by Chris Ryall
After the astounding critical and commercial acclaim of Dark Knight, Miller was catapulted into another realm as a creator — he could now do anything he wanted and feel secure that there would be an audience for his work. With this newfound freedom, Miller threw himself into a work that could never be published at DC or Marvel, not only because neither publisher had any interest in publishing non-superhero work, but also because Miller's new series would be unashamedly sexy and violent, oft-disturbing rampage of fists, babes and bullets, combining the best of all of Miller's influences (EC crime comics, writers Mickey Spillane, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, artists Jack Kirby and Bernie Krigstein) with a vision uniquely his own. This entirely new beast was the series of graphic novels and miniseries, written and drawn by Miller, collectively known as Sin City. Sin City is where Miller's heart truly lies, and stands as the best example of Miller's talent and skill as a storyteller. Start with The Hard Goodbye — you won't be disappointed.
The year 1986 is considered the greatest single year ever in comics due in part to this book.
DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN: ©1986 MARVEL ENTERTAINMENT, INC. USED WITH PERMISSION. ART BY DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI.
Mark Gruenwald
Scott remembers Da Gru
It's time once more for another trip in the Way-back Machine, this time to the year 1987. Teenaged Scott (I must've been either a sophomore or a junior in high school, I'm thinking) is on the way out the door one morning when the phone rings. My mother picks it up, speaks for a minute, and then hands me the receiver: “Phone for you. It's Mark,” she says, assuming it's a friend of mine, having asked who's calling.
“Hello?”
An unfamiliar voice began: “Scott? This is Mark Gruenwald. I'm an editor at Marvel Comics.”
I didn't need the explanation. At the time, Gruenwald was editing most of my favorite comics, including all three Avengers series, as well as writing Captain America, which was in the middle of what was, for me, the best storyline the series had seen in years. But why would Gruenwald at the Marvel offices in New York be calling my parents' house in California?
You might recall from an earlier chapter (page 55) that I was a full-on comic-book letterhack when I was just a fledgling teenaged fanboy. My fan letters appeared in the letters pages of all kinds of Marvel and DC books. (The morbidly curious among you can look in late-1980s issues of comics like The Avengers, The West Coast Avengers, Captain America, The Incredible Hulk, The Flash, Secret Origins and many others for examples of my far-from-deathless prose.)
“Uh, hey, Mark … what's up?” I kind of mumbled.
“So we just got your letter about the Hawkeye series, and I just wanted you to know that I've got Mark Bright in my office right now, and he's redrawing the art for the next issue, putting notches on all the arrows.” I could hear someone else laughing in the background.
Notches on the … and then I remembered. I had just written a wiseass letter to the Solo Avengers letter column about the fact that Hawkeye must be having some difficulty firing his arrows, since there were no nocks at the ends of the shafts for the bowstring to rest in. Hey, cut me some slack — that's what passes for cleverness when you're sixteen years old, and besides, in my defense, artist Mark Bright used to draw these arrows really large in the panels — it was like Hawkeye was firing bowling pins, and you couldn't miss the fact there was no notch for Hawkeye to nock the arrow.
Gruenwald and I chatted about Marvel comics for a few more minutes, and then before I knew it, the call was over. I really don't remember much of what else was said that day — I was just stunned to be getting a call at my house from Marvel over something as petty as Hawkeye's arrows. I'm sure that's why Gruenwald made the call. Based on what I know about him from our numerous subsequent conversations, as well as everything I've read, the sheer randomness of such a phone call no doubt appealed to his wicked sense of humor.
That was how I first “met” Mark, the man who would become, for me, the face of Marvel Comics. I would get to know him better over the years through continued correspondence and our annual meetings at conventions, until his tragic and far too early death in 1996. The summer convention season always makes me think about “Da Gru,” the comics he wrote, what made him a good editor and what an all-around decent fellow he was. A good man gone too soon: “Marvelous” Mark Gruenwald.
