See Part One here.

The third and fourth issues of Blackwulf came out in June and July 1994 and looked different than the first two. Angel Medina drew the first 15 pages of the comic with the majority of the cast while the character Sparrow’s subplot became a seven-page back-up drawn by Mike Gustovich. For Blackwulf #5, Angel and regular inker Bill Anderson were absent and replaced by penciler Keith Pollard and inker Sandu Florea who had also filled in on Thunderstrike #7.

Chris De Fellippo (Blackwulf intern & colorist): Yeah, because it fell behind schedule because Angel, not to be mean, Angel was super detailed and he was super slow. 

Ralph Macchio (Blackwulf creator/editor; Avengers, Thunderstrike, Daredevil editor): Angel was putting so much work into it. We did a couple of the back-up stories. Which we tried to relate to the initial story. And then we had the one Keith Pollard issue but I’m very happy that Angel was able to stay with us to the end even though we had to truncate some of the issues because of the deadline thing. Because again, if you look at what Angel was putting into every panel, knocking himself out.

Glenn Herdling (Blackwulf writer): They were actually very seamless. I was like when Ralph said, I need something here, but we want to make sure that it’s not something critical, because we want to know Angel will do the critical issues. I said no problem. I have a back-up story that we can easily push in here.

Chris De Fellippo: Angel’s way behind. They decide what issues they skip and put Angel on this one. The hope was they put Angel here and he could get ahead and then we got track again.

Glenn Herdling: I had very little input on the fill-in artist, but I’m sure Ralph ran his decision by me to make sure I wasn’t disappointed. I wasn’t. As an editor, I understood the need for fill-in artists and how difficult good ones were to come by, especially at that time during the comics glut.

Ralph Macchio: I always felt that my best talent as an editor, such as it is, would be to try to bring out the best in the creators. I always try to encourage them. I always felt that that was the prime job of the editor.

Gregory Wright (Daredevil writer): I came out of [Marvel Comics imprint] Epic Comics where Archie Goodwin taught us to be good to people and they will be good back to you. He was always right. The same with Gruenwald. He was editing Solo Avengers, he wanted to give new people a shot. This is how I got my first story. I had to rewrite it about 20 times, but it was worth it… but part of that was trying to teach me to understand what it was like on the creator side of things. What it was like for the writers on the other end, because you don’t want to be demanding changes that aren’t necessary. They’re the writer in charge of the story, based on what you wanted. But it’s not productive to sit there and just pick at it demanding changes until it’s dead. There were editors who would take the heart of the story out because it was some personal thing they didn’t like and you just think, “This is not an editor I want to work with again.” But luckily, I had a very good relationship with most editors I worked with as a writer thankfully. Especially Ralph Macchio.

Ralph Macchio: I just felt that you try to unleash these guys, you know? You remember the way [Jack] Kirby and [Steve] Ditko worked on Thor and [Amazing] Spider-Man and Fantastic Four, right? You could just see the evolution of them. They began to open up and they began to just explore the medium. And that’s what I would try to infuse into every artist and writer that I worked with that. That to me was my mission as an editor, to always bring out the best of them. And for me as an editor to always be in the background. Or say, “This is the storyline I want you to do.” That’s to me, not my job. My job is to be a backstop to make sure the book comes in on time, to make sure that the character is in character and all that other good stuff. But to encourage creators to be the best they can, to work with one another and to mesh. And I actually have been very lucky. It was a pleasure for me to see them really develop along those lines and I hope I had a little bit to do with it then.

The creative team hit another snag as their announced plan to include a mutant-hunting Sentinel robot from the X-Men in Blackwulf #4 instead became a Sentry robot from the Kree aliens.

