back and forth between our apartment and Sam and Rickey’s (fortunately only a few minutes away), both of which were transformed into the types of places you could absolutely buy a teenage girl living in thanks to no small effort on Sam’s part as far as set creation. They seriously worked non-stop for nearly 48 hours straight (with eight or so hours slipped in for sleep) while I mostly just took people to and from the train station and picked up lunch using the funds generously contributed by Mr. Pasciullo.

The results were stunning and made even more impressive by the fact that a couple weeks later they had to re-shoot almost the entire thing (for reasons I can’t and don’t really need to get into) and it came out even better the second time around. I remain to this day immensely proud of the work Megan, Sam, Guy and Ashleigh did and am incredibly grateful they were willing to burn two weekends bringing my stupid alien version of lonelygirl to life.

So the videos began going up according to plan on MySpace and picked up a surprising amount of regular viewers who thought they were just watching a high school girl planning for her prom; as people would comment with dress suggestions or try to cheer Kinsey up when the guy she liked didn’t ask her, I felt both a giggly tingle that we were actually pulling this off and a small smidgen of guilt that we were somehow lying to these poor people.

As we came closer to the big reveal, we brought a couple of comic sites in on the act, and they were extremely helpful in directing fans over to the Kinsey series which suddenly jumped in views (the nice people at MySpace also helped by making Kinsey a featured friend). I was expecting a bit of a negative backlash as you always do from the Internet when we let everybody in on the trick, but most of the feedback we received was refreshingly positive, praising our attempts to do something different, which made all the hard work more than worth it. When we at last aired the final video, which ended on the cliffhanger of Hank revealing his Skrull form (I can’t heap enough superlatives on what Sam was able to do with a paper mask and shaky camera effect) then followed up with an ad for Secret Invasion as well as Home Invasion, the only folks really upset were those who had thought Kinsey was real.

It was pretty cool attending the aforementioned New York Comic Con the week that Secret Invasion #1 shipped and seeing that final video air before several Marvel panels to thunderous applause; it was cooler when some fans and even creators like Dan Slott recognized Megan and yelled out “Kinsey!” on the floor.

Over the next eight months, my job mostly done, I presided merely over loading the new pages Ivan and Nick produced for Home Invasion and updating the story on the homepage. I can’t deny how neat it was to see this character I had no small role in creating (and who looked like my girlfriend) interacting with Nick Fury and the Young Avengers as Ivan’s meticulous and suspenseful story unspooled with the help of Nick’s downright spooky art.

Kinsey Walden has not been seen since the end of Secret Invasion, but she is out there in the Marvel Universe and I do have a Secret Invasion: Home Invasion trade paperback sitting on my shelf that credits me with special thanks right up front and tells the tale of my little viral marketing idea and the life it took on. No matter what I do or don’t accomplish in comics, I will always have that book, and I’m so thankful to everybody who made it possible.

I’m glad I spoke up at that meeting.

Our Comics Decade: 2007

Kiel
2007 was a year chock fucking full of great comics. The short list of books I dug that also seem to qualify as critical darlings includes Exit Wounds, Town Boy, The Blot and Bookhunter not to mention everything Gipi had hitting. And there were scads of amazing mainstreamy projects from Criminal to The Immortal Iron Fist to the first of those jaw-dropping Kirby reprints DC put out.

And for me personally, 2007 was a year where I did a lot of writing that was both challenging and rewarding (yet not always both at the same time!) I wrote a profile on artist Brett Booth's return to the limelight after a year of living in a van (sounds more dramatic than it was, but still a great story), finished a mega-engaging and mega-controversial profile of Darwyn Cooke (better saved for another post, me thinks) and a profile on Kirby's creation of the Fourth World (still SUPER bummed that thing never saw print).

And I was looking over all these great books and all these great memories from that 12-month period and trying to decide which one thing I could write about...and then I just thought, "Fuck it. I'ma write about G.I. Joe!" And not just any G.I. Joe series but a G.I. Joe series with the added layer of jingoist absurdity that is the subtitle "America's Elite" as well as the chronically overused/unimaginative story title of "World War III." Even if you're a little predisposed to like G.I. Joe in general, that sounds pretty silly, right?

