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Annotations to Marvel 1602 |
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first posted on 14 August 03 |
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JULIAN DARIUS |
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Read The Continuity
Page covering Marvel 1602 (and other Marvel universe-spanning work). |
Why Annotate 1602? 1602 is significant in uniting two worlds: that of the Marvel Universe of
super-heroes, all with their own history, and that of Neil Gaiman, who brings
to the project literary respectability as well as his revered writing
skills. The publication of the series
was not only a major event in comics, but a significant event in all
publication due to Gaiman’s considerable talents and reputation as a best-selling
novelist. In both comics and novels,
Gaiman maintains a considerable readership tending towards the intelligent
young and willing to embrace clever takes on marginalized media, such as
comics, and genres, from fantasy to super-heroes. |
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So why annotate 1602? First, why not? Fairly few annotations of comics are available, despite the
maturation of the medium and the attention it increasingly receives in both
scholarly and entertainment circles.
Moreover, 1602 is an important work in comics by an incredibly
important writer in multiple media.
But 1602 is by nature a work that ravenously absorbs references
and traditions: while featuring
Marvel characters in alternate forms, it takes place primarily in late Elizabethan
England. Any reader may not get this
wide range of resonances, many of which are not necessary to follow the story
(as narrowly defined). Any reader,
but particularly those of Gaiman’s best-selling novels, may not get 1602's
resonances with Marvel Comics’ many decades of history. And any reader may not understand the
historical background into which the series is set. For these reasons, annotations are of particular value in the
case of 1602. An ancillary question is why I should be
the one doing the annotations. First,
there’s not a lot of competition.
Second, my own background seems perfectly suited to 1602, with
both Renaissance English literature and comic books being areas of particular
expertise. While my formal academic
training has been in English literature, with more training in Renaissance
literature than most other experts in the field, I have privately studied
comics even more intensely -- in an age in which they are academically
marginalized if not non-existent -- and have both published and presented on
comics at international scholarly conferences. The apparently strange mix (perhaps not as strange as one would
immediately think) of the Renaissance and super-heroes is shared by both 1602
and my biography. My point, I trust,
made, I now stop burdening you with my credentials. The Origin of 1602 In the 1980s and 1990s, when Neil Gaiman
made his name working on The Sandman for DC Comics, he expressed no
desire to work for Marvel Comics.
Indeed, he expressed his desire not to do so for the same
reason that his mentor Alan Moore had vowed never again to associate himself
with Marvel Comics: Marvel had
promised legal action over the name “Marvelman” after that British character,
who normally appeared in the British anthology Warrior, got his own Marvelman
Special. The fact that Marvelman
was published in the 1950s before Marvel Comics was Marvel Comics made
no difference to Marvel, and the threat of a suit from deep-pocketed Marvel
forced the Marvelman feature to stop appearing and to be changed to Miracleman
as it moved to the U.S. to be reprinted and then continued by Eclipse
Comics. While disdain for Marvel’s
strong-arm tactics in this episode caused both Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman to
swear off Marvel Comics, both expressed no real desire to work with Marvel’s
characters, who they felt were inferior, or at least less iconic, than DC’s. |
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The story of Marvel 1602’s genesis
is also intertwined with that of Miracleman, properly regarded as
historically important on the highest level for the evolution of super-heroics
and on which Gaiman had succeeded Alan Moore in the early 1990s but not
finished before publisher Eclipse went bankrupt. Todd McFarlane, creator of Spawn
and cofounder of Image Comics, bought Eclipse’s characters in the bankruptcy
auction. Gaiman, who had created the
characters of Angela and Medieval Spawn for McFarlane, had been in a dispute
with McFarlane over royalties for those characters’ subsequent appearances in
both comics and toys. McFarlane offered
Gaiman Eclipse's rights to Miracleman, though what portion of the rights to
Miracleman Eclipse actually held was itself disputed, in exchange for Gaiman
surrendering his claim to the Spawn-related characters he had created; Gaiman
agreed but McFarlane apparently failed to send the supporting
documentation. In 2001, Miracleman’s
appearance in McFarlane’s Hellspawn title was announced, and Gaiman
had to respond. Now a best-selling
writer for his novel American Gods, Gaiman asked readers to boycott
the issues featuring Miracleman, initially declining to sue. As others rallied in support of Gaiman and
of Miracleman, the limited-liability company Marvels and Miracles was formed
to fight the legal battles over Miracleman.
