| Posted: 17 December 2007 at 6:23am | IP Logged | 1
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From the January, 1990 issue of Marvel Age. Not a John Byrne interview but some interesting tidbits on the startup of his run on Namor the Sub-Mariner.
He was once the prince of the underwater civilization of Atlantis, who time and again found himself at odds with the nations of the air-breathing humans living on the surface world. But he himself was the son of an air-breather, and now he finds himself back in his father's nation, sitting on a throne of a very different kind. For now Prince Namor is the secret head of one of the world's richest and mightiest business conglomerates. And he once again has the power to change the fate of the world.
This is the story of NAMOR THE SUB-MARINER, a brand new series starring the classic Marvel hero who celebrates his fiftieth anniversary in print in 1989. the new series is written and drawn by John Byrne, inked by Bob Wiacek, colored by Glynis Oliver, and edited by Terry Kavanagh. And, as John puts it, "The thrust is Donald Trump with wings on his heels."
The new series contains several surprises for longtime fans of the Sub-Mariner. John intends to stay away from Atlantis, the traditional undersea villains, and underwater adventures as long as he can. In fact, in the first issue of the new series, the adult Namor is never once shown underwater! "Well, that wasn't deliberate," John explains, "because it surprised me as much as it surprised anybody. But I think it sets the tone of the new series. So it's only appropriate that when we see Sub-Mariner in this issue, he is entirely above water. Baby Namor in a flashback is underwater, but that's the only underwater sequence for him in the first issue." Moreover, as Jon points out, in the flashback to Namor's origin, not only does he depict the Atlanteans with black eyes, as the Sub-Mariner's creator, Bill Everett, did back in the 1940s, but he will show the Atlanteans floating in the Atlantis scenes, rather than standing and walking around. After all, the are underwater.
Furthermore, unlike his past series, the new one is not titled SUB-MARINER but NAMOR THE SUB-MARINER, with NAMOR in far larger letters in the logo than the rest. "We're doing that for two reasons," John says, "one, it's impossible to make a good-looking logo out of 'Sub-Mariner,' and tow a shorter word, like 'Namor,' will stand out better. Also, perhaps people will be less inclined to mispronounce 'Namor,' although I did when I was a kid: I used to say 'Nam-mor.'" (By the way, "Sub-Mariner" is pronounced with a short "i." In other words, it's not pronounced like "submarine.") But the idea is to have a title that in and of itself diminishes the 'Sub-Mariner' idea, because it's less important in the new series that he's the Sub Mariner. It's less important to him that he can breathe underwater. That's simply a tool., but it's not his most important tool.
One of the reasons for taking the Sub-mariner in such a different new direction is so that newcomers will not have to feel they have to know a slot about the Sub_mariner's lengthy past to appreciate the new stories more fully. One of my major concerns here is so that a new reader can pick this up and not feel that he's missed the last six issues, or the first six year, or whatever.
John Byrne has had the new direction for the Sub-Mariner in mind for quite some time now. Funny enough, he recalls, it was something that I had thought of over a year ago when the first two books that (Marvel executive editor) Mark Gruenwald said he wanted me to do (when John once again began doing the majority of his comics work for Marvel) were SHE-HULK and SUB-MARINER. I ended up doing the SHE-HULK and WEST COAST AVENGERS, now AVENGERS WEST COAST. But in considering Namor back then, I thought that the approach I would like to take would be to play off the fact that this guy has got more money than God.
Then, lo and behold, a year later Tom DeFalco and Mark Gruenwald and Howard Mackie and Terry Kavanagh and a bunch of other people sitting around trying to think of what to do with Sub-Mariner came up with the same concept independently. So when they called me up and said, "Would you be interested in doing this?" I said "Golly, sure." John recalls laughing.
the seeds of the idea of Namor as a multimillionaire businessman go back to an early issue of THE FANTASTIC FOUR, in which Stan Lee and Jack Kirby depicted Namor as the head of a movie studio that made a film about the Fantastic four. He'll be doing lots of movie stuff.