But, look...like a lot of people my age, I'm a big fan of Larry Hama's '80s run on the Marvel G.I. Joe series. At its best, that book was a prime example of straight to awesomeness comics craftsmanship – well-paced, smartly-written and highly entertaining comics. At its worst, that book was still fired from the hip in each new issue, pulling gonzo sci-fi surprises and inexplicably fun plot twists from God only knows where. It was unsurprisingly a great gateway comic for young people and a cultural artifact from an era when comics still had a chance at holding that mainstream junk culture status and blah blah blah, you've heard it all before.

I feel like I should cop to the strong associations I have to the franchise in general from my elementary days and the burgeoning would-be comics professional's appreciation I have for Hama's work right out front. Nostalgia obviously plays a HUGE part in why I started picking up this series from the Wizard office comp stack that year, and I'm positive that I wouldn't have enjoyed the final year of the Devil's Due run on the series nearly as much without that childhood fondness in full effect. That said, writer Mark Powers and artist Mike Bear still pulled one hell of a story out of "World War III." It's got everything that you'd be looking for in an over-the-top action comic about a highly trained special missions force with an unlimited budget for transforming tank/helicopter/space shuttle laser-powered vehicles fighting against a serpent-themed terrorist force with similar capabilities as well as wild super science on their side. Cobra hatches a real plan to take over the world, spreads the resources of the Joe team super thin in a fire-fight across the great cities of the globe, kidnaps the president and fires a bunch of bombs all over hell's half acre. In terms of "going out with a bang" the creative team raised the stakes for the entire franchise and expanded the scope of the whole series, bringing some actual consequences into play for characters built on being locked in an eternal stalemate. All of this is played with a surprising amount of subtly by Powers and drawn with some great, gritty (in the best sense of the word) atmosphere along with a lot of clean, crazy action pieces at the hands of Bear and his collaborators. Plus, whether you notice it or not, there are a million little nods to continuity bull and character arcs from the old Marvel series that don't get in the way of the action.

It's fun comics.

And sure, there are plenty of criticisms to level against this kind of thing. Were these comics created specifically for an ever-shrinking fan-base obsessed with the minutia of the stories of their youth? Pretty much, yeah. Was the book cancelled during the course of the story line by not even meeting the sales standards the licensor expected even considering that small, inbred market? Yup. Is this a comic whose shelf life only extends maybe a year or two past its initial serialization? I'm betting that's a big "Uh huh."

But I really could give two fucks. We're lucky enough to live in a world where new, interesting, challenging, beautiful works hit every year, pushing the boundaries of comics as art and entrenching the medium more and more into a popular and respectable place in the broader culture landscape. I love living in that world, not only because I get to track that great growth in comics quality and popularity as a reader and reporter, but also because when a good ol' fashioned slice of comic book comfort food comes along, I can dive in and enjoy it for what it is without having depressing thoughts of, "Is this really what we've come to?!?!?!" running through my head. Isn't that a great thing?

Ben
In the summer of 2007, I came to a major crossroads in my professional life. Following my and Rickey’s super-successful hosting of the Wizard Fan Awards at Wizard World Chicago for the second straight year (or more accurately later that evening), my old chum and former Wizard editor Ryan Penagos, who had since moved over to Marvel where he was editor of Marvel.com, brought up with me the potential of coming onboard as his assistant (he didn’t offer me the job outright, mind you, just the opportunity to interview for it).

The idea of leaving Wizard wasn’t actually anything new at that point, as I had interviewed for positions both at DC and Marvel in the year leading up; however, first those were both straight-up publishing editorial gigs, and second, with each I had a chance of landing the job, but not an amazing one. With Ryan’s offer, I stood a significantly better chance of actually getting the position, though I would be transitioning from working in print back to the web.