Gaiman and other creators transferred to Marvels and Miracles any
rights to Miracleman that they held -- or may have held -- in order to fight
the lawsuits with the eventual interest of having Miracleman published
again. |
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Marvel would donate its profits to Marvels and Miracles. |
By 2001, Marvel Comics had changed
dramatically since the dark days of the 1980s when it had threatened to sue
over the name Marvelman. Joe Quesada
had been brought to Marvel to head its new Marvel Knights imprint, which
began renovating characters such as Daredevil, giving those characters a
slightly more mature spin. He had
aggressively recruited major comics creators, in contrast with Marvel’s early
statements marginalizing the role of creators in favor of corporate-owned
characters; Quesada even desired to mend the relationship with -- and to
recruit -- both Gaiman and Alan Moore.
Quesada, promoted to Editor-in-Chief of all of Marvel, continued such
recruiting of creators and began (along with Marvel President Bill Jemas)
slowly renovating the entire Marvel line.
Quesada seized the opportunity of the Miracleman lawsuit to
strike a deal with Gaiman: Gaiman
would write a mini-series for Marvel and Quesada would donate Marvel’s
profits to Marvels and Miracles. In
addition, Quesada expressed a willingness to publish Miracleman,
despite its adult-oriented content in stark odds with Marvel’s normal oeuvre,
and promised to allow the name Marvelman, should Gaiman wish to return to it. As flights resumed shortly the 11
September 2001 terrorist attacks, during which flights over the United States
were suspended in response to hijacked passenger jets being used in
devastating kamikaze attacks, Neil Gaiman was set to fly to a science fiction
and comics conference in Trieste, in Northern Italy. Stuart Moore, who had succeeded Quesada as
head of Marvel Knights, arranged a meeting between the three in Gaiman’s
hotel room before his departure.
Quesada suggested that Gaiman write Secret Wars, a planned new
version of the mid-1980s 12-issue mini-series that had united Marvel’s
characters in a single title to promote a toy line of the same name; Secret
Wars was remembered fondly for its trailblazing format as a universe-wide
long mini-series, if not its content.
Gaiman seemed uninterested but, in Italy, took a day trip to Venice,
where he planned to come up with whatever he was going to write for Marvel. In the environment of car-less Venice, in
the aftermath of 11 September 2001, Gaiman came up with 1602. Gaiman later recalled his thinking in a 27
June 2003 press conference held by Marvel: The idea for the story came about in part
because I was plotting it immediately after September the 11th ... in Venice
... I decided that whatever I did, given the mood I was in at that point, it
wasn’t going to have skyscrapers, it wasn’t going to have bombs and it
probably wasn’t going to have any guns or planes in it. That was simply what I felt like at the
time. ‘I don’t think this is stuff I
want to put into my fiction right now.’
As soon as I put that together, the ideas of 1602 sort of fell
straight into my head. Some consideration here is due to the 11
September 2001 terrorist attacks with their images of planes slamming into
the World Trade Center towers, which quickly collapsed with then-untold
thousands inside. Planes and
skyscrapers had instantly become traumatically present symbols of the
ideological mass murder of civilians.
Movies and comics dealing with terrorism, crashing airplanes, or
threats to buildings were rapidly delayed, altered, or aborted; from dramatic
writers to comedians, many acknowledged the need for a less violent if not
outright escapist period in narrative art.
The environment of Venice, in which one finds a thriving but
pleasantly non-modern environment without skyscrapers or cars, is also worth
noting. Gaiman had come up with a different idea,
but one that, like Secret Wars, also took in Marvel’s wider universe
of characters. In a sense, the plot
of 1602 would be a kind of “secret war” -- so secret, in fact, that
even its characters would not understand it.
