I thought I had a post explaining Marvel's job numbers, but apparently I do not, so let's take some time to rectify that. What are Marvel job numbers and why should we care about them?

Comics are, of course, a business and Marvel has long had to run their company as such, going well back into their days as Timely. One piece of evidence of this are job numbers. Job numbers were unique codes assigned to each project -- we usually talk about them in reference to the stories, but they were also used for covers, letters pages, pin-ups, and pretty much anything Marvel created for any given issue. Marvel could then use the job numbers as a running point of reference to follow a project's status and/or how an issue might be assembled. There would have been notes and spreadsheets internally saying who was assigned to each project (writer, artist, inker, etc.), what the deadlines were, and that sort of thing.

These job numbers followed a sequential pattern, but the sequence was only relevant to when a project was assigned and had no bearing on when a piece might be actually published. Consequently, job numbers tend to clump together around the creators and not necessarily the publications. Jack Kirby might go into the office, for example, and Stan Lee would assign the next issues of Fantastic Four, Journey Into Mystery, and a 6-pager for Tales to Astonish and if Steve Ditko walked in next, Lee might assign him work for Amazing Fantasty, Strange Tales, and Tales of Supsense. But by the time they all got published, there might be a month or more between them, and a bunch of other stuff by Don Heck and Dick Ayers and whomever else got mixed in as well.

The format of the numbers was a letter (starting with A and continuing throught he alphabet) followed by a number between 1 and 999. Although I don't know the extremes have ever been identified but, in theory, they started with A-1 and ended with Z-999. And because they ran sequentially, we can use them to identify roughly when a project was worked on. A story with job number M-339 (used in A Date with Patsy #1 circa 1957) was created after the one with job number L-965 (from Hedy Wolfe #1, also from 1957).

Alright, so now that we know what these numbers are, how do we know what project was assigned which job number since they were an internal identification system? Well, in many case, artists would write the job numbers on the art itself, usually on the first page of a story. If you look in the lower corner of either the first panel or the first page of issues up through the mid-1960s, you can often find a small notation about what job number that particular story is. (Job numbers continued to be used beyond the mid-60s, but their appearances on the art itself started to fall off then.) Here are the first pages of Fantastic Four #11 and #12, where you can see the job numbers in the lower left of the page (X-72) and the lower right of the first panel (X-101) respectively.

Not every story has a job number written on it, however. Not surprisingly, that was largely not a big conern for the aritsts themselves, so it got skipped sometimes and so we don't know every job number associated with every story. We do have more than what is visible, though, in large part thanks to Dick Ayers, who kept meticulous records of everything he worked on. He took advantage of the system Marvel was already using and would record whether and how much he was paid for his own work using the job numbers as reference. There are a variety of databases that keep track of this info; the Grand Comics Database is probably the most widely used.

"But, Sean," you ask, "now that I know what these job numbers are and where to find them, why should I care? I mean, obviously FF #11 was going to be produced before FF #12! That was obvious before I even knew about job numbers!"

There's actually quite a few insights we can gain by sorting through job numbers. Take, for example, this recent "When We First Met" article over at CBR. Brian Cronin notes that Fantastic Four #12 is "tied with Amazing Spider-Man #1 as the first official crossover of the Marvel Age." FF #12 guest stars the Hulk, and the FF themselves guest star in Spider-Man. As both issues were published at the same time, the idea of them being "tied" for this honor seems reasonable. But the job numbers tell a different tale.

We already looked at the job number of FF #12 above -- if we compare that to the job number of Spider-Man #1, we can see which was created first. Well, here's the opening page of Amazing Spider-Man #1...

And what do we find? It's labeled as job number V-816. That seems pretty far removed from X-101. In fact, if we start checking other issues of the Fanastic Four, the closest job number to V-816 we can find is V-835 from FF #6, which came out six months before #12!

