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Post by MDG on Jun 6, 2023 13:45:04 GMT -5
32 pages, 2 staples , continuing stories tied together in a monthly format. Well that rules out Superman for the first half of his existence. It was mostly shorter standalone stories, many of which were in an anthology title called Action that featured several other short shorter features and the books both Action and Superman were more than 32 pages for much of their existence. And many of the DC titles, even when they went to 32 pages, weren't monthly but 8 times a year, and some were bi-monthly not monthly. But I guess comics as we know them is code for comics when you first saw them and prefer them, not as they actually were for much of the existence of the industry. -M Also rules out most comics by EC, Dell, Gold Key, Warren, Fantagraphics, Archie, Fawcwett... |
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Post by Deleted on Jun 6, 2023 13:48:13 GMT -5
Well that rules out Superman for the first half of his existence. It was mostly shorter standalone stories, many of which were in an anthology title called Action that featured several other short shorter features and the books both Action and Superman were more than 32 pages for much of their existence. And many of the DC titles, even when they went to 32 pages, weren't monthly but 8 times a year, and some were bi-monthly not monthly. But I guess comics as we know them is code for comics when you first saw them and prefer them, not as they actually were for much of the existence of the industry. -M Also rules out most comics by EC, Dell, Gold Key, Warren, Fantagraphics, Archie, Fawcwett... And monthly also rules out a lot of those early Image books like Youngblood that were perpetually late and couldn't keep a monthly schedule. -M |
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Post by Batflunkie on Jun 6, 2023 14:00:50 GMT -5
Speaking of which... We're WAY overdue for the conclusion of Afterlife with Archie. We're getting into A Song of Ice and Fire territory, delay-wise!!! After Archie canned the Dark Circle Iteration of their MLJ characters beyond Black Hood, I kind of gave up on them. It feels like they mostly go after a cash grabs like "Archie Meets Predator" and don't have any long terms plans |
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Post by Deleted on Jun 6, 2023 14:35:44 GMT -5
I’ve never seen a cover with a shark that I didn’t love.
Try looking for this when you're scrounging the dollar bins. It's an absolutely insane read.
There are also a couple of other variant covers--
Have to get this, there's also an Archie vs Predator series.....
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Post by codystarbuck on Jun 6, 2023 16:15:43 GMT -5
Speaking of which... We're WAY overdue for the conclusion of Afterlife with Archie. We're getting into A Song of Ice and Fire territory, delay-wise!!! After Archie canned the Dark Circle Iteration of their MLJ characters beyond Black Hood, I kind of gave up on them. It feels like they mostly go after a cash grabs like "Archie Meets Predator" and don't have any long terms plans As opposed to everyone else's cash grabs, with evens, new Number Ones and media tie-ins? Archie is still doing their regular books and they have never really found much of an audience for their superheroes, even with higher profile venues like DC. At least they are willing to try again, ever few years. |
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Post by tartanphantom on Jun 6, 2023 16:20:48 GMT -5
Have to get this, there's also an Archie vs Predator series.....
There's actually two Archie vs. Predator series, both with multiple variant covers. The first one is a 4-issue series from 2015, and the 2nd series is 5 issues from 2019-20.