I went into Marvel a couple times, interviewed pretty well, and got to meet (or re-meet) some of the folks I’d be working with; I really felt at home there pretty instantly and also the idea of moving back over to the digital side of media was starting to really grow on me as I saw the potential. However, signing on with Marvel wasn’t really such a tough decision (I’d wanted to work there since I was about eight—this was the dream), it was leaving Wizard.

Say what you will about Wizard Magazine, but the people there were very good to me. They took a shot on me straight out of college and provided me with all the contacts in the comics industry I needed to make a (potentially) lifelong career. Additionally, I owe guys like Pat McCallum, Dan Reilly, Joe Yanarella, Brian Cunningham, Mike Cotton, Andy Serwin, Jesse Thompson, Mel Caylo and plenty I’m forgetting a ton not just for helping me come into my own as a writer or an editor, but in many ways adopting me and helping me learn how to live as an adult truly away from home for the first time.

The people running Wizard were also not shy about letting me know how much they appreciated me when I told them I was thinking about leaving for Marvel, both in the form of heartfelt words as well as the offer of a potential raise and promotion. I spoke to pretty much everybody important in my life, from Megan, my friends and my family to comics pros I respected about what road I should go down. Appropriately enough, it came down once more to Geoff Johns, who offered me the advice that every few years you need to look at what you’re doing with your life and determine whether there’s still room for you to grow and try new things in your current situation, or whether you’ve pretty much gone as far as you could go there; for me, leaving Wizard wasn’t about money, or mistreatment or any grudge, it was simply a matter of having achieved all I could there and wanting the new challenges that Marvel represented.

One of those new challenges was chucking years of travelling primarily by car out the window and adapting to a daily train commute from my home in Saddle Brook, New Jersey into New York City. At the time, I was aghast, always having been a hardcore car guy, but now, just over two years later, I take the train everywhere I can possibly go. A big draw for train travel to a guy like me is that once you get your schedule and commute down, you can very easily lose yourself in a book, magazine or comic, which is exactly what I did.

Interestingly enough, one of the very first things I utilized my new train commute into Marvel to read was Maus. I say this was interesting because reading Maus was something I was supposed to do for Wizard, but just never got around to.

Earlier in 2007, the aforementioned Joe Yanarella called me into his office and tasked me with conducting Wizard’s first major feature/interview involving Art Spiegelman. For those not familiar, Spiegelman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, writer, editor, etc. viewed by most as of one the—if not the—most important and respected figures in the alternative comics movement. He’s a certifiable genius, a huge advocate for creator rights, and has won a bazillion awards, so needless to say he’s a huge deal.

Joe had reached out to Spiegelman and gotten him to agree to an interview with Wizard, which was kinda tantamount to Entertainment Weekly landing an interview with Nelson Mandela to discuss Invictus in terms of a legitimizing event. Wizard had long been seen as the unruly frat house of comics, so a working relationship of any sorts with Art Spiegelman, complete with meaty interview and profile, would be a huge first step in Joe’s savvy plan to up the mag’s profile and pedigree.

The only problem was I had no idea why he wanted me to do it.

Yeah, I was the primary staff writer at the time and, don’t get me wrong, I think I’m pretty decent at what I do, but I had an embarrassingly limited knowledge of Spiegelman and his work as well as alternative comics in general. Also, I had tanked my last major profile assignment on Bill Messner-Loebs big-time. Undaunted, Joe said he had faith I could pull it off—and I appreciate that to this day—and sent me home with Wizard’s copy of Maus and orders to get a crash course from Kiel and Sean on all things Spiegelman.

As it turned out, Kiel would end up going to WonderCon that year in my place (I can’t remember precisely why) to meet and take initial notes on Spiegelman, though Joe still intended me to ultimately be the guy conducting the feature. The interview kept getting moved further and further back until I made my intentions about potentially leaving for Marvel known, at which point it was decided that Kiel—who had already logged plenty of time on this and was way more familiar with Spiegelman and his world to boot—would inherit the assignment regardless of whether I stayed or went. It took awhile, but Kiel did eventually publish the profile and I for one am extremely glad he did as opposed to be, because it was a damn fine piece.