That means Lee assigned Amazing Spider-Man #1 to Ditko a little before but still around the same time as he gave FF #6 to Kirby. So did Ditko sit on the first issue of Spider-Man for six months? Did Lee expressly tell him to wait? We can take a look at some other Spider-Man stories to glean the answer.

Spider-Man of course had actually debuted in Amazing Fantasy #15. The issue contains four stories, all drawn by Ditko and they have the job numbers V-789 (Spidey's origin), V-790, V-791, and V-792 (the other three "generic" stories in the issue). So they were all assigned at the same time, not too far in advance of when Ditko began work on what would later become Amazing Spider-Man #1 (V-816) and shortly after Fantastic Four #5 (V-735). And if we go the other direction, we see that only one of the two stories in Amazing Spider-Man #2 has a job number and it is X-171. If we start digging a little more, we can find the order in which the various FF, Spidey, and Hulk stories (because he was mentioned in that crossover) were created...

Fantastic Four #1 (V-372)
Fantastic Four #2 (V-457)
Fantastic Four #3 (V-563)
Fantastic Four #4 (V-643)
Incredible Hulk #1 (V-709)
Fantastic Four #5 (V-735)
Incredible Hulk #2 (V-781)
Amazing Fantasy #15 (V-789)
Amazing Spider-Man #1 (V-816)
Fantastic Four #6 (V-835)
Incredible Hulk #3 (V-869)
Fantastic Four #7 (V-895)
Fantastic Four #8 (V-950)
Fantastic Four #9 (V-995)
Fantastic Four #10 (X-38)
Incredible Hulk #5 (X-48)
Fantastic Four #11 (X-72 and X-73)
Fantastic Four #12 (X-101)
Incredible Hulk #6 (X-116)
Fantastic Four #13 (X-138)
Fantastic Four #14 (X-144)
Amazing Spider-Man #2 (X-171)
Fantastic Four #15 (X-191)

(We don't have the job number for Hulk #4, which is why I don't have it listed above. Presumably it was somewhere around V-950, but we don't know for sure.)

What does that list tell us? For starters, we can see both Amazing Fantasy #15 and Amazing Spider-Man #1 were created between Fantastic Four #5 and #6, and almost immediately after Hulk #2. This means they would have had sales numbers for at least the first two issues of Fantastic Four and possibly the third (or maybe just initial numbers for #3) -- enough to show that the sales on #1 weren't just a fluke. But the sales numbers on Hulk #1 wouldn't have been in yet, so they're steering towards both the longer-form storytelling and the superhero genre based almost exclusively on the strength of the FF.

Fantastic Four #12 (with a guest appearance by Hulk) was ostensibly about trying to pump up interest and save the flagging sales of Incredible Hulk but with as close as FF #12 was to Hulk #6, there's no way the former's impact could have been measured before the latter was canceled.

And, getting back to Spider-Man, look at the number of FF issues made between Spider-Man #1 and #2: nine! Certainly a big leap from the zero issues between AF #15 and ASM #1! This not only means that Lee had originally planned to launch a second Spider-Man story almost immediately after his debut, but it took several months to get ASM well enough on track that they could get around to #2. My guess as to what happened is that Lee felt Spider-Man was pretty strong and wanted to make sure Ditko was able to roll along with whatever momentum he had from Amazing Fantasy so he assigned the next Spidey story right away. Perhaps not even knowing what title it would wind up in! The problem he ran into, however, was that Marvel comics at the time were (by a weird set of circumstances that is way too much of a tangent for this post) being distributed by Independent News, owned by their publishing rival DC. Because they were direct competitors, DC imposed some restrictions on Marvel's output, one of which was a limit on the number of titles they could publish. I've seen variations on what exactly the criteria was, but the end result was that Marvel couldn't just start a new title any time they wanted. So even though Amazing Fantasy was canceled, Lee couldn't just replace it with Amazing Spider-Man the following month.

