[00:00] Intro: Welcome to The Corner Box, where your hosts, David Hedgecock and John Barber, lean into their decades of comic book industry experience, writing, drawing, editing, and publishing. They'll talk to fellow professionals, deep dive into influential and overlooked works, and analyze the state of the art and business of comics and pop culture. Thanks for joining us on The Corner Box.

[00:29] David Hedgecock: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to The Corner Box. I'm one of your hosts, David Hedgecock. With me, as usual, is my very good friend,

[00:38] John Barber: John Barber, another host.

[00:39] David: Hey, John. How are you doing, buddy?

[00:41] John: I'm hanging in there. How about you?

[00:42] David: I'm doing great. I spent my entire morning getting ready for today's podcast, something I don't normally do. It’s for a good cause. I'm excited about what we're going to be talking about today, John.

[00:51] John: Me, too. We've been talking about doing this for a while, and I'm excited to do it.

[01:21] David: That's right, John. We're here to talk about one of the greatest 12-issue miniseries in the history of Marvel comic books, Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E., with Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen, with inks by Wade Von Grawbadger, Dave McCaig colors, and friend of the show, Chris Eliopoulos, was the original letterer for this, original designer, and then handed it off to Joe Caramagna, and then it's by Nick Lowe, the infamous Nick Lowe. John, Nextwave is one of my favorite comic books, favorite comic book series, I should say. I'm a massive Warren Ellis fan. I don't know if I've said that on the podcast. I feel like I have, but Warren Ellis is probably one of a few-- there's not a lot of writers that I will go out of my way to purchase their work when it's out there, but Warren Ellis is definitely one of those. When he is writing a comic book, I will line up.

So, when you pair Warren Ellis with probably the greatest, if not definitely one of the greatest, illustrators of the last 25 years, the result tends to be something special, and in the case of Nextwave, I think it was extra special, even though maybe it didn't see the sales that a series by those two guys would normally see, especially in that time, in the 2006/2007 era. Warren Ellis is coming off of some serious heat with Authority and Planetary, and Transmetropolitan. He's pretty much at the height of his powers around that time, and then Stuart Immonen, as well, suddenly burst upon the scene. He's been around for a while, but it feels like, around that time, he really alters his style and bursts upon the scene, in a way that elevates him to that upper echelon of comic book artists, and he never looks back. So, we're doing this Nextwave deep-dive, and this is meant to be one of the promises that we've made to ourselves for Season 2, where we're going to talk a little bit more in-depth about some of these projects that we love, comic book projects, and maybe stuff that we don't love, in the case of Star Trek: New Visions, that friend of the show, Dave Baker, came on and did with us the other day, but this one is definitely one that is a favorite of mine.

So, we're going to do a little bit deeper dive, but I wanted to give a quick shout out. In these deeper dives, the idea is that we do a little bit more research, do a little bit more homework, before we start talking about things, which is what I did for this. This was my choice, and I wanted to give a quick shout out to Dave Harper over at sktchd.com. Dave Harper, a couple of years back, did a retrospective of Nextwave himself. Definitely recommend reading that article that he wrote on his site, and one of the cool things that he did was, he actually went out and interviewed some of the main players, some of the creative talent, that were in that book, at the time, and got some extra added bits. I don't think I cribbed too much from him, but definitely was inspired by his writing over there, and definitely was informed by some of the extra interview pieces that he had in that article, definitely. So, definitely go check that out. sktchd.com is a great resource. I love Dave’s writing. Big fan and a patron of his work over there at sktchd.com. I think we can dive in.

Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. was a 12-issue series that came out in 2006/2007. The origins of Nextwave came about out of the roots of Ultimate Fantastic Four. Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen had just come off the run of Ultimate Fantastic Four. That was successful. Nick Lowe was the editor, maybe the assistant editor, on that series, and really enjoyed working with Warren Ellis. So, he asked Warren, at the time, “hey. That was fun. Really love working with you. What else have you got?” So, Warren immediately hit him back with this pitch for Nextwave, and the pitch is actually reprinted in the Nextwave Director’s Cut Issue #1, and I thought it might be fun just to read the actual pitch that Warren sent Nick Lowe, just so you can get, from the horse’s mouth, what Warren Ellis thought this thing was. So, this is the Nextwave original pitch by Warren Ellis. I'll just read it as quick as I can.

