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I will write that Flash Roller Derby comic.
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Nov 15, 2019 07:19
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Open Marriage Night posted:I will write that Flash Roller Derby comic.
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Nov 15, 2019 13:33
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Edge & Christian posted:Cary Bates beat you to it, those were all real examples. FWIW, I think the roller derby issue was after the era of commissioning a cover and then figuring it out. Though it probably was a situation where the editor (was it still Julie Schwartz at that point?) said, "Roller derby is popular. Give me a Flash story where he's in a roller derby."
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Nov 15, 2019 14:19
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Random Stranger posted:FWIW, I think the roller derby issue was after the era of commissioning a cover and then figuring it out. Though it probably was a situation where the editor (was it still Julie Schwartz at that point?) said, "Roller derby is popular. Give me a Flash story where he's in a roller derby." Looking it up this issue is both a little later (1971) and longer into Adams's career at DC (he started doing covers in 1967) than I believed, but the general "make cool looking covers and have the people actually producing the comic work backwards" still feels like it was in effect for a decent number of books at that point, even if stuff like GA/GL, all of Kirby's stuff, etc. was moving away from it. They had Neal Adams doing like 25-30% of their entire line's covers at this point, too.
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Nov 15, 2019 16:14
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Edge & Christian posted:I don't think any of the "old dudes at DC in the 1950s/1960s were taking drugs" stories are anything but "man those guys must have been soooooooooooooooooo ooooooo ooooooo oooooooooo ooooo stoned to make that, man!" speculation/unsourced stories; Ditko and Kirby never did drugs according to anyone and did some pretty weird poo poo, as did [insert a ton of artists, writers, musicians, painters, sculptors, actors, etc. across centuries]. The guy who made Adventure Time, Pendleton Ward, said once that part of the reason why he got burnt out on his show was that everyone just kept on saying that he was so high to come up some of the poo poo in that show. He reacted to it with something like "thanks for thinking I have no creativity on my own".
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Nov 15, 2019 17:28
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It's obvious the roller derby issue was one of those "cover first, story later" comics because Kolossal Kate looks nothing like the girl on the cover in the actual comic.IUG posted:The guy who made Adventure Time, Pendleton Ward, said once that part of the reason why he got burnt out on his show was that everyone just kept on saying that he was so high to come up some of the poo poo in that show. He reacted to it with something like "thanks for thinking I have no creativity on my own". This constantly happened to KC Green when he was doing comedy-only comics and it pissed him off royally.
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Nov 15, 2019 17:39
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IUG posted:The guy who made Adventure Time, Pendleton Ward, said once that part of the reason why he got burnt out on his show was that everyone just kept on saying that he was so high to come up some of the poo poo in that show. He reacted to it with something like "thanks for thinking I have no creativity on my own". People talk about Super Mario Bros. in the same way, though to be fair there are literally magic mushrooms in the game. It was just Miyamoto being creative.
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Nov 15, 2019 17:53
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Lobok posted:People talk about Super Mario Bros. in the same way, though to be fair there are literally magic mushrooms in the game. It was just Miyamoto being creative. Tom Wolfe wrote "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" without doing any drugs at all. (Although you might think he had from some of the writing.)
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Nov 15, 2019 18:02
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If that stuff upsets you, you should get high and chill out.
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Nov 15, 2019 18:21
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Lobok posted:People talk about Super Mario Bros. in the same way, though to be fair there are literally magic mushrooms in the game. It was just Miyamoto being creative. That's probably from Alice in Wonderland anyway, right?
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Nov 15, 2019 18:40
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Aphrodite posted:That's probably from Alice in Wonderland anyway, right? I should ask my dad if he understood the references to classic literature when he'd see me play and comment with "wish I had whatever they were smoking when they made this!"
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Nov 15, 2019 19:40
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Aphrodite posted:That's probably from Alice in Wonderland anyway, right? 100% from Alice in Wonderland. Lobok posted:I should ask my dad if he understood the references to classic literature when he'd see me play and comment with "wish I had whatever they were smoking when they made this!" It's always amusing when someone talks about how original something they encountered in a video game was when it's something the game maker just took from some classic literature or film.
