Many! Mighty! Micro! Mini! No. 6: ta-ta, tinyletter!

I gotta admit, it was close. I’m hoping beehiiv proves to be a pleasant experience (though I wish it didn’t continue social media’s trend of taking common words and rendering them unspellable) But between the one-two punch of “oh hey, try the first month at the paid tier” and the “oh hey, we’d love to let you have more than 10 subscribers, just let us scan your driver’s license and face!” this newsletter almost went the way of All-Flash. (Say what you will about John Byrne, that’s still just a genius level pun.)

But I’m here, I hope you are too, and neither of us comes to regret it too much.

It’s Sunday night, I’ve got tomorrow off, and i’m trying not to do anything that would throw off my game—which is to say, as much as I’d love to break out the pot gummies and idle away the night feeling warm and very cozy, I don’t want to pay the price with a severe spike in my anxiety levels on Thursday or Friday. The fact I’m not working tomorrow should be warmth enough—though since that warmth is only metaphorical, it can only go so far.

So instead I’m sitting in the dark, listening to the wind ramp up—another storm is sweeping through, and I’m hoping it doesn’t take out our power or our tree—and wishing I had something new to say about Rom: Spaceknight, other than…it’s fun!

Though, actually, the thing that comes to mind as I’ve page through the Mantlo-Buscema opus is a certain residual disappointment about the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

Honestly, I don’t think I’m going to get much further down that train of thought, because what’s more wearying than thinking about the MCU, even if it’s just to shit-talk it?

But, in a nutshell: one of the things that makes me sad about the MCU is I can’t help but feel when they started talking about the different phases, they really did have in mind a phase like ‘70s and ‘80s Marvel, when someone like Bill Mantlo and Sal Buscema would get a comic based on a toy license and decide to treat it absolutely as a seriously as they do The Incredible Hulk or Marvel Team-Up or any other title they could get.

I mean, I actually enjoyed Shang-Chi and the CGI Effects of Power, and lord knows there was a shit-ton that was problematic in the original concept, but…Master of Kung-Fu was a kung-fu spy story; Man-Thing was a gonzo horror comic; Rom: Spaceknight is like The Invaders or V or Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where the residents of a small town don’t know who to trust and who to hate while giant silver space cyborg Jesus tries to save them all.

Whether it was the Seventies when Lee & Thomas wanted to have whatever comics were going to come next after the superhero fad ran out, or the Eighties when Shooter would’ve been willing to do a licensed comic book about a Betty Crocker Easy Bake Oven if it meant he got another bonus to spend on top-notch cocaine, the formula of “genre plus continuity multiplied by hungry creators willing to take absolutely any idea (too) seriously” created a whole lot of material Kevin Feige could’ve shoved into a multiplex that would’ve felt different from the first six, or sixteen, Marvel movies that came out. Marvel as a movie brand could’ve meant something much different than what it became—something closer to “just” a studio.

But I can see why they didn’t.

For one thing—the most important thing—Marvel was, up until very recently, extraordinarily good at making money doing this thing almost nobody else could quite figure out how to do. Any gambler worth their salt is going to tell you to play out a streak until it grows cold—until it all went sideways and shitty, Marvel looked like it was doing the smart move by saving the different stuff for TV.

And the other thing is: what would a Marvel movie be, if not the superhero template it built and perfected? If you strip out the superheroes, what really is left of a Marvel movie? Good casting people; screenwriters that could very well just be A.I. slider bars to adjust the smart-assedness of the dialogue; and a visual blandness counterbalanced by the willingness to stripmine the talent of every VFX studio on the planet.

Anyway, I’m really enjoying ROM, even though it often reads like at any given time there’s only one character per issue not delivering their dialogue in a shriek.

But I can’t help but imagine the AMC TV series where the casting people and the slider bars do their work, and the smirky residents of Clairton, West Virginia don’t know who to trust anymore. Friends and lovers are forced to choose—based on nothing more than what they see and what people vehemently insist is really going on—between two terrifying unknowns, one of which happens to be a shadowy sinister cabal, and the other of which is Christ embodied as an seven foot Art Deco toaster with a ray gun.

Have a good week!

-Jeff