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Monday, 9:49
2007-03-22 14:17:39

Another week begins, and to start it off right, here's another Bad Comic I Had A Hand In. Technically, five comics.

In 1995, as a shell game to get #1's onto the covers of the Spider-Man Annuals, the decision was made to call them Super-Specials instead. This was also the height of the specialty cover, so all five covers had fifth color silver ink as well (the five books being AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN, WEB OF SPIDER-MAN, SPIDER-MAN and VENOM). And they all had flip-covers, the B-side featuring the then-hot Scarlet Spider.

The big problem with these Annuals was that there were way too many cooks in the kitchen. This was during the year Marvel had split editorial into five fiefdoms, when Bob Budiansky was the Spider-Man EIC. There was plenty of friction with Danny Fingeroth, who had been and remained Spider-Man Group Editor, since Bob had been put in place above him. What this meant was that, on every story, on every assignment, there was a jockeying for position. This would be bad enough under normal circumstances, but in this case Bob and Danny seldom agreed on anything.

The lead story in these Annuals was "Planet of the Symbiotes". Written by David Michelinie, it wasn't bad per se, just sort of "there." And if coming up with six symbiote characters made Venom less unique and interestin, a whole planet full of them made him downright pedestrian.

The idea for "Planet"--just the name, really--had been suggested by former Spidey assistant editor Mike Lackey. Because of this, Danny was stumping for Mike to write the Scarlet Spider serial, which was something I wasn't in favor of (no one is owed work.) My assistant editor Glenn Greenberg and I turned to John Ostrander instead.

Unfortunately, John ran into difficulties with his story, in that anything we liked, Danny didn't like. And anything Danny liked, Bob didn't like. And so forth. Somewhere in here, an idea got floated for using the Lizard in this story, a notion Danny became obsessed with. Whenever he got a new story outline, he'd inevitably ask, "Is the Lizard in it?" We went round and round on a couple of drafts of an outline before John realized that this was perhaps not the best beehive to step into, and withdrew from the project.

His replacement was Terry Kavanaugh. This was a sop to Danny on my part--Danny had fired Terry from WEB OF SPIDER-MAN a few months earlier, and felt guilty about it. Again, not the best reason in the world to give a guy an assignment. To make matters worse, we'd killed tons of lead time on Ostrander's story, so we pretty much had to go with whatever Terry came up with first. That SCARLET SPIDER serial wound up being a real mess, with pretty much no redeeming qualities to it. Terry spent a lot of time introducing a whole cast of characters around Ben Reilly, thinking that they'd be picked up on in the main books. When they weren't, the entire thing wound up as an exercise in futility.

No kidding, no excuses--we just basically gave up on these Scarlet Spider stories. We were tired of not getting any traction, we knew they were bad, but we chose to save our energies for battles we could win. No amount of fancy silver ink was going to conceal the stench.

And then, on top of everything else, the color separator lost the color guides to the VENOM Annual, and had to color the book completely on their own, which resulted in one of the most ghastly-looking comic books of the era. A shame, since Kyle Hotz' artwork on the Venom lead story was quite nice.

The only saving grace to the entire thing was a series of 8-page back-up stories that I was able to put together in the center of each Annual. The first one was, again, a sop to Danny, written by his assistant Eric Fein. But thereafter, Glenn and I were able to do a couple of stories just for us. So we had a Karl Kesel-written Black Cat tale, a story of Spidey in his black costume by Dan Slott and Mark Bagley, and a Stan Lee-written job illustrated by Darick Robertson and George Perez dealing with the (short-lived) death of Aunt May.

More later.

Tom B

Good grief. Just reading this it is quite clear what a pain in the rear the whole ordeal must have been. Especially the part where two people just don't get along. That is horrible in any work environment, especially when they are expected to work together in cases such as these.

And I'm sure no one wanted to play the part of referee. Too many different people working on it with too many ideas, huh? What a shame.

