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DrProsek posted:I fail to see the problem. Because MRAs are a cancer on nerd hobbies and need to be shown the door instead of being coddled? On a more general note, it's pretty nice to be seeing a Marvel with 0 Punisher and 2 Wolverine books currently. Even Deadpool seems to be down to 2 books, 3 if you want to count the current miniseries. And Marvel doesn't seem any worse for sales because of it. I know it's going to cop a lot of flak, but I'm fine with finally dropping the stupid anti-heroes books as a final break from the grim & gritty era. I have this horrible feeling a lot of the fanbase for these guys (especially Punisher) are the same kind of people who missed the point and thought Rorschach was a badass instead of the broken shell of a man the text explicitly showed. I get that at their best Wolverine and Deadpool avoid this, but in general that's when they're in a team book and the author doesn't need to constantly revel in the anti-heroes' angst and need to kill. Punisher really doesn't have this, as he was a straightly played villain until the poor idea to unironically protagonise a regular person murdering regular people was a great idea for a super hero comic.
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Mar 21, 2016 23:02
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Wanderer posted:That was why Ennis and Rucka's runs were well-liked, and why Edmundson's wasn't. Rucka's Frank is fundamentally broken and the narrative spends surprisingly little time with him; it's mostly about the effect he has and people around him reacting to him. Ennis's Frank is a particularly efficient serial killer. Neither are in any way laudable. It also isn't an accident that every arc in Ennis's MAX book is at least as much about the antagonists and supporting characters as it is about Frank himself. I think this is the big Punisher trade I read back when I first got back into comics in the 00s (Welcome Back Frank) and it's still fundamentally unreadable to me, if only because I understand that most of the people reading it are cheering Frank and miss the whole point. I'm also the wrong audience for Garth Ennis stuff I guess, though as time goes on he's way better than whatever kind of filth monsters Mark Millar or Alan Moore have turned into. In the end, Punisher has the same problem as Batman does to me. He's a white dude who can't get over the one loss in his life, and does impromptu therapy by beating up the lower classes. I think it was Grant Morrison who I first saw bring up the class commentary about it (actually just Supermen & Batman), and now I can't help but see it all the time. But at least Batman has had some great stories that move away from those tropes (well, basically one great story arc in the Morrison stuff) but I've never seen something for Punisher that was both a step away from the angry white dude shoot criminals in the face stuff and also iconicly good.
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Mar 22, 2016 00:51
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Wanderer posted:Yeah, Ennis's Marvel Knights books are way more into the escapist fantasy angle than the later stuff, and I should've drawn that distinction. Marvel Knights, especially in "Welcome Back, Frank," is an attempt for Ennis to do a PG-13 version of the kind of comedy he'd become known for with Preacher, and I really don't think it lands. Sorry, I didn't realize that there were two separate Ennis runs on Punisher. I'll also say that a lot of my feel for the character is from the 90s, when it was specifically much more Grimdark Batman with Guns. But even with Welcome Back Frank I saw an angry white guy who'd slot well into AAA game of the moment killing a bunch of a vaguely ethnic mob criminals. And there's the fact that class is more than just money--stereotypical criminals are considered lower class despite sometimes having huge amounts of wealth. Frank's class is also somewhat elevated by the stupid amount of ARE TROOPS stuff that's internalized into American culture. It's pretty hard for me to not read a subtext of "Angry All-American Uh Rah takes out the lower class criminal trash" into the character. I mean, he's not taking down fraudulent investment bankers or tax cheats (which would also make for a bad story IMO) it's the standard low life mobsters.
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Mar 22, 2016 02:31
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Mr Hootington posted:I like the Punisher that shoots knives and the Punisher that becomes Frankenstein. That is the best Punisher. I never read Frankencastle, but it looked sort of interesting and different. Given that I pretty well liked all of Remender's other Marvel stuff besides Uncanny Avengers vol 2, would you say it's worth picking up as someone who doesn't otherwise enjoy the character?
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Mar 22, 2016 02:33
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Wanderer posted:You might enjoy the "Barracuda" arc on Punisher MAX. It's Frank vs. a bunch of cocaine-addled power company executives. Hmm... that's some violence I could  to.EDIT: Power companies? That was relatively contemporary with the whole Enron debacle, right?
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Mar 22, 2016 02:38
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X-O posted:I need another Peter David X-Factor title. Those have been the best X-Books since, well forever really. I'm sort of over Peter David after the whole "Let's talk racist caricatures of Roma" moment. And I say this as someone who loved both his 90s X-Factor, as well as the 00s reboots. It's odd to me, since he definitely understood the crazy European lies about Jews (that are thankfully mostly gone now) but couldn't see them when they were directed against a different group.