This is a remix book. The Nextwave was actually the name of a crap Marvel supervillain group in the 80s. All the protagonists are old Marvel characters, or carry old Marvel trademark names. The quasi-governmental security and defense organization H.A.T.E., which is an acronym for Highest Anti-Terrorism Effort, bought the rights to the name, and Dirk Anger, Director of H.A.T.E., recruited 5 troubled, obscure superheroes, to form the Nextwave Squad, an elite intervention force in the war on terrorism. Monica Rambeau used to be known as Captain Marvel. She once ran The Avengers. She will tell you this a lot. An unlikely veteran of superhuman combat wanting to do a bit for her country, she found herself leading this team. Aaron Stack used to be called Machine Man, but his name is Aaron Stack, and it's none of your business that he’s wired his robot brain to be affected by alcohol. Elsa Bloodstone is the daughter of near-immortal monster-hunter, Ulysses Bloodstone, wears the same creepy gem that makes her superhumanly resistant to harm, works in the family business, and tends to come off like Lara Croft's evil twin sister. The Captain claims not to remember his real name. His checkered career has seen him basically be every crap Marvel character called Captain Something. Tabitha Smith used to be Boom-Boom in the New Mutants, and Meltdown in X-Force, and she's a terrible kleptomaniac, and it's because of her light fingers that the Nextwave squad discovered that,…

Well, it seems that H.A.T.E. isn't fighting the same war on terrorism as everyone else. They are funded and supplied by a multinational called The Beyond Corporation, and much of their time seems to be taken on testing and deploying weapons. The Beyond Corporation used to be a terrorist cell called S.I.L.E.N.T., which is an acronym that he doesn't actually name. In an open bidding process, they have co-opted their opponents to test their own unusual weapons of mass destruction. In 2006 and 2007, weapons of mass destruction, which is a much more common used series of words. This is all laid out in the Beyond Corporation’s marketing plan, which the Nextwave squad have stolen, along with the Shockwave Rider, an experimental assault plane with an inexhaustible power supply. Nextwave have gone rogue with the blueprint for Beyond’s plan to devastate a series of American towns in a product testing process. For instance, digging the 150-foot atomic monster in purple underpants, Fin Fang Foom, out of his hibernation sack inside a mountain overlooking the town of Abscess, North Dakota. Nextwave have that to cope with, and the Beyond Corp Human Resources Department, an Army of Giant Human Freaks in lead three-piece suits and Doctor Doom armor, and of course, H.A.T.E., with their goofy 60s Steranko technology and their immense flying Aeromarine, 4 massive submarines nailed together with girders and plastic tunnels.

Dirk Anger is slowly having a massive nervous breakdown. He thinks no one can tell. These are two-issue story arcs every two months, a complete story, and then on to the next threat on the list, or the next trap H.A.T.E. set for them. One story arc makes a European book, three makes a TPB, 6 makes an absolute-style book. Early storylines include, yes, the return of Fin Fang Foom. Nextwave is not about character arcs and learning, and morals, and hugs. It’s about cramming an insane movie into 44 pages at a time. It's about the mad things underpinning Marvel Comics, S.H.I.E.L.D., several curse words, which are not added, whatever that is, and it is about special effects out of Asian cinema, and absurd levels of destruction, and a skewed sense of humor, and spectacle, and things blowing up, and people getting kicked. It is mostly, especially, about things blowing up and people getting kicked. It is about humanoid clone things made out of engine oil and broccoli being smacked to death by a woman with a guitar. Nextwave, healing America by beating people up, and that is the original pitch.

[09:32] John: I'm sorry. I didn't hit record. Would you do that one more time, really quick?

[09:37] David: That was long.

[09:38] John: It’s a hell of a pitch, too.

