Marvel Comics blabbery

i'll amend that to "less prominent stars of david;" i imagine part of why the "our bad" response wasn't taken entirely at face value is pushing that imagery is stereotypical in any case.

you know, you watch Uncut Gems and try to do an unsubtle diamond merchant sketch and fuck it up three ways...

Long piece on Marvel's history (I haven't read it yet) - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/15/who-really-created-the-marvel-universe

Kim O'Connor read it so I didn't have to risk my blood pressure reading praise for R13sman

It's a really cogent and balanced explainer! Until the very end, where it's just like..... I genuinely don't know where to start pic.twitter.com/5ezJpZsIcL

— Kim O'Connor (@shallowbrigade) February 9, 2021

I didn't expect to see a former ILXor namechecked in that

so should I read his book?

hasn't Old Lunch also been reading Every Marvel Ever?

so should I read his book?

Still curious about Douglas' book, not about Abrah4m's.

Wolk is always good value, imo. Wish he would return to these parts.

I've been making the effort, morrisp (made it as far as the early '70s, and then started plowing through the daunting volume of the past eight years or so), but I do not have his fortitude/focus.

The linked article is pretty decent though

Another article about the career of Lee, that takes AR's book as its only source, and repeatedly reads between the lines to tease out startling conclusions that Lee may have overstated his contributions, abilities, beliefs and creativity. Imagine the reviewer's potential shock if she'd consulted a second source!

https://newrepublic.com/article/161130/stan-lee-true-believer-marvel-comics-review

TwoMorrows put out a book recently called Stuf' Said! which chronologically plots Lee & Kirby interview snippets re: attribution.

https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1513

I only noticed yesterday that ILX's very own Al Ewing has gotten a gig of writing Guardians of the Galaxy! Has anyone read it, is it good? Ewing + cosmic Marvel feels like the best possible combination to me, IMO his Ultimates run was the best thing he's done for the company.

Immortal Hulk!

Yes, that one is very good too, I just love the cosmic stuff more. I've never been that interested in occult themes, so the whole Satan thing he's doing there has left me cold, as good as the series is otherwise.

he also writes SWORD iirc

We Only Find Them When They’re Dead is a good read btw

Amazing piece of Houseroyism in the Hollywood Reporter: in which Roy argues the R13sm4n bio to be a hit piece because he finds it 95% fair and accurate but 5% mean to Stan.

Thomas argues that it's absolutely unfair to suggest that Kirby did nearly all the writing on the Lee/Kirby comics, because one uncontested primary source exists: Lee's written plot for Fantastic Four #8. By Roy's account, this consists of "three longish paragraphs," containing no dialogue, but "complete with Reed Richards trying to stretch his malleable arms far enough to save a man falling from a building but not quite reaching him, so that the Human Torch has to catch him on the fly," and a subplot about Richards wanting to restore the Thing's human form.

He acknowledges that Kirby wraps up the three-paragraph plot in seven pages, while the story goes on for 13. He brings up the fact that the "yarn's ending as printed" recalls one in a Kirby story from the 1950s, but argues that this makes it likely that Stan dictated a second synopsis over the phone to Kirby, rather than that Jack repeated himself.

Elsewhere, the rascally one argues that it was fair to not pay the artists for writing, because they could go and starve if they didn't like it, and anyway the writers were paid worse. Thomas also argues virtuously that the Marvel Method was fair, because as editor-in-chief, he wouldn't have hired a writer who didn't partly plot over the phone, "so an artist could make some money by starting work a day or so sooner on a story."

A true classic of the genre.

Interesting article on Lee’s dalliances with Hollywood as an actor by Riesman, which sidesteps the issue of comics authorship entirely but is telling in its own way: https://www.polygon.com/movies/22289175/stan-lee-cameos-non-marvel-movies

I think Roy Thomas always comes at this from the wrong angle, by concentrating on “what does the physical evidence say” as opposed to “was Stan Lee an inveterate bullshitter.” I’d ask whether whether a guy who called himself “one-take Lee” because he thought he nailed it in one, and didn’t bother listening to his friends when they told him about where to look when on camera, would have been that much more invested in managing the plots of comics when he’d already written up a short summary.

Lee’s legacy is locked in. Kirby and others had been trying to claw back a piece of the credit they’d likely deserved, for decades, without a lot of traction. Questioning that legacy now still doesn’t do much to change his stature.

I think Roy Thomas is just trying to get the details cataloged, the guy has spent quite a bit of time trying to get some of the details of that whole period of American comics history captured in general. That being, you have to take that his opinion is as someone who was actively involved with those issues and his own point of view. If viewed as a rap battle, he's definitely one side of the beef.