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Jan 10, 2017 20:46
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IUG posted:I won't get much more with his name attached, but that's because I think he stretches the plots out way too long. However, he has since appologized a lot about what he said and how he viewed the Roma. Here's a link from his blog if you want to get it right from the horse's mouth: http://www.peterdavid.net/2016/10/10/final-thoughts-on-the-romani/ You know, that's the kind of thing that takes some real stones to do, and I have to give him a lot of credit for doing it. I'll also admit to liking the long game in all works, (I mean, I still will read Claremont's good stuff from the 80s, where a quarter of all plot threads die on the vine) so it might mean I give PAD another shot with the new series.
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Jan 10, 2017 21:11
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IUG posted:I'm at the point where I'm having problems physical fitting my entire collection, and a small budget problem. Is anyone doing Unlimited instead of picking up floppies? I went 100% digital awhile ago. I travel too much, and taking trades along was only a band-aid on a issue. I make enough that the dollar issue is non-existent, even though you come out way ahead with Unlimited. I thought I'd have an issue reading on a tablet, but an 8" one is big enough that I can view without any problems. Note that I am mostly an archive reader, so being months (in reality just a single story in most cases) behind is no problem for me. If I wanted to be up to date, I'd probably go Comixology, though somehow you end up paying more for a digital issue than a print one. I'm not a huge fan of the hobby shop model, so anything that moves sales closer to what people actual buy versus what a shop orders seems like a positive to me. But I'll fully admit I've completely gotten loose of the LCS, and never did enjoy the locations and people I had to put up with to just buy comics to read.
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Jan 12, 2017 02:06
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How you don't take away "gently caress events, let books keep doing their thing" from the last few years is beyond me. The best DC event ever (Final Crisis) had basically zero tie-ins, and the best Marvel events of the last few years (Infinity/Secret Wars) didn't need basically any of the tie-ins to work. Events are cancer since they just tend to disrupt every book not being written by the main series writer, and eve sometime then like with the Avengers series during Secret Invasion.
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Apr 17, 2017 21:19
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Endless Mike posted:Uh, Final Crisis had a 52-issue maxiseries tie-in. So again, it didn't derail any normal books? I don't see how this undermines the point. I guess it also had the New Gods mini too, but none of them actually fit into the series timeline from what I recall.
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Apr 17, 2017 21:30
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Edge & Christian posted:Again, I generally agree this is true, but the realities of working in a shared universe is that you're going to have the share the universe. I dunno, I rather preferred the 80s model, where events involving a character we actually in the main book for that character. Yes, Secret Wars was an exception pushed by about the shittiest guy involved in Marvel at the time but it was the exception rather than the rule at Marvel. I mean, just look at their big books (X-Men). All their events were self-contained between Secret Wars II and Onslaught. Before SW2, there was no non-Mutant crossover that affected the X-Men. You'd agree we had a shared universe in 80s Marvel, right? I'd even take the model where you don't have to worry about a crossover if you don't read the main writer's books, which minimizes the amount of fiat from other writers screwing over main characters from other offices.
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Apr 17, 2017 23:54
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Edge & Christian posted:1) Using the X-Men is kind of cherry-picking, since that really just comes down to Chris Claremont having Most Favored Nations status. Even ignoring that, In between SWII (1986) and Onslaught (1996) the core title still crossed over into other X-Books for Mutant Massacre (1986), Fall of the Mutants (1988), Inferno (1988), Acts of Vengeance (1989), X-Tinction Agenda, X-Cutioner's Song (1992), Fatal Attractions (1993), Bloodties (1993), Phalanx Covenant (1994), Legion Quest/Age of Apocalypse (1995), and probably some smaller interbook crossovers I'm forgetting about. There were also a number of events like Infinity Gauntlet that featured the X-Men but didn't explicitly cross over into the X-Books, I guess because Claremont wasn't interested. Did you actually read any of those? They actually have to do with the books they are in, instead of getting derailed because someone is writing about Skrulls infiltrating the MU, for instance. The X-Men crossovers involved buying other books you were probably already buying, like X-Factor or New Mutants. Infinity Gauntlet w/r/t X-Men is exactly the way an event *should* be. I get to give a poo poo and read it if I want to, and ignore it if you didn't. Back in the day, I did because I was reading the Jim Starlin run on Silver Surfer, and Infinity Gauntlet was an extension of those plot lines. quote:2) Again, NOT DEFENDING THE STORY ITSELF of Civil War II, but I find the "Ms Marvel does four issues that when you read them feature plot elements of Civil War II" model infinitely preferable to the sort of poo poo that happened in the late 1980s and 1990s, where if you were reading the Avengers title, pick up issue 344 one month and then you'd hit a crossover and literally you're told "before reading Avengers 345 make sure you read this month's