Glenn Herdling: The last minute we had to change it because, I think [Avengers writer and X-Men editor] Bob Harras had said, “No, you can’t use this Sentinel” or something. Because I thought it would be great if someone stole a Sentinel and reprogrammed it for their own whatever, but at the last minute we had to change it so we changed. “Alright, we’ll make it a Kree Sentry.” And it did actually work out better. It was one of those things, sometimes where your hand is forced to do something then you’re like “wow” and it opens up all these other possibilities. That’s what’s great about the craft of writing, when you got to work, especially working within a universe. We called it Stan’s Sandbox, right? We know Stan and Jack created the sandbox and we all get to play in it. So there are certain rules in that sandbox you have to do and so this is the rule and I was like, “Alright, I couldn’t use the Sentinel.”

Gregory Wright: The Spider-Man office was very notorious for saying “No you can’t use Spider-Man”, but part of that is you don’t want Spider-Man showing up in every single comic and you don’t want people using your characters incorrectly. The X-Men office didn’t really like you touching those characters either. They didn’t want you adding anything to their continuity. But during my Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD run people would use Baron Strucker and Hydra completely wrong. Dan [Chichester] had revamped them, gave them new outfits and new purpose… but they’d show up in other comics and suddenly there they are in the green outfits… and they’re not in the green outfits anymore. And Baron Strucker isn’t acting anything like he does in the Fury comic. That was very frustrating because the editor wasn’t stopping it. That was part of your job when I was an editor. Anyone who used characters from your books were supposed to come to you to either get your approval or not. And I did have times when I wasn’t allowed to use this character or that character, or the editor didn’t like something that I was trying to do. And that’s the way it is. And that was okay. It’s much easier to create your own characters to use in the books you write. I got this from Howard Mackie. When Howard started Ghost Rider, he started immediately creating a bunch of his own characters. He said he wanted to have his own rogues gallery so that nobody could tell him what to do with them. And I thought, “That’s really smart.” So I started doing that on all of my books. I just tried to create as many characters as I could. And you don’t know if you’re gonna create one that readers will like. Sometimes you create a bunch of losers, but now they’re your losers so you could do what you want with them. You hope somebody else will use them. DJ (Dan) Chichester used to use my characters all the time and I would utilize his characters so they got a little more use. Plus we used each other’s characters correctly.

Glenn Herdling: I said it’s a Sandbox and there are certain toys in the Sandbox you can play with and certain ones you want to play with and certain ones you don’t want to play with and certain restrictions you got to do. But you’re gonna also create your own sand castles and your own little things using the toys and working within those, some people say it’s too restraining to me it’s liberating.

Ralph Macchio: It was to see that the characters remain true to themselves that you as the editor were the first line of defense. Say a writer came in and he just decided he wanted to kill somebody because it was going to make a great opening shot or something. As the editor,. I’m the line of defense saying, “No, I don’t buy that,” so you stop it. But it was also just as important to see that a creator could get his vision to the page, that you were there to facilitate that as long as it stayed within the parameters of that character’s world and that character’s personality and all that. You pushing as far as you can. That was also true with the artist, I always encourage them to go out of their way to try different things to look at the material in a different light. And to say, “Hey, let’s pretend this is the first time you see Galactus, not that we’ve seen in a million comics, but we’ve never seen this character before, draw it that way.” 

Tom DeFalco (Editor-in-Chief; Thunderstrike writer): To me, it’s all about character. If you have an old character then you say, “It’ll be fun to play with this character. Let’s figure out what the essence of this character is and what this character really means and what he really wants and what’s keeping him from what he wants.” And when you’re creating a new character, you do the same thing. You go from scratch, you put it together. I love both. I mean it’s not like I only want to create new characters and I only want to deal with old characters. I am not a continuity guy. There are certain guys that would say they read an old story that bothered them and then they come up with a story that straightens out the continuity from ages ago. I never bothered with that stuff. My goal is always to move forward, forget about the past and move forward, right? Not that you ignore the past. I believe very strongly in consistency. Spider-Man’s powers work a certain way. Spider-Man’s personality works a certain way. He talks a certain way. That’s consistency, that’s not continuity. When he meets Doctor Octopus, we don’t have to mention every other appearance of Doctor Octopus. “When I saw you in issue 47 and did… you said this or blah blah.”

