As I was cleaning out my computer files, I found some early notes from the Character Assassination story that we did this past January in Amazing Spider-Man 584-588.
Basically this is a running timeline I was keeping for myself as the scripts came in. This isn't final, so there may be mistakes that we corrected for the final books. (and if a mistake made it into the printed book, blame Brennan.)
Anyway, not sure how many people will find this interesting, but I hope you dig it. I just wanted to get it somewhere before I deleted.
-Wacker
CHAR ASS timeline
53 hours
- Bookie found by Shocker
???Hours
-Bookie found by Cops
-Spidey chased and shot
??? Hours
-Carlie gets device from Julian who mentions that Spidey was shot earlier in the day
-Spidey dreams
36 hours
-JJJ and Robbie at gym
-Dexter, Crowne and hollister looking at poll numbers. Hollister losing
-Lily/Harry at Statue
-Vin leaving Home. Pete returns
Less than 35 hours (Sunday evening - after 6:00)
-opening of 585
-Lily/Harry at statue
-Pete in bathroom while Vin confronts carlie
Spidey/menace fight at 14th street
33 hours (Sunday evening - after 8:00)
-Menace flies back to hollister HQ -Harry and Lily scenes
32 Hours til polls open
-O'nell, Carlie and Vin in apartment
-Spidey taken into 5th precinct
24 hours till polls open (6 AM Monday morning)
Spidey in custody/Murdock comes in
Carlie talk to Palone
23 Hours until polls open (7Am monday morning)
Spidey in Rykers Throughout Monday
SPIDEY IN COURT. First part of Spartacus gamBit occurs
Today's letter deals with what has been an ongoing topic in the Spidey letter column: Spidey's web-shooters.
Hey gang, First off, congrats on the book. Spider-Man hasn't been this much fun to read for quite a while, so kudos to you all! But I don't want to bore you with praise. I'm sure you get more than enough of that. I'm writing more in regards to the debate that was happening a while ago about Spidey's web fluid. People were asking, "Why doesn't Spider-Man have some kind of indicator on his web shooters to let him know when he's running low?". Well, I found the answer. He DOES! Or at least, he did. Way back in ASM #337, page 25, Spidey's tussling with his favorite starfish-faced foe, Electro, when a warning light on his web shooter starts blinking, warning him that his cartridge is nearly empty.
So why doesn't he still use this handy light? Here's my theory: After having his web-shooters crushed by numerous villains, Spider-Man has rebuilt them many times. Unfortunately, with money almost always tight, he can usually only afford the most essential components. So the light has to be put on hold until his next check comes around. But by then, he usually has so many other bills that he has to keep putting the light purchase off. That, and the Radio Shack he usually buys the LED's at is always out of stock! (darn it!) No Prize?
Today's letter came in right after we announced #600 and captures a lot of the same sentiments we received at the time.
-Wacker
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Dear Amazing Spidey Crew,
600 issues…a few adjectives come to mind (all positive BTW), but I’ll just stick with the obvious one- AMAZING! To think it was only six years ago that I was reading #500, and though both my world and Spidey’s has changed significantly since then, through it all I can safely say I get the same amount of joy and excitement with each issue. Perhaps even more.
Great to see Dan Slott work on Spidey fulltime and for me the math on #600 was simple: SLOTT + DOC OCK=SOLD! That plus 104 pages all for the LOW, LOW COST OF $4.99!!!! Kudos all around. Guess I’ll have to return the favor by buying all the variant covers, won’t I?
Spidey has always been a huge part of my life and though I can’t recall exactly my first encounter with the webhead, I do know Spider-Man brought me back into comics and has kept me in since. After seeing the first Spider-Man movie 3x in theaters I got a subscription to ASM ASAP starting with #481. I regret not returning to read the title when Straczynski first took over, but I’m so glad right now to be able to be part of this new era of Spider-Man.
