Marvel Comics blabbery

I got used to screen reading and ran out of shelf space. After i filled seven bookshelves, I am now on new book lockdown.
I more or less NEVER enjoyed the weekly ritual of going to the store; always feel silently judged by the behind the counter guy. Probably just me.

I don't buy anything regularly but what I do buy is floppies or trade paperbacks

i got an "excellent choice" today in re: new shigeru mizuki kitaro collection /basks in forbidden planet employee approval

i can understand buying trades, i have a harder time understanding buying floppies (especially if they're from DC/Image/Marvel). Resale value is basically nil and you run the chance of missing an issue and having an incomplete story... plus the little buggers are hard to store!

I make an effort to pick up the occasional stack of issues when it's a low-selling series I want to make sure they'll be interested in collecting

Man, Civil War II is awful.

Nothing makes sense, the 'moral argument' is ludicrous, not a single memorable line or drawing. Just pure unrelenting Bendesque dullness.

How is the repro on the new Shang Chi omnibus?

I buy floppies because I like the medium. They are digestible in 5-10 min and easy enough to throw into longboxes.

when i hit thirty longboxes, i migrated everything to bookshelves. the pokemon collector in me gets obsessive about full runs and that way lies madness and poverty. Trades saved my soul.

would any of y'all want a fancy wooden longbox, or would you feel weird paying more for your box than the comics inside it?

i've known at least one guy who used full longboxes as a boxspring for his mattress.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/55/da/7e/55da7e7654945e0f31ef3e57178365ea.jpg

I buy floppies because I enjoy being part of a cultural moment, that this is comic book day and I'm finding out the same time as hundreds of thousands of other people, a shared communion.

And while I'm there, I might as well pay for all the books that aren't The Wicked and The Divine, as well.

I regularly buy an embarrassing number of floppies, mostly Marvel. And trades of older stuff. At a steep discount, but still. You would probably be alternately impressed and ashamed. And, yeah, space has not yet but probably will start to become an issue soon.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/a8/69/e2/a869e2ffabfdb27ab85a71b0a2d4d281.jpg

i would be afraid i'd fuck up my books putting them in that thing but i gather you'd be meant to have them mylar bagged and boarded if you were at that level of collectordom. Nice handiwork nonetheless.

I gave up floppy buying on the reg five years ago, went back to doing so weekly when a comic shop was on my commute route (on the road I drove most of the way in a neighborhood where the speed limit was 25 so I couldn't not stop) and am mostly digital now

Six or seven years ago I moved temporarily to a smaller space and gave away 90% of my comics. Just took them to a well-connected friend's place and said "find these a good home"

ownership and reading of floppies has always seemed ephemeral, even if people collect them. I've mentioned it elsewhere on ilx, but when I was probably 13 years old, a neighbor who owned a rental house had his tenant bail and the guy forgot a few longboxes that had pretty much every x-men issue from the Phoenix saga to around when Jim Lee started, along with a lot of other random comics of the era. I carefully read all those and returned them.

You better be pretty strong if you are moving around full wooden long boxes.

One odd thing I do notice about new comics is that they seem to be quite a bit heavier than the old newsprint comics, even more so for a box of trades.

you can set coffee on them multiple times before the rings soak through the cover

This is tangential but I wanna ask: Who among you still buys individual floppies on a monthly basis? And why?

I'm only buying monthly at the moment while Prophet is wrapping up, and it'll drop down to every few months after that. If I'm living in America next year near a shop that gets Retrofit and Youth In Decline and Koyama and Oily and the like, I'll be back to it - but Diamond has destroyed distribution for individual creative voices: I've bought more comics in the US and Canada in the last three years than I have in my local comic shop.

Prophet is only because I've been following it for four years or whatever and want to ride the story out - I love the comic book format, but loathe coverless books, which would rule out the rest of Marvel, Image & DC if the content didn't already. I bailed out on Island after it went coverless, or that would be one to keep a monthly visit ticking over. (Sometimes takes me seven weeks to make it in, though.)

Possibly because I own a store I mostly read via digital (mostly Marvel Unlimited, some purchased on Comixology) unless I take damaged copies home with me (I pretty much always get destroy orders for them so I read and recycle).