1602 was originally a working title but one that, like American
Gods (the title of Gaiman’s best-selling novel), Gaiman and his editors
simply came to like as it stuck in their minds. The title of 1602 was announced for
publication in 2002 without description of the mini-series’s contents. In an industry where developments within
various titles are typically leaked, publicized, and discussed months in
advance, Quesada orchestrated the utter media shut-out over the contents of 1602. In fact, had already practiced secrecy to
ensure surprise, including on the afore-mentioned Origin
mini-series. For a long time, the
ambiguous title was all anyone knew Gaiman’s mini-series. Industry journalists and fans speculated
wildly about what this name meant, some investigating what happened in the
year 1602. The artistic team of
illustrator Andy Kubert and colorist Richard Isanove, who had developed a new
artistic style, in which color is applied in subtle gradations on the
computer in a manner mimicking painted art, for the blockbuster mini-series Origin
(which told Wolverine’s origin in expanded form and was held in similar
secrecy), was assigned to 1602.
The mini-series was planned for publication in 2002, but kept being
delayed -- apparently as Gaiman and Marvel expanded its length and consulted
on its content. Besides that it would take in the entire
Marvel Universe in the year 1602, yet somehow ingeniously not take place in
an alternate universe, no one knew anything more about the title when Marvel
1602 -- the series’s official title -- was solicited, with a few
ambiguous pages altered to serve as advertisements, in the June 2003 issue of
Previews, published in the last week of May. Many retailers felt that they did not have enough information to
accurately order the book. On 27 June, Marvel held a press conference
on the series. For the occasion,
Marvel released the following written statement by Neil Gaiman: 1602 is an 8-issue mini, set in a Marvel
Universe in which, for reasons which will take a while to uncover, the whole
Marvel Universe is starting to occur 500 years early: Sir Nicholas Fury is head of the Queen’s
Intelligence, Dr. Stephen Strange is her court physician (and magician), the
Inquisition is torturing “witchbreed”, many of whom have taken sanctuary in
England under the wing of Carlos Javier, and now a mysterious treasure --
which may be a weapon of some kind -- is being sent from Jerusalem to England
by the last of the Templars. Something
that may save the world, or destroy it, which has already attracted the
attention of such people as Count Otto Von Doom (known as “The Handsome”)... 1602 thus hit the stands on 13 August 2003 with massive publicity
but with its contents almost entirely unknown. The Process |
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Gaiman had originally envisioned 1602
as a 6-issue series. |
Gaiman had originally
envisioned 1602 as a 6-issue series.
The first issue had grown to 34 pages instead of the company’s normal
22. During the process of writing 1602,
however, Marvel instituted a new policy discouraging extra-long issues. This prevented the conclusion from being
similarly expanded. On 17 January
2003, Gaiman noted in his online journal: Back
to writing 1602... on chapter 4 now.
The big question is how many issues come after this. I’d originally thought of it as a 6 issue
miniseries. At his point I’m just
hoping I can finish the body of the story in 8 issues. (ME:
What if the last issue’s a double-sized one, like the first? JOE QUESADA: What
if it’s just two issues instead?) Marvel now preferred expanding
the series instead of expanding particular issues, a move consistent with its
recent transition of its most popular titles, as possible, to more than 12
issues per year. Marvel seemed
willing to expand mini-series at this time (or at least popular ones, such as
Truth: Red, White & Black
and Ultimate Six) beyond their announced length, a way of
accommodating creators without resorting to expanded issues. This preference would alter the form of 1602
and present a challenge for Gaiman as he later concluded the series’s
writing. Gaiman, while praised for his
ability, was never known for speedy writing; his classic ongoing series, The
Sandman, struggled to keep roughly to its monthly schedule. On 20 January 2003, Gaiman recorded that
he had run out of lead time:
penciller Andy Kubert needed pages.
