Rich Buckler’s cover for this issue of Astonishing Tales is one of the most striking ones he ever did for his “Deathlock the Demolisher” series, featuring a design-forward approach that clearly displays the influence of Jim Steranko (though without being a direct “lift” from any of that artist’s individual works, to the best of my knowledge). Interestingly, although the cover’s copy announces “a new beginning” for the feature, its imagery comes almost entirely from previous episodes (among other elements, it prominently features two characters — Deathlok’s arch-foe, Major Simon Ryker, and his one-time friend, Mike Travers — who don’t appear in this issue at all). But perhaps Buckler’s choice to look back is appropriate, as, fifty years ago this month, the 36th issue of Astonishing Tales turned out to be the last one for the title — a fact which, intentionally or not, retrospectively allows its cover to serve as a sort of commemorative piece for the entire “Deathlok” series.
Cover to Marvel Team-Up #46 (Jun., 1976). Art by Rich Buckler and Mike Esposito.
We’ll be moving on to the interior contents of AT #36 presently, but before we do, we need to take a moment to note an appearance by its leading man in a different Marvel comic that had come out in the two-month interval since the preceding issue, #35. In Marvel Team-Up #46, a time-traveling Spider-Man made a stop in 1990, where he teamed up with our favorite cyborg ex-soldier against some mutant cannibals. While Deathlok’s (then) near-future milieu had previously been linked to mainstream Marvel Universe continuity via an oblique reference in Defenders #26, as well as a more direct tie-in that appeared in Super-Villain Team-Up #4 and Marvel Spotlight #27 (both of which featured a younger iteration of Simon Ryker), this was Deathlok’s first face-to-face encounter with one of the publisher’s costumed superheroes. Given the involvement of two prominent members of the “Deathlok” feature’s creative team in the production of MTU #46 — Buckler himself pencilled the cover, while the Demolisher’s most recent scripter, Bill Mantlo, wrote the story within — one might assume that there was buy-in for this team-up tale from those responsible for steering the character’s ongoing series. But, in later years, Buckler would state flatly that he’d never meant for Deathlok (of whom he was the primary, if not sole, creator) to be connected to the greater Marvel Universe at all, which rather complicates the issue. Based on the accounts given by Buckler in several different interviews, it seems he may well have acceded to Marvel’s wish to have Deathlok fully integrated into the MU under duress; it also appears that that wasn’t the only compromise he made to his original vision for the character in the feature’s latter days, as the editorial control he thought he’d been guaranteed by contract was challenged or contravened by staff in the Marvel offices.
Some indications of the turmoil going on behind the scenes are evident from the credits on Astonishing Tales #36 opening splash page…
As we’ve covered in several previous posts, the “Deathlok” feature had been plagued virtually from its beginning by frequent changes in creative personnel, with “producer” Rich Buckler having been the only consistent presence throughout the run. In the last three issues, however, the book seemed to have at last settled into a productive groove, with Buckler’s efforts in plotting and pencilling complemented by Mantlo’s scripting and Klaus Janson’s inking and coloring. But that’s gone now, as we find Buckler now having once again taken over the full writing chores (he’d previously fully scripted issues #27–28 as well as parts of #30 and #32), with his friend and fellow Detroiter Keith Pollard back as embellisher (Pollard had previously contributed to the artwork of #30-32). As for coloring, that task was here attributed to “The Swash” — obviously a pseudonym, but for whom? Behind that credit lies a story — a story which almost certainly has more than one side, although as far as I know, only Buckler’s has been put on the record.
As with many of his other recollections concerning Deathlok, the late Rich Buckler gave several different accounts of the “Swash” incident; this version comes from an interview that was conducted by Michael Aushenker a few years prior to the artist’s untimely passing in 2017, and ultimately published in Comic Book Creator #18 (Fall, 1018) . There, after some general discussion of friction between himself and unnamed editorial staffers at Marvel, Buckler offered the following:
I was back to working at Marvel’s offices, doing my best to regain the control of “Deathlok” that I had almost lost entirely when I had moved briefly back to Detroit. So this was actually toward the end of the run. This was the situation: I decided to do some of my own coloring, for at least one issue. I figured, why not? Tom Palmer was coloring all of the art that he inked. This was not without a precedent…
Buckler was right about Tom Palmer, of course; but an even more appropriate contemporary comparison could be made with Jim Starlin, who in addition to writing and drawing Captain Marvel and Warlock had also colored multiple issues of both series, beginning with CM #28 in 1973.
