Marvel Comics blabbery

http://comicsbeat.com/marvel-sold-original-art-in-1973/

where is the goddamn DCU ipad app?

I'll be surprised if they do an app soon. They just got around to making it non-flash.

I've been using it on the ipad through Safari and it's nice.

Do we really need a Deadly Hands of Kung Fu revival? It's only been 40 years since the last one...let's give it another 40 to really let the nostalgia build up.

Will it feature Shang-Chi? Still waiting on a reprint of Master of Kung Fu, which I think has always been scuppered by rights issue to do with the Sax Rohmer characters.

Love some of the Neal Adams covers on DHOKF

Apparently so.

http://www.newsarama.com/20285-shang-chi-strikes-in-marvel-s-new-deadly-hands-of-kung-fu-series.html

I liked Shang Chi as Moench wrote him, but Hickman making him a spaceship-piloting Avenger was a development so wrong-footed it's sort of put me off the entire company, except for Bendis' Miles Morales, Waid's Daredevil and Wilson's Ms. Marvel.

I just don't get the love for Hickman (in some quarters), everything I've read by him has been a dreary mess with no real feel for Marvel history/characters/style. But I'm totally Team Bendis when it comes to the Avengers - the best run on the title since Englehart.

Manhattan Projects is very good, can't really speak for his Marvel work besides a few FF comics which were pretty seemed fun.

xxp -- I forgot to mention Soule & Pulido's She-Hulk, which is 1001% fun, and beautiful to look at. Hawkeye has good moments but it's inconsistent.

mmm pretty seemed fun

I really like East of West. It's one of the few comics I'm reading month to month anymore.

lol 1985

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Br9h7WFCcAEo1fl.jpg

poor Groo :(

Groo back issues are hard to come by!

I dunno if I have any anymore but that was a great book.

sales must have turned around at some point cuz it had a pretty long run (120 issues?!). I have fond memories of the storylines with his dog, who was even stupider than he was.

yo man, Hama GI Joe was dope can't argue with that
i remember picking up Groo into the late 80s, it went forever

these numbers are from may 85... groo's first marvel issue was march that year.

ah that explains it

and yeah, groo was excellent.

Looks as if Groo was the second-highest selling Epic title after the flagship anthology. That's not too shabby, really.

It's hard to imagine Marvel making so much of their bread off of adaptated properties nowadays. Everybody but them seems to have cornered that particular market of late.

Was the New Universe the first time Marvel attempted the alternate, self-contained universe of titles gambit...? Was there any precedent of a similar approach from DC? (DC was pretty explicit about the separate universes, but they didn't have entire titles devoted to alternate universes, did they? At least not until Vertigo?)

I think Marvel (copying 2000 AD and other sort of indie lines) was ahead of DC with Epic and OGNS and whatnot

Kirby's Fourth World?

that included Superman/Jimmy Olsen

Epic and OGNS titles weren't related to each other tho. What I mean is something like Ultimates or New Universe, where there was a series of titles that were related to one another, but totally separate from the "regular" continuity.

like, DC didn't have a bunch of Earth-2 titles (right?)

There was All-Star Squadron and that's about it for Earth-2 ongoings.

It was the first line produced by Marvel Comics utilizing a pre-conceived shared universe concept.

I have a whole short box of nothing but groo. Can't even get at it rn (lol nyc) but I'm gonna wallow in them again someday.

yeah, groo was awesome

i loved groo as a kid. a bit sad that the collections available on amazon are a tad pricey.

Those figures are for postal subscriptions only, rather than newstand or comic book store sales

Collections were only ever four issues too iirc, they could have gotten the whole series out if Evanier had switched to fat 12-issue tomes

sales must have turned around at some point

subscription figures aren't necessarily exactly proportionate with newstand and direct sales anyway

i remember picking up Groo into the late 80s, it went forever

it's still going, the last series was in 2010 (and there's a Groo Vs Conan that was due in 2011, but Sergio's illness knocked it off track [and Sakai's family troubles probably aren't helping him speed through it rn])

Looks as if Groo was the second-highest selling Epic title after the flagship anthology. That's not too shabby, really.

can't possibly believe the Heavy Metal knockoff magazine sold more than Elektra

Was the New Universe the first time Marvel attempted the alternate, self-contained universe of titles gambit...? Was there any precedent of a similar approach from DC? (DC was pretty explicit about the separate universes, but they didn't have entire titles devoted to alternate universes, did they? At least not until Vertigo?)

Vertigo wasn't an alternate universe, it was a bunch of DCU and otherwise self-contained books

Essential-style, phonebook Groo volumes wld be a winner, no?

Think Conan v Groo is finally coming out this year.

There was All-Star Squadron and that's about it for Earth-2 ongoings.

Before that there was an All Star Comics, also featuring the Earth-2 heroes, but since 'Flash of Two Worlds' DC have never exactly resisted crossovers between the two universes.

Groo was the first American-style comic I read after a childhood of Tintin and Asterix and The Beano. Anecdotally - it felt like Mad and Groo were much more widely read than the superhero books - maybe a UK thing? There were copies in every newsagent - plus (anecdotally again) it was never just boys who read them.

Groo was always tough to find in my area (NY), never seemed that popular around here. Probably because of the times (late 80s/early 90s). I was often surprised when I was able to find a copy

I think I got into Mad magazine as a kid before most comics but never saw Groo on a newsstand and hardly ever in a comics shop.

Groo was dead easy to find in the UK, but I always suspected we mainly got the leftover comics that hadn't sold in the US

Nah. For quite a while, Marvel US would swap a 15 cent (or whatever) front cover price plate for a 10p cover price place at the end of a run of 'colour' comics, so the Marvel titles in newsagents etc were produced specifically for the UK market, although certain titles (eg The Avengers) that had British Marvel equivalents were 'non-distributed' (ie you could only get them as imports.)

http://www.comics.org/issue/1057795/cover/4/

By the time that the cover price included both a US and UK price, comics were distributed to UK specialist shops just a couple of days after they went on sale in America, so not 'leftovers' either.

paper is heavy, I would imagine shipping comics overseas was at the bottom of their list of strategies

really? woah, I always imagined when I was reading Marvel obsessively (86-88) that they were imports... thanks for clearing that up, Ward.

As a kid, I was always fascinated with Marvel comics from the UK whenever some neighborhood kids got their hands on one (usually Action Force, IIRC). Those larger comics with the different paper stock felt like alien artifacts. Even later, non-tabloid stuff like Knights of Pendragon looked so much different from what I was used to (which was largely due to what I think might've been a completely different color process than what was standard in most US Marvel books at the time).

I have mixed feelings on Kieron Gillen's recent Iron Man run, but using a couple Marvel UK characters (Death's Head and Dark Angel) was kind of entertaining

Stevie, I hope you won't mind if I make things a little clearer, still

The small, colour Marvel comics were always technically 'imports', in that they were printed and published in America. When Marvel comics were first imported to the UK, they would have a cents price on them and over that t UK price stamp, normally bearing a T&P insignia, which stood for the British distributors Thorpe and Porter Lrd. The comics were brought over to this country by sea mail.

At some point in the early 1970s, Marvel in America began to print a certain amount of their color comics with a UK pence price, rather than a cents price. This was done at the end of the printing process, a simple matter of swapping a printing plate, but it meant that UK pence copies traditionally have had shittier printing, more colour mis-alignment etc, which may have contributed to your impression that these comics were somehow 'leftovers'. They are generally deemed less collectible than the 'real' cents comics. But they were American Marvels, printed and published in the US and imported here.

Not every American Marvel title was officially distributed in the UK (these comics are known in British collector circles as 'ND' - not distributed - comics.) When the British Marvel titles kicked off in the 1970s, reprinting the American comics in larger size, black and white (or two colour) weekly editions, lots of the series featured in these UK Marvel titles - Spider-Man, Hulk, Avengers etc - were removed from UK distribution, so as not to distract from the UK sales, or confuse readers with stories from vastly different time periods. The only way for a UK reader to acquire these ND comics would be to subscribe, visit America, order them via a mail order dealer either at home or in America, or buy them from one a dedicated comic book store, like Dark They Were and Golden Eyed in London. Distribution of the Marvel Comics with British prices was always extremely patchy, but there's no evidence that any particular titles were 'dumped' on the UK market.

Again, at some point in the 1980s, Marvel began to print only one version of their American colour comics, with both an American and British (and Canadian) price on the front. These titles would be imported in large quantities by air to UK comic shops, typically going on sale just a couple of days after they went on sale in America. Or you could wait a month or so and buy pretty much every Marvel or DC as a slightly cheaper (cover) price, sea-freighted and officially distributed to newsagents and even comic shops.

Looking at a gallery of Groo covers, it seems that the first one with a joint US/UK price was issue 16, cover dated June 1986:

http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/groo-the-wanderer/16-1.jpg

Thanks for that, Ward. I could read ultra-granular comics minutia like that all day long.

Seconded. And I'm pretty sure I had that Groo!

Really interesting! I just finished the Sean Howe so am definitely in minutia mode. Follow-up question: when did DC/Marvel stuff start disappearing from UK newsagents? I stopped buying (for the first time) round Death of Superman time - I think they were still on the shelves then.

Just noticed by a friend on Twitter and reposted to Facebook:

"Disney owns marvel.
Marvel owns Thor.
Thor is the son of a king.
Thor is now female.
Thor is now a Disney princess."

it goes all the way to the top mannnnnnnn

Good idea I guess then

Marvel Unlimited is doing a month for $0.99 during Comic-Con, I'll get in on this
http://marvel.com/mu

No ALL-NEW DOOP available, what a waste.

If only for the sake of people that might read the title and have no context for it whatsoever, I love that there's a comic called All-New Doop.

I'll probably eventually get on the Marvel Unlimited train, but not until it gets a helluva lot closer to actually being Unlimited. For the time being, I'm content to stupidly spend all of my money in the futile attempt of getting physical copies of everything I want.

reminds me, I need to catch up on All-New Doop, I'm a bit behind

Read some older Dark Wolverine issues. Man, it's infuriating - so many crossovers, every issue continues directly into another series, and there's no way to just go to the correct book without hunting it down. Netflix this ain't.

I haven't used the service at all, but if Marvel's oft-nonsensical methodology with respect to physical collections is any kind of a barometer, I can only imagine that reading the more recent hyperinterconnected stuff is a total nightmare.

How is the new Nightcrawler run from Chris Claremont?

I would love to give him the benefit of the doubt given that he is 90% of the reason why I read comic books today but, after the 90s, I'll be damned if I'm ever reading another new Claremont book.

The new Nightcrawler is readable. It's not good by any means, but compared to DC, readable counts as a win.

what, you don't like reading captions with paragraphs of exposition and character description draped over soap operas? xp

djp otm

I thought Claremont came across quite menschy in the Howe book so I'll give him a shot

I haven't read comics for years, Marvel or otherwise, but I came across the Howe book at the library and have been blowing through it over the past few days. I just finished the Shooter years- which were the years I in which I discovered Marvel comics. Boy he did not come across well. I was cringing imagining working for him as depicted in his later tenure.

Dreaded Deadline Doom notwithstanding, I loved the auteur years between Stan and Shooter as E-I-C. Shooter's ascension = the day the music died.

It's certainly seeming that way to me. The Gerber/Englehart/Starlin stuff sounds great - I've not seen much of it other than the odd issue or reference here or there. I'm thinking of getting a Marvel Unlimited subscription in the hopes that some of that material is represented.

I really dug the Howe book too! So many pros are pissed about it.

I haven't read these yet, but I thought I'd pass them on, two-part Shooter defense:
http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2013/01/jim-shooter-a-second-opinion-part-one-the-best-job-he-can/
http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2013/10/jim-shooter-a-second-opinion-part-two-romper-room-on-crystal-meth-installment-1/

omg lolz @ that Ghost Rider + Jesus storyline, never heard of that before

no kidding! if your main gripe about Jim Shooter is that he didn't want to publish your story where Jesus helps Ghost Rider, then you really have no ammo whatsoever, really

Those Shooter defense articles have been linked to here before - they're still mostly bullshit. Creators had other, bigger gripes abt Shooter than that he wouldn't publish their Jesus/Ghost Rider story (but i mean, why not - this is a company that published Son of Satan, after all.)

