One Other Thing...

...A while back I teased out that I had ghost-written for Bill Jemas.

This sent people scrambling to their collections of MARVILLE and...jeez, I'm drawing a blank. Honest to god, I can't remember what else he wrote. Anyone with a better memory help me out here?

Anyway, it wasn't Marville. Or any other comic.

At the time, I was a humor columnist on Jonah Weiland's Comicbookresources.com, doing a comics parody thing weekly called You'll All Be Sorry. It was strangely popular even with the people I often made fun of, and a couple companies, including CrossGen, paid me to make fun of them a little (although, true story, they objected to a page I wrote that had Mark Alessi as the unholy ruler of a snake-worshipping cult. Why, I can't imagine).

I'd spoken to Bill a couple times, once after I'd really slammed him in my column (in a relatively unrealistic way...the main gag was that he'd been left in the snow to die by Joe Quesada. Not true, to my knowledge). And whatever else you may say about the man, he had a sense of humor about being poked at. He thought it was really funny and told me personally.

To be honest, in fact, I had pretty much nothing but positive exchanges with Bill. I liked that he was willing to do things that no one thought would be commercial, just to see if they were wrong. And he was a big supporter of Gus Beezer, if I understand correctly. When my first couple Deadpool issues came out, he sent me a very nice personal note about them.

So, while I do understand a lot of folks didn't like him, I didn't really see that side personally, and we always had a very cordial relationship.

One day out of the blue, he asked me to write a bullpen like page, ostensibly from him, based on a solid comedy concept...he said that even when he did something that was almost completely positive for fans, he was so disliked by fans and the fan press, that someone would find a way to twist his motives so that it was evil. So his gag was, what if he made an announcement that he was giving away free cookies, how would the usual suspects find a way to make that seem evil?

I thought that was pretty funny, so I wrote up some things, and I think he used most of it (don't really recall...I do think it actually made it into Marvel Comics as a fake bullpen page, or maybe on Newsarama or something). I think I did two such gigs for Bill, and he reworded them...he had some solid comedy chops, truth be told. I think he was looking for some inspiration and structure to bring them out.

Anyway, that was my 'ghost-writing,' mainly about cookies. It had one funny bit in it:

JOEQUESADA:

Uh, see, Bill is like the bad cop, and I’m the good cop -- I mean, he likes to shake things up. Uh, he’s probably kidding about the whole cookie thing, I bet. It’s more than likely a joke. I’m 90% certain that he’s just kidding. Oh, forget it. You guys grab him and I’ll stun him with this shovel.

Mystery solved!

Now, about the actual Marvel COMIC that I ghost-wrote a little while later... ;)


Best,

Gail