I haven't been reading a ton of issues, but I have read Roy Thomas Daredevil run and his Hulk run in the past months. There is some good late 60s wacky goodness in those comics. That issue of the Hulk where Tom Wolf shows up and Valkrie is in the story is one of the strangest comics of the time.

I think Roy Thomas always comes at this from the wrong angle, by concentrating on “what does the physical evidence say” as opposed to “was Stan Lee an inveterate bullshitter.”

also the physical evidence that he's citing shows the exact opposite of his claim!

He does make a case that implies he has never watched a legal show on television

haha, they've decided to screw comic shops harder than DC

looks like it's more they're thinking that Diamond will be bankrupt soon?

Signed non-exclusively with Penguin/Random House for direct market and bookstore distro from October 1st. Press release highlights

After a thorough analysis of the market environment, Marvel has chosen PRHPS as its distribution partner to create a sustainable, productive supply chain and enhanced infrastructure for Marvel publications that will benefit comics retailers and fans alike for years to come. Penguin Random House is known for its state-of-the-art multi-ranging services that enable independent booksellers to increase efficiency and profitability.

and

Penguin Random House is a free-freight company, allowing retailers to simplify their business models while alleviating the volatility and complexity of reducing freight costs and planning. Through many of PRH’s standard offerings, like its rapid replenishment program for graphic novels and advanced supply chain, Direct Market retailers will experience more flexibility to manage inventory and stock their stores to best serve their customers.

Direct Market retailers can choose to order Marvel products direct from PRH, or alternatively, through Diamond as a wholesaler under terms established by Diamond in the US and the UK. Hachette Book Group will continue to manage distribution of Marvel’s graphic novels and trade collections to the book market.

So Penguin is distributing to comic shops while Hachette distributes the same product to bookstores? Seems weird.

They're signed exclusively with PRH, anyone else (ie Diamond) will have to buy from PRH and then distribute from there.

The discount being cut down to 50% across the board is the screwing shops harder bit - DC didn't fuck with margins at least.

IIRC, Penguin won't charge for shipping so that's the incentive over Diamond?
And milo, you're saying the discount is overall worse than it was with Diamond?
Third - I assume this isn't another Heroes World-type debacle since it's unlikely PRH will go down in flames.

and god help us for the inevitable shipping fuck-ups that will occur in Oct

Yes - shops of any size were getting 55-56% (up to 58%ish at very high tiers) on Marvel comics and trades via Diamond. For big launches, Marvel would run promotions that would take that up another 15%. Now they're all at 50%. Diamond shipping wasn't eating up 5-8% unless you're located in Alaska.

It also means that the discounts and shipping are going to be worse for manga, Boom/IDW/Dark Horse/Image/etc. with less weight to spread around sans Marvel. Theoretically you could keep buying Marvel from Diamond but now you've gone from 56% and 2% shipping to 50% max and 2% shipping - no way to make that make sense.

This seems to pretty clearly be Marvel getting a better deal from Penguin because Penguin doesn't discount as much, not anything to do with Diamond's future prospects.

Bookshops usually only get 40% from publishers, surprised PRH will go higher for comic shops.

They're signed exclusively with PRH, anyone else (ie Diamond) will have to buy from PRH and then distribute from there.

ahh right. thanks for the extra context in the last post too

the line about trusting this distribution partner will exist for years seems pointed to me, especially with last year's multiple reorgs of the Geppi family of companies, DC's lines about not being confident that Diamond are solvent, it coming out that DC had let their right-to-buy deal lapse a few years ago...

xp comics aren't returnable outside of special circumstances so the discounts are higher.

This feels a little like Marvel's contribution (alongside DC raising the price of some single issues to $7) to the Munchausen-by-proxy-ing of the floppy, or at least Big Two floppies.

Both would kill for readers to go digital-only but that has stalled out pretty badly.

I dunno, I'm a staunch physical copy holdout, but $7 a pop across the board would be a pretty effective strategy to ensure that I drop monthlies altogether.

And with Marvel's new deal, if shops' customer-side preorder discounts wind up scaling back as I'd expect, that'll result in a lot of people scaling back the number of titles they purchase in a given month. Which will result in more titles getting cancelled (the sales just aren't there!).

thx milo. couldn't really understand the articles i've read, your take was much clearer

xp - re Geppi Industries Inc solvency, from what I gather Disney and AT&T were both incredibly pissed that Diamond unilaterally stopped shipping product (and sending them money for said product) last March/April. Which is both mind boggling (at Disney/AT&T's stupidity) and unsurprising (at Disney/AT&T's stupidity) - people weren't even at stores to receive shipments! The piling up of bills for weeks on end when stores couldn't have been open would have wiped the direct market off the face of the planet.