I love the Sean Howe bk, gobbled it up, but I think there are other histories of Marvel and American comics still to be told - it's not, by any means, definitive.

yeah idk if Shooter was in the right there (it's conceivable) I just find the whole prospect v v 70s and v v funny

If I were to do a radio-button poll of Marvel 70s "auteur" series, what should I include?

Starlin's Warlock
Moench/Gulacy Master of Kung Fu
McGregor/Graham Black Panther
McGregor/Russell Killraven
Wolfman/Colan Dracula
Wolfman/Perlin Werewolf by Night
Rich Buckler Deathlok
Steve Gerber, Howard the Duck
Gerber, Man-Thing

What else would fit in there? Any of the superhero titles?

surely claremont's xmen, no?

Gerber's Defenders is the only obvious omission. Maybe Starlin's Captain Marvel. Claremont might be outside the purview of that particular endeavor.

xpost

Is Wolfman's Werewolf by Night run really thought of as 'auteur' comics? Moreso than the Gerry Conway issues, or the Doug Moench issues?

Would also include

Englehart/Brunner/Colan's Doctor Strange
Englehart/Starlin's Captain Marvel
Gerber's Defenders
Gerber/Skrenes' Omega the Unknown
McGregor's Power Man

the Claremont/Cockrum issues of X-Men are sort've the Marvel Comics equivalent of Jaws - recognisably the work of 70s auteurs, but also a harbinger of a new, less personally expressive/more commercially-minded way of creating comics

well put

Is Wolfman's Werewolf by Night run really thought of as 'auteur' comics? Moreso than the Gerry Conway issues, or the Doug Moench issues?

My error on that one -- I meant to type Moench instead of Wolfman. The only issues I ever read were Moench/Perlin.

xp, yes, that's a great description of the X-Men revival

Isn't Englehart's run on Cap A supposed to be pretty distinctive? I still need to order that essentials volume...

it's gd solid superhero comics w/ the odd bit of political 'relevance', but also slightly more 'straight'/mainstream than most of the titles william nominated (see also englehart's avengers) - i think in part that's because it was drawn by sal buscema (and often inked by vince colletta), so the storytelling and general look isn't so 'out' as say w/starlin (tho' sal b inked by klaus janson on gerber's defenders is a v. pleasing combo imho). the few issues of cap that gerber wrote later on are more bizarre than the englehart stuff (but then you could say the same abt kirby's seventies cap run)

All of his 70s Marvel work was pretty distinctive, but yeah, I would argue the Cap and Avengers runs could belong in this theoretical poll. Also, Don McGregor's wiki page says "He and artist P. Craig Russell engineered color comic books' first known interracial kiss, between the "Killraven" characters M'Shulla and Carmilla Frost, in Amazing Adventures #31 (July 1975)." But I just checked, and Gabe Jones' and Peggy Carter's kiss in Cap was a month earlier. (#186, June '75)

xp

What would be a good corresponding radio-button list of 80s "auteurs selling out in style" blockbuster stories - Kraven's Last Hunt, Ground Zero (in Hulk), that sort of thing?

I've often thought how great it would be to have a Mad Men-style period drama set within the offices of a Marvel-esque publisher. Names changed obviously, but using real events as inspiration. The history of the industry being what it is, there are so many potential story avenues it could go down.

Great idea. There was a great episode of Deep Space 9 where all the principals were staffers at a 1950s SF Pulp mag...

Didn't Will Eisner or somebody do a barely-fictionalized book about working in the Harry 'A' Chesler shop? An account of 65-77 Marvel from the POVs of Sol Brodsky, Flo Steinberg, John Verpoorten and (especially) Marie Severin would be cool.

Kavalier and Klay's strongest parts are basically this.

Eisner's book is The Dreamer (all I can remember about it was that George Tuska was called 'Gar Tooth' in it!)

There's also this:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-aOwTPlkDAmM/T5a3YlkQFQI/AAAAAAAAQlQ/WTaYH4Z8X7o/s1600/What-If-v1-11_00fc.jpg

Wholly tangentially, I was reminded recently after pulling my copy out of storage that The Maximortal is basically the bloated, pustulant ancestor of Kavalier & Klay. Now that is an adaptation I'd pay good money to see.

xpost thanking u for new dn

http://namtab.com/phantomstranger/doompatrol53.gif

lol @ "original bullpen" with lantern-jawed, hair-headed Stan

I'm glad we have this thread -- I didn't want to throw a digression into the interesting discussion on the other thread. Just wanted to say that two issues in, Brian Wood's Moon Knight is just as awesome as Warren Ellis' was.

really? I run hot and cold on BW in that I was really into a lot of his work for years until I decided a lot of it falls kind of emotionally flat.

bit sad that Hawkeye and Superior Foes Of Spiderman are both ending in an issue or two - two of the best Marvel runs of the moment...

I just looked at his wiki page and realized that he's the guy who'd been accused of sexual harassment by Tess Fowler last year, a story I didn't follow beyond the headlines. I don't think I'd read anything by him before, but I like these two MK issues. Seamless transition from Ellis, not a jarring "MY WAY NOW!" reboot.

I jumped off of Moon Knight after Ellis but it's still on my pull list. It's a little sad putting that issue back on the shelf instead of removing it from the list but part of me perversely enjoys actively rejecting Wood based off of the Fowler allegations.

On a different note, everything Al Ewing has touched to date has ruled.

do you guys all buy new issues off the racks? Or off digital racks?
I am solely limiting my marvel intake to the unlimited app so i dunno how far behind all of you i am.

I'm a rack man.

(Repost to the out of context thread in 5, 4, 3...)

otm about Al Ewing, Loki and Mighty Avengers are pretty much awesome every time

I was a voracious floppy hog (yet another out of context gift) until about three years ago when I stopped cold turkey. I'm slowly filling in gaps now but I mostly don't know anything that's happened from Fear Itself to present day.

dan/lunch: i quit buying floppies about five years ago when i bought my ninth bookshelf solely for comics... do you bag/board/box? Why do you guys still buy physical capes and tights books? they take about two minutes to read and a year to form a complete storyline that, nine times out of ten, is worth nowhere near that amount of effort and collected editions are cheaper and more manageable. What's the appeal for you?

I box my stuff out of necessity but I'm generally not precious enough about it to bag it (lotsa beat up comics). Back when I did buy floppies regularly, it was honestly in large part because of the addictive ritual of going to the shop every Wednesday. But also because it was easier to keep on top of the stuff I read than buying it after the fact would've been (especially given Marvel's horrendous reprint policy). Nowadays, I generally buy older stuff in trades, with the exception of anything crossover-y (I can't stand jumping all over the place within a trade/between multiple trades when I'm trying to read what's ostensibly a single story).

Also, while I find good value in digital (it's lovely to have hundreds of comics at the ready when I'm on the train), I vastly prefer to read physical copies of comics/books/etc. E-readers were much more favorable to my ADD when they were single-purpose devices.

The new Bucky Barnes: Winter Soldier is pure ilx-fodder. Trippy water-color imagery that takes place on the planets Syro, Exai and Mer-z-bow and involves aliens Ventolin and Rossz Csillag. The story, though, is a bit meh, and most of it is imcomprehensible. But I can't help but think it's cool that Marvel publishes this kind of thing. Hope it succeeds.

i do miss the ritual of comic book stores. sometimes i'll walk into one and kill an hour walking up and down the aisles but i generally leave with either a graphic novel i've long wanted or nothing.
ipad comic reading does just fine for me honestly; any issues i have with lack of haptics pales in comparison to portability, accessibility and space issues.

I have longboxes in basement storage and I like having physical, tangible objects

i'd like having basement storage!

Yeah, I wish I had more storage space. We have a lockup in the storage room of our building which doesn't have space for much but even so I'm sure it's been a relationship saver.

by the same token though, there's something to be said for being able to find anything you own in under ten minutes because it's on a shelf in front of you.
for me, boxes ultimately made it easy for me to lose or forget ownership or have any reason to curb my buying habits. Once I dumped about eight long boxes and bookshelved everything that i wanted to keep, I found i got a lot more choosy about where i wanted to buy... and it was often less about disposable income and more about what I could justify wanting to keep
that said, I now have a very specific sort of library that multiple moves over the past five years has left spread out all over the place and no close and nearby comic buddies to share it with. this is why people have children, isn't it?

I, uh, have a parrot and an eyepatch for current superhero stuff. And four longboxes, mostly 60s/70s Marvels and 80s indie floppies.

that said, I now have a very specific sort of library that multiple moves over the past five years has left spread out all over the place and no close and nearby comic buddies to share it with. this is why people have children, isn't it?

Feeling you. I also still have some stuff in a storage unit and in a shed at my mom's house. The thought of it all being in one place vividly illustrates the need for some hardcore paring down (or, perhaps, the selling of furniture). And, yeah, except for a few choice things my girlfriend's interested in, no one reads this shit but me, although I'd happily share the wealth.

children are the worst man

I generally haven't bought floppies in years - not worth the time/space/effort - and with rare exceptions all I buy now are trades or graphic novels. I still have like 1 1/2 longboxes full of stuff I bought when I was younger and don't want to part with.

now, my daughter otoh - I buy her floppies of stuff she wants pretty regularly, maybe a couple a month. soon she will need a longbox of her own lol

a father's proudest moment

reading comics w kids is awesome I highly recommend it btw

right now all her comics are jammed into the coffee table

I buy floppies occasionally but half of them have coffee stains on them and once I am done with them I throw them in the recycling bin

I only buy my kid trades. We don't really have the room for individual issues. Actually, at the moment, about two years into our mutual comic store trips period, we're even pushing our limit on trades. I'll have to rearrange the bookshelves soon.

I only buy trades/GNs now in physical form. Ran out of space for floppies years ago, and have found that the art genuinely seems to look better on an ipad's backlit screen.

Really looking forward to my daughter being old enough for comics. Got some Moomin and other stuff already for when she can read.

Straight scans of actual 60s and 70s marvel floppies look SO GOOD on a lit hd tablet screen.

Ah - I need directing to some better ones then! I had to delete my Gerber Defenders scans, they were kind of unreadable.

there are definitely bad scans out there. most of the ones I've gotten from torrents have been pretty careful-looking. Haven't read my old defenders files yet-- I was most of the way through the gerber run in Marvel Essentials but I'm gonna start it over in color cbz.

for whatever reason, black and white comics don't seem right on a screen for me, even a really nice screen...

Our Marvel All-Ages series are now changing names, but the stories remain the same! Marvel Universe Ultimate Spider-Man is now known as Marvel Universe Ultimate Spider-Man Web Warriors. That's not all! Marvel Universe Avengers Assemble will now be called Marvel Universe Avengers Assemble Season 2.

Marvel Universe Ultimate Spider-Man Beach Boys BBQ Blowout Bash Blast

in other news, squirrel girl

heh Ryan North gettin' work!

Our Marvel All-Ages series are now changing names, but the stories remain the same! Marvel Universe Ultimate Spider-Man is now known as Marvel Universe Ultimate Spider-Man Web Warriors. That's not all! Marvel Universe Avengers Assemble will now be called Marvel Universe Avengers Assemble Season 2.

what the everloving fuck with these guys
― the other song about butts in the top 5 (forksclovetofu), Monday, October 6, 2014 1:36 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm so glad I got out of comics, this is insanity atop insanity

TBF, these are just marginal, 'based on the animated series!' comics, and the stupid titles are probably just edicts from some low-level Disney marketing exec. Not really reflective of the main line.

yeah, sorry tbf those are actually comix made for kids.
but the constant rebooting!

the titling of comics for kids should be WAY LESS confusing than for 40-yo babymen

like in the mid-00s the all-ages Marvel books were all "something Adventures" and collected in $5 digests, not full-size TPBs - easy branding

I'm presuming they're trying to match the cartoon titles exactly

it's actually kind of a savvy (though also obnoxious) move to title a second year of books "season 2" to match the TV series
web warriors is a good idea considering there's going to be a separate canon Miles Morales series that will follow Axis (if i understand correctly)

So is Axis going to be really bad or what?