So getting back to the main point here, I had this perfectly good copy of Maus, one of the most highly-touted works of graphic literature of all-time, and it seemed a shame not to read it before having to return it to Wizard. So read it I did in some of my very first train rides to and from New York City.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about how great Maus is, since obviously it has won a friggin’ Pulitzer and if you really want to read some decent essays praising it you can find them pretty easily. I’ll simply say that I enjoyed the heck out of it and started actively looking forward to my two-hour roundtrip simply because I wanted to get to the next chapter and see what happened. I’ll also say that one thing I’ve certainly learned from reading more indy or alternative comics in the past couple years is how they all seem to aspire to using a more down-to-earth conversational tone and yet still convey excitement and heightened emotion worthy of visual accompaniment; I’ve seen both hits and misses in this regard, but no bigger home run than Maus, where Spiegelman goes about just telling a story the same way he likely would if he were sitting right across from you sans theatrics or explosions and yet it’s the most exciting, tantalizing narrative you could imagine, complimented perfectly by his art, subversively placing cute animals into such horrific situations as the Holocaust and mundane ones like a mid-life semi-crisis.

Though my father is Jewish and thus I’m half myself, I don’t consistently feel a real kinship to that faith by virtue of not being raised that way, by having many Christian influences in my life, by my dad really not being all that religious, and so on; however, Maus is one of those works that reminds me that I am a part of an often terrible one, yet one that yielded incredible stories and amazing survivors. Little about Maus could really be called uplifting, but that it connected me in some way with part of my heritage, albeit through tragedy, did give me some sense of odd pride. I also never felt lost or confused by it, a testament to the man who created a story that could win a Pulitzer yet appeal to the masses as well.

I’d still be terrified to try and interview Art Spiegelman though.

Rickey
If you look up the year 2007 in the dictionary you'll find "The shit" next to the definition because that's what the year was for me - THE SHIT.

That was the year my girlfriend moved up from Austin, Texas to live with me in the New York area (marking the first time we ever lived in the same town together), and it was the year I did several movie set visits (The Dark Knight, Watchmen, Iron Man) for Wizard as part of my new role as Entertainment Editor. And 2007 was the first year I ever went to San Diego Comic-Con, this little show out on the west coast. I was so busy at the show that I didn't get a chance to give the floor a thorough probing, but I did make time to stroll through artist's alley. Even though I was generally let down by the selection, I DID find a book unlike anything I'd ever seen before: boy's club #1 by Matt Furie!

I was at the Sparkplug booth and overheard a random guy telling the cashier that he's seen Matt Furie's art show in LA and loved the book, which they were distributing. So I flipped through it and actually chuckled out loud at the unnaturally nuclear levels of goofy irreverence (goofeverence?) inside. Imagine four endearing, harmless, pop-culture quoting, hot dog-eating, video game-addicted, beer-guzzling, pot-devouring anthropomorphic dudes just hanging out and living together in que sera sera bliss. Now imagine they invited you to hang out at their place for 40 deceptively simple pages and you've just pictured the most care-free day you never realized you could have - and the funniest, most fun comic I've ever read. And shit, this book reminds me of some of my friends so much that I can pick it up and read any page and it's practically like I'm hanging out with them (I'm looking at you, David and Kiel).

That first issue find was a grand one, too. The book doesn't have any indicia, copyright or website info, so I had to look up Furie's name and the name of the book online. I couldn't find dick, and none of my friends had heard of the book, so I just had to wait till a new issue came out. Luckily issue #2 did. And then so did issue #3! My first print of issue #1 is at a slightly larger scale than the more recent printings, too, so BONUS! I finally met Furie at San Diego Comic-Con in 2009, and he even did a Watchmen sketch for me. But never before or since that 2007 show have I ever blind-found a new creator or book that so perfectly encapsulated what I love about comics - or what I never realized I COULD love about comics.