Born June 18, 1953, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Mark Gruenwald fell in love with comics at an early age, buying most of the early Marvels off the rack when they were first published, and forming an affection for Gardner Fox's Justice League of America comics that would continue throughout his life, showing itself prominently in his most acclaimed work, Squadron Supreme (1985). Mark graduated from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh in 1975 with a degree in art and literature, put together a portfolio and set off for a visit to New York to break into comics. After being rebuffed by both Marvel and DC, Gruenwald decided that the only way to make this happen was to pick up and move to New York, with no job and no prospects. Taking work as a file clerk in a bank to pay the bills, Mark and fellow comics superfan Dean Mullaney began publishing a fan-zine called Omniverse, which explored the notion of “reality” and continuity in comics, and which Mark hoped showed off his writing, editing and design skills. Clearly, the plan worked, and in 1978 Mark was hired by Marvel's then-new editor-in-chief Jim Shooter as an assistant editor.
Mark rose quickly through the ranks, becoming a full editor on many books, including The Avengers, The West Coast Avengers, Iron Man and Spider Woman. After thriving in that position for many years, Mark was promoted to executive editor in 1988, a post he held for several years, before finally being promoted to editor-in-chief of the Marvel Heroes line in 1995 (at the time Marvel divided its publishing output into five separate imprints, each group of titles with its own editor-in-chief).
For most of this time, Mark was Marvel's resident “continuity cop,” acting as the primary in-house source for information, history and current status of Marvel's characters. This no doubt led him in 1983 to create, edit and co-write The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, an exhaustively researched reference series that lists all of Marvel's characters, concepts, locations and technology from A to Z.
Mark was also active creatively throughout his time at Marvel, writing for such series as Marvel Two-in-One, Hawkeye, D.P. 7, Squadron Supreme and a lengthy, world-record run on Captain America, spanning some 136 issues (#307–443) — over ten years on the series. However, it was his work as an editor that had the most impact on me. From the outside looking in, it's impossible to realize what makes an editor good at his job. All I knew then was that I enjoyed the books he edited more than the rest of Marvel's line. More than that, Mark, a fan himself, realized that part of his job as editor was to connect with fans, get them excited about comics and, more important, get them excited about Marvel. For Mark, the best way to go about this was through the comic conventions, where he would go out of his way to transform the traditionally stodgy panels and discussions into things far more fun and memorable.
I remember one year at WonderCon in Oakland attending what was listed as a “Marvel Q & A Panel.” (This was back when Marvel still attended the smaller conventions, a move which I think works miracles for creating lifelong fans.) As Mark came out to greet the crowd, he was holding a brown paper sack. Questions would be asked and answered, Mark revealed, but the only way to ask a question was to first receive … “The Bun of Inquisition!” Mark then dramatically reached in the bag and slowly withdrew a bran muffin, much to the excited gasps and murmurs of the audience, completely playing along with the gag. Mark then proceeded to huck the muffin around the room for the next hour and a half, hurling it in turn at each potential questioner, who would need to pluck the slowly disintegrating muffin from the air in order to ask his question. I think it was two or three questions after I had thrown it back that the muffin finally exploded in mid-air. The dejected crowd moaned at the sight, only to break into a wall-shaking roar when M
ark reached back into the sack and thrust a second muffin into the air, as if pulling Excalibur from the stone. It seems like such a small thing, but in all my years at the cons, I've never seen a crowd leave a panel in a better mood.
Even the more routine panels about Marvel books were a lot more exciting with Mark in charge. Before the panel began, while the crowd was still filling the seats, Mark would get up onstage and do this bizarre maneuver that my girlfriend still refers to as “the stompy dance.” He would stomp on the wooden stage with what seemed like a giant shoe, over and over and over, with his elbows jutting out at an odd angle. This insanely loud stomping noise would get the crowd more and more fired up until soon they were clapping and stomping along, worked into an absolute frenzy. By the time the guests were announced, it didn't matter who was coming out; it could have been the letterer on Power Pack, and the crowd would have roared as if it was Stan Lee and Jack Kirby flying in on jetpacks.