issues of Captain America, West Coast Avengers, Quasar and Wonder Man! And then read this month's Thor and Iron Man, and next month's Cap/WCA/Quasar/Wonder Man, then come back for Avengers 346! Then repeat this for the next three months, also you should probably pick up Silver Surfer and Fantastic Four to understand some of this." If you're going to make this point, don't use Mutant Massacre. The only one that really involved any crossover was Thor/Power Pack/X-Factor. And yeah, I'd rather have crossovers headed by the guys I'm reading so that you don't just get a de-rail for a few months to a story that I don't give a poo poo about. Also, LOL at Including Acts of Vengeance, where all the involvement in the crossover meant was a page or two, and the actually interesting gimmick of fighting a different character's villain. You're also apparently referencing Operation: Galactic Storm, which was bad because it was bad and had nothing to do with it crossing over between books. The solution is not to handle a crossover badly, or at least do it in ignorable annuals. The 80s and early 90s were far better about crossovers than we are now. quote:3. Do you have an example of "the model where you have to worry about a crossover if you don't read the main writer's books, which means that fiat from other writers screwing over main characters from other offices?" Like when did this happen? As far as books go, you just named one-- Thor. I know it's popular to hate on JMS and Bendis (also Hickman oddly) here, but they were writing something different that works better when they get to not have their books derailed by unrelated big story. It's also the part of Secret Wars that I'm least happy with-- making GBS threads on all your other stories for ~6 months is a trash model. See also Avengers during Civil War, where the book gets critically hosed by creeper Mark Millar's lovely event book. It's like people lived through the "Secret Wars II shits up your book" debacle, and nobody learned a drat thing from it. But we also had the cosmic joke of Claremont getting run out of X-Men by Jim "Tit Ninja" Lee who they couldn't even keep on the book a year afterwards, so it seems that editorial wasn't thinking long term even then.
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Apr 18, 2017 12:55
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Happy Noodle Boy posted:Almost every Secret Wars tie-in was fun as all hell. But was it worth cancelling literally everything else Marvel was doing for it? For as bad as Flashpoint was, it at least had the dignity to not poo poo on any books except Booster Gold, at least until DC decided to New 52 up the place.
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Apr 18, 2017 14:45
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Edge & Christian posted:I read a lot of them! As for "derailed because someone is writing about Skrulls", there certainly were a lot of (non-X-Men books) that got derailed because someone else was writing about New York being invaded by demons. Acts of Vengeance required everyone to derail their story because someone decided that all of the supervillains were going to trade partners. I might be something of an outlier but growing up I only read New Mutants, not X-Men or X-Factor or Wolverine because the X-Men seemed weird and confusing and my first X-Book was that Warlock vs. Impossible Man annual so I was a New Mutants loyalist. Therefore crossovers like X-Tinction Agenda and even a lot of Inferno turned into New Mutants crossing over with a bunch of books I didn't read or care about. Later in the post-Claremont era, this sort of crossing over not only turned me off of reading all of the X-Men books (I got suckered in by the pre-Image Image Creator hype of gatefold covers and trading cards) until the only book I was still reading was Peter David's X-Factor, which made poo poo like X-Cutioner's Song a real pain in the rear end unless you wanted to buy five other books. Coincidentally this crossover mania, while supported and coordinated with "the office", were bad enough that they were cited by Peter David, Mark Waid, and others as the reason they quit working on the X-Books. But at least they got hosed over by the office, not by another creator! Then why did you bring up Mutant Massacre? The New Mutants story out of that is entirely self-contained. Something weird is happening off panel, but it had basically nothing to do with the story in New Mutants. They get told to not go into the sewers, go in anyway, fight Magus, and nope the gently caress out back to 15th (?) century Scotland with Robert the Bruce. The problem to me is more that it has the marquee on it, so that people would pick it up while it had zero to really do with the stories that were happening in X-Men and X-Factor. The Inferno stuff in New Mutants was basically the same-- a fully separate story running through that book (and the X-Terminators mini, but reading it didn't add anything)while the main story was happening in X-Men & X-Factor. The stakes were 100% New Mutants stuff, and so were the results. I'm not going to defend the poo poo events that happened later in X books because they were poo poo. You are right that they did drive David off his book, and it sucked because he was writing the best X book at the time. The analog to this is to say have X-Factor stop being about the team and do single issue mildly related vignettes for six months-- you know, how New Avengers was hosed over by Civil War (also Secret Invasion, though that was self-inflicted wound by Bendis). The solution is always to not do things shittily in either method. But I can't help but feel that things were better before events were annualized, so books got a chance to really breath and didn't have to waste a third of their issues a year with tie-ins to unrelated events. quote:I think you're looking at a lot of the old storylines/comics with rose colored glasses or something. You also keep dismissing some truly lovely comics (Operation Galactic Storm) because "they were lovely". Well great. It was also really lovely that I was only reading Avengers at the time it came out AND I had a pull box so I was on the hook for like $3 (a lot in 1992 junior high money) in order to buy fuckin' part 6/12/18 of a story that had nothing to do with what had been going on in the Avengers. That or somehow find an extra $20 to buy all of the tie-in books I didn't care about. Under what circumstance would this ever be an acceptable way of doing crossovers? I don't care how good the story is, if you're reading Hawkeye and issue 5 is Kate working on a case in LA, then issue 6 is "oh man, Kate's possessed by Mephisto but only appears for four pages, meanwhile WHY ON EARTH have Ms. Marvel and Ironheart changed costumes? And is that Squirrel Girl in Hell?" I don't care if you bring in Your Favorite Writer to show-run that crosover, it's going to be annoying as hell and bad for the person who just wants to read Hawkeye. The answer is it wouldn't matter how you set up the O:GS crossover because it was a lovely crossover and crossed pretty poo poo books at the time. The solution is to have events that organically involve the characters involved. As an example, you didn't complain that Infinity Gauntlet was de-railing Silver Surfer when it came out and crossed over specifically because Gauntlet was a Silver Surfer story in run up and stakes. You can something similar for Avengers/New Avengers and Infinity or Secret Wars. The other tie-ins were awful, because it was a de-rail for an event, same as when say you have to deal with Skrull or Civil War poo poo loving up an unrelated book. quote:Speaking personally as a comics reader from the time you were describing, there definitely wasn't anything like the Internet to fill you in on books you weren't reading. You could buy Marvel Age or Comic Buyers Guide to essentially read press releases about what was going on, and Marvel would provide little postcards with checklists for crossovers/events. If you wanted to catch up on a book you could trawl back issue bins for the old issues, there were no trade paperbacks to speak of, certainly no digital subscription services. So even "simple things organized by the creators and offices working on the books" would get awfully confusing if you're trying to collect old issues of New Mutants and you finally find the issues that are tying into the simple clear Mutant Massacre book that I suppose you should really go find other back issues to fully understand, but it's okay, Louise Simonson also wrote some of those. Isn't it normal to read all of a creator's books that are coming out? Even your Peter David example had this kind of crossover in it involving the Hulk. quote:Would it be nice if everyone had 100% freedom to write exactly what they wanted? Sure, that would be cool. But that will probably never happen, it isn't happening now, it wasn't happening 10/20/30 years ago either, and I still can't see why you feel things were better Back Then, unless the period of "back then" comprises "1987-1991, but only if you're Chris Claremont". I dunno, I like the idea of not having the status quo of a book hosed up in an event that didn't even happen in the related family of books, or at least a crossover coming out of them. DC was famous for this for years (CoIE and even worse Zero Hour) but Marvel has gotten worse about this over time-- X-Men and Thor both get hosed over in Avengers stories, and everything gets screwed by the Secret Wars reboot.
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Apr 18, 2017 16:50
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X-O posted:Absolutely, no question. In fact I could have gone with more issues for most of the tie-ins. How can you say that? A lot of books never picked up steam again afterwards. I mean, we knew that both Avengers books were done at that point, but say GotG never got back on track, and X-Men just sort of found its footing unless this art fiasco pulls its feet out from under it again. All for 'Memberberry stories.
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Apr 18, 2017 16:59
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redbackground posted:oh nooooo, no gotg comics for four months Yup, because 4 months of no book is enough to really de-rail the book and kill its sales in lots of cases. See what happened with OYL back in the day for DC. X-O posted:You're shooting your own argument in the foot by constantly holding up Secret Wars as an example of a bad event as it's probably the most universally well regarded event the company has had since Infinity Gauntlet and a lot of that is because it used the Age of Apocalypse method of completing upending everything line wide. Which is the thing that also helped Age of Apocalypse be so well regarded for so long. I liked the actual event (i.e. more Hickman Avengers stuff) but didn't care for making GBS threads on literally every other book coming out at the time. Some of the stories were very good to great-- I'm remembering the Days of Future Past one being great, and I'm sure there were some other ones. But what about these required dropping everything else that Marvel was doing? At least Flashpoint was kind enough to let all of DC's other books go on without consequence during the event. AoA was okay, but I wasn't as enamored with it as you guys are (it was the thing that got me out of comics as a kid) and I don't think it's really aged all that well. I know, a goon shits on something popular, news at 11. But it was a grim & gritty reboot of the already grim & gritty comics line, and that's pretty much the opposite way we've needed to go since Watchmen first came out. The idea that there were some lasting consequences afterward was somewhat neat, but I'm not sure that X-Man, Holocaust, or Sugar Man really made a mark long term or even middle term. Also, weren't the AoA books actually one to one replacements with the same creative teams? I don't think I had something like that with Secret Wars if I was say read Al Ewing's Mighty Avengers.