So I went about my business… And then, rather unceremoniously, word arrived from “on high”, from the editor-in-chief. Which one? I’m not naming names here. Why bother? It was actually one of the many “editors-of-the-week” as I liked to call them back then…
With all due respect for Bucker’s attempt to be circumspect, the editor of record for Astonishing Tales #36 was. of course, Marv Wolfman. Wolfman had come on board in that role with AT #32, succeeding Len Wein, who in turn had followed Roy Thomas (the editor-in-chief who first greenlit the Deathlok feature, and the only Marvel editor Buckler spoke of positively in any interview I’ve read).
…For no apparent reason, it was spelled out for me that no way was Rich Buckler going to color his own work! “Why?” I asked. “Because you can’t!” That was the reason? Can you imagine? Like I’m back in fifth grade…
So I decided, “Enough already!” I’ll just go to [Marvel publisher] Stan Lee and knock on his office door to get his take on this… Stan was mostly in the background in those days, busy working in merchandising and marketing and licensing, those areas. So you hardly ever saw him. But as far as I knew at that time, Stan still had the last word about anything at Marvel. So it was a real short meeting and it went like this:
“Can I speak to you for a moment, Stan?” He could tell that I was obviously upset about something. “C’mon in. Of course. What seems to be the problem?” I told him that I was forbidden to color my work, on my own book. I said; “I need special permission for that?” Well, it turned out that I didn’t. Stan just looked at me somewhat bewildered, and after a second or two he shook his head and with an expansive gesture he said to me: “Rich, there’s no problem! You can do whatever you want!” Okay. So that should have settled the matter, right? You would think so. But no, it didn’t. I did get to follow through and I did finish that color job. But I had gone “over the head” of the editor-in-chief. That was going too far. It was ludicrous. If Rich ever does “that” again — well, what were they going to do? Fire me? I had a contract to do that book. They couldn’t fire me. But things continued along those lines anyway.
Obviously, things couldn’t have continued “along those lines” for very much longer, since, as we’ve already noted, AT #36 turned out to be the final issue of Astonishing Tales, as well as of “Deathlok the Demolisher” as an ongoing feature. Still, there’s evidence of further behind-the-scenes strife within this issue itself — evidence which, in the end, offers indications of what would have been a more serious adjustment to the nature and future direction of the series than the question of who was allowed to color it, had it continued. And we’ll get back to that topic before the end of this post; for now, however, let’s go ahead and move further into the story “Confessions of a Demolished Man!” itself, pausing just long enough to acknowledge that title’s debt to a classic 1953 science-fiction novel by Alfred Bester before picking things back up with page 2:
The “new” Luther Manning still has a computer voice speaking in his presumably all-human (if cloned) brain? Now, that was a surprise, back in April, 1976. I’d have loved to learn where Buckler was going with that twist; alas, none of us would ever get the chance.
This is probably as good a place as any to say that, while I miss the dark and gritty texture that Klaus Janson brought to Buckler’s pencils, as well as regret the loss of visual continuity with the issues immediately preceding this one, I still think that Keith Pollard has done a perfectly fine job on the inks for this final outing of Deathlok in Astonishing Tales.
Deathlok immediately goes charging to the rescue of his other self, with armed security agents following not far behind…
Luther and Deathlok may not be able to account for the “familiar demeanor” of this giant glowing creature — but those of us who read last issue know that this “Doomsday-Mech” has been created by Simon Ryker’s equally evil (and possibly smarter) brother Harlan, aka Hellinger,
With the page above, the story sets aside the POV of “Luther Manning” for that of Deathlok, as Buckler initiates what’s framed here not as simply a second chapter of this issue’s main narrative, but rather as a different story altogether, to the extent of giving it not only its own title and splash panel, but also its own credits (which, for the record, are completely identical to the credits for the issue’s first half) — and even a subtitle. “The Deathlok Transcripts”, which suggests that this could be the first installment of an ongoing backup feature.
I’m not all that familiar with New York’s subway system, but I assume that the photo Buckler has incorporated into the above panel is a more-or-less authentic representation (circa 1976) of the real-life 23rd Street Station.
“Godwulf” appears to be a legitimate name from Old High German that means, um, “God’s wolf”. As best as I can tell, it has no traditional association with sabotage, so I think we’ll have to assume that this “Godwulf Principle” business is just an entrepreneurial bit of branding on the part of “Underwear Dude”.
Buckler-the-scripter has made an interesting choice here, allowing the last five panels of the page to run in complete silence, without so much as a sound-effect to mark Deathlok’s sudden… disintegration? Displacement? That’s a question that will be answered some months in the future… though not in the pages of Astonishing Tales, of course.