[09:40] David: It is a hell of a pitch. I can feel the inspiration coming off of that thing. The close is the best, too. It's most especially about things blowing up and people getting kicked. It really does adhere to that throughout, which is why I love it so much. In an interview, Ellis says that he came up with the concept for Nextwave when writer Brian Michael Bendis was lamenting that no one had followed up his reinvention of superhero teams in New Avengers with an effort of their own. So, Ellis saw that as a challenge and thought to himself, “how can I really horrify Bendis, and what could I do that would just scare the shit out of him and make him utterly regret saying that?” This is Warren Ellis talking. “So, I took The Authority, and I stripped out all the plots, all the logic, character insanity, and I just cut everything back until I was left with pure superhero comics.”

[10:31] John: It’s funny. I just reread this. I was at Marvel when this was coming out. This was one of my favorite comics while I was there. I think this is the first paperback where I collected all of them together into one volume. On the back is a quote from Brian K. Vaughan, then best-known as the author of Runaways, “one of the few mainstream comic books people are still going to be talking about 15 years from now.” That was two years ago. Yeah, a really accurate quote. It's one of the things I think we were talking about, stuff like Year One or Watchmen, where this doesn't really read like the other stuff from that time period, and it has a certain timeless quality to it, where parts of it are just absolutely state-of-the-art now, or still fun and surprising, not just because I'm old and this doesn't seem that long ago, to me, but also, the same way even stuff from the 70s, from before I was born, feels that way when it's presented a certain way.

[11:22] David: Reading it today, it feels just as fresh as it did when I was reading it the first time. In some ways, even more so, I think. Before the book launched, Ellis did a junket, where he was talking about this book and a couple of other projects he had with Marvel, and somebody asked him, “what's it about?” and he said, “in Nextwave, people get kicked, things explode. This is what they want. What more do you need to know?” He continued, then joked, when asked if anyone got eaten in the series, he said, “someone tries to put someone else in a large pair of underpants. There's something for everybody,” and then he said, “I do it for the children.” Ellis says, “I particularly wanted to write something with a real pace to it. Each one is a big and probably slightly brain-damaged action film crammed into two issues. Also, how can I put this? I was trying to get away from something, which I guess could be categorized as grim and thin-headed […]. I wanted less of that. If I wanted to watch that, I could go get a DVD of old stuff. For that essential blood-on-the-sofa experience, I don't want to go to superhero comics. There are some things this genre doesn't hold up too well with. What I think it does do well is, in fact, that things explode, and many people get kicked.”

[12:41] John: Definitely a unique way of putting together the stories. I mean, I do think that, as much as it takes the cinematic stuff from The Authority, like he says, there's also a heavy dose of Planetary in there, where Planetary was taking all of these different influences and putting it through this blender of Warren Ellis and John Cassaday. One of the things that I think is really impressive about Nextwave, and one of the reasons it feels so new, is that its influences are not just other superhero comics. It is influenced by that, but as much as it takes some influence from the stuff that's going on right then, with the Ultimate line, and with New Avengers, like you said, and pulling in old goofy comics and stuff, weird stuff from previous Marvel comics, it's running this through this Hong Kong action movie filter, and these other pieces that inform the way we look at action stories, at that point in time, and what wound up happening after that, to superhero comics, not everyone, by any means, but one of the things that wound up becoming a dominant style of it was being influenced by movies that were based on superhero comics. It creates a different feedback loop than just the fanboy “I'm just going to write the stories I read when I was a kid” stories, but into this “here's the dominant cultural force about superheroes right now” superheroes, and it becomes a snake eating its own tail kind of thing. I'm not saying you haven't had other stuff. I just mean that, that became a dominant force right after this.

[14:17] David: Exactly. Interesting.

[14:20] John: Yeah. This is coming out at the dawn of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

[14:24] David: Yeah. Iron Man's just out, or to be out.

[14:27] John: Yeah. I think it's around that, which itself was hugely influenced by Extremis, that Warren Ellis had written with Adi Granov.