I'm sure Lee knew that even when he assigned the work to Ditko. What he was doing was getting ready. He was confident Spider-Man would go over well, but he didn't know when he would be able to squeeze it into their schedule. So by giving it to Ditko early, he could have it waiting and ready to go as soon as a spot opened up. There was probably some measure of waiting for Amazing Fantasy sales numbers to come in as well, since publisher Martin Goodman was pretty famously against the character to begin with, so it's possible Lee assigned it Ditko but still told him to wait on starting it for a few months. But that there was a delay of another three months beyond that suggests that there were some production issues that had to be worked around as well.

What this also sheds light on is Lee's cross-marketing thought process. His first crossover idea was to use the FF to draw attention to a brand new title by putting them in it, assuming the three-ish issues of their own title's sales data would've been available by then. When he gets to FF #12, he brings the Hulk over into their book instead of putting them into Hulk #6. This may have been a deliberate test, as he would by then know about when Spider-Man #1 would be coming out, so he could gauge which provided a more substanital boost -- having their biggest seller cameo in another title or having the new hero he wants to promote appear in theirs. It should be noted too that Hulk #6 was in fact published only a couple weeks after FF #12 and ASM #1, so sales of those three issues would have been directly comparable since they all would have been on the newsstand simultaneously.

This is obviously just three titles I'm looking at over a period of about a year and a half, but you can start to get a sense of how Lee, Kirby, and Ditko were starting to build up what would become known as the Marvel Universe. Start adding to that job number list how the monster books like Tales to Astonish and Strange Tales started shifting, or when Avengers started getting worked on relative to Journey Into Mystery.

You can find parallels that are more obvious than looking at publication dates, because the job numbers tell you where the creators were at when they were conceiving these ideas. The publication dates just tells you when fans got a chance to read them, at a minimum, three months later. A lot of Marvel history is mired in half-truths and failing memories and, while job numbers can't paint a complete picture, they can shed light on and provide perspective to the process that was being used by the mythical Marvel Bullpen back in the day!

This has been floating online for a while, but have you actually watched this? It's a ten minute clip of the Mike Douglas Show from 1977 featuring Phil Seuling, who basically founded the comic direct market. Prior to him, new comics were almost exclusively available at newsstands. Wendy Pini makes an appearance towards the end of this clip as Red Sonja as well (that's why it's posted on the official ElfQuest channel) but there's a lot of other more fascinating stuff there.There are several things I'd like to point out here, some more obvious than others. First is the somewhat obligatory "Holy cow! He's just riffling through landmark collector issues like they were right off the shelf!" and semi-related "ONLY $1500?!?" With that out of the way, though, I'd like to point out that the stack of comics Seuling has on his lap is not insignifcant. Looks like maybe 25 books or so. But he's able to pull out issues relevant to the immediate discussion exceptionally quickly, even though they're all over the map chronologically. Which suggests to me that he's actually put some serious thought into what he wanted to say, and the order in which he wanted to say it. Or at the very least, he's got the books arranged alphabetically, knows exactly what he has with him and is able to jump through the stack so smoothly that the camera never really picks up his digging through them. Either way, he was clearly well prepared for this.

Next, listen to Jamie Farr. Farr was, of course, well known for playing Max Klinger on MASH, which had been running for about five years when this clip was filmed. That's an interesting bit of timing, I think, because Klinger's character was, at that time, still basically a one-note joke -- he wore women's clothing to try to get out of the army. Recall, of course, this is still 1977. Men in women's clothing was always played for laughs, as gender roles were pretty strictly enforced at the time. For the purposes of the show, Klinger was a clown; the more dramatic aspects of his character wouldn't really develop for another few years. But listen to what Farr says during this interview. He is surprisingly well-versed in comic history, not only pulling out the names of relatively obscure characters without even thinking about it, but he also tries to goad Seuling into talking about the legal battle between DC and Fawcett, a battle which had been over and done with for about 25 years by that point. He also makes the comparison between comics and storyboards for films.

