Marvel Comics blabbery

Marvel's reprint strategy seems haphazard at best, I will grant you. If you're anal like me and make sure that you preorder pretty much everything you want (and, perhaps more importantly, have a clear idea of what you want and how what you want is being collected), they do a pretty great job and seem serious about slowly reprinting as much of their material as possible. If you come at it from a more casual angle, I'm sure it's incredibly frustrating both to keep track of how things are being reprinted and to deal with the inevitable and ongoing OOP issue.

good to know they’re still living in opposite world where casual readers who’d want to pick up a TPB are out of luck

I’d hazard a guess that they sell a fair number of TPBs to libraries? those few that still have a budget

the Kamala Khan Ms. Marvel is definitely librarian bait! in a good way

Definitely unrelated.

Right, though looks like Black Panther barely was too: 28k in 2018 without a movie, 36k with a movie. the Kamala Khan book sold 13k in 2018 (and, because Marvel, no other volumes charted in either year).

xp Kamala K. was the first book I picked up when I got into nu-Marvel in the mid-2000s... it was getting significant mainstream / "general reader, check this out" press.

It was a pretty decent series but got derailed a lot by crossover events like Secret Wars and Civil War II

Yeah, I read few books and then hit the Secret Wars wall. (I also couldn't really get into the teenage-focused content, but that's just me.)

Lolz

Do I really live in a universe where Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a Captain America comic featuring a parody of my ideas as part of the philosophy of the arch villain Red Skull? https://t.co/waFsAvWlfd

— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) April 6, 2021

oh no, he found out

A guy published this blog post(I don’t get how he isolated the logos; did he redraw them?); Tom Orz popped into his Twitter, suggesting he credit the original designers.

it's not that hard to isolate text with solid borders using photoshop or any other software with a magnet selection tool

https://reaganray.com/img/blog/marvel-lettering/doctor-strange-3.jpg

From that post, this Doctor Strange logo from 1988 feels like it's homaging some TV show or movie logo from the same era, but I can't quite recall which one... Can anyone think of a logo similar to it?

no, but I'd bet $7 that logo is by Todd Klein

Hmm. Klein pegs the then-recently-revealed movie Strange logo as based on his 1988 logo in this 2014 blog, buuut the original logo he shows looks more '90s to me.

This 1988 Marvel Doctor Strange #1 has the logo posted above, and the next movie logo was just released the other day, and looks like a very close adaptation of the (real) 1988 one.

That one only lasted four issues before being replaced with a riff on the 1970s logo; Klein's (other?) one is indeed from 1992, and came in on issue 62 of the '88 series.

xxp Tuomas, I assume you're not thinking of the (current-day) Stranger Things logo(?)

i love that logo and that era of doctor strange

https://i.redd.it/ciex4a8ta1vz.png

I can see it.

Stranger Things titles are more of an homage to the typography of '80s horror paperback covers (and Stephen King specifically).

Right, I just wondered if the vague similarities (stacked script + "Strange") may have tripped T's neurons.

Heavily dipped serifs, the dramatic, swooping cross-bar on the A, the Stranger Things letterforms look closer in height to the actually-tall Doctor Strange bcz of the high crossbar on the H - a lot of casual similarities, intentionality completely aside.

Dr. Stranger

Stranger Docts

I think comics logos are underappreciated, but that blog post doesn’t really do them justice… I feel like you need to see them full-size, on the actual covers, to really get the impact; not abstracted and isolated in tiny squares.