[14:37] David: That's right. I forgot about that. So, that was Warren’s side of things, in terms of coming up with the initial concept and pitching it to Nick Lowe, the other Nick, and apparently, he was very keen to do this, according to a quick interview I read with Nick Lowe. He was saying how Warren was pretty excited, it seemed. So much so, that even though Warren was rather busy at the time, he was 3 scripts ahead on this thing before they even started, which was a good thing because Warren requested specifically for Stuart Immonen to work with him on this project. So, Stuart had just come off finishing an Ultimate Fantastic Four issue that Warren “wrote,” which apparently was a paragraph written on the back of a napkin that Stuart Immonen had to turn into 22 pages of story, and that made Stuart's life a little difficult. So, Nick Lowe called up Stuart Immonen and said, “hey, I've got a new project I think you'd be perfect for, that I'd love to work with you on.” Stuart's response was, “as long as it's not with Warren, I'm in, Nick,” and Nick said, “well, you might not where this is going then.”

[15:55] John: That is not a legend. That is absolutely the case, yes.

[16:00] David: Which I love. Apparently, though, having Warren being three issues ahead on the script was the thing that allowed Stuart the level of comfort that he needed to sign on, and thank goodness, he did.

[16:13] John: Yeah, well. Okay, so, this is one of those ones where I was there for this. Not only were those guys coming off Ultimate, but so was Nick, and I was coming on to Ultimates and taking over. I was his assistant for a little bit. We were both technically Ralph Macchio's assistant, but Ralph gave a lot of leeway to the assistant editors on those books, and we were the ones talking to the writers and artists, and everything. I think it was just assisting on these. I’m trying to remember how it worked, but he was doing a story arc with Warren and a story arc with Andy Kubert, at the same time, and both of them fell into this same deadline problem. If you actually go look at it, the one Stuart didn't do is one of the only Warren Ellis stories that has sound effects, and that's because there was no dialogue script, and Andy was just drawing the sound effects onto the page, and it was the same thing here. It was a weird one, where a lot of people were using muscles they don't usually use. I think those issues actually hold up. I think they're good comics. It is strange, and Stuart had to do a lot of Jack Kirby-style, coming up with the story. Not the story, but the specific mechanics and the scenes, and everything for this. Stuart’s a super nice guy, and he genuinely wasn't super happy with that. That wasn't the situation he wanted to find himself in. Not that he's not a good writer. He is, in fact, a really good writer, as is his wife.

[17:40] David: That was the assignment at the time. So, I could understand the frustration. I also got the impression, just by watching him in his career, he's pretty fast. So, the fact that potentially, maybe, he was waiting for things, when a penciller should never, ever be waiting. There should always be something waiting for the penciller, not the other way around, ever, in the history of comics. That is the one edict that I am sure of. It was funny, because the pitch that I read you, when Nick Lowe got it, he says his first thought was, “I love this,” and his second thought was, “there's no way we'll publish this,” because it was just not going to happen, but Warren Ellis was smart enough to send the pitch, when he sent it to Nick, he Cc’d Joe Quesada, who was Editor-in-Chief, at the time, and Joe emailed Nick and said, basically, “I love this. We're doing this.” So, that's how the project got greenlit and how the major players came on board. With that, the project was off to the races.

There’s five main characters in this, in the Nextwave team. By the way, it was originally called Nextwave. It was going to be Nextwave, which really was the name of a supervillain team from the 80s. I'm not sure where they appeared. I couldn't find that, but apparently it was a real team. There was some New York art opera or something.

[19:07] John: Yeah, some music festival, or something like that.

[19:09] David: Yeah. So, they threatened to sue if Marvel used that name. So, they had to change it to Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. Anyway, there's five main characters in the team. There's the team leader, Monica Rambeau. She's a former Avenger and team leader. In this setup, she's long past her prime, as an Avenger. Machine Man, they call him Aaron Stack in this series, is also in here. He's a character who loves to hate humans. He's always calling them fleshy ones, and he hadn't been seen in a Marvel comic in at least six years. Tabitha Boom-Boom Smith was a former New Mutant and X-Force member. She blows things up. In this series, she's the resident young person, which causes everybody else to really not understand her. She's also a bit vapid, I guess. She's played rather vapid in this series, which, I think, sticks true to her character from pretty much all versions of her, up to this point, but it's pushed, for humor, a little bit more, in Nextwave, than it is in others. Elsa Bloodstone. She's British. She's the monster-hunting badass. She barely appeared before this series, but she is a legacy character, Bloodstone being her father. The only original creation of the book was The Captain. In this series, we learned that he gets his powers from a couple of aliens, while he's drunk, and he knocks them unconscious, because he thinks they're leprechauns and that punching leprechauns will get him some coins. He's also not the smartest.