And on that exceedingly inconclusive note — and entirely irrespective of that bottom-of-the-page “Next” blurb — Astonishing Tales ends its 36-issue run.
I’m sure many of you may now be wondering, “Where was Buckler going with all this? Why split Deathlok and Luther Manning into two people? What was the point of the ‘exact medical replica’? And assuming that Deathlok’s not really dead, where did Godwulf send him?”
Only the last of those questions would receive a definitive answer on Buckler’s watch (which, contrary to current appearances, wasn’t quite over yet — but more about that in a moment). We can only speculate about the others — although comments the auteur made in another, earlier interview with Michael Aushenker (this one published in Back Issue #25 [Nov., 2007]) give us some strong clues. Once again, the trail leads back to the conflicts Buckler was having with Marvel’s editorial staff…
We came to the point where I had to bring him into the Marvel Universe so we split him into two characters. So one existed in the future, one existed in the present. They co-existed. In other words, it was a solution that wasn’t a solution. It worked. It was a little bit of a cheat.
As we readers of the time would learn in approximately nine months’ time, the Deathlok we’d seen disappear from Godwulf’s lair has been sent back in time to the late ’70s — which would appear to account for the “present” version. As for the “future” iteration, it seems safe to assume that the human Luther Manning had some rough times ahead of him — and that that handy “exact medical replica” of his cyborg alter ego would figure into them somehow. But as to how this would work going forward, with two different Deathloks operating in two different time periods, we can only guess. And it’s quite possible that Rich Buckler himself never got that far in his planning, as he evidently decided to bail out of the whole project even as he was setting up the future direction demanded by Marvel. As he told Aushenker earlier in the same Back Issue interview:
It just seemed that I was getting a lot of interference. I got frustrated, I didn’t want to deal with it, it was becoming a headache, so I just left [the series]. Probably mid-story…
Asked if Marvel simply didn’t want to continue “Deathlok” once he’d left, Buckler replied:
Well, the problem is, see, I’m the only one who knew what the character was, except maybe… Doug Moench… but nobody called me, nobody called Doug.
One has to imagine that, if sales of Astonishing Tales had been strong, that Marvel would have at least attempted to continue the series without Buckler’s involvement. But who knows? The decision to pull the plug on the title seems to have been made very abruptly — so abruptly, in fact, that Marvel opted not to publish issue #37 despite it having already been completed, or at least very nearly so — as is evidenced by the production stat reproduced below:
That cover image — and the story it promoted — would eventually appear in the form of Marvel Spotlight #33 (Apr., 1977). Never fear, we’ll be covering that one when its own fiftieth anniversary rolls around — so be sure and check back come January, 2027 to find out how the heck Deathlok got mixed up with a carbon-copy of Rich Buckler’s defunct Atlas/Seaboard character Demon-Hunter, as well as for some final thoughts from your humble blogger regarding the “Deathlok the Demolisher” series as a whole.
Alan, that colourist credit is ‘The Swash’ (presumably as in ‘Swash’ Buckler), not ‘The Smash’.
Arrgghh! Of course it is. Would you believe that, when I was proofing the post one last time before sending, I had the thought, “Gee, ‘Swash’ would have worked so much better!”? Anyway, I’ve fixed it. Thanks for the catch, chris!
Nice review of one of my still prized possessions. I remember being very disappointed that we never got a #37 and I only recently read Marvel Spotlight #33. I always think of it as sad that Rich Buckler never got to take it further. Deathlok and Killraven were two of my favourite titles in the mid-70s and both died a death not too far apart from each other. They both were too far ahead of their time for the audience of the mid 1970’s. What might have been!
Bringing everything into the MU seems to have been a thing in that era, as it ensnared both this book and Eternals.
Amazing cover. Book seems awfully talky.
Deathlok is the comic book equivalent of a slow-cooker stew that was prepared without all of the key ingredients and served about an hour before it was ready.
Although clearly an intriguing concept and dynamic visual, Deathlok’s series struggled from the get-go with uncertain storylines, deadlines problems and a bi-monthly schedule that worked against a complex series that required reader attention.
I’d like to imagine how Deathlok would have worked as a limited series with time allotted for Rich Buckler to meet deadlines and have continuity with writers and inkers (as he did with Mantlo and Jansen) as well as editorial input that smoothed over the rough spots but allowed the concept to flourish.
Unfortunately, that’s a fantasy with the chaos of the late 70’s Marvel. As John noted previously, a number of off-beat Marvel series met their end around this time, including Warlock as well as Killraven.
Thanks for fun start to a busy Hump Day, Alan!
