GALACTUS — DOWN AND OUT ON PLANET EARTH

ITEM! More troubling news and a further update on the sad state of affairs with everyone’s favorite consumer of after-dinner breath mints, Galactus. It seems that Hollywood wags have spotted the Big G coming and going from auditions to join next season’s cast of Dr, Drew’s Celebrity Rehab. We here in Soapboxland wish the World Devourer well with his recovery from addiction to the Power Cosmic and Coors Light. It’s been a long, strange trip from those heady hey-days in the mid-60s when ol’ Purple Boots first showed up in our Merry Marvel books. 

Reports recently reached me that not only was the G-Man fired from the cast of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (replaced by a CGI-animated cloud), but he’s run out of money and is flat broke as well. Apparently Galactus signed the standard Marvel work-for-hire contract that all free-lancers were required to sign back in the day, and thus he receives absolutely no royalties from the pulse-pounding plethora of Galactus-themed merchandise Marvel licenses — like this nifty Galactus coffee mug (ideal for sipping your morning cup o’ elemental energy) or this cute li’l Galactus Teddy (see pics). Let’s all do our part pilgrims, and keep the World Devourer in our thoughts! ‘Nuff Said!

Excelsior!

Smiley

DEVOURER OF WORLDS HITS HARD TIMES — STARTS DOING THE CONVENTION CIRCUIT

ITEM! Hard times — it happens to the best of us. Just ask Nick Nolte or my bestest biddy-buddy Robert Downey Jr.. Looks like the Devourer of Worlds and everyone’s least favorite all-you-can-eat buffet companion has finally hit rock bottom! News reached me just this weekend that Galactus was seen signing autographs at Mid-Ohio Con in Columbus, Ohio. It just breaks my heart to see the scourge of the Skrull Empire and sentients across the universe squeaking by like this on convention appearance money. Bet they put him up at the local Motel 6, too.

Apparently the Big G’s long-tall fall started back when he was replaced by a CGI cloud in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Director Tim Story later claimed that it was an artistic decision to replace ol’ Purple Boots with computer effects, but the tabloids all reported that it was really because he was constantly showing up late on the set or without his lines memorized. Next thing anyone knew the Big Guy was seen hanging out at Britney Spears’ compound. She’s like what? 1/576,000,000th his age? Even now, with a Silver Surfer movie in pre-production, the studio won’t take his calls. How the mighty have fallen! Gimme a call, G. Maybe it's not too late to get you into Secret Invasion.

Excelsior!

Smiley

THE WORLD’S GREATEST COMIC SYNOPSIS

ITEM! Didja know that Yours Truly still has a copy of his original outline for Fantastic Four #1 (Nov. 1961)? And thank Odin for that! Without it, my mnemonically-impaired misfiring memory cells would never be certain who came up with what between Jolly Jack and myself. As it is, you can read this and easily see what parts of our cosmic quartet came from your Uncle Stanley and which came from King Kirby!

I do recall that originally Uncle Martin wanted me to do a knock-off of the Debilitated Competition’s Justice League mag, and went so far as to suggest that we reunite all of our Golden Age heroes for just such a team. But I’d already tried that once with Cap, Subby and the Torch in the mid-50s and it didn’t sell. Plus, the only combustible character that I really liked from back then was the Human Torch. So I hit on the idea of forming a new team just using the one Golden Oldie, revised to suit modern day readers, natch. Jack and I brain-stormed the rest of the team up, and then I set down to my trusty ol’ Olympia manual typewriter (the preferred writing instrument of Harlan Ellison and Luddites everywhere) and banged out the outline shown below (click on the images to enlarge to comfortable reading size, pilgrims).

What’s particularly interesting is what’s in this that we didn’t use, and what’s not in it that we ended up with. Obviously, the idea of Sue’s clothes not disappearing when she used he power and her having to run around naked every time she needed to be invisible didn’t make it past Jack (though Tim Story had some fun with it 40 years later). Neither did the ideas of Sue being an actress, Johnny not being able to toss fireballs, and (except for a few passing mentions in early ishes) Ben’s crush on Sue.

As to FF #1 itself, you’ll also note that there’s no mention of the Mole Man or Monster Isle. Don’t hold me to this, but I’m pretty sure that I just handed Jack this outline and told him to rip out another 12-13 pages of the FF fighting their first battle against some standard monster-mag monsters, just like the ones we were publishing like crazy at the time. So all of that stuff, plus the reordering of the story into a framed flashback, were all Kirby creations.

