The Corner Box

The New Big Two! Talking the Absolute and Ultimate lines at The Corner Box S2Ep08

• David & John • Season 2 • Episode 8

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Episode Summary

On this episode of The Corner Box, hosts Ultimate John Barber and Absolute David Hedgecock get into the Ultimate and Absolute comic lines at DC and Marvel, the differences between Marvel and DC characters, how the new launches compare to the originals, and what does and doesn’t work in each new line, and John says something interesting.

Timestamp Segments

  • [00:46] The Big Two’s new lines.
  • [02:48] John’s inside knowledge on the Ultimate line.
  • [04:03] DC characters vs Marvel characters.
  • [09:05] Mark Bagley retires.
  • [13:09] John says something interesting.
  • [13:19] John joins the Ultimates line.
  • [15:05] Why the Ultimate line was successful.
  • [18:37] The conceits of the Ultimate line.
  • [25:00] DC’s iconic miniseries.
  • [26:01] Marvel’s miniseries.
  • [28:42] The coherency of the Marvel and DC universes.
  • [30:35] Marvel’s new Ultimates line.
  • [33:53] Old vs New Ultimate Universe.
  • [35:22] Spider-Man is like Shakespeare.

Notable Quotes

  • “Accidents happened.”
  • “There’s an iconic version of Batman. There’s not an iconic version of Spider-Man in the same way.”
  • “This is like Shakespeare.”

Relevant Links

David's Fun Stuff!
Did Someone Say Fun Time? Let's GO!

John is at PugW!
Pug Worldwide

For transcripts and show notes!
www.thecornerbox.club

Books Mentioned

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[00:00] Intro: Welcome to The Corner Box, where your hosts, David Hedgecock and John Barber, lean into their decades of comic book industry experience, writing, drawing, editing, and publishing. They'll talk to fellow professionals, deep dive into influential and overlooked works, and analyze the state of the art and business of comics and pop culture. Thanks for joining us on The Corner Box.


[00:28] Absolute David Hedgecock: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to The Corner Box. My name is Absolute David Hedgecock, and with me, as always, is


[00:34] Ultimate John B&rber: Ultimate John B&rber.


[00:36] David: Ultimate John B&rber.


[00:37] John: The A in my name is an ampersand. That's how Ultimate I am. That's an Ultimate X-Men reference.


[00:43] David: Oh, man. This is going to be a long podcast. As the title of our latest podcast suggests, we're going to talk, John, about the new DC and Marvel lines that have popped up over the course of the last 12 months. For Marvel, we've got the reimagining of the Ultimate Comics line, and for DC, the stealing of the Ultimate line, but they called it Absolute DC, instead of Ultimate, because that would have been probably a bridge too far. Excited to talk about these new Universes that the Big Two have been creating.


[01:16] John: Absolute is Ultimate-ish, but DC had tried to do an Ultimate version with All-Star some years ago, and I think one of the things that's really interesting about it is that both of these versions are coming out in very different worlds than those previous versions launched in, in terms of where superheroes are in the media and where public awareness of a lot of superheroes is. Both of those were launched in the early days of comic book superhero movies, and now we're in this world where everybody knows this stuff.


[01:49] David: You're right. I hadn't actually thought about that. I hadn't actually given that much thought. So, just for the listener, John, I think that there's a lot of talk about the Absolute Batman book and the Ultimate line of comics, but I think they've been focusing a lot on the story and the creative talent, and I think we've got a slightly different take on this stuff, as we usually do. At least, I hope we usually do. So, we're going to definitely be talking about the storylines and the creative talent behind it, but we're also going to talk about what this all means, in terms of the comic book industry and why this approach is working, whereas maybe other approaches haven't, in terms of relaunching or rebooting, and new #1’s, and things that. So, strap in, listeners. All four of you. We're going to take you on a ride.


[02:33] John: All the kids that came in for our swear-filled Dog Man episode, we're glad to have you here.


[02:39] David: There were sure a lot of swears in that Dog Man. You’d think we’d think that through a little bit more.


[02:44] John: We should have replaced them with barks. Go ahead.


[02:48] David: I'm going to let you start, John, because you have some inside, or unique, knowledge of where all this started, with the Ultimate line of comic books, right? Weren't you in there, editing stuff, on that Ultimate line, that original run?