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Nov 16, 2019 00:46
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prefect posted:Tom Wolfe wrote "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" without doing any drugs at all. (Although you might think he had from some of the writing.) there’s a good chance someone slipped him something, or certainly a contact high on that bus
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Nov 16, 2019 01:27
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Skwirl posted:I figured it was intentional and he may have even been asked to bring it in X-23 was from Evolution as well. Yeah, I feel like it had to be some kind of intentional nod/wink, but I'm more wondering if Milligan outright discussed. If they were outright asked to put the character in the comics, then lol he got shunted to the wrong book. His main 'accomplishment' was receiving nearly no mention after dying on a mission because he was waaaaay less popular than the other KIA team member. That right there is my whole reason thinking it's a joke. 'Spike is gone, but nobody cares'
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Nov 16, 2019 03:42
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Aphrodite posted:That's probably from Alice in Wonderland anyway, right? Random Stranger posted:100% from Alice in Wonderland. I forget where I read it, but apparently AiW is huge in Japan. If you think you see a reference to it in anime/manga/video games, you're probably right.
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Nov 16, 2019 04:28
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Not as much nowadays but yeah it was all the rage, especially when Miyamoto was growing up.
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Nov 16, 2019 09:27
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Lurdiak posted:Not as much nowadays but yeah it was all the rage, especially when Miyamoto was growing up. I bet the translation is interesting given how much of it is wordplay and nonsense used to fill meter. Hell, plenty of Alice in Wonderland's wordplay is lost on modern readers in English since they come from early 19th century expressions (the Mad Hatter being the obvious one; no it's not about mercury poisoning).
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Nov 16, 2019 14:14
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Random Stranger posted:no it's not about mercury poisoning what's it about?
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Nov 16, 2019 18:46
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Random Stranger posted:It's always amusing when someone talks about how original something they encountered in a video game was when it's something the game maker just took from some classic literature or film. Kojima is a gigantic film nerd and he just lifts from movies most people aren't familiar with.
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Nov 16, 2019 19:24
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Aphrodite posted:Kojima is a gigantic film nerd and he just lifts from movies most people aren't familiar with. It's not like he gets that obscure. His audience is just 20 years younger than he is.
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Nov 16, 2019 19:33
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E&C you might know this given how you seem to know a lot about comic book history from the 60s-70s. I heard that during this time, when the competition between the big two was a bit friendlier, Marvel was in general outselling DC. DC was doing their research not only into what to write but also what was selling. Stan Lee was friends with someone over in the DC offices who would come back to him and report that DC's findings would have these terrible "Correlation is not Causation" conclusions. For example last month comics with a lot of red on the cover outsold comics with blue on the cover. Or comics with word balloons sold better. According to the story I heard, Stan would hear these crazy conclusions and purposely have the covers on Marvel comics changed to the opposite of these findings just to poke fun at DC. "Pull all the red covers", etc. Any idea if there is any truth to that or if it is just a classic "Uncle Stan" story?
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Nov 16, 2019 19:39
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I'm not really sure when that would have happened, but it's also something that I'm not sure you can really disprove. I'm also not sure whether competition was all that friendly in the 1950s or 1960s? DC was definitely outselling Marvel for pretty much the entire time that Mort Weisinger (the market research/focus group champion) was at DC. He left/quit/retired in 1970. Lee pretty much stopped working day-to-day in comics only a year or two later. I guess it depends on how you count "generally outselling DC", because Superman and Batman books were outselling anything Marvel put out for the entire decade of the 1960s, as were a lot of other things -- Disney books, Archie books, various TV/movie tie-ins -- to the point that the only time a Marvel comic cracked the top ten circulation numbers in that decade was Spider-Man, which squeaked in 1969: 1. Archie 2. Superman 3. Superboy 4. Lois Lane 5. Betty & Veronica 6. Action Comics 7. Amazing Spider-Man 8. World's Finest 9. Batman 10. Adventure Comics There are some citations about how Marvel's "average number of copies sold" overtook DC in the late 1960s/early 1970s, but nothing else I've seen really backs that up, and even if it did it was probably down to Marvel being restricted by a distribution deal to only putting out eight titles a month up until 1968 and generally putting out fewer books than DC for that entire stretch; selling 10 books at 300,000 copies apiece versus 35-40 books where some top out at 1,000,000 but a bunch are only selling 150-200,000. I don't actually think the individual book numbers I've seen support that, but I think that's the only way Marvel "winning" would really make sense. Anyway, I don't think that Marvel and DC editors were making a habit of visiting each others' offices in that time period but everyone was working in the same city and plenty of staffers swapped back and forth, maintained friendships across company lines, etc. I can fully believe that there were instances where a DC staffer told a Marvel staffer "I had to kill this cover with Batman on a motorcycle, Mort told us kids don't care about motorcycles anymore" and Lee/someone else decided to stick Cap on a motorcycle the next month as an inside joke. I don't know of any specific instances of that, though.
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Nov 16, 2019 21:12
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90% of the DC comics during the 50s suck.
