Jeph Loeb Has New Job as Marvel's Head of Television

"Executive Vice-President, Head of Marvel Television" to be exact!


Huh...

This is a subtle ramification of Disney's purchasing of Marvel last year. In this video, Loeb talks about "hour-long dramatic television series" (presumably he means live-action series) soon to be in development with "ABC and ABC Family", both Disney owned channels if you didn't know. It's exciting because although there has been a 'Marvel Animation' or a 'Marvel Studios', there has never been an over-all TELEVISION division at Marvel. That is why there have been so few Marvel properties in live-action television adaptations, and why they have generally been very cheesy when done. It is also why there has never been a push toward television advertising for Marvel's comics.

"The Amazing Spider-Man" 1977 live-action series:

is a prime example of Marvel on TV gone bad.

The 70s "Incredible Hulk" live-action series is the exception to this... although it's not exactly perfect either.

What will this mean moving forward? Well, I imagine that if nothing else it means we will have one centralized force working to get Marvel's characters back on television and hopefully in high quality narrative productions, but possibly limited to channels owned by Disney.

Regardless of the quality of the comics he has been producing of late, Jeph Loeb is a damn smart man who has had a varied career in varied media for decades: film, television, and comics. This isn't Marvel putting a comics writer with no experience in moving image media in charge of their Television division. This is a shrewd move on the part of Marvel/Disney and I'm sure we'll see some nice productions come out of it but...

I hope this leads to some avenues for direct comics advertising on channels owned by Disney. Because this blog is about comics, Disney bought Marvel and Marvel is in the business of making comics goddamnit. I know, 'Again he's harping on this?' but I really do believe that good adaptations may lead people back to the comics and bad ones may steer them away from the medium, but advertising for the comics themselves can only be good for the industry. No matter how bad an advertisement for a specific pizza brand is, it gets you thinking about pizza. This is even more important for comics in the US because we are in a country where thousands or even millions of people don't even know that comics HAVEN'T died out yet.

If this new "Marvel Television" diverts even more capital away from the sequential art division and isn't also going to incorporate some advertising for the comics or at least some planned financial kickback into the comics, I'm going to be pissed. The potential here, as always, is great. Whether Marvel remembers to keep the focus on their roots remains to be seen.

~ @JonGorga

DVD Comics Talk: "Marvel Then & Now: A Night With Stan Lee & Joe Quesada"

While I was in Japan for a short period in the Summer of 2oo4, I flipped through the channels on the TVs in the various hotel rooms I stayed in at night if I didn't feel like reading the Japanese history books or komiksu and manga (Japanese words for American and Japanese comics) I'd brought with me. Usually the best thing I could find was a prime-time samurai drama or a Hollywood movie in English with kanji subtitles. Mind you, at this time I knew maybe... ten phrases of Japanese? "Hello." "Goodbye." "Thank you." "Excuse me." "Good morning." "Good night." "Where are the comics!?" (DOKO MANGA KA!?) Stuff like that, you know, the important stuff. So I barely understood any of what I was seeing.

[The awesome promotional logo for the recorded event I'll be talking about later is above!]

To my excitement, one afternoon I changed the channel and I saw a panel of people sitting behind a table across from a person seated in a slightly-goofy-looking throne-like chair. Each of these people had a small stack of mass-market paperback-sized books next to them. After watching for a little while, the scene switched to a young man standing in front of a screen with a digital pointer pointing out random bits of a page of manga. Upon returning to the other side of the room, I realized that each person had an identical small stack of paperback-manga reprints of the work of the creator, or mangaka, sitting in the 'throne'.

Holy crap. A talk show about manga. A talk show about comics.

This is something America needs! Indeed, this is part of why I talk to everybody I meet about comics, why I wrote my senior thesis about comics, and why I was absolutely ready to sign-on to write this blog. The medium of comics doesn't get a ton of exposure and, when it does, it tends to be dismissive or commenting on how SURPRISING it is that it's not easily dismissed.

I assumed this show was a one-time thing but I was even more excited to discover that the same show came on a few days later with a different mangaka!! It wasn't pure promotion. It wasn't pure academia. It was a pleasant, normal (for Japan) TV show that featured different comics creators each week talking about their work like it was no big deal. (Now I wish I could direct you to the website for this show, but I have forgotten the name and lost the browser bookmark I made years and years ago. If anybody reading this has an inkling about it, please let me know.)

One of the closest things in the Western world is this:

"Very, Very, Live: Marvel Then & Now. A Night With Stan Lee & Joe Quesada" - 2007. Single Disc DVD. The Hero Initiative. Maverick Interactive.

On December 2, 2oo6 on the UCLA campus Kevin Smith interviewed Stan Lee (Marvel Comics' Editor-in-Chief from 1941 to 1972) and Joe Quesada (Marvel Comics' Editor-in-Chief from 2ooo to the present).

I watched it recently and LOVE, LOVE, LOVED it.

The atmosphere is shockingly laid-back as these three media giants sit in front of a crowd and pontificate about the history of the company called Timely, Atlas, and then Marvel Comics. Stan Lee comes right out and lays down on the couch. Kevin Smith stands up or turns the chairs around as he feels comfortable. Plus the fact that they're playing to a live audience at UCLA makes everything even more alive. As a result of the live audience and the friendly presence of Smith and Quesada all of the OLD Stan Lee stories that he's told a million times feel much fresher here than in other places.