I’ll admit that I haven’t loved everything that’s happened in the past 1 ½ year in ASM and still have some unanswered questions regarding One More Day which I’m sure you’ve probably heard enough already. Still waiting to hear about whatever happened to the organic webbing and Spider-Man’s other enhanced powers, but after everything else that’s been revealed thus far, I can wait a little bit longer.
Looking forward to see what you guys have planed going forward A new Sinister Six? Wonder who’s in this roster. Doc Ock? Ana Kraven? The new Vulture?
I hear that Slott and artist supreme Marcos Martin will be teaming up again for a Mysterio story (DROOLS). Eagerly waiting to read it and see who’s under the dome. Quentin Beck, Daniel Berkhart, Francis Klum, or even…..A NEW MYSTERIO! Could it have anything to do with police officers:Quentin Palone & Julian Beck?
Curious and curiouser. Guess we’ll just have to wait and see won’t we? And on the subject of baddies, I don’t suppose we’ll be seeing the comic debut of Swiss Miss a new villain created for the stage set to appear in the SPIDER-MAN: TURN OFF THE DARK musical around the time it opens this February? How’s that for a free plug?
What else can I say but keep up the great work and assuming the thrice monthly schedule continues I’ll see ya again in May 2012 for #700! So what are you guys waiting for? Better get a head start on it now. I can wait…
Sorry to be off the radar so long folks. We've been busy getting Spidey through his big 2009 (21 regular issues so far this year as well as and Annual and an ASM EXTRA, plus several issues of ASM FAMILY...not to mention #600 being 104 pages long!).
In the meantime, We're going to start using this blog as an addendum to the regular letter's page. Fitting in some letters we just may not have room for in the book itself. So if you have something to say, just let us know at spideyoffice @marvel.com.
And on that note, here's a letter that just popped up this morning.
-Wacker
====================================
Dear Marvel,
Thanks.
I grew up reading Spider-Man during the David Michelinie era beginning in the late 80s.
And boy was it a ride! I loved the stories so much, and every month I was treated to the amazing styles of Todd McFarlane, Erik Larsen and Mark Bagley. (Mark drew my favorite version of Mary Jane) Reading those high flying tales made me want to be Spider-Man and just like many people I related to Peter Parker.
I fell out of the series soon after issue 400 in the mid-90s. Not that I didn't like the idea of the Clone but just that I wasn't feeling the same excitement as before.
Unfortunately, it would be nearly seven years (2002) before I reconnected with my friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. But it would happen in a most seemingly random event and JM Straczynski would provide the first-class plane ticket.
I checked out the ASM: Coming Home TPB (on a whim) from my local library of all places and my jaw dropped. This gourmet quality of Spidey was what I'd been missing the last seven years?!? I freaked out and was unable to do anything else until I completed the book.
Obviously I ran out and purchased all the current issues and began following Spidey monthly. I was enthralled with the beautiful writing by JSM and the lovely art from Romita Jr. And although I would not be blown away; until later, by the shear impact of what JMS was setting up, I was feeling something I hadn't felt in years in reading comic books - excitement.
I followed JSM down the rabbit hole for five years and he never let me down. Even through the rough patches; Gwen's return and Civil War, although CW can't be held against him.
When Marvel decided to drastically change direction at the end of Back in Black with BND, I felt it was too soon, especially since there was still so much to explore with Spidey's cool new powers and the intense experience he went through in The Other story arc. JSM's wonderfully laid out foundation seemed to have been wiped out and along with it was that feeling I had, my excitement was gone. So sadly, again, I stopped buying Spidey.
Now it's 2009 and Spider-Man celebrates a milestone - Issue #600. I was there for #300, #400 and #500. So after all that history I had to show my support and I had to celebrate too.
