The King of Spain - Tom Brevoort

The King of Spain. That's what Jeph Loeb called Carlos Pacheco, who left us this week, with whom I worked on and off for more than twenty years. And in some ways, Carlos's departure hits home more than some of the other losses we've experienced this year, as he was closer to my age and closer to being of my generation. One of the things that bonded us was the fact that we both read the same comics when we were young, with Carlos coming along a few years later, as the stories were later reprinted in Spain. So we shared a common language, even if it wasn't his actual language. Although I know a little Spanish, that was really my assistant editor Gregg Schigiel's specialty, and one of the secrets of why we got along so well with Carlos from the start: Gregg could converse with him in his native language. Not that it was necessary: ​​Carlos was fluent in English. But I think speaking Spanish came more naturally to him, put him more at ease. It didn't require the same effort and concentration. Gregg and I sometimes had fun imitating Carlos’s distinctive diction (“Ex-ac-a-ta-lee, Tahm! It’s very good, BOT—!”). I could have killed Loeb the day, while talking to me, when Carlos remarked that Loeb had told him I did the best Pacheco impression in the business. But Carlos was very gracious while I goofed off for him. I ended up working with him in our editorial office after he expressed a desire to work with Kurt Busiek on a project—a project that became AVENGERS FOREVER . It was actually meant to be another project entirely, a never-realized concept called AVENGERS: WORLD IN CHAINS , which Carlos and Kurt spent a lot of time ideating and creating characters for. At the last minute, it turned out that a series with a similar premise was actually going to be launched the month before WORLD , even though everyone involved knew about it in advance. It was a lot of frantic work pivoting into a completely different approach, based on a story idea Kurt had planned to develop later in his run on AVENGERS , resulting in AVENGERS FOREVER . That series took 15 months to publish, a fact no one has considered one iota since it was completed and reissued again and again in beautiful book collections.

Carlos’s work was a wonderful synthesis of diverse influences—in particular, it was easy to see Neal Adams and John Byrne in his work, the way he positioned and distorted figures in space, and the dynamics he brought to the storytelling. After FOREVER , he was offered the opportunity to write and draw FANTASTIC FOUR , and he asked me to edit it, which was nice, but it set off a little drama within the editorial office, as FF was being edited at the time by Bobbie Chase, who was very close to Bob Harras, the editor in chief. It was at this point that I told Bob that I didn’t need to edit FANTASTIC FOUR at that point, but if it ever changed editorial offices and didn’t end up in mine, I’d start breaking people’s fingers. Carlos worked on FANTASTIC FOUR with his friend, screenwriter Rafael Marin, but a change in editorial supervision and a feeling that the script, written in a language that wasn’t either of their own, came off as somewhat clumsy. So Jeph Loeb was brought in to write the series. Everyone did the best job they could, but it ended up being a somewhat disappointing run for everyone. The hope, I think, was that eventually Jeph would start writing the series and Carlos would go back to just drawing it. That wasn't the case, as Carlos wanted to be more than just a penciler. I ended up working on the last few issues of that run, after everyone involved decided to move on.

Carlos continued to do a lot of work at other companies. Arrowsmith (again with Kurt), JLA/JSA , and Green Lantern at DC with Geoff Johns, among others. But his path would eventually lead him back to Marvel, where we would work together on projects like Age of Ultron (along with Brian Michael Bendis, Bryan Hitch, and Brandon Peterson) and Captain America (with Rick Remender), where Carlos designed the suit worn by both Sam Wilson and Anthony Mackie when they took up the hero mantle. More recently, Carlos was working on the RECKONING WAR launch special, which spun out of Fantastic Four , but had to step away from the project midway through. He was having difficulties with his leg and back, making it difficult for him to be at the drawing board for long. There were a few misdiagnoses and some less-than-helpful operations before it became clear that what Carlos was suffering from was ALS, or “Lou Gehrig’s Disease.” At least outwardly, Carlos maintained a positive attitude, confident that he and his doctors would find a way to overcome this setback and return him to the drawing board full-time. He continued to work on whatever he could, usually covers. His final comics cover was produced for me, for DAMAGE CONTROL #2 . It's an excellent, fun piece, but if I'd known it was going to be his last, I would have tried to create something a little more special. But neither he nor I did. Carlos kept quiet about the extent of what he was facing until the very end, when there was no way around it, so most people at Marvel, including me, were shocked to learn he was on his deathbed just a day or two before he passed away. His last act was to donate his organs so other people could benefit from them.

As an editor, I'm used to keeping most of the people I work with at arm's length. It's a coping mechanism, because you never know when you'll be asked to deliver bad career news. But this time hit me more than others. As I mentioned at the outset, Carlos and I were often on the same page when it came to Marvel books. For years, I had what I thought was a great idea for Sue Storm in Fantastic Four . I pitched it to different writers over the years while I was editing the series—Mark Waid, JMS, Dwayne McDuffie, etc. We never managed to find a home for it. Then, sometime later, I looked at FANTASTIC FOUR #47 , which was the first issue of the series I sent to press as editor (although Bobbie Chase had done much of the editorial work on it). And damn, there was that idea in the middle of the issue. I remembered it distinctly from that issue, and somehow convinced myself that I had created it. The same thing happened when I organized the MARVELS COMICS event in 2000, which published the so-called Marvel comics that were produced within the Marvel Universe. The Fantastic Four comic was presented as a licensed publication, with fan pages like a teen magazine, and Carlos contributed a bit to that. But Gregg later reminded me that at some point earlier, Carlos had told us about the idea of ​​doing an issue of FANTASTIC FOUR that way. So clearly, he was stealing ideas from Pacheco, consciously or not.

On the flip side, I once bought Carlos a copy of NOT BRAND ECHH #1 after learning he'd never read it, having no familiarity with it since it was never reprinted in Spain. This would have been before he and the FF team did the story from which the above panel is taken, which is perhaps the most accurate depiction of me in comics, based on the style of those NBE stories.

Goodbye, Charles. Lower the flag, the Monarchy is over. May the King of Spain rest in peace.

Tom Brevoort
November 13, 2022
https://tombrevoort.substack.com/p/33-the-king-of-spain