“Wrote the first 8 pages of 1602 part 4 on the plane, because I have a
spare battery for my laptop. E-mailed
it to editors, who will, I expect, be very relieved as Andy Kubert finished
drawing Chapter 3 on Friday.” A month
later, on 19 February, Gaiman noted that he was still writing issue #4. Serious illness conspired to delay
Gaiman’s work. Almost two months
later, on 12 April, Gaiman recorded that he had recently finished the first
third of issue #5. On 9 May 2003,
Gaiman noted that he was still at work on that issue. In a 12 June entry, Gaiman looked back on
the past months’ production and the delays that illness had wrought: “I had an eight week period where I wrote
almost nothing -- I think from February to April I finished three or four
introductions, a Fermata rewrite, and a handful of 1602 pages.” On 1 June, Gaiman reflected on
1602 in his online journal:
“So far, I like it, except when it threatens to get too big and I have
to remind myself that I don’t have 75 issues to tell this story in, or even
20, just eight.” The editorial
mandate precluding an expanded issue was now reaping consequences. On 20 June, Gaiman recorded: “I’m writing the last three episodes right
now, which is maddening. Several huge
climactic sequences, and lots of information to reveal on the way. And I have to fit it all into the final 66
pages, so I’m being very good and figuring out exactly what goes where. Which isn’t how I’d write it as one 66
page sequence either -- the fact that these are 3 monthly comics changes the
shape of things.” At Marvel’s 27 June press
conference on 1602, Gaiman stated that he was working on issue
#6. On 13 August 2003, the day the first
issue was published, Gaiman noted, “I start writing part seven
tomorrow.” On 20 August, Gaiman
recorded a conversation with penciller Andy Kubert about the last page of the
sixth issue’s script. On the same
day, Gaiman recorded that “Part 3 of 1602 arrived today [from Marvel], all
lettered for me to proofread.” This
gives us a remarkable portrait of the various stages of production as they
occurred simultaneously: Gaiman was
writing #7 as Kubert was concluding #6, always nipping at Gaiman’s heels; at
the same time, #3 had progressed to the proofs stage while #1 was on the
stands. #2 was published on 10
September; Gaiman was still at work on #7 and still struggling with the
confinements of the series’s format, decided months before. In a 16 September entry, Gaiman had this
to say about 1602’s length:
“It probably ought to have been longer. Now I’m in the final act I’m trying to make every panel do
several different things, and I’m already wondering about doing an additional
story which explains some of the stuff that no-one in the 1602 world really
knows, except for one person, and he’s not talking.” In a 25 September 2003 entry, Gaiman noted
writing issue #7 while on a book-signing tour. 8 October saw #3 hit the stands. On 27 October 2003, Gaiman recorded that he was still at work
on issue #7. #4 was published on 12
November. |
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Go to NeilGaiman.com. Go to EnjolrasWorld.com. Read the FanboyPlanet.com article. Go to Jess Nevin’s
pages on Geocities.com. Go to ComicWorldNews.com. |
The Contemporary Response to 1602 1602 consistently sold well throughout the series. 1602 #1 was the top-selling
American comic in August 2003. The
website icv2.com estimated its sales at 150,569. (See http://www.icv2.com/articles/home/3489.html.) 1602 #2 was the third best-selling American comic in September
2003. It was beaten by Batman
#619 (the conclusion of the celebrated “Hush” storyline with Jim Lee art) and
JLA / Avengers #1 (the premiere of the long-awaited mini-series
teaming DC’s Justice League with Marvel’s Avengers). The website icv2.com estimated 1602
#2’s sales at 132,737. (See http://www.icv2.com/articles/home/3636.html.) 1602 #3 was the third best-selling
American comic in October 2003. It
was beaten by Avengers / JLA #2 and by Amazing Spider-Man
#500. The website icv2.com
estimated 1602 #3’s sales at 140,972. (See http://www.icv2.com/articles/home/3873.html.) These annotations appeared on Sequart.com
concurrent with the publication of the issues themselves. The annotations to the first issue were
posted on 14 August 2003, the day after the first issue was released. They received a great deal of press
coverage, including references in Neil Gaiman’s online journal on NeilGaiman.com,
a journal reposted all over the world wide web. Consequently, many other sites referenced these annotations as
well. EnjolrasWorld.com, a
website specializing in comics annotations and bibliographies of diverse merit
and style, also covered on these annotations and their updates. FanboyPlanet.com covered these
annotations and reposted their introduction in a major article. Indeed, what can only be described as a
fury of online writing accompanied 1602. In addition to these annotations, Jess Nevins produced his own
on his webpages hosted by the free provider Geocities.com. Nevins’s fashion of annotating, which he
had practiced before on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and other
series, was to make some initial observations and post extracts from e-mails
he received and from other online sources.