Kinda old at this point but I don't remember seeing this piece on Ike Perlmutter posted anywhere around these parts. Pretty eye-opening. Among the alleged revelations: in order to punish the studios who are thwarting Marvel's desire to have all of their properties under one cinematic roof, there will be no new characters in the X-books and FF is being cancelled outright.

Interesting, not aware of that guy. I didn't see anything about hobbling the X-Books and FF though, which sounds a little farfetched

That is more recent allegations. Can't remember who said there is a mandate not to create new x-characters, but it was someone with inside information. And it really seems as if FF will be canceled next year.

Well, I imagine that sales of the FF comic are pretty marginal, and probably have been for years (it's sort've the same situation as with Superman - a foundational comic that doesn't actually sell that well.) But if only to protect the copyright, I'm sure the characters will continue to appear in Marvel Universe Comics, even if not in their own title.

Oh, that stuff might've been in the io9 article I read last night that linked to the Perlmutter article. Sorry 'bout that.

There's been an excess of X-characters since.. what, 1982? So that's not a totally bad idea to ease up on introducing new mutants. I say this just having read that years-long Messiah Complex-Messiah War run from ~2008-2010.

FF - yeah, I wonder when the last time FF was really a top Marvel book, maybe the 80s? How successful was that Waid run from the early 2000s in sales?

In a way, the Hickman run was pretty crucial, just in the way it showed what Hickman could do. He moved from there to Avengers. It also sold really, really well when one of them died. The Fraction FF with Shehulk, Medusa, Ant-man and, um, She-thing?, was pretty fun as well, and had good art by Allred.

the last super hot FF run i remember was these:
http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2007/04/23/comics-you-should-own-fantastic-four-347-349/

ha, EXACTLY what I was thinking of! that Arthur Adams art was awesome

Can't remember who said there is a mandate not to create new x-characters, but it was someone with inside information

Claremont.

guhhhhh

http://comicsbeat.com/marvel-relaunching-secret-wars-in-2015-in-a-synergistic-fashion-across-the-marvel-brand

fucks sake

i guess Miles Morales is gonna keep showing up in the 616 then...

Those FFs are fun - checked them on MU. Thanks for that. And also this line in the CBR piece:

"Art Adams' women are gorgeous without being skanky."

The original Secret Wars was exactly what company-wide events should be: the crossover part of the plot was limited to one maxi-series, and only the after-effects were shown in individual titles, so you didn't have to read any of the tie-in issues to get what's going on. It's sad that Marvel seems to have forgotten this, the crossovers of the 00s and 10s have become increasingly incoherent messes, with different writers adding their own bits that often don't jibe with each other. Seems like the new SW will be like this too.

But I guess back in the 80s they had to consider the fact that most of their readers were kids who couldn't afford to buy every tie-in issue, not middle-aged geezers who can.

CBR is an appallingly written website. I have a bizarre compulsion to read their 'Comics Legends Explained' series every saturday morning, but I come for the trivia, not the prose, which is eye-wateringly clumsy and amateur.

Not all of their writers are bad, though... Personally I like Greg Burgas, who currently has a nice article series running where he analyzes the stylish developments of various comic book artists. It's true that Brian Cronin, the guy who writes (among others) the Comic Book Legends series, has a weirdly amateurish writing style, even though he's done it for years and has even published a book on the those comic book legends.

was that book self-published? it's a good feature/book idea, but so badly written.

Nope, it appears to have been published by a subsidiary of Penguin. And judging by that first Amazon review, it suffers from the same problems as his columns.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00LIsgWrKPs

that's a pretty good stan lee voice

The original Secret Wars was exactly what company-wide events should be

a legal dodge to safeguard against potential lawsuits from creators that the company screwed over? sounds about right

??

I thought it was to sell toys.

dying at K&P sketch

I thought it was to sell toys.

persistent rumor that makes a lot of sense (c+p'd from another forum): The reason for the Secret Wars was back in 1982/83, Jack Kirby was in a lawsuit against Marvel over the rights of the characters he created and to get his original art back. The rumor is that Jim Shooter wrote Secret Wars in order to subtly change some of the characters in case Marvel lost (Spidey in the Black suit, She-Hulk joining FF, various characters in costume/personality changes etc). Marvel were afraid that if Jack won, then other artists (ie-Steve Ditko), would file their own suit. Hence, the mass-scale change. After Kirby and Marvel settled the characters that were changed reverted back to their original conception.

I have no evidence to support this apart from the timeline lining up and my enduring confidence in the bottomless pit of Marvel's cynicism

Kirby was not involved in a lawsuit with Marvel.

I couldn't remember if he was just threatening or it was a dispute or a lawsuit had been filed or not but I had faith that you would correct me

Marvel Universe Ultimate Spider-Man is now known as Marvel Universe Ultimate Spider-Man Web Warriors

wtf

It's a comic for kids, as in actual kids five years old or something. It looks like this:

http://subscriptions.marvel.com/images/PRODUCT/FUL/3891_ful.jpg

It's got nothing to do with the Marvel Universe or the Ultimate Universe. It's just for little kids, so it's got a fun name.

Oh wait, it's the name of a cartoon for kids. So this is the comic of the cartoon.

Marvel's Ultimate Spider Man Web Warriors: The Comic of The Cartoon

Exactly.

tbf almost every Marvel/DC animated show has had a counterpart book in the style of the show

i see ultimate spiderman, classic spiderman, brock venom, SpiderMan2099, Scarlet Spider and Spider Girl... who are the other two?

The one on the right edge I think is Spider-Man Noir. Red/Yellow Iron Spidey was from Civil War-era. The two on the left I'm not sure about.

lol "Spider Man Noir"; that sounds right.
I'm pretty sure red/yellow spidey is the scarlet spider
Bottom left is nu-hero Venom. It's the one above that I can't place.

Ha, the Iron Spider is an alternate universe Amadeus Cho! Nice!

Spider-Ham makes an appearance. I might actually watch this show

I think most of these and more will be in EDGE OF SPIDERVERSE

I thought you were joking but that's a real event!

I know, right? Those pesky spider-killers are jumping across universes and only a team of spider-people can stop them!

Marvel's Ultimate Spider Man Web Warriors The Comic of The Cartoon presents EDGE OF THE SPIDERVERSE: And One Must Fall!

They haven't quite been there yet, forks

excelsior

The red/yellow Spider-Man is indeed from Civil War era: there were three clones (or something) that wore that costume, though AFAIK they weren't related to Scarlet Spider or the original Clone Saga. IIRC Spider-Man himself might've worn the red/yellow thing at some point too.

Ah, apparently the CW era red/yellow spidermen were also called "Scarlet Spiders", even though they had nothing to do with the Clone Saga Scarlet Spider. How confusing.

I believe they just violently killed Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends in a recent issue (no, really)

on an unrelated note i'm super into X-Statix right now, or at least I have been for a dozen issues or so--it's funny, ~90s edgy~ (they spend a third of their time in-fighting about marketing deals & manufacturing drama for ratings on their televised superheroics, the writers must have watched Natural Born Killers a bunch or something), surprising. none of the characters are likeable, but i'm most of the way through all 38 issues, so i'm sort of looking forward to the end.

The Milligan/Allred run on X-Force/X-Statix isn't really typical of the 90s though, their take on superheroes as cynical celebrities was pretty unique. (The only precedent I can think of is Verheiden's "The American".) I hated the way it ended though, even if it made some thematical sense, given the way theit X-Force started.

The Milligan/Allred run on X-Force/X-Statix isn't really typical of the 90s though, their take on superheroes as cynical celebrities was pretty unique

right, i've gathered as much--picked it up after gillen/mckelvie's young avengers run, read an interview where they cited it as a big influence.

the writers must have watched Natural Born Killers a bunch or something

hoos I always find it curious that someone as political in life as you can be so enthusiastically into as virulently anti-labor a company as Marvel! but there's one writer of X-Statix and it's Peter Milligan

PS it's from the '00s, not the '90s, and feels distinctly an artifact of that time to me. Also if you didn't read Milligan & Allred's 12-issue run on X-Force that set up -Statix, pause the latter and go back immediately!

^^^ yes, do that

it's from the '00s, not the '90s,

yeah i saw that just now looking at the wiki and was surprised, to me it feels very "gen x cynical" (whatever that means idk) but i suppose all the reality tv reference points probably mark it more clearly as an early 00s thing

hoos I always find it curious that someone as political in life as you can be so enthusiastically into as virulently anti-labor a company as Marvel!

i only really know what i hear alluded to around here and what i read in that mammoth jack kirby thread! i suppose i should grab the sean howe book or something

They don't pay royalties or foreign publication fees.

Charles Soule's She-Hulk to be cancelled after #12. If rebooting and renumbering a title after every creative team change is the way forward, I just want to go on the record as really really hating it.

No worries, they'll also be renumbered for roughly six months whenever the number of cumulative issues from all seventeen volumes of a given title hits a notable benchmark ending in '00'.

I wish the writing in the Soule issues was anywhere as good as the art.

I wish the plot idea was anywhere as good as... I don't know, 1/2 of all Marvel comics plots of the last decade

I can't tell if it's Soule's style that leaves me cold (for any of his books) or if he's just, you know, not very good.

I think he's a bit shit tbh.

Charles Soule's She-Hulk to be cancelled after #12. If rebooting and renumbering a title after every creative team change is the way forward, I just want to go on the record as really really hating it.

Though I think this one is less reboot and renumber than "miserable failure" sales-wise. Last issue sold 1/5 the copies of the current Hulk title for me, which is already one of the weaker big-name titles.

i always liked what i'd read of soule's she-hulk, felt very fraction's hawkeye to me, which was a good thing in my (uh) book.

Ditto, I was sad at the hatin' on it ITT.

Yeah, I like Soule's She-hulk, will be sad to see it go, as I was with Superior Foes

There are 13 different covers for Marvel's first new Star Wars title. Fuck this shit.

i think you only need to buy one to read the comics story

variant covers are bullshit and an act of disrespect to readers and of financial violence to retailers

true, but remember polybags? now THAT is an act of disrespect to writers

Do not understand the pull of variant covers. Surely nobody buys these for speculator value any more? Is there even any such thing these days? And if you like the picture, fuck, download the JPG from Marvels's site and buy a cheap-cover copy.

Varient covers are the crystal meth for collector nurds and the greasy sharks that surround them. The worst of the type are the guys who worry about a comic store putting as stamp or sticker on a Comic Book Day freebie. I'm not sure if that rung of hell is above or below the record collector nurds.

People worry about that?! I haven't had anyone complain to me, at least, or I would have started laughing.

So does the nerd variant cover market subsidise the rest of us?

The ones I really don't understand are those sub-Calvin and Hobbes variant covers by - is it Chris Eliopoulos? They're just so... creepy and sad.

It subsidizes retailers and/or pumps up numbers for titles - with the Amazing Spider-Man #1, between two stores I ordered 300 copies IIRC. My price on that would be $670 - I got one 1:300 sketch variant that I sold for $200, two more non-sketch variants of that cover that I sold for $100 apiece and ~10 other variants that sold for $10-75 apiece. I made back all my ASM#1 money before I sold a single issue. That was with a blockbuster, though.

A lot of the variants Marvel solicits these days sell for no premium, you can just order them if you hit a target of some kind - which is a massive PITA. If I normally order 40 of something and they have four variants that are tied to it but - I now have to order 60 if I want the 40 I need for the target plus five of each for the people who want Skottie Young or whatever Deadpool variant is out this week. So I just don't bother with most variants that aren't incentive variants I can sell to defray costs.

Variants can pump up numbers in situations like Star Wars - there's a 1:500 incentive variant and people are talking about ordering 500 just to get that one, when they might sell 100 of the issue itself. I'm not willing to bet that kind of money and have 400 extra copies on the chance I get a mint variant and can find a buyer. I grew up around comics and baseball cards, so I know how speculation works out with this stuff.