As for where Namor got all this money that's an easy question for John to answer. he knows the location of every (ship) wreck in the world, as he says in the first issue as he shows the new female lead a huge pirate's chest full of gold doubloons.
But why is it that Namor has decided to turn back to the surface world and big business after all these years? WWII, there are three things that have happened. John asserts. One is that he's lost his kingdom again. The new series will be interrupting his search for his people rather effectively I think. Two is that he has realized that the way to accomplish what he wants to accomplish, the way to fight the surface world, is on it's own terms. So, instead of amassing an army and attacking New York, you go out and buy as much of New York as you possibly can.
The third and most significant thing is that Namor meets a marine biologist who presents Namor with a solution to a problem that has plagued him all his life. This man's name is Caleb Alexander, who has an adult daughter named Carrie. They are a father and daughter team of marine biologists who happen to be puttering around the South Pacific when in one of those coincidences that only happen in comic books, they run into the Sub-Mariner. Caleb has been a big fan of Sub-mariner since he was a little kid. Back in 1944 he was Sub-Mariner in New York, in fact, Sub-Mariner saved his life. This is what directed Caleb into marine biology and his particular interest in Sub-Mariner.
John believes that the Sub-Mariner has been portrayed in highly inconsistent ways over the years, in which Namor sometimes behaves reasonably and other times goes into irrational rages. Caleb, John says, "has figured out what it is that has always caused Sub-Mariner to go off on these rages and act in this extremely inconsistent way, and has suggested a cure. So now that Namor is more in control of his emotions and his metabolism, he can take a more rational approach to the world. The problem is explained in the first issue. The instrument by which he is able to bring his mood swings under control is established in the second issue.
this does not mean that Namor has mellowed completely though. He still has the ability to get thoroughly ticked off, and he's still an arrogant person. John observes "That goes with being a king."
Yet another reason why Namor keeps the Alexanders around is that he finds himself attracted to Carrie. the Sub-Mariner recruits the Alexanders to be what John calls "his eyes and ears on the surface world" while Namor himself runs his business affairs in secret.
"But Namor is not motivated to become a big business magnate out of greed. His general approach is ecological although I don't want to scare people into thinking this is going to be some heavy ecology text because it isn't," John explains. Namor's concern is that the surface world is rather sloppy in taking care of this planet that we all share. And a lot of the glop that the surface world creates ends up in the seas, which, while not the place where Namor is going to be spending most of his adventure time, is certainly the place where he feels most comfortable. He doesn't want to see it wrecked, and in the process of trying to clean up the surface world's acct, he obviously is going to be making it better for all of us as well."
At first virtually no one will know that the Sub-Mariner is back in the surface world. "As he says in the first issue, the world thinks he's dead, and he's decided not to disabuse them of that misapprehension," John remarks. "Only a handful of heroes knows that he's not dead. So he will not have a secret identity per se. but he will be the mysterious guy operating from behind closed doors. People will now that there is somebody who is really the power behind the throne at Oracle, Incorporated (named after the ship of Namor's father, Antarctic explorer Captain Leonard McKenzie). But they don't know who it is."
"He's going to live on the top half dozen floors of the Tipton Apartments, which is an imaginary building on Central Park West."
But surely, as Namor continues to encounter various enemies over the course of the series, he won't be able to keep his existence a secret for long. "Well, that's not actually going to be a problem," John reveals, "because it is my intent that eventually the world will discover that he's not dead, and then he'll start operating publicly. Rather than the fans chalking up all the instances where the world should have figured out (that Namor is still alive, but didn't), they can chalk up all the instances where people have figured it out, and (then see) just how long it will take for all these instances to come together so everybody knows. Because it will happen, maybe not within the first year, but certainly by the end of the first year, I would think. And then I will be getting very much into the Beautiful People, quote-unquote. He'll be on the cover of PEOPLE. He'll be going to parties wearing a tuxedo, things like that."
The first issue will introduce two people whom John calls his "recurring 'villains'--for lack of a better term. They are "a brother and sister team of big business tycoons named Desmond and Phoebe Marrs. They're the heads of business quote-enemies-unquote of Oracle, Inc., and will be the people who are trying to figure out who's behind Oracle, Inc. They are as close to being identical twins as a male and female can be."
