A place to talk about anything to do with comics that doesn’t belong in the other threads.
Random Comics-Related Stuff
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Anyone know who the artist is on the packaging for Hasbro’s Marvel retro 3.75” toyline? Whoever they are, they’re putting out some great pieces of “classic” designs.
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‘I read all 27,000 Marvel comics and had a great time. Here’s what I learnt’
The poor bastard.
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Anyone know who the artist is on the packaging for Hasbro’s Marvel retro 3.75” toyline? Whoever they are, they’re putting out some great pieces of “classic” designs.
That looks like Buckingham’s style.
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Oh, could be. Here’s a few more to help narrow it down and because they’re nice.
Shame about the figure themselves, really.
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Love how the Wolverine figure looks short and stocky compared to the others.
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I always thought they copied art from the comics to use on those packages.
Hasbro are pretty good at commissioning art. David Nakayama does a lot of the 6” Legends box art.
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https://www.humblebundle.com/books/humanoids-megabundle-featuring-incal-books
Decent Humble Bundle this month. Incal, Metabaron, both things I’ve wanted to read. Have to pay 30 quid to get everything but it’s a damned sight cheaper than the price of the books individually. Bunch of other stuff in there some of which I’ve heard of (I backed the first Space Bastards kickstarter) and a lot that i havent.
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How Hollywood Saved Comic Books – and Then Killed Them
Another dumb article from CBR. No research, no data, just one would-be journalist making a claim and then writing an article that doesn’t actually justify or support that claim. Well done, CBR!!
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It’s a load of horseshit.
Comichron have done a much better job in using data to show that almost every year the comics publishing income grows and that growth in recent years is in collected editions, which are much easier to access.
In early 2011 there was panic that the best selling title in comics was a Green Lantern issue with 85,000 sales. The latest chart shows 8 titles selling more than that, with the peak at 150k. That’s despite the fact that in early 2011 day and date digital comics didn’t exist. So at the average estimate they are 30% of total sales they are doing even better again.
There is one thing guaranteed in comic fandom is that they have predicted the death and decline of the medium every year for 50 years and it never happens. They try and connect ‘other media’ success to speciality store sales when that also never happens but a quick glance at stuff like Amazon sales always shows that they rocket with a movie release.
The week the X-Men: Days of Future Past film came out the number 1 graphic novel on Amazon was Claremont and Byrne’s Days of Future Past. This is exactly what Millar repeated when he was here that his trade sales went through the roof with a movie release.,
These people, to be polite, are idiots. If anyone has been paid for that garbage article good luck to them.
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Here’s Bruno, talking about 2021 in his and John’s comic shop, and counting down their best selling comics/collections:
https://sktchd.com/longform/on-a-enormous-year-for-big-bang-comics-from-the-shop-itself/ (Free from paywall)
The first thing you need to know about our 2021 was that it was phenomenal. We broke all the records. We sold more of everything than we ever did. Our number of transactions went up 65%. Our turnover went up 72%. All through the year we kept waiting for the inevitable crash. But it never came, much to our incredulity.
And we did that all in a year that was so weird. In an example of how unique every store is, we were closed to the public for nearly the first five months. Zero walk-in customers. Online only. This happened during certain periods in 2020, as well, but it was the first time there was such a continuous period without customers in-store. I’m not going to lie, it was scary.
But 2020 showed us that this wasn’t an insurmountable problem, as we had a major plus on our side: online sales.
We use a point-of-sale system called Comichub. And one of the advantages of ComicHub is all stock goes online in an easy and pretty much immediate way. So, your online store is populated in real time as you scan in inventory. This was a gamechanger for us, one that saved us in 2020 and made us thrive in 2021.
That’s exactly what we did in 2021: we thrived. It ended up being incredible in so many ways. Don’t just take my word for it. Just look at the reports of other shops. Many ended up having their best year ever, which is mad considering how 2021 was so…2021. And the experience and obstacles were enormously different by location, so there is not one common denominator to this success.
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Their online store is very good, I don’t use it very often but I’ve done pickups and deliveries and had no problems either way.
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I really don’t know about this listing.
Doom developed his own time machine.
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Ummm, where the fuck is Batman?
Sitting in the Batmobile masturbating to a picture of Wonder Woman.
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And had also chosen a font that didn’t make it look like “Top 18”.
It’s a masterpiece of design really.
Maybe it is a top 18 and we’re not clever enough to see the other 8 people on it?
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The more I think about it, the more I’m annoyed that Peter Parker is on he list. Peter had *one* feat of genius, and that was inventing web fluid, which on subsequent performance must have been a fluke because the only significant invention he’s had since them has been putting a camera in a belt buckle.
As alternatives I give you the Tinkerer, the Mad Thinker, Doctor Octopus, the High Evolutionary, HANK PYM fer christsakes who not only invented the entire science of miniaturisation but then went on to become the world’s leading roboticist.
