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Thursday, July 15, 2004
Every superhero is in the book! Every one!!!
Steven Grant talks about the creation of the Marvel mini-series Contest of Champions in his latest column for CBR. Dorain, Mike and I pulled the series out of the back issue bins and gave it the once over a year ago. Most notably it might have one of the silliest panels in Marvel history (and that’s saying something) where the members of Alpha Flight all engage in the most awkward conversation ever so readers can find out the names of all the characters. One would think that just putting caption with the characters’ names on the page would work, but no, so often common sense seems to be the big loser in the making of comic books. The book really doesn’t get much better from there; pretty much every one of the characters' actions seemed contrived. There’s good reason why many of the international characters created for Contest are rarely seen again, although I do remember Sabra appearing in an issue of Peter David’s Incredible Hulk.
Grant’s column is a fascinating read about the creation of Contest, perhaps because it’s such a great example of corporate comics’ clusterfuckery. The book was meant to tie into the Winter Olympics, but when the United States decided to boycott the 1980 Olympics that tie-in was kaput. When Marvel needed a mini-series, and from the looks of it that meant any mini-series, those Olympics tie-ins were re-worked into Contest. The story just gets more complicated from there. Still, Grant says he gets copies of the book to sign all the time. I guess if it brings a smile to some people’s faces, well, maybe it’s not all bad. And hey, it opened the door to Contest of Champions II!
Hmmm, Grant has wrote about Contest of Champions, he's named the Hardy Boys books he wrote on his message board...is it only a matter of time until we find out the story of his work on Blip! magazine?
And on that note I will wish you all a very happy afternoon and rest of the day.
Permanent Link: 12:19 PM |
2 comments
Comments:
Gotten & Forgotten also noticed the thing about the name dropping here.
# posted by Björn : 3:05 PM
I love that site, but I missed that entry. Those guys are funny, though.
# posted by Ian : 3:34 PM
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