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Apr 18, 2017 17:39
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Edge & Christian posted:I haven't read any of these mutant books in at least twenty years, probably not since roughly around the time they were released. I may have not been deeply confused by the specific books you're citing. I remembered that flowchart and how even Marvel's house ads were giving me the impression I was missing out on poo poo because I wasn't buying every book with the given logo. I did re-read them to go along with a podcast I listen to, and yeah they were their own stories. Or more accurately, for Inferno there was a X-Men/X-Factor story that was big payoffs for both, an Excalibur story, and a New Mutants story with minor points from the X-Terminators mini. I will admit that a bunch of other books got drawn in for no good reason, but otherwise the most the crossover meant core-wise was picking up X-Factor if you were reading X-Men and vice versa. Mutant Massacre had basically no crossover between books, unless you want to count the Thor story crossing with X-Factor. Note that Thor's stuff stood on its own and even actually had some decent Thor-related stuff (Hela's curse reveal) happen in it. quote:Your initial argument was things worked really well from 1986 to 1996, but fine, we're narrowing that to 1986-1991 and the lovely things in that five year span now were just a result of lovely books, and lovely books after that period were also lovely so they were lovely in that time. Great. I agree, but given that the story was six issues of most Avengers punching each other, you ought to just make it an Avengers story and play it out in the actual series. If you want a recent example, see the Hickman FF/F4 stuff, though you'd probably poo poo on that too since somehow someone is reading FF for Bentley or Alex Power and then gets annoyed when he has to read about the Fantastic Four half of the story. You get to have an event (i.e. big sweeping story with high stakes and major characters) without loving over other books in the process. quote:Infinity Gauntlet (and Infinity War, and Infinity Crusade, and etc.) did not derail Silver Surfer, but they sure did end up randomly crossing over into Hulk, Fantastic Four, Deathlok, and other books I was reading at the time. I was also reading the Infinity Gauntlet/War comics but it's hard to argue that all of the weird poo poo with evil clones and Invisible Woman being possessed by her evil clone and an evil Wolverine clone attacking everyone and etc. wasn't a "derail" by your own standards. But also by your own standards, Fantastic Four (and for all I know everything else I was reading) were lovely books who deserved a lovely derail for the lovely Infinity War poo poo. I guess I don't understand what your position here even is, that when Chris Claremont did good crossovers they were good, and all lovely comics from the halcyon days of 1986-1996, or 1986-1991, or the summer of 1989, or whatever period was good were good because they were good, and lovely examples from that period don't count because they're lovely, not like the current lovely period where everything is poo poo? I agree that pretty much all the Infinity War crossovers were awful de-rails, same with the Infinity Gauntlet stuff outside of Silver Surfer and I think maybe Dr. Strange. You could equally say the same thing with Infinity or Secret Wars and every book that wasn't Avengers and New Avengers. They were stupid important plotlines showing up in books without stakes, and have all the resonance of Spider-man teaching the Beyonder to poop. Look, the point I'm trying to make is that crossovers worked better when they were narratively driven by the books in the crossover, and have payoffs for them. X-Cutioner's Song was this way if the X-Factor portions are ignored, which means it should have been an X-Men & X-Force crossover, or else should have been written to give X-factor more of a point in it. I'm sorry I called a bunch of the 90's Avengers adjacent stuff crap, but looking back on it none of it had any real quality. I read the main series at that time, but god did Bob Harras have zero clue how to write. The only notable thing is that the main villain of the run was essentially an MRA/friend zoned d-bag, but seeing that it was the 90s there was no real commentary on it. quote:Again, i feel like there's a communication gap here. When are you saying that the X-Men and Thor got "hosed over" in Avengers stories? I am assuming for Thor you're talking about Siege, but when did the X-Men get hosed over in an Avengers story? House of M? That would be the one. The line gets rebooted in what was essentially an Avengers event book. If you're going to have a huge status quo change for a book, have it in that book.
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Apr 18, 2017 19:00
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Lurdiak posted:Maybe someone had the presence of mind to realize how hosed up the comic was and in how much trouble they'd get if a bible mom accidentally bought it for her kids. Hunh? Power Pack dealt with some heavy stuff (runaways and child abuse were two I could remember), but it was always explicitly for young kids. Having it available in nerd dungeons only was a mistake. See also DC's attempts at direct-only books hurting sales on both Teen Titans and LoSH a few years before. Edge & Christian posted:Citation needed for this, especially because ONE YEAR GREATER involved DC derailing/stopping publishing their regular titles for zero months. It was just a creative team shake-up/relaunch of a bunch of books that came out the month after the issues that happened before the time jump. Some of these new creative teams/directions were poorly received, but isn't that just because they were lovely stories, not because they had an internal leap of one year or a new creative team on them? Which books do you think had their sales killed by either of these things? Really? I was reading sales charts at the time, and OYL triggered a a big reduction in sales on almost every book. Here's a month-to-month DC charts from Feb 2007, so you can see how OYL hollowed out books (see Supergirl and Hawkgirl for the worst), or at best had no effect. OYL was in May 2006, so you can see it not help out much. I thought this was common knowledge-- DC squandered any momentum they had out of Infinite Crisis, and really never did all that well again sales-wise until New 52.