Like the classic ASM logo (especially when accented with webbing) is one of the GOAT, but this anemic image hardly captures why:

https://reaganray.com/img/blog/marvel-lettering/spider-man-1.jpg

agreed

Got a bunch of TPBs of ImmorTAL Hulk and the current Marvel TPB is a thin and anaemic looking thing.

technically speaking this isn't that similar but in terms of era and general vibe the Doctor Strange logo made me think of this:

https://tvseriesfinale.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/murder-she-wrote-e1513781745389.jpg

The Doctor Strange logo looks like the sign for a fern bar in Dallas

From a couple of weeks ago, Hibbs going long on the PRH situation and repurcussions:

But this is the crux of my fear: Diamond, on the face of it, would not seem to be able to pivot to a more modern GN distribution business structure now that they’ve lost the majority of their volume, and the reasons that most DM retailers had to deal with them. They could have, once – but now it’s probably too late. While Steve and his team are smart, and conceptually Steve has resources that could be liquidated to keep things going for a while, it is very hard for me to see where the payout can possibly be. We know what happens to a distributor who loses both Marvel and DC’s business, and have Image comics as their largest exclusive vendor...

ultimately my biggest fear is that the vanguard of independence for making comics, the ability of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or a Bone or even a Walking Dead to rise up “out of nowhere” and to build that periodical behemoth which then allows indy creators to leverage the book format, is about to be severely tested, and perhaps entirely lost. And while people will find a way to make comics –of course they will –the likeliest result is going to be that comics will start to pay a lot less for creators as a general class, and comics will get “safer” and less experimental as even more corporate control is consolidated. I’d rather that Eastman & Laird or Jeff Smith or Robert Kirkman & co are the ones who get to reap the rewards nstead of giant multi-national corporations – and this has always been the greatest promise as well as the greatest gift of the Direct Market.

I kinda get what he's saying, but... thankfully, many young creators aren't waiting for a big publisher to print floppies for them anymore and see (or have been forced to find) the other outlets available.

His three examples are 37, 30, and 18 years old. Utterly irrelevant to the current market.

As someone who thinks well-printed, well-designed comics are the ideal presentation for the medium, I wish that a retail infrastructure for them will continue to exist.

https://www.gamesradar.com/wandavision-success-leads-to-continued-comic-sellouts-and-back-orders/

(apparently Newsarama is GamesRadar now)

Ahead of WandaVision's debut on January 15, Marvel Comics' collections department printed new editions for two books - The Vision Complete Collection, and House of M - as well as three new collections of older material - Scarlet Witch by James Robinson: The Complete Collection, Vision & Scarlet Witch: The Saga of Wanda and Vision, and Marvel-Verse: Wanda & Vision.

The response was quick, as by the end of WandaVision's first season in March most of these comics had sold out at the distributor level - with new printings not becoming available again until a month after the show ends.

Now that we're a few months out from WandaVision's finale and Marvel Comics is re-initiating new plans for Wanda (such as the Darkhold comic book event), Newsarama checked in again to see if collections of these stories of Wanda and Vision's past are any easier for customers to get.

Unfortunately, these five collections are still hard to come by. The printings from earlier this year have all sold out at the distributor level for comic shops, and most are either unavailable on Amazon or only at a mark-up from second-party sellers.

Marvel-Verse: Wanda & Vision
(Image credit: Marvel Comics)

The Eisner-winning The Vision Complete Collection has gone through multiple printings since its November 2019 debut. The last printing hit shelves in April and sold out in two months, with another new printing scheduled for July 21.

Marvel-Verse: Wanda & Vision apparently sold out in March, then again in May. A third printing is scheduled to debut July 28.

The three other collections - Vision & Scarlet Witch: The Saga of Wanda & Vision, House of M, and Scarlet Witch by James Robinson: The Complete Collection - have also sold out at the distributor level, however Marvel has not announced plans to reprint them despite the apparent demand.

The other new collection of older material, Vision & Scarlet Witch: The Saga of Wanda & Vision, sold out quickly after its January 2021 debut. It's currently on back order, with no announced plans by Marvel to reprint it despite the apparent demand.

They're very good at this.

you can't spell "permanently unavailable, leaving retailers and customers alike muttering bitterly" without Perlmutter

I generally preorder Marvel collections that I want, knowing that there's a good chance that waiting will = unavailability.

This is not a business model that makes sense to me.

Marvel comics is a business model that has not made sense since '62. Completely unbelievable that it became such a cash cow considering how it had bordered on insolvency on and off for decades.