[03:03] John: Not in the very beginning of it, but yeah, I was around Ultimates 2 era. The Ultimate line was an early-21st Century relaunch of the Marvel Universe with new characters. It really sprung out of, the X-Men movie had come out, and the realization was that the X-Men comics were very mired in continuity. The X-Men continuity was notoriously complicated. As popular as they were, that was always a thing, where stories would just go on for 10/15 years. I don't remember how long the Who the X-Traitor Was story went on. That launched when Bishop originally showed up, but I don't think it was done by 2000.


[03:41] David: Definitely not. How long were they in the Outback? 8 years? Something like that.


[03:47] John: There's a lot of back story there, but when they realized that they should clean up what the X-Men were, and knowing there was a Spiderman movie coming out, Spiderman was the other one that they, preemptively, were trying to figure out, “okay. What's the movie going to be?” And Marvel always has a slightly weird thing, or I don't know if weird is the right way to put it - there's a difference in the way some of the Marvel and DC characters function, I think, or at least maybe the companies, at that point, where I think, at around 2000, DC had a good set of backlist that was perennial sellers: Dark Knight, Year One, Kingdom Come, that had all these books that, if you liked these characters, you could hand them to somebody and they were recognizably modern comics. It wasn't going back to stuff from the 50s or 60s, or something, where Marvel had always had more of a problem, that it tended to be big runs that were important, and a lot of that stuff was really locked into the time period that it was in. As much as I loved Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four, or the Lee/Ditko Spiderman, it's a tough sell to get somebody to casually read a 1960s comic, no matter how good it is, the same way it is with music or movies, or something. Yes, they're really good. You should read them. A lot of people want something that's aimed at them, at their age, and stuff, and I think the other piece of that is that the DC characters tended to have these really iconic versions of what they are. You know what I mean?

Batman is Bruce Wayne. He lives in Wayne Manor. Alfred is his Butler. The Bat Cave is connected to all these things that are always there, in the character, where the Marvel characters tended to not have that, as much. Even when you think they do, when you think about, “what's the iconic version of Spiderman?” He's in high school. He's dating Mary Jane. Norman Osborne is the Green Goblin, and that's his big villain, but those things actually didn't all happen at the same time in the comic. There actually weren't these eras where that was the case, and I think the idea with the Ultimate line, and I would argue that the original Ultimate line worked perfectly as a machine to tell these stories twice, with Ultimate Spiderman and The Ultimates, and the rest of it never fit in quite the same way. It took what you would see if you were going to make a movie of it.

So, what’s the iconic part about Spiderman is, he's a teenager. So, we're going to have a teenaged Spiderman, even though he hasn't been a teenager in the comics forever. He hasn't been in high school in the comics since while Ditko was doing it, but that's still one of the things you think about with Spiderman, but then you can put in “he's dating Mary Jane,” even though she didn't show up till later in the actual comic. You can introduce Green Goblin and have it be Norman Osborne, even though Norman Osborn, I don't think, was even a character when Green Goblin was introduced, and Green Goblin’s first story is him tricking Spiderman into making a movie with the Enforcers. It's super weird. You can trace that to, “oh, and then he kills Gwen Stacy.” You're able to put this all together into a coherent story.

Bill Jemas, I think, was the person that was really spearheading that, especially on Ultimate Spiderman. He plotted a lot of the issues, and then Brian Michael Bendis, who was a newcomer to Marvel, at that point, came in and wrote the Ultimate Spiderman, rejected a lot of the stuff that wasn't going to work from Jemas’s version of it, in a way that Jemas fully accepted and was fully on board with, and it was terrifically successful. Mark Bagley came on the art, and X-Men was Kubert on the art and Mark Millar writing it. X-Men is a little trickier, I think, even than anything else, where X-Men, at that point, the movies are very-- Matrix-y, black leather outfits. So, the Ultimate X-Men was following that style of it, but the problem with X-Men is that, the version of X-Men that was the original version, where they’re kids at a school, was never the popular version of it. I think it's always a little shaky, on Ultimate X-Men, what was working inherently the way Spiderman was, and what was working just out of the force of will of the creators, that you could still have a good story and that would drive people forward, but I don't know that the machine that was building the story was built as solidly as Spiderman was. Does that make sense?


[08:01] David: Yeah, for sure. That makes sense.


[08:03] John: Which is a long-winded way to get to, both of them are attempts to make clear opening stories you can get if you see something in the movies, hear something recognizable, little different, doing its own thing, but same ballpark, and you don't need to know 50 years of continuity to read it.