I’m actually annoyed by how much this is annoying me :D
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But I do agree with you in that he shouldn’t be on the list.
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I have to backtrack that last statement after reading up on some wikis and quora posts. Here’s my list:
Top 10 Smartest DC/Marvel Characters
1. Reed Richards
2. Brainiac-5
3. Bruce Wayne
4. Victor Von Doom
5. Lex Luthor
6. Peter Parker
7. Michael Holt
8. Superman
9. Bruce Banner
10. Hank Pym1 user thanked author for this post.
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He’s done a lot of ludicrously high tech shit since you stopped reading comics.
Not canon
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How intelligent is The Leader? Isn’t he meant to be super-smart?
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Why are people putting Banner on lists like this? His main invention is a nuclear bomb that turned 100% of the people it was used on into unkillable rage machines, the guy’s an incompetent.
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I know I’d put T’Challa higher on that list.
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Intelligencia is a group that consists of the greatest criminal minds on Earth. Its known members are Leader, MODOK, Mad Thinker, Red Ghost, and Wizard. Doctor Doom and Egghead were shown as former members.
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https://bleedingcool.com/comics/grant-morrison-launches-xanaduum-on-substack-comics-pro/
I only just heard about this – Morrison starting a Substack thing (along with some other newly announced names like BKV and Tom King).
As a bit of a Morrison completist I was briefly tempted to sign up until I saw how much it costs and what you get. It sounds like a load of tossed-off rubbish even from the description that’s meant to be promoting it.
A lot of this Substack stuff feels like milking fans with deep pockets, and I’m just not convinced the value is there for something like this.
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Tom King and BKV are both producing comics for free, with the “behind the scenes” and fan club stuff requiring a subscription. I don’t think that makes a load of sense, from a business perspective, but I’m in for the free comics.
Morrison’s just looks like a weird newsletter/ brain dump. I’m not sure he’s actually announced any comics on there, and his is by far the most expensive subscription rate, as far as I know.
As you know, I am subscribed to Tynion and Hickman’s platforms. Both also made major updates yesterday, with lots of new comics on the way.
The interesting thing from 3W3M was the announcement of a “free” physical collected edition of the first year’s material for subscribers. A swanky deluxe hardcover for those paying the premium rate, and a 180 page softcover for the rest of us.
I didn’t know that was going to happen going in, but I think that’s a nice bonus that recoups a fair chunk of our subscription rate.
I’m not 100% sure if I’ll be renewing either at the moment. I’m thinking about it. But, as with TV streaming there’s just too much content to keep up with everything.
Funnily enough, I am not subscribed to Jeff Lemire’s offering but that’s the other one I’m really tempted by. He seems to be pumping stuff out there even on top of his already substantial workload. He seems like a genuinely top bloke too.
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Tom King and BKV are both producing comics for free, with the “behind the scenes” and fan club stuff requiring a subscription. I don’t think that makes a load of sense, from a business perspective, but I’m in for the free comics.
I remember Warren Ellis and artist Paul Duffield releasing FREAK ANGELS in weekly installments for free (I don’t recall what platform it was released through). I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and ended up happily purchasing all the TPBs that collected the series in print. BKV and Marcos Martin also released PRIVATE EYE via Panel Syndicate in a pay-what-you-like format, and I ended up buying that collection in hardcover down the road. Based on suckers like me, offering free digital-only product with the intention of making money on an eventual paper collection has some advantages as a business model, assuming your product is good enough to generate an audience.
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I remember Warren Ellis and artist Paul Duffield releasing FREAK ANGELS in weekly installments for free (I don’t recall what platform it was released through).
It was a website (owned by Avatar Press).
My approach to the Substack thing is I am primarily interested in the comics, I’ve seen enough process stuff over the years and have no ambitions to be a creator myself. They all seem to suggest they retain the rights to publish (mostly via Image) and I’m honestly happy to wait for that to come out eventually.
I think of Substack a bit like an 80s fan club. Duran Duran would be on the radio playlists and sell half a million singles but 10,000 would be enthusiastic enough to pay extra to join the fan club and get extra posters and badges and interviews etc. It won’t work as a replacement for other publishing models as the audience is too small but it will probably work as an extra outlet for die-hard fans.
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Substack seems to be basically another version of Patreon, and Patreon is very successful for all kinds of creatives, including comics professionals. Coleen Doran has a Patreon, for example, which she uses to fund the republication of her A Distant Soil series — something that she admits she couldn’t do without Patreon.
Amanda Palmer apparently has 12,000 Patreon followers. I don’t know what incentives she offers them, but at $3 per month she’s making a cool half-million a year without ever needing to commercially release anything if she doesn’t want to. So it can serve as a replacement for other publishing models (though for music, in this case).
