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Chinston Wurchill posted:If people buy the digital version of a given comic while stores are closed they won't buy the print version when stores open up? LOL at fans showing solidarity. The Direct Market was on shaky ground before this. Already DC has indicated they're looking at new distribution models in light of this and that's just not good news to a system that only exists because of a weird monopoly that barely benefits anyone. ComicsHub has started to implement a system where you order print comics from your local shop through their site, you get a digital code immediately to read, and you can pick up your physical copy later. It's probably the "best" solution right now but it also requires shops to be part of their system and my understanding is that isn't a majority of them. https://bleedingcool.com/comics/comichub-save-comics-industry/ I was a few weeks behind so I had a not-quite local shop that was doing delivery/shipping send me stuff. They were extremely efficient on it but it's hard to keep supporting when there's no inventory for me to browse, even online.
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Apr 2, 2020 14:00
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I'm one hundred percent digital to trade or hardcover. Floppies are lame.
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Apr 2, 2020 15:48
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I love comic book stores as an institution and I love the floppy as a sort of, I don't know, cultural artifact, but right now my wife and I live in a small apartment and when we move we're going to be thinking about a baby's room, and she works from home so she'll still need an office, and I need space for a pretty big home library for work, and we need space to sew and keep crafting things, so single issues just don't make sense for our lifestyle as something for us to buy and store. We have a pretty modest pile from when she worked a block away from a really great store but even two short-boxes have always been awkward for us to store.
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Apr 2, 2020 20:07
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I mean the largest lovely thing about it is that it would be another industry where smaller businesses die while big corporate just keep all the profits.
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Apr 2, 2020 20:12
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I think my other problem with the direct market dying is that even if you go trades-only, or digital, that just means place like Barnes & Noble, Newberry Comics, and other corporations will be the only people distributing this stuff afterwords. They're going to be some of the few places that will have money to stay afloat if this goes on long, and who's going to try to open an indie shop if the direct market closes? Everyone's going to go to digital with maybe trades from Amazon, there may be no small independent shops, and Disney/Warner aren't even going to feel it. EDIT: ^^^ Damnit!
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Apr 2, 2020 20:13
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When I got laid off back in the summer of 2010, I had to cancel my pull box at the local shop, and I never got back into the habit even after my job situation improved. I've only just got back on board in time for Hickman's new X-stuff, and even then it's all been digital. Once you're not going to the store every Wednesday, it's pretty easy to keep not going. This could well be the beginning of the end for the direct market.
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Apr 2, 2020 20:16
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jng2058 posted:When I got laid off back in the summer of 2010, I had to cancel my pull box at the local shop, and I never got back into the habit even after my job situation improved. I've only just got back on board in time for Hickman's new X-stuff, and even then it's all been digital. I just started back on floppies BECAUSE of Hickman's X-Stuff, after pretty much 15+ years of trades (and 5ish years of digital). I've honestly felt closer to books because of the move back to floppies and when I get the chance to be in a good shop (the one closest to me is literal trash), I usually find myself buying some random thing to support them. That said... the Direct Market is probably the worst business system one can conceive of, and only kind of worked due to the back issue market. That market is mostly dead- when I think about "good shops," usually those aren't the ones with a couple hundred long boxes strewn about- and the system itself is probably long due to collapse. It sucks because it is going to hurt a lot of small businesses, but horse farmers and stage coach builders had to go at some point, too.
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Apr 2, 2020 20:24
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https://twitter.com/awhiteCuban/status/1245905162444713985?s=20 https://twitter.com/awhiteCuban/status/1245908983279427585?s=20 What the hell? was it an unused design from an X-artist? something from a failed pitch? did the artist for the toy packaging just try and draw Cyclops' costume from memory?
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Apr 3, 2020 11:56
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Scutt Sommers
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Apr 3, 2020 13:55
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Skwirl posted:https://twitter.com/awhiteCuban/status/1245905162444713985?s=20 It looks like somebody trying to evoke nostalgia for his 90's costume without actually drawing an outfit that ridiculous.
