Pitch Month: Grandmaster

Hey:

So I sorta stumbled my way through two pitches in the course of this month (with me having to put two posts in in order to get one halfway decent pitch out).

It makes me suspicious of myself, it does: right now, as I’ve more or less said, “yup, this is the last one,” I can think of at least three I’m not going to talk about…but back when I would get anywhere near my computer in the early part of the month, my mind would just got suspiciously blank.

This is even true of some of the little non-pitches—creative boogers, basically—I’ve got on the inside of my brain: at one point I thought I’d accumulate a whole post of those but realize I only have, uh, two I can access right now.

My brain has Michigan J. Frog complex, only singing and dancing its way across the stage whenever nobody else is around. (Is that part of why that damn cartoon is so resonant? Probably….at least for me.)

Rather than dwell on that whole issue, let’s talk about Grandmaster.

Grandmaster is either the first or the second of two comics pitches I worked up—the other was for The Punisher—back when I was a little kid….let’s say between ten and twelve. (The reason why is probably going to be another post someday, or should be.)

And calling them pitches is too strong a word, but they were also a bit more substantial than daydreams—on lined blue three by five cards, I jotted down the story beats of each “issue,” plots and subplots. A form of personal shorthand, they were not long at all—I wanna say I usually could fit two issues on one side of a three by five? But if I’d taken each beat and fleshed it out into a sentence or two, it probably wasn’t too far off from Stan’s plots, kissing cousin to the Marvel Method.

I’m trying not to spiral down the path of just talking about those cards, and the plotting, and comparing and contrasting what I remember of those first 25-50 Punisher issues.

It’s very tempting, in part because I’m realizing now I’m mentioning for the first time ever something that gave me unalloyed joy and it seems to me something so crucial unspoken for so long must have some kind of power to it.

But also because it’s been so long since I’ve really even thought about them, other than marking their existence in my brain, a crucial “oh that happened, and somewhere I still have the little filing box with a good chunk of those cards still in there and i should look at them someday.” I haven’t thought about them in so long, things I’ve forgotten are now mysteries to me I want to try and solve here on the digital page.

One thing worth mentioning is, like any uncreated work, the pitch has become a mental palimpsest: the non-work is returned to again and again, and, just like we now know happens to memories, it changes each time even if it’s just being re-reviewed.

Which is to say: I say I wrote it when I was between ten and twelve, but I returned to my memory of it in my head several times since and fleshed things out, changed things up. That’s really the only explanation I can come up with for how I had a pitch sprung from a book in 1974 with a supporting character from 1981.

What book? Which character? Well, as with probably any idea for a comic series a child would come up with, you can probably get the best idea of what I was shooting for by knowing the book I was inspired by/ripping off/emulating: Giant-Size Defenders #3 from (according to the contents page of Defenders Masterworks, vol. 3) January, 1975.

GSD’s 38 pages move quickly: Nighthawk recruits Daredevil to join him and the rest of the Defenders to fight as gladiators for The Grandmaster who’s been challenged to a game by The Prime Mover (a crazy chess playing robot from Sterankos’ SHIELD series that’s maybe able to lightly manipulate reality?). The Defenders and Daredevil are split into three groups of two, and each two are dispatched to a different planet to fight a duo of alien foes. Best two out of three wins, and if The Prime Mover wins, the Earth is his.

On a re-read, GSD #3 is still, I think, a banger: it’s plotted by Len Wein, Steve Gerber and Jim Starlin, with Starlin doing the layouts, Gerber doing the script, and then finished by Dan Adkins, Don Newton, and Jim Mooney. And it’s basically the Arena episode of Star Trek multiplied by three and bundled in a wrapper of cosmic Marvel and deep cut continuity?

In other words, a banger now but for me at (nine? ten? twelve?) it was everything.

And so, on those little blue cards, I fervently jotted my notes.

At the end of Giant-Size Defenders #3, after defeating the Prime Mover, The Grandmaster decides he does want the Earth (after telling The Defenders he was only in it for the thrill of the game) since the Avengers (his first appearance) and the Defenders (his second) have fought so well for him. All-powerful, he’s only stopped by Daredevil beating him with a game: a coin toss that due to Daredevil’s heightened senses is rigged to land exactly the way DD wants it.

That’s the end of GSD. The start of my series is The Grandmaster realizing he doesn’t need to take Earth in order to have a steady series of gladiators, he can just pick people and ask. And to make sure he gets a good chance of them agreeing, he asks them at just the right time: he snatches them from the moment of their death and invites them to fight for him…or die.

Little continuity nerd that I was, I thought this would be an elegant way to deal with how often villains would die in comics and then return just a few months later—Marvel writers at the time would make a poiint to explain it, but you could see them growing weary.

This way, you could have a villain or a hero die and there’d be a neat little reason for it: the Grandmaster had seen their potential and offered them a chance at a way back.

Looking back now, my idea had a bit of the Johns/Ostrander Suicide Squad to it: most of the Grandmaster’s group would be villians, with a few antiheroes sprinkled in, and not all of them would be content to just play their part. Some might offer to throw their fights if the Grandmaster’s opponent would cut them a better deal what they were getting.

And just as in Suicide Squad, people would die. In the second of the two fights, the Sub-Mariner and Daredevil lose against their foes: Sub-Mariner, weakened by a rupture in his life-sustaining suit, is clubbed to death by the tail of his (very Gorn-like!) opponent, and Daredevil is roasted alive over a volcanic fissure. They’re brought back to life by The Grandmaster a few pages later after he wins…but that didn’t have to always be the case, I reasoned.

