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It looks like Marvel and DC still do it. I think mail order subscriptions have been a thing in American comics since at least the Forties? There used to be a requirement that comics have one page of text to qualify for a cheaper mail rate, which is why old comics from the days before letter columns have one page short stories. Stan Lee’s first comics credit is for one of those filler stories. Edit: It was two pages of text, not one, to qualify for the magazine postal rate. In the late Forties, Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories had four hundred thousand subscribers, paying a buck for a year’s subscription. Servoret fucked around with this message at 02:36 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 22, 2018 21:29
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Servoret posted:It looks like Marvel and DC still do it. I think mail order subscriptions have been a thing in American comics since at least the Forties? There used to be a requirement that comics have one page of text to qualify for a cheaper mail rate, which is why old comics from the days before letter columns have one page short stories. Stan Lee’s first comics credit is for one of those filler stories. Yep. As an interesting note, if you find comics from the 60's with a big crease down the middle, it's because they were sent to a subscriber. Until the mid-70's, Marvel would fold the comics in half to place them in a letter sized envelope to send through the mail. They had a big announcement when they started using larger envelopes.
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Oct 23, 2018 14:06
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Another weird ramification of the mail regulations is the numbering on some comics. Publishers would roll the numbering of cancelled titles over to the first issues of unrelated books because it cost money to file for a new permit to use the magazine rates to mail out comics. So there’s things like EC Comics changing their Wonder Woman rip-off title Moon Girl Fights Crime to a romance comic called A Moon, A Girl... Romance with issue #9, then changing that to the completely unrelated science-fiction comic Weird Fantasy with issue #13. With the Disney comics, Dell sent out junk mail to solicit subscriptions. I remember Marvel having big house ads in all their Eighties comics promoting subscriptions, which is how I ended up subscribing to G.I.Joe for a while (which was apparently their best selling comic in terms of subscription sales). I tried searching for earlier house ads, but didn’t find any. I know printed fan club offers were a thing, like the Supermen of America or the Merry Marvel Marching Society. How people were subscribing to marginal selling comics like the pre-horror ECs or pre-Marvel Age monster titles, I’m not sure.
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Oct 23, 2018 17:15
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Thanks for the responses, I was mostly just curious since I never saw anyone bring it up and asking people on twitter etc. just makes them talk about pulllists. It was nice to hear about the historical thing as well with folded issues etc.
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Oct 23, 2018 20:06
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Subscriptions were big for Marvel and DC into I wanna say the late 1980s/early 1990s. The three strikes against them going into the 1990s were: 1) Collector culture was really taking off, and the copies sent through the mail would rarely arrive in "mint" condition. They weren't folded into envelopes by the late 1980s, but they'd still be rolled up in rubberbands, the polybag would rip, early automated mail sorters would rip half the covers off, etc. 2) More and more comics were getting renumbered, or crossing over into event mini-series, or getting oversized/gimmick covered/more-expensive-than-normal issues, so the idea that you could just pay $X for twelve issues of Spider-Man sort of fell apart when over the course of 12 months there would be 18 issues of Spider-Man because it went biweekly over the summer, and crossed over with New Warriors and Web of Spider-Man and Silver Sable and Infinity Gauntlet, and one issue had a hologram cover, and the 25th issue was oversized and cost 2.5x more. I dimly remember some Usenet threads about how hosed up subscriptions got for people when they had a subscription to an X-Book during Age of the Apocalypse and things like that. 3) As fan culture/events/the early stages of online communities were starting up, the idea that maybe you'd get your copy of a book 2-3 weeks after "New Comics Day" lost a lot of lustre too. Even in that era, comic subscriptions direct from the publishers were mostly a sort of last resort for people who lived somewhere that made it difficult/impossible to go to a comic shop or whatever. By the early 1990s things like Mile High Comics's N.I.C.E. (which I used for a year or two as a pre-teen when we were between accessible/halfway professional comic shops in my area of Kansas) and other mail order services (I think American Entertainment and Lone Star were the other big two?) had largely eaten up the "subscription" model because you could actually opt into crossovers/mini-series/annuals, get more than just Marvel/DC, choose to get Collector's Editions, cancel a book if a creator leaves, etc. etc. etc. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Oct 25, 2018 |
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Oct 25, 2018 16:08
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American Entertainment had a sort of sister company where they sold backstock for cheap. I used to love getting the AE catalog in the mail and never having the extra cash to order anything.
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Oct 25, 2018 17:23
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Rhyno posted:American Entertainment had a sort of sister company where they sold backstock for cheap. I used to love getting the AE catalog in the mail and never having the extra cash to order anything. They got me my run of Busiek's Thunderbolts back in the day.