Posted by TwilghtDragon on 2006-07-31 10:56:57

spidey has some bad comics
go figure any way i 've got a question the other day i had new x-men #28 and i was look in through it and i found a daily bugle pulse head line news tell me is this somthing u guys put in all of ur comics or is this new

Posted by tarhaun on 2006-07-31 11:46:21

The wrong collection
Not the first time that I 'Bad Comic I Had A Hand In'-blog and think, hey, I have that book.

This worries me. A bit. But mostly it's funny.

Posted by NielsVanEekelen on 2006-07-31 12:31:16

Scarlet Spider
Scarlet-Spider was popular once?! Geez, I missed that completely.

Posted by NewChad on 2006-07-31 12:33:18

Hmmmm
Hearing stories like this make me wonder what less than ideal situations are going on right now. I would imagine there would be few "less than ideal" situations as the quality across the board is much higher. However there is still the occasional book/story that seems to be driven by something other than story.

Posted by dingogary on 2006-07-31 14:34:48

Gypsy Moth is hot!
If you had renamed the story "Planet of the Sybarites", I would have bought it.

Posted by Lonesome Pinky on 2006-07-31 15:18:30

good grief...
tom the tattle tail. i like it lets take that story and turn it into well a lizard story...ha ha..aren't you glad those head ache days like that one is over and only times to laugh out loud about. just say hey it was the nineties the big boom of bad decisions everyone once in a while has one.you know look at clinton he may of had one.i like the honesty and look forward to having more fun on another bad comic..thanks

Posted by image221972 on 2006-07-31 15:33:40

I Miss Scarlet Spider
It's still the best Superhero costume around

Posted by Rain on 2006-07-31 16:15:45

1995 salad days
I was an intern in that teeny-weeny office with Eric Fein and Sarra Mossoff right about then. Boy howdy, the desperation was thick in air between them. I remember being glad that you had survived the January 1996 purge, but glum that Sarra and all my other contacts didn't. Thankfully, Sarra had little to do with Spider-Clone, and more to do with reprints and Disney licensing.

Speaking of Danny Fingeroth, there was a bit of lore handed down from intern to intern about how unwelcoming the Fing would be -- and wouldn't you know it, I had a fair share of doors slammed in my face and elevators not held for me that winter.

Posted by AmericanCaesar on 2006-07-31 17:03:38

sarajevo
read the list of people that competed in the 1984 Olympic Winter Games for me and find the flaws.
you may hold the key.

Posted by Celestial on 2006-07-31 22:23:34

it seems we have some lost
Their are archives missing and people this affects.

Posted by Celestial on 2006-07-31 22:45:16

Uh, was that a haiku?

Or did Mr. Lao send you?

Posted by Lonesome Pinky on 2006-08-01 01:38:47

These Bad Comic entries are great. It's interesting to see the behind the scenes stuff that goes on. I work in publishing (for a newspaper, not QUITE as fun as comics) and I know stuff like this happens all the time. I'd really love to know what the heck was going on during The Crossing. That seemed like a very confused time at Marvel.

Posted by jonwes on 2006-08-01 01:49:00

...
...i LIKED the scarlet spider...
...

Posted by dp_lombardo on 2006-08-01 02:28:30

Scarlet Spider
The Scarlet Spider may not have been everyone's cup of tea. However Ben Reily is/was/always will be my favorite Marvel Character of all time. Which is why they had to kill him off. The Characters I prefer always bite it without hope of rebirth. Unlike Reed Richards and Doctor Doom who should have stayed dead in my opinion.

Posted by boundingwolf on 2006-08-01 08:57:55

scarlet spiders, symbiotes, oh my..
scarlet spider/ben reilly should never be revived again-- there is only one, true Spider-Man.. and I couldn't stand the way that Venom became a hero-- let alone the quasi-heroic acclaim that Carnage ascended to-- let alone a whole team of symbiote villains.. I'm glad they're all gone (well-- venom and carnage are back-- sort of..)

Posted by Hypestyle on 2006-08-01 16:48:11

hey gang!!!
im new here show me some love!!!
i like fantastic four & sandman
theyre my favoriets

Posted by gem mint mike on 2006-11-04 22:14:54

Array

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