One of the things I liked most about Giant-Size Defenders #3 was The Grandmaster himself. Shock of white hair, blue skin, yellow high-collared celestial toga, red eyes surrounded by a thick black outline very reminscent of the black surrounding Spider-Man’s white lenses—he cut a pretty neat figure, I thought, enjoyably generic in what I assume is that Buscema brothers way.

But even better, he was neither menacing, histrionic, or portentious—the three stripes of Marvel cosmic personality—but almost….solicitous?

Part of that surely owes to one of the general rules of hack science fiction: as has been the case since time immemorial, the alien gets to deliver the exposition. But maybe it’s also that Gerber’s script makes it a point to underline everyone fighting on both sides are “fighting of their own free will.”

Additionally, it’s all very matter-of-fact for The Grandmaster. Despite being described by Nighthawk as “a galactic gambling addict,” The Grandmaster isn’t some high-strung adrenaline junky.

And there’s not much stake in the game for him, literally: The Prime Mover gets to pick his team with the powers the Grandmaster grants him; The Prime Mover gets Earth if he wins only because the Grandmaster will use his power to give it to him. After winning, The Grandmaster decides The Defenders have to stay and continue to fight for him, because The Grandmaster loves winning.

In short, for an all-powerful being, The Grandmaster seems desperately lonely.

This is his only excitement, this is what he’s dedicated himself to. The only other explanation Nighthawk gives to understand The Grandmaster is “his games are his life.” One of the Elders of the Universe, he is essentially divine, and what he chooses to do with his infinite power is take tiny beings who are nothing like him, and tries to understand them well enough that he can determine how well they’ll fight for him. What they can and cannot do, what they will and will not do. They go into battle, which he does not need to do, has apparently never needed to do, and when they lose, he too loses. When they win, he wins.

In those non-stories in my young head, the Grandmaster starts to develop a team, and comes, perhaps, to care for them even as he plunges them again and again into life and death situations where they endure and inflict a terrible pain—some kind of cosmic purgatory. Most, after winning for him, leave—sometimes asking their memories to be wiped rather than relive what they had gone through. But others stay; others like him, lonely but unable to care about anyone who’s not also a warrior, someone able to protect themselves.

Like I said, this idea lived in my head so long it’s a palimpsest: I know Elektra at one point was one of those characters, despite the length of time between Bullseye killing Elektra and Miller returning her to life is, what, six months? Eight? How could that be? What stories did I draft back when I was ten or eleven that would have a female character I could later swap otu for Elektra.

Another character who would be part of the regular stable would be my beloved Skull The Slayer, unable to adjust to civilian life, and offered the chance to remove the alien belt bonded to his skin if he’ll fight for The Grandmaster. And in doing so he learns he has no life really to return to.

There was also Big Jim, a competent and powerful man with a mysterious past and based—oh the delightful shame of it!—on both my Big Jim action figure and on who it would always be alluded to but never fully revealed: James “Bucky” Barnes, plucked from the moment of death to serve as a cosmic gladiator.

The Punisher would also show up to fight for The Grandmaster—because that would be the way I’d have him come back from the dead after killing him in the series I was writing for him on the other set of three by five cards: The police shoot him to death on top of the Statue of Liberty, and he’d fallen—a seemingly sure-fire “yup, he’s dead" end to an issue which would then follow (in emulation of another comic I loved, Englehart’s Captain America) the doomed attempts of men who’d try to take on The Punisher’s mantle. The Punisher would, after winning for the Grandmaster, would return to Earth and to life, because he had no wish to fight just for gain or glory, he wasn’t a gladiator in another’s game, he was a warrior in a war of his own.

(And, of course, since Jim Scully and Frank Castle both had served in Viet Nam, I would’ve had them recognize one another when Frank shows up on The Grandmaster’s team….and that in turn would plant the seeds for another story/series I had dim ideas about: The Troop, which was a team in Vietnam that were essentially all the heroes and villains who’d come out of that war—The Punisher, Skull The Slayer, Demon Slayer, Jigsaw, and others—and the cursed thing they’d fought that had warped all of them.)

One of the villains I mentioned —maybe Doctor Doom, maybe The Mad Thinker—fights for him and gets the right to return to life, but stays again in exchange for a bit of cosmic power. After another few matches where he gets enough power, he challenges The Grandmaster to a match, picks his own team…and wins, taking as his prize all of The Grandmaster’s power.

Exiled to a distant galactic backwater, the depowered Grandmaster and the few loyal members of his team would have to battle their way back to power so they can take it back from the supervillain who has transformed the Earth into a twisted world of his own making.

And so on and so forth, etc., etc.

It’s funny. Writing it all out now, I can see how each of the bits I thought of mirrors each of the styles of the writers: with Starlin, it’s all the cosmic stuff big and small, and the machiavellan wheeling & dealing (put Thanos as the supervillain in that arc and it really resembles, well, a good 80% of Starlin’s later Thanos stories, doesn’t it?); with Wein, it’s the shared universe continuity stuff draped over the popcorn pulp aesthetic; and with Gerber, it’s the idea of small and broken people finding a place for themselves out on the margins after rejecting/being rejected by life.

(And yeah, in all that continuity porn and opportunities to resurrect forgotten sacred cows, there’s also more than a little Roy Thomas, who not only created The Grandmaster as a way to have the Avengers fight Marvel’s heroes of Wolrd War II, but later had to right a whole Invaders annual explaining why in that fight The Sub-Mariner of World War II was wearing the wrong kind of pants.)

Anyway.

Pitch month….good grief. What was I thinking?

Thank you for indulging me. I hope to be back right at turn of the month, either to throw that damn list of comics at your or maybe just to talk about some of the manga I’ve read in the last month or so.

And I hope you’re well!

Cheers,

-Jeff