kurtbusiek.bsky.social
Writer, mostly of comics. MARVELS, ASTRO CITY, ARROWSMITH, AUTUMNLANDS, FREE AGENTS, THUNDERBOLTS, SUPERMAN, AVENGERS, UNTOLD TALES OF SPIDER-MAN, more. NYT bestseller, Harvey & Eisner Awards, yaddita yaddita. My head hurts.
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Harvey Kurtzman and Joe Staton both ghosted for Gil Kane, but you can't tell, because they did their best to do Kane-like layouts, and when Gil inked it, it looked like Gil.
[Howard Chaykin ghosted some STAR HAWKS, and you can tell it's him because he inked it, too, and he can't fake Kane inks.]
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...ghosted THE PHANTOM, it looks like Heck, because he couldn't not draw like Don Heck.
But being hired to match a style and then arguing with the guy who hired you about it seems pretty weird.
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There are certainly people who brought their own style to ghost jobs -- when Sekowsky or Kirby ghost-penciled Giacoia's JOHNNY REB, you can tell it's them. But Giacoia didn't care. If he wanted someone who didn't look like Sekowsky or Kirby, he wouldn't have hired them.
Similarly, when Don Heck...
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Also, if Toth was ghosting for someone else, surely the objective is to do it their way, not Toth's way.
I can see saying "I'm not interested in a job where I have to draw like Raymond," but I can't really see saying, "Look, I did the ghosting job but I did it the way you _should_ be drawing."
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I'm not that interested in writing about toxic people. There were plenty of "deconstructionist" creators who wanted to write stories saying "wasn't this old stuff awful?"
I was more interested in finding the heart in it.
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It’s excellent.
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They didn't make the comment to me.
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I aspire to become a comic book viscount, at least.
So far, I'm at least a discount, which is close, right?
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And I don't even have a crown!
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There are certainly people on social media whose obituaries I expect to read with pleasure someday, but I think systematizing their extinction as a categorical imperative seems uncalled for.
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I am making the assumption that "all royalty" includes other forms of social-media royalty, but I'm not extending it to the imputed royalty of, say, the WWF or the soap-opera world, or wherever else one might might unofficial royalty.
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But this chowderhead responded that Bouie is Bluesky royalty and like all royalty should be guillotined.
And...whaaaaat?
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The context of this was that someone else had griped that they know Jamelle Bouie is "Bluesky royalty" but he couldn't take him seriously when he says that political reporting should be better, because he's a NYTimes columnist, which is itself a pretty daffy statement.
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I’ll be right over.
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I got the crossovers that ran in the titles I got regularly. I might have explored a little more widely, but I had no money back then. As it was, I didn’t even get all of CRISIS until later, since I knew how it ended and needed more to know what happened next…
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...halting thoughts, too, broken up by frequent ellipses.
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Swamp Thing always had a slower, halting speech pattern, when he talked at all; it wasn't something that changed with the Moore issues. Len, as editor, pointed out that Moore wasn't breaking up his speech the way Len had, or Marty had, so Moore corrected it.
Len had always given Swamp Thing...
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Moore first writes the Demon four months after this issue.
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As a matter of fact, Len isn't "sticking with" the Demon's rhyming in this issue...he's establishing it. This is the first story in which he rhymes most of his dialogue.
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Didn't Len create the Demon being a rhymer? Kirby's Demon didn't do it, aside from things like the transformation spell.
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Nice!
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Not that it mattered much with CRISIS undoing all of that only a few years later.
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I can't say I ever really got the appeal. So many of them felt like summaries rather than stories. And while I like finding out about comics history, "Whatever Happened to Characters You Never Saw" doesn't strike me as a great hook. Tying their stories off also limits options for bringing them back.
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And how many of them were hired for the day?
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Then again, if you folded them into a nice fat SUPERMAN BY LEN WEIN hardcover, that'd be nice too, and make a very solid collection.
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That's a good one.
There's a Bates/Janson issue I remember as strong, and a Gerber/Veitch issue. And of course the Moore/Veitch Superman/Swamp Thing.
But in general, DCCP was not a real sparkler of a series.
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I'd like a nice HC of Len's best DCCPs --
Metal Men (JLGL)
Deadman (JLGL)
Mongul trilogy (Starlin)
OMAC (Pérez)
Demon (Kubert)
Santa Claus (Swanderson)
I guess you could toss in the other two stories he did for completism, but one of 'em he didn't script and the other was a "Whatever Happened To."
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Fantastic visual design. Kubert rules.
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It may be the best single issue of that whole series.
Though it has competition from a few other issues Len did with terrific artists.
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Oh, yes.
A perfect song for nerdy high school SE fans like I was at the time.
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...from Hell's Kitchen I stab at thee...
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Thanks. As I recall, the outline I did for it still needed some work, but my editors just weren’t enthusiastic about it. If we had done it, I think we might not have done THE IRON AGE, which was a better book than I think LOOK BACK IN ARMOR would have been.
But I still love that title.
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…ending point in subsequent volumes.
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…and one that has the finale of Len Wein’s editorship is coming, there’s a WONDER WOMAN coming that has everything after Gene Colan left and before George Pérez arrived, and so on.
The ones that don’t have an obvious starting or ending point are probably chosen because they set up a starting or…
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I think they’ve probably done rough outlines for where the volume breaks happen for any series they start collecting, so they can take into account various milestones. Like, they’ve done a SUPERMAN that starts with the beginning of the Bronze Age, a BATMAN that starts Denny’s long editorial run…
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…classic Tony as Franklin remembered him, there’s no body in a grave, and he has hazy access to all the memories he needs, but a lot of it’s like a dream, now let’s forget all about it.”
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We covered it in about two panels in an AVENGERS Annual. LOOK BACK IN ARMOR would have given it more space, but it would also have been a thriller story about Midas.
I’d have liked to do it, too, but it wouldn’t have dug very deep into Teen Tony; we were more interested in saying “He’s back to…
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It's because this is a collection that starts right after Weisinger leaves, and Boltinoff took over ACTION three months before Schwartz took over SUPERMAN.
[Or to put it more clearly: They took over at the same time, but Schwartz's run didn't start hitting the stands until three months later.]
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...from Brooklyn's heart I vote against thee...
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"...does it really matter who you rank after Cuomo and Mamdani?"
Aside from the other good advice people have been giving: Don't rank Cuomo at all.
Rank 5 other candidates to make sure that your vote counts against him all the way to the last round. Leave him off the ballot.