[20:45] John: He actually seems like a little bit of a riff on [John] Hawksmoor from Authority, to me, where he was captured by aliens and redesigned to live in cities, which is Warren Ellis’s creation in Stormwatch and then The Authority, but this seems like the comedy version of flying up that same superhero trope of “captured by aliens but turned into a hero.”

[21:08] David: So, that's the setup for things, and then they're off and running. The series launches in 2006, and true to the original pitch, it's a series of two-issue miniseries, basically, is what Nextwave turns into. The team sets itself up a pretty interesting challenge right out the gate, though, because you've got relatively unknown Marvel characters in a book that no one's ever heard of. So, really, you're relying on the names of the creative talent to push the sales forward and upward. Nextwave launched pretty well, and even gets a director’s cut edition, which is what I read that pitch from, but it never, unfortunately, seems to really catch fire the way I think everyone hoped it would, that was working on the book, and those fans who gravitated to it and found it, I think, also were hoping for more and loving where it was going. I think the good thing, the thing that helps make this book stand the test of time, is that Warren Ellis's original intent for the series was to do 12 issues and then hand it off to somebody else, to take over. At least, that was his stated intent, before they even launched. So, we get those 12 issues. We essentially get Warren Ellis’s 12-issue plan. So, at least, we get that, and I think, ultimately, over time, really, that might be all we ever need. I think, trying to revisit Nextwave would be folly, at this point. I don't know that it is something that you can recreate.

[22:42] John: I didn't remember that. It feels very complete. The big problem with it wasn't that it didn't sell. It’s that it didn't sell to the degree that the costs were adding up to, because Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen were top-tier talent at Marvel, which meant they were commanding top-tier page rates. Stuart’s actually a little weird. I don't know if an asterisk is the right thing to say. I love Stuart. I think Stuart's, like you said, one of the, if not the best, comic book artists in the last, whatever number of years you want to pick. I think, aside from Naoki Urasawa, he was the best comic artist drawing, at that time, and a pleasure to work with. I believe it was a talk to get him on to an Ultimate book. You know what I mean? It wasn't just like, “oh, it's Stuart Immonen. He gets the Ultimate book.” It was Nick making a push to try to get Stuart on to the Ultimate book that succeeded. Stuart’s incredibly talented and incredibly versatile, but he wasn't necessarily the fan-favorite that a David Finch was. David Finch, you put him on a book, and there's a bunch of David Finch fans that come out and go see him, where Stuart is this incredible artist, but because every project that he was doing, especially at that time, looked really different, he didn't necessarily have the same fans project-to-project.

So, you have the double-whammy of him being an A-tier, a top-tier talent, but not bringing on the top-tier audience. This is a cult book. This is like Buckaroo Banzai, in that this is how you design and build a cult book, and it was going to sell cult book numbers, and it was selling good cult book numbers, but it needed to be selling Civil War numbers. I mean, it wasn’t that expensive. This is a comic that comes out during Civil War, when every comic was crossing over with Civil War, and every comic was getting a boost, in terms of sales, and it has a cover making fun of Civil War and talking about how they're not a part of it. So, that's what's going to happen, […].

[24:42] David: Like I said, the creative team, or Warren Ellis himself, they set themselves up for a difficult task, for sure. I think it shakes out the only way this book could ever shake out, which is, it developed a perfectly fine, but on the small side, devoted number of fans who all love it, and you either love this book or you put it back on the shelf. I can't imagine there's too many people in between. There's not too many people who are picking up Issue #7 of Nextwave that weren't already massive fans of Nextwave, by that point. I don't think it had casual readers. So, I thought we'd go in to just break down some of the issues. For the listener, I tagged a bunch of pages. For you collectors out there, I did not harm the books. They're still in really good shape. These are near-mint-minus, very-fine-plus copies. They will remain that way, but I’ve flagged a bunch of little tidbits in here. You have to read the dialogue in order to really appreciate where this thing goes. So, first of all, you’ve got fantastic Stuart Immonen art in Issue #1, right out of the gate, fully formed, but it's a cold open on a cafe, and it's on The Captain, who's this new character we have never met before, and Elsa Bloodstone. Readers don't know who this character is, either. Elsa’s rather striking. She has really long, straight red hair and is wearing a bright red, colorful one-piece, but visually, there's two people sitting in a café, that you have never seen before, and they're talking, and the dialogue goes like this.