[08:22] David: New #1, John. Jumping-on point.


[08:25] John: Exactly. Yeah, and on top of that, it was a different story. Bendis certainly was telling the story differently than Spiderman traditionally was, at that point.


[08:34] David: For sure. Yeah. Oh, my God. The stuff was decompressed.


[08:37] John: Yeah, but it was paired with Mark Bagley, who was a recognizable Spiderman artist. So, you had something that was still palatable and looked Spiderman, and he happened to be very good at that. He happened to be very good at doing the teenage emotions and all that stuff that he hadn't really done when he was drawing Spiderman, when Spiderman was an adult who was married to a supermodel, and all the things that Spiderman was, at that point.


[09:04] David: Bagley just retired, right? Did I read that story?


[09:07] John: What? I didn't see that.


[09:09] David: Yeah, I think he retired from interiors. I think it was announced.


[09:14] John: Oh, man. Man, Bagley was a machine. I don't know if I've said this on the podcast. There used to be the Bagl-o-meter and the Hitch-o-meter, these two pieces of paper that were stuck outside the office, showing how many pages Bagley had produced versus how many pages Bryan Hitch had produced.


[09:32] David: Oh, Jesus.


[09:33] John: It’s just this one sheet of paper. This is the slowest he ever was. I love Bryan, but there's a particular period that was particularly slow between Ultimates 1 and 2, and the deadlines were far off, and he was working really hard on the pages, but he would redraw them over and over. He was trying to make them very good, and it's not like Bagley wasn't trying to make them very good, but he was knocking them out very quickly, and that went down to the floor and rolled across the hallway. One time, Bagley didn't turn in pages when he was supposed to, and he sent me a photo of his mangled hand from when he was doing yard work and cut himself, and I'm like, “dude, first of all, don't do yard work. Draw one more page and hire someone to do it. You can see how you're putting your livelihood in danger.”


[10:21] David: Yeah. Right. Comic book artist trying to figure out how to do yard work seems like a bad idea, all around.


[10:28] John: He was a handy guy. I think he knew how to do that stuff, but still. Accidents happened.


[10:36] David: I wonder how fast Bagley is, because there's different ways to hit deadlines. There's the, you work 12 hours a day instead of 8 hours a day to hit your deadlines, or you’re just so fast that you're able to crank out what you need to crank out in an 8-hour period. I watch some people draw, and it's just the anatomy and perspective parts of things, they've been doing it for so long that it’s just innate, and they don't second-guess themselves. They go right into it. Whereas, I see other artists, who are amazing artists, and I've seen them work, and they're not that. They're second-guessing themselves a lot more.


[11:17] John: Yeah.


[11:18] David: I wonder which one he is.


[11:19] John: He works really hard. He would work a lot. Bagley's origin was, he was the guy that won the Marvel Tryout Comic Contest. Even though he's a little after this, he was very Jim Shooter-era, mid-80s Marvel, stylistically, in the sense of how you'd build a comic. Again, even though he's later than that, when he appeared, he was penciling a comic, he was hardcore penciling a comic. He was not drawing a complete comic. He was penciling a comic, and somebody was inking it, and the inker was going to have to come in and figure out the line weights and all the stuff that inkers always did in the 70s and 80s, and that by the late 90s and early 2000s, they weren't doing, when you had pencilers that were really penciling that stuff, super detailed.

Bryan, he was very concerned about the quality of the comic. He was always very obsessed with it. He had one of the best inkers in the world inking his comic, who was also his favorite inker, and he would still go back and re-ink parts of it. Not that the inking was wrong or bad. It wasn't what he wanted or what he was trying to get through it. Mark Bagley was just a lot less fiddly with that. He pencils the page, he goes out to the inker, the inker gets something wrong, “here's a note. Next time, don't ink it that way,” or something. That stuff.


[12:33] David: More of a fix it on the next one attitude.


[12:35] John: Yeah, but you can see, Bryan Hitch looks pretty much the same, whether Andrew Currie was inking him or Paul Neary was inking him, and Bagley did not look the same, depending on who was inking him. The Art Thibert stuff looked really different than, we had a bunch of inkers that we tried for a while before Drew Hennessy came on, and I think Hennessy and Thibert were the iconic inkers from that run.


[12:56] David: Larry Mahlstedt is my Bagley inker.