I got one 1:300 sketch variant that I sold for $200

I'm glad it helps your store stay afloat, but I just don't get who's made enough to do this. It's not as though it's an actual original sketch, just a printed copy on a crappy floppy

MAD enough

there was a 75th anniversary hagiography on network tv tonight that i taped, curious to see how marvel presents its own history these days

Someone asked me to recommend them issues of Deadpool, which I've never read, so would welcome yr suggestions.

nah

I've never read much Deadpool but I've been enjoying the recent Brian Posehn / Gerry Duggan Deadpool run via Marvel Unlimited. A nice mix of goofy fun stuff and some surprising character depth. I remember liking Gail Simone's Deadpool / Agent X issues back in the early years of the 21st century too.

Kind of looking forward to the day when all this Spiderverse silliness hits Marvel Unlimited

^word

reading the slott silver surfer right now, leaving me a little cold, but the writing is funny

OG Joe Kelly Deadpool run rules

Thank you BG and DJP for the DPool recs, have passed them on

I never followed Marvel in the Liefeld era and Deadpool feels a bit like a private joke I don't get

Or at least I kind of associate him with Robert Kirkman-style comics with no heart and lots of lovingly detailed gruey body stuff

Is that wrong? Or is that right, but the comics are still ok?

Pretty much every Deadpool thing I've read has been hot garbage, but I haven't read much/any of the Deadpool runs that are considered "classic" so my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt.

Half of Joe Kelly's run was spent making fun of Liefeld's nonsense and the other half was spent making fun of the rest of the Marvel Universe

It'll be interesting to see how all the currently Hickman/Avengers/8 months later countdown stuff reads when collected. There are enough intertwined story bits right now that reading it monthly is kind of rewarding. All the stuff he introduced at the beginning of his run has been kept in play and is now starting to flush out!

I can't really think of many other writers/comics events that have juggled different teams and events while keeping all the balls in the air

i find hickman exhausting and unpleasant to read. I'd like to request a moratorium on full page every issue recaps and black page / white text "NOW" dividers.

I used to be on the fence! It's a time investment and it definitely doesn't work for everyone, but pondering how certain characters would react to events, to each other, with the different players and personalities in play and doing it over months instead of pages is something I think he's gotten better at.

his SHIELD series stuff really fell flat for me originally but Secret Warriors was where I got on board with his Marvel work and went back to read the FF/Ultimate FF stuff

i like how bendis has basically just carried over his avengers plotlines/characters to the x-books he's writing now.

can't get on w/ hickman at all.

nice thing about Marvel right now is they have two completely different events with the same set of characters and don't seem to care at all. not sure how I feel about Axis, but it's somewhat interesting

which is fine with me. having strong continuity across the entire line just means you don't get to do what you want with characters

Jason Aaron's Thor is still pretty great!

so far Axis can bite me

Remender has been absolute shit since X-Force. But I wasn't into his pre-X-Force stuff so I'm thinking it's the anomaly and not what I hoped was an upturn in quality.

Don't get me started on "hey guys, we made Falcon into Captain America and then for his first trip out decided he should be EEEEEEEEVIL"

I will cosign x-force tho'

oh his X-Force was great

is Mighty Avengers part of the Axis bullshit or no

Unfortunately yes

Don't really know what thread to ask this on, might as well try this one.

My housemate, and occasional comic reader, was really into Moon Knight as a kid and I thought it might be fun to get him a MK trade for xmas. Are there any good runs from the last decade or so which have been collected?

People have been speaking very highly about the recent Warren Ellis run, but I haven't read it. It's collected in a single cheap trade. There's also the recent but higher-priced Epic Collection featuring the earliest stories (basically the same stuff that's in the first Essential Moon Knight but in color).

The new Ellis run is excellent, I'll cosign that as worth buying for sure.

yeah it pretty much ruled

Cheers, seems like that'll be the one.

xp -- Agreed.

The Bendis/Maleev series (12 issues, 2011-2012) wasn't so great. Scene-setting for Age of Ultron, killed off the character Echo. It did look good, though (I'm a big Maleev fan).

I think I read that and blocked out them killing Echo :/

I liked when she showed up to help in Japan as Ronin and it took until the very end for anyone to realize Ronin didn't catch what you were saying unless you had eye contact, even though there were clues

Didn't realize Echo was dead. Thanks for spoiling a story from three years ago, jeez.

Eh, she disappeared for years at a time anyway

They reprinted the first Moon Knight series also in Marvel Essentials, which you might still be able to find. It's one of those series that really looks just as good in black and white especially Sienkiewicz's artwork.

So, thanks to the success of the Guardians of the Galaxy movie, Marvel has been reprinting Abnett & Lanning's GotG and various related titles (Annihilation Conquest, War of Kings, Realm of Kings, etc), which is nice, because I missed buying them in physical format when they first came out, I was poor back then and read them on the computer. Anyway, the second big GotG collection just came out, and rereading stuff has been tremendously fun and thrilling, I still feel these are among the best comics Marvel has put out in the last decade. (Too bad A&L exited the cosmic Marvel comics, and GotG is now being written by Bendis, in his trademark mediocre style.) They haven't reprinted Abnett & Lanning's Nova though, which is sad, because I remember it being almost as good and thrill-powered as GotG (even if the whole Nova Corps concept is a pretty shameless Green Lantern ripoff). Hopefully the sequel movie will expand the Nova stuff seen in the first movie and introduce Richard Rider, so they'd have an excuse to reprint that run too.

Yeah, the lack of Nova re-reprints is just Marvel being Marvel. The two books were pretty intimately linked and tied into no fewer than four crossovers. If they're smart, they'll put out a couple of Cosmic Marvel omnibi after the upcoming Annihilation: Conquest omnibus and collect this material in a way that makes sense.

FYI, Abnett is currently writing a new Guardians title featuring the OG team.

Ah, okay, I didn't know that! Does "OG team" mean the original seventies Guardians?

Yeah, as far as I know. I haven't read it yet but that's how it's been solicited.

the hype! this event will live up to it! really!

I'm gonna wind up spending so much money that I don't really need to be spending...

In other news, 6+ months later, I've just about finished reading all of the '60s Marvel stuff (up to mid-'69 at the moment). Trying to decide whether to just plunge insanely ahead into the '70s or if a break is advisable.

Maybe a break before you head into the auteur years at Marvel, which is the most fascinating stretch of its history to me. Englehart, Starlin, McGregor, Moench, Wolfman/Colan on Drac, etc. A mix of their highest highs and most embarrassing failures. Everything up to Jim Shooter's ascension as Eastern Pontiff Ed-in-Chief, aka The Day the Music Died.

I feel like I should start a thread for '60s Marvel questions and fun facts while this stuff is still relatively fresh in my brain. One of the bigger revelations for me was John Romita Sr.'s early work (I'd never found him particularly noteworthy before) and the extent to which that early work was clearly super influential on Jaime Hernandez. The early appearances of Mary Jane are basically proto-Penny Century.

my Bronze-era Marvel knowledge is p spotty, even though the tail end of that era was when I first started reading comics. The initial post-Kirby years are a total blank for me for the most part. I did pick up some Avengers vs. Thanos reprint collection the other day and it seemed to collect a lot of the key Starlin stuff, but it didn't blow me away or anything. It does seem like a v strange era.

By the time he came to draw Spider-Man Romita Sr had been a comics professional for something like fifteen years, so calling his Marvel stuff 'early work' is not entirely accurate. Romita had been toiling away mainly at DC/National, drawing romance and war strips; like many National artists of the post-war period, Romita he was a devout Caniff worshipper, so the way he drew his female characters was clearly indebted to (but not swiped from) things like Caniff's Male Call. Working initially from Kirby layouts on Daredevil, he quickly picked up on the kind of artist-driven dynamic storytelling that was the Marvel house style throughout the 60s, and was always excellent at things like 'modern' clothing, haircuts etc. Stan Lee clearly adored the way he 'sexed up' Spider-Man following Ditko's departureand it doesn't seem a coincidence that Spider-Man became Marvel's best-selling title once Romita took over. His main problem - he wasn't fast enough.

Yeah, I should've specified that I meant his early Marvel U work. Dude was clearly already super-polished by the time he started on Amazing so I figured he'd been doing it for a while at that point.

Also revelatory (although disappointing) is the dearth of standout Marvel artists in the '60s. I mean, it's pretty much Kirby, Steranko (more for design sense than draftsmanship), Romita, Colan, and Ditko (who, after extended exposure to his prime Marvel era, I'm realizing I'm not actually that crazy about). Buscema and Barry Windsor Smith have just gotten started. Everyone else is workmanlike at best and laughable at worst. I guess there's a reason why those particular names are still known 40+ years after the fact.

Those guys plus Heck and Ayers could, and just about did, draw the whole roster of titles before the distribution bottleneck was removed in 1968. There were some truly horrific inkers — coughgeorgeroussoscough — back in those days.

I also like the Severins, but John was, I think, doing mostly war and western in the '60s and Marie was mostly being inked horribly.

Buscema began drawing for Marvel in 66, slightly before Steranko. And I can't think of a comics company w/ a better frontline than Kirby, Ditko, Buscema, Colan and Romita (not to mention intermittent appearances from Wally Wood, Gil Kane, Bill Everett, Bob Powell, John Severin etc etc).

I sort've prefer the crude vitality of George Roussos' inking to the dead line of Ayers (or ugh Paul Reinman), but they had some great inkers in the 60s, too - a young Tom Palmer, already possibly the greatest comics inker of all time, Joe Sinnott, Chic Stone, George Klein, Everett again doing luscious work on Kirby; even Vince Colletta raised his game on Thor for a while (until he started erasing Kirby's backgrounds to save time).

You know, you're absolutely right that those guys really are top-tier. I think I'm just more disappointed because I'd hoped to stumble upon more quality artists from this period that I wasn't already familiar with.

I don't think I realized before that Colan was such a cornerstone of silver age Marvel. I associate him mainly with Daredevil and Tomb of Dracula and, because his style is so distinct in comarison to anything resembling the house style, I had always figured him for more of a niche guy.

Colan was the great third way of marvel storytelling, which wasn't really followed up. Lots of artists took after Kirby, some took after Ditko, but who the hell took after Colan?

Old Lunch you should totally get your thoughts down on this while they're fresh.

huh was unaware Colan took on Dr. Strange, and also

Colan admitted relying upon amphetamines in order to make deadlines for illustrating the series Doctor Strange,[28] for which he would personally visit the character's real-life Manhattan neighborhood, Greenwich Village, and shoot Polaroid photographs to use as location reference.

I bet Colan had colorists in the mechanical separation days pulling out their hair, with his blurs and speed lines.

xp -- yeah, iirc Colan was the artist during that funky run when Strange and Clea went back to 1776 and Ben Franklin seduced her while Strange was off saving the world.

Old Lunch, is there a timeline checklist that you're working off of?

also i find hickman's avengers work pretty much unreadable

Yeah, forks, I'm roughly following this site, which has been mostly on point.

And Jon, I may have been taking notes throughout this endeavor. Which is pretty much the only way to ensure that I won't have forgotten everything I've read six months from now.

OL, are you doing this through t0rrence or Marvel Unlimited? If the latter, i might play along someday.

The stupidest story element of the '60s, hands down, was Mike Murdoch. Secret identities are such a flawed and shaky concept to begin with (and require otherwise intelligent characters to suffer temporary brain damage when they get anywhere near putting the pieces together) that, naturally, the solution is to introduce a third identity in the form of your identical, jive-talkin' twin brother who no one has ever met before and with whom you're never seen. And then when the heat is on, kill off your fake twin (habeus corpus be damned) and just say that, uh, some other dude is Daredevil now...I guess?

i gotta say, everytime i try to read that era, the stan lee-isms just bring me to my knees.

xxpost Well, I have all of the '60s Essentials, so I have legit paper copies of 90+% of this stuff. But I've done a lot of my reading via Kindle on the train and don't want to deal with unnecessary gaps, so my electronic copies aren't precisely above board. I'll do Marvel Unlimited someday when my finances are a little rosier but I'm too much of a control freak about this stuff to not maintain my own complete collection on the side.