P.S. My BFF Sean T. Collins wrote about the series here. Check out his better-written reasons why you'd love the comic. He's got better sample images than I do, too.

Our Comics Decade: 2006

Ben
No doubt for me 2006 was the year of 52.

Only a few months into my tenure as DC contact for Wizard, my first two major assignments were steering to a compelling close the coverage of Infinite Crisis my predecessor Rich Ho had begun and coming up with my own plan to cover this new initiative. And with all due respect to Rich, while managing Infinite Crisis, DC’s biggest event in nearly two decades, certainly must have provided quite the challenge, figuring out how to give monthly love to an innovative new kind of beast—a weekly series with a rotating A-level writing team that impacted the entire publishing line—was a whole other level.

Luckily, I had a lot going for me: I had a great support team both at Wizard and at DC, I both got along with and respected the folks involved with the series, and last but not least, 52 was really really good.

Upon becoming DC contact, I inherited a huge pile of notes, sketches, etc. related to a project with the working title of “52.” My then-boss Brian Cunningham had been on hand for one of the very first meetings where 52 (I’ll take it out of quotes because obviousy the working title stuck) had been discussed, so he sat me down for a lengthy period and gave me the short version of what was being discussed (said meeting took place in the fall of 2005, over six months before 52 would actually launched, so as has been said in many interviews over the past few years a lot changed, but an impressive amount remained intact as well).

To sum it up, I was impressed, both with what a bold move this was and also by how much the folks involved had their shit together and were working so far ahead of the curve. Later on, both to my additional respect and sometimes unavoidable frustration, I’d discover they were equally adept at changing on the fly when necessary. Mostly though, I felt both because this was my first major chance to prove myself professionally and because I had such appreciation for the guys involved (Geoff Johns in particular, who as I detailed two posts ago basically got me my start), I was bound and determined to cover this sucker to the best of my ability.

The first thing I did to this end was convince my superiors that it would be a good idea to send me solo to WonderCon in San Francisco in January; it was a show that Wizard did not typically attend, but as the entire 52 writing team of Geoff, Mark Waid, Grant Morrison and Greg Rucka as well as editor Steve Wacker and DC head Dan DiDio would all be there, I saw an opportunity to kick off our coverage with a bang, and my bosses concurred.


WonderCon was a weekend of excess in some ways for me, but mostly good ways (and I’m a fairly conservative person when it comes to a lot of stuff, so “excess” for me might be tame for a lot of you). First off, Wizard put me up in a way nicer hotel room than I’d ever stayed in before, so that was pretty cool; one of the first things I did when I got there was to call Rickey (I called Megan first), tell him how sick the room was and then send him pics. I also ordered this crazy ass deep-fried sushi from room service because I was starving and had not eaten since leaving Newark.

Not long after my “dinner,” I got a call from Geoff telling me to meet him, Steve and Mark in a bar down the street. I had met Steve a couple of times at that point, but I’d never had any contact with Mark Waid, who was one of my major heroes and influence, so I was nervous and starstruck from the start. So rattled was I, in fact, that I let Geoff order me a bunch of Jack & Cokes without paying heed to the fact I hadn’t had caffeine since my freshman year of college because I was enraptured listening to Mark tell stories about writing issues of Spider-Man Team-Up in the 90’s. I think the worst that happened that night was that I completely inadvertently implied that Mark was old at some point, but the next morning my stomach and I were feeling the combination of the time change, fried sushi, and Jack & Cokes pretty bad.

I was scheduled to sit in on a closed door meeting of the 52 braintrust to observe and take notes around noon and to say I was physically a bit rough would be an understatement, something anybody who had the misfortune of being a stall over from me in the convention center restroom an hour before would be able to attest to (sorry, guy). Fortunately a quick trip to CVS to grab some Pepto Bismol and a cross-country pep talk from Joe Yanarella later and I was back in business (Geoff and Steve would later tell me they had no clue I was ready to puke into my briefcase most of the meeting).

