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Post by Icctrombone on Jul 1, 2019 20:47:51 GMT -5
[Pity the body odour crowd and the selfish sellers don't go and organise their own conventions. Come to Stinky's Comic Con For Slobs this July! Free entry if you weigh 400lbs and over, or can render a room uninhabitable in less than five minutes with your body odour. It probably gets pretty smelly under a rabbit suit.
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Post by The Captain on Jul 6, 2019 8:45:53 GMT -5
I love that feeling I get when I open a comic for the first time, even if it has been in my collection for years, and find something unexpected. Last year, while reading through the Hero for Hire/Power Man series, I found that I owned a double cover book that I hadn't know about previously. Yesterday, I got another pleasant surprise. I was sitting in the bleachers at my daughter's swim practice, reading through Master of Kung Fu, and I came to issue #29. Pulling it out of the bag and opening up the front cover, I see the following on the bottom of the first page. Signed book! This stuff doesn't happen often, but when it does, I feel like a little kid on Christmas morning again.
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Post by Trevor on Jul 6, 2019 10:56:11 GMT -5
That is a cool finding! I buy a lot of bargain bin books online and in the wild, and have stumbled upon similar creator signings once or thrice, with hopefully more to come in the unread boxes.
I guess it stands to reason that books with signatures will show up more proportionally than expected, given that cared for collections/books will be more likely to have previous owners that took the effort to get them signed, and the disposed of books will more likely be unsigned. Not sure if I phrased that logically.....
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Post by Icctrombone on Jul 6, 2019 14:34:32 GMT -5
I love that feeling I get when I open a comic for the first time, even if it has been in my collection for years, and find something unexpected. Last year, while reading through the Hero for Hire/Power Man series, I found that I owned a double cover book that I hadn't know about previously. Yesterday, I got another pleasant surprise. I was sitting in the bleachers at my daughter's swim practice, reading through Master of Kung Fu, and I came to issue #29. Pulling it out of the bag and opening up the front cover, I see the following on the bottom of the first page. Signed book! This stuff doesn't happen often, but when it does, I feel like a little kid on Christmas morning again. That's a major score.
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Post by Duragizer on Jul 6, 2019 22:50:17 GMT -5
Colouring in American comics reached perfection in the late '80s-early '90s, after Ben-Day dots disappeared and before digital colouring became dominant.
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Post by Cei-U! on Jul 7, 2019 9:28:27 GMT -5
Colouring in American comics reached perfection in the late '80s-early '90s, after Ben-Day dots disappeared and before digital colouring became dominant. I'll buy that. Marie Severin's colors on the Batman Adventures book, to name just a single example, was positively exquisite. I heartily dislike most digital coloring. The overrendering detracts from the line art, and the glare makes my eyes ache.
Cei-U! I summon the polarized sunglasses!
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Post by Graphic Autist on Jul 7, 2019 10:13:00 GMT -5
While I don’t miss comics characters talking out loud to themself while alone, I kind of miss thought bubbles.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 7, 2019 10:16:32 GMT -5
While I don’t miss comics characters talking out loud to themself while alone, I kind of miss thought bubbles. So do I. Whatever the logic of thought bubbles (don't let John Byrne hear you say "bubbles"), the amount of speech bubbles/thought bubbles in older comics did give you bang for your buck. It can take me a good half an hour, or more, to properly read a 70s Black Panther comic (one example). Some modern comics, which cost £3+, can be read in under ten minutes. So, yes, I miss thought bubbles.
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Post by Icctrombone on Jul 7, 2019 11:00:30 GMT -5
Thought bubbles were a very useful tool. It was abused by some. I’m looking at you Claremont.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 7, 2019 11:18:15 GMT -5
Thought bubbles were a very useful tool. It was abused by some. I’m looking at you Claremont. Maybe they got paid by the word back then!
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Jul 7, 2019 11:37:59 GMT -5
That was when comics were written with the assumption that they were somebody's first comic, so issue after issue would contain nearly identical explanations of backstory or how someone's powers worked. Nowadays if you buy any comic you've basically jumped into the deep end if you don't already know most of the characters.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 7, 2019 11:42:43 GMT -5
That reminds me, I do miss the technique of showing half a Spidey mask on Parker's face whenever his spider-sense tingled!
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Post by Icctrombone on Jul 7, 2019 11:49:19 GMT -5
Way back in the 60's they used thought balloons properly. You are privy to what they are thinking but won't say out loud. It was more than just catching up with the plot. Word balloons would catch up a new reader , and it was effective without taking you out of the story.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jul 7, 2019 12:18:30 GMT -5
That was when comics were written with the assumption that they were somebody's first comic, so issue after issue would contain nearly identical explanations of backstory or how someone's powers worked. Nowadays if you buy any comic you've basically jumped into the deep end if you don't already know most of the characters. If it had only been that it would have been significantly less egregious. But many comic writers had no understanding that I don't need the characters or the text to tell me exactly what the art is showing me. Yes, I'm talking to you, Don McGregor.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 7, 2019 13:57:12 GMT -5
That was when comics were written with the assumption that they were somebody's first comic, so issue after issue would contain nearly identical explanations of backstory or how someone's powers worked. Nowadays if you buy any comic you've basically jumped into the deep end if you don't already know most of the characters. If it had only been that it would have been significantly less egregious. But many comic writers had no understanding that I don't need the characters or the text to tell me exactly what the art is showing me. Yes, I'm talking to you, Don McGregor. I think a big part of it boils down to the Marvel method. The writers wanted to convey certain moods, tones, emotions, etc. but since they didn't work full script and they had no guarantee it would be conveyed by the art in most cases. So they doubled down on what they wanted in the script. It was even worse when the scripter was different than the plotter. Since the artists wouldn't always know how the plotter wanted something conveyed, what ended up on the page was their interpretation of what was in the plot, and they may have given less space to something the writer considered important, or more space to something the writer didn't want to emphasize, or something important to the plotter didn't get conveyed visually so had to be jammed in via text, and so you often got art conflicting with text, or being redundant instead of them working in synch. Full script eliminates some of the ambiguities, but runs the risk of stifling the artists ability to frame scenes the best way visually if the writer is not a strong visual thinker, which can throw off pacing, or if the writer asks for too much in a single panel. And then there is the whole deadline factor. Also why would an artist take the time to put a lot of details in the art of background if it was going to all get covered up in balloons, and since the Marvel method didn't provide a guide as to how much text would be in a panel, the artist had no idea how much space to leave for text or how to lay out a panel to accommodate the needed balloons, which resulted in a lot of crowded looking panels and other panels looking overly sparse and bland with a lot of empty unused space outside of the figures themselves. It's why I still think the full cartoonist model often results in the best product because the writing and art are almost always in synch. The writer knows how the artist works and what they can and cannot do and the artist knows exactly what the writer wants. -M
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