Aside from historical interest, I don't know how strongly I'd recommend '60s Marvel to the uninitiated. Not very strongly.

huh was unaware Colan took on Dr. Strange

Colan had two substantial runs on Dr Strange, in the 60s and 70s, both inked by Tom Palmer, both excellent - the 60s issues written by Roy Thomas (who gives Doc S a mask!), the 70s by Englehart at his most cosmically ambitious. Didn't know Gene the Dean was a speed freak tho (the history of comics and amphetamines still needs to be written).

I always thought Gene Colan had a pretty unique cinematographic perspective to his pages. Most of the big Marvel/DC artists of his period more often would have the angle so you are looking down at the item in the picture, Colan would often use the perspective from looking up at the character in the frame. I think Colan had this in his earlier comics, but as he got working for Marvel and on into the 70s then back to DC, it became more his thing. It kind of reminds me of some of the camera angle tricks you would see in some 60s movies and TV shows, especially something where they wanted to give the effect of 'things are not right'.

Can't think of too many pros that directly looked like Colan, but I think some of that panel layout and perspective many other artists picked up from him. I think you see it in Miller's Daredevil quite a bit. Tom Mandrake is one 80s/90s comic artist whose style seems to have a heavy Gene Colan influence except less smooth and maybe a bit more jagged like from say Joe Kubert.

Frank Brunner is another artist that has similarities in his style with Gene Colan, I'd think that is perhaps one reason Colan was used as one of the artists on Howard the Duck.

So glad that you dudes with the deep comics knowledge are around here, seriously. I've always been more focused on writers and story so it's nice to read some history/commentary on the artists.

(An aside: I'm pretty sure my first exposure to Colan was via an issue of the Archie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series.)

a quick marvel unlimited check suggests they have most if not all of the 60's for reading so i'm giving this half a shot and just cracked 1963. The writing is atrocious! The art is consistently astonishing.

Feel free to share non-atrocious highlights...

well right off the bat, did Lee get confused as to how many skrulls were left on earth? Three turn into cows, the other is apparently free to join the escaping armada?
And the grey/green hulk shift appears to be an accident of coloring, yes?

the early peter parker-looking mutant story in Tales to Astonish is the secret start of the X-Men isn't it?

Both Lee and Kirby had notoriously poor memories (which of course caused all sorts of grief later), and as production at Marvel cranked up, editorial resources were even more thinly stretched, so that there was nobody paying strict attention to the lore of the Marvel Universe until Roy Thomas turned up. A friend of mine owns an original Kirby Thor page where Jane Foster is described as 'Thor's Gal' in Jack's margin notes. Lee and Kirby were old pros enjoying a surprising second act; they weren't sweating the details, they were just riding the wave. The Fantastic Four between abt issues 25-80 is still, imho, pretty near-perfect superhero comics. Now most of that is Jack's doing, obviously, but I think Stan contributed something, too - not to mention Joe Sinnott, who really gave the comic a very sleek finish, with no details cheated on.

I've been surprised by how long some of the '60s stories lasted (I think there was a stretch of Thor that sustained an ongoing narrative for about a year and a half). Most of them are total shaggy dog stories that end up miles away from where they started, but still. I expected "one and done" to be more of the norm but that largely tapers off in the early '60s. Although I understand that it does become more the norm in the late '60s/early '70s?

There was definitely a period in the late 60s/early 70s where Marvel swore off continued stories, but they soon gave up on that.

a lot of the 60s Thor run is overlapping story arcs - in the middle of one three-issue story they'll introduce the elements that lead into the next three-issue arc *rinse and repeat*. this gets messed up towards the end of the Kirby run, the last 6 months or so there is clearly some editorial meddling/fighting over the direction of the book

also Ward mentioned him already but I wanted to give some more love to Chic Stone as a Kirby inker, some really nice looking issues got turned out under that combo

i totally get that it's not a good look to be all "WHY AIN'T THIS FUNNYBOOK CONTINUITY RIGHT IN 1962, I DEMAND CLARITY" but they're just barely trying to keep the train on the tracks for much of this year.
in any case, these are an easier read than i remember. reading on a pad is fun!

continuity is for chumps

hmm, i'm tempted to do the same. there a good reading guide for that era through MU?

Quick question: is Masterworks dead? I've been steadily buying and enjoying the trade paperbacks. What am I supposed to do? I'm running out! Help!

I don't need continuity, but when continuity is an explicit goal, I appreciate when it's well-maintained. I get the logistical challenges involved (particularly over the course of several decades) and I'm not particularly pedantic about it, but if you're telling a story, I'm kind of a stickler for the basics of storytelling mechanics. Which implies at least a degree of consistency.

Not that this applies to early silver age Marvel. AFAICT, these guys were just beginning to move away from a world of one-off stories (or, at best, random snapshots of the lives of ongoing characters) so I'm forgiving of their narrative foibles.

Nhex, I posted this link a few posts up.

And on the off-chance that anyone here wasn't already aware of it, the Unofficial Handbook of Marvel Comics Creators is a godsend of an online resource. Prepare to lose some productive hours.

thanks OL

Masterworks are still coming out sporadically

Ward- Do you consider the 60s Marvel artists even better than early 50s EC? I think Kirby and Ditko are more visionary than the EC guys, but I think EC stable is better because the sheer number of brilliant artists they had, no substandard guys. Even the not-so-great brief guest artists were pretty solid.
Too many Marvel comics from the 60s look a bit shoddy. I'm a big fan of Bill Everett (or at least certain eras of him) but I don't think his work for Dr Strange, Hulk, Daredevil or various other things were very good. I think it looks like he's been pressured to modernise and it looks very uncomfortable.

Old mainstream comics are a source of endless bittersweet frustration to me. A lot of them are very important to me and I like those artists better than any other era of comics yet I feel the comics are like piles of crap with dazzling gems embedded in them.
I really wish the creators could do it all over again with the hindsight we have today and condense all the good things into a smaller and better collection of books. But it's difficult to imagine how they'd do it.
Anthology comics like Tales From The Crypt, Amazing Adult Fantasy, Creepy, Ghostly Tales and Twisted Tales are a real passion of mine but it's hard to imagine them being done to any really satisfying level. Coming up with that many good short stories seems impossible. It's no wonder they stole and recycled so many ideas.

I love the Essential/Showcase format so much that it's a real pain I can't fully enjoy anything on offer in them. Flipping through Dr Strange is great though.

Part of me wishes all these artists had became fine artists instead. A disreputable bunch of fantasy artists.

moments of genius amidst the shoddy/cliched/nonsensical stuff is part of the appeal for me, I think

I'm warming more to the stories as i read them in bulk

yet I feel the comics are like piles of crap with dazzling gems embedded in them

This reminds me of reading old Donald Duck comics. Carl Barks on ten pages, then pure crap the rest of the way.

moments of genius amidst the shoddy/cliched/nonsensical stuff is part of the appeal for me, I think

― soref, Wednesday, 4 February 2015

Have you ever seen something that was completely amazing and then said "I wish this had worse writing with insanely excessive pointless repetition, more sloppy/rushed looking visuals, worse designs, mistakes and recycling of good things that cheapens the first time they were done"?

Nhex- I think most of the better modern comics have less heaps of flaws than my favourite comics of 50s to mid80s.

Have you ever seen something that was completely amazing and then said "I wish this had worse writing with insanely excessive pointless repetition, more sloppy/rushed looking visuals, worse designs, mistakes and recycling of good things that cheapens the first time they were done"?

I'm a Doctor Who fan, so...

Haha. I haven't seen much Doctor Who but what I liked some of the Pertwee era.

Nhex- I think most of the better modern comics have less heaps of flaws than my favourite comics of 50s to mid80s.

also lol DJP

In modern comics I rarely find that sort of density that old comics are plagued with or The need they had to tell you everything a few times. That's one great thing about Japan, even their old comics breeze along by comparison.

I mean, what sort of problems do the better comics have today? Some of the colouring is really bad but I can't think of much else.

wait. i'm sorry, i totally misread you, i thought you were saying the opposite thing

Ward- Do you consider the 60s Marvel artists even better than early 50s EC?

I don't know about 'better'. As a comic strip artist (rather than illustrator) Kirby could do things Al Williamson couldn't (ie tell a dynamic and personally invested story), but it would be difficult to argue against the sheer craft of so many of the EC artists in their prime, and Marvel never really offered the same kind of freedom to experiment with form that people like Krigstein, Kurtzman or Craig enjoyed at EC (it also seems really obvious that the way that Marvel addressed its readership through letter columns and so on owed a great deal to the way that Gaines/Feldstein spoke to, and engaged with, 'EC Fan-Addicts'). In both Marvel and EC's case, it makes much more sense to read their comics on an installment basis, rather than in huge chunks, when the limitations of formula and genre start to become very apparent.

no substandard guys

Never been much of a Jack Kamen fan; the Harrison/Wood collaborations are horrible; Severin inked by Elder is not playing to either of their strengths; Feldstein's stiffly ugly artwork is the v definition of an acquired taste. There's plenty of dross in every major EC title if you dig deep enough, tho' by about '53 all of their major artists are absolutely ON FIRE.

moments of genius amidst the shoddy/cliched/nonsensical stuff is part of the appeal for me, I think

Agree w/ this. It seems like a real fool's errand - or a recipe for perpetual disappointment - to expect a constant stream of 'masterpieces' from such a labour intensive and economically marginalised cultural form as the monthly American colour comic book. The dross illuminates the good stuff, if only by negative example.

the technology advances in production and printing alone have made comics a more consistently high quality product

Some of the 'modern' computer colouring, illustration and lettering tools used by current comic book artists look ineffably ugly and vulgar to my old school eyes, so I don't necessarily think technological improvement equates to a 'quality' product (actual 60s Marvel comics, printed from the original artwork, usually seem far more beautiful and elegant than the whizzbang stuff of today, imho). Obviously modern, streamlined storytelling techniques are a response to the fact that these days, comic book readers have so many other distractions and pleasures to choose from, so there simply isn't time for the huge amount of (over)writing that ppl like Stan and Roy Thomas could indulge in. Again, I don't think this means that the caption-less, thought balloon-less, read-it-in-five-minutes comic book is automatically superior, or inferior.

great post, ward!

Severin inked by Elder is not playing to either of their strengths

but it's so cuuuurious! such a weird blend of their two styles - not complementary, not an improvement, but a really interesting combination. like P Craig Russell on Mignola.

Some of the 'modern' computer colouring, illustration and lettering tools used by current comic book artists look ineffably ugly and vulgar to my old school eyes

I find 92% of '60s Marvel str8 unreadable but it's SO much easier on the eye to flip through, or look at images from, than 98% of modern assembly-line comics

Ward otm

I like Kamen a lot, some of his rendering ability is stunning. His work for the picto fiction line is really impressive.
Remember all those jokes about Kamen being "too nice?", get a load of this
http://www.comics.org/issue/353075/cover/4/

I love Feldstein. His work always looks very alive and awake to me.

It really doesn't help that there's so much hype and worship around EC and silver age Marvel. The way reprints are often priced and presented reinforces that. There are still lots of seemingly otherwise sane adults who will freak out in denial if you say to them that these comics are badly written (I think Feldstein writes fine but there's just too way way way much of it). As a teenager reading all those TwoMorrows magazines, I felt like a blasphemer when I was admitting the flaws of the classics.

I really like the idea of reading Kirby era Fantastic Four but I just can't and that's pretty damming that lots of people feel this way. But I should say there are lots of golden and silver age comics that read just great and have very economical writing. Even some Stan Lee comics from the 50s are relatively restrained. I think Eisner's Spirit reads well. Kids comics should read like that.
It's just incredibly unfortunate that two of the best sets of old American comics are written the way they are.

