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Post by MDG on Sept 18, 2018 15:41:37 GMT -5
The 1985 'Ambush Bug' mini-series, which pretended to have a 'storyline', but was just a fun spoof of silver-age comics, had a page goofing on the mail-order ads ('Is It A U-Boat? It's-a Not-a MY Boat!';... I saw Robert Loren Fleming at a show when Ambush Bug was coming out and he said that the original joke was "Hey kids! What's long, hard and full of seamen? It's a submarine!" Julie nixed it.
Ambush Bug, maybe more than Crisis, started me buying DCs again in the 80s.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 18, 2018 16:40:00 GMT -5
I miss done-in-one stories. I miss the old numbering, and the implication that you were taking part in something far larger than yourself because this was the two hundred eighty fifth issue. I miss the more juvenile feel. Comics could be deep and mature, but there was still a sense of fun in the house ads, letter cols, and even the corner boxes and logos at times. Serious and brooding was a welcome departure from the norm rather than the norm. I miss cover prices less than a buck. Not for the obvious financial reasons, but rather because you could go to the store with two bucks and some change, feeling like the possibilities were endless. Once comics hit a dollar at the end of the decade, the illusion died, and it was really easy to quantify how much (or how little) you could get. Now that they are $4+, it's just depressing. I miss tight editorial control. One title often knew what the other was doing, as well as what had been done two years earlier. There was a reward for having stuck around for so long and a sense that what you were reading now would matter later on. I miss subscriptions. I still have print subscriptions to three titles, two from Marvel, and one to Heavy Metal. Print subs from Marvel are usually 40% off cover price. Multi-year subscription to Heavy Metal was closer to 50% off cover price. -M |
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Post by String on Sept 18, 2018 18:53:33 GMT -5
Both Marvel and DC still offer print subscriptions for almost their entire line.
Throughout the 80s, I had subscriptions to Avengers and Iron Man, finally letting them run out in the early 90s when I moved away from home. Back in the mid-00s when I got back into reading comics, I had subscriptions to Superman and Action Comics. Today, like old times, I currently have subscriptions to Avengers and Iron Man.
Times change though. Back in the 80s, the issues arrived in the mail with only a thin brown paper sleeve around it. Nowadays, they come with a cardboard sleeve (with has info and postcard on subscribing to other titles or renewal if you so desire) all contained within a plastic sleeve bag. Though I miss the old brown sleeves sometimes, I do like how, on the front of the cardboard sleeve now, above your address, they do list what number issue that is in your current subscription. (For example, 6 of 12). Very convenient in tracking when it's time to renew.
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Post by brutalis on Sept 19, 2018 8:34:43 GMT -5
I miss those comics being found in other places outside of the LCS. The fun and joy of exploring every rack across town as you went into convenience stores and searching through them. I miss going to magazine stands looking for the Savage Sword of Conan magazines and the Marvel Super Special movie adaptions. I miss finding comic book issues with 2 covers on them. I miss going into an LCS that had marked up prices on just arrived "hot" issues and knowing I could wait and find them at a convenience store for cover price.
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Post by dbutler69 on Sept 19, 2018 11:42:03 GMT -5
I definitely miss letters pages, Hostess ads, and ads for Sea Monkeys!
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Post by comicsandwho on Sept 21, 2018 19:26:41 GMT -5
The first comics I had were from the spring of '78, priced at 35 cents. Then DC 'exploded' to 50 cents, and 'imploded' to 40 within a matter of months. Marvel at least managed to stay at 35 til the beginning of '79.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 21, 2018 19:43:31 GMT -5
The first comics I had were from the spring of '78, priced at 35 cents. Then DC 'exploded' to 50 cents, and 'imploded' to 40 within a matter of months. Marvel at least managed to stay at 35 til the beginning of '79.
Didn't that 50 cent DC explosion at the time mean 44 pages of comic? I know I have some of those Action Comics somewhere. I think Marvel's 35c books remained 36 pages (don't recall seeing a 44 pg Marvel).
I liked the DC 80pagers even more.
Yes. Although same cost per page. DC had 25 pages of story & Marvel had 17 pages of story. |
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Post by beccabear67 on Sept 21, 2018 19:44:46 GMT -5
Last All Star was a 50cent/44pager...  It was too much for green Lantern too though apparently...  |
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Post by comicsandwho on Sept 21, 2018 20:03:51 GMT -5
Who else had a nearby store that sold a few 'special edition'/weird format comics, but nowher nar a full selection of the usual titles?
Marvel increased its page count to 21 in response to DC going to 25 pages, in the summer of 1980(with the price hike to 50 cents). As far as getting comics at 7-11, they were all 40 cents when I started doing that, in 1979.
My mom and dad started off buying comics in 3-packs for me, at K-Mart and other department stores, in 1978, when I was 5. I didn't see comics on spinner racks til the following year, as we didn't know yet to look for them in places like convenience stores.
K-Mart stopped selling comics somewhere around the end of '78, and so, for much of '79, my only sources sourcs for comics were other department stores that only sold Gold Key comics, in packs; or supermarkets and Woolworth, which, for some reason, always sold digests, tabloids, and DC 'Dollar Comics' on the magazine rack, even though they never had any of the 'regular price' comics. So, I had a lot of DC and Richie Rich digests from the grocery store, and once in a while there'd be a 'Marvel Treasury Edition'.
