An entry from my Marvel blog of long ago, this one talking about the sincerity of the editorial voice. Also, it contains a reminder that the Blog was at one point up for a Harvey Award (although it didn’t win its category.)
June 26, 2008 | 1:00 AM | By Tom_Brevoort | In General
I read an in-house editorial column last night, and really walked away from it with a sense of phoniness, of reading a manufactured product that was trying really hard to be hip and casual, but in which all the strings showed. I feel like this Blog comes across that way sometimes, especially when I’m not on my game, and pounding out words furiously so I can jet out the door and go home.
And that’s the trap—there’s no way to get around the fact that this is a corporate-run site. This isn’t just a Tom Blog, it’s a Marvel Blog, and that means there’s always going to be a certain amount of skepticism and suspicion about what’s discussed here. I don’t know how to get around that.
But I will tell you that every poorly-typed, poorly-spelled word comes from me, usually off-the-cuff, always in a single draft without any rewriting. It’s genuine, no matter how artificial it may sometimes appear.
I have to say, though, those posters who responded to the Letter of the Day with angry retorts about feeling disenfranchised by the Spidey books, and looked at it as some kind of insult revealed more about themselves than anything else. Sometimes a heartfelt letter is just a heartfelt letter.
A few bits of bookkeeping before I head out for Wizard World Chicago:
–As usual, we’ll be doing the Prize of No-Prize Marvel trivia panel on Sunday, and giving away a stack of cool Marvel swag, typically including one-of-a-kind sketches by some of the artists in attendance.
–Additionally, we’ll also be doing our newfangled Marvel: Your Universe panel on Sunday as well. No guarantees that we’ll be handing out another rare variant cover at the event or anything, but we’d love to hear what you have to say about what we’re doing, and how we can make our books better and more enjoyable to you.
–In honor of our Harvey Award nomination, I’m posting the strip to the left. This is an example of “HEY, LOOK!”, a strip that the great Harvey Kurtzman, for whom the award was named, did at Marvel in the days before he created MAD. According to legend, Stan Lee didn’t really have a budget for these little one-page masterpieces, but he loved Harvey’s work so much that he just bought them, and would just toss them into random issues of random books whenever he had a spare page. There was a collection published a number of years ago, but before that tracking down all of these pages was a herculean task.
More later,
Tom B
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