[12:59] John: Scott Hanna inked a lot of it, too.


[13:00] David: Scott Hanna did a lot of stuff in there, too. I think Mahlstedt’s inks over Bagley in the New Warriors stuff was always some of my favorite Bagley stuff.


[13:08] John: Yeah.


[13:09] David: There was one other thing you said in there that was interesting. What was it? I forgot now.


[13:13] John: I was bound to say something interesting someday.


[13:20] David: So, that was the origins of the Ultimate line. You were coming in on Ultimates 2? How old was the Ultimate line by the time you got your hands into it?


[13:29] John: That’s a good question. It was probably only two or three years old, maybe three years old. Something like that. Maybe 3 or 4. Maybe. I remember, as a young web comic artist, seeing how Marvel put up Ultimate Spiderman #1 on their website, and they had a clickable Flash-based interface, and I reverse engineered that, and made some comics like that. So, it was far enough back that I was still doing that. I hadn't even figured out. So, one of the only things I was, I don't want to say known for, because nobody paid any attention, and nobody cared, but one of the things I was really known for was doing Flash-based comic interfaces, where panels would move and stuff, as you went on. So, it was before I'd figured out how I was doing that, that I was reverse engineering that, and that whole thing happened before I worked at Marvel. So, 3 or 4 Years, I think, which is 100,000 issues of Ultimate Spiderman. That comic was shipping every two weeks.


[14:28] David: That's right. I forgot about that.


[14:29] John: It shipped at least 18 times a year.


[14:32] David: Man, that was also the advent of that shipping schedule, too. That was around the time that they started going, “it'll sell better if we just make it another issue, instead of one-offs and annuals, and one-shots, and miniseries, let's just fold it into the main series.


[14:38] John: Yeah, that was definitely Bagley being like, “oh, I can get really far ahead,” and then Marvel being like, “ha-ha, not so fast, or actually exactly that fast, except you're not ahead.”


[15:05] David: What do you think were some of the things, John, that made that Ultimate line successful, then, back in the day?


[15:12] John: One was actually having that teenage Spiderman comic that felt like a teenage Spiderman comic, that you hadn't had since the 60s, I think, and there have been a couple of relaunches, where you had Spiderman in his early years, but it didn't feel young. It wasn't necessarily bad, but it didn't have that young feeling. It felt either kid-like or adults going back and just doing stories for adults, set in that time, or felt a little old-fashioned, maybe. The Bendis stuff felt state-of-the-art, felt very different, in the way he was approaching the writing of it. Mark Millar, as well, and I think Ultimate is where that stuff really played out of the widescreen cinematic versions of things.


[15:52] David: Yeah, for sure.


[15:53] John: So, I think that all fit together. Having that clear jumping-on point, Marvel legitimately put a lot of push behind it, because this is Bill Jemas’s big baby. This is his big thing that was coming in, I think, from him, in a way that the Marvel Knights stuff wasn't. That originated with Joe Quesada and Jimmy Palmiotti, and Nanci Dakesian, and everybody. So, I think all those things fit together, and Marvel was putting top tier talent on it. That was a big thing. I mean, Mark and Bryan were both new to Marvel when they launched that series, or they weren't the superstars that they quickly turned into, but they were putting, with them, top-tier a-level talent on the art, and that was just where Marvel put the focus. It started getting split when New Avengers started coming out, and then when the Whedon-era X-Men started happening, where you started to have with these other titles, other runs of comics, that were trying to get up to the same level as Ultimates, and you can see that the talent gets, in some cases, literally moved from one title to another. The New Avengers was the Ultimate X-Men creative team, but you didn't have that focus on the three or four books that they were putting out. The top talent went there, and then it went other places, at least for a little while. No offense to the talent on other books, and there are certainly exceptions to it. I mean, John Cassaday wasn't drawing an Ultimate book, and he was A-level talent at Marvel.


[17:20] David: That's as an outsider, at that point, as well, not really working in the industry yet. That's what it felt like. Anybody that was in the know, knew that Brian Michael Bendis was really good and had a really unique spin on how to craft a story, a superhero story, or just a story in general. His Sam and Twitch stuff, that stuff came out of nowhere and was so fantastic. You knew that guy was going to blow up. He certainly took advantage of the opportunity and crushed it. So, even though he wasn't a big name, I don't remember being surprised by that choice, at all. I remember thinking “Brian Bendis on a big book makes sense to me.” I feel like Millar was the same, but I don't remember what he was doing, at that point. Was he doing Authority, or something like that, before this?