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I don’t think anyone disagrees that creators can make a living from this stuff. That kind of model has been in place for years now in various fields, including comics pre-Substack.
But as fans/readers we all have to make the call on whether we’re getting value for our money.
Some of the content available via Substack seems decent, but an awful lot of it also seems to be glorified blog/backmatter/process stuff that would have at one point been free and used for promotional purposes, rather than paid content in its own right.
(Frankly Morrison’s content sounds like something scrawled on the back of a fag packet, even from the promotional description of it.)
But no-one is forcing readers to pay extra for this stuff, and like Gar says I imagine it’ll end up feeling like a fanclub thing where people are as much paying for that group membership and closeness to the creator and insights into their work, as for the comics themselves (most of which seem destined for physical release at some point anyway).
Everyone will have a different threshold for this stuff based on how dedicated a fan they are and how interested they are in what’s being offered. But by nature I think it’s destined to remain a niche concern rather than the challenge to the standard comics model that some people hyped it up as initially.
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I was staying well away, but I think I’ll go for this one
It starts with a substack and ends with forty NFTs.
Forty NFTs.
And that’s terrible.
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But by nature I think it’s destined to remain a niche concern rather than the challenge to the standard comics model that some people hyped it up as initially.
Yup and it probably always was the case and really it’s just the headline writers that get excited.
I think it was Tynion that went first with Substack and in that very initial press release said he’d be releasing the material via Image eventually. So from the second it arrived in the comics world they were admitting it was an addition to the standard models rather than a replacement.
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Equating it to cutting the cord on cable, which as a Brit, I don’t entirely understand as a point of reference, but I assume it’s big.
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Cables are generally a big deal, so cutting one must be pretty bold, I assume.
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Head of security at FSU’s Strozier Library charged with theft of thousands of rare comics
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Head of security at FSU’s Strozier Library charged with theft of thousands of rare comics
Does that crime carry a death penalty in Florida? If not, it should!!
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Head of security at FSU’s Strozier Library charged with theft of thousands of rare comics
Under cross-examination, the defendant broke down and confessed, “I couldn’t help it, I just HAD to have all those copies of MacFarlane’s Spider-Man #1”
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“I even made a little hat out of the foil covers!”
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What is this? The next Greg Land?
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This confuses me. Those looks like normal poses that a competent artist should be able to whip together while sleeping. Can you really save that much time swiping them? (And also: If you decide to swipe them you would just have to make a few changes to make the swiping impossible to discover. Why not do that?)
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Having looked at the full image I do wonder whether there’s more going on here than we know so far, and we maybe shouldn’t rush to judge it.
The composition of the image looks really unbalanced to me, with those two ‘swiped’ figures in the background throwing the whole thing off. It feels like those characters could have been added after the original image was created – possibly at the request of editorial – and may have been thrown together and added to the image quickly, possibly not even by Jones.
Pure speculation, obviously. But something about the image feels ‘off’ to me, beyond the swipes. All of the other figures in the image are very much in Jones’ style and don’t appear to be lifted from somewhere else.
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I was informed by my editor that Marvel’s Standards & Practices flagged my art and requested I redraw several panels so that they would be “within tolerance for best representation of Asian characters.”
I’m not seeing a problem
Maybe I’m not the best judge because I’m not Asian. I wonder if Marvel’s “Standards & Practices” are all old white dudes?
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I think there may be a bit of oversensitivity here.
Yes.
It’s interesting to look at the two takes, probably both well intentioned.
The editorial argument is the eyes look too small and could be seen as a caricature. Asians in the comments saying they don’t want their eyes changed to a western ideal.
You are potentially creating an ultra fine balance in depicting any minority to fit perfectly between the two and the temptation then would just to not bother using diverse characters as it’s too much hassle. I’m sure if I showed that comic to any of my Chinese friends and family they wouldn’t even think about other than be happy the comic had Asian characters.
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I’m not seeing a problem
Just to clarify because I can see that can be taken both ways — I don’t see a problem with the original version and don’t understand why anybody would think it needed changing. So I’m siding with Smallwood.
But also, I probably wouldn’t have looked at the changed art and said, “That looks bizarre and doesn’t mesh with his style” it if hadn’t been pointed out to me. I mean, that changed versions aren’t actually terrible (just unnecessary).
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I wonder if it seemed particularly notable in the context of the full page – with the panel linked above falling right next to the image of Elektra at the bottom right, with relatively wide eyes.
A shame these changes have overshadowed it as I think it’s a lovely page of art overall.
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Sounds like the new Comixology app update (moving everyone onto an Amazon Kindle app, essentially) is a huge disappointment. Worse reader experience, lower-resolution books, download libraries deleted, non-US readers unable to subscribe to any series at all, no DRM-free copies available going forward… there’s a long list of complaints.
It’s amazing how Comixology – which once felt like the future of comics – has been run into the ground over the years.
