Every now and then I find myself wondering what it would have been like if the New Universe had been a universe a lot of readers wanted to buy.
I mean, the opportunity was there. They just needed to pick a target audience that existed and create books that actually targeted that audience, instead of “books that had principles Jim Shooter wanted comics readers to like."
They could have aimed it at younger readers, trying to create a whole line that’d be a gateway in, like TRANSFORMERS and GI JOE were.

They could have aimed it at older readers, doing smart comics for people outgrowing the regular line.
Heck, they could have done another line just like the regular line, since the readers of that were already coming into stores and buying that sort of thing.

They could have tried an SF line. Or a fantasy line. Not likely a crime line would have worked.
But something coherent, something targeted, something that aimed at readers they could reach with material they’d enjoy.

Not a bunch of hastily-concieved stuff thrown together at the last minute that was a lot like regular Marvel but less splashy.
Jim’ idea of “the world outside your window” didn’t mean “a world you could believe was a world like your own with superheroes added” but “a world where the super stuff was never so loud it couldn’t be denied.”

Which ended up meaning “superheroes, but quiet."
Doing something loud — but something that had an actual focus — would have been more likely to catch on.

Especially with consistent creative teams.

The time was right for omething like that. But the line was so very wrong.
I may have been unclear in this first tweet.

I didn’t mean “what if more people had wanted to buy KICKERS and MERC and STARBRAND.” I meant, “what if Marvel had done a different line of books as the New Universe, ones people would have wanted to buy?"

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More from @KurtBusiek

19 Dec
Se7en Brides for Se7en Brothers

#HorrorRomComs
Crazy Rich Aliens

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Annie Hall Has Risen From The Grave

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Read 9 tweets
19 Dec
You’ve Got Zuul

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Read 6 tweets
18 Dec
I see people saying that if somehow Joe Biden weren’t inaugurated, like he was arrested by the secret non-Deep-State that Trump’s secretly Q-mmanding, then Kamala Harris couldn’t be president because she would have nver been VP, so Trump would win!

Oy.
First off, if Biden were somehow incapacitated — even if he died — Harris would be inaugurated as President. That’s what she was elected for.
Second, if the winner of the election is somehow taken out of things, they don’t award the presidency to the loser as a consolation prize.
Trump lost. His term ends on the 20th. He’s not “president in perpetuity until they inaugurate someone else.” He was elected to a term, and the term ends.

Even if Biden and Harris were both killed, kidnapped or revealed to be aliens from Io, the election wouldn’t go to Trump.
Read 5 tweets
3 Oct
I feel like I’m split into two perceptions: On the one hand, the president of the United States has a potentially deadly disease and it’s apparently spreading like wildfire through his administration and that’s news that should shake and unnerve the world, including me, as a...
…citizen.

And on the other hand, I feel incredibly distanced from it all, because I don’t actually feel like the United States has a president.

And not on “I don’t recognize that guy as my president” grounds; I fully recognize that he’s got the job.
But I don’t think _he_ thinks he’s my president. I think, at best, he feels like the president of his admirers, and he just thinks he’s my boss. More likely, he thinks he’s everyone’s boss.
Read 12 tweets
2 Oct
The press secretary said that out of an abundance of caution, Trump will be working from the presidential offices at Walter Reed.

I did a Google search, and on that admittedly-sloppy basis, this may be the first mention of "presidential offices" at Walter Reed in history.
Has anyone heard of "presidential offices" at Walter Reed before?
Thanks to @thatpetewoods, I have an answer. Which is that there’s no such thing as “the ptesidential offices at Walter Reed” for the president to go work at when he feels like it. There’s a suite that can be used by the president, but can also be used by others.
Read 4 tweets
29 Sep
What happened here, I wonder? Image
The word back in the day (to the point that even I heard it, and I hadn’t broken in yet) was that Gene Colan would give so much space to the early scenes in a story that he’d have to cram the endings into too-little space. This is the second-to-last page of an issue, and that...
…seems to be what’s going on here, but it’s a very un-Colanesque layout overall — it looks like two different layout ideas.

So I’m kinda wondering if Colan drew too many pages, and that cape-shape was perhaps not a silhouette at first, but they had to crop the bottom of the...
Read 5 tweets

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