We’re girding our comics loins for the post-Holiday crunch, where all the work we didn’t get done while we were too busy hanging our stockings by the chimney with care comes back to haunt us. Our printer is closed for the Holidays this week, so no books are leaving house. We’re gearing up for next week, where we’ll be sending out ASM 584, par tone of Marc Guggenheim and John Romita Jr.’s epic-to-end-all-epics, CHARACTER ASSASSINATION!
But these rare quiet weeks give me a moment to reflect, and when I reflect, I frequently look back on all the mistakes I made. That should give you a good idea of what my childhood was like. Putting out 36 issues of Spider-Man in one year, mistakes can’t help but get made. Many of you were kind enough to point them out to us in e-mails through out the year. It’s a cliché amongst editors, but I’m new enough at this to have never said it before: nothing kills you more than opening the first make-ready copy of a book and seeing a mistake. Cuz once it’s in print, that’s the ball game.
My first major mistake at Marvel was crediting the wrong guy for a cover. My boss was kind enough to take the rap publicly for it – after all, I’d been here about a month and he had to go out of town the week the book left house. But I’ve never felt worse about something. I ran into that same jilted cover artist at a convention later that summer, and when I apologized for it, he smiled and said, “the *check* had my name on it, so I’m okay.”
That does lead to the much more painful mistake you can make of not paying your freelancers when work comes in, which can occur from time to time. *That* one particularly stings you because when it does occur, it too often happens to the guys who really bust their humps to make the payment deadline.
It’s an odd situation being a comic book editor – much like a producer in TV or Film, if you do your job right, no one thinks you’ve done anything at all. But when you screw up, everyone notices. Even if they don’t, *you* notice and sometimes that can be even worse. (Especially if you’re prepared to hang yourself for every mistake you’ve made since 4th grade, like me.)
In a situation as unique as the thrice-monthly Spidey, I can sometimes get stuck with a case of tunnel vision. There will be moments where the assembly line mentality comes dangerously close to trumping doing it the right way. You can have a thousand eyes on a book and still miss the most obvious mistakes. ASM 581 went through all of the necessary sets of eyes and a few extra ones – and we only noticed right before we sent the book out that dialogue balloons were going to the wrong people in one crucial page. We caught it that time – but sometimes we don’t. That said, I think we tend to catch the big ones before they go out. Still, all the effort in the world won’t prevent a mistake from slipping through.
The best advice I ever received about those mistakes was from a very unlikely place – John Stockton, legendary point guard for the Utah Jazz and the only six-foot-two 46-year-old white guy who’d put a scare into the guys at The Goat Park (look it up). I was at a past job assisting in a web interview, and he said something akin to the following quote (I can’t find our interview with him – this is from another interview he did with a different outlet, but essentially the same quote he gave us)
“I make bad decisions, too. I think the big thing, and it came from a long time ago, is that you just don’t give up. I make a lot of mistakes. As you get older, people say, 'You don’t make many mistakes’ and ‘You lose a step,’ and I’m not sure either is true. All you can do is keep trying, regardless of what happened the play before.”
Corny a sentiment as it is – it’s true. We make mistakes, and we push past it. That’s not to say you shouldn’t hold us accountable – by all means, call us on it (if nothing else, we can fix it for the trade!) because ultimately this entire industry drives on is the passion of those of us working on the books in the offices and across the world and those of you picking up the books in the stores. It’s the reason we push through those off-weeks.
I mentioned a few weeks back that ASM580 was scheduled as an evergreen -- a story we could slot into the run as needed, with space open to ensure it reflected the current storyline. Here's a neat little insiders story for you:
When Roger wrote the outstanding page (originally planned to be issue #581 as you'll see), seen here, he also suggested the page's layout. Lee took his cure but put his own signature style on it before sending it to Dean White and Cory Petit who put the finishing touches.
About this blog: Freshly spun news and previews from the office of the Amazing Spider-Man
About the author: Editor "Simperin" Steve Wacker and assistant editor "Typin" Tom Brennan take time out from bringing you Amazing Spider-Man thrice monthly and indulge your need to know everything now!!!
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