Jason Pomerantz produced another batch of annotations, titled
“Mysteries and Connundrums” and focused on the mysteries of the then-ongoing
series, as articles on ComicWorldNews.com. No series had previously received concurrent annotations from
more than one source, let alone three sources -- and only one or two series
(such as Watchmen and The Sandman) had ever previously been
annotated by two sources, even years after the fact. In addition to websites and magazines
covering comics, 1602 garnered attention in the popular press due to
its author. Between the conclusion of
The Sandman and the beginning of 1602, precious few comics
written by Gaiman had appeared. In that
time, however, he had become a best-selling novelist, augmenting his presence
generated as popular culture increasingly noticed The Sandman, the
collected editions of which became a staple in American bookstores hostile to
comics. Attention given to 1602
was enhanced by the fact that it appeared almost simultaneously with two
other projects: DC / Vertigo’s The
Sandman: Endless Nights, a
collection of stories written by Gaiman and illustrated by prominent American
and European comics artists, and The Wolves in the Walls, an all-ages
book illustrated by Dave McKean that made it into bookstores. |
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Annotations to All Issues The covers, printed on thick cardstock
paper, are illustrated by Scott McKowen (known for his work on theater
posters more than on comics), not the interior artistic team. These covers are rendered a style
deliberately reminiscent of engravings.
With engravings, images are drawn in negative, with lines carved into
a wooden block or a metal plate for reproduction in print; ink applied to the
engraving imprints paper where the engraving is not, so that one
carves or etches what one wants not to print rather than what one
wants to appear in print. This
fashion of creating images was used for printed books for many centuries,
from the late Medieval period and Renaissance to the Victorian era. The color on the covers, of course, is far
more subtle than real (or traditional) engraving allowed. Note also that the use of ornamentation,
such as the ribbon behind the title, was common to title pages, which
sometimes placed the titles, credits, and even a dedication or purpose
statement within an ornamented design, sometimes with a central image. |
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The title page, on the interior front
cover, is fabricated in a style reminiscent of Renaissance books. |
The title page, on the interior front
cover, is fabricated in a style reminiscent of Renaissance books. While the artificial aging of the page’s
borders makes the page look more like a single page of paper rather than a
bound book, the font is instantly recognizable as typical of English
Renaissance publications, and the lack of uniformity and smoothness of the
characters themselves reproduces the effect of printing, in which ink from
the letters’ faces was imperfectly physically transferred to the page. Both the title of each episode and the
capitalization within those titles are typical of the English Renaissance, in
which capitals were used differently and more frequently than in today’s
English. Note that, in addition to
the typical indicia included at the bottom of the page, the illusion is
broken by the spelling, which is modern rather than that of the English
Renaissance, in which spelling was not yet standardized (as demonstrated most
dramatically in Shakespeare’s many different spellings, in signature, of his
name). |
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Explore the
other annotations on Sequart.com! Read about the author on our About page. Julian Darius can be reached at julian@sequart.com. Discuss this article online on Sequart.com’s messageboards. |
Proceed
to the annotations for issue #1. |
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WEBMASTERS: |
Please feel free to link to these annotations, but do not repost
without permission. |
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PUBLISHERS: |
Please cite quotations by website and author (e.g. “—Julian
Darius, Sequart.com”). |
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LEGAL: |
The characters and
images of Marvel 1602 are copyrighted by Marvel Comics. This site is copyrighted by Julian Darius
and intended for scholarly purposes and to increase interest in its topic. |