Comics in 1977 were generally looked down upon, and I give the folks at the Mike Douglas Show a lot of credit for treating Seuling with such respect. They're surprised a grown man still reads comic books, but they don't present him as sideshow freak example of arrested development or anything. Part of that is, I suspect, because Seuling carries himself so well. He's confident, thoughtful, intelligent, well-spoken, and well-groomed. Farr is an interesting contrast in that he's almost literally falling out of his chair in excitement; there's more than a little stereotypical fanboy behavior going on. BUT, I think Farr could get away with it precisely because of his popularity as Klinger. The character, as I said, was a clown at that time and Farr could exude his real fanboyish enthusiasm for comics precisely because that culturally fell into the same category as cross-dressing on television.

I have to wonder how Farr might've reacted differently if MASH had been a few years later into the run, after Klinger gave up wearing dresses and became a more serious character. Or what Farr's agent would've said if he behaved as he did here.

The cartoon seen here is one by Nina Allender. It's dated August 5, 1916 but it was published some weeks later in The Suffragist, a weekly publication from the National Woman's Party. The woman in the cartoon obviously represents the Woman's Party while the Donkey is the long-time symbol of the Democratic Party. The woman's weapons are metaphors for the votes women represented and the title of the piece, ”Sic Semper Tyrannis”, means ”Thus Always to Tyrants.” The implication is that if Democrats kept their elitist attitude towards voting and did not work in favor of women's suffrage at the federal level, they would be forced into oblivion. (Prior to the 19th Ammendment's passage in 1919, women's voting rights were dictated at a state level, leading to a strange hodge-podge of voting laws across the country.)

I'm no expert on women's voting rights, far from it; I just looked that up on Wikipedia. The portions about the cartoon itself came from the Sewall-Belmont House & Museum, "one of the premier women's history sites in the country". It was Mike Rhode who tipped me off to its existence a while back in one of the comment threads on my blog.

I'm not big on women's voting history, as I said, but I am interested in comics. And while histories of comics of the early 20th century generally focus on the names you've probably heard of -- Outcault, McCay, Herriman, etc. -- there are also plenty of folks like Allender and Carl Himmelman who did pieces with a smaller audience. Just like Charles Schulz and Jim Davis cast a long shadow over the folks who turned in niche cartoons to fanzines, the artists from those fanzines are worth looking at too.

So might I suggest that, when you do stumble across an Allender or Himmelman, do some investigation to find out who they are and what they did. You might find some interesting corner of comics history that might surprise you.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: The Foolish Questions Game
https://ift.tt/UxflPDX

Kleefeld on Comics: Fun Things To Learn From Original Art
https://ift.tt/3tkCiIh

Kleefeld on Comics: DC's 1978 Pocketbooks
https://ift.tt/lX8r5Oc

Kleefeld on Comics: The American Dream
https://ift.tt/rs72LdV

Kleefeld on Comics: My Drive-Through LCS Idea
https://ift.tt/gsUeSDC

One of the why-isn't-everyone-doing-this-yet ideas I've seen in comics retailing is the notion of turning the store into a destination itself. That is, make the store the reason people go there instead of just letting it be some building that happens to have comics for sale. I think the direction of comics retailing in the future will be trying to make shops a place to be and not just a place to stop by. Lounge chairs, maybe a bar or a coffee shop. Starbucks, but with comics.

Some shops are definitely doing this already. The Isotope Lounge was the first one I had heard of, and I've seen and even been to several similarly positioned shops. I've heard of several with coffee bars built in. One was even part comic shop/part bar and grill! These types of shops seems to be doing well, and I think we'll see more of them as shop owners are able to save/borrow enough money to make these types of conversions. (This type of thing ain't cheap, you know!)

But here's another idea I've thought of, but never seen: a comic shop with a drive-through window. Just like a McDonald's or a Starbucks, you could swing through the driveway, order the latest issue of Superman or whatever, pick it up and pay at the window, and drive off without ever leaving your car. Or perhaps regular customers could grab everything that's already in their file.