It's too hard for me to keep up since I see so many titles every week and by the time I've unpacked and sorted on Tuesday I can no longer think about what I might want to read. Never had the collector gene so stacking boxes of them isn't for me and too often with floppies I'll give away or recycle an issue and have forgotten what happened (esp with long layoffs ala Saga or Sex Criminals) in the issue I no longer have from months ago.

Although I buy a ton of floppies and appreciate having a physical thing made of paper over pixels, I don't have any special attachment to them as floppies. It'd be awesome if I could eventually trade a lot of them off for their equivalent collected editions.

sorry, what's a "coverless" book?

milo, I would love to hear your thoughts on piracy as i am a marvel unlimited subscriber and a fairly unrepentant torrenter of things I solely want to read once and discard or keep as a reference library or are simply unavailable in the states. I still buy creator made material either on the web or at cons and trades at used book stores or amazon or ebay but I gave up on buying floppies more or less at the end of brubaker's run on daredevil. Am i evil? It's okay, you can tell me.

i might add to that guilt ridden screed that I make a point of blowing fifty bucks at any comic book store i go into more or less as penance but that often leads to me buying stuff I don't care for which keeps me away from comic books, vicious cycle

I spend the equivalent of a small nation's GDP on comics and, because I like having a digital library at my fingertips, I also t0rrent the shit out of comics (many/most of which I've already procured via "legal" means). I don't subscribe to Marvel Unlimited because they don't have everything and because limited control, but my floppy addiction probably singlehandedly bought Alonso a new Jag so I can't imagine they're too brokenhearted about it.

sorry, what's a "coverless" book?

ha, I was using that term because I thought the technical "self-cover" would be too obscure. Five years ago Marvel stopped having covers around the 32-page signatures that their books are printed on, and just ran the cover image and back cover ads on the outer sheet of the internal signature. DC and Image have followed suit gradually. With the paper stocks these things are printed on, it means that they puff up around your fingertips in humid weather, crumple easily, get loose and flappy, etc.

It's historically been an indicator of intended disposability, not a "real" comic that anyone might be expected to hold onto and read again. The current stocks survive through mass shipping much better than newsprint would, but the implication is telling. And just feels gross and insubstantial to my hand. But I'm someone who cares about paper and print quality already.

Y'know...I totally hadn't even noticed that, but you're absolutely right, now that I'm comparing recent stuff with comics that are just a bit older. I guess I failed to notice the transition because that would've been right after I stopped buying comics altogether for a couple of years.

that dates how long it's been since i've picked up a current marvel/dc/image book as that's news to me.

ReBirth was the first floppy I've bought in years, apart from those two oversize issues of Criminal that parody Marvel magazines of the 70s - aside from anything else, floppies just seem to be such poor value for money (and the fact that ReBirth was 80 pages of story material for $3 tells me that's one of the reasons the comic has been so successful)

Back when I was a kid I bought superhero comics, published by the local Marvel and DC affiliates in Finnish, in the floppy form, because that was the only option. Occasionally I came across some of the early American TPBs, like Elektra Assassin, but my English wasn't yet good enough to read them. I still have a few those floppies left, like the one with the ending of the original Phoenix saga (Finnish superhero comics typically included two American issues per one Finnish issue, so it included both issues 136 and 137). That was actually pretty hard to acquire even in the late 80s, I remember having to pay almost twice the official cover price for it in some used book store.

(Here's the Finnish cover for it, btw:

http://files1.comics.org//img/gcd/covers_by_id/1017/w400/1017369.jpg

As you can see, the Finnish X-Men comics were a few years behind the American ones back then... When they began publishing X-Men in their own book, they started from the beginning of the Byrne/Claremont era instead of the most recent issue. But after the Byrne era was through, the Finnish publisher began to co-print the X-Men comics with the Hungarian Marvel affiliate, which was way ahead of us in the X-Men chronology, so we jumped straight from the Byrne era to the JRJr. era. The Paul Smith era X-Men stories were eventually published in special editions, but the second Cockrum run was never available in Finnish.)