The meeting was incredible and certainly unlike anything else I’ve ever gotten to experience in or out of comics. The natural rhythm and flow between these five creative forces working seamlessly as one was a thing to behold. During the period I observed, I got to witness more or less in its entirety the genesis and evolution of the Black Adam-Isis wedding and all the things swirling around it from large chunks of Renee Montoya’s journey all the way to the eventual murder of Osiris. At other creative summits I’ve attended, I’ve freuqently piped in with a suggestion here or there for some minor thing, but for this one, I just sat in rapt attention and watched tose gents do their thing (and not just because I was kinda queasy).

I had some other neat experiences out in San Fran (being a question plant at the 52 panel, watching Frank Miller and Jim Lee hold court at our hotel bar, mocking Christos Gage at the galling thought that he could actually get a Union Jack limited series greenlit at Marvel), but pretty quickly it was time to head home and get back to work.


As a professional working to cover 52, I had both my good times and my bad times. I loved fun little things we’d come up with on the fly (as the nature of the project often demanded) like doing a faux tabloid mock-up in one issue of Wizard covering the big mysteries/events where Greg Rucka and Keith Giffen shind as my “correspondents.” On the flipside, we did a sketchbook feature featuring what would become the Great Ten and Lex Luthor’s Infinity Inc. that was a nightmare to coordinate because there were a lot of last-minute changes going on in 52 itself (they proved positives for the book, which was of course the real priority, but stymied me a bit as a guy trying to produce coverage three months out, but that was a tightrope we often walked and fell off at Wizard).

As a fan, I loved 52, perhaps even moreso than the average dude since I got to see the whole script-to-art process at pretty much every step as my weekly FedEx packages from Alex Segura at DC came in. I will always tip my hat in reverance at how the writers were able to take perennial also-rans like Booster Gold, Ralph Dibny or Montoya and elevate them to being every bit as fleshed out and important as Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman in my eyes. I had immense respect for Keith Giffen’s ability as layout artist to give the book such a consistent feel despite working with literally dozens of other creative types. And perhaps above all, I marveled at the tremendous feat Steve Wacker (and later Michael Siglain accomplished) making the trains run on time. As far as personal favorite issues/moments, I gotta go with the infamous “Wicker Sue” chapter where Ralph and friends break up the ceremony that may or may not have resurrected his wife Sue both due to its incredible emotional wallop and because my buddy Todd Nauck showed once and for all he could not be boxed in as an artist simply capable of humor stories.

In the end, neither Steve nor I would make it to the end of 52 “on the inside.” He left DC for Marvel during the summer of 2006 (which is a bit deceptive as it makes it seem as though e was only onboard a few months, but in fact he’d already helped plan out at least half the series by then) and I moved from the DC beat to the Marvel one a couple months later. I actually sent Steve, Geoff, Mark and Greg a pic we’d all taken at WonderCon with mine and Steve’s faces exed out the day I got transferred with a subject line of something like “Casualties of 52: Who Will Survive?” (I don’t think I included Grant on the e-mail because Grant Morrison has better things to do than read my crappy jokes—ok, all those guys do, but I didn’t know Grant as well).


52 stands to this day for me as milestone in comic book accomplishment and I’m not sure what those guys did can ever be quite duplicated (though Mr. Wacker has done an admirable job with a similar though not exactly the same task on the thrice-weekly Amazing Spider-Man these past couple years). It was also another career milestone for me, as it was the first project I really felt a part of—whether deservingly so or not—and what a way to start.

Rickey
In 2005, Grant Morrison wrote me a love letter. But I didn't really start to understand it until 2006.

