Comic Book Resources

Your timeline doesn’t quite jibe with the Marv Wolfman/Luthor revamp, partially because you’re using the wrong issues with Vandal Savage. The revamp of Luthor and Brainiac was in 1983; the issues with Vandal Savage you’re showing are from 1980, which was from the first time Wolfman used Vandal Savage.

The revamped corporately accepted Vandal Savage taken from the rejected Luthor pitch appeared (I think, the Grand Comics Database is down right now) in Action 542 (1983). It uses the backstory developed in issues 515 and 516– Vandal Savage changed history in that, and here he has also changed history to eliminate any past reference of his wrongdoing so he can be a corporate citizen even though Superman knows he’s lying.

I’m going to start asking for cool points if I keep correcting your Urban Legends…

how much do you tip a bellhop with a giant red skull for a face? 10%? 15%?

how much do you tip a bellhop with a giant red skull for a face? 10%? 15%?

1 punch in the face, according to the ‘Steve Rogers book of courtesy’.

Erik Larson ??!!

Isn’t that supposed to be Erik LarsEn ??

So, yeah, I really do not know why the changes were made.

Although I’ve never read the issue–or Mark Waid’s run on CA–the tone feels like the changes were made because someone at Marvel suddenly got paranoid that people might be offended at the Red Skull actually acting like a Nazi; combined with a little bit of fear about him acting like a Nazi AND referring to Captain America as his “leader.”

People are paranoid.

Brian, I have to disagree with you on the “bigness” of the changes to the first two pages. While the Skull remains an unreliable narrator, the tone is drastically changed, from a subtle, more human evil into a bombastic, blatant evil. The scene would be much more chilling, and thus much more effective, with the original dialogue.

The most striking change between Waid’s script and the revised one is that the Skull idenitfies himself as evil, instead of leaving that judgement up to the reader.

The Skull’s always been more of a “I am an virtuous warrior for my ideals” rather than a mustache-twisting, hand-wringing “I’m so evil” type of antagonist. It looks lie someone at editorial got scared at the last minute, realized that the entire issue was from Skull’s point of view, and ordered some ham-handed changes to make it clear that Skull=Evil (”See, even he knows it”).

I’d say that the most striking change was from good writing to bad writing.

Concerning the changes to Waid’s Captain America script:

Note that on the first page, Mark’s “twisted liberalism becomes “twisted ideals.” They just couldn’t allow ANY criticism of liberal thought, not even when coming from a deranged Nazi.

This ain’t a Liefeld bashing but just an observation. His strongest work usually came out early in his career, because of the strength of the talented inkers at his disposal. just look at that hawk and dove cover from that link. it looks pretty decent. of course, as artists gain some fame they grow an ego and leave little room for an inker to place his mark on a page. it’s just tracing the work afterwords. how bland.

Your timeline doesn’t quite jibe with the Marv Wolfman/Luthor revamp,

The revamps had been planned in advance, so Wolfman knew his revamp wasn’t used well before the revamps actually occured.

When you’re working with as many writers as Julie Schwartz was, it is a lot easier to plan out stories well in advance.

And yeah, the Larsen error was just idiotic on my part.

My apologies, Erik!

So that’s why that issue of Captain America was so terrible! I dropped the series with that issue.

“CAPTION: I awake to the fetid stench of the CHINESE or the JAPANESE or the AFRICANS…”

Actually, since the Japanese were part of the Axis (which indicates that Yahweh was in cahoots with the Kami pantheon including Hirohito), that second mention seems odd.

Another nice column. I just want to point out that Germans holding racist attitudes towards the Japanese wouldn’t be odd at all: Nazis and WWII Japanese both felt themselves racially superior, and the alliance made more sense in terms of similarity of national worldview and simple power than actual ideological compatibility. Remember that Nazism and national socialism was absolutely rabidly against Communism, yet Hitler allied with Stalin.

What’s amazing about the issue of Captain America in question is that it’s still a good issue even with the changes: Marvel wasn’t exactly very willing to experiment from a literary standpoint in those days, and this was an issue told entirely from the Red Skrull’s standpoint using splash pages. Yeah, Waid’s script was better than the printed version. But it’s a testament to Waid that even as edited as it was, it’s still a strong and memorable issue.

