Tagged: Pascual Ferry

John Ostander: Annotating H4H, Part 2

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This coming week, Marvel is issuing the second part of my work on Heroes For Hire and, as I did when the first volume came out, I thought I’d talk a little bit about it and why I made some choices that I did and what I was thinking when I created the stories.

Background info: my run on H4H began in 1997 and ran for 19 issues. The team was a corporate entity, hiring out groups of superheroes for various missions. Luke Cage and Iron Fist were the core, with the Original Human Torch, Jim Hammond, running the business. Lots of characters cycled in and out, the most constant being White Tiger, Ant-Man (Scott Lang), Black Knight and Thena of the Eternals. We also had lots of guest stars such as Hercules, Wolverine, Shang-Chi, She-Hulk and Deadpool who, not surprisingly, was featured on the cover.

Deadpool is probably one of the main reasons Marvel is gathering this collection right now, along with the fact that Luke Cage and Iron Fist both either have had or will have a series on Netflix that will lead into the Defenders miniseries. And, maybe, the fact that I wrote Suicide Squad and that movie is now out on DVD, Blu-Ray, and so on. Ah, name recognition!

Often the guest stars would appear depending on availability and also on with whom I wanted to play. That accounts a lot for Deadpool’s appearance. ‘Pool is a lot of fun to write; he has a deep streak of whacky and I like whacky.

In fact, the entire series has a deep streak of whacky as best exhibited by the narrator. The voice of the narrator started normally but rapidly developed into sort of a character of its own. I was influenced by Stan Lee’s way of talking to the reader, calling them “effendi” and promising to get them caught up when the story started in the middle of a fight scene (which is one of the best ways ever to start a comic). My narrator would complain about not being told what’s going on and once panicked when there was a crash and it appeared all the heroes were dead. She-Hulk, who was also a lawyer, later broke the fourth wall and fired the narrator. We had a new, normal narrator after that; even the font changed to establish this was not the “same” narrator.

I have no idea what readers thought but, hey, I was amusing myself.

Smack dab in the middle of this we had a five-part crossover with the Quicksilver book that I was writing along with Joe Edkin. That year, Marvel was doing “paired” Annuals and, since I was involved with both H4H and Quicksilver, they got paired. Joe and I had inherited a storyline involving the High Evolutionary, the Knights of Wundagore, Exodus and the Acolytes, and ultimately Man-Wolf. In retrospect, Joe and I probably should have wound up that storyline sooner than we did and gone on to our own ideas. We hoped that linking the Quicksilver book with H4H would create an event and would help increase the readership of Quicksilver.

It didn’t work out that way. Quicksilver actually got canceled and I think we hurt H4H in the process. There were just too many characters and plenty of switching sides. Maybe we should have had a scorecard.

The pencilers on the series were generally top notch. Pachalis (Pascual) Ferry was our regular penciler and he’s terrific. Very flowing artwork but with a sense of energy and excitement akin to Jack Kirby. Excellent storyteller, too.

My other favorite penciler remains Mary Mitchell for a lot of good reasons. I first encountered Mary at a Chicago Con; incredible storytelling skills, a great sense of architecture and place, and even minor characters seemed to have a real life. They all had their own stories and we could have followed those but we were following these other characters instead. I helped her get some of her first jobs and she eventually came to live with Kim Yale and me. She stayed during Kim’s fight with breast cancer and stayed after her death. Much later, she and I became a couple and still are but at the time of her doing the story in this volume, we were just good friends.

The story was a solo adventure of the Black Knight who was a favorite character of mine and who I had brought into the group.

Another favorite character that I brought into the comic was Mrs. Arbogast, the older and sometimes acerbic secretary who had worked for Tony Stark. She has a dry disdain similar to Alfred in the Batman movies.

We had lost some readership but it was growing again but this was the Ron Pearlman era when the company was owned and operated by bunch of people who clearly didn’t know what they were doing. One underling decided he would curry favor by saving money by canceling a bunch of books – including H4H. We didn’t really warrant it. Said underling then left the company a short time later. Such is life.

I’m proud of my work on H4H. My approach was consciously different from my work at DC; a bit looser, a bit more in what I considered to be “the Marvel manner.” A plot might not complete in one issue but end at the start of the next issue and we would then plunge into the next story. Sometimes the pace was a bit breathless and that was all by design. I wanted H4H to be fun and the best way to make that happen was to have fun myself. I did and I think it shows. If you take a look, I think you’ll have fun, too.

Excelsior!