They're a little nuts, but not as bonkers as the Sharknado story. Some fun covers, though.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 6, 2023 16:23:27 GMT -5
After Archie canned the Dark Circle Iteration of their MLJ characters beyond Black Hood, I kind of gave up on them. It feels like they mostly go after a cash grabs like "Archie Meets Predator" and don't have any long terms plans As opposed to everyone else's cash grabs, with evens, new Number Ones and media tie-ins? Archie is still doing their regular books and they have never really found much of an audience for their superheroes, even with higher profile venues like DC. At least they are willing to try again, ever few years. Or you know, hey let's take a bunch of popular characters and stick them together in our try out book to see if it sells more (JLA in B&B 28) or hey they stuck their popular characters together in one book and sold, let's try it in ours (Avengers), etc. Everything a for profit publisher does is a cash grab, especially when it was Nicholson Wheeler or Goodman at the helm. I've never understood the cash grab criticism. Publishers always put out titles to make money, whether it's good or makes sense is secondary to whether or not it will sell. Everything is a cash grab is a capitalist system, that's how capitalism works. And comics has always been a reactionary industry, if something works, everyone else tries to cash in on it. That's why there are super-heroes plural and not just one Superman. -M |
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Post by Batflunkie on Jun 6, 2023 16:45:20 GMT -5
After Archie canned the Dark Circle Iteration of their MLJ characters beyond Black Hood, I kind of gave up on them. It feels like they mostly go after a cash grabs like "Archie Meets Predator" and don't have any long terms plans As opposed to everyone else's cash grabs, with evens, new Number Ones and media tie-ins? Archie is still doing their regular books and they have never really found much of an audience for their superheroes, even with higher profile venues like DC. At least they are willing to try again, ever few years. Or you know, hey let's take a bunch of popular characters and stick them together in our try out book to see if it sells more (JLA in B&B 28) or hey they stuck their popular characters together in one book and sold, let's try it in ours (Avengers), etc. Everything a for profit publisher does is a cash grab, especially when it was Nicholson Wheeler or Goodman at the helm. I've never understood the cash grab criticism. Publishers always put out titles to make money, whether it's good or makes sense is secondary to whether or not it will sell. Everything is a cash grab is a capitalist system, that's how capitalism works. And comics has always been a reactionary industry, if something works, everyone else tries to cash in on it. That's why there are super-heroes plural and not just one Superman. Guess my own bitterness about Dark Circle got the better end of my judgement... |
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Post by codystarbuck on Jun 6, 2023 16:52:26 GMT -5
As opposed to everyone else's cash grabs, with evens, new Number Ones and media tie-ins? Archie is still doing their regular books and they have never really found much of an audience for their superheroes, even with higher profile venues like DC. At least they are willing to try again, ever few years. Or you know, hey let's take a bunch of popular characters and stick them together in our try out book to see if it sells more (JLA in B&B 28) or hey they stuck their popular characters together in one book and sold, let's try it in ours (Avengers), etc. Everything a for profit publisher does is a cash grab, especially when it was Nicholson Wheeler or Goodman at the helm. I've never understood the cash grab criticism. Publishers always put out titles to make money, whether it's good or makes sense is secondary to whether or not it will sell. Everything is a cash grab is a capitalist system, that's how capitalism works. And comics has always been a reactionary industry, if something works, everyone else tries to cash in on it. That's why there are super-heroes plural and not just one Superman. Guess my own bitterness about Dark Circle got the better end of my judgement... Hey, I'm still bitter about the abortion of the Spectrum line! |
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Post by Deleted on Jun 6, 2023 16:54:30 GMT -5
As opposed to everyone else's cash grabs, with evens, new Number Ones and media tie-ins? Archie is still doing their regular books and they have never really found much of an audience for their superheroes, even with higher profile venues like DC. At least they are willing to try again, ever few years. Or you know, hey let's take a bunch of popular characters and stick them together in our try out book to see if it sells more (JLA in B&B 28) or hey they stuck their popular characters together in one book and sold, let's try it in ours (Avengers), etc. Everything a for profit publisher does is a cash grab, especially when it was Nicholson Wheeler or Goodman at the helm. I've never understood the cash grab criticism. Publishers always put out titles to make money, whether it's good or makes sense is secondary to whether or not it will sell. Everything is a cash grab is a capitalist system, that's how capitalism works. And comics has always been a reactionary industry, if something works, everyone else tries to cash in on it. That's why there are super-heroes plural and not just one Superman. Guess my own bitterness about Dark Circle got the better end of my judgement... Publishers make bad decisions all the time, so do people. It's the nature of things, and it's ok to be upset about decisions made. But to blame a publisher for making a decision that they think will make money (whether it does or not is irrelevant) when their primary purpose is to make money, always seems either silly or willfully naïve to me. -M |
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Post by Icctrombone on Jun 6, 2023 17:45:16 GMT -5
I Returned from work to see my fellow CCFers have engaged in a feeding frenzy trying to rip apart my comment about " comics as we know them " .