Cullen Bunn (Deadpool & the Mercs for Money writer): I have a thing where If I write a character. I wrote Uncanny X-Men and I wrote Magneto which were dream projects for me. I can’t read those books anymore. I can’t read them. And it’s not that I don’t like them either. I’m sure they’re great stories being told. I’m not gonna read them. It’s sort of like you’ve got an ex and you don’t want to see the next person treating them poorly but you also don’t want to see them treating them well either, you just don’t want to know. And that’s the way when it comes to creating characters and doing some new stuff. It’s kind of painful for me physically. I mean, I don’t think it’s mentally healthy necessarily for me. Because I’ve created characters who either are completely forgotten that I think were interesting and very cool characters and they’re just forgotten. Or I create characters that are just treated like crap either by editorial mandate or by the next writers trying to do something edgy or shocking or whatever and I don’t like that either, I don’t want to so I just don’t want to see it. So it’s tough when I come into a book and I say, “Do I create something? Am I creating the Blackwulf that’s going to be forgotten? It’s just never gonna be done again and then I’m done with it if I love it.” So let’s say I’m going in and I’d written Blackwulf and I loved it. 25 years ago or however long, it was miserable. I don’t know how I can handle it, not being able to tell more Blackwulf stories. So it frustrates me. The concept of creating these brand new characters because they don’t catch on fire. They’re probably gone forever. Or you won’t be writing, I won’t be writing them. Someone else will be writing them because that’s the mindset, that “Let’s change writers because a new writer is gonna sell more copies than the old writer no matter what” and it’s a terrible mindset, a dumb mindset. Publishing or readership, whoever came up with, whoever is facilitating that, it’s dumb. So it’s a little frustrating sometimes. I think sometimes, “Would Blackwulf have made it if it were an Image book? Would we still be reading? Would we be on issue 200 and something of Blackwulf if it were an Image title?” What a wonderful work, but then I would have had Blackwulf books for years to come. 

The same story that replaced a Sentinel with a Kree also featured two characters from the Avengers: founding Avenger Hank Pym and his evil android creation Ultron.

Glenn Herdling: When we used Ultron, we asked Bob, because Ralph was also the Avengers editor at the time, he had no problem giving approval of Ultron.

Harras had one request, that they set up Ultron’s next appearance in a miniseries for the Avenger Vision set in New Orleans

Glenn Herdling: We asked him what to do with Ultron and he said, “Just end it with ‘I feel like listening to jazz.’”

Snuck in among these high profile appearances were cameos by more obscure characters like Spider-Man’s former landlady Mrs. Muggins; robotics scientist Dr. Oliver Broadhurst; Carol Danvers and X-Men-affiliated spy Michael Rossi; and spy Rick Mason, The Agent.

More importantly, the book’s core cast continued to change. The heroic Wildwind died in #3 only to be resurrected in #6.

Ralph Macchio: Anybody who knows me from Marvel knows I hate to kill off characters. I don’t care if it’s Leapfrog or whoever. I love all of them. And so when it came time for Wildwind, I think I asked Glenn, I said, “Look, I understand the reason for doing it but can we find a way to bring her back in?” Glenn had the way to do it and I said, “Hey Glenny, you made it work in a very interesting way.”

Glenn Herdling: I had planned for Wildwind to be an android right from the start. I believe Ralph knew that, but I may have kept my plans to “kill” her from him till I actually wrote the issue. I wasn’t sure how long I wanted to play that out, but I’ve never been a writer who can play the long game. 

Ralph Macchio: That’s why even Tantalus at the end, the comic says, “No, he’s just transposed to a kind of another dimension” and all that stuff because I couldn’t bear seeing him permanently killed 

Issue #6 also introduced a new character Godstalker designed by Scott McDaniel, the artist on Daredevil also edited by Ralph.

