Thread by @KurtBusiek

Another thing about writing fill-ins (back when that was more of a thing). You had to be ready to go.

If someone offered you a gig, you couldn’t spend a week coming up with a really great idea. They needed it now. Usually, anyway.

I got offered JLA #231-232 because @gerryconway, the regular writer, didn’t want to do the JLA/JSA crossover that year (most of the characters were tied up in a plotline on Mars, anyway), so the editor, Alan Gold, had to find someone else to do it.

He’d offered it to a number of writers, and they’d all said no. Not enough time, and those stories were a headache to write, anyway. Plus, most of the JSA was unavailable, too, due to a storyline going on in INFINITY INC.

So Alan told me he’d hire me to write it if I had a plot idea to him by tomorrow, and the first batch of script the following day. All those other writers turning him down had wiped out his lead time.

I said, “Okay. I’ll have an idea by tomorrow."

It wasn’t easy. Aside from the roster problems, it was traditional for here things to guest-star yet a third team, and we had no time to pick one and clear it, anyway.*

So I spent the afternoon at the DC offices figuring out who I could use.

*I shoulda just picked the Metal Men, because that’d have been fun, but I didn’t think of it.

I remember talking to Len about it — the main JLA was on Mars, the Flash was in jail, the JSA was mostly encumbered, I had no guest stars. Len laughed and said that’s why he wouldn’t do it; he wasn’t hungry enough to take on a job like that.

I said,, “I am!"

So in the end I made up what I thought could conceivably be a new team — a nuclear family that could go on inter dimensional adventures. Maybe this story could launch them in their own series! It was heavily inspired by A WRINKLE IN TIME, if Dr. Murry had been kidnaped by...

…a comic-book super villain and the kids went to the JLA for help instead of the Mrs. W’s. And it wasn’t a great story (and the Champion Family never appeared again). But it got done and came out on time, and I got paid and Alan’s deadlines got saved. All good.

If I’d had a few days to think, I could have come up with a better story. Maybe I’d have used the Metal Men after all.

But I didn’t, so I did what I could.

Later, I got another gig under similar time-pressure: @gerryconway (again! Thanks for the breaks, Ger!) had left SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN, JM deMatteis was going to take over, but he needed some lead time and the book was running late.

So editor Danny Fingeroth told me he’d give me two issues if I could keep up with Sal Buscema. The whole point of me doing these stories was to catch up on the schedule without bringing in another artist. Sal was available, Sal needed work NOW, and Sal was wicked fast.

So I came up with a story, quick, figuring that a character who’s motto could be “With great power comes utter privilege” would make a nice contrast with Spidey, and started feeding Sal pages.

Again, not the world’s best story, and if I’d had more time to think I might have come up with a better one. But it was there, Sal kept drawing, it got done.

Opportunity knocks, and if you’re young and hungry, you answer.

That was even, sort of, how I got UNTOLD TALES OF SPIDER-MAN, too.

Marvel had decided to do the 99-cent books, they’d decided that the Spider-Man one would be set in his younger days (to avoid the continuity tangle of the main books), and they’d offered it to multiple writers...

…including obvious choices like Roger Stern and Tom de Falco, and they’d all said no.

So editor @tombrevoort was going to do what we called a "bake-off”: Pay 4 writers to do pitches, and hire whoever has the best one. It’s faster than going to writers one by one.

I didn’t want to do a bake-off, though, because if you pitch perfectly good ideas and another guy gets the nod, you’ve just sold the publisher ideas you’d like to write but you can’t, because they now own them but hired the other guy.

So I told Tom — look, if you hold off on the bake-off, I can have you a pitch by Monday, and you can either buy it or go on to the bake-off, but you’ll at least be considering me solo, not in a crowd.

He agreed, I dove into my Masterworks volumes, and came up with a pitch.

As it happens, there’d been some miscommunication: I was told the book would be set in Spider-Man’s early days. That was supposed to be his college days — Gwen, MJ, Harry and all — but Tom didn’t tell me that.

So I went looking for the earliest point to fit an interesting...

…untold tale, and came up with: Peter at one point stops wearing his glasses (because Stan wanted him more handsome? Ditko was tired of drawing them? I dunno). Would Aunt May freak out at something like that? But Peter couldn’t tell her why he didn’t need them any more...

…but he also wouldn’t want to go see an optometrist, for fear of the guy seeing spider-tracks in his retinas or something.

So that set my pitch in high school. Luckily, Tom and his colleagues liked it, and I got my second regular gig.*

*it had been a while; my previous “regular gig” had been POWER MAN/IRON FIST #95-100, in 1983. This was 1995.

Technically, I’d had two others in between, LIBERTY PROJECT (which paid almost nothing and lasted 8 issues) and VAMPIRELLA, which the publisher tried to cheat me on...

…so I quit midway through issue #2.

But it was my second regular gig from a major company, and it (and MARVELS) led to just about everything else.

The first two jobs I ever turned down were an issue of NFL SUPERPRO and a custom Spider-Man comic that was being done for the Canadian Police Chiefs association.

Feeling able to turn them down was a big change for me. The confidence that there’ll be other work doesn’t come easy.

I turned down the Canadian police chiefs job because it meant flying to Montreal or Toronto or somewhere, changing my flight plans home from New York, and I needed to be home Monday for some reason. Otherwise I’d have taken it, if just for the novelty of writing one of those.

I turned down the NFL SUPERPRO job because I don’t know anything about football.

That was a real turning point, because simply not being interested was not a reason to turn anything down, previous to that. Work was work. Fake it.

So being able to say, “Look, sorry, I’m just not your guy” took confidence, both that there’d be other work, and that by saying no I wasn’t annoying the editor and costing myself future work opportunities.