Like Samuel L Jackson said In Pulp Fiction "Allow me to retort"
After the mid 60's ,successful comics were mostly in the monthly format that I described. It was the sign of a profitable book . Fawcett, Dell etc, became defunct because they did not uphold the standard that I mentioned. Comics that were bi-monthly were that frequency because they were close to cancelation. Again, I am talking about late 60's on to the present time. Action comics with multiple stories went the way of the do do bird because comic buyers preferred the current one feature format. Anthology titles have always had a hard time staying Viable. So you can all sneer at my comment , but bring me the sales figures for those books and if they are still around in the present day. The format of the 40's did and could not continue. In have read about most of those companies going under from lack of sales. Of course events like the Wertham witch hunt were a factor but there are still 4 comic companies still alive and kicking in 2023. This response has nothing to do with the original post about Eisner , this response is addressing what a successful comic format is. Like @mrp likes to constantly point out, we get the comics that we support and the formats that we support for good or bad.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 6, 2023 18:15:07 GMT -5
I Returned from work to see my fellow CCFers have engaged in a feeding frenzy trying to rip apart my comment about " comics as we know them " . Like Samuel L Jackson said In Pulp Fiction "Allow me to retort" After the mid 60's ,successful comics were mostly in the monthly format that I described. It was the sign of a profitable book . Fawcett, Dell etc, became defunct because they did not uphold the standard that I mentioned. Comics that were bi-monthly were that frequency because they were close to cancelation. Again, I am talking about late 60's on to the present time. Action comics with multiple stories went the way of the do do bird because comic buyers preferred the current one feature format. Anthology titles have always had a hard time staying Viable. So you can all sneer at my comment , but bring me the sales figures for those books and if they are still around in the present day. The format of the 40's did and could not continue. In have read about most of those companies going under from lack of sales. Of course events like the Wertham witch hunt were a factor but there are still 4 comic companies still alive and kicking in 2023. This response has nothing to do with the original post about Eisner , this response is addressing what a successful comic format is. Like @mrp likes to constantly point out, we get the comics that we support and the formats that we support for good or bad. they were so successful that in the 70s and 80s DC and Marvel constantly experimented with format (80 Pagers, 100 pagers, giant size quarterlies etc. because the newsstands didn't want to carry the monthly 32 page pamphlet and often the books would arrive at dealers, get put in a pile without the straps ever being cut and returned. Look at the yearly circulation reports in the letters pages and see the discrepancy between # of copies printed and # of copies actually sold, and the lie of that being a popular and successful format is pretty self-evident. It also shows how unprofitable the format was despite selling hundreds of thousands of copies because the profit was eaten up by the costs of hundreds of thousands unsold copies being returned for credit and creating production costs without any revenue from those copies. It was so successful that they had to turn to a new path to market to sell directly to the small minority of the market that liked it (i.e. the direct market) to keep it a viable format. In addition to the publishers constantly looking for a better format, if you read stuff like Eisner's interviews with creators in shop talk, every creator from Kirby to Eisner himself, hated that format and were constantly looking for a better alternative. the 32 page monthly periodical wasn't the best format for comics, or even a desirable one, it was the one they were stuck with and had to make due with because of the nature of the periodical market. The only people who like that format are long time fans who were kids who discovered comics in that format who look at it through the lens of nostalgia and without any regard for the realities of that format in the marketplace. As for Einser rather than format, you were the one who dismissed Eisner because his work didn't appear in traditional comics as "we" knew them, which, even if we accept your definition of traditional comic, is patently false. -M |
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Post by commond on Jun 6, 2023 18:20:12 GMT -5
Speaking of Eisner, this thread reminded me I haven't read any Spirit in a while. Just read Croaky Andrews' Perfect Crime from April 13th, 1941. it's the strip about the two crooks who escape from the Spirit and hide out on a Caribbean island. Quite an impressive bit of storytelling. Probably my favorite Spirit strip so far (having read them in chronological order from the start.)
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Post by Deleted on Jun 6, 2023 18:36:11 GMT -5
Checking out these religious comics done by Kingstone publishing....this is the full set 1-12 of The Christ. I don't know if these are sold in comic book stores.
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Post by kirby101 on Jun 6, 2023 19:06:41 GMT -5
The one with The Living Mummy looks cool.
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