Ralph Macchio: I had him on Daredevil, I was working with him and Dan Chichester, and if you were a Daredevil reader, you’ll notice that Scott’s art took an enormous leap when we started to do the “Fall From Grace” story. Scott was doing some good stuff there. [But Daredevil] was beginning to lose sales. And I had DD as right up there with Thor as my other favorite Marvel guy. I just loved Daredevil. Absolutely love. I think he’s just the perfect superhero. The vision, everything about Daredevil’s world, not very lucky, is just the most human of all the Marvel characters. I’ve had discussions with people who think Peter Parker and Spider-Man, I say, “No, I think Matt Murdock and Daredevil are the best.” I worked with Frank Miller as Denny O’Neill’s assistant, when he first came up to Marvel. I was through that whole phase of him on Daredevil and I worked with Frank on “Born Again” and Man Without Fear. And then afterwards, I was on Daredevil with Ann Nocenti and John Romita Jr. And that’s what he really became that John Romita Jr. that we know today; he became his own guy and I was very happy to see that. So as we were going along, once Ann and him had left the book, I had Greg Wright on and Dan Chichester. And their Daredevil book is beginning to lose some steam. You know what happens, you have years and years of good stuff and then it just kind of trails off. And Tom says, “We’re gonna have to make this book bi-monthly. And I hate to see Daredevil canceled on your watch.” I knew what he was telling me so I sat down with Scott and I sat down with Dan. I said, “We’ve gotta really kick this book. We’ve got to do some radical stuff right now.” And one of the things Dan wanted to do was, he said, “Can we bring Elektra back?” I said, “You know, I told Frank I wasn’t going to do it but we’re kind of in a quandary right now and we’ve got to throw every iron into the fire.” So that’s what we did. We did that. We did the “Fall from Grace.” And we also did “Tree of Knowledge” which is a series of Daredevil stories that are way ahead of their time. If you read it, there’s so much about AI, artificial intelligence in there. And all kinds of wild stuff that Dan was doing and Scott was equal to the task with the drawing. So Dan and I mapped out that whole “Fall From Grace” thing with Scott and Scott rose to the challenge by really just changing his artwork completely and doing some outrageous stuff. And I thought he would be a good designer for Godstalker.

Tom DeFalco: If it was a direct market only book, our cutoff was 40,000 [copies per issue] in those days. These days, you come out with a direct only book that’s selling 40,000, you’re leaping up and down. But in those days, “40,000? Well, then maybe we should rethink this.” And certain books, you’d look at and go, “This isn’t working now. So let’s retire it for a year or two and then come back to it and maybe with a fresh take on it.” And we do that to Ghost Rider as an example. And it’s not like we’re making these discussions in a vacuum. No. I had a Brain Trust. By then it was Gruenwald, Carl Potts and Bob Budiansky. The four of us would sit down and discuss these things. 

Tom DeFalco: And every month we got sales reports and we’re looking at the sales reports and basing a lot about what we were doing on the sales reports. What’s working? What isn’t working and why isn’t it working? Nothing was automatic. But like I said, we would look at it and study it. Every month, Gruenwald and I would look at the lower sellers, the titles that were on a downward projection and we would get a bunch of issues one or two before they started going down and then the ones where they were going down and then we would read them and then we’d get together and discuss it if we could figure out why is it on this downward progression? Did we switch artists? Did we switch writers? Did we switch tone? Did we switch to a boring storyline? Why is this thing going down the way it’s going down? A lot of times we could look at it and go, “Yeah, it’s kind of obvious. From this point on every splash panel starts with a close-up of somebody shouting at the reader. You can’t do that every month.”