Elsa Bloodstone says, “So, what made you want to be a superhero? Was it the clothes?” and The Captain says, “the mask, I guess.” “Why?” “So, I could hit people in the face really, really hard and run away, and no one would know it was me.” Elsa Bloodstone says, “what was your superhero name?” and Captain says, “Captain,” and then it's an expletive that's blurred out, and the way they blur it out is, they use four skull-and-crossbones, and that essentially becomes much like Prince changed his name to a symbol. That's what you see him called for the rest of this entire series. He's Captain [expletive], basically. It's just these 4 skull-and-crossbones, which I thought was funny, because Chris Eliopoulos probably had to figure that out. They had to design the skull-and-crossbones to make that a thing.

So, “Captain [expletive],” and she says, “you're kidding me.” He says, “Nope. I was Captain [expletive].” She says, “why, for God's sake?” He says, “hey, I'm from Brooklyn. I'm going to call myself Mr. Friendly? Hell, no. Captain [expletive].” Very definitively, and he says, “I met Captain America once. He asked me what my name was.” Elsa Bloodstone says, “and you said Captain [expletive]?” and he says, “man, he beat 7 shades of it out of me. Left me in a dumpster with a bar of soap shoved in my mouth,” and that's just the way it goes from there. What a great cold open. You're introduced to this character you’ve never heard of, and his name is Captain F*ckpants, or whatever. It's left to your imagination, but it's horrible. It's so horrible that Captain America beat the crap out of him and shoved a bar of soap in his mouth. That's how this thing starts.

[28:00] John: I'm trying to put together the timeline on this, and I can't remember if I was in the same office as Nick during this, or if I would just go over there and hang out a lot. I think it was the latter. I don't think I moved in there till later. Sean Ryan, who was the assistant editor on the book, and Nick, and I were and are friends. Nick would read parts of the scripts out loud. He would get this in, and you can see it in here, this crazy joy, where I can see how Warren Ellis is three issues ahead, and it's not like these issues aren't really well written, but you can also see, he just started on page one and wrote up to page 22, and that was the end of it, and it all works, because it all works, and maybe it wasn't that easy. Maybe it was a lot harder. I don't know, but it definitely has that feeling of the Michael Moorcock books, where he would just take a bunch of speed and write the books over a weekend. It makes sense, but in a particular way, but there's also that bit of just everybody trying to make everybody else amused, on that team. I think Warren was trying to get the reactions out of Nick that Nick was getting. This isn't Julie Schwartz sitting there with a cigar, thinking about denigrating women, or whatever. Nick was getting these scripts in, and going and telling them to people, and stuff. Sean, too. You can see it, with all the ancillary stuff that those guys put together. That's actually collected in the paperback. All of the recap pages and letters columns are reprinted, as well, because they're so goofy and weird.

[29:26] David: I want to get into some of that extra goofy weirdness, too. I think that's a good way to put it. The whole team gets inspired by one another, and everybody's trying to entertain one another, almost. There's a little bit of that. I could see how that might be happening there, with Warren leading the charge. The first two issues are a story about the reintroduction of Fin Fang Foom, who's this giant green monster. In this particular series, he's Godzilla-size, and he's set to destroy this small town in Idaho. He's very angry, John, and the reason he's angry is because he has no genitals. At some point, he tries to stuff Tabitha Boom-Boom down his pants, but thankfully, she’s spared that fate when the rest of the team comes to her rescue, and sadly, Fin Fang Foom is taken out and killed, by the end of this one.