[18:08] John: It was around that same time. He was somebody that was just on the cusp for a long time. He wrote the run of Flash with Grant Morrison. He did some JLA spin-off stuff. He was just, I think, a guy that was in the ether. He had a run on Superman Adventures.


[18:25] David: That’s the thing that people talk about when they talk about early Millar, which is funny.


[18:30] John: Yeah. It wasn't an out-of-nowhere pick. They weren't the huge names that they would be five years later.


[18:35] David: So, Ultimates had a good run, and then, I think we've talked about this before, and you just touched on it, it seems what happened with Ultimates, the Ultimate line, or the ideas and conceits that the Ultimate line proposed got folded into the mainline Marvel Universe.


[18:55] John: Yeah, the conceptual gist of what Ultimate Spiderman is, is Peter Parker is in high school and he's a superhero, and that absolutely makes sense, and that frames it really differently than regular Spiderman. The conceit of everything else was shakier. What's the conceit of Ultimate X-Men? They're the X-Men, but they're younger, except for the ones that aren't, and Ultimate Spiderman could let you walk through the introduction of all of these iconic Spiderman villains, and even when you get to somebody that's chronologically out of place, like Venom or Carnage, or something, you can introduce them into that world, and then you have the, “well, what if Peter had to fight Venom in high school? And that makes sense, and here's a different version of what Venom is anyway.” All those things still fit in that framework, but when you start introducing other pieces of X-Men continuity that are the key parts of X-Men, to a lot of people—when Cable shows up, everything just goes out the window. There's so much backstory you have to have for what Cable is.

Some of the individual stories, I would argue, are excellent on all those books. I'm not trying to trash the comics that I worked on, and believe me, I was working on these and loving them, and loving working with everybody that was working on them, and really enjoying the comics. I'm just, in retrospect, looking at what actually worked, if you pull it apart. In Ultimate Fantastic Four, Mike Carey and Pasqual Ferry did a cool Thanos as Darkseid story that was really fun and cool, but there wasn't a framework for what the Ultimate Fantastic Four were, that made that different from what you would see in a regular Fantastic Four comic. It was just, “here's a good Fantastic Four comic”

So, I think all of that would start to come to a head, because I remember by the end of it, I remember, even making this point, that the only one that was still working the way it should was Ultimate Spiderman. Everything else, no matter how good it was, had broken down what it was originally. I think the idea was that you would be able to pick up any Ultimate paperback and read it. You could pick up Ultimate Spiderman Volume 5 and it would be this clean storytelling thing. That falls apart right away in monthly comics, though, because the second time Doctor Ock shows up, he's already showed up. There's already a backstory. You can't have Green Goblin show up and not reference the fact that he knows Peter Parker. So, the continuity started building up, and it still worked with Spiderman, I think, because you had that framework of “this is him in high school, and he's going to be in high school,” but when you don't have that framework on the other titles, it just became another morass of continuity that was as complicated as anything else, and like you said, the talent got split to other titles, the storylines got moved to other titles, but also the storytelling lessons learned by the Ultimates were applied to all the ongoing Marvel Comics.

It wasn't like the continuity didn't happen. They just weren't talking about the stuff that was getting in the way of the story they wanted to tell. Even One More Day Spiderman brought mainline Marvel Spiderman back into something not super far away from “Peter’s in high school.” He's a young man still. When Ultimate Spiderman launched, it was the Straczynski run of Spiderman where he was Welcome Back, Kotter. He was the high school teacher at the school that he used to go to high school at, which is a neat conceit, but he's old, and again, he's married to a supermodel actress. This isn't down on your luck Peter Parker. Even later on, in all the Dan Slott stuff, even when Peter was really successful, there's a Damocles hanging over it that's going to fall, and it's going to destroy Parker Industries, and Peter's going to be the guy that had a failed electronics company, and he's a photographer for the Daily Bugle.

Actually, we do need to throw in the other super successful -- there were two very successful Ultimate Spidermans, the second of which was Miles Morales, who has a more lasting impact than doing another teenage Peter Parker. So, they Killed off teenage Peter Parker, brought in Miles Morales, and that was still functioning really well when the Ultimate line went away. So, they brought him into the mainline Marvel Universe.