It was after Mark's surprise call to my house that we got to know each other better. The following year at WonderCon, I was looking through the preview issues at the Marvel booth when Mark approached, noticing the name on my badge, “Still checking the arrows?” It was clear he knew who I was past the single phone call — he had mentioned characters and stories I'd liked and disliked and had written to him about in numerous fan letters, some of which had been printed, and some not. Every year after that, Mark and I would meet up at WonderCon and discuss the previous year's books, what I'd liked, what I hadn't, the things he thought had worked and the things he thought could have been improved. Mark would without fail hassle me for my favorite characters: “Look, Hank Pym is staying retired, and you're the only one asking to see Stegron the Dinosaur Man again.” My suggestion for a no-doubt best-selling Yellowjacket/Stegron miniseries went untaken, needless to say. One year, I stopped by the Marvel booth and Mark was immediately on the attack — “Buy any Ant-Man comics yet?” — only to mime being outdrawn, gunfight-style, when I pulled a Silver Age Tales to Astonish out of my bag, which I'd purchased just minutes before.
Our annual meetings continued through my college years; I'd make the trip from Santa Barbara to Oakland every spring for WonderCon. When graduation neared, I wrote to Mark and asked how the employment outlook was for an assistant editor's position. Mark replied with the blunt, but honest truth: business was bad, they were in the middle of layoffs and he wasn't even that confident about his own position. He left his office number, and we talked about it some more on the phone. Mark tried to be positive about possibilities down the road, but it was clear that Marvel wouldn't be doing any hiring any time soon.
When Marvel reorganized, it gave up its separate-imprint structure, and Mark was passed over as editor-in-chief. I thought (and hoped) that he'd head over to DC, where his old assistant Mike Carlin was in charge at the time — he'd get the chance to work on so many characters he'd never had the opportunity to write. Instead, Gruenwald and Carlin wound up working together on a project decades in the making: DC versus Marvel Comics, a miniseries that would pit all of Marvel and DC's heavy hitters against one another, with fans voting to decide the outcomes.
Just as DC versus Marvel was hitting the stands, tragedy struck, with Mark's shocking and unexpected death from a heart attack at the age of forty-three.
Before his untimely death, Mark had requested that his body be cremated, and the ashes blended with the printer's ink used in the production of a comic book. His widow Catherine and Marvel carried out the request, and in 1997, a trade paperback collection of Mark's critically acclaimed Squadron Supreme series was published, with the ink containing, as his wife put it in the book's foreword, “actual particles of the Gru.” Although some found the request odd or macabre, I thought it perfectly in character, reflective both of his love of comics and his often completely chaotic and unpredictable sense of humor.
The summer following his death, a memorial panel was held at the San Diego Comic-Con for Mark Gruenwald. It was a packed room, probably a couple hundred people in attendance, and many of Mark's friends and fans got up to speak. I'm pretty sure I told the phone-call story.
Mark's widow, Catherine, brought us all a gift that day: video footage taken of Mark from his years at Marvel and from a local-access sketch comedy TV show that Mark and a few other Marvel cohorts did for a couple of years. We got to see some of his legendary office stunts like filling the office with crumpled paper floor-to-ceiling, or building a three-foot-tall platform beneath his desk and chair, so that he towered over all who entered; we got to see some of his equally famous quirks, like his insistence that absolutely nothing be left on the surface of one's desk (even the telephone was tucked away in a desk drawer); mostly we just got to see Mark again.
Da Gru is gone, but his wisdom remains, thanks to the list of Life Lessons handed out at Comic Con that year.
IMAGE COURTESY OF CATHERINE SCHULLER.
As we got ready to leave that day, Catherine had a favor to ask: we'd all seen on the video this odd, silly walk that Mark would do from time to time just to get some easy laughs, a kind of mix of a laid-back saunter and a John Cleese-style high-step. She thought Mark would like it if we all walked out of the room that way, and not tell any of the people waiting to come in for the next panel what we were doing. Sure enough, about two hundred people came lurching out of that room one at a time, and not a word was said.
Catherine passed out to all of us that day a list of life lessons that Mark had written for his column in Marvel Age magazine, and looking through it now, Lesson #168 strikes a bittersweet note:
“Someday the universe will tire of me and will break me down into the components I came from. Right now I'd mind if that happened, but when the time comes I imagine I will welcome no longer being separate from the rest of reality.”