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Nov 16, 2019 21:35
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Cubone posted:what's it about? It's a pun on the expression "mad as an adder" which was in use at the time to mean a venomous person. The mercury poisoning version didn't start circulating until the 1970's when a lot of fake etymologies for phrases and terms started becoming really popular. Mr Hootington posted:90% of the DC comics during the 50s suck. Almost 100% of Marvel comics during the 50s suck. Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Nov 16, 2019 |
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Nov 16, 2019 21:40
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Random Stranger posted:
Yeah but part of that is almost none of Marvel's most famous characters existed then, just Cap and Namor.
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Nov 16, 2019 22:03
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Random Stranger posted:It's a pun on the expression "mad as an adder" which was in use at the time to mean a venomous person. The mercury poisoning version didn't start circulating until the 1970's when a lot of fake etymologies for phrases and terms started becoming really popular. Whether one is a pun of the other, which one came 'first', etc. I have no idea.
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Nov 16, 2019 22:15
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Random Stranger posted:It's a pun on the expression "mad as an adder" which was in use at the time to mean a venomous person. The mercury poisoning version didn't start circulating until the 1970's when a lot of fake etymologies for phrases and terms started becoming really popular. Sure, except the first known printed use of "mad as an adder" doesnt appear until a few years after the first appearance in print of "mad as a hatter" (which is a phrase which wasnt coined by Carroll), so that is far from certain either. Its probably fairer to say that either etymology is possible. ^What he said. I should have refreshed the page after making sure I wasnt misremembering...
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Nov 16, 2019 22:19
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So if DC was still outselling Marvel during the 60s when Marvel was actually producing its successful characters, when did Marvel take over? The 70s? The 90s?
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Nov 17, 2019 18:52
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Marvel overtook DC the first time in the late 60s.
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Nov 17, 2019 20:00
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When was DC actually publishing Marvel's comics for them to keep them from going under? That was in like the 70s right? So even if Marvel outsold them, they were still making money for DC.
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Nov 17, 2019 22:49
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SonicRulez posted:So if DC was still outselling Marvel during the 60s when Marvel was actually producing its successful characters, when did Marvel take over? The 70s? The 90s? Unmature posted:When was DC actually publishing Marvel's comics for them to keep them from going under? That was in like the 70s right? So even if Marvel outsold them, they were still making money for DC. 1932: In the earliest days of proto-comic books, Harry Donenfeld started a distribution company/pulp publishing house called Independent News. 1935: Donenfeld bankrolled Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson in launching a number of comics, including Detective Comics and Action Comics. 1938: Wheeler-Nicholson was short on money and Donenfeld sued him to take ownership of National Publications (the company that eventually became DC). 1940s-1950s: Donenfeld, through a series of lawsuits and buyouts, consolidated ownership of National, All-American, etc. Timely/Atlas (the precursor to Marvel) was one of the relatively few comics publishers that wasn't owned or at least distributed by Donenfeld's companies. 1957: American News Company, the country's biggest newspaper/magazine distributor (and Marvel's distributor) lost an antitrust lawsuit or had some bookkeeping shenanigans exposed during an antitrust case or a combination of both, and abruptly dissolved. Marvel was left without a distributor. 1957-1968: So Independent News (who owned future-DC) stepped in as the distributor of future-Marvel's titles. Marvel went from publishing in the neighborhood of 40 titles a month in 1956 to eight titles in 1957, because Independent News capped the number of titles of a competitor they were willing to distribute at eight, and from Marvel's perspective eight titles was better than zero. Though even that isn't entirely accurate, they seemed to be relatively flexible, Marvel's monthly output in this era was generally around 8 books a month from the start of the contract through to 1960. It went all over the place but averaged nine books a month in 1961, then 10-12 issues for 1962-1963, creeping up to 12-14 books by 1964, then 15-16, and breaking 20 in June 1967. Then in a chain of events I am not quite sure if I have the sequence of correct, Martin Goodman got a new contract with Independent News to publish even more books some time in 1968, so in July 1968 the line had grown to 25 books. At the end of 1968, Goodman sold Marvel to Cadence Industries, and a few months later Cadence bought Curtis Circulation, their own distributor, and moved all of the Marvel books to getting distributed by Cadence/Curtis. Within a few years Marvel was putting out 30-50 books a month. So it was only a very brief window in the late 1950s that DC's parent company was severely limited Marvel's output, and even that would be hard to really accurately gauge without some deep data mining because Marvel (and DC, and a lot of companies) were publishing so many reprints throughout the 1950s-1970s. This was in part a market-share thing, but also there were no reprint rights/royalties back then so putting out a ton of reprints was a pretty low cost/high profit move even with low circulation. So