[22:48] David: It's pretty interesting that Miles Morales comes out of that Ultimate Spiderman line, because like you said, you have a successful title that had a really nice, good, long run, over 100 issues, and then it seems, I wonder how that change came about. I mean, I'm sure sales weren't fantastic, because it was a pretty drastic change, but I don't know. It feels like maybe it was more about Brian Michael Bendis just wanting to do something different, and really getting out there and trying to push the envelope again, after doing 100-plus issues. That's how many years-- seven years of one thing.


[23:26] John: For the last several years of Ultimates, you had a lot of throwing things against it, trying to blow things up and rebuild things. You had the Ultimatum comic that killed off the Ultimate X-Men, and then they had a big reboot of the Ultimate line, killing Peter Parker, all those things, none of which makes easy entry point. You know what I mean? Miles does because he's “here’s a New #1, and here's a new guy becoming Spiderman, and a new Spiderman, and all that,” but then the story where you have a new X-Men team forming because the old X-Men team died, well, that's a lot of backstory built into it already. No matter how clean you do it, you’ve still got to know there's a bunch of stuff that happened, which isn't necessarily bad. Like I was saying in the Dog Man episode, it turns out, that's probably okay, but that wasn't really where anybody's head was, at that point. This point, you’re early days of the MCU. I mean, the Ultimate line predated the Marvel Cinematic Universe by a lot. I mean, it predated the first Spiderman Movie, the first Sam Raimi one.


[24:23] David: Yeah, I think the Ultimate line loses its reason for existing once it's weighted down with all that continuity. I think, once you're weighted down with continuity, then it’s just “well, I've just got another complicated thing. I've already got a complicated thing.” Fold in whatever we want to keep, ditch the rest, and call it a day.


[24:42] John: And the talent on the other comics are of equal quality to the talent of the Ultimate books. The bar has been raised, hopefully, or the bar has fallen down, if you're half empty or half full.


[25:00] David: So, we fast forward a little bit. To your earlier point, DC has an All-Star line that fails to launch, I think. I mean, All-Star Superman is probably one of my all-time favorite comic books, but that was one of the points that you brought up. It's interesting that, I think you're right, that DC does have these, small, curated stories that are, in some ways, timeless, and just are great entry points. So, All-Star Superman, that collection, is an amazing story about Superman. It tells you everything you need to know about Superman and whether or not you would want to enjoy a Superman story moving forward, for all time. Batman: Dark Knight Returns, Killing Joke, there's these very finite pieces that are done by a single creative team’s vision. DC has, it seems like, several of those, whereas, I can't think of, what are the Marvel miniseries or OGNs?


[26:06] John: No joke, it's Marvels. When you think about, I love Marvels, but Marvels ends with a reference that, you have to know who Danny Ketch is, in order for the end of the book to work. You know what I mean? That's a strange beat that Dark Knight doesn't have. You don't need to know who Lana Lang is to enjoy Dark Knight Returns, even though she's in it. When I was a kid, I knew the good Batman stories were not in the main Batman comic, and that isn't to say the main Batman comic wasn't good. I'm not trying to slam it, but I just mean, after Year One, which was in the main Batman comic, after that, Killing Joke was its own book. Batman: The Cult was a limited series. Arkham Asylum, Gotham by Gaslight. all these massively influential comics were not in the main Batman run, where Marvel just didn't do that. The stuff was in the main run. Jim Lee's X-Men wasn’t #1 but it was a run of X-Men that more or less continues to this day. In a way, it's always been like that. It goes back to that, there's an iconic version of Batman. There is not an iconic version of Spiderman, in the same way.


[27:11] David: So, it just doesn't lend itself to those smaller, more compact things because you don't have the shorthand the way you do with Batman?


[27:19] John: I don't know. They've never been able to make that work, Marvel. The Frank Miller Wolverine limited series works that way, except it reads very 80s, in a way that Dark Knight and Year One, and Watchmen, and V for Vendetta, while they read 80s, they are so idiosyncratic themselves, they don't read like other stuff that was around there. So, they read like 80s stuff, but they read like themselves. They're like a Sonic Youth album or a Nick Cave album from the 80s, not like A-ha.


[27:51] David: Europe?