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Apr 3, 2020 19:04
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Cabbit posted:It looks like somebody trying to evoke nostalgia for his 90's costume without actually drawing an outfit that ridiculous. I would say it's significantly worse than the 90's one
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Apr 3, 2020 19:08
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Remember a few years ago, when Mike Deodato Jr. did a promo image for a new wave of Marvel books that included Kate Bishop wearing a new outfit, and it turned out he'd seen a design from a fan on Google Image Search and thought it was a real thing? I wonder if some toy-store company did the same thing by mistake, where that's a Cyclops redesign someone put up on their Deviantart that they mistook for something from an actual book.
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Apr 3, 2020 19:43
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Finally a version of Cyclops that cuts his own hair in his dorm room.
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Apr 3, 2020 20:55
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https://twitter.com/gwenpool_ebooks/status/1246237314357112833?s=20
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Apr 4, 2020 01:58
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https://twitter.com/JHickman/status/1246282966235561990?s=19
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Apr 4, 2020 13:26
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Happy Noodle Boy fucked around with this message at 15:51 on Apr 4, 2020 |
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Apr 4, 2020 15:47
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So I've only been reading X-Men monthly. Did Hickman just drop the Hordeculture plot or did that unfold in another series?
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Apr 4, 2020 16:38
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Shneak posted:So I've only been reading X-Men monthly. Did Hickman just drop the Hordeculture plot or did that unfold in another series? nope to me it feels like he wanted to show "Krakoa and crew are not invincible or untouchable, element of surprise and information asymmetry are still a factor that can beat them"
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Apr 4, 2020 18:16
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Goa Tse-tung posted:nope And then he did it like, 3 more times in a row by introducing multiple nameless mooks with power-dampening weaponry.
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Apr 4, 2020 18:34
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Frankly I am surprised there are not power dampers on street corners like there are cameras.
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Apr 4, 2020 18:40
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Shneak posted:So I've only been reading X-Men monthly. Did Hickman just drop the Hordeculture plot or did that unfold in another series? They’re supposed to be showing back up in either the Empyre tie in mini or an upcoming issue of X-Men that has to do with the plant people from that event.
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Apr 4, 2020 19:36
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:And then he did it like, 3 more times in a row by introducing multiple nameless mooks with power-dampening weaponry. And like the first issue of X-Force had the new model Reavers dropping in. I don't mind if, say, Reed is smart enough to do it but like anybody can swing by.
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Apr 4, 2020 19:58
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Dawgstar posted:And like the first issue of X-Force had the new model Reavers dropping in. I don't mind if, say, Reed is smart enough to do it but like anybody can swing by. I mean, it kind of had to happen because Hickman started a new X-men run by benching the Sentinel program and then making 90% of the X-men's traditionally powered foes into allies; writers pretty much had to rear end-pull reasons why nameless mooks would be a credible threat in order to get things moving. It's just funny that it happened in basically every book for the first month after PoX/HoX.
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Apr 4, 2020 21:06
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https://twitter.com/arthurstacy/status/1246258723787616257?s=20
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Apr 5, 2020 00:20
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So what's the deal with Empath exactly? Hellions made it seem like he was some sort of uncontrollable murder monster, but I was googling his history and he doesn't sound all that skeevy. Is there anything specific he did that makes him particularly horrific?