It was late in 2005 when All-Star Superman dropped and a lot of the guys at the Wizard offices lost their minds over it. The issue even won top honors in the "Single Issue of the Year" category in the "Best of 2005" issue. But, really, I didn't think it was that great. Between the odd designs from Frank Quitely and the dwarf star density of the plot, I just wasn't that intrigued. I think a lot of that had to do with not understanding the All-Star line period at the time. Then, in early 2006, when I finally sat down with issue #2, my stomach began filling with nerdy butterflies AND STILL HASN'T STOPPED. The only ceiling that seemed capable of containing Grant's cosmic ideas and break-neck plot pacing was my own limit of imagination/understanding and the implied motion and flourishing detail in Quitely's art made me feel like I was watching a cartoon painted cell-by-cell by, I dunno, Moebius. And the colors! I'm convinced Jamie Grant INVENTED new hues for the series. How else do you figure out the color of a Kryptonite eye-beam shooting out of a giant synthetic man and bouncing off the indestructible back of Superman before crystallizing in space? (See issue 4, story page 14)

So instead of talking your ear off about the series, I'm just gonna give you my favorite scenes from issues #2-#5 - the issues that came out in 2006:


Issue #2 - While impressing Lois Lane with his Fortress of Solitude, Superman takes a moment to feed (by hand) a baby Sun-Eater he keeps as a damn pet. What does he feed it? A miniature sun he cracks into pebble-sized pieces with a hammer on something called The Cosmic Anvil, of course.


Issue #3 - After Atlas and Samson show up all Silver Age-y in an effort to win Lois' affections, they wind up fucking up and attracting a mad god who plans on deleting Lois from existence. This series of panels tickles me pink with A) a perfect summation of how serious the Lois/Clark love can be portrayed and B) a dope-ass threat from Superman so palpable it kinda chokes me up.


Issue #4 - When Jimmy Olsen takes over leadership of the top science program in all of human history, he pulls a boner and falls into a vat of something called the Underverse - a newly discovered realm of super-heavy gravity hidden in the basement beneath the known structure of the universe (WHAT?!). Superman not only pulls Jimmy free - he yanks out a mineral specimen from the dangerous reality with as much effort as it takes my chubby ass to shovel snow off my sidewalk.


Issue #5 - In my favorite issue of 2006, Clark Kent visits Lex Luthor in prison to do a Daily Planet story on the villain's incarceration and finds himself the first-hand witness of a superhuman riot. Frank Quitely blew my mind with this sequence as the ultra-strong Parasite's rampage creates an earthquake so vengeful it literally cannot be contained by the panels and rips the fucking page apart!

And yo, the continuity! This was the first place I noticed Grant's proclivity for stringing all his DC stories into one linear continuity all his own. DC One Million, JLA, Animal Man, 52, All-Star Superman, Batman - it's alllllllll connected, and this was the series that showed me that truth. Comic life hasn't been the same.

So I admit, the love letter wasn't to me, or even exclusively FOR me - it was meant for Superman and all the creators over the past 70+ years who have made the Man of Steel one of the most stunning examples of how far and wide comics can journey into the fun-zone of the imagination. Don't get it twisted: All-Star Superman is as wholly about the infinite possibilities of comicdom as it gets. And I'm proud to say that since 2006, after at least 7 or 8 more read-thrus, I'm proud to call it my favorite comic ever. Big words for the comic that gets me more giddy than any other. Now please go and read an issue - any issue. Bet you'll smile at least once.

And for the record, in all my years in comics, I've never spoken to or met Grant Morrison. It's kind of pathetic of me, but I just never got the chance.


Kiel
Maybe my favorite moment in the whole of DC's 52 series comes at the beginning of issue #31. As the cosmic zombie legions of Lady Styx circle in on a planet that just happens to be a lot like Victorian England, all but forgotten '50s space hero Captain Comet makes a last stand, sending a desperate telepathic message across the cosmos asking for help. But no help is on the way, and so a whole civilization is eaten away by blind white cubes as its people have their chest cavities cut open with oblong scissors.

The scene is dramatic and strange and more than a little creepy, despite the fact that it relies on a few well-worn genre and character tropes and has next to nothing to do with any of the regular cast of the 52-issue weekly series. For me, that was one of the series biggest strengths – not the drama of "Can they pull it off?" or even the tension in the many mysteries confronting the main cast, but the weird inventiveness and joy that Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka and Mark Waid were collectively able to pull out of that cut-and-pasted mess (and the DCU is a TOTAL fucking mess) of a universe.