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Apr 18, 2017 23:24
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X-O posted:I saw it coming, but still sucks to see it official that Nova is cancelled. Jeff Loveness books are just too good for this world. Boo to that poo poo. I'd also guess that puts the books below it sales-wise at risk. So enjoy the following while they last-- Rocket Raccoon, Power Man & Iron Fist, Star-Lord, Thunderbolts, Spider-Woman, Unstoppable Wasp, Great Lakes Avengers, Prowler, Moon Girl, Hellcat, Mosaic, and Foolkiller. That's a dishearteningly large number of books, and I'm hoping at least Moon Girl sticks around due to non-monthly sales. It's not my book, but I really want stuff that does well with non-traditional comic audiences. quote:I'm writing my research paper for a History seminar focusing on race/ethnicity in Marvel comics from 1975 to 1985 if anybody is interested in reading that, I'll have a rough draft done by Friday. Yes please.
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Apr 18, 2017 23:53
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BrianWilly posted:Are you gaddam poopshatting serious? Are all the best books at Marvel really doing that badly? Looking at the sales charts, yeah pretty much. DC is beating Marvel, and I don't think they are doing all that well overall numbers wise either.
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Apr 19, 2017 00:11
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Endless Mike posted:This is the kind of citation he was looking for, though you should be aware that while the OYL books had a cover date of April or May, many shipped as early as March, and that column uses the *shipping* date, not the cover date. I'm pretty sure that running a big event and having all your books lose the bounce from it within 2-3 months is terribad, especially when it's the company that was already having sales issues. 52 and hilariously enough Justice were doing well at the time for DC, but everything else reverted to mean or worse quickly. I've read sales charts for a long time as a way to make sure I'm not wasting effort reading a book that's just going to be dumped in a few months. So I know that sales are this awful downward trend. But with relaunches, you actually expect some level of a win out of it for a little bit of time. You got nothing meaningful from OYL. quote:Not...really? Of the last three months of available sale figures, DC is beating Marvel by 1.12% in unit sales in March, losing by 0.17% in February (so really, pretty much equal for both), and losing by 11.29% in January (an actual difference). They're losing dollar share by 6-8% in all three months. Wasn't a huge amount of this due to $10 Spiderman? So something that hopefully for readers won't be happening on a regular basis-- Marvel's bad enough price-wise as compared to DC without the return of expensive gimmick issues.
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Apr 19, 2017 01:48
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Why is that funny? Even if I like a book, there's not much point in getting invested into it if it's going to last six issues and not even get out of the starting blocks. I get its a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I'm also not the whole market. Most people seem to read a book because it's got their favorite characters in it, which seems about as non-sensible as you can get.
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Apr 19, 2017 02:01
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X-O posted:Yeah that's a poo poo attitude. Again, why? If I have a budget and can get X number of books, wouldn't it make sense to get the ones that are actually going somewhere? I'm not saying buy the most popular stuff, but if you're making a decision between say Ms. Marvel and Unstoppable Wasp, going with the latter just seems like a bad bet.