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Apr 5, 2020 00:46
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BrianWilly posted:So what's the deal with Empath exactly? Hellions made it seem like he was some sort of uncontrollable murder monster, but I was googling his history and he doesn't sound all that skeevy. Is there anything specific he did that makes him particularly horrific? He did a lot of gross stuff around sex and consent during Claremont's New Mutants, most prominently, as far as I can remember, making two supporting character uncontrollably horny for each other and just leaving them to gently caress.  (The New Mutants #38)They show up again days later traumatized and almost emotionally catatonic:  (The New Mutants #43) He was also always using his powers on women and framing it as making them love and desire him even when the actual effect on the scene was pretty PG. Here, for instance, from the same issue, look at the language he uses for the relatively tame trick of hijacking Majik as a getaway vehicle:  (#38 again) Later on he was in a long-ish running subplot about being in a relationship with the New Mutant Magma that was later revealed to be him just preying on her with his powers as well, although I honestly don't remember if this was a retcon or not. He's just a super gross skeezy character who allowed Claremont to play up a lot of the more unsavory elements of his writing. I think in recent years and certainly in Marauders he's kind of been the victim of the same arc of escalation that the Joker has-- he can't just be a really gross, grimy guy, he has to be a terrifying sociopathic anomaly. Whatever. He just loving sucks. In the original New Mutants run I don't really remember him murdering people or even fighting much at all-- he was all about abusing power in a hedonistic way, a much more mundane and common kind of evil. Marauders' back-matter made him sound like the Earth X Red Skull. I think that as much as he's a big vector for Claremont's kink stuff in New Mutants he's also a pretty well written bad guy in it all things considered. The New Mutants hate him and it's very clear why. He didn't beat them in a fight, he didn't kill one of their friends, but he violated their free will and treated them like play-things. I think he was a good counterpoint to mutant antagonists like Magneto, who was all about mutants vs. humans, and Sebastian Shaw, who wanted to capitalize on that conflict. Empath is also a miniature study in what power is like-- because he does have a really, really potent and scary power. But what power means to him is "what I am allowed to exact from other people, what I can get away with doing to them." He's the figure of the sovereign as unfit and venal, using pure will (literally!) to just be a horny little sadistic creep. He was definitely a mutant supremacist, as seen in #43 when he makes a girl's friends mortally terrified of her for life after he sees them playing X-Factor make-believe, because they were talking poo poo about mutants and she was "imitating her betters." But he's also just a straight up racist, as when he calls Tom Friedlander and Sharon Corso "animals," as well as a hard core misogynist. He's not an idealogue, he just likes thinking of other people as beneath him. He's petty and loathsome, and, notably, not really capable of putting up a fight. Most of #43 is the New Mutants tormenting him in order to get him to cut it out, and he spends the issue terrified. It's a good beat to show that yeah, he's powerful, and he uses that powerful to elevate himself, but he's a really, really weak person.  (The New Mutants #43) Even in his Fraction-era appearances, IIRC (and I'm hazy here) he was more of a sleazy Renfield type to the Red Queen's starker agency. I think building him up as some kind of mutant Hannibal Lecter is all wrong. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Apr 5, 2020 |
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Apr 5, 2020 00:58
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Hmm. Seems a bit Purple Man ish. I figured that the whole "he's just a born sociopath who couldn't help being a sociopath" thing from Hellions, while interesting in a bubble, was probably gonna be...embellishing canon a bit.
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Apr 5, 2020 01:40
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I think like you say, part of why Claremont's treatment of Empath works to sell him as a skeevy, despicable predator without it becoming unbearable to read is that he usually isn't allowed to go too far with it. Basically this:Archyduchess posted:I think in recent years and certainly in Marauders he's kind of been the victim of the same arc of escalation that the Joker has-- he can't just be a really gross, grimy guy, he has to be a terrifying sociopathic anomaly. Not to bag on Alias, but (in modern comics especially, where the tone is allowed to run darker than it was in the 80s) practically every villain with mind control powers is at constant risk of having a story arc written about them where they pull a Purple Man. There are a few similar vilains in Claremont's X-Men/New Mutants runs, and they're typically about as sexually menacing as Count Dracula. Mastermind pulls the same shtick in the arc where Madelyne Pryor is first introduced, but it's all done with such comparative restraint that we understand this guy's a creepy predator without him actually being allowed to commit a rape. I think Brainchild pulls the same shtick briefly in Claremont's 2000s run on Uncanny, and is promptly shut down. The Shadow King turns people into mind slaves in fetish suits during the kid Storm and Gambit arc, but he doesn't make out with them. There's a line that Claremont hovers around with these characters, but doesn't cross because on some level he recognises he's still telling superhero stories, colourful tales where the heroes prevail, and that sexual exploitation isn't a plot device on the same tonal level as Magneto's dastardly weather control machine. You can't have a villain do it and get away with it, and if they successfully violate someone - which is rare compared to these villains attempting to do so and being thwarted - there needs to be a serious reckoning of the impact of that on the characters. See also: his excoriating continuity correction of Avengers 200, where he has Ms. Marvel explain that the creators of that issue penned her rape without even realising they'd done so. I dunno. Dude's not perfect, some of this stuff was definitely fetish material, but he was drinking his respect women juice in a way a lot of (male) creators who handle the same subjects don't seem to be. I've lost count of the amount of modern comics I've read where some previously innocuous villain rapes or violates or sexually menaces a female character, usually a superhero, in a way that is far more skeevily fetishistic about the violation of a powerful woman.
