A couple years ago there was this new thing called Quibi where they had a bunch of high profile names like Kevin Hart, Anna Kendrick, Christoph Waltz, Kiefer Sutherland, etc who made these shows where the episodes were only 10 minutes apiece and you were supposed to watch them on your phone or tablet, not a TV. There were a lot of commercials and a big rollout...that failed. The company went under and like a year later all that stuff got bought up by Roku and added to the Roku Channel, which is free for Roku users.
Anyway, Slugfest is a documentary from Quibi about Marvel and DC Comics. There are 10 10-minute episodes so you can watch the whole thing in under 2 hours. There are plenty of documentaries on comics already, but some of the episodes in this focus on smaller events.
The first one talks about the creation of Captain America and how pissed off the Nazi Bund in New York got about it. Writer Joe Simon and artist Jack Kirby received death threats, but the character's growing popularity finally had the mayor promise to station police outside their office.
Then there was the first "crossover" of Marvel and DC that happened in the late 60s thanks to a guy in Rutland, Vermont (known to MST3K and Rifftrax fans as the home of Edgewood Studios) who threw elaborate superhero costume parties. Three comic book writers went to one of these parties and worked it into stories for two Marvel and one DC comic. They didn't use the actual characters or anything, just kind of off-brand versions of them like "Nighthawk" instead of Batman.
In another story, in the 70s Stan Lee was nervous about an issue of Dr. Strange where a guy goes back in time to the beginning of the universe and sees God. One of the writers (probably while high) wrote a fake fan letter from a fake reverend and mailed it from Dallas, TX. The letter fooled Lee into thinking that religious people were cool with the issue.
Another one was about the first real crossover of Marvel and DC where Superman and Spider-Man were to fight. It took negotiating on the level of the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt to get anything put together. It illustrates why these "vs" comics are usually bullshit because they aren't really made to be realistic. In this case neither company wanted their guy to look bad so all these rules had to be made.
Another story talked about the breakup of the legendary duo Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. They had worked together pretty much since the beginning of comics from when Marvel was Timely Comics. But they had different personalities with Lee being a lot more of the showman while Kirby was more reserved. With the success of Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, etc Lee was getting a lot more credit in the press and so in the early 70s when Kirby got a huge offer from DC, he took it. In the pages of Mister Miracle, he created a manager who was a parody of Stan Lee named "Funky Flashman." Lee did not really like that, though I don't think they ever really had it out and probably had buried the hatchet years later. This episode probably would have been better if both men weren't already dead so they could only interview other people like assistants and relatives and such.
Another interesting story was how in the late 70s DC hired a woman to help revive their struggling comics. She had the idea to introduce a whole bunch of new titles and so a bunch of writers and artists were hired. And then there was a big snowstorm that really messed up sales, which back then were entirely in paper and mostly at newsstands and the like. So a few months later they had to cancel most of this new stuff and lay off most of the artists and writers hired. Some of the writers and artists copied their material and put it all into an omnibus called the "Cancelled Comic Cavalcade" that there are a few copies of today, like in DC's archives. (Ironically, DC made sort of the same mistake in 2011 with the New 52, introducing a bunch of new titles that within 2 years had pretty much all been replaced by Batman or Superman titles.)
There were some more high-profile things like the infamous contest to phone in and decide whether Robin (Jason Todd) would die or not. This story was better in a History Channel documentary I watched in 2003 because they could still talk to Dennis O'Neil, the Batman editor of the time, who passed away by the time this documentary was made. They could at least talk to writer Jim Starlin about it. If you don't know, Robin received the death sentence by less than 50 votes. And of course Jason Todd didn't stay dead but returned about 15 years later as the "Red Hood" who is sometimes a bad guy and sometimes a good guy.
There was also one about the Death of Superman and another about the Clone Saga in Spider-Man. The Clone Saga was just supposed to be a few issues but as the sales rose, they had to keep going. Then everyone bitched that it sucked because the writers had to keep throwing in stuff to keep the story going for almost two years. The Death of Superman is a pretty well known story: the comics were going to marry Lois and Clark but then the Lois and Clark TV show came along and they needed to do something in the comics to replace the wedding. Writer Jerry Ordway suggested they just kill the Man of Steel and so that's what they did, though they always knew they were going to bring him back later. A lot of people bought issues of Superman's death thinking they would be worth something...but they weren't because there were so many copies.
The last one focuses on Stan Lee's "Just Imagine" comics where, after being released from bankrupt Marvel Comics, Lee was asked to write new origins for DC's iconic characters. And then it talks about Lee's death not much before this came out.
The segments feature some reenactments starring comic book movie/TV actors like Brandon Routh, Clark Gregg, Ron Perlman, Tim Blake Nelson, and Patrick Warburton. And it's narrated by ubergeek Kevin Smith. For some reason they interview people from the Netflix Marvel shows: Vincent D'Onofrio, Krysten Ritter, the lady who played Karen Page, and the lady who played Misty Knight. I don't know why since none of them are really experts on comics or the comic book industry, but whatever.
Since these are only 10 minute episodes, it can't really give as much detail as a full documentary on the subject, so the ones about smaller things are better served. I mean you could do hours about the Death of Superman or the Clone Saga in Spider-Man but most of those other ones I mentioned, 10 minutes is about enough time to cover it. Obviously there's a lot more they could have done; maybe they can make a Slugfest 2 someday. Though I would doubt it since Quibi went under.
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