So there you have it, Frantic Ones... a little gem of a piece of Merry Marvel Mythology all documented for your analytical appetites. Enjoy!

Excelsior!

Smiley

MARVEL REMASTERWORKS REVEALED AT LAST!

ITEM! You’ve waited and you’ve wondered, you’ve giggled and you’ve guessed. Now the truth can be revealed at last! What in the name of Odin’s Depend Undergarments is or are the Marvel ReMasterworks? As some of you may recall, Marvel has been taken to task recently for paying artists to redraw or recreate the artwork from some of the most-beloved Lee-Kirby and Lee-Ditko classics for their Marvel Masterworks series of deluxe reprints. Well, your Uncle Stanley had a brilliant idea — if yer gonna go to all the trouble to redraw some of those golden oldies, why not give Yours Truly a crack at re-dialoguing a few of ‘em? As classic as some of my Silver Age soliloquies were, I’m sure I could make them even bigger, better and even more verbose than ever today! And so, we here at Soapbox-land proudly present the first (and if we get a cease-and-desist letter, maybe the last) installment of the re-dialogued, remastered, and revisited version of Fantastic Four #3 (March 1962)... with all art diligently and digitally scanned from an original print copy! Depending on reader response, critical acclaim and juris prudence, we’ll try and put up a new chapter every Friday. Until then, Keep Making Yours Marvel! (Marvel Comics, The Fantastic Four, and Stan Lee’s immortal soul all © Copyright 2008 Marvel Entertainment, Inc.) Click on the cover below to get started!

Excelsior!

Smiley

COME WATSON, THE FRAME IS AFOOT!

ITEM! Hi there, Heroes! Time for another clandestine clue concerning the mysterious Marvel ReMasterworks logo featured in yesterday’s blog! Get out your magnifying glasses, deerstalker caps and seven-percent solutions to solve this mystery, pilgrim. Your next clue? Submitted for your approval: a frame from a classic Lee-Kirby issue of the Fantastic Four, scanned with loving care from an original printing. Notice anything odd about it? It’s elementary, dear reader! What in the name of Galactus' lobster bib does it all mean, you ask? Keep those guesses coming, noble No-Prize seekers!

Excelsior!

Smiley

THE WORLD'S GREATEST LOST ADVENTURES!

ITEM! As if an entire magazine daringly devoted to your Uncle Stanley wasn’t enough bombastic comic bookage for one week, be sure and grab a copy of the deluxe hard-bound Fantastic Four: The Lost Adventures! In this 200-page timely tome you’ll find my re-re-dialoging of Jolly Jack Kirby’s original art for the never-published FF #103 (in which I still don’t exactly stick to his margin notes — what can I say? I’m a stinker!). Also included are John “Ring-A-Ding” Romita Jr. and Yours Truly’s Fantastic Four, The Last Adventure, and two or three other insightfully scripted past FF efforts of mine that all bear re-reading again and again! You know you’ll want to own this one, pilgrims... it’s got my name on the cover in 72 pt. type! That’s as close to a guarantee of par excellence in sequential art as you’re gonna find in this lifetime!

Excelsior!

Smiley

THE WORLD'S GREATEST DVD HEROES

ITEM! You know some days I barely have time to sit down and catch my breath from all the signing of media deals, licensing agreements, and assorted other lucrative legalese and leases. But yesterday I finally had a moment and decided to pop my promo copy of the Fantastic Four: World’s Greatest Heroes (The Complete First Season) DVD into my poolside media system and check out a few eps. Believe it or not, pilgrims, just because I’m listed in the credits as Co-Executive Producer doesn’t mean I’ve ever actually watched the show before now... leastways not that I remember. You know how it goes...