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Oct 25, 2018 17:26
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Dawgstar posted:They got me my run of Busiek's Thunderbolts back in the day. I went crazy on Ultraverse #1s and then they showed up super late and the coupon for the #0 was expired. Still bitter.
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Oct 25, 2018 17:27
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Quick question. I know the Clone Saga in Spiderman went on waaaaaay too long, but when did it actually begin and when did it officially end? Were there any big Spidey crossover stories before that? When it comes to Spiderman stories the Clone Saga seems to be the big one until the late 90's and current times, but was there any other big major events before that? edit: forgot Maximum Carnage. Also not including big important single issues but more crossover focuses stuff.
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Oct 25, 2018 20:58
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Madkal posted:Quick question. I know the Clone Saga in Spiderman went on waaaaaay too long, but when did it actually begin and when did it officially end? Were there any big Spidey crossover stories before that? When it comes to Spiderman stories the Clone Saga seems to be the big one until the late 90's and current times, but was there any other big major events before that? The thing is that in the mid-90's the Spider-books were kind of copying the Superman books where they had four titles a month and stories just kind of moved between them. So the lead up to the clone saga had a mysterious shadowy figure running around for several months and the first story arc that's actually "clone saga" stuff starts with the two bumping into each other picking up the cliffhanger at the end of an unrelated story arc. So drawing an actual line that says "This is it! The Clone Saga Begins Here!" is kind of muddy. But if you wanted to go to about the August 1994 cover dated Spider-Man books, that would let you move smoothly into it. As for preceding Spider-Man crossovers, Kraven's Last Hunt was a crossover between the three Spider-books at the time. There was also a crossover in the 80's called Missing In Action where he was missing after a big villain fight.
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Oct 25, 2018 21:46
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American Entertainment was the one that ran ads in every comic that were catalog pages where every Image comic was described as RED HOT right?
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Oct 25, 2018 21:59
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Lightning Lord posted:American Entertainment was the one where every Image comic was described as RED HOT right? I want to say that they pioneered the galaxy brain take of "well actually there
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Oct 25, 2018 22:02
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Edge & Christian posted:Presumably. I found (and scanned) one of their 1989 catalogs awhile back, it was full BATMANIA and every single lovely PVC figure/tie-in novelization/poster/trading card set/coffee mug/t-shirt/novelty sock licensed Batman '89 was a red hot sure-fire best selling investment. I think they were the pioneers of BUY TEN COPIES OF THE SAME COMIC AND SAVE $2! deal too. You're probably right, although we can also lay some of that at the feet of Wizard magazine's top ten, which did things like inflating almost random issues of early Valiant comics to insane prices because 'LOW PRINT RUN!'
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Oct 25, 2018 22:35
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Madkal posted:Quick question. I know the Clone Saga in Spiderman went on waaaaaay too long, but when did it actually begin and when did it officially end? Were there any big Spidey crossover stories before that? When it comes to Spiderman stories the Clone Saga seems to be the big one until the late 90's and current times, but was there any other big major events before that? Wikipedia has a good write-up on it. Starts in Spectacular Spider-Man #216 (Sept 1994) with the appearance of the clone (Ben) and then goes all the way to Spider-Man #75 (December 1996) when Ben dies. Like you said, there was Maximum Carnage before that as a story that truly crossed over among Spider-Man titles. Kraven's Hunt before that. Everything else I think was connected but not in an overt way where there was an overall name of an overarching story with numbered parts spread among the different Spider-Man titles.
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Oct 25, 2018 23:08
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I grew up in a podunk farm town in Illinois where the only local source of comics was a spinner rack at the pharmacy. I swear they never had the same titles month to month. The closest proper comic book shop was forty minutes away so I had to lean on mail order services to get my fix. I only used American Entertainment and East Coast Comics for back issues / new monthlies because they offered the best value for poor little kid me. I remember being confused how I could buy a new $1.50 comic for $1.19 when they had to ship it halfway across the country.
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Oct 26, 2018 03:28
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Madkal posted:Quick question. I know the Clone Saga in Spiderman went on waaaaaay too long, but when did it actually begin and when did it officially end? Were there any big Spidey crossover stories before that? When it comes to Spiderman stories the Clone Saga seems to be the big one until the late 90's and current times, but was there any other big major events before that? Long answer http://www.benreillytribute.x10host.com/LifeofReilly1.html
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Oct 26, 2018 03:48
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In the World War III storyline from JLA, Orion's attack dog tackles the General (Wade Eiling in a Shaggy Man body) through a portal to the Phantom Zone and they both tumble off into nothingness. The General shows up in subsequent stories, but was there ever a story explaining how he got out of the Phantom Zone? Also, remember when he was in the Flash tv series and he was played by Clancy Brown? It's a shame more wasn't done with him there.
