Robserecaps Forty Three – Uncut Gems! Miller! McFarlane!
The premise of this week’s episode is rare, unknown, little talked about work of two very popular creators, Frank Miller and Todd McFarlane.
- We get a few updates on Jim Valentino. Jim has returned home from the hospital, if he wasn’t before, Jim has retired from conventions. The Rob mentioned Marvel reached out to Jim to do new work recently. It was going to be a piece in the recent Deadpool anthology, but Jim would only do it if he got to work with the Rob on it, but the Rob was too busy
- TANGENT! The Rob talked about bumping into Marc Silvestri at the Eagles concert this past weekend. The Rob has seen the Eagles in concert ten times and really, REALLY likes them
- The Rob equates the original Image Seven to the Eagles, all heavy hitters in their field, all giant egos
- Last Blood, the Rob’s latest project will be available to purchase next week only through WhatNot and the Rob will be doing several variant covers for Dynamite’s new Thundercats line
- the Rob states DC is planning an “Ultimate style reboot”, as the Rob has spoke to people not on board with the new plans
- after 44 minutes, we are finally on to the topic at hand
- Some of Todd’s early work at DC were backups (second features) in Coyote and Infinity Inc inked by Tony DeZuniga
- Related TANGENT: the Rob tells a tale of several ‘heavy handed finishers’ that came over to the US from the Philippines. Their agents were negotiating triple normal page rates, which they got because they were that good. But the agents weren’t actually giving the artists that money. This caused many of these artists to change their names to get out of these bad contracts
- Marvel’s New Universe failed, in the Rob’s option, due not enough big name creators on the book at launch
- Todd first work at Marvel was part of the New Universe line, Spitfire and the Troubleshooters issue 4
- Back in the Image days, the other six ended up inking their own stuff as Scott Williams, their preferred inker, hitched his wagon to Jim Lee
- Every Marvel editor, up to the early 90’s, were required to have at least one inventory story (fill in issue) ready to go at any time
- Frank Miller’s first work at Marvel was an issue of Marvel Spotlight number 8, focusing on Captain Mar-Vel, which was one of those inventory stories
- This issue was released a few issues into Frank’s Daredevil (which was on a bi-monthly schedule at the time) and had probably been sitting in a drawer for a while
- Kids today equate Frank’s success to inker Klaus Janson, who certainly helped meet deadlines, but are not familiar with Frank’s work from 40 years ago that “would set your hair on fire”
- Both of these issues are better than 98% of the books being released this week in stores
- The Rob is going to read iTunes reviews first time this season. There are four new ones, all positive, the Rob reads two of them
- We find out the Rob’s second favorite candy bar is Mr. Goodbar
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