Just read ASM #304 (1988) with my kid… it begins with Peter learning that the Bugle has published a book of his Spider-Man pics, which they can do because they own his work “lock, stock, and negatives.” JJJ offers him a $100 “gratitude fee”—but the publisher tells him that if he goes on tour and signs autographs, he can earn some money from it. I didn’t get Michelinie’s subtext around all this, when I was a kid myself… but I get it now!

(Also in this ish: Pete & MJ visit Disneyland.)

I generally preorder Marvel collections that I want, knowing that there's a good chance that waiting will = unavailability.
This is not a business model that makes sense to me.

I'm painting in broad strokes here but maybe it makes perfect sense, your preorder purchase is confirmed, the company will not be left with unwanted stock and scarcity/demand is built back into the model. Comics (or the collecting of them at least) thrive on scarcity.
I think back to the swamping of the comics market and inflated secondary narket that was going on around and after the first Burton Batman movie, LotDK. It was unsustainable and precipitated the wider bust that inevitably comes with a boom. Issues from A Death In the Family were on shop walls for ridiculous money but everyone had a copy.
I sympathise however, I came late to Adam Warlock and followed him in trades right up to Infinity Crusade vol 2. Cant seem to get that book without someone else always willing to pay that little bit more than me, not even touching the bonkers bot prices on amazon.

what about the bathroom policy, does that make sense

I still weirds me out that Marvel published an Avengers book that had Hank Pym romping through Janet’s vagina

Well, it was written by Geoff Johns, so I guess we should just be thankful that he didn't rip her in half afterwards.

And now it's my turn to be weirded out remembering that Marvel published a book that had the Blob literally eating Janet.

Same era that has the Hulk making kids with his cousin She-Hulk and the Green Goblin having kids with a teenager...so makes sense.

I'm painting in broad strokes here but maybe it makes perfect sense, your preorder purchase is confirmed, the company will not be left with unwanted stock and scarcity/demand is built back into the model. Comics (or the collecting of them at least) thrive on scarcity.

Comics might, trades don't. Invincible Compendiums have been the hottest superhero item this year and buyers of those $65 books are shockingly unconcerned with condition, because they're readers (or reader/collectors) - the big Image compendiums get damaged just looking at them.

Marvel sets trade/gn/etc. print runs before stores put in their orders (and thus consumer preorders) so it's not a case of ensuring that there are no leftovers. They just let some things go out of print for a while before they get back around to firing up the printing presses if it seems like demand warrants. (They've instituted a system where shops can put in prospective reprint orders to let them know what to put back in print.)

You would think somewhere in the Disney empire would be some distribution wing where they could sell books and actually have a back list.

DC always had the Time Warner books distribution system, so they have had many things 'always' stay in print.

I'm just pi$$ed that I have not been able to get the 2nd Omnibus volume of Tomb of Dracula for a freaking decade even though having the 1st and 3rd and I'll be damned to pay what the vultures on ebay etc. want for one. They reprinted the 1st one not all that long ago and have started a TPB run of the series, but never have gotten to the latter part of the run and the first one of that series is like stupid expensive.

They've instituted a system where shops can put in prospective reprint orders to let them know what to put back in print.

So all we need to do is figure out how to spam this system with our wants list!

They're releasing a portfolio of reproductions of the '70s Third Eye black light posters. Presumably full size. It's fairly 'spensive but I've considered buying the originals for a lot more.

For the uninitiated: https://www.coolandcollected.com/marvel-third-eye-blacklight-posters/

yeah, i fuckin love those

https://www.denofgeek.com/comics/marvel-announces-new-projects-that-could-tease-mcu-future-avengers-5-title

If you want to know what the future of the MCU looks like, just look at what Marvel Comics is publishing right now.

I'm not really convinced by this - my impression was that Marvel had been hilariously bad at giving anyone coming out of a movie theater and into a comic book store anything resembling what they'd just seen.