The path to digital uptake would be to sell comics much cheaper but for whatever reason they don't want to dip below cover price (presumably not worth it for Marvel Comics to exist if they're making $.15 per digital copy sold after Comixology takes their cut) + tablets/iPads have not really had the necessary penetration + generations of readers learned through the lens of collecting and want a bookshelf of Vol. 1-12 trades.

I have a mild aversion to paying for discrete units of digital media but I have an extreme aversion to paying for those units when I can only access them via some proprietary platform (eg the one and only video that I ever bought from the Apple store and realized to my chagrin I couldn't watch in VLC Player as I can with literally every other video format under the sun). Like until these companies are selling their digital comics in a .cbr format or something similar that I can use/access/organize precisely how I choose, I'm not paying for that shit.

Another retailer’s perspective: https://www.progressiveruin.com/2021/03/26/we-interrupt-this-program-with-an-important-bulletin/

As happened with DC the welcoming competition spin is strange - none of these deals creates competition. They’re just different exclusives so instead of one monopoly for comics, there are separate monopolies for Marvel/DC/Image.

I dunno, I'm a staunch physical copy holdout, but $7 a pop across the board would be a pretty effective strategy to ensure that I drop monthlies altogether.

What I don't understand is why Marvel and DC (and some other US publishers, I guess) still continue to sell individual comic books monthly instead of just TPBs? AFAIK the sales of monthly comics have become quite small, and most of their comics these days are written in longer arcs instead of done-in-one-issues anyway, so why don't they just move to only releasing larger books less often with a smaller per-page price? Or they could release individual issues in digital format only, and the collected editions on paper - that way both the ones who want a monthly fix and the ones who want to read their comics on paper would be satisfied. I get it that the monthly comic book has a long history, but if the sales for them are now minuscule compared to the heyday of the medium, is there really some good reason to keep them alive? Releasing larger chunks of a story in fewer installments has worked very well for comics in many European countries, as well as for several smaller US publishers, I can't imagine it couldn't work for Marvel and DC as well?

Guessing from a position of profound ignorance - seeing the drop from a first to a second issue gives you some idea how many people will want the next few, and is cheaper (and you've probably sold a lot of #1s) than just gambling everything every six months?

AFAIK the sales of monthly comics have become quite small

The sales of TPBs are smaller. You make less money without amortising the costs of production in advance.

Or they could release individual issues in digital format only, and the collected editions on paper - that way both the ones who want a monthly fix and the ones who want to read their comics on paper would be satisfied.

As noted in recent posts, this has literally been proven not to be the case.

Also, both companies (esp. Didio's DC) have aggressively worked on reducing their core audience to middle-aged men who value the monthly paper ritual and the serial experience.

The sales of TPBs are smaller. You make less money without amortising the costs of production in advance.

That is actually starting to happen a bit. Stuff like Batman - The Adventures Continue started digital and then got printed monthly. I will probably get the DCeased: Hope at World's End series that was digital-only and getting collected in HC in May. Marvel has done this at least a couple of times that I can remember, like those Jessica Jones digital series that eventually were printed in issue format / trade. sic's very possibly right that they're not successful, but this I feel like this still a fairly recent development to watch.

Both companies are printing more children's/YA books that are small format, one-shot TPBs and skipping over floppies, emulating the success you see from publishers like Scholastic. They seem to be doing well, so I hope this continues.

It's a bit of a trap for an old consumer. I definitely want to help keep my LCS alive, and that means buying more floppies, gradually converting more buys to trades since I can't keep up with reading 20 series a month anyway. Have similar feelings about my local movie theater and physical media in general - want to support this stuff and these people, you know you're paying a premium over digital for principle. But can any of it last?

Well, in here the local comic shops have been selling TPBs from the US and "albums" (the European standard TPB format for stuff like Asterix, Tintin, Valerian & Laureline, etc.) from Europe as their main product for as long as I can remember. Some of them did use to carry floppies as well, but it was a minority of the customers who bought them, because importing them from the US meant that the per-page price when compared to TPBs was even higher here than in the States.

What has killed most of the local comic stores in the last 15 years is not the low sales of floppies rather than online stores selling TPBs and albums for cheaper than them.

Also, both companies (esp. Didio's DC) have aggressively worked on reducing their core audience to middle-aged men who value the monthly paper ritual and the serial experience.