Turns out what we have here are all 26 episodes, eight of which never aired in the U.S. thanks to some bone-headed programming decisions at the Cartoon Network. I think they got burned by the plumeting ratings from their various Brand Echh cartoons and decided to clear out all the capes at once. But of the four cartoon versions of the FF to date, this one is easily your Uncle Stanley’s favorite, if only for the rockin’ theme music! Once I got past the French/Japanese anime art direction of the series, which I’ve had to do anyway to work on Ultimo with Hiroyuki Takei, the Smilin’ One was totally into it, as the kids say these days. Really, after you get used to Johnny’s Astro-Boy astro-turf haircut and Ben having the circle-four symbol spay-painted on his chest and everyone having chins that could split wood, this series is fantastic! This is the FF that we all wanted to see in those two movies. Lotsa action - check! Family dynamic - check! Ben and Johnny constantly banging on each other - check! Reed inventing one crazed Kirbyesque techno-solution after another - check! Impossible Man? Checkerino! Kree... Skrulls... and of course Doc Doom... what’s not to love?

After I dove into the diligent DVD extras I understood what was ringing so duly for Yours Truly in all of this — the showrunners at Moonscope loved the original Lee-Kirby run of the series, and — modernizations and stylistic choices aside — hewn pretty closely to the classic originals in spirit and scope. In fact, why not enjoy one of Irving Forbush’s embedded linky things and watch a few minutes for yourself? Then go out next Tuesday (June 10) and catch your copious copy of this cosmic cartoon collection before they’re all calamitously confiscated! Enjoy!

Excelsior!

Smiley

FANTASTIC FONTS, FACES AND FOURS

ITEM! Well Fearless Ones, we talked about the history of Spidey’s logo, so it seemed only fair to give Marvel’s First Family the same frankly featured foray into frantic fandom! Simple, you say? After all, wasn’t the Fantastic Four logo simply a reuse of the Amazing Adult Fantasy font? True, true... but there’s much more to tell regarding the 3-4 issue evolution of the FF from un-costumed anonymous adventurers into properly attired super heroes!

Our story starts with a tragic twist. Through a set of decidedly disastrous distribution decisions (better covered in a future blog, but here's some background) Mighty Marvel’s only access to newsstands throughout most of the 1960s was also our primary competition — DC Comics! The bend-over Brand Echh bargain that was brokered went something like this: DC would distribute Marvel’s books, but we could only publish eight titles per month and we were “encouraged” not to publish books that competed directly with DC’s... namely superhero books! Thus, we published mainly monster-of-the-month books along with a handful of westerns and glamor girl comics. When it came time to break the mold and create the Fantastic Four, Yours Truly thought it prudent to position the FF as closely to being just another monster book as perceptually possible. FF’s #1 and #2 therefore featured typical Marvel Monsters on the covers, and our heroes looked about as much like super heroes as Aunt May’s bridge club. Even so, when the books came out we still held our collective breaths waiting for a backlash from the folks at National, and what we finally heard was... absolutely nothing. Not a peep came from our Distinguished Competition.

So by FF #3 your Uncle Stanley was starting to feel a little froggy. I decided to make the Cosmic Quartet over into proper superheroes. That meant costumes, a high-tech headquarters, secret identities... the whole schmeel. Yes, pilgrims, you read that sentence correctly. Jack and I still hadn’t hit on the genre-defying idea of the FF having public identities and becoming media darlings. And so, in Jolly Jack’s original art for FF #3, Sue designs costumes for the team that include masks (see assorted before-and-after pics)! What’s more, the Thing was covered from head-to-toe so as to completely disguise his scaly orange appearance.

As he so often did, King Kirby was the one that actually caused your Uncle Stan to stop and rethink the concept a little. For starters, Jack made their “hideout” the top five stories of a New York skyscraper, complete with it’s own ICBM! It’d be mighty hard for the FF to conceal their real identities if they were launching missiles and pogo planes every other ish! So much for the secret HQ and secret identities! So with a little Sol Brodsky production magic — off came the masks!

And while we were changing things, the Smilin’ One wasn’t too crazy about Jack’s simplified “FF” chest symbol. It just didn’t seem heroic enough. I know, I know... Jolly Jack co-created half the Marvel universe and all of everything cool in it. But let me tell you something he didn’t create... the extruded “4” chest symbol for the FF. Your favorite Silver Age editor - writer - art director -bon vivant noodled out the famous-four symbol on the back of one of Jack’s FF pages (see pic at right).

The last change was to have Jack re-do the cover art to FF #3 (see the original version above). Out went the feature creature and in went the Fantasticared and costumed goodness! And that’s how the Lee-Kirby team finally birthed “The Greatest Comic Magazine in the World!” Hyperbole, thy name is Marvel!

Excelsior!

Smiley