Marvel Comics blabbery

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

I don't think we have a thread about collectible comics, so I'll use this one. Has anyone here ever had any comics graded & slabbed? I have a set of FF #48-50 that I've been holding on to for about 30 years and just looked at the prices they're going for. Pretty sure the cost of grading would be recouped in any sale.

i'm opposed to slabbing on principle

old comics are still worth money? I have some Kirby FFs, I forget which issues, Inhumans are involved

I don't have an opinion about slabbing, but I'm completely in favor of collectors giving me their money for old paper.

If you're going to sell them yourself on Ebay, slabbing is the only way to go IMO. The slow service options aren't horribly expensive.

I always thought that Silver Age Marvels in Fine+ condition were pretty much the gold standard when it comes to collectible old comics, so wld def slab those FFs if they're no longer required as reading material (ditto FFs w/ the Inhumans).

What puzzles me is the value attached to pre-Silver Age titles - yes, they're no doubt scarce in decent condition, but will the next generation of collectors actually give one fuck about old issues of Mr District Attorney or whatever? I guess certain libraries/archives might want them, the odd historian/researcher, but actual readers...hmmmm...

Also feels like original artwork has replaced old comics as the ultra-desirable collectible object.

Yeah, I think back to those days when Dave Sim was selling Cerebus pages for something like $30 each and just grit my teeth...

I had to look up slabbing to see wtf you guys were even talking about. But I know what you mean now that I see it. Yeah, that shit's perverse as a general practice (I see so much garbage getting that treatment and going for $$$ on ebay and elsewhere) but I geddit if you have old stuff of some value. I'm coming from the opposite end of the collector spectrum, where I just reluctantly bagged and boarded a bunch of my stuff because I'm moving it and didn't want it to get more banged up than it already was. And I know I have at least a handful of things that have skyrocketed in value (unrelated to this particular conversation but it's starting to look like I could trade my Kirby Fourth World omnibi for an economy car) but that I don't have any intention of selling so whatevs.

Jesus Christ, I just looked at the prices of the Annihilation omnibus, and the lowest-priced used copy is now 500 bucks on Amazon and 400 bucks on Ebay! (Even the Simonson Thor omnibus costs peanuts compared to that, you can get a used copy for mere 200 bucks.) Not that I intend to sell the one I have, it's one of my favourite Marvel comics of the 2000s, but Marvel's policy of reprinting any of their collections has made most of their omnibi a solid investment indeed.

And yeah, I had to goole "slabbing" too, comics as collectables is a foreign world to me.

So glad I picked up those Annihilation books in time (after stupidly selling the original trades in a time of financial distress and realizing with utter dismay when I tried to rebuy that their value had quintupled). For better or worse, it seems that the collections are becoming the collector's items. I've taken to preordering any omnibi I want when they're initially solicited.

My current back issue bonanza strategy is to fill as many holes as I can prior to the release of a new character's cinematic debut. The GotG shit went haywire when the movie was released, and everything Apocalypse-related has been fetching big bucks for a while. Trying to snatch up the little bit of Dr. Strange stuff I'm missing and was planning on following suit with Black Panther but now I'm noticing that even the recent Hudlin runs (trades of which you used to be able to pick up for a couple of bucks used) are hard to track down. Black Panther Masterworks vol 2 coming soon, though (collecting a lot of Kirby and the entirety of BP vs. the Klan, I believe)!

ha ha i gave my entire abnett/lanning cosmic collection to goodwill when i moved

xpost
BP vs the Klan was started by Don McGregor but completed by Ed Hannigan, some years later, so it's not a very satisfactory read unfortunately

The prices for the Abnett/Lanning Nova TPBs have also become ridiculous now, because they were never reprinted, unlike the GotG ones and the Annihilations. I was missing the last few issues of their Nova run, and I had to order them from the US as floppies, because the TPB containing them had gone up to 50 euros or something.

xpost That's too bad. Just picked up a big, cheap lot of Marvel Comics Presents with McGregor's complete 25 part 'Panther's Quest'. Hopefully that'll balance the scales.

I've never read a good comic by Dan Abnett. Do they exist?

I saw this in part because Death's Head II was one of the things that put the boot in me reading comics for several years.

xps always hoping i'll find a reasonable price on those early Fourth World omnibuses, especially vol. 2 which is way worse than the rest for some reason

I've never read a good comic by Dan Abnett. Do they exist?

I haven't read much of his early 90s Marvel UK comics, only the Knights of Pendragon, but the '00s comics he cowrote with Andy Lanning are way better than those. Their Guardians of the Galaxy and Nova run, which begins in Annihilation Conquest, continues in the CotG and Nova ongoing titles, and culminates in The Thanos Imperative, is my favourite long-form Marvel story of this millennium. There's so much sense of wonder and Silver/Bronze Age inspired thrills in those comics, especially considering that at the same time most of the Marvel universe was stuck in Bendisian "hard boiled"/"gritty" bullshit and increasingly pointless mega-crossovers. (Since CotG and Nova weren't set on Earth, they managed to avoid those crossovers; they had a few of their own, but those were small-scale and mostly plotted by Abnett/Lanning, so much better than Bendis and Millar ones.)

I don't think it's a coincidence that Guardians of Galaxy movie was mostly based on the Abnett/Lanning run (and the groundwork laid for it by Keith Giffen in Annihilation and Annihilation Conquest), not the original version of the team (which had an almost completely different cast of characters). Those were some quality comics, and the movie-makers must've recognized that too.

Otm. Some of the best fun comics I've ever read.

Had no idea about slabbing or what it was

My FFs are p banged up i doubt they rate as Fine (probably VG at best). But i dont wanna sell them anyway

Guys, the variant cover theme for September's books is, um, Prostate Awareness Month.

I await the final covers with bated breath.

they know their audience

'bated breath.

Any thoughts on RiRi Williams beyond "which black name generator did Bendis go to in order to make that name"?

ouch, lol

I keep imagining him watching tennis highlights with "Work" playing in the background while he was working up the backstory

I was thinking more "standing at the grocery store, reading names off the magazines at the check-out aisle"

lol that's probably more accurate

i have zero issues with marvel's desire to broaden the racial/ethnic/gender base of its headliners but boy do moves like "RiRi Williams" feel patronizing.
also, i had never seen this origin story panel before
http://wetalkpodcasts.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Power-Man-V1-17-Page-19.jpg

aaaahhhhhhhh

I'm sorry, that is the best "coming up with my superhero name" panel ever

Is that mcgregor Gerber englehart or thomas

Len Wein

http://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronocomic/entries/scans/PM17_AceOfSpades.JPG

It gets even better than that, right before coming up with Power Man he was considering "The Ace of Spades", but thought it was "too ethnic"!

:-o