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Apr 19, 2017 02:05
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redbackground posted:Just wanted to chime in to laugh at this post. Again, why? Sticking around reading your favorite characters is how we get poo poo like the cattle who buys Spider-man regardless of who writes it because it's Peter Parker. You buy for the creators, because quite frankly Spider-man written by some poo poo creators might as well not be Spider-man. Let's use a real world example I have here. My (now deceased) half-brother bought every issues of Fantastic Four, year in and out. Apparently, this is something he did since the early 80s. Now, he got some good runs in there (Simonson, Hickman) some okay stuff (Byrne, Waid) but also a pile of dreck that got put out because you had to have a writer do F4 and put a book out. Here I'm talking like Millar, Robinson, DeFalco, later Claremont, and Loeb. Hell, those are the names are the ones I remember-- there are plenty out there aren't memorable and get forgotten. I get buying the good stuff, and honestly even the okay stuff because you want to read dudes punch other dudes. But reading the dreck because you always read F4 just lets the industry be lazy, and with big name characters god knows it has been over the years. With a TV analogy, I am stupid for not watching Star Trek V or Nemesis, even though I normally enjoy the Star Trek movies? And that makes more sense than a comic, since at least in those cases an amount of the creative team (the actors) are constant within the subseries. Endless Mike posted:Personally, I read books by creators I like, and like to try new things. If Star-Lord by Chip Zdarsky only lasts six issues, I'm perfectly satisfied if those are six good issues. Any writer worth their while can put together a good six-issue story that can be expanded upon if their book ends up being popular. Not everything needs to be an epic spanning multiple years and titles. A good amount of my enjoyment with comics is that its a long form storytelling medium. So six issues doesn't give any ability to build up anything and these zero payoff possible, doubly so since six issues now is like maybe a single story instead of four to six with some plot threads running between them. And yeah, I don't really generally buy mini-series, because even if it's an interesting take on the c-list character it's just going to be dumped the next time the character is used. Sorry that apparently makes me the cancer killing comics. I'd love it if my dollars could bring more diversity and thus a wider audience to comics. I already buy books in that vein-- hell Ms. Marvel is my current fav and I took a risk on her first #1 and have been buying it since. I buy the diverse comics from Marvel that I think are actually going to survive, like Black Panther and Iron Man. If there was a dollar figure I could pay to build a more diverse fanbase and product line, I would. If there was a dollar figure I could pay to get every one of the the fans of legit poo poo comics (we're talking like Identity Crisis or creeper porn comics, not people who just like poorly written/drawn stuff) the gently caress out of the hobby, I would in a microsecond. But there isn't, and supporting the lowest of the low tier stuff from Marvel doesn't even get them to make more of it. Hell, what I buy doesn't even matter. Sales are determined by whatever the guys who running the nerd dungeons order, not by what is bought by customers. I get that the two of them should be highly correlated, but at several of the places I've bought from it hasn't been-- it's a poo poo way to run a business, but lots of these business are shittily run, and it was worse during the boom years when you could be an idiot and still make money. I can't even really vote with my dollars for product because of the way votes are counted. I probably come off as very jaded and disconnected in this, but that's honestly how I feel with the state of the industry. It's a dying hobby, and a decent wing of the fanbase is toxic enough that they poo poo on any attempts to actually get better fans in to replace their pathetic asses and actually grow it. The situation's awful, and I legit don't know what's in my power to actually construct positive change instead of just throwing dollars into the well and hoping for the best or bitching about it on the internet.
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Apr 19, 2017 10:24
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Onmi posted:There is nothing you can do. Distance yourself from the idea you're doing this for a purpose and not just reading what you enjoy, because I don't know if you've noticed but this is primarily a hobby of entertainment. Don't give a gently caress who's reading what or who's responsible for what. If you are buying a comic to support diversity or a creator and not because you enjoy the book you're reading... what the gently caress is wrong with you? Buy it cause you enjoy it or with an open mind because it sounds neat. If you can't separate yourself from all of that then it's going to eventually tear you up inside. No lie, I legit bought issue 1 of Ms. Marvel because I didn't want the big depiction of Muslims in comics to be the crap Geoff Johns pulled with Green Lantern. I honestly thought I had thrown $4 or whatever down the drain, but I wanted Marvel to know they did the right thing actually getting someone who had an idea about the subject matter in to write this. As a huge side benefit, the book was not good but great, and Wilson is channeling all the stuff Bendis did at the beginning of Ultimate Spider-man. Which is why I still buy the book and have it as top of the stack whenever I get back from the shop. I also refuse to buy a goddamn thing from either Orson Scott Card or Ethan Van Sciver, because both of them want me dead or seriously hosed over for who I am. Are you saying these positions are somehow bad, because they don't directly impact the content of the books? I get there's a level of "no ethical consumption under capitalism" vibe in the air, but to some extent you have to be responsible. The hobby's pretty obviously in a tailspin, and if you just keep walking down the same path the end point is pretty obvious. I'd rather have comics around in 10 years, and the way to do that is to get new blood than is almost by necessity going to be diverse. quote:You can't even say "Buy for the creators" There's plenty of creators who write absolute dreck at times and at others write magnificent books. The only driving factor that should be in anyones mind when picking up a comic is "Does this look good? Am I enjoying reading this?" Problem is that isn't true on its face. I read and still sometimes re-read Maus. It is not an enjoyable book, at least in the sense most people use. As as far as regular books are concerned, the one I always go back to reading every few years is Cry the Beloved Country. Again, not something that's at least conventionally enjoyable. It's not quite comparable, but there is superhero stuff that's sort of straddled the line between serious and pop lit before, so enjoyable might not be the best metric. Or maybe I just think of enjoyable closer to fun, when maybe you're meaning it as closer to important (regular use, not comics use of the word)
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Apr 19, 2017 11:50
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Aphrodite posted:Haha yeah man way to step out on that comic that was hyped up for months ahead of time and had all kinds of numbers already. It was? No seriously, I don't read comics news because it just comes off as reprinting press releases. But Wilson herself said that she thought it would be lucky that she got six issues before cancellation, so I don't think it was a slam dunk of a book like you suggest. Especially since it's a new character, and last one of those that was successful was Deadpool back in the 90s.