As much as I loved Deathlok in the beginning, I think the dew had fallen off the rose by this point and I’d stopped reading by the time things came to an end. Had no idea of the backstage shenanigans until now. My question about the backstage stuff, however, is this: If Buckler really had a contract that guaranteed him full editorial control over the character and Marvel (Wolfman) didn’t want to honor that contract, couldn’t/shouldn’t Buckler have sued Marvel to get his due? I’m sure if he had, Marvel would have just cancelled the book anyway, but it just seems weird to me that Buckler would go to all the trouble to give himself a legal standing in the matter and not take advantage of it when that standing was threatened. If anyone has any answers, I’d appreciate it.
“Swash” being short for “swashbuckler” is funny.
As for the creative stuff, Buckler’s art is still solid and Pollard’s inks are good, even though they don’t live up to the high bar Janson set during his run. As someone else mentioned above, the book is very “talky,” which probably has to do with the computer voice that has to comment on everything. With POV’s from Deathlok, Manning, the ‘puter and the omnipotent narrator, there were always too many cooks in Deathlok’s narrative head. I realize Buckler was trying to do a grown-up book for a grown-up audience, but all the text boxes almost left him without room for the art.
I enjoyed this book in the beginning. Did I miss it once it was gone? Not really. Buckler seemed to be letting his reach exceed his grasp with Deathlok. Either Buckler wan’t really a good enough writer to create and sustain a cohensive story for this book, OR Marvel’s interminable deadline and managerial mishigas kept Rich going at such a breakneck pace, he couldn’t keep all of his balls in the air. All in all, this book was probably a little ahead of it’s time, which is appropriate for a book set in the future. Thanks, Alan!
Buckler having some theoretical right to sue Marvel for breach of contract doesn’t mean that an individual could outlast a corporation in a war of attrition, as seen when Steve Gerber did in fact sue Marvel and got ground down in the process. Further, one would imagine that any writer or artist of this era who sued Marvel or DC and won would have been blackballed from the industry pretty quickly.
It’s also possible that whatever agreement he thought he’d secured had loopholes or language that undercut his position. Only he decided that was too embarrassing to mention.
That cover by Rich Buckler is definitely amazing, one of his all-time best, in my estimation. That splash page with the Statue of Liberty is also really nice.
I’ve always considered Keith Pollard to be one of those good, solid, underrated artists who made up the backbone of the mainstream comic book industry in the 1970s and 80s. His inks here over Buckler are definitely solid.
Fortunately for me, I read the original Deathlok stories in 2009 when they were collected in the Marvel Masterworks hardcover, so I did not have to endure all of the publishing delays of this run, or need to wait nearly a year for Marvel Spotlight #33 to come out to find out what happened next. But I imagine it must have been a frustrating experience for readers at the time in the mid-1970s.
It is a bit unfortunate that the Deathlok feature was cancelled here. As bumpy a road as it had been, I feel that at least Bucker was attempting to do something new & different, instead of just rehashing the various characters & concepts that Lee, Kirby & Ditko had created in the previous decade, which I feel is what happened on a number of Marvel’s flagship titles during the 1970s.
I’m a big Keith Pollard fan from his run on Fantastic Four from around the time I was ten or twelve years old. I agree that he’s a good, solid, underrated artist.
I’d counter that was most interesting about early- to mid-‘70s Marvel was precisely the lack of adult supervision, before Jim Shooter was hired to make the trains run on time, that allowed idiosyncratic creators to do something new and different beyond rehashing Lee, Kirby, and Ditko, as witnessed by Conan, Man-Thing, Dracula, Werewolf by Night, Ghost Rider, Killraven, Deathlok, Warlock, Howard the Duck, Shang-Chi, etc. and probably other titles I’m forgetting, even short-lived books such as Night Nurse and The Cat. Warlock was a Lee/Kirby creation, but Starlin took him in whole new directions. A lot people resented Shooter for imposing order on the chaos he inherited, and the chaos probably couldn’t have lasted forever, but it sure produced some interesting books while it lasted. Flawed/failed experiments such as Deathlok can be just as interesting, albeit in different ways, as a sleek machine such as the Claremont/Byrne/Austin X-Men.