cutting/expanding Marvel's output by a dozen titles could have meant a lot less for business than it immediately appears to. Aphrodite posted:Marvel overtook DC the first time in the late 60s. The 1970s are kind of a void of actual hard numbers -- this site has a bunch of numbers but they're not broken out and they don't really line up with any other sources I can find, and they all come from this single Usenet post in 2004. There are more recent interviews from various professionals citing the tide turning from DC to Marvel in the late 1960s that line up with the story of these numbers, but not any hard data. The fact that the general trends of the chart don't really jive well with more specific narratives better supported about the near-death of the industry in the mid 1970s, the DC Implosion, Marvel's sales in the 1980s, etc. I am pretty leery of that chart. Even on that specific page, there's a flyer from Marvel touting themselves as a hot company on the rise that stores should stock, and touts their rising circulation numbers. Lining those up to the ones from the Usenet post/chart: (Marvel's quote/Audit Averages) 1960: 16.1M v. 32.2M 1961: 18.7M v. 37.4M 1962: 19.7M v 39.4M 1963: 22.5M v 45.1M 1964: 27.7M v 55.4M 1965: 32.0M v 64.9M To be fair, the year over year increases touted by Marvel and shown in the Audit Bureau numbers matches up so it's not like these numbers were arrived at out of thin air, but Hoyle even talks about how different companies report their circulation differently and that DC's changed repeatedly and confusingly, so without being able to see the actual reports (and maybe even with them in hand) it'd be hard to make a really hard and fast declaration that Marvel was outselling DC, especially when the numbers used on that site essentially double the circulation numbers that Marvel itself was claiming. By the time 'real' sales charts began getting published in fan/industry zines (the earliest ones I can find are in The Comics Reader sporadically in 1979 and then consistently in 1980) the charts (compiled by polling participating comics shops) had Marvel solidly dominating DC, but even then that's got all sorts of selection bias and limited data going on. I wish there was any money at all in doing this research (as opposed to the lovely money doing Fifteen Times Venom Got SEXY listicles on CBR) because I'd love to actually have an answer for any of this. I DID find at least a source for that "Stan Lee changes covers to mess with DC Comics" story CzarChasm asked about : it was Stan Lee telling it in a 1977 television interview. It has nothing to do with any of the Weisinger focus group poo poo I described, but was actually (according to Stan Lee telling this story once to college students in 1977) DC aping whatever Marvel did on their covers to try to outsell Marvel and Lee claiming that he'd notice them copying his style and change it just to mess with them. He gives very little details, the full transcript of the tale is: quote:[DC has been] miserable. They've been trying to catch up, they've been trying the best they can, bless their little innocent hearts. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Nov 19, 2019 |
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Nov 18, 2019 02:49
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Edge & Christian posted:It has nothing to do with any of the Weisinger focus group poo poo I described, but was actually (according to Stan Lee telling this story once to college students in 1977) DC aping whatever Marvel did on their covers to try to outsell Marvel and Lee claiming that he'd notice them copying his style and change it just to mess with them. He gives very little details, the full transcript of the tale is: This is exactly what I was talking about. Anecdotal at best considering the source, but as with all the Stan Lee stories, I want to believe.
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Nov 18, 2019 05:09
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Whatever happened to the Immonens? Stuart did X-Men with Bendis and Kathryn did Journey Into Mystery and then what happened? They just disappeared.
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Nov 20, 2019 00:43
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They've been doing a webcomic together and Stuart worked on Star Wars for awhile, and has a series with Joe Hill coming out in February.
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Nov 20, 2019 00:49
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Didnt Stuart retire for a bit?
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Nov 20, 2019 04:26
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Endless Mike posted:They've been doing a webcomic together and Stuart worked on Star Wars for awhile, and has a series with Joe Hill coming out in February. A webcomic presented through Instagram sounds like one of the worst ways to put out a web comic.
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Nov 20, 2019 15:31
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Eh. Now that RSS and feed readers are dying, Instagram is a good platform to find an audience.
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Nov 20, 2019 16:27
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IUG posted:A webcomic presented through Instagram sounds like one of the worst ways to put out a web comic. It beats Pinterest.
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Nov 21, 2019 01:07
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I was checkin Jen Bartel's store and she has some cool stuff. Any other comic book artists that have their own stores for stuff beyond prints??
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Nov 21, 2019 12:40
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Combing through MU and I see they added some 2099 stuff since I last checked. I’m tempted to read Doom 2099 but it starts at 24 when Ellis takes over, and it seems like the earlier stuff is tough to track down. Is it worth looking into or should I just jump in and figure it out as I go?
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Nov 25, 2019 00:56
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