In the Masterworks reprints I remember Mike Allred going along with all the hype, so when Steve Bissette written his alarmingly frank introduction for Amazing Fantasy Omnibus, I was amazed Marvel printed it.

As much as I think it's true that people underestimated these comics, I think it's very important to see that the snobby public was half right that these comics are trash.

Heinlein's Law applies but i don't see why you can't also apply Oscar's Law.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxgWHzMvXOY

Marvel never really offered the same kind of freedom to experiment with form that people like Krigstein, Kurtzman or Craig enjoyed at EC

This is interesting because a lot of people consider EC too rigid with their overall form but they certainly allowed everyone their own drawing style. Krigstein had to fight to get his way with the panel arrangements at EC but he went nuts with his work for other publishers.

Forks, can you tell me the title of that video because my kindle doesn't show embedded videos.

Oscar the Grouch's "I Love Trash"

To be honest, I love a lot of the overwritten Stan Lee stuff. That's what I come for. To want to erase that or edit it out seems like a fool's errand along the lines of colourising old movies or, you know, the Star Wars special editions. These comics are what they are, they're a point in the evolution of the form, and trying to change them so they read better to current generations seems crazy wrong to me. If you don't like them then read modern comics that are more to your tastes (and which, in forty years, will doubtless seem as dated and unreadable as you feel Silver Age marvels are). You're not wrong or right to have issues with this era of comics, but they are what they are.

I would never want them edited or changed by anyone.
Feldstein at least seemed to understand he'd overdone it and made them less readable.
Finding Stan Lee's cheer and goofiness charming is understandable but having blocks of text repeatedly explaining the same thing is something I don't know how anyone can defend. A lot of comics from that time never did this.

Wishing they were more economically written (like Eisner's Spirit or Joe Gill's Gorgo & Konga, Tezuka and lots of other old comics) is not remotely the same as colouring black and white movies or adding things to Star Wars.
But Marvel actually does something along those lines. Not only are they horribly recolored in a way that ruins the art (ruining the best reason to buy these comics), some are even redrawn.
http://ohdannyboy.blogspot.co.uk/2008/06/original-art-stories-marvel-masterworks.html
They are fucking with their own comics in a way I think is vile.

Some earlier reprints removed the dotted eyes from Spiderman when he sees Uncle Ben's killer because apparently it looked too goofy for such an important moment.
Some Tomb Of Dracula reprints (such as the Essential collections) covered up female nipples that were in the originals.
http://groovyageofhorror.blogspot.co.uk/2006/09/censored-essentials.html?zx=b452862fc142c0fb

Re: experimentation in Marvel, Gene Colan faced resistance for his work.

And to be totally clear, in this context overwritten doesn't mean purple prose (I love HP Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. I actually prefer this style to most styles), it means writing the same information again and again and again as if you're trying to beat the information into a child.

Re: dotted Spiderman eyes.
http://comiccoverage.typepad.com/comic_coverage/2008/08/humble-beginnings-spider-manaka-mr-peepers.html

as if you're trying to beat the information into a child

uh this is what they were trying to do

I'm sure most children understood the first time. And if they didn't they'd go back and read it again. Like they'd do with any other well written comic for kids.

Chris Claremont is almost painful for me to read sometimes due to his style being that, forever. Every issue forever telling you that Storm is mistress of the elements, claustrophobic, and strong

Len Wein's Swamp Thing. "Shambling muck encrusted monstosity", I'm sure lines like that were repeated loads of times.

i caught the spider irises for the first time on this recent readthru and they are AMAZING

i think another thing to remember is that these comics weren't written to be masterpieces, or given the budget or timetables to become masterpieces - that they were written fast, and suffer for that low budget, hurried production process. i'm not saying that voids your issues with these comics, but they weren't being written for us to appreciate decades later - they were written to make money, and quickly.

Given that situation, it was even less sense the way they were written. Stan Lee always praised his artists by saying they barely needed dialogue to be understood. So my theory is that he was trying to justify his presence with such an abundance of writing. Maybe he felt competitive.
Most people facing Stan Lee's schedule would have been incredibly restrained.

I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was SpidaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

Every issue forever telling you that Storm is mistress of the elements, claustrophobic, and strong

haha yeah I can't take this w Claremont either

"Given that situation, it was even less sense the way they were written"
Should have written "it makes even less sense"

the admittedly painful repetition of themes and key dialogue is easier to take if you break up the reading process and don't try to read the sheaf of pamphlets as if they were a novel.

One of my favorite lines to come out of this '60s Marvel readthrough: someone is confused by something ridiculous that happens in an issue of Tales To Astonish and Hank Pym's response is, "Explanations are too boring!"

Ron Goulart is the first person I ever seen comment on this. He said it drove him nuts because it was like someone narrating a film while you watched it, describing everything on screen.
I think he was told to write more words per panel and he took too much pride in his work to go along with that nonsense.

I think EC comics were possibly worse for this "tell it 3 times" phenomenon. Told in the caption, told in the image and then told in the dialogue balloon.

Example: a panel of two men, one looks angry and threatening, the other looks afraid and is starting to back away. Caption says "The stranger looked angry and Bobby was feeling threatened and he started to back away, fearing what the stranger might do". Dialogue has Bobby saying "hey fella, simmer down, you're scaring me. What are you gonna do?".

A lot of these comics had pages filled with that. Whether you're a kid buying them as they came out or an adult fan reading them decades later who wants to read large amounts of them eventually, it's difficult to space them out so it isn't too grating.

This isn't totally relevant but some of my favourite comics dialogue is this by Basil Wolverton. I memorized it without much trouble and I read it ten years ago. It's a couple afraid of two hairy ape men, the man says to his girlfriend "Let's tear, Claire! I don't care for that nightmare pair with the rare hair!"

I was reading through the first collection of Remender's Uncanny Avengers (I give it a 4/10) and boy there a lot of fucking panels in it. I can't tell whether it's pastiche or deliberate. Either way the comic is not very good.

I think even the trashiest, hackiest of '60s Marvel comics have beautiful single panels or pages in them, even when the whole story together is garbage.

Marvel overwriting is weird - actually I find Claremont okay! His sentences are pretty clear and clipped even if they're bombastic/repetitive. It's the 70s era (Thomas/Wein/Gerber/Englehart/etc) I find quite hard work, except for maybe Jim Starlin.

Also I grew up with Edgar P Jacobs' comics and those are fucking dull and wordy as shit, so maybe I'm not the average. (Beautiful art though.)

And obvs Kieron Gillen does some magnficent panel-overwordiness in Journey into Mystery.

I never have to deal with this stuff because there are virtually no Marvel/DC superhero comics I want to read but this nicely sums up bad habits of the writing in the new stuffhttp://groovyageofhorror.blogspot.com/2009/11/blackest-night-midpoint.html
The middle bit with The Flash talking.

If I was to point out some problems of modern comics I liked. I think some of Alan Moore's work has text captions too visually descriptive to be put in with comic art. Particularly that Swamp Thing issue of psychedelic sex. I liked some of the writing in that but it's awkward reading a comics page and trying to visualise all these amazing things he talks about.

The new Sandman Overture looks like it has way too much blocks of text in with so much complex imagery. If they made it an illustrated prose book, I think I might have read it.

http://groovyageofhorror.blogspot.com/2009/11/blackest-night-midpoint.html

Corrected link

Well, TBF, the existence of Blackest Night nicely sums up bad modern-era mainstream comics.

Immediately after spending hundreds of dollars on that mess was roughly the point I jumped off the DC bus.

geoff johns is SO BAD, history is not gonna be kind to him

Definitely a good touchstone there. He also links to the reintroduction of Black Hand in Green Lantern, which had some great artwork and storytelling, but at the same time was just so gratuitously grim. The pinnacle being that full-pager of him blowing his brains out with the laser - it's an incredibly arresting image, but just too much.

To be more positive, my favourite Marvel thing is mostly Dr Strange. I like lots of their anthology comics and it's easy to forget they published stuff like Powerhouse Pepper but the most I ever enjoyed a Marvel comic is when Baron Mordo chases Dr Strange across the world. I love that part where he divides into multiple identical versions of himself to mislead and confuse his enemies.

Gene Golan's Dr Strange work is amazing to flip through because it always looks like amazing and important things are happening.

http://comicartfans.com/galleryroom.asp?gsub=14639

I still like a lot of things about Ditko's Spiderman, for me the fashions and settings are important so it's hard for a modernized version to be as compelling. Some of Everett's Sub-Mariner looks really great.
I think Marvel's big supernatural and cosmic space/multi-dimensional stuff has always been more compellingly visualized than DC. Thanks to a relative few artists for inventing that more operatic and psychedelic approach.

For a very modern superhero approach I think Claudio Castellini's Silver Surfer is pretty impressive.

Gay, I'm 're-using too many words.

Sorry, WHAT THE FUCK is kindle doing, all these mistakes then making me sound like a homophobe.

Some have defended G Johns because apparently he takes his job very seriously as a way to impart his lessons about life. They say he really thinks of ways to make his readers lead better lives.

Maybe somebody hacked my kindle and put in all these ridiculous corrections that make no sense.

Geoff Johns thinks of ways to make me lead a better life by not giving me any reasons to read his funnybooks

but it's so cuuuurious! such a weird blend of their two styles - not complementary, not an improvement, but a really interesting combination. like P Craig Russell on Mignola.

Nicely put! But I'm not sure the world needs as much of the Sev/Eld stuff as we ended up with. The issues of Rom pencilled by Ditko and inked by PCR are also a tasty treat.

Re: experimentation in Marvel, Gene Colan faced resistance for his work.

Wasn't this only really toward the end of Colan's tenure at Marvel, when he fell foul of some Jim Shooter bullshit about 'proper' comics storytelling?

The wordiness on 60s/70s Marvel Comics is obv a by-product of the 'Marvel Method', where the pages are drawn first and then dialogued/captioned after (sorry if explaining that is like explaining Storm's powers every issue - there are always new readers!) And yeah RAG, the writer/editor types like Lee, Thomas, Wein, Wolfman etc def looked upon it as their chance to wrest some of the storytelling control back from the artists - if the lazy/bloody-minded/more talented penciller hadn't drawn what had been plotted/expected, then that could be 'corrected' by a mass of words.

Excessive writing - in tone and quantity - was also a gesture towards the literary. Lee and Kirby had experienced first hand the 1950s anti-comics moral panic, so Lee's garrulousness could be presented as an attempt to broaden the vocabularies of his young readers, and position the superhero comics closer to the respectable literary novel. Again, the typeset (Kurtzman's war comics were hand-lettered) ECs strips written/edited by Gaines/Feldman were very 'aspirational' in terms of cultural reach, and that very much included their own mad idea of what constituted fine writing, expressed in pulp purple plastered all over the page.

And writing lots of words was seen as a benevolent gesture to the reader - it made the comic book a denser object, a 'bigger' read. These days, I don't think we're obliged to read every last 'face front true believers'.

It could have been just Shooter against Gene Colan but I've heard people like John Romita Sr say that Stan Lee gave a lot of artists a hard time. Stan didn't like Gil Kane's art and many artists were pressured to look more like Kirby and Romita. Ditko was left alone obviously, I think Stan understood his work.

doubt Stan understood much of anything, Ditko likely less malleable than the others

http://dialbforblog.com/archives/296/one_or_the_other.gif

http://charm-of-charlton.de/
Elsewhere I talked about Gaines stealing horror concepts from someone else but I don't think I ever remembered the link but here it is. Sheldon Moldoff makes a pretty convincing case that he was done wrong but I don't think anyone can claim to have invented horror comic anthologies that late.
The first horror comic anthology was a few years earlier and there were others before EC started.
http://www.comics.org/issue/215631/cover/4/

Also I grew up with Edgar P Jacobs' comics and those are fucking dull and wordy as shit, so maybe I'm not the average. (Beautiful art though.)