By the end of Issue #2, Fin Fang Foom is killed, but there's this really sweet moment of Fin Fang Foom. He's been killed, and [Machine] Man has gone into his body and cut his heart out, and it's outside of his body, and Fin Fang Foom is looking at his heart, and he's crying, Fin Fang Foom starts crying, and he's like, “Fin Fang Foom’s heart is broken,” and then he collapses and dies, but the way that Stuart Immonen draws it, it's got a real emotional impact. You go from this silly goofiness to this really sweet, sincere moment, which is also incredibly dumb and goofy, but I don't know. It plays on a couple of different levels. So, as a reader, I don't know if this was purposeful or not, if they were trying to evoke this, but it really did evoke a little bit of a feeling, for me, because here I am, laughing, because Fin Fang Foom, this giant monster who’s got no genitals and is angry about it, and then when they kill him, and they destroy him, you feel bad for him. I don't know, and then you're right back to [Machine] Man crawling out of the guts of Fin Fang Foom, saying, “my robot brain needs beer.”

[31:47] John: Crawling out of the pants, where Tabitha didn't wind up.

[31:49] David: That's right. That's right. So, that's the first two issues.

[31:53] John: Yeah. Two controversies that dovetail into each other, that also speaks to what I was speaking to before. Things that come up with this, internally, at Marvel, at least, is this in Marvel continuity? Is this Fin Fang Foom? And the other one, “don't do that to Fin Fang Foom” is another opinion that is going around, and I don't think anybody, I don't know, I think is okay, Ralph Macchio, who had worked on all the Ultimate books, and very much enjoyed Warren Ellis's books, and absolutely thought the world of Stuart Immonen, he was one of the people who was a protector of the Marvel characters, the righteousness of them, or the “don't turn them into jokes because you can't un-turn them into jokes.” The example that I think is the best version of this is, there's a Daredevil villain that Daredevil fought one time, who was a baseball pitcher, who could throw baseballs in such a way that they could be deadly. It's pretty preposterous, except in Frank Miller's hands, Bullseye is a really cool character. You could do the silly one, where it's Captain Baseball, or whatever, just making fun of this guy and throwing it around, or you could take that character and turn him into Bullseye, a major thing.

So, Ralph was definitely on that side of things, and was definitely looking at this as, “this is mocking some of these characters. This is really denigrating Fin Fang Foom. Also, Machine Man. Machine Man's not an alcoholic. He's a robot.” Last we saw him, apparently, he'd gone off, and the Eternals had given him some cosmic awareness, or something, which that gets back to Warren, who writes a scene later on, reflecting on that. I believe that was in reaction to Ralph's notes about these first issues. It's really dubious and really questionable throughout Nextwave, for whatever it's worth, as to whether or not this is even existing in the Marvel Universe, especially when Civil War is over everything, and it doesn't come up, except on a parody cover here, but retroactively, obviously, absolutely it is. I mean, this is the only version of Elsa Bloodstone. There's no other competing version of it. Everybody else, that is, but there were enough people who were super influenced by Nextwave that it's infused itself into parts of the Marvel Universe. Anyway, sorry. That was my aside. I can't see those issues without thinking about, not everybody was 100% pleased. I think the idea that maybe it wasn't in the Marvel Universe made people okay with it, internally, where they might not have been.

[34:24] David: Yeah. Warren Ellis himself, I think, again, this is before the book is launched, he himself is like, “this is not going to be in Marvel continuity because if this was, everyone would be mad at me, because I'm going to break everything, basically. He's got very little reverence for anything that comes before. Ellis doesn't have a lot of reference for this stuff, and in fact, in another interview, talking about the series, he says, “when I did my first round with Marvel in the 90s, one interested editor, in an attempt to destroy my brain, had the entire Marvel Universe handbook copied and FedEx’d to me. Every now and then, I would page through this and just be astonished at how some of this stuff got published. So, I really just need to page through this moldering photocopied book. It's like if the Bible had been assembled by the inmates of five lunatic asylums. You can really just cherry-pick this stuff.” So, I think that might have informed how he was picking some of these villains that Nextwave comes up against, and the level of love and veneration he had for some of this stuff, Fin Fang Foom included.

Hey, everybody. We went a little long in our discussion about Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. Hope you all come back for Part 2, next week. In the meantime, have a great rest of your week, and we'll see you next time, on The Corner Box. Bye, everybody.

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