Ted wrote:

Note that on the first page, Mark’s “twisted liberalism becomes “twisted ideals.” They just couldn’t allow ANY criticism of liberal thought, not even when coming from a deranged Nazi.

I read that change completely differently — that they didn’t want to associate Captain America with liberalism, even if that association is from a fascist POV.

“(and I am not going to touch “who came up with the idea to turn Luthor into a ruthless businessman for Man of Steel” with a ten-feet pole, thank you very much!).”

Why not? I thought it was freely admitted by everyone concerned that it was Marv Wolfman’s idea.

Hey Jerky! Your mother was a tracer!

Did anyone notice the similarities between Vandal Savage and Maha Yogi/Merlin Demonspawn/Warlock?

1. Both have encountered Merlin (Savage in the second run of All-Star Comics)
2. Both have black beards
3. Both are primitive men who became immortal (MY is a Nordheimr Vanir from around 8,000 BCE, the end of the Hyborian Age)
4. Both have their own companies (the Maha Yogi had his in Hulk II#210-211 about 5-7 years before Vandal Savage had his own company)

http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix/merlinds.htm

Why not? I thought it was freely admitted by everyone concerned that it was Marv Wolfman’s idea.

From the FAQ section of John Byrne’s site:

[quote]JB: It went like this: Marv Wolfman was offered the Second Chair on the Superman relaunch, to write what was then going to be ACTION COMICS, with a new title to be created for the team-up book.

Marv called me to discuss something he had in mind for Luthor, a “fix” he had been working on in his head for several years. Before he would tell it to me, however, he had a couple of stipulations:

1) It must be all or nothing. Either I accept his proposal in its entirety, or I take nothing from it. He was very insistent on this point: he wanted my promise that I would use nothing from his proposal if I did not take all of it.

2) If I decided I did not like his version of Luthor, he would decline the Second Chair and we would have to find someone else to write ACTION.

I agreed to both these terms, since they seemed very fair, to me. Plus I always like it when all the cards are on the table up front. That’s how I play.

Then he told me his version of Luthor in exactly these words:

“Outside Metropolis, on a high mountain, in his palatial Xanadu-like estate, lives Lex Luthor, the world’s richest man, and his mistress, Lois Lane.” He paused, for dramatic effect, I suppose, then said “See, she’s drawn to power!”

It took me about 3 nanoseconds to say “No.” I said I liked the “world’s richest man” angle, but what he was proposing was more of a reboot of Lois than it was of Luthor, and I already knew who I wanted Lois to be — or, more exactly, what I wanted Lois to be: likeable ! And the Lois he presented was not my definition of “likeable”!

So I said “Thanks,” and suggested maybe there would be some project in the future that we might work on together, and I was about to say “Good-bye” when Marv said “Well, we don’t have to use that part!”

“But you said we have to use all of it,” I reminded him.

“Oh, no! If you don’t like the part with Lois, we don’t have to use it!”

Huh.

So I told him I would think about it, and over the next few days, after discussions with a number of people (including Roger Stern and Mark Gruenwald) who all heard the story as I have told it above, and who had suggestions on what I could do with Luthor as “the world’s richest man”, I decided that basic four-word seed was a good place to go with the character. Of course, since I saw Metropolis as New York (quite literally) I didn’t want any mountains poking up along side the city, so that went away, and I built the character as a cross between Donald Trump, Ted Turner, Howard Hughes and maybe Satan himself!

Later, when everything was launched, and ACTION COMICS had become the team-up book and Wolfman was writing ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN (the title was my suggestion, to invoke both the George Reeves’ TV series and the old ADVENTURE COMICS home of Superboy), I found out that he was claiming sole credit for “creating” Luthor. I shrugged it off. It did not seem important enough to worry about.

Years later I found out Wolfman got paid a bonus for his “creation” of the new Luthor. Something that, somehow, no one at DC had thought necessary to tell me about.

