Bazillions of people have written to ask if I've heard the announcement that Ava DuVernay, who directed the film A Wrinkle in Time, will helm a mega-budget feature based on Jack Kirby's The New Gods. Sure. They want to know if I'm excited about it. Yeah. I don't ever get too excited about this kind of thing but I'm sure glad they're doing it.

As seems to always happen when these kinds of thing are announced, there are already folks on the 'net proclaiming it a huge hit and others who are sure it's going to suck. Not one role has been cast. Not one frame of film has been shot. They may not even have started on a script. But the fate of the movie has been sealed for some, which I guess saves time. Me, I think I'll wait to decide how good it is until they actually make it. I may even be so non-intuitive about judging films that I'll need to wait until I see the trailer if not the entire movie.

But like I said, I'm glad they're making it — for two reasons. One is that I think it was a wonderful creation even if its abrupt termination as a comic book caused it to never reach its full potential. The other reason is more personal.

Just in case there's anyone reading this who doesn't know, I was privileged to be on the premises when the New Gods happened. My then-partner Steve Sherman and I had very little to do with the contents of these comics when we worked as Jack's assistants but we suffered along with him when DC Management, after first telling him the books were doing well, abruptly canceled them. One reason that was given was that the folks who handled DC licensing decreed that there would never be any interest whatsoever in those characters for toys or film adaptations or movies or television or anything of the sort.

Jack is no longer here and even if he was, he was too classy to point out how wrong they were. I, however, am here and I'm nowhere near as classy as he was.

The other reasons had to do with allegedly poor sales…but New Gods was selling better than a lot of comics they didn't ax, and DC at the time was a pretty dysfunctional company, launching new books and quickly canceling them, launching new books and quickly canceling them. Anyone remember Bat Lash? Or The Secret Six? Or Beware the Creeper or The Hawk and the Dove or Anthro or the Green Lantern/Green Arrow series by Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams or many, many others?

Some of those comics lasted six or seven issues, meaning that the decision to cancel came about the time they were getting final sales figures on issue #3. I never understood how they expected to find a new audience when they kept giving up right away on a new audience finding them. When Marvel launched Conan the Barbarian as a comic book — about the same time DC launched New Gods — Conan initially got the kind of sales figures that usually warranted termination at either company…but it stuck around, found an audience and flourished.

Back then, DC's distribution channels were atrophying and there was rampant fraud in the tallying of unsold copies versus sold ones. Also, around the time New Gods was just getting going, they moved to a new, larger size for all their comics, leaping from 32 pages for 15 cents to 48 for 25 cents. Not many industries can suddenly raise prices — what is that, like 62%? — without losing customers. It was especially bad for comic books because young readers have limited funds, and Marvel was at 20 cents.

Sales plunged on every single DC title and only when they abandoned the idea did some books rebuild their audience. Jack's rebuilt slower and I honestly believe he paid a price for being viewed as a guy who could create whole new books in an instant. DC was losing a few bucks — and really, only a few — on his titles when someone got the idea of "suspending" them (that was the term used at the time) and seeing if he could come up with something else that would suddenly change the whole dynamic of the marketplace.

In hindsight, that looks more and more like it was a bad idea. New Gods and its allied titles have had great value to DC over the years. I don't know how many times they've reprinted that material. I should because I'm called on to write forewords for most of the new repackagings…but the characters have since been seen in revival series and on toy shelves and TV and, inevitably now, movies.

I'll bet — heck, I know because some there have told me — the current management wishes Jack had done a few dozen more issues of Orion, Lightray, Darkseid, Mister Miracle, The Forever People and all the rest. He was adding new characters and concepts to the book at a breakneck pace. Who knows what new wonders would have appeared?

I have very little skin in this reckoning. No one blamed his assistants when the books were terminated and labeled as failures. But I loved Jack and I love his work. (Full Disclosure: I wasn't as unreservedly wild about his Fourth World series at the time because it didn't read like what everyone else was doing…but the more and more I re-read it, the more I love it and that's in large part because it doesn't read like what everyone else was doing.)

There's an unfortunate tendency in the creative arts that when a film or a book or a TV show succeeds, everyone involved is a hero, everyone involved claims a large chunk of that success. The producers, the publishers, the marketing people, the publicists, the wholesalers, the retailers, the assistants, the assistants' assistants…every one of them did their job well…

But when something fails, there's usually only one reason: The creative people screwed up.

The director made a bomb. The writer did a lousy script. That's where the blame always falls, even if that director wasn't allowed to make the film he or she wanted or the writer had her or his work trampled and rewritten. Kirby took a lot of abuse for the New Gods being branded a flop when it first came out. Everyone kind of forgot that Marvel's three biggest successes — Spider-Man, the Hulk and the X-Men — were all considered failures on first publication. The Hulk lost his comic after six issues and Spider-Man went away after one.

It makes you wonder how many comics that didn't get a second chance could have been just as big.

Speaking now as maybe the only person posting to the Internet who isn't sure how successful the New Gods movie will be, I'm glad they're doing one. I'm also pleased that most of the announcements are reminding people that Jack was not only the co-creator of most of the Marvel heroes who are now doing so well on the screen, but that he was not merely a guy who drew someone else's ideas and stories for them.

And maybe this will make more people realize that when something gets canceled — a movie, a TV series, a comic book, whatever — the blame might lie with the folks who created it but it might also lie with those who canceled it. Or those who were supposed to market it better than they did.

I'm going to wrap this up even though I'm having enormous fun writing it. Since I started on it yesterday, I've gotten a couple of e-mails asking me what I think Jack would have thought of the news that New Gods was about to become a movie with a budget of something like a hundred million bucks. That's a real easy question. people. He would have smiled and asked, "What took them so long?" But he wouldn't have gloated. Like I said, he was a lot classier than I am. Probably a lot classier than you, too.