[27:52] John: Europe. All of them from the 80s. So, on the DC side, I think you definitely had that feeling that you could not read the Batman comic, and when Denny O’Neil was editing Batman, you can see the mechanics going in to make that not be the case, that they'll blow up Gotham City and do No Man's Land, they'll break Batman’s back, all these storylines they put into the main comic, which is all done by pretty good people, but it's not done by Bernie Wrightson. Mike Mignola doesn't draw one of those runs. He draws the covers for some of it, or whatever. Frank Miller has several runs of Daredevil, or at least two, and no runs of regular Batman, aside from the four issues of Year One that they published in the Batman comic, but even that's weird. I mean, that was weird, at the time. I think Kevin Feige would see that later, as well, and then the strength of the Marvel Cinematic Universe was the coherency of the universe, in a way that the DC stuff didn't worry about, and then when it did, it didn't succeed, at all.

DC had a bunch of big, beloved standalone movies. Superman 1 and 2, Batman. Batman Returns, even the third one. Some people liked that. The Nolan Batman stood by itself. It would have reference to other things, maybe, but just really obliquely, and it wasn't a shared universe, where the strength of the Marvel stuff has always been, they all live in the same New York, and they all hang out together, and they all know each other. It's just different eras they came from, different editorial philosophies that just became ingrained.


[29:26] David: Yeah. I've never really thought about it like that, but that's a fascinating little thing to contemplate. It doesn't seem like either one is served any better than the other. Well, I guess, maybe Marvel. I mean, Marvel's a much stronger company, in terms of just overall market share. So, maybe that philosophy wins out, in the long run.


[29:45] John: Maybe there's other explanations for that, though, and also, you can also look at, I don't know what Marvel's market share was in the year that the Watchmen movie came out and they moved however many units of Watchmen in bookstores, along with the complete run of Sandman that was still selling extremely well, at that point, and I mean, there’d be these things. It becomes a different revenue stream. It doesn't necessarily go from apples to apples. In terms of monthly books, sure, if Marvel’s putting all of their resources into monthly books, they're going to do better, but presumably, DC’s stuff pays off in other ways.


[30:21] David: Yeah, we're not looking at the book market, which you and I both know can be a very meaningful, impactful, sizable chunk of business. Last year, Marvel had the good idea, I'm wondering where it came from, if it was editorially driven or if it was creatively driven, they came back with the Ultimates, and launched with three titles, Ultimate Spiderman, Ultimate Black Panther, and Ultimate X-Men, and it didn't feel to me like there was a lot of fanfare around those projects. In fact, there was even a lead up tie-in book that launched the whole thing, I think, based on some Jonathan Hickman old storyline plots, I guess, that’s been around for a while, but The Maker as a villain has been, it seems, in every Jonathan Hickman story that Marvel's done forever. I don't remember, this time last year, going, “oh, Ultimate Spiderman's coming,” but it's really caught fire. I think the stories themselves caught fire, and the creative talent was definitely there. Purposefully, they put, I think, some really cool and interesting people on the new Ultimate line. Hickman paired with Marco Checchetto, who's probably one of the best interior artists we have right now, and then Peach Momoko is just out there brushing. I don't know. Black Panther is one that felt like it was just a Black Panther story.


[32:02] John: Yeah, as it went on, it definitely developed into doing stuff that you couldn't do in the Black Panther series, but I thought that launch was a little weird, in the sense that, you had Black Panther and Ultimate Spiderman, both very much in the same sphere of storytelling. They're both very Hickman-y. Hickman wrote one of them, but even if he hadn’t, the storytelling and the visuals of it are very contemporary Marvel. If you swapped art teams on those two comics, you'd be fine. They'd still look more or less like the same comic, and Peach Momoko’s stuff is nothing like that. It barely seems to be in the same universe, if at all. I love it. I think it's delightful. It's really neat. It's turning X-Men into a Junji Ito comic, is the gist of it. It’s a body horror manga with her unique storytelling. I don't mean to say that she's taking Junji Ito. I mean, I think that was one of the influences of it, but very idiosyncratic, very different looking than anything else you're going to find. I love Marco Checchetto, but when Dave Messina comes in and draw some of the later issues, it looks in the same ballpark. It looks the same. There's nobody else you could bring in on Peach Momoko and have it still look the same, which is a weird choice. That's an odd piece of it, but yeah. No, you're right. I mean, this stuff came out, took off. I didn't remember there being the fire on it that I felt there was on Absolute Batman.