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Apr 5, 2020 01:51
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Android Blues posted:There's a line that Claremont hovers around with these characters, but doesn't cross because on some level he recognises he's still telling superhero stories, colourful tales where the heroes prevail, and that sexual exploitation isn't a plot device on the same tonal level as Magneto's dastardly weather control machine. You can't have a villain do it and get away with it, and if they successfully violate someone - which is rare compared to these villains attempting to do so and being thwarted - there needs to be a serious reckoning of the impact of that on the characters. Yeah. It's not that Empath is more powerful than Mastermind or the Shadow King, it's that there's a line that's as much a line dictated by genre as by human decency, and he crosses it. It's not that he can do worse than other villains, it's that he does do worse, which is why the scene with Tom and Sharon is still really viscerally shocking. quote:See also: his excoriating continuity correction of Avengers 200, where he has Ms. Marvel explain that the creators of that issue penned her rape without even realising they'd done so. This too, I've always respected that Claremont seems to know what he's doing when he does it, and rarely if ever writes about sexuality or control without thinking through what he's saying, even if he's saying something extremely bizarre about turning into a baby or a dinosaur. That Carol Danvers scene is brutal because it's correct-- Layton and Michelenie wrote an absolutely horrific story, whether they meant to or not, and I don't know if it's a testament to Claremont's being ahead of the curve on this stuff, or if we can chalk it up to him having read Carol Strickland's excellent essay "The Rape of Ms. Marvel" in LoC the year prior (which he acknowledges in an interview): Claremont posted:Avengers #199, where Carol Danvers is introduced to the Avengers, and they're told that in two days she has become eight months pregnant by an unknown father, or by force of persons unknown, and the reaction of the entire crowd, men and women both, is to the effect of: "Can I babysit?" "Can we knit booties?" "Can I make cookies for the baby?" "Oh you must be so happy?" and my reaction was, "What an insensitive crowd of boors." Actually, my reaction was a lot stronger than that. But how callous! How cruel! How unfeeling! Considering that these people must have seen Ms. Marvel only a couple of days before, or even a couple of months before. She wasn't pregnant then. How could she be eight months pregnant now? Now, if that had been the point David [Michelinie] was trying to make, that these other Avengers are callous boors, okay then, I may disagree with the point, but if he followed through on it, it would have made sense. But it seemed to me, looking at the story, looking at the following story, that he was going for: "This is how you respond to a pregnancy." He at the very least knew when a violation was a violation and an assault was an assault and either treated them accordingly or exercised more restraint that his peers.
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Apr 5, 2020 02:16
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That reminds me. I always kinda liked Sharon Friedlander (and Tom Corsi) as a supporting character, so it was disappointing to find out she got killed off shortly after Claremont's departure from the X-books. It'd probably be a weird look to bring either of them back right now, since they got literally "race lifted" during the Demon Bear storyline, but Sharon is up there with Rumiko Fujikawa on my list of supporting characters who deserved better than they got.
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Apr 5, 2020 20:27
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I’m reading a big collected edition of New Mutants now, and goddamn is it hilarious that they’re teaming up with failed marketing tie-in Team America by issue four. Professor X ditches the new mutants for three issues in order to train them in mastering their motorcycle skills. I think their toy line and comic had already been cancelled by that point. What a weird choice for a guest star. When did they start using Spiderman or Wolverine as guest stars to help out new books?
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Apr 5, 2020 20:51
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:I’m reading a big collected edition of New Mutants now, and goddamn is it hilarious that they’re teaming up with failed marketing tie-in Team America by issue four. Professor X ditches the new mutants for three issues in order to train them in mastering their motorcycle skills. I think their toy line and comic had already been cancelled by that point. Ha, we're at the same point in a New Mutants re-read then. I just looked up Team America to see if any of them spit off and did anything, or if someone like Zdarsky or someone had an odd reference to them. Nope, no one has been used since mid 80s.