Now this kind of goes against the lounge/coffee shop idea I noted earlier, but it might still work. After all, Starbucks have drive-throughs in many of their locations.

I think that if an owner wanted to try this, they'd almost need to buy/lease a space that already had a drive-through established. A former fast food joint or a bank or something. And if that were the case, it would almost certainly require some not-inexpensive renovations on the inside. I have no idea if this would actually work from a practical sense, but I'd be curious to see if someone has made a go of it. I mean, it's not any crazier than the DC ComicMobile from the mid-70s!

Jim Bonaminio is something of a minor celebrity. He's appeared on Good Morning America and NPR and all sorts of outlets. He's certainly a celebrity in his local Cincinnati market, and gets mentioned pretty regularly on the local news there.

Back in the early 1970s, he sold produce out of the back of his pick-up truck in an empty parking lot. He did well enough that, after several years, he was able to buy a small plot of land and erect a more permanent structure. By which I mean some two-by-fours supporting a plastic corrugated roof. After several years of doing that, he built an actual building. That expanded and got added on to. By the time I first heard about and walked through in the late 1990s, the store interior was about 3 acres. Now, it's about 6 and 1/2 acres. Inside.

He sells much more than produce these days. In fact, it's by far the largest grocery store I've ever seen. He has whole sections devoted to different countries, importing foodstuffs from Mexico, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Greece, China, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy and a host of other countries. The last time I was there, I bought spicy Indian ketchup, frozen Filipino lumpias, a Japanese coconut drink and several bottles of root beer from different American microbreweries I had never heard of. The guy stocks just about everything edible that can legally be bought/sold in the U.S.

And, if that weren't enough, the store is also peppered with animatronic figures. Mostly bought from a Chuck E. Cheese that went under, but he's also got several General Mills cereal mascots, an anthropomorphic can of Campbell's soup and some less animated, but still quite chatty, Robin Hood characters.

I've taken friends and relatives there on occasion when I used to live in the area, and we always spent 3-4 hours in the store. It's just really frickin' huge with lots and lots to see. And believe me when I say that I'm seriously under-playing things here. There's no way I could really give you a true sense of what you're getting into when you walk into this place.

But that's WHY he's a celebrity. Here's a guy who started in the back of a pick-up truck and now has what has to be one of, if not the most successful independent grocery store in America. That's the American Dream^TM in action. Dude worked hard and honestly, and became very successful as a result. He has enough money that he can afford to buy a monorail and just park it in his lot for a decade. (Which he actually did.)

Here's the thing, though. He's celebrated as one of the folks who "made it." That's great that he did, but the reason we continue to celebrate him is because THERE IS NO ONE ELSE. That American Dream of becoming a great success through hard work and determination is largely a myth. Comicdom is rife with examples.

There are, of course, the notable examples of older creators getting screwed out their due. Siegel and Shuster, Bill Finger, Marty Nodell, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, the list goes on and on. Even those who didn't get completely shafted -- guys like Bob Kane and Will Eisner -- weren't leading exorbitant or lavish lifestyles. They made a living, but not a whole lot more. Stan Lee is probably the only one who might be able to make a claim success along those lines. (Although there is some evidence that Ditko received some decent royalties from the various Spider-Man movies. But even if he did get large royalty checks from them, the money didn't seem to impact his lifestyle appreceiably.)

More recent creators that might be considered successful aren't exactly rolling in dough, either. Robert Crumb lives a pretty modest life in France and Jeff Smith remains near his childhood home in Ohio. Wendy and Richard Pini always seem to be doing well, but again, we're not talking vast commercial empire here either. I suspect Raina Telegmeier is living pretty comfortably now, too. Todd McFarlane is about the only other comic creator I can think of that can claim the kind of success that's idealized in the "American Dream." And my understanding is that most of that money came from wise investments, and not comics -- or even comics-adjacent activities -- themselves.