Finally, later in '79. my parents figured out that the 7-11 and one other shop in our town had spinner racks, and so that was where I was able to get stuff that wasn't 'pre-bagged'.
All those 'other stores' seemed to stop selling comics by about 1980(except for Toys R Us, which seemed to overcharge for 'packs' of comics I'd already gotten from 7-11 a month or two earlier).
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Post by urrutiap on Sept 21, 2018 20:10:18 GMT -5
Well speaking of early 3 comics in one bag
Back in the mid 1980s when I was a kid, I grew up in Durfee, South Dakota a small town that was close to the Rez if you know what I mean. My mom would take us kids in our family to the grocery store and she'd get me those Whitman's comics that were 3 in one bag. They were the same old thing. Flash Gordon and two Disney comics that were either Donald Dock or something else.
That one Flash Gordon comic issue was of the one where Flash had some weird snake like plants wrapped around him and that was the last issue of the Flash Gordon series when the Flash Gordon movie was still popular at the time.
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Post by comicsandwho on Sept 21, 2018 20:17:50 GMT -5
Those Whitman/Gold Key comics seemed to languish on the shelves of small-town grocery stories for years. I found a Pink Panther from 1976(with a Grimm's Ghost Stories, and whatever the third one was...'Star Trek', I think) in a Northern California grocery store...in the mid '80s. Plus,Long's Drugs in my hometown must have had some kind of warehouse clearance one day in 1981, when they had a bunch of 1979 DC three-packs on sale.
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Post by urrutiap on Sept 22, 2018 18:41:27 GMT -5
Back then, I think those Whitman bagged comics were a common and normal thing where theyd always have the same old Donald Duck and that one issue of Flash Gordon all the time while they lasted.
oh yeah Magnus Robot Fighter would always come with those Whitmans comics 3 in one bag. Pretty much all the time it was that one Flash Gordon issue along with the same old Magnus Robot Fighter and a Donal Duck or Mickey Mouse comic
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Post by beccabear67 on Sept 22, 2018 21:10:18 GMT -5
I remember buying Star Wars reprints three to a bag, but aside from them I never bought Marvels or DCs that way. When I first saw a DC with the Whitman logo in the corner I thought it was something rare. Do people rate those as less desirable than the regular DC editions? I bought lots of Gold Key/Whitmans that way that weren't DCs however, I think they even had smaller sized bags with two or more digests. Also I think those Modern Comics reprints of Charlton comics came in 'three fer' bags. I also remember a shop that otherwise didn't sell comics which opened up three fer bags and sold the Gold Key/Whitmans individually... I guess they made one cent more. I bought single Scamp, Donald Duck and Buck Rogers at that place. Really old wooden magazine rack along one wall and an old sign out front saying "pick up a magazine today!" or something like that, must've been from the '50s going by the lettering style and the faces of clip-art Mom and Dad. Another place that didn't have comic book comics had the b&w magazines but I didn't get to it easily... I did buy Bizarre Adventures there a few times. Most of the time before I found a comic shop I bought comics from the spinner racks at two corner grocers and one pharmacy/drug store within a couple blocks of our house. They all took bottle returns too. Both corner grocers are long gone now though.
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Post by Chris on Sept 22, 2018 22:17:11 GMT -5
This one is super-rare, one I wouldn't mind owning.
DC Comics Presents. Now that's something I miss from the 80s. Every issue not only had a different co-star for Superman, but an entirely different creative team. |
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Post by Deleted on Sept 22, 2018 23:42:09 GMT -5
I remember buying Star Wars reprints three to a bag, but aside from them I never bought Marvels or DCs that way. When I first saw a DC with the Whitman logo in the corner I thought it was something rare. Do people rate those as less desirable than the regular DC editions? I bought lots of Gold Key/Whitmans that way that weren't DCs however, I think they even had smaller sized bags with two or more digests. Also I think those Modern Comics reprints of Charlton comics came in 'three fer' bags. I also remember a shop that otherwise didn't sell comics which opened up three fer bags and sold the Gold Key/Whitmans individually... I guess they made one cent more. I bought single Scamp, Donald Duck and Buck Rogers at that place. Really old wooden magazine rack along one wall and an old sign out front saying "pick up a magazine today!" or something like that, must've been from the '50s going by the lettering style and the faces of clip-art Mom and Dad. Another place that didn't have comic book comics had the b&w magazines but I didn't get to it easily... I did buy Bizarre Adventures there a few times. Most of the time before I found a comic shop I bought comics from the spinner racks at two corner grocers and one pharmacy/drug store within a couple blocks of our house. They all took bottle returns too. Both corner grocers are long gone now though. In some cases the Whitman variants can be more expensive than the standard cover (but then there are people who pay more for newsstand versions of books rather than the direct market version too) so it can vary, but I do see them priced slightly higher than the standard version on high grade at some of the cons I go to. Low to mid grade copies don't seem to show much price differentiation. -M |
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