I effectively got forced out of using the app a while back when my tablet became to old to run the latest iteration, and reading the latest on this new version I’m not unhappy that I left when I did. I don’t miss it as much as I expected.
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Yeah. I had my upgrade yesterday. It’s pretty obviously a reskinned Kindle app, and that’s not a good thing. That app was pretty horrible for comics, and is a big step down from ComiXology’s own.
What really pissed me off though was that there’s no archive feature. Literally everything I archived previously is now mixed back in with my collection. Other than marking something as “read” or “unread” there’s no way of differentiating between books. Which is fine for a few dozen books but when you have literally thousands it is a pain in the ass.
And, if you “permanently delete” something you will have to re-purchase it at a later date if that was a mistake.
Overall, not very impressed.
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I get why some people like digital comics, I really do.
But I can still read the comics I bought in 1970.
I’m just saying
I agree with you in theory. In practice, however, I rarely dip into my short boxes to re-read an old comics run from the past decades; instead, I rely on TPB or hardcover collections that I have on bookshelves, or on a digital collection that I’ve purchased from Barnes & Noble (a US-based bookstore chain) or Amazon and have uploaded to my iPad.
One thing about reading the original comics that the collected editions don’t provide is…letter columns. It’s fun to glance through the names of the fans who wrote in, and to come across the name of someone who later became a professional in the industry.
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I get why some people like digital comics, I really do.
But I can still read the comics I bought in 1970.
I’m just saying
I can also read the comics you bought in the 70s.
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I get why some people like digital comics, I really do.
But I can still read the comics I bought in 1970.
I’m just saying
I can also read the comics you bought in the 70s.
So it’s you!!!
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One thing about reading the original comics that the collected editions don’t provide is…letter columns. It’s fun to glance through the names of the fans who wrote in, and to come across the name of someone who later became a professional in the industry.
One reason I like the Marvel Omnibuses – they include letter columns. DC don’t do that, and I wish they would.
I’ve read a lot of the old Legion comics (Superboy, Adventure, and Action Comics) in digital specifically to see the letter columns. You can actually see Legion fandom forming in those pages, as people I now know (at least by reputation) write in asking for other fans get in touch.
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I get why some people like digital comics, I really do.
But I can still read the comics I bought in 1970.
I’m just saying
I can also read the comics you bought in the 70s.
So it’s you!!!
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apparently @mcdonalds is the fuel that @jamesgunn needs to write a character as dynamic as me pic.twitter.com/H54iR0Tstl
— Peacemaker on HBO Max (@DCpeacemaker) February 6, 2022
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The JLA is an elite country club and the Avengers is a local YMCA.
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The X-Men is the cool jocks and the Doom Patrol is the chess club.
The Avengers are the cool jocks. The X-Men are the goth kids.
Doom Patrol is the sci-fi club.
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The Avengers are the cool jocks. The X-Men are the goth kids.
Doom Patrol is the sci-fi club.
What does that make the Defenders?
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What does that make the Defenders?
The student council.
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The Avengers are the cool jocks. The X-Men are the goth kids.
Doom Patrol is the sci-fi club.
What does that make the Defenders?
Superfluous.
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The Avengers are the cool jocks. The X-Men are the goth kids.
Doom Patrol is the sci-fi club.
What does that make the Defenders?
The stoners
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How about the Authority?
When you posted your list of archetypes of the typical superhero team, I immediately thought about The Authority and how they do not easily fit into that description. What category would Jack Hawksmoor (man who can communicate with cities) fall into? What about the Doctor? And Jenny Sparks/Jenny Quantum, the woman who is basically the Spirit of the Century?
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https://qr.ae/pGQTgV
An Quora answer to “Why is Batman not sore all the time” I was amused by this take. -
How about the Authority?
When you posted your list of archetypes of the typical superhero team, I immediately thought about The Authority and how they do not easily fit into that description. What category would Jack Hawksmoor (man who can communicate with cities) fall into? What about the Doctor? And Jenny Sparks/Jenny Quantum, the woman who is basically the Spirit of the Century?
Remember that big WildStorm fan on MW years ago?
Wonder how he feels.
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Chris Striker? He was an authority on all things Wildstorm.
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A lot of people angry with Comixology folding into Amazon’s platform. Loads of features no longer working and shit navigation. I had a quick look and when I viewed Die from Image Comics it suggested only prose novels including a romance set in WW2.
I’ve signed up to Scribd after Paul mentioned them, on a 30 day free trial. I’d stopped buying monthlies from Comixology a while back because of the better value from collections, now I think I’ll read most this way. They seem to have most of the back catalogues of Image and Boom plus other books, audiobooks, magazines etc.
You have to search specifically for what you want to read really but I’m started on Ministry of Truth and they have all the volumes released and the reader is fine on a tablet.
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