Marvel needs to bring back TALES OF SUSPENSE | Opinion

Marvel Comics, and in some ways the comics industry as a whole, has become an ouroboros of late in the past few years, caught in a doom spiral that it cannot seem to break itself out of.

Part of that is evident in how hard they try to "match fetch happen" over and over again with a new character. It seems like every few years Marvel is trotting out a new idea for a young hip character that's going to reshape the Marvel Universe as we know it -- and for a little while that character is everywhere. They guest-spot in other books, they get a Disney+ show, they join one of the long-standing super-teams.

But eventually the push ends, and the character is left to stand on their own two feet, and more often than not that's when sales decline and things start to go astray before eventually failing into obscurity.

I did an interview with Marvel editor Heather Antos once on The Write Project, who said (and I'm paraphrasing here, that one of the things she wished she could make clear to new writers starting out in the industry was that the days of the 100+ issue series were over. Nowadays, even mainstays like The Amazing Spider-Man and X-Men could only last through 50-issue runs before being rebooted with a new #1. The age of a longstanding legacy number being a badge of honor, it seemed, were over.

One problem that causes this is how retailers order comics. Because orders come six months in advance, often titles are cancelled not only before the book can gain steam, but often before the first book even comes out.

But is that an inevitability? And if not, does the answer to how to fix this lay in practices at the root of Marvel's origins?

I've been reading my way through some older comics of late, and I find myself enamored with the old-style anthology comics that Marvel used to put out. See back in the day, there were a limited amount of titles that Marvel could produce a month -- I want to say six -- because of their deal with their printer. So because Stan, Jack and crew had so many good ideas they wanted to tell, they produced anthology-style magazines where they could switch up who was in the title role every month depending on the interests of the authors and the readers.

Thus was born titles like Tales of Suspense, Amazing Fantasy, Tales to Astonish, and more. These books would feature two-to-three shorter stories often anchored by one marquee story at the front. If you picked up Tales of Suspense #50, you weren't just getting an adventure with Iron Man, you were also getting a story about The Watcher.

And in that lies a key detail: these were not books wherein the grouped all the unsellable characters together, or even all the untested characters together. This was a series in which there was a "draw" character and then several ideas they were testing out. Captain America started in Tales from Suspense as a backup to Iron Man after they stopped doing The Watcher. Why? Because the Watcher wasn't working and they wanted to test out Captain America on this popular Iron Man book to see if people would buy it. And eventually it spun off into it's own title.

In later years these titles morphed into the titles we know. Tales of Suspense became Captain America with issue #100. But the trend morphed and became Marvel Comics Presents which followed the same format as those previous anthologies, but also Marvel Two-in-One and Marvel Team-Up, featuring their two most popular characters at the time, The Thing and Spider-Man, respectively. The gimmick with Two-in-One and Team-Up were that rather than have the guest characters be a second story to the anchor character, they would actually team-up and fight together in a book-length story.

These anthologies proved vital testing grounds not just for new authors and artists, but for characters as well. If Marvel Premiere hadn't taken a chance on Ghost Rider, he never would have spun off into his own book. If Marvel Comics Presents hadn't afforded Barry Windsor-Smith the chance to produce at his schedule, we wouldn't have gotten Weapon X.

Not only that, these titles proved an important value in giving stories a chance to end. When Iron Fist was cancelled, rather than have all the plot threads be dropped, the writer brought the characters and plotlines over for a multi-issue arc on Marvel Team-Up where Spider-Man was melded into the project. When Adam Warlock's character couldn't sustain his own book, he was brought over to Marvel Two-in-One and the Thing got involved to complete that story. These chapters in team-up books are now integral to the ongoing sagas of these long-standing characters, who might not have become long-standing characters had their stories been left to die on the vine.

We need this back, and more importantly, we need to commit to the bit. They tried this a few years ago, revitalizing Tales of Suspense with Winter Soldier and Black Widow... the problem there being, Winter Soldier and Black Widow can't anchor a long-running title.

No, what you need to do is have the main Captain America title be: "Tales of Suspense starring Captain America." You need to restart the current Cap book and instead anchor him back in an anthology title, back to him roots, and then you pair him with a character you want to make happen. Either a new character, an old character, completing a plot-line from a different book that didn't do well, whatever. And you collect them separately in trades down the line if you think it warrants that: maybe the backups get collected, maybe the reception wasn't positive enough to warrant that and those floppies become collector's items.

And with the sea of alternate-covers nowadays, you don't even have to worry about doing the flip-cover gimmick that Marvel Comics Presents used to do: alternate covers can have alternate characters, even feature the guest character's name as the marquee.

To me, as a publisher, this is just an obvious moneymaker. Make the issues 45-pages of story each, the main plot gets 30 pages, second plot gets 10, and maybe you do reprints for 5 to save a few dollars. Rake in the cash while testing new characters that might be your new stars or throwing a bone to the few fans whose love keep forgotten characters alive.

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