To say that this period of time at Marvel 50 years ago was chaotic is an understatement, to put it mildly. Unfortunately for Rich Buckler and Deathlok, this was just the time when the Marvel editorship changed hands again. Gerry Conway became editor for about 4-6 weeks then left and Archie Goodwin became editor-in-chief. Apparently Gerry (according to interviews) was scrutinizing what were the lowest selling books for cancellation: Astonishing Tales, Amazing Adventures, Jungle Action and Warlock. There were others: Marvel Chillers, Skull the Slayer and eventually Ka-Zar and Son of Satan. It’s not clear how involved Archie was in the decision making, but from what I’ve read Conway earmarked a number of these books for cancellation. It does appear that the cancellation of Astonishing Tales was Conway’s decision but why so abruptly? I really don’t know. I haven’t seen any information about that. Certain other series like Jungle Action and Warlock were cancelled abruptly. As I understand, Amazing Adventures was at least given the opportunity to have a farewell letter page and not end in the middle of a story.
From what I’ve read, the cancellation decision from an editorial perspective was simply that Astonishing Tales, Amazing Adventures and Jungle Action were the lowest selling Marvel series and had to go. Also Marvel was going to raise the price of their books from 25 cents to 30 cents, and were also planning to come out with some new series (Nova, Ms. Marvel, 2001, Logan’s Run) later in the year. In addition in the summer of 1976 the Invaders and Howard the Duck would go monthly.
So this was a very strange and confusing time at Marvel and Deathlok was definitely not a high priority for Marvel. In fact, it is amazing in retrospect that Marvel actually later published the issue that was supposed to be Astonishing Tales 37.
I never read this issue of Astonishing Tales (36) but I did find your review very interesting Alan. I thought the art was fine and Pollard did a very good job as inker/embellisher. The problem as I see it is the story. What a mess! It was incredibly confusing and if anybody picked this issue up without any back story it would be impossible to follow. Buckler was a very good artist but had not developed as a writer the way Starlin did. It’s too bad. And it looks like having a “contract” didn’t really mean anything here and I don’t believe it would have helped Buckler at all… he would have been removed or the series would have been cancelled. It appears this series would have benefited from a strong editorial hand. It doesn’t appear that Len or Marv were keeping an eye on this strip at all. It’s ironic..at this time DC could be accused of having editors who were too strong…but at this time at Marvel there does not seem to have been a lot of editorial guidance. Sometimes that resulted in a lot of freedom and wonderful work from writers like Englehart and Gerber…and then you have a situation like this. Too bad. Deathlok certainly had potential.
TwoMorrows’ Comic Book Implosion mentions in passing that Marvel axed just as many series as DC did in its implosions. Tough times all around.
I also heard at that time that Marvel was close to bankruptcy. What I find a bit ironic is that the more stringent editing moved to Marvel with Jim Shooter’s tenure while DC then adopted the more “laisse-fair” approach of the two companies – particularly with Conway, Wein and Wolfman working for them.
Star Wars no. 1 saved the day, though artist Howard Chaykin claims it “ruined his career” (it didn’t) because it was such a rush job with characters that did *not* look like their film counterparts.
Buckler’s Deathlok always looked interesting, but I only bought one issue, and that had Wrightson inks over Ed Hannigan pencils on a cover.
Maybe the cover has some Steranko influence (the concentric circle design behind the smaller Deathlok figure, for instance), but the ‘montage of scenes within a mostly-silhouetted larger figure’ is very much in the Neal Adams’ playbook as well. Without hunting for specific examples, I can recall him using it in most of the series he worked on in the sixties/early seventies.
I’m not entirely convinced about Buckler’s recollection of his situation at the time, either. Why would an unproven writer/freelance artist be given exceptional contractual control of a series which Marvel would still have owned lock, stock and barrel? Maybe someone somewhere made a verbal promise to the effect that he’d control his character (Roy Thomas, maybe?), but I’d be very surprised if it ever really amounted to more than that.
I think maybe those of us who remember this series fondly were perhaps too taken in by the very good first issue. The idea of a man trapped in a cyborg existence has worked well for everyone from Martin Caidin to Robocop at the very least, and this was a good take on the idea (at least in the beginning). The dystopian near-future background served it well, and we had a grim and gritty (‘for mature readers’) series before either of those expressions were in vogue.
For me, at least, the series went rapidly downhill after the first issue. As you’ve noted before, Alan, there were too many repetitions of very similar sequences, like Deathlok wading into a gang of thugs/gunmen or whatever. I also thought that right from the second issue’s introduction of the Kirbyesque Man-Wolf cyborg, Luther Manning lost his uniqueness as a weaponized killing machine. By the time this issue rolled around, it felt like every other character was in some way enhanced by mechanical, computerized or genetic means. Like everyone else here, the final nail was the lack of a clear direction. I don’t think Buckler or anyone else really had an idea what to do or where to go with the series.
A flawed, failed experiment for sure. Shame the potential was never realized.