But even considering all those brilliant left-field moments, they aren't the reason I'm writing about 52 for 2006. They just helped me through the reason I am.

See, 2006 was my first full year at Wizard, and while I could go on for a while about my experience landing and keeping the job at the magazine, all that's really germane to this discussion is that I was one of the first staffers (if not the first) tapped to work on Wizard's first stab at having a real online presence with the now defunct WizardUniverse.com. It was an odd thing that first year. Shortly before the summer con season rolled up, I was asked along with new hires Brian Warmoth and Rick Marshall to build an entire back catalog for the site by inputting former magazine features into our super jankety FileMaker Pro-based blogging system. And before we were even finished with that task, the three of us were thrown into the deep end of on online comics journalism when Wizard had its annual Philly convention where it was our stated task to "beat CBR and Newsarama" in posting panel reports and on-the-floor interviews from the show. Boy, did that suck balls.


All things considered, I think the three of us did a pretty great job that year of making the Wizard site viable in the online marketplace, and one huge part of that for me was 52. In any online venture, a big part of getting people to give a shit about what you're writing is interactivity – how many people you can get not just to show up and read or show up and comment, but to show up and link back to you from their own site. With their chock-full of fanboy Easter Eggs approach to throwing every character and their brother into the mix approach, the 52 writers gave our first year on the site a giant gift. Warmoth and I split duties with the series with him interviewing cover artist J.G. Jones each week (and it's still a fucking shame those columns are now gone) while I organized a rag tag bunch of staffers that included everyone from Ben and Rickey to Dave Paggi, TJ and a series of random interns to pitch in to the regular "52 Roundup" column highlighting each issue's biggest moments, plot twists and hidden clues.

That column was occasionally a bear to put together as I had to dive into each Wednesday's new stack of comics (on the week's we couldn't get an advance copy from DC), grab the new issue, pass it amongst the gang and then discuss, assign and write the column with their help. But most of the time it was a total blast. From the ongoing mystery of what exactly Ralph Dibny was going to find throughout his resurrection quest to whatever the hell was going on with the mad scientists of Ooolong Island, there was plenty of addictive cliffhangers carrying along our discussion each week with plenty of curveballs thrown in. And as our silly little column went along, it felt more and more like the round table chats we'd have each week at the Wizard offices was starting to spread around the internet from the site's own message boards to Douglas Wolk's invaluable 52 Pickup blog.

And even though I'd been working at the magazine and having my stuff read by several thousands of fans each month for nearly a year at that point, I didn't feel like I was a part of the broader comics community until that year. While 52 the comic dolled out its thrills over a long, slow-boil story arc, 52 coverage was all about the instantaneous gratification of geeking out over moment of continuity or making some extremely corny (and sometimes just plain mean) joke to see how many people you could get to laugh along. I'm sure that can be said of damn near all writing on the internet, but I never really felt that way about what I did until that 52 column. By the end of it, we even had the writers following along (sometime at a con, ask me about the scariest e-mail I ever got from Mark Waid), though those interactions are dwarfed by what I'm sure Ben's writing about for this year (and if he doesn't include that photo from his Facebook page, he's cheating you poor bastards).

Anyway, the first iteration of the Wizard website collapsed shortly after my year of 52-ing (plus I had to write about Countdown each week during the decline...woof), and it would be easy for me to look upon the whole enterprise as something that never came together in the way I'd quite hoped. But just like 52 the series, that website's bright spots and downturns and (hilariously) dramatic moments added up to a lot more than they'd seem if held in amber (or mylar, to keep my metaphors in house). I wish those archives were still around.

[NOTE: Since it was my turn to post one of these entries, and I see now that Ben did NOT in fact post that pic off of Facebook on the site, I'm doing for him. HAHA! - KP]