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Oct 27, 2018 16:07
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Wheat Loaf posted:In the World War III storyline from JLA, Orion's attack dog tackles the General (Wade Eiling in a Shaggy Man body) through a portal to the Phantom Zone and they both tumble off into nothingness. The General shows up in subsequent stories, but was there ever a story explaining how he got out of the Phantom Zone? That was when the CW shoes couldn't go wrong and there were 15 proposals on the table, one of them being Captain Atom.
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Oct 27, 2018 17:40
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In retrospect I think that's one of the reasons the first season of the Flash was its strongest: it had a bunch of different plots going on, with the Reverse-Flash one and Barry keeping his identity secret from Iris going over the entire season, the military subplot with Firestorm, the stuff with the Rogues as recurring bad guys and then the standalone episodic plots. I know the comparative weaknesses of the subsequent seasons are really things that were already part of season one, but I feel like they were exacerbated by each season only really having one really big plot going each time, which means there's not as much for the other characters to do.
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Oct 27, 2018 18:05
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The first season of the Flash is the ballsiest loving thing. Here's the hero and before he even knows himself we're going to drop in his greatest foe of all time and with him buckets of extremely obscure comic book references. BEFORE HE'S EVEN THE FLASH. That season was fantastic and it's almost insulting how bad the show is now.
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Oct 27, 2018 18:25
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All the writing problems were still there in the first season they just got obscured by "That's the thing he can do in the comics!" and Tom Cavanagh being the only good villain the show has ever had.
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Oct 27, 2018 18:39
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Rhyno posted:I've also stopped drinking. Jesus, you stopped working in a comic shop, got married, bought a house, stopped drinking and have lost a ton of weight. You know, I had something snarky here, but gently caress it, good for you. Seriously. I wish you the best of luck. Aphrodite posted:All the writing problems were still there in the first season they just got obscured by "That's the thing he can do in the comics!" and Tom Cavanagh being the only good Only kind of joking. Most of the cast is serviceable, and I do love the relationship between Harry and Cisco as the actors are IRL friends. But barring the likes of guests like Clancy Brown and Mark Hammil, acting talent is really not any of the CW shows strong suits.
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Oct 31, 2018 03:25
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CzarChasm posted:Only kind of joking. Most of the cast is serviceable, and I do love the relationship between Harry and Cisco as the actors are IRL friends. But barring the likes of guests like Clancy Brown and Mark Hammil, acting talent is really not any of the CW shows strong suits. Jesse L. Martin, Wentworth Miller, Neal McDonough, and Matt Ryan are pretty great actors as well.
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Oct 31, 2018 05:31
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Big Bad Voodoo Lou posted:Jesse L. Martin, Wentworth Miller, Neal McDonough, and Matt Ryan are pretty great actors as well. John Barrowman too.
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Oct 31, 2018 05:39
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Credit where it's due, Amell has grown so much as an actor since season 1. I again point to the reunion with his parents in the dream reality.
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Oct 31, 2018 06:28
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Amell is soooooo good as Oliver Queen that I really think he is underrated as far as everyone else goes. He deserves a lot of credit
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Oct 31, 2018 06:40
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The limiting factor for most of the cast tends to be the writing rather than their own ability, even Thea did some good work when she had something to chew on instead of randomly deciding which parts of her family she hates and which she loves on a loving whim.
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Oct 31, 2018 06:56
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based on his multiple wrestling appearances amell seems like a huge nerd which probably helps when playing green arrow, plus doing your own stunts always seems to be a positive factor in peoples work
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Oct 31, 2018 07:11
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It also really helps if you judge the CW shows by primetime teenage soap standards instead of prestige television standards. Arrow is a superhero show for people who loved The O.C. Two of CW's new shows this season are a Charmed reboot and a spin-off of a spin-off of Vampire Diaries
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Oct 31, 2018 07:22
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All the CW actors are good when they’re given anything at all to work with. Even the worst actor in the lot, Caity Lotz, who started out on Arrow playing an animate plank of wood, has grown into a fun, campy, confident presence on Legends of Tomorrow.
