And speaking of Simonson's Thor

Tom Brevoort, Marvel's Senior Vice President of Publishing, shared these pictures of the upcoming Thor Simonson Omnibus.

 

Walt Simonson’s The Mighty Thor: Artist’s Edition

From Bleedingcool.com (http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/04/01/walt-simonson-and-the-mighty-thor-to-get-idw-artist-edition/):

In an unprecedented deal with Marvel Comics, IDW will publish the Walt Simonson’s The Mighty Thor: Artist’s Edition, recreating original art boards for the Marvel series. Reproducing pencils under the ink, blue lines, yellow pages, whiteout, essentially what Walt submitted to his editors, at 12″ x 17″ size, 176 pages containing issues 337-340 and 360-362 for $100, published in July.

 

1982-83 - Bill Sienkiewicz's Dazzler covers

Bill Sienkiewicz did a few Dazzler covers in 1982, but become the regular Dazzler cover artist in July 1983 for just under a year. I was always disappointed as the interior art was so crude in comparison to his art.

And it's interesting to contrast the covers of Dazzler #15 and the others from 1983 and you can see the clear shift in Sienkiewicz's art style.

1980 - Dazzler

I was startled by the amount of content behind the creation of Dazzler. I was under the mistaken impression that it was all Chris Claremont and John Byrne. While Claremont and Byrne wrote and penciled Dazzler’s first appearance in Uncanny X-Men #130 (February 1980), they had no input on the Dazzler character or her ongoing series that debuted in 1981.

A record company, Casablanca Records, trying to bring Marvel Comics and Filmworks together to create a new disco-oriented character, originally called Disco Queen, that would span music, comics and the movies. Rising superstar, John Romita Jr., was tapped to design the Dazzler, modeling her after Grace Jones. However, when Bo Derek signed with Filmworks to star in their film, that changed everything. And then, Filmworks had a difficult time getting traction on the Dazzler film, but Marvel decided to publish Dazzler #1 anyways. Over 400,000 copies of Dazzler #1 were pre-sold to the direct comic market and was the first Marvel comic sold only to comic stores. At that time, the average comics pre-sold around 200,000 copies.

Some trivia bits

* Bogie in this drawing was Casablanca president Neil Bogart.

* The Disco Queen was supposed to have powers that could make people tell the truth

* Roger Stern came up with the name, Dazzler

* from Dazzler #1, Dazzler's conception was credited to Alice Donenfeld, John Romita Jr. and Jim Shooter with help from Stan Lee, Al Milgrom, Roger Stern, and Tom DeFalco.

According to Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed (http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2008/06/26/comic-book-urban-legends-revealed-161)

So I was quite shocked when, in response to a question on the subject, Jim Shooter graciously let me in on an amazing piece of information that I had never heard before – that the Dazzler character was first intended to be featured in an animated film, and the film was to feature all the artists that Casablanca had under contract!

Here is Shooter describing the situation:

“The Marvel brass wanted a treatment done over the weekend. The Casablanca people wanted to use many of the people they had under contract, including Donna Summer, Cher, Rodney Dangerfield, Lenny and Squiggy, Robin Williams, the Village People, Kiss and more as the voices of the characters. They told me “hire anyone you want” to write the treatment. Our film/TV agent suggested Harlan Ellison. Fat chance I could get H.E. up to speed and get him to write something in four days. I considered my options and decided that it was me or nobody — I’d be the hero or the goat. I delivered as requested. Treatment atached, OPR-scanned from the original. The Casablanca people said, and I quote, “F**k half-hour animated special, this is a feature film.”

Shooter then even more graciously supplied me with the actual film treatment, which is far too awesome to post here in its entirety, but as you can imagine, a story that needs to find roles to spotlight the qualities of Donna Summer, Cher, Rodney Dangerfield, Lenny and Squiggy, Robin Williams, the Village People and Kiss, while also guest-starring Spider-Man and the Avengers (not to mention introduce us to Dazzler) is going to be quite “out there,” and this story is no exception!

Interestingly, Jim Shooter wrote the Dazzler: The Movie Graphic Novel (Marvel Graphic Novel #12, 1984). And thankfully, it didn’t include Rodney Dangerfield, Lenny and Squiggy, Robin Williams, or the Village People.

From Comic Feature #7 (November 1980), Tom DeFalco was interviewed:

They [Casablanca Records] had about ten or twelve different things that they wanted. I’m a professional commercial writer and I can put in anything that a customer wants. Especially if they were willing to pay for it over and over again. So we went and did everything that they wanted. Sometimes it was pretty silly, but we did it just the way they wanted.

So I think around the third or the fourth time we finally got what they wanted, more or less, and we had essentially the story that will appear in Dazzler #1 and #2. They wanted some strange things done with the artwork. Take the X-MEN pages which basically come across like bubblegum cards. They said the story was fine and basically everything was fine – they wanted the F.F., THE NEW X-MEN, SPIDER-MAN, THE HULK, and a bunch of other characters thrown in.

By this time we had already decided not to publish it as a regular comic book. We were going to bring it out as a Super-Special. So we had like 34 superheroes in the book?? I don’t remember what it was – some outrageous number – and we were going to publish a 34-page book. They liked all the introductory scenes where all the characters were introduced, but they just didn’t see any need for a fight scene. Originally there was just a one page fight scene.

J.R. [John Romita Jr, the artist] made it work. You almost wouldn’t notice it. J.R. really worked on this project, and when he’s good, he’s fabulous – when he’s having an off-day, he’s merely brilliant – still they wanted so much introductory stuff in the space allotted, especially the way they wanted it written… They wanted so much introductory stuff that we had a 34-page story with a one page fight scene. It was a weird story with these 34 characters fighting the Enchantress in one page.

Happy April!

From Marvel Age #28 (1985):

1981 Revisited: Hank Pym was Not a Wife-Beater says Jim Shooter

As some of you might know, Jim Shooter has started to blog:

http://www.jimshooter.com

A lot of his posts so far have dealt with his early career at DC Comics and with the Legion of Super-Heroes and some broader commentary on Marvel Comics in the 1970s.

However, one post related to the 1980s did jump out at me, Hank Pym was Not a Wife-Beater:

http://www.jimshooter.com/2011/03/hank-pym-was-not-wife-beater.html

 

From Shooter’s point of view, who wrote the Avengers in 1981:

 “He was never the Avenger who saved the day at the end and usually the first knocked out or captured.  His most notable “achievement” in the lab was creating Ultron.  Meanwhile, his rich, beautiful wife succeeded in everything she tried.  She was also always flitting around his shoulders, flirting, saying things to prop up his ego. 

In that story (issue 213, I think), there is a scene in which Hank is supposed to have accidentally struck Jan while throwing his hands up in despair and frustration—making a sort of “get away from me” gesture while not looking at her.  Bob Hall, who had been taught by John Buscema to always go for the most extreme action, turned that into a right cross!  There was no time to have it redrawn, which, to this day has caused the tragic story of Hank Pym to be known as the “wife-beater” story.”

Interesting that such a miscommunication has rippled through the Marvel universe and shaped many Avengers-related storylines.

John Byrne's Fantastic Four Omnibus on its way!

With the Simonson Thor Omnibus a little over a month away, could a FF Omnibus be far away?


See post #19 from David Gabriel
http://marvelmasterworksfansite.yuku.com/topic/16542/We-predict
confirming a John Byrne Fantastic Four Omnibus! No release date though.



Also confirmed, more New Mutants Classics and Alpha Flight reprints, as well as a collection of 1980s silver surfer sometime next year.