 

John Ostrander: Heroes For Hire Redux

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Boy, do I have Christmas gift ideas for you! Volume 5 of the Suicide Squad reprints, Apokolips Now, goes on sale December 27 (okay, it just misses Christmas). The extended blu-ray for the movie goes on sale December 13. And Marvel is releasing the first of two volumes gathering my Heroes For Hire work on December 20. You’re right, we want all your monies.

Today I want to talk about H4H. It was a team book whose members included Iron Fist, Luke Cage, White Tiger, Black Knight, Ant-Man, Jim Hammond (a.k.a. the Original Human Torch) plus assorted guest stars rotating in and out such as Hulk, She-Hulk, Hercules and, eventually, Deadpool – who shows up in Volume 2 out in late January.

heroes-for-hireIt’s not hard to understand why Marvel is re-issuing the stories in a TPB. Luke Cage is on Netflix and Iron Fist soon will be, they’ll both then appear in The Defenders, and there’s some serious buzz about a Heroes For Hire series as well. There’s a little luster on my name as well right now because of the hoopla about Suicide Squad.

The series was originally set in the Onslaught Era where some of Marvel’s heroes, specifically The Avengers and the Fantastic Four, were thought to have died in battle with a being called Onslaught. In reality, they wound up in a pocket universe from which they would eventually return. Their absence left a power vacuum in the Marvel Universe where other teams, such as Heroes For Hire, were formed to fill the void.

The book was originally going to be written by Roger Stern, a fine writer and Marvel mainstay, but after putting the team together and plotting the first issue, Roger felt that his workload was overcommitted; something had to give and, at that point, H4H was easiest to jettison. However, Roger recommended me to his editor, Mark Bernardo, as his replacement. Mark and I had worked together on other Marvel projects such as Blaze of Glory and an incarnation of The Punisher so Mark was more than willing for me to take over H4H.

I had previously done Suicide Squad over at DC so I was interested in seeing what I could do with a team book at Marvel. I had long been a Marvel fan; at one point, I was an even greater Marvel fan than a DC one and was reading almost everything Marvel put out in those days.

I’m really glad to see H4H reprinted; it became a very different series for me. I plotted it more loosely in a very freewheeling style. Sometimes a story wouldn’t end in one issue but overlap into the next and then plunge right into the next plot.

One of the stranger conceits that I developed was the narrator, the person who speaks in the caption boxes. He got very strange. As early as the third issue, he was addressing the reader directly. It started as him being a Stan Lee type, calling the readers “effendi” and promising to get them caught up as he went.  I especially remembered Stan doing that in Spider-Man and it always stuck with me.

This narrator got out of control, however, throwing in pop quizzes and sometimes panicking at what was happening to the characters. He eventually was “fired” by She-Hulk. How’s that for odd?

I always like playing with continuity when I can and there was one element in Luke Cage that I had fun with. Cage is very street tough but, when he swore, he’d say, “Sweet Christmas!” Understandable at the time given language restrictions in comics when Cage was created as a Marvel blackploitation character.

Lot of people thought “Sweet Christmas!” was ridiculous but I gave Cage a reason for using it. When he’s mocked by an opponent during a fight about it, Cage informs him that his grandma objected to swearing and that “my grandma is tougher than you!”

There are some quiet moments as well that I loved. Namor comes over to the building housing H4H and visits Jim Hammond. In their younger days they had been occasional foes and then allies during WW2,along with Captain America in The Invaders. The scene is just the two of them talking as old friends and Hammond gets out a joke that makes Namor laugh hard. “Firebug,” he tells him, “you kill me.” It’s just one page but I really love it.

My penciller on the series was Pascual Ferry, a Spanish artist, and his stuff was and is amazing. The storytelling is wonderful, there’s a Jack Kirby like sense of energy in his work, he has lots of enthusiasm and energy as well as talent and skill and I simply loved working with him. He’s very professional and a great guy to boot.

The tone of what I did in H4H is very different, I think, than anything else I’ve done. There’s just a lot of fun in it; I was consciously trying for a very Marvel feel and I think this, along with my Marvel westerns, are some of the best work I’ve done for the House of Ideas.

As I said, the second and concluding volume of H4H will be published at the end of January and I’ll come back and talk some more about that when we get there. I got to work with one of my favorite artistic partners before the series ended. In the meantime, if you’re a fan of my work I can recommend this to you. Not everyone has seen it and I think it’s worth seeing.

As Stan the Man used to say, Face front, true believers. Because that’s where the future is coming from.

Excelsior.