Tom DeFalco: And a lot of times we could figure out what was going on. And then we’d have a discussion with the editor. Depending on how that went, sometimes we bring in the creative team or sometimes the editor would just handle the creative team. Every once in a while, the editor would say to me, “This writer is just not working.” And then I would say to the editor, “If you could choose any writer to write this book, who would you choose?” And then they would give me a name and I said, “Hey, guess what? You have the power to choose anyone, so do what you think you should do.” And then the following week, I get a headline in the Comic Buyers Guide that “DeFalco fired…” and I go to the editor, “Did I fire so-and-so?” “I told them you weren’t happy with…” “Thanks. When I fire somebody, tell me I fired them so I know.”

Capitalizing on the hot collectible market at the time, Marvel licensed their characters for multiple series of trading cards. Lucian would appear in three different sets: Marvel Universe V (1994) with art by Ron Frenz and Al Milgrom, Marvel Masterpieces series 3 (1994) with art by Greg and Tim Hildebrandt, and Marvel Flair (1995) whose uncredited art was either by Angela Medina or copied from his cover for Blackwulf #2.

Mike Sterling (comics retailer since 1988, Sterling Silver Comics): We had an entire corner of the store devoted just to trading card singles and sets, while we kept the individual packs available at the front counter by the register for those all-important impulse buys. Oh, for the days when we were selling full sealed boxes of Jim Lee’s X-Men cards just one after another!

Glenn Herdling: I was working with [Bob] Budiansky at the time he was doing the cards but I wasn’t on those particularly. But I worked for the Hildebrand Studio two years after I left Marvel. Jean Scrocco actually hired me away from Marvel to help them do all their Marvel stuff. She’s Greg Hildebrandt’s wife and manager and she hired me to write the Marvel Art of the Brothers Hildebrandt so I wrote the text to that and that had all their Marvel art and all their training cards and things like that. And she said, “Glenn, I can’t pay you a lot for this.” And I said, “I don’t need to pay me.” She’s, “What?” I said, “No. I want the original painting that Greg Hildebrandt did of Blackwulf.” That’s one of my prize possessions. I mean, Greg Hildebrandt painted something that I created. I need to own this.

Tom DeFalco: Trading cards, for a while there, was a great business. I still got a couple of complete sets that I probably can’t give away now. But as time went on, our licensing started to work. Then we had to do stupid things and start buying the trading card companies. Yeah, that was not wise but yet mergers and acquisition people that were terrible at their jobs… that’s a separate issue.

Issue #8 was promoted by saying that Daredevil would appear. 

Glenn Herdling: There was gonna be [a crossover] because that’s when you had the line editors. Since Ralph was editing Daredevil and he was editing Blackwulf, he was going to try some kind of crossover thing. But then when we got the notice that [Blackwulf] was gonna be canceled.

Chris De Fellippo: A year before, [it] would have kept going. But it was just the timing of corporate that killed the books. It’s all the same reason.

Glenn Herdling: The reason for cancellation was definitely sales. There was always a threshold, but sometimes that number was arbitrary.

Marvel had begun the process of buying other companies including other publishers, trading card companies and a comic book distributor. These decisions would have lasting impacts on the marketplace and the company’s future financial health. Tom DeFalco’s disagreements about these business decisions would lead to him leaving the company in late 1994. In his absence, Marvel installed five Editors in Chief with their own fiefdoms. Blackwulf and Ralph’s other Avengers books were now under Mark Gruenwald while Ralph would lose Daredevil to Bobbie Chase’s office.

Gregory Wright: Because it was all direct sales, you knew right away “this is how many copies were ordered from the direct market.” With newsstand, you really didn’t know, because they would overprint a ton of comics, ship them all out and you didn’t know how well they really sold on the newsstand until comics that didn’t sell on the newsstand were sent back. back. Because what would happen is if they didn’t sell, the newstand would send them back and get money back on them. With the direct market, if the retailer said, “I’m going to buy 20 cases of X-Men number one,” bought 20 cases that were not returnable. This was fine if they sold the 20 cases.If not…they were stuck with the product and out the money they paid for them. That’s how a lot of the comic stores went out of business because they weren’t business people. Marvel’s Direct Sales Manager and Vice President of New Product Development, Carol Kalish was no longer alive at that point to help teach them how to run their shops. She did this during the early days of the direct market. She showed them how to make their business work. So now they were buying… 50 cases of X-Men #1 and selling two of them. They’ve committed all that money to these comics that are now worth nothing. Later they were trying to order only what they were certain could sell. They would under order and miss out on something that could have made them money. Some were stuck with a tremendous amount of stock they couldn’t get rid of. For companies, the direct market was great.They knew from the order how many copies to print. They knew how much money a comic was going to make because of the numbers. Unless they go back for a second printing. 