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Apr 5, 2020 21:25
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IUG posted:Ha, we're at the same point in a New Mutants re-read then. I just looked up Team America to see if any of them spit off and did anything, or if someone like Zdarsky or someone had an odd reference to them. Nope, no one has been used since mid 80s. Sounds ripe for Al Ewing to use, then.
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Apr 5, 2020 21:29
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:I’m reading a big collected edition of New Mutants now, and goddamn is it hilarious that they’re teaming up with failed marketing tie-in Team America by issue four. Professor X ditches the new mutants for three issues in order to train them in mastering their motorcycle skills. I think their toy line and comic had already been cancelled by that point. Team America was a toy line that was created pretty much exclusively because Ideal Toys didn't want to keep making their Evel Knievel toys after he got arrested for attacking the ghost writer of his book with a baseball bat; Evel was upset that the book portrayed him as a violent drug user who abused his wife and kids, and so his solution was to threaten to kill the person who wrote it. So they repainted all of those figures and made a line of DEFINITELY NOT EVEL KNIEVEL motorcycle daredevils wearing patriotic costumes. They paid Marvel to create a tie-in comics that apparently no one wanted to write or draw and it died after a year. New Mutants, meanwhile, was the first extremely popular spin-off of Marvel's top-selling book, and had sales close to X-Men for the first few years of its publication. If anything, the guest appearance was designed to prop up Team America, not the New Mutants. Why they were trying to boost Team America in a storyline that started a few months after the book got canceled, I don't know; maybe Claremont/McLeod started working on it before the book got axed. Maybe it was one of those "tie up loose ends" things Jim Shooter and Mark Gruenwald were fond of doing where a plotline from a canceled book just takes over a more popular book for a minute -- the one I always remember from my childhood of back issue collecting is when the Avengers got a guest writer for two issues to tie up loose ends from the Spider-Woman book despite Jessica Drew having never been an Avengers or really mentioned in passing in the previous or subsequent 200 or so issues. Claremont definitely had the same streak as Gruenwald for "use every part of the continuity buffalo" writing, which sometimes really paid off (digging up Sabretooth as a Marauder/Wolverine nemesis, the whole Carol Danvers rehabilitation run) so maybe he just wanted to use some chopper riding mutants and figured he didn't need to create new ones?
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Apr 5, 2020 21:49
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I know Cable was in the X-Men '92 cartoon (though I don't remember if it was ever revealed in the cartoon who his parents were on there), but was Rachel Grey ever in any of the cartoons?
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Apr 5, 2020 22:18
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Skwirl posted:I know Cable was in the X-Men '92 cartoon (though I don't remember if it was ever revealed in the cartoon who his parents were on there), but was Rachel Grey ever in any of the cartoons? The wild man of Borneo......... see you around Rachel had a cameo as a background character and that's it. So she was in X-Men as much as... Moondragon! https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/X-Men:_The_Animated_Series_Season_4_11
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Apr 5, 2020 22:24
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Codependent Poster posted:The wild man of Borneo......... see you around Oh yeah, that was the one where Apocalypse was going to break time by killing a bunch of psychics at the same moment or something.
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Apr 5, 2020 22:26
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People make the mistake of deciding characters who can and will do whatever they want whenever they want with 0 moral compunction factoring into their actions are all interested in being skeevy sex criminals and murderers in the first place. Give me a character completely lacking in conscience who's still pretty nice to be around until you see what they do to someone they both despise and wouldn't be in trouble for harming. Don't have then enjoy what they do to the person, maybe even have them find it unpleasant, but also show they have no moral qualms about doing it.
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Apr 6, 2020 09:06
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Adder Moray posted:People make the mistake of deciding characters who can and will do whatever they want whenever they want with 0 moral compunction factoring into their actions are all interested in being skeevy sex criminals and murderers in the first place.
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Apr 6, 2020 12:14
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I’ve been reading New Mutants, and am shocked to discover that in Issue Seven, Mr. T is the villain:  He’s really fixated on calling people chumps. Also his superpower is an axe.
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Apr 7, 2020 03:31
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