"they're not their real names. the have abandoned their pasts, and these are the names they chose for themselves. So they chose 'Marrs,' and then they chose 'Desmond' and 'Phoebe' as the regular names that most resembled "Deimos and 'Phobos,'" the names of the sons of the Roman war god, Mars. But don't start plowing through old back issues of Marvel series trying to figure out who the Marrs twins could possibly be. "They're brand new characters who have no prior connection to the Marvel Universe," states John.
Issue two pits the Sub-Mariner against the Griffin as well as leading him into conflict with Roxxon, the powerful and unscrupulous oil conglomerate. Namor suspects that Roxxon is behind the Griffin's attack since the Griffin was seen at Roxxon's subsidiary, the Brand Corporation, in his first appearance. But in actuality it is the Marrs twins who are behind the Griffin.
Then in issue #4 and #5, John reports, "The thrust of the story is that a giant oil tanker comes into New York Harbor and has a spill, and then the spill gets set on fire. The subplot will probably introduce a new villainess called Headhunter, which is a big business term, obviously."
The Sub-Mariner's cousin, Namorita guest stars in the story that appears in issues #6 and #7. "i was reading an article in NEWSWEEK about pollution," John recalls, "and discovered that there is a place where all the untreated raw sewage from New York and New Jersey goes. It's called East 106, and it's a spot 106 miles off the United States coastline. And it is, as it said in NEWSWEEK, the leading contender for the title of the most disgusting place on Earth. And I said to myself, what if some sort of biological mutation occurred in all that stuff? And what if it turned into a kind of gigantic super-Man-Thing and decided to go home? It's going to be disgusting. It's going to smell real bad. And it's going to be huge."
In the future John intends to do a storyline in which Namor discovers "that one of the companies that Tony Stark owns is doing something nasty that Stark doesn't know about." So when Namor intervenes, Stark goes to fight him as Iron Man.
There will definitely be a reunion of the Sub-Mariner, Captain America, and the original Human Torch, who were the three leading members of the World War II super hero team known as the Invaders. "Mark Gruenwald and I have already started talking about that as an obvious has-to-be-done three way crossover, probably going from NAMOR to CAPTAIN AMERICA to AVENGERS WEST COAST, depending on the sequence in which they're published." The villain will probably be the Red Skull. Inasmuch as the original Human torch killed the Skull's leader, Adolf Hitler, "I'm reasonably sure the Red Skull would not be thrilled to know the original Human Torch is back."
The Fantastic Four will probably turn up in NAMOR eventually, and John says he would like to do a story about all of the women whom the Sub-Mariner has love in the past, including the Invisible Woman, and "look for something that might link all the women in his life." John hopes to do stories involving Doctor Doom and the Puppet Master, whose paths have crossed the Sub-Mariner's in the past. John may also be doing a tie-in to a plot element form one of this early issues of ALPHA FLIGHT.
John has not seen that many of the SUB-MARINER stories done by the character's creator, Bill Everett, back in the 1940s and 1940s, though he has seen the ones that Marvel has reprinted over the years. "I was always impressed by Bill Everett's stuff. One of the first places I saw it was that big page of Sub_+Mariner punching the (original) Human torch in Steranko's HISTORY OF THE COMICS. It's very much definitive Golden Age style. "But because John first saw the Sub-Mariner in FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #1, by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, "he's always felt to me like a Lee and Kirby character more than an Everett character. So I'll treat the Everett stuff with the necessary reverence. But I still come at stuff from the direction of Lee and Kirby, as I always have."
John is looking forward to doing stories setting Namor's super-heroic exploits against the world of high finance. "Exploring those rarefied realms is fascinating, though certainly I'm not going to worry about being a textbook on economics, or anything like that. I don't expect to be reviewed in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. But it's fun to play with people who have what amounts to the real world version of super-powers, which is to have lots and lots and lots and lots of money." And NAMOR THE SUB-MARINER thus promises to be a super hero comic the like of which has never been seen before.
-Peter Sanderson
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