Gregory Wright: When I was an editor, you knew what the sales on your books were and you were told that you needed to keep the sales at a certain level or it would be canceled. So that’s why the editor of Blackwulf, Ralph, was likely told, “The sales on Blackwulf are not great. You’re gonna need to do something to get it up.” And I’m sure he responded, “Okay, I’m gonna put some new guest stars in.” Hopefully that will help. I had to do that on SHIELD, I put a couple X-Force characters in there and it bumped the numbers up a bit, but not as much as they wanted. The editors didn’t have complete control over it and neither did the editor-in-chief, it was sales and marketing and the guys up in the big offices that made all the big bucks demanding this sort of thing so it was frustrating.

Chris De Fellippo: You gotta remember in our world, it ended with Tom DeFalco. He’s the boss. But there’s a level above that was making fucking dumb decisions. And it’s all this chaos upstairs and worried about Image and you had to have certain criteria for the book to move on or it got canceled. That’s what killed Blackwulf. It came out during the time when Marvel was in this weird transition phase thing and it killed that book.

Glenn Herdling: I think that was part of it again, it was an experimental title and Tom understood that and so Tom was willing to say, “Let’s see what we can do with this. Let’s see we can push it. Let’s see where we can go.” But then when Tom was gone, we no longer had that support from the higher ups and when I say to higher up, I don’t even mean the line and I mean, even higher up than that. There was, “We should just get rid of the books that do that well, and we should just focus on our core characters.”

Bill Wylie (Secret Defenders penciler): Yeah, they put the ax on a lot of books at the same time.

Ralph Macchio: Knowing that we had this limitation, from issue seven or eight, we knew we were going to have to end it. I think Glenn did a superb job of bringing it to conclusion. Kirby never got to Darkseid versus his son Orion in the fire pits, right? But we were able to get 10.

Tom DeFalco: We tried to give people notice. I wanted to be fair to the readers. When I look back on Blackwulf, I think it was just too complicated. And I think that we should have sat down on that a little bit more, pruned it a bit because it just, yeah, just too complicated.

Gregory Wright: If you’re lucky, you got a couple months warning. I had a year’s worth of SHIELD stories to tell that I had to tell in two months. That was annoying. I did finish Silver Sable up the way I meant to. Deathlok, I had enough warning… but, I wasn’t by any means finished, but I was able to put an ending to a story, I guess. Okay, the readers aren’t going to go “What the heck” at the end of it. It was aggravating to create and begin a six-issue series that the suits might cancel after three issues. We all put way too much thought and effort into figuring out a compelling story with a satisfying ending for the company to cancel it early and say, “Well, we’ll just figure it out.” I can’t cram six issues of story into three issues. You just can’t.

Glenn Herdling: We plan things out and I introduced things and some of the things I just said, “Let’s see if we’ll throw it at a wall, we’ll see if it sticks.” Sometimes you hear things and you’re like, “Did they really have a storyline in mind for this?” And I did actually have storylines in mind where they were fleshed out. Now, when I finally got to them would they’ve been completely different than what I was thinking at the time? Probably but I wanted to just kind of put little hints here in there and just kind of get people, it’s kind of like, the old Claremont X-Men, where he would just put a little hint here and then later on it would bear the fruit?

Tomorrow in part three: Compromises and climaxes to conclude a canceled comic. How to make a comic. How to make a late comic on a deadline. Blackwulf’s legacy.