Remember when Rick Veitch ragequit Swamp Thing over DC not letting him do the story that he wanted? Of course you do. Everyone's heard that story before. But do you remember who replaced him?Doug Wheeler."Who the fuck is Doug Wheeler?", you ask? That seemed to be what the Swamp Thing readers were asking at the time. And for good reason. At the time, writing Swamp Thing was a fairly prestigious gig, but this Doug Wheeler guy was given the job with apparently ZERO prior comics experience. And DC wasn't helping to clarify for their readers either, generally responding to "who is Doug Wheeler?" with "a writer". After his 20+ issues of Swamp Thing over less than 2 years, he wrote a single short story for Dark Horse Comics Presents and then another single short story for Negative Burn (another 90s indie comics anthology). Aaaaaaand that's it. As far as I can tell these are not only his only comics writing credits, but his only writing credits of any sort. There aren't even any photos of the man online! And I can't find a single record of him attending a convention (though admittedly google isn't much of a help here). I haven't heard a single comics industry pro talk about him ever either. At this point I have to wonder if he even existed or if it was a pseudonym.
>>155307795Is Jamie Delano still active in comics?
>>155307818Pretty sure he does novels now. I think he only did comics because it was a good gig at the time
>>155307795>"Who the fuck is Doug Wheeler?"A pen name.
>>155307795Speaking of Swamp Thing, Steven R. Bissette retired early.
>>155309253Okay but who is the real writer
>>155309600Wheeler was real. Also his run and every fucking Swamp Thing run after Veitch got retconned as being fake in Swamp Thing 1989
>>155309600Veitch.
>>155309423Bissette kept doing creator-owned work through the 90's (Taboo and Tyrant, which got a deluxe re-release via Kickstarter recently). John Totleben was the one who retired early due to a degenerative eye condition.
Is his comic any good?
>>155309876The first year of the Wheeler run is decent but #100-109 is a really really crappy fungus vs tree war arc that pretty much cemented the run's reputation as boring at best and bland at worst
All of those people J. Michael Straczynski brought with him to Marvel.
>>155309876His first issue is better than any Veitch issue.
>>155307795>Remember when Rick Veitch ragequit Swamp Thing over DC not letting him do the story that he wanted?Not quite true. They DID let him write and pencil it under full editorial approval but then some exec high up the food chain caught wind of it and pulled it from printing.
I know Rick Veitch only for The Big Lie (2011). Great work.
>>155310719It was never fully penciled, you can see it in the recent release.
>>155307795Doug Wheeler was a computer programmer who was dabbling in 80's indie comics and got the job because Karen Berger asked Bissette and Totleben for emergency replacements and they separately recommended him. Apparently he had NO idea what he was walking into and after his run he retreated back to his day job.Cronin has the full story here:>https://www.cbr.com/swamp-thing-how-an-unknown-writer-ended-up-replacing-neil-gaiman/Personally I tapped out of his run after 2 issues, he was trying to complete Veitch's story but he didn't get it.
>>155310933You ARE right, he had a full script and several thumbnail'd pages
>>155310939Bullshit. Read his first issue and compare it to when other people dabbled into writing comics for the first time, not even talking about randoms, but people in creative/entertainment or even novel writers. Hell, compare it even with regular comic book writers in the first couple of years. It's waaaay above that level, nobody is that competent right out the gate.
>>155310964Some of them were penciled which is why Michael Zulli is in the credits page despite being dead for a few years.
Alan Brennert is an interesting case of a mostly TV writer who did a few comics, but was notable enough to have many of them be standouts or signifigant in some way. perhaps most notable is that he introduced the concept of Batman having lots of scars on his body in the Brave and the Bold story The Autobiography of Bruce Wayne, about Earth 2 Batman finally settling down with Catwoman. In the story, Cartwoman sees Batman's back and is shocked to see it covered in wounds, which he describes as the result of a lifetime of crime fighting .Alex Ross would remember this story and in the 90's would paint his Batman with a back full of scars based off this, which has become a standard depiction of him since.He also wrote the first official Elseworlds, Batman Holy Terror, although Gotham by Gaslight would retroactively be the first. He largely stopped writing after the 80's, but did one Batman Black and white story in the 2000s teaming up Batman and Alan Scott, and a Submariner story for Marvel. And one thing I found while looking him up, incidentally, as a TV writer he wrote the 80's Twilight Zone episode "Her Pilgrim Soul, which while unrelated was the inspiration for the title to the BTAS episode "Her Silicon Soul). I always thought that was meant to be a play on a phrase, turns out the writer just liked the title of the Twilight zone episode.
>>155309423>>155309842It's a miracle Bissette even did as much as he did, I love the Kevin eastman story where he kept claiming car troubles to avoid delivering a story>GROTH: I don’t want to criticize anyone’s motives here, but the whole context seems to me to be corrupted by money. Did Bissette do Turtles stuff, too?E>ASTMAN: Bits and pieces. I mean, a lot of it, much of it was never finished [Groth laughs]. Some was actually drawn in his car on the way down, which is a really funny! [Laughs.] Bissette is probably the first to admit how slow and deadline dreadful he is.>[Groth laughs.] He’s at least a realist in that way; for sure. He would do these nutty things, like when he was delivering this eight-page story for this Turtle Soup thing we were doing, he held up production about three months doing this, and we’d call him and say, “You gotta bring that story in.” And he’d say, “I’m bringing it down tomorrow.” And every trip from Battleboro to Northampton, there’d be a mysterious breakdown or there would be a huge delay in why he couldn’t get there. When he’d actually make it down and have only two more panels done than he had the two weeks earlier. So, we sort of figured out after a while that he was pulling off the side of the road [laughter] and probably inking a little bit on the way down, and then showing up and saying, “Next week, it’ll be done for sure.”>GROTH: That’s one of the best Bissette stories I’ve ever heard. [Laughter.]>EASTMAN: Once there was a big snow bank in the road that he ran into. And then, the next day, a car broke down and he stopped to help and time ran short ... And then something else ... God bless him, we love him for that: because he wasn’t fooling us as well as he wasn’t fooling himself.
>>155311462If I had a nickel for every time a male comic writer from the 70s, whose last name began with “Br,” was better-remembered for TV work than for comic work (despite the latter being highly significant to the main character), I’d have two nickels.
>>155310939He did great finishing Veitch 's time travel story, as everyone hated how long it was being dragged out, as far as finishing it asap