[33:28] David: Yeah, there weren't a bunch of interviews with Jonathan Hickman, talking about his bold new vision for Spiderman. There wasn't a bunch of hype around Marco --


[33:39] John: I believe it's Checchetto.


[33:40] David: I think you're right. I've worked with Marco, but I've never actually said his last name out loud. Anyway. Yeah, I thought that was interesting, but that line seems to be wildly well received. Specifically, the Ultimate Spiderman stuff, because once again, which is interesting, and it's interesting that they've flipped the concept on its head a little bit. They de-aged him in the original Ultimate line, and now they've aged him up in the new line, which is funny and interesting.

 

[34:08] John: To me, that is the most emblematic change between those two eras is, Ultimate Spiderman is going after young readers, and not necessarily Dog Man young, but young people going into comic bookstores, with a young version of the character. Everybody in the Ultimate X-Men and Ultimate Spiderman, when those launched, were young-ish. I mean, I think Wolverine was still 200 years old or whatever, but everybody else. It was very clean, very clear, “here's what it is. Guy in high school gets bit by spider, gets powers. What does he do?” You don't need to know the old stuff, any of that stuff. The New Ultimate Universe is, for Spiderman, the exact opposite. He is an old guy. Old, as in, younger than me, I think, but old-ish. He's an adult. He's married. He has a family. He has a regular family, not a superstar super cool family. I mean, they're cool, but not Mary Jane in 2000 Spiderman comics cool, and he's trying to be a superhero dad and do family stuff, and deal with his parents, or Uncle Ben, and all this stuff.

I remember a thing Brian Bendis said, and I can't remember if he was saying it, that he said it, or this might have even been from Jemas or something. This might have been just one of the shared philosophical points that they all had, that when somebody suggested “what if, in the original Ultimate Spiderman, Aunt May gets killed and Peter grows up with Uncle Ben?” Then the answer was that “this is like Shakespeare. There are certain things you can change. You can change the setting. You can change the time. You can change the way they talk, but there's certain things you have to keep, or else it just stops being Spiderman and becomes something else.”

So, when you look at the original Ultimate Spiderman, it's very conservative, in terms of what it changes in the story. Uncle Ben still dies in pretty much the same way. Most of the changes are logical changes that you can tie Spiderman's origin in to Norman Osborne, and tie Doctor Octopus into that, all these different things that you can spin out of knowing what the next 50 years of the storytelling came to, but the new version of it is “no. Well, Uncle Ben's there and he's in business with J. Jonah Jameson, and Ben is one of the main characters,” and it is deliberately flipping everything, and I think also deliberately going “the people going into comic bookstores aren't young people. They are people in their 40s. So, let's make a Spiderman for them, not for the kids that aren't going there.”


[36:44] David: That aren't in there anymore. Yeah, that exact idea seems to be legit and real, but I think the other piece of it, potentially, at least, is that I think it is something new and fresh, and interesting, and different, and I do think that's somewhat what the audience wants. Although there's the hint of familiarity to it, that is just enough of a whiff of the familiarity that makes it comfortable and safe, I guess, to try.


[37:13] John: It is funny, because I do think one of Hickman's main things that he's done is zig when the movies zag. The Ultimate line is very much about preemptively trying to do what the movies are going to do, and make something recognizable, and then all of Marvel Comics turned into that, for a long time. Hickman’s stuff, I'm going back through all of this stuff, Avengers, certainly X-Men, and then now, this is “okay, well, what if we do the opposite? What if we do something different with it and try to build,” and I think I’ve heard him say this in panels and stuff, that “what if we build out what the next series of movies are going to be built on, instead of trying to redo what was in the movies?” but the funny thing, with Spiderman stuff is, yeah, you're right, there is that familiarity to it, because you do know the Peter Parker from Spiderverse is an older adult Peter Parker.

Tobey Maguire showing up in the last Spiderman movie, and I think rumors that there's going to be another Tobey Maguire Spiderman movie, is adult Peter Parker, married to Mary Jane, maybe with kids. I can't remember if they suggested that he has kids or not. Yeah, you're right. The Spiderverse movies have created a situation where it's virtually impossible to make a Spiderman that doesn't, in some way, reflect on something that already exists, and we're going to pause right there, but we will Absolutely be back next week for the Ultimate conclusion to this talk about the Absolute and Ultimate lines. I think you got what I was going for there, but come back next time. We'll finish this up, here on The Corner Box.


[38:46] David: Bye, everybody.


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