After a most unsatisfactory first year of “collaboration” Wolfman’s contract was not renewed, and I took over writing ADVENTURES, with Jerry Ordway doing a fair bit of the plotting.
[/quote]

So while Marv Wolfman did come up with the idea of making Luthor a ruthless businessman, Byrne “built” the character.

Yeah, as Gokitalo mentions, Byrne denies the idea being Wolfman’s (which is not to say that he states that Wolfman didn’t come up with the idea as WELL, just that Byrne wasn’t working off of Wolfman’s idea when he came up with his idea).

And, really, it is way too contentious (and way too difficult to prove one way or the other) to get into.

Butbutbut…Brian:

1) the revamp of Vandal Savage you’re describing is nowhere to be found in those two issues you cite. In Action 515-516 Vandal Savage has changed history to become ruler of a dystopic world where Superman is his one-man goon squad.

2) I know there’s advanced planning and all, but 3 years doesn’t make sense.

3) Action 542 (1983) is the first appearance of the Luthor-like Vandal Savage as corporate tycoon whom the world doesn’t know of his misdeeds…which also jibes with the timing of the Luthor and Brainiac revamps.

Whatever source you’re clinging to I think got its issues wrong. The actual content doesn’t conform to your facts.

And yet…Byrne credits Wolfman for the ‘fix’ to Luthor in the 1988 Greatest Superman Stories of All Time hardcover. Go figure.

If the story was “read and approved by several editors” it’s odd that they left a couple of big mistakes.

The first and rather obvious one is that the German word for “welcome” (the only German word in the entire story?) is misspelled. It’s supposed to be “willkommen.”

The second one is perhaps more subtle, but there is no way that people would have put that particular mix of English and German on a banner in the 1940s. Whenever there was an obvious translation of a foreign name, that’s what people would automatically use. Or, alternatively, if the Germans felt it necessary to greet Caps with his native name, they would simply have translated everything and written “Welcome Captain America.” The tradition with localized names was very strong in Central and Northern Europe until about a generation ago, when it started to get more lax, and today it’s almost completely gone.

If you want to trace history backwards, you can compare this recent German comicbook cover

http://www.parnass.scram.de/neu_07_99/indus2_kleinrechts.jpg

to this one, presumably from the early 1970s, where they still used the German spelling of “America” but someone decided that the word “Captain” sounded cooler if it was in English. (It’s not a literal military rank, after all.)

http://www.meinesammlung.com/user-pics_300/david79/250106121536_AddUt.jpg

and I’m almost certain that in the 1940s anything but “Kapitän Amerika” would have been unthinkable.

Rob Steager, concerning Red Skull’s “twisted liberalism” becoming “twisted ideals” (and my apologies for neglecting to close my quote up there) in CAPTAIN AMERICA: “They didn’t want to associate Captain America with liberalism, even if that association is from a fascist POV.”

Good point, that could well be it, but as this was Page One, it might be a little of both.

Gokitalo, on the post–Crisis retcon of Luthor (and I acknowledge that he’s quoting John Byrne):
1. “[ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN, written by Marv Wolfman] was then going to be ACTION COMICS, with a new title created for the team–up book.” I thought at the time that the only reason that they dropped the title of DC COMICS PRESENTS, the Superman team–up book, was the combination of the following factors: they had agreed to give Byrne a new #1 for SUPERMAN, they didn’t want to drop the numbering sequence of the then–current SUPERMAN, and they (then) didn’t want to create a fourth Supes series. Hence, the team–up format went into ACTION. Or was the original plan for what we now know as ADVENTURES to take the DCCP format?
2. The first of Wolfman’s two stipulations: “Either I [i.e., Byrne] accept his proposal in its entirety, or I take nothing from it. He was very insistent on this point: he wanted my promise that I would use nothing from his proposal if I did not take all of it.” Subsequently, John indicates that Marv being willing to drop the Lois–as–Lex’s–mistress part when he himself found it unacceptable was in contradiction to this. However, what he says Marv said clearly means, “Don’t say no then use part of it yourself after I’m out the door,” not, “I do this exactly as I outline it or not at all.” I challenge anyone with no bias to find the latter in Stipulation #1 as put forth by Byrne. Did John’s paraphrasing grossly misrepresent whar Wolfman actually said, or is Byrne simply that dense?