I was gonna mention Jacobs' Blake & Mortimer as one of the worst example of the "words telling you the exact same thing as pictures" phemomenon Robert mentioned. Like, you could literally remove all the third-person narration boxes (which appear in abundance) from those comics, and the plot would still be as easy to follow. I find this particularly weird given that, before Blake & Mortimer, Jacobs worked for a long time as Herge's assistant in Tintin, which a complete opposite to B&M: Herge (correctly) trusted that the visual storytelling was enough, so Tintin comics have pretty much no narration boxes at all.

To want to erase that or edit it out seems like a fool's errand along the lines of colourising old movies or, you know, the Star Wars special editions. These comics are what they are, they're a point in the evolution of the form, and trying to change them so they read better to current generations seems crazy wrong to me.

Robert touched on this but it can't be reiterated enough that the hideous recolouring (and NOT recolouring for white paper!) makes basically every Marvel reprint from the '50s to the '80s read worse to current generations, or other people with eyes

except for Essentials I guess, which you must also be opposed to?

aw I really like my Thor Masterworks - I have a few original issues too but idk if I would say they look any better, faded as they are

I don't like Essentials, fuck b&w reprints of color material

reprints of 80s era stuff do look weird to me tho

Ditko and Gene Colan look superior in black and white. Way more atmospheric. I think Colan prefers his work not being coloured.

I think Eisner seen the Masterworks and DC Archives and made sure Spirit Archives didn't look like those. Respect.

Is there a better version of the Nick Fury/SHIELD material that's been reprinted other than the TPB? Never got confirmation the Masterworks one is any different, but the trade has the worst coloring ever

Well, at least bad enough that Steranko cringed for a while if someone showed it to him

Poor Steranko. When talking about the new colouring of Red Sonja, Frank Thorne said "They raped my Sonja".

Surely everyone agrees that Alex Toth and Mort Meskin look better in black and white?

I think 50s horror comics lose something when they're just black and white but I won't complain; I think Fantagraphics is doing a great job with their EC reprints. The recent EC Archives really blundered by changing the color to a more literal colouring. The originals had something similar to the impressionistic colourful lighting of Bava and Argento films.

Some people even get torrents of scans from the original comics to avoid bad recoloring jobs. You hear that, big comic companies? Your recolouring is so bad it's creating piracy.

I gave away that nick fury tpb. Just unreadable.

There's a new trade of all the Steranko SHIELD material that came out sometime last year. I haven't seen it so I can't speak for the coloring.

I'd be surprised if they changed their reproduction methods. Don't know why a lot of the bigger publishers are often reluctant to use the type of cleaned up scans everyone else sensibly uses.

I had no idea about artists reworking those TPB reprints - that is complete horseshit.
Actually I do feel the same way about the B&W reprint volumes. Yes, sometimes they look better, but it always bothers me that it looks completely different as it did on publication.

again, so do the colour ones

i don't disagree

also

Some Tomb Of Dracula reprints (such as the Essential collections) covered up female nipples that were in the originals.
http://groovyageofhorror.blogspot.co.uk/2006/09/censored-essentials.html?zx=b452862fc142c0fb

i am indeed shocked that mainstream comics had *gasp* nipples! in them

The censored material first appeared in the black and white Tomb of Dracula magazine, which bypassed Comics Code Authority prohibitions against vampire nipples.

I agree that modern recolouring and 'restoring' of vintage material is on the whole very unsatisfactory - would much rather see reprints shot directly from clean copies of the original comics, as in The Smithsonian Book of Comic Books, or Spiegelman's children's comics anthology. Those huge original art repro books are very nice too, if you can afford them.

Part of the problem is that at the time, Marvel failed to keep decent film of the original artwork (which is of course now scattered far and wide, if it even still exists). DC, by contrast, have much better negatives of their old comics - the reproduction on their black and white reprint Showcase books is far superior to the repro in the Marvel Esssentials, by and large.

Robert touched on this but it can't be reiterated enough that the hideous recolouring (and NOT recolouring for white paper!) makes basically every Marvel reprint from the '50s to the '80s read worse to current generations, or other people with eyes

― oochie wally (clean version) (sic), Thursday, February 5, 2015 11:49 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

except for Essentials I guess, which you must also be opposed to?

― oochie wally (clean version) (sic), Thursday, February 5, 2015 11:50 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

to be honest i thought we were discussing narrative and dialogue. i'm not so bothered about colouring, and while i'd much rather the Essentials volumes to be in colour, if I have to lose that to gain a phone-book's worth of comics at a small price I'm fine with that.

Anyone know if Marvel's Atlas era anthologies will ever go into public domain if they aren't already? Other publishers have reprinted bits of that work but is there some sort of limit on it?

Because Marvel are probably never going to do good reprints of them.
http://ditkocultist.com/2014/01/30/original-art-tales-to-astonish-13-marvel-1960/

Don't think there's much here that hasn't be said before - and the text seems to be very verbatim - but still some nuggets of interest in John Romita's deposition to the Marvel/Kirby Family lawsuit:

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/03/09/the-john-romita-deposition-for-the-kirby-family-v-marvel-lawsuit/

Thought this bit was particularly interesting:

Q: So what would Stan do with notes or the dialogue in the margins?

JOHN ROMITA: I used to write notes that I thought were clever. I’d say “maybe he should say ‘what’s up’,” you know, something like that.

They sounded clever to me while I was doing the drawing. 3 in the morning everything sounds clever. He invariably would not use them, and I asked him once “why wouldn’t you use — why wouldn’t you let him” — he said something similar. He said, “because I can’t speak in somebody else’s vernacular.” He says, “when I am writing my characters, I am writing in Peter Parker’s personality and Aunt May’s personality and I write the captions in my personality. If I start putting your personality in there, I am going to confuse the reader.” So he used to -he told me — he invariably did not use anything that was in the margins that was cleverly suggested by the artists, because he said he did not want to stray from his normal approach. He had a dialogue going with the reader. Saying “dear reader, this is your editor speaking right now.” He used to do that. It used to drive me crazy. I used to tell him “you are puncturing the illusion.” It’s like opening a door in the theater and letting the sunlight in and everybody realizes they are watching a movie now. I said “you are ruining” — he said, “it doesn’t matter. I am talking to my readers.”

I'd buy the Miller Daredevils as b&w Essentials if they existed, as the recolouring in the collected versions is atrocious.

agreed; i'm perfectly happy with the floppies

Something that often looks really brilliant: black and white with newly added grey tones.

i wonder how the coloring in those TPBs is compared to the stuff on Marvel Unlimited. Do they put the redone stuff up on there?

Just got to Neal Adams on X-Men. One of the best draftsmen thus far but also one of the absolute worst storytellers. A series of pin-ups do not a coherent story make bud, bud.

Oh, phone. Please suck a fuck.

i wonder how the coloring in those TPBs is compared to the stuff on Marvel Unlimited. Do they put the redone stuff up on there?

Yeah, the covers are the same, but the contents are recoloured (for Daredevil at least). It's annoying.

I can't remember, are there any members of the Council of Reeds left from Hickman's FF run, or did they all get killed or merged into a giant green head

am I the only one who is inordinately excited about the idea behind A-Force

looks cool!

I'm wondering how Al Ewing's Mighty Avengers will flush out

am I the only one who is inordinately excited about the idea behind A-Force

plz tell me this is a reboot of Atari Force

oh wait that was a DC property wasn't it :(

http://www.cnet.com/news/a-force-assemble-all-female-avengers-team-on-the-way-from-marvel/

"She's actually a cosmological event -- a pocket universe that gained self-consciousness during the radical upheaval of 'Secret Wars.'" Inspired by Q from "Star Trek: The Next Generation," Singularity is "learning about the human race as an outsider," according to Wilson.

lol rmde

"that pocket universe has breasts!"

this is like the fourth "universe personified" Marvel has had!

how is that (adjectiveless) all-female X-Men book doing?

this is like the fourth "universe personified" Marvel has had!

Yeah I mean Captain Universe is currently an Avenger, this is nothing new.

how is that (adjectiveless) all-female X-Men book doing?

It's a top 100 book but afaict sales have been in a steady decline over the past year.

not to mention the Beyonder, who... something something secret wars

ftr I'm not as eye-rolly at things like Eternity or Captain Universe as I am at the idea that a universe has a gender

lady pocket universe's drive like THIS

gods having genders is stupid, sure

um, today's Spider-Man comic has Peter Porker saying "Face it pal, you just got hamboozled!"

lol

am I the only one who is inordinately excited about the idea behind A-Force

plz tell me this is a reboot of Atari Force

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, 10 February 2015 19:32 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh wait that was a DC property wasn't it :(

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, 10 February 2015 19:32 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Think Atari Force was actually owned by Atari, and that's why those comics have never been reprinted (which is a shame - beautiful Garcia Lopez a/work on those early issues).

well, funny thing: https://archive.org/details/atariforcecomics#collection-title

shame about the marvel micronauts series for the same reason, and that's a series that was very dear to my heart. It had its longeurs but there were several stretches where mantlo caught fire (not just the initial run with M Golden).

Yeah, it's unfortunate that, between that and ROM, Mantlo cornered the market on popular late-'70s/early-'80s Marvel titles that will likely never be reprinted.

Well, him and Moench, I guess.

re: Moench are you referring to Kung Fu...? I follow Diversions of the Groovy Kind religiously and he's always putting up issues of that, and given that he p much sticks to stuff that's never reprinted I was wondering what the deal was there.

It's because Fu Manchu is still somehow under copyright.

jeez, is that why they never reprinted Master of Kung Fu? Damn.

you'd think the copyright holder would be falling all over themselves to shed that most racist invention of the pulp era. But yeah. (I'm an HPL and REH fan despite their noxious facets, but I don't ever expect to reread Sax Rohmer).

Rohmer's Fu Manchu supporting characters Nayland Smith and Petrie also turn up in MOKF, tho I imagine their value as 'properties' are negligible.

There's another 60s Marvel repeated annoyance!

"Hey, look at Harry Osborn's Fu Manchu moustache" "You like my Fu Manchu moustache Peter?"

Don't forget Mary Jane's outtasight "ginchy" new haircut.

bring back "ginchy"

been there, done that

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/FullTextSearchControllerServlet?terms=ginchy&offset=0&searchtype=text&startdate=&enddate=&artefact=messages&idtype=null&sortorder=Relevance&boardid=0

I know the early Ultimate Spiderman comics had lots of nu-metal t-shirts and modern teenage speak but did any of those comics have stuff like "lol, random"?

this is just a thought but maybe you would enjoy reading comics from different eras more if you didn't come across as explicitly looking for things in them to complain about

To be fair, Harry's mustache and Mary Jane's new do are probably the biggest '60s Marvel tonsorial mistakes I've seen outside of Doc Ock's perennial bowl cut.

Harry's mustache and Mary Jane's new do

don't recall these - pics?

I read these comics mostly because those eras are my favourite in terms of American comic artists. Now I just tend to look at them instead of reading.

And I find some of the dialogue funny. There's a Spiderman annual with bonus page of Aunt talking hip and groovy and then Stan Lee actually apologizes for it in a caption below.

Harry's mustache has it's own marvel wiki page:

http://marvel.wikia.com/Harry_Osborn's_Fu_Manchu

http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130421143111/marveldatabase/images/2/2f/Harry_Osborn_in_1969.JPG

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6512/558/320/File0501.jpg

nice.

lol

Extra points to anyone who can get a scan of Aunt May talking hip. I almost certain it's a backup in a Romita drawn annual.

When I watched the first season of SNL, I was ultimately more fascinated with the shots of the audience than anything else. Talk about a time capsule of godawful hair and style choices. So given the way things were headed by the late '60s, I really look forward to seeing Marvel's depictions of 1975.

Peter Parker's ugly jacket with tassels is the only thing that stuck out to me. I think his sideburns got longer too but it wasn't a bad look.

http://www.spidermancrawlspace.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/91.jpg

God DAMN but the influence on xaime is writ large there

it really is

Woody Allen Lives

Well done Bizarro Gazzara. Funny that even Fu Manchu is there.