HIGHLIGHTS:
Description of what Stan Lee did as "creating" the universe, and what Joe Quesada does as "managing" that universe and the varying difficulty of both tasks.

Smith asks Quesada about the iconic nature of the Marvel's characters and whether or not new ones are being made now.

Stan Lee: "I didn't want them [the Fantastic Four] to have secret identities. Mostly because I'm conceited. ... I would want the world to know!"

Joe Quesada: "The way I see it is: we tell the story of extraordinary people doing extraordinary things under extraordinary circumstances and triumphing over evil. As long as we kept to that mission statement I felt like we were okay."

Smith lovingly calls Stan Lee "the biggest flim-flam artist there is!"

Quesada asking Lee about the Black Panther, in regard to his ground-breaking status.

Guest appearances from Reggie Hudlin, Brian Pulido, Jeph Loeb and Tom DeSanto no less.

Reggie Hudlin thanks Lee for creating the Black Panther.

Quesada referring to what would become "Brand New Day" as a Spider-Man revolution.

Lee: "For the villain, I thought the greatest power -really my greatest invention- I said he had the power of magnetism! ... I called him Magneto! If he had a different power, I would have given him a different name."

Quesada recounting how the Marvel Knights line was started by making a crazy bid for control of the entire line of Marvel comics to insure that he would get his childhood favorite: Daredevil. And then how Smith came to write, and Quesada to draw, that hugely successful comic.

Quesada tells the story of the 'saving' of the "Spider-Girl" title.

In fact, the only negative things I could say about the film is that the atmosphere is a bit too loose as the evening wasn't tremendously well-organized, although everyone admits this over and over again to hilarious effect. That and the production values on the recording: the cinematography and the sound mixing are a disaster. Audio levels change when camera angles change sometimes. It's distracting.

The DVD can be bought here. Also available from Amazon.com.
It's quite informative and the whole damn thing makes me laugh.

As you can see from these quotes, there's a great deal of self-ego-puncturing and mockery from Smith that keeps things light.

"government cheese" "the gay X-Men, again" "I didn't have a clue" "burn that fucker down" "it could be Brainiac" "until he takes off his mask" "almost lost my job then and there" "dudes in tights" "see Daredevil call somebody a cocksucker" "they gave Captain America tits" "we did something cool"

It's kind of a three-way comics roast. I could watch it over and over again.

At the end Stan says a basic 'we gotta do this again'. I wish they did. America needs some capital-M-Media celebrating, and commenting on, the medium of comics. So I will be reviewing other DVDs on which you can see comics writers and comic artists (and comicsmiths!) talking about their craft (or themselves) in the future, both full-length feature documentary kind of stuff like this and big budget movie DVD special features. Look forward to them!

Siege Attacks!

Marvel is up to some crazy tricks.

"Siege: The Cabal" came out this week. It was pretty sweet. This is where and when the crossover 'event' is scheduled to be played out from here on to APRIL:

The main crossover 'event' miniseries itself: "Siege" numbers 1 through 4, in January through April.

The connected mini: "Siege: Embedded" numbers 1 through 4 in the same months.

An issue of "Avengers: The Initiative" for December and then each month the mini comes out.

An issue of "Dark Avengers" for each month (a no-brainer really).

An issue of "New Avengers" for each month.

Three issues of "Dark Wolverine" for the first three months of the event.

Three issues of "Thor" for the last three months of the event (although if you ask me, the new arc that just started with #604 HAS to be connected at least as prologue).

Three issues of "Thunderbolts" for the last three months.

Two issues of "Mighty Avengers" for the last months in March and April.

One issue of "New Mutants" (#11) in March.

And, of course, a handful of just FOUR one-shots: the one that just came out, "Siege: The Cabal", the cryptically titled "Origins of Siege", "Siege - Storming Asgard: Heroes and Villains", which are probably either collections of short stories or a collection of written pieces (a la "The Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe") about the players, and what is probably an epilogue one-shot tentatively titled "Fallen".

(Also, the story just started in "the Invincible Iron Man" #20, is probably going to be prologue material too.)

The main mini is going to be written by Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by Olivier Coipel and if you remember how much I like "House of M", you'll understand why hearing those names again makes me excited.

You want to know the really weird thing? "Fall of the Hulks" started this week too, with the "Fall of the Hulks: Alpha" one-shot...

That just seems stupid to me. They're probably not going to connect much at all and it's asking the average reader to cut-back on what they would spend otherwise.

I won't be reading "Fall of the Hulks". Primarily because I'm not a big fan of the Hulk family of characters, and partially because the one issue I read of Jeph Loeb's Hulk was pretty bad, but I would have considered it more seriously if not for the clear fact that I would probably find myself deciding between the two events at some point over the next few months. I expected that they were going to spread these things out over the next calendar year. Giving us breathing room. By not doing that, they are risking exactly what I warned against in my last editorial: widespread 'event burnout'.

In a complete sidenote related to crossover 'events', I bought issues #1 through #5 of "Identity Crisis" which I'm quite excited to read, on Black Friday. And just last night, while walking through Times Square, I bought "Zero Hour: Crisis in Time" #4 through #1 (they are numbered backwards, get it?) from a street vendor. I really do love that part of living in New York, unequivocally. Now, neither of those were a full miniseries. So after I do some reading I will have more buying to do...