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Apr 19, 2017 13:48
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Lurdiak posted:A moderate liberal who thinks wikileaks is treason and loves white flight. Uh.. Spencer being on the Wikileaks hate train a few years ahead of time is one the few things he's been right on. It's sort of sad to see Cap in this kind of malaise. I'm just hoping that Secret Empire has Spenser leaving the book. I rather like having Falcon as Cap, but there's exactly zero reason you have to turn Steve Rodgers into a Nazi to have it work. Hell, you had Captain Falcon well before this idiot heel turn. The only thing I can compare it to is maybe the Green Lantern transition, and even that was better since Hal's POV at least has some decent basis, and he didn't turn into a goddamn Nazi as part of it.
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Apr 24, 2017 16:31
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Lobok posted:Bagley comes from a military family and was in the military himself, then later worked for Lockheed Martin. So Joe Mad is the epitome of lazy artist whereas Bagley is the epitome of work and discipline. All other artists are somewhere in between. Totally agreed. Say what you want about Bagley's art (I personally like it from about issue #3 of New Warriors on) but the man has the work output of a god. He's about the only artist where "Issues are done when they're done" means 14-16 issues a year, like his USM run with Bendis. I think he also drew about half of every issue of Trinity, which was quite impressive when it was weekly.
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May 2, 2017 21:08
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RandallODim posted:That would be both mildly clever and endorsing the punching of Nazis, so Spencer won't do it. Isn't there talk about a writer change for the later issues of the series? I could totally see a better writer doing that, which given the Marvel bullpen seems like almost anyone else.
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May 21, 2017 21:45
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Let's not also forget either of the two Life Death stories. Though I'm sure these will be discounted since their technically X-Men stories that just have large Storm arcs in them. I also think the difference there is that Storm was the #1 or 2 character on X-men throughout the 80s and 90s, while Ms. Marvel basically didn't exist during the 90s thanks to the worst comics story ever, and She-Hulk was basically an also ran character.
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Jul 9, 2017 21:30
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Rhyno posted:The post Erik Masterson run is really terrible. Pretty much everything from Thor #460-502 is considered the worst in the entire run. Is that the Tom DeFalco stuff? Yeah, that was all pretty lovely, same as his awful Fantastic Four at roughly the same time. Basically every long running comic has had lovely runs, because in the Big 2 publishing plan you have to put out 12ish issues a year, regardless if anyone has a good idea or not. Daredevil is probably one of the most solid ones since Miller made it an interesting book, but there are really scant few others.
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Jul 11, 2017 15:05
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Skwirl posted:It had terrible art and editorial hosed her in the first arc. She was told reinvent Carol's origin and then told not to when she was halfway done. Ann Nocenti & Dann Thomas too, but your point is taken. And really, Simonson's first stuff at Marvel was early X-Factor, which wasn't exactly going good places. Female writers don't get good looks at either of the big two, and it really helps limit the audience for their stuff. I like Bitch Planet, but I can't say I wouldn't be happier if DeConnick would have been treated better while at Marvel, so we could have had that book via the Icon imprint and still had her and her husband doing good work on mainstream stuff too.
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Aug 30, 2017 04:16
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Random question for someone with Marvel Unlimited-- How much of the Peter David Incredible Hulk run (331-467) is on Unlimited? I want to get screen caps for a project, but there doesn't seem to be a way to check what's available without shelling out for the service. Also two other random issues (Web of Spider-Man 44, X-Factor 76) since they were crossovers.
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Oct 16, 2017 02:43
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Lobok posted:All those are available. Hunh. And here I was worried, since the line I heard was Unlimited was missing a huge pile of classic 80s and 90s comics. Seem interesting enough to get me to start a subscription.
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Oct 16, 2017 12:49
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Lobok posted:Unless it was actually your job to read comics all day everyday I don't think you could ever run out of good stuff to read on MU. I agree, but I'm using it for something different. As in, a buddy and I are doing a deep dive podcast that goes through "good" runs of stuff ala Jay & Miles or Titan Up the Defense. So I want to have decent scans to create a visual companion out of, and Marvel Unlimited seems like the best legal option, and is certainly higher quality than any scan you're going to find via :files: Our first thing was going to be the PAD Hulk run, since it was fairly long but held together quality-wise at least until the end of the Pantheon stuff. Depending on how it gets taken, the goal is to do different seasons, each one covering a different run that's either definitive of just very good. Think Grant Morrison's Batman or the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League. I'm more of a generalized comics fan (really a fan of good authors) anyway, so being stuck talking about the same book for years probably wouldn't be as interesting to me. And the actually decent stuff has already been staked out by people who would be way better at than I am anyway.
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Oct 16, 2017 16:54
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