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Oct 31, 2018 13:07
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Skwirl posted:It also really helps if you judge the CW shows by primetime teenage soap standards instead of prestige television standards. Arrow is a superhero show for people who loved The O.C. Two of CW's new shows this season are a Charmed reboot and a spin-off of a spin-off of Vampire Diaries i assumed it went without saying that anyone watching arrow etc wasnt expecting it to be the next walking dead or westworld or whatever the gently caress counts as "good" television
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Oct 31, 2018 13:22
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Madkal posted:Amell is soooooo good as Oliver Queen that I really think he is underrated as far as everyone else goes. He deserves a lot of credit I think part of the problem is he's just the first of the CW heroes so people gloss over him.
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Oct 31, 2018 14:26
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As I mentioned, Amell is heavy as gently caress in this scene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI-yDnARrls
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Oct 31, 2018 14:30
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Rhyno posted:As I mentioned, Amell is heavy as gently caress in this scene It's weird they couldn't get the guy who played Tommy for that episode but they were able to get him the next year for two different episodes. I was kind of upset they killed him off in the first season
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Oct 31, 2018 22:32
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Skwirl posted:It's weird they couldn't get the guy who played Tommy for that episode but they were able to get him the next year for two different episodes. He’s a regular on a show on another network that is also is part of an extended universe of sorts. The NBC Chicago Public Services Universe.
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Oct 31, 2018 22:40
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Since the panel request thread has been archived, I'm gonna put my requests here. During Tim Drakes introduction after Jason Todd died, it was mentioned that Batman got meaner and tougher on criminals, and that Drake noticed he'd gotten more reckless and violent. This has been mentioned a few times after that over the years. Does anyone know the exact issue numbers for this, and if possible also panels? My second request, if there are examples where Batman causes the death of criminals. An example would be in Venom, when he tilts a rowboat with some goons in it into shark-infested waters. (if i recall that scene correctly), or the recent example with KGbeast (both times). McCloud fucked around with this message at 13:41 on Nov 2, 2018 |
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Nov 2, 2018 13:34
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McCloud posted:Since the panel request thread has been archived, I'm gonna put my requests here. Batman 440-442. New Titans 60-61. What you want is in Batman #440, page 8? 
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Nov 2, 2018 16:29
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I found some wonderful "treasures" in one of my local bookstores today and I want to see how much of a battle I'm in for to get it all. First off, Marvel's The Order - Dr. Strange, Grey Hulk, Namor and Silver Surfer are cursed (literally) to defend the planet as the dying action of some Villain. Instead of "defending" the planet, they decide that's too much work, so instead they are going to bully the nations of the world into playing nice. This looks like an amazing, stupid, fun ride. I managed to find issue 1, and I don't imagine that it's a long series, but I'd like to know how many issues this runs for, and if there is some comic that has the lead up, just prior to this. Amalgam - I was able to get Stragefate #1 and Super Soldier #1 and it reminded me how much stupid they are packed with, but in a really great way. I know it's not collected anywhere in any trades because that would require the big two to play extra nice and that ain't happening any time soon. So, I'm going to try and get everything in floppies. I don't recall how many issues each comic ran for, but I'm going to guess it's in the 4-6 range? Also, was there any end cap crossover? As in I know that the Amalgam comics started with a standalone-ish lead-in Marvel/DC Crossover book. Does it end the same way, or do the series just kind of peter out? I'm going to try and hit up my regular shop before hitting up ebay or other online places. And as kind of an aside, has the Secret Wars event books been collected in trade yet? And I would like both the main story titles as well as all the weird off shoots (Battleworld, Deadpool's Secret Wars, Angela Witch Hunter, Planet Hulk, etc).
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Nov 3, 2018 02:17
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CzarChasm posted:And as kind of an aside, has the Secret Wars event books been collected in trade yet? And I would like both the main story titles as well as all the weird off shoots (Battleworld, Deadpool's Secret Wars, Angela Witch Hunter, Planet Hulk, etc). I know they've been collected in individual trades but I don't know if there's one big Warzones trade
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Nov 3, 2018 03:28
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CzarChasm posted:First off, Marvel's The Order - Dr. Strange, Grey Hulk, Namor and Silver Surfer are cursed (literally) to defend the planet as the dying action of some Villain. Instead of "defending" the planet, they decide that's too much work, so instead they are going to bully the nations of the world into playing nice. This looks like an amazing, stupid, fun ride. I managed to find issue 1, and I don't imagine that it's a long series, but I'd like to know how many issues this runs for, and if there is some comic that has the lead up, just prior to this. The Order runs six issues, and it’s a sequel/ending storyline to a twelve issue Defenders series done right before that by Kurt Busiek and Erik Larsen. Issue 1 of that Defenders series is when the villain curses them, which is basically just an excuse to get the original team to go on the kind of adventures they did in the early Seventies. If you’re looking for stupid fun you might want to check it out.
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Nov 3, 2018 05:12
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