That may be, but the rest of us are all the poorer for it.
RECOMMENDED READING 101
MARK GRUENWALD
Captain America #332–350
D.P. 7 Classic, Vol. 1
Essential Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe — Deluxe Edition, Vol.1–3
Hawkeye
Quasar #1–60
Squadron Supreme
11 Alan Moore
Whenever folks new to comics ask what graphic novels to pick up, we tend to recommend the same ones: Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Swamp Thing. It's no coincidence that these and so many more sprang from the mind of British writer Alan Moore, the “mad genius” of comics. There are countless things to say about Moore's work, but perhaps the most easily overlooked is the man's versatility. He can write anything, and do so with such subtlety and maddening effortlessness that it makes lesser writers (meaning, well, everybody else) gnash their teeth in frustration.
Moore's work on Swamp Thing, about a second-rate DC horror character, transformed it into an affecting, occasionally heartbreaking work of romance and suspense. His childhood affection for Marvelman, the British version of Fawcett Comics's Captain Marvel, spurred a startlingly stark and disturbing exploration of superpowers in Miracleman. V for Vendetta explores Moore's distrust of government and authority, taken to the ultimate degree and personified in V, probably the most cheerful and likable anarchist murderer in popular fiction. And finally, acting almost as a capstone to this period of his work is Watchmen, Moore and Dave Gibbons's ultimate deconstruction of the comic-book superhero, pulling in readers with a “real-world” approach, then absorbing them in a work so intricate in its storytelling devices and layered themes that even after having read the book dozens of times, new nuances can still be discovered upon every reading.
After a bit of a fallow period, Moore roared back to life in the 1990s with scores of new projects. With artist Eddie Campbell, Moore published From Hell, a scratchy and chilling look at the Whitechapel murders and the theory of Jack the Ripper's identity. Working for Rob Liefeld's publishing company, Moore wallowed in his love for the Silver Age Superman in the Supreme series, a book that subtly mocked and analyzed the classic
comics while it was at the same time paying tribute. (Moore had already written what many consider to be the best Superman story ever in “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” This would be the final appearance of the classic Silver Age Kal-El before John Byrne's post-Crisis revamp.)
Moore's output took a prodigious leap forward in 1999 with the creation of his own new comics imprint, America's Best Comics. (Published through Jim Lee's company Wildstorm, it was later purchased by DC, putting the then famously anti-DC Moore in a sticky position, which never quite settled itself to Moore's satisfaction.) After a long drought of new Alan Moore comics, suddenly new and absolutely wonderful series were hitting the shelves practically every week. Tom Strong channeled the best of Tarzan, Superman and Doc Savage in a brilliant mix of styles and themes. Moore's Tomorrow Stories put out a variety of comics archetypes, most notably Greyshirt, a thinly disguised Spirit pastiche that let Moore flex his muscles with the eight-page short story in Eisner's style. All of Moore's new interests in sorcery and the psychology of “magic” showed up in Promethea, and in a notion of sheer genius, Moore combined the superhero team with the storytelling style and interconnected storylines and characters of the TV cop drama in Top 10.
And as if all that wasn't enough, Moore took the superhero team back to the Victorian age in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999) uniting famed characters Allan Quatermain, Dr. Jekyll, Mina Harker, Captain Nemo and the Invisible Man in several globetrotting adventures teeming with characters, locales and concepts from the literature of the period, so carefully and smoothly combined that the casual reader would barely notice. Moore's most recent installment of his League series, Black Dossier (2007), jumps ahead to the 1950s, as a rejuvenated Allan Quatermain and Mina Harker dodge familiar spies in a metafictional Great Britain attempting to get hold of the Black Dossier, the secret history of all the different iterations of the League that have existed over the decades. In typical Moore fashion, the book is packed with countless literary references both obvious and arcane. Still, it's Moore and collaborator Kevin O'Neill at their best, duplicating all manner of publications from newspaper comics to government reports to Tijuana bibles, forcing readers to delve for meaning and create the history for themselves from these entirely fabricated “primary sources.” A dense, engrossing read.