I always thought Gilbert was the most Romita inspired one.

was wondering - is this Fu Manchu copyright thing also the reason the character is never referenced by name in the initial League of Extraordinary Gentlemen storyline?

yeah, it is

someone should do an intentional meta thing about the strange numinous menace of the licensed-character-who-cannot-be-named. (someone probably has, probably moore even)

Should just call him Nu Manchu and get on with it.

Marvel/Agents of Atlas sort of did that with Yellow Claw

Yellow Claw has been around since the golden age.

call him "Craig"

The other Asian claw still gets used but he looks so monstrous that it probably doesn't register as racial caricature to most people.

I've got kind of a soft spot for characters like Fu Manchu, I always thought they were really cool but preferably the ones that don't caricature or portray Asians in general as sinister (like the crap old Karloff version of Fu Manchu).
There's quite a few of these characters in videogames and Hong Kong martial arts films but I can't presume they aren't racist because sometimes they have racial typecasting that isn't obvious to western viewers, so I wouldn't really know when those cruel emperors are supposed to be associated with foreign people. Like I read that sometimes having Japanese or Malaysian villain was like having a German or Transylvanian villain.

xp I know - in the Agents of Atlas mini they actually try to clean it up by having the guy reclaim it as "dammit it's GOLDEN CLAW you dumb racist Americans"

Which are the best crossover events worth reading?

Just finished the Infinity Gauntlet one and have all 51 issues of Infinity War lined up next (and then onto Crusade, Abyss, The End and Annihilation).

Any more recent ones worth checking out? Civil War? X-Men?

The worthiness of a given crossover can often be measured in part by how familiar you are with the characters/situations presented therein. There are several decent X-Men crossovers that may not do much for you if you haven't read a year or so ahead of when the crossover started.

The best crossover from recent years (and one that doesn't require much of a new reader) is Annihilation. The Infinity stuff doesn't really even provide much of a preamble to it. It's pretty easy to just jump right in.

kind of - since it was all on MU anyway, i did find the preceding Marvel: The End and Thanos series that preceded Annihilation to be worthwhile

really loved the mutant massacre

idk where to put this (there's no Bronze Age Marvel or Superhero Spanking threads) so um yeah:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-iN6RbCdaO_s/VPiE1ySuYLI/AAAAAAABIPE/XJCG_YRlnXc/s1600/MarvelTwo-in-One062-11.jpg

I died a little laughing at this:

http://www.frequency.com/video/staying-positive-in-apocalypse-pilot/208508354?cid=5-47

More directly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV54wy_IBVg

So I'm apparently going all-in on Secret Wars and its 25,847 crossover issues. In case you were wondering who'd be dumb enough to do that.

post here.

Make a thread like Aldo's 52 excursion.

that video is pretty great btw

The best thing about DC this week has been the last issues of a lot of books, and stories actually ENDING.

I'm a few years behind on Marvel stuff so I've put my silver age marathon on pause (up to '71 currently) to catch up on material that seems like it might be germane to Secret Wars. Having only read a little of Hickman's Secret Warriors and Fantastic Four before, my current deep plunge into that material has been overwhelming. I don't know if it's going to ultimately add up to anything or how long it's going to take to get there if it does, but every one of these issues is a massive info dump of new concepts and new characters and new timelines and locations. Pretty much the polar opposite of the decompressed style that was so in vogue just a few years prior. I can see where it might've been kind of a confusing slog to keep up with on a monthly basis, but it's been thrilling to read through a couple years' worth of this over a handful of days. Feel like that dude's home must be plastered floor to ceiling with notes and maps and strings connecting this map to that note. Depending on how adroitly he's been able to play the long game, I have a degree of faith that he'll be able to make Secret Wars Mk 2 an interesting failure at the very least.

I'm actually quite excited to read it.

Yeah, me too, despite being out of the modern day Marvel loop for a while. It feels more like a proper EVENT than the crossovers they've gotten in the habit of tossing out every few months. It's sparking a bit of the excitement I got from tracking down new Infinity Gauntlet installments back in the day, which is the thing that began my Zombification in earnest.

I'm going to read it just in hopes of it starting out with a recap of what the hell's been happening in the Avengers titles for the last 2 years, because I'm pretty much lost.

I initially thought I'd just cover a little bit of the preamble by reading the Time Runs Out stuff but then I made the mistake of reading hints and allegations that Hickman has been planting these seeds for years and I appear to have fallen down a rabbit hole where I've deluded myself into thinking I can read the last half decade of Marvel's output in the next couple of weeks. Because that's my brain for ya.

Nothing is directly tied to the Council of Reeds that he did back in FF, but there's definitely a line of continuity from those days to now

the only prepping i've done is Hickman's New Avengers + Avengers runs and i feel totally prepared. overprepared even.

The Avengers' insane plottiness makes it seem like Hickman is constituionally incapable of doing character work or jokes, but there's a lot of sweet-natured character stuff in his Fantastic Four. I wonder why he seems to have intentionally subsumed that aspect this time 'round (not that I don't enjoy the insane plottiness). I need an Anhillus on the crapper moment.

Started the Hickman Avengers - it's really nice art but the fight scenes are all completely incoherent. Totes impressed they could sell this to people issue by issue when half are just introducing a new character so far (through 8-9).

One of my Secret Wars solicitations this month is "Mrs. Deadpool and the Howling Commandos." Basically rolling dice on ordering that.

do it, what the hell

I don't know if this is a useful metric but, while I probably would not usually have purchased a comic called Mrs. Deadpool and the Howling Commandos, I will be purchasing (and I guess I technically have already purchased) a comic called Mrs. Deadpool and the Howling Commandos because it will also have the words "Secret" and "Wars" on the cover.

So, Iceman's gay then.

On the Deadpool thing, he's been married to Shiklah Queen of the Undead for about a year.

um, this seems counter to iceman's long term storyline?

Remember when he kept trying to date Opal, and his dad was furious because she was Japanese? And then, she kind of dumped him because he was never interested in her unless she was in trouble.

iceman has successfully dated zero women, iirc

An interesting post about that.

having read two pages and not the entire issue where this is a plot beat, yes, it does seem really token and dismissive

really this is about establishing his sexuality as canon before this summer where we get an adult gay Iceman who has never been interested in women being the only multiversal survivor post-Battleworld

that's weird and interesting reading AF, i'm at a loss at the suggestion that skirt-chasing bobby was just dealing with being in the closet for the past sixtyfive years but hey, whatever.

I'm a superhero comics infant, now about halfway through Infinity in the Hickman Avengers/New Avengers run and it's kind of off-putting how they'll spend five issues laying out plot and then BAM kind of incoherent resolution in the sixth issue just in time for the TPB collection.

Are the majors usually better about pacing, or is that par for the course?

I do like that Spider-Man is a bit of a dick.

Yeah, the Mrs. Deadpool thing happened a while back (tbh, I measure big events/comic time in the ridiculous high-dollar variants I was able to sell on Ebay).

At least with most of the Secret Wars titles there's something I can connect to, but is Mrs. Deadpool going to sell the same as Deadpool? Nah. I wound up just matching that title to my lowest Secret Wars titles.

Reading the Hickman comics does give me hope that Secret Wars is going to be much less of a disaster than Convergence, but that doesn't take much.

"Are the majors usually better about pacing, or is that par for the course?"

I don't know that there are any super hero comics going now that really excellent examples of the genre. Pacing has been pretty screwed up on current comics stretching for the trade.

While there are some really good super hero comics made in the last decade or so, I do somewhat agree with the idea that the high water mark was in the 80s.

As Ed B told me once, "the writing was so much worse but the STORIES WERE SO MUCH BETTER"

Yeah, that's true. Code comics were just different, they were more like the best Saturday morning cartoons you never saw.

You don't need to fret on the logic of why the Masters of Evil were busting into the Avengers mansion to beat the crap out of them, it was just what they did and it was cool. You get too serious and it all just breaks down.

I dispute that! I mean, I read comics in a different way now to how I did when I was 12, obviously. But I still qualitatively enjoy them a lot, when they're good, and it feels like the last decade of comics was certainly better than the decade that preceded it - both of which I (just about) experienced as an adult (in purchasing power if not maturity).

Jesus fucking christ. I count 57 Secret Wars crossover issues in July's solicitations. 57.

Yup. It's a nightmare on the retail side.

At least DC, with Convergence, made the main series returnable, offered decent discount incentives on the miniseries and all the new series launching have returnability. That made ordering easy - I met my return quota and I'll be able to adjust orders for future issues after I see how those #1s do.

Marvel doesn't give a damn. Even the number to get popular variants (like the Skottie Young covers) is high, much less to hit the few discount numbers they're offering.

tbh you can charge an arm and leg for those, that is why they figure you'll buy all the issues and pump up their numbers

otoh, I had to look up who Skottie Young is because I just read the damn things and only really get into artists over a period of issues

I really think some retailers just take the number of issues to get an incentive cover, multiply it by the per-issue wholesale cost, and then throw the incentive cover on eBay at that price.

What's the appeal of those Skottie Young covers? They are like hella ugly Margaret Keane chintz

The Young covers just go for retail - it's a different kind of incentive, you have to meet or exceed the number on a prior comic.

tbh i love the skottie young covers bcz they are adorable

I don't like all the teeth. But you know, potato potato

And the 1% retailer incentive audience say potàäæÂâåto.

Finished Avengers/New Avengers past Infinity but I'm pretty burned out on it.

What's some Marvel Unlimited classic stuff I should try?

Added Simonson/Thor and the first Runaways series

Someone on the John Buscema Facebook page shared this great anecdote about Buscema's art tuition class:

So there we were, in Buscema's Workshop for Comic Book Art, at the Commodore Hotel - one day close to Christmas. Big John decided to hand out pages of original art as a gift to each of us. As he reached my seat, he was surprised to find this splash page in the stack! "I could get $50. for this one!" he exclaimed as he tried to shuffle it back to the bottom of the stack and hand me the next page down - but the next one had been heavily corrected & pieced together... Buscema paused for a moment, looked at this longingly, then shoved it at me... "What the Hell! Merry Christmas, kid!"

And this is the page:

https://scontent-lhr3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xta1/t31.0-8/s960x960/11406607_10207496983886091_7641302544163860037_o.jpg

wow. hell of a piece of art too!

I never had much of an appreciation for Buscema (John, anyway...I was wild about Sal back in the day) until I started reading some of his old Conan stuff and wondering how the hell I'd overlooked him before.

FYI, still doing the pre-Secret Wars catch-up and started reading Remender's Captain America more out of a sense of completionism than real interest, but it's actually really good! The first arc, anyway, which is some Planet Hulk-level Big Action gamechangery.

i caught up on remender's cap recently too and really enjoyed it. cap's relationship with ian was surprisingly touching!

Yeah, he really pulled off the hat trick that's eluded Marvel so much of late in creating a big and bombastic action story that also has legitimate emotional beats and characters the reader cares about and is invested in.

Steve Rogers as a dad is really something that makes a lot of sense.

It's good! I think the run kind of falls apart after that story, sadly, although the big blowout finish is worth slogging through to get to. But then the Falcon stuff back to being super generic.

Just noticed that Jeff Lemire is the X-men writer, which is a hot snooze.

Stoked for:
Captain Marvel
Daredeveil
Dr. Strange
Iron Man
Thor
Sam Wilson, Capt. America
Vision
Spider-Man (Miles Morales)

Will give a chance for a few issues:
A-Force
All New All Different Avengers
Ant-Man
Hawkeye
New Avengers
Scarlet Witch
Squadron Supreme
Ultimates
Old Man Logan
Spider-Woman
Karnak
Uncanny Inhumans
Illuminati

Little or no interest:
Agents of SHIELD
Angela
Nova
Hulk
Uncanny Avengers
Wolverine
All New X-Men
Deadpool
Extraordinary X-Men
Uncanny X-Men
Amazing Spider-Man
Carnage
Silk
Spider-Gwen
Spider-Man 2099
Venom: Spaceknight
Web Warriors
Ms. Marvel
Guardians of the Galaxy (might check it for 1 or 2 issues)
Drax
Star-Lord
Gamora
Contest of Champions
Howard the Duck
Howling Commandos of SHIELD