Today's Bad Comic I Was Associated With suffered from the curse of the guest-stars, as well as some differences of opinion in the ranks.
DEATHLOK #5 was the last issue of the first multi-part storyline in the ongoing series, written by Dwayne McDuffie and penciled by Denys Cowan. The story up to this point was really good, with various members of the cybernetic community being captured and abducted by a mysterious antagonist, which causes the newly-created Deathlok to join forces with fellow cyber-enhancile Misty Knight to get to the bottom of things. What they discover is behind it all is a Doctor Doom robot who's gained self-awareness and evolved into Mechadoom, a conflicted cybernetic life form.
So what went wrong with the closing chapter? Two things. First off, as I said earlier, we had the curse of the guest stars. Because of the nature of the story and the characters who were involved (as well as the obvious commercial considerations), we had decided to guest star a number of other characters from the Marvel Universe as a sort of cavalry in this closing issue. The idea was that, having subdued Mechadoom, the characters then had to figure out what to do with him. The problem here came from the individual editors of the characters in question. At one point, the discussion turns to the notion of needing to put Mechadoom down permanently--but none of the other editors wanted the characters under their purview to voice such an opinion. (Particularly, Bob Harras, who had taken over the reins of the X-books from Ann Nocenti not that long before, was trying to make the X-Men more heroic, and get away from the more ruthless take that had been allowed under Ann.)
More crucially, the climax as originally written had Mechadoom set up in a new status quo--when on the 21st page Deathlok was to learn that he'd been assassinated by one of the other cyber-villains whom he'd done wrong. It was a very distinctive and downbeat ending--too offbeat for Bob Budiansky, who was overseeing the book, even though I was directly editing it. He felt that, if we were going to kill off Mechadoom, we had to do it on-panel for maximum impact. This completely changed the intent of the sequence, and I remember we went round and round on this point. In the end, we wound up with a terrible compromise that didn't make anybody happy, in which Ultron runs into a room with a dozen super heroes and mechadoom, shoots Mechadoom dead, and then runs off without the heroes being able to catch him or stop him. It was just plain stupid, a bad compromise that stepped on the ending of the tale.
On another note, there were some art corrections done on this cover, for folks who're interested in that sort of thing. As originally drawn, the Deathlok figure was quite a bit smaller, so we had him statted up in size so that he was more the focus of the shot. Additionally, Denys had drawn a Wolverine who owed a lot to Kent Wiliams' interpretation in MELTDOWN--but he didn't really look enough like Wolverine to my eye. So John Romita redid the Wolverine face--which now looks like Wolverine, but doesn't look at all like the artwork on the rest of the cover. It appears that Wolverine is wearing a John Romita mask--not the most effective art correction ever done.
More later.
Tom B
now that you mention it... Wolvie does kind of look like one of those stickerbooks where you mix and match the heads, feet and hands. This Ultron sequence can't be any worse than the Secret Wars book where Spiderman totally pwned all of the X-men at once. STUPID!!!!
Posted by bigdaddyhub2 on 2006-08-01 21:23:39
now that you mention it... Wolvie does kind of look like one of those stickerbooks where you mix and match the heads, feet and hands. This Ultron sequence can't be any worse than the Secret Wars book where Spiderman totally pwned all of the X-men at once. STUPID!!!!
Posted by bigdaddyhub2 on 2006-08-01 21:28:39
Heh. A John Romita Jr. mask. Priceless.
Posted by Lonesome Pinky on 2006-08-01 22:31:35
Whoever thought it would be a good idea to give all the X-men matching costumes?
Posted by Rain on 2006-08-02 01:10:19
yea x-men waering matching suits awesome
Posted by tarhaun on 2006-08-02 02:15:43
okay i was just look in over t-voort early blog entries and it seems joka was makin crap loads of messages so u said joka can get baned from this site and i was like why hav'nt i been banned from this site can somone answer me and tell me why i haven't been banned i don't want to be banned i just want to be hear wat u guys think of me
Posted by tarhaun on 2006-08-02 03:45:56
Okay With the cover you can tell it is wolverine, although the costume direction is a little funny. The Xmen have a good reputaion to carry the book and Ive seen art work just as bad in todays books. Ive read alot of what Ann N. had to contribute to the Xmen and maybe thats the reason why the book became questionable after she had left it.
Posted by terciera on 2007-03-28 06:17:56
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About this blog: Ramblings and musings from the mind of Tom Brevoort. "It won’t be clean. It won’t be fun. It mostly won’t be coherent."
About the author: Tom Brevoort is Executive Editor for Marvel Comics, and oversees such titles as New Avengers, Civil War, and Fantastic Four.
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