I agree with DanCJ that this dispute over credit for the post–Crisis Luthor is news. But I deny that it deserves to be argued over. At the time (again) I saw the new Luthor as a paraphrase of Marvel’s Kingpin, and every comics fan I mentioned this to agreed the simularities were there. This reminds me of somebody filing a complaint with the Writer’s Guild and getting Gene Roddenberry’s name removed from the writing credits of STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE, that is, it’s literally not worth fighting for.

That rewrite of Mark Waid’s issue was totally PC. Why bother having readers realize that although Red Skull is talking fondly about Nazism, he is really considered evil?

No, dumb it down and just make him “bad guy” and make Cap “good guy.”

Yech.

Waid’s writing is true to life. Good for him for taking his name off that crap.

Butbutbut…Brian:

1) the revamp of Vandal Savage you’re describing is nowhere to be found in those two issues you cite. In Action 515-516 Vandal Savage has changed history to become ruler of a dystopic world where Superman is his one-man goon squad.

2) I know there’s advanced planning and all, but 3 years doesn’t make sense.

3) Action 542 (1983) is the first appearance of the Luthor-like Vandal Savage as corporate tycoon whom the world doesn’t know of his misdeeds…which also jibes with the timing of the Luthor and Brainiac revamps.

Whatever source you’re clinging to I think got its issues wrong. The actual content doesn’t conform to your facts.

Gotcha, Graeme!

“Years later I found out Wolfman got paid a bonus for his “creation” of the new Luthor. Something that, somehow, no one at DC had thought necessary to tell me about.”

Oh, Byrne you funny, funny man.
This bothers you, yet you had no problem taking the “Lois & Clark” royalty checks for coming up with LexCorp… especially when Elliot Maggin came up with that one first.

Here’s a question for you (and apologies if they’ve already been answered)

I own a dictionary published in 1978 called “The Super Dictionary”. Aimed at children, is stars the DC Comics Super-Heroes…along with some interesting additions.

For instance Zatanna has been replaced by “Conjura”, and African-American enchantress with the same powers and “backwards speak” gimmick.

She’s joined by several other heroes of Latino, Native American, and Asian ethnicity, none of whom I can recall appearing in any other DC project.

Were they created just for this dictionary?

And are they the most obscure DC super-heroes -ever-?

“From the FAQ section of John Byrne’s site:”

Thanks for that quote. I didn’t know that there was any dispute over the creation of Lex.

For what it’s worth, he never seemed like a knockoff of Kingpin to me (though I didn’t know Kingpin at the time). I always thought he was inspired by Robert Vaughan’s character in Superman 3.

Ah yes, here it is: “Perhaps the biggest change of all was born out of fellow writer Marv Wolfman’s suggested ‘fix’ for Lex Luthor. No longer a mad scientist, Luthor became a super-businessman, the most powerful man in Metropolis…” - from John Byrne’s introduction to The Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told (1987)

I suppose you could quibble about what ‘born out of’ means, but it sure sounded to me at the time like he was giving Wolfman credit. Amazing how perspectives can change and evolve over a 20 year period…

Not much to quibble about in that quote really. Byrne acknowledges that it’s Wolfman’s idea, but doesn’t go into any detail about how much of the creation was who’s beyond that.

Waid’s script make so much more sense. It’s unbelievable - Waid actually succeeded in explaining the obsession of fascism in a comic book and marvel basically censored it. Does anyone know where I can find a full scopy of the script so I can staple or glue his Red Skull dialogue in to my issue? I just love the artwork of that issue and would prefer to read it with the complete (or almost complete) Mark Waid script.

The Liefeld story is 100% true. I asked Rob about it personally a couple years back when I had him autograph my Hawk & Dove trade. He said his mistake was he didn’t bother to tell the editor he was drawing the Chaos Dimension sideways and just assumed since he saw that’s how Larsen did it, he’d do it that way too. Well, the editor freaked out and that’s where the cutting and pasting came into play.

BRIAN:

This isn’t showing in the regular CBUL archive list. You might want to fix that.

Liefeld’s mistake was in taking his lead from a coward like Erik “Name Withheld” Larsen.