That's nothing to say for the thousands of professional comic creators who worked incessantly on their projects, did excellent work on them, only to be largely ignored. Now, granted, the crop of 20-something folks out there now really haven't had a chance to become wildly successful, and you could make the same argument about many 30-somethings as well. But in the past several decades since comics as we know them were invented, and the thousands and thousands of people who worked on them during that time, that we might only point to two individuals who were able to turn comics into the "American Dream" says to me that it's not very rooted in reality. It says to me that there's either something inherently wrong with that ideal and/or that we live in a society that, contrary to popular belief, does not support true entrepreneurialism. Which is not to say that you can't start your own business; just that your new start-up has a great many barriers placed in front of it to prevent it from becoming "American Dream" level successful.

It's worth celebrating those individuals, like Bonaminio and McFarlane, who are able to somehow sneak through the cracks and become successes despite themselves. (And in both those cases, I really do mean despite themselves. Listen to them speak, and you'll wonder how they were able to keep their checkbooks balanced before they were able to pay someone to do it.) But it's also necessary to recognize that their successes are exceptionally, exceptionally rare, patriotic dogma to the contrary.

I picked up a couple of DC pocketbooks at a used bookstore a little while back. One featuring just Superman and another featuring Superman and Batman (and Robin). They cost barely more than the original $1.25 cover price, and I was curious to see how well they would translate into the 21st century. I had had a few Marvel pocketbooks from the same era, and quite enjoyed them. But that was when I was a kid -- not only were the stories new to me, but I was pretty oblivious to the production changes that would've needed to have been made to cut up the pamphlet format into something that would fit in the "standard" trade paperback size.

The first curious thing that struck me was the story choices. Despite these books being published in 1978, the stories all came from the late 1950s up through the mid-1960s. It seems to me an odd choice. They're certainly old enough to not worry about competition from the then-burgeoning after-market, but they're not really old enough to have been classics yet. In fact, they're right about the age that would've been seen in the same light as that embarrassing old photo of you from 15 years ago. It looks dated; you can recognize the styles and fashions as sophomoric, and it's old enough to remind you that you're aging. But you've moved just beyond that and haven't quite reconciled that era with yourself yet.

And it's not like they didn't have access to more contemporary work. Both books feature some title page art by Neal Adams.

The choice that struck me as odd was that the Superman book starts with a Superman origin story from a 1961 retelling, but the World's Finest book has nothing by way of an origin tale for any of the characters, much less how they came to meet up and/or be friends. This, despite several pieces of dialogue throughout many of the stories referencing how Superman and Batman have a long history with each other and know each other's tactics well. I suppose the publishers assumed if you were buying a Superman/Batman team-up book, then you already knew a lot about the characters?

The other thing that struck me was the complete layout changes from the originals. The Marvel pocketbooks, to my recollection, largely just ran all the panels in a landscape format and were able to fit two on each page with a minimal amount of fuss. These books work in the portrait format, but the various panel widths lead to a wide array of croppings, re-sizings and (in many cases) re-letterings to fit the new format. Having read these types of formats (from some comic strip collections I had back then that did pretty much the same thing) I didn't have any mental issues in reading the stories, but looking at it now with fresh eyes showcases how absurdly clumsy and awkward the pacing and page layouts became in the process. Seriously, there are just some weird-ass layouts going on in places. Not to mention some art patches that were less than skillfully rendered.

I was surprised at how well the books have held up physically. The paper is a bit yellowed, but still very pliable. The glue has held up remarkably well, and these particular copies have very little cracking on the spine at all. A little nicked around the corners, but not exactly what I'd call dog-eared.

I have some level of appreciation of comic stories from that era, but I'm not a big fan of them generally. But this specific presentment was interesting, and I'm left wondering why that particular market didn't last. Was it just bad story selection? If so, was that the fault of DC (and Marvel -- their reprints from that time were also mostly from the early 1960s) for only allowing older comics to be reprinted, or was that the fault of the pocketbook publishers themselves for choosing poor examples?