Today, superhero comics translated into Finnish are pretty much extinct; maybe some Spider-Man comics are still getting translated, I dunno, but I prefer to read everything in English. I don't buy American floppies though, they're pretty hard to obtain in here (there's practically just one or two comic stores left that sell them), and since the stores import themselves, the prices are fairly steep - you'd certainly have to pay much more for getting the same story as floppies than as a TPB. Only occasionally I've mail-ordered some American floppies, if the story wasn't available in collected form, like Flex Mentallo or Brute Force.

Whoops, sorry, that image link doesn't work, here's the X-Men cover:

http://www.ensipainos.fi/tuotekuvat2/11003_5848_4.jpg

sweet

The blurb on the cover says "The Rage of the Dark Phoenix", which as a kid I thought was kinda stupid, since the Phoenix is clearly dead in that pic.

Also, "Ryhmä-X" translates to "Team-X" or "Group-X"... They couldn't translate the name "X-Men" directly, because in Finnish "men" always refers to males only, it can't be used as a synonym for "humans", so it would've been weird to have a team with women in it with a name like that.

Before I went directly to comic stores, in the 90s I bought 3 comics-in-1 Marvel UK comics. It was a really good deal and you could follow those ridiculous storylines because they reprinted all the main Spiderman and X-Men titles and some of the more important one-shots and miniseries. They were two years behind the latest storylines. They went for a long time but I doubt they're still going. For the first several years they had original cover art from Marvel UK. They had no adverts either.
If I had grown up in America I doubt I would have followed these comics and bought all the necessary titles.

milo, I would love to hear your thoughts on piracy as i am a marvel unlimited subscriber and a fairly unrepentant torrenter of things I solely want to read once and discard or keep as a reference library or are simply unavailable in the states. I still buy creator made material either on the web or at cons and trades at used book stores or amazon or ebay but I gave up on buying floppies more or less at the end of brubaker's run on daredevil. Am i evil? It's okay, you can tell me.

I can't argue that piracy doesn't cost companies/creators/retailers money to some extent but I've always thought the vast majority of piracy (to a varying scale, music was hit hardest) was never going to get converted into sales no matter what. I pirated George Plimpton's Shadow Box recently for my Kindle - he's dead, it's not available as an e-book, my conscience is clean.

Marvel just relaunched the 3-in-1 books as "Timely Comics" here in the US. Issues 1-3 of current series for $3.

are they on newsstands and bookstores? I mean, as much as those places carry comics anymore

sic's point about comics without a different cover stock are something I notice on occasion. it's weird because the covers seem more absorbent than the cheap old covers of the 80s, but the interior pages are definitely better than newsprint

it's weird that they swung all the way to this direction after the years where the covers were practically cardstock

I don't know about bookstores/news stands. I know that B&N gets their comics from a company that places books in the stores on a commission basis, buying from the same channels as me so they technically could have them.

Does America get that cheap Marvel graphic novel series that the UK gets?

Re: our recent discussion of floppy vs. digital, the surprising revelation that digital comics don't seem to be hurting physical sales, and that physical sales have actually steadily risen over the past five years.

Digital has some disadvantages over floppies (where a Kindle doesn't really over paper books) - but it's hard to beat the ability to easily acquire and read a run in order across multiple series (just downloaded Grant Morrison's Batman run myself).

Can you create a "playlist" that puts all the different issues of different series of Morrison's run in order? With the two relevant issues of 52 at the start, interleaving the Batman issues with the Final Crisis and Superman Beyond and Return Of Bruce Wayne issues, etc?

can we incorporate douglas wolk's annotations into some sort of interactive hypertext encarta tome?

I've seen Torrents do the playlist by putting the order number first before title and issue, so that in your cbr reader the next issue will come up regardless of which title.

This one breaks it down into storyline sections, I think, but seems to be missing some parts (no 52 issues).

https://kat.cr/complete-grant-morrison-batman-comic-run-pre-new-52-t7100920.html

Not only is it missing parts of Morrison, it appears to have more non-Morrison bullshit than Morrison, and not put all the Morrison in the right order

otm

As soon as I saw the word "Hush" I was thinking, wtf is this shit