Amazing Spider-Man #603

I was looking at the cover of this week's Amazing Spider-Man #603, by Stephane Roux, and something struck me as odd... Here, take a look; can you figure it out?















Still not sure why this image looks odd? How about a hint...















That's right. Stephane Roux took arguably the hottest female character in the Marvel Universe, former model Mary Jane Watson Parker, and made her look like the creepy kid from Mad Magazine, Alfred E. Newman.

"Face it Tiger-- What, Me Worry?"

Epic Art Fail, Stephane Roux.

Pri¢e Point$

Marvel proudly announced a rise in their comics’ prices recently. In a struggling economy, however, retailers and long time readers question such a decision.

One aspect that has kept comics as viable entertainment has been the promise of affordability and collectability, and right when reader’s are re-examining their pull lists to fit their budgets, Marvel reaches out to those same readers to pick their pockets.

A look at Diamond’s January 2009 Previews shows the startling contrast; more than 45% of Marvel’s line is more expensive than $2.99; 4% of those comics are more expensive than $3.99. More than forty books from marvel’s line that exceed the standard $2.99. DC prices more than 86% of their products at $2.99 or less; in fact, unlike Marvel, DC has a price-point below $2.99!

Be sure, if we as readers hand our wallets over to Marvel now, the other larger comic book publishers will follow suit and increase their prices as well, not to mention the likelihood of independent comics soaring to $4.99 or $5.99 a book.

A clear message needs to be sent to Marvel that this increase in price of books is the exact opposite of what the comic industry needs right now. It’s important that we make the statement clear for the out-of-touch Marvel still lauding the Brand New Day Spider-Man debacle as well-received.

So how do we send a clear message to Marvel and other companies eyeing the new price-point? We have to affect their bottom-line, severely, if Marvel will ever listen to us. Obviously, if the plummeting sales of Amazing Spider-man, now about half of pre-Brand New Day sales, haven’t been enough to change bad editorial mandates, our response must be even more severe.

A drop in revenue might be misinterpreted as a reflection of the economy, so the severe message must also be clear; not only must Marvel notice a drop in their sales, but they must also experience a loss of market share. In December, Marvel held it’s top ranking with the largest market-share for Comic Book publishers. To send a clear message, we must award the greater market share to affordable publishers.

I recommend we readers should boycott Marvel’s $3.99 books, and to direct the rest of our budget to other excellent publishers in the industry. DC Comics has a great, full line of comics with many books at $2.99 or less, as does Dark Horse Comics. Top Cow even made a pledge to readers last month that all the Top Cow titles will remain at $2.99 an issue for 2009.

It is important to remember that we are trying to save the industry from itself, not kill it; even as we send our message of disapproval to Marvel, we must still support our local comic shop, the life-blood of the industry. If we stop buying from our local comic shops, they’ll close, and the comic industry will dry up.

So, if you can’t find anything new outside of Marvel to read, buy back issues; buying back issues will enable you to support your local shops without contributing to Marvel’s market share. This would also be a great time to pick up a Graphic novel you might have been meaning to try from another publisher, or read a classic stories like DC’s Kingdom Come and Crisis on Infinite Earths, even try a manga like Deathnote, or ask your local comic retailer for more suggestions!

Let’s help save the comic industry from itself; say “No!” to $3.99 an issue, but say “Yes!” to the comic book industry’s continued prolific publications for the years to come.



Or you can make yours Moneygrubber.

One more time...

Well, you might notice that it's been quite a while since my last post.

I have a bad tendency to get out of the habit and ignore things altogether. I've thought about posting, but never got around to it, so I'm just going to post something here just to get back in the habit.

Since I really don' have anything i'd like to write about today, I'm going to post a strip from a comic I'm working on called 80 Page Giant.

How to Shop Comic Book Sales

If your comic book shop is anything like mine, they probably have at least on big sale a year. My shop has it's big sale coincide with Free Comic Day. Here's a few tips for maximizing those sales.

1. Prepare:

A. Make a list of the comic books you own Comic books.

You can use buy programs that help you create your own Comic Book Database, or you can use programs you might already have, like Excel, or even something as simple as Microsoft Word or Notepad.

I suggest that you use a computer based program rather than just a legal pad simply because as you add on, it will be easy to insert new data, and you can always print up a hardcopy later.

The benefits of Comic Book Database software are the inclusion of cover scans, some offer free, downloadable price and title updates, the ability to use barcodes* for entries, find features which can indicate character appearances, deaths, origins, storylines, and writers and artists work, add multiple entries at once, instantly sort lists, print comic lists, export data to HTML lists, and track loans.

Here are some Comic Book Database programs:
ComicBase 10
Collecterz.com Comic Collector database
Comic Collector Professional
Justapps.com Comic Book Manager

* You will need to invest in a barcode scanner which can cost well over $100 to use this feature

B. Research:

From your list of collected comics you can extrapolate what books are missing from your run of issues. You can then create a list of missing books in a spreadsheet program, or in other programs mentioned before. If there are characters, writers, artists, or storylines that you like, you might consider searching for such items at CBDB (the Comic Book Database) and GCD (The Grand Comic Book Database), which will help you to create a list of issues containing the searched entries.

I prefer GCD because for the simple setup, offering categorized results. However, neither CBDB nor GCD are completely exhaustive, and you will be able to put together the most complete list by using both databases.

It’s important to include the title, issue number, month and year in your list. If you’re list covers many items, you might include a note as to what characters, writers, artists, or storylines. You might also include a column as a check list for issues as they are collected.

Once you’ve put together a list and printed it up, you’d be best served to put the list in a binder or folder, anything to contain and organize the list. You should take your list with when you go to your local comic book store.

2. Bargain Bins:

Comb the bargain bins first, and don’t forget to consult your missing/ buy list. I ended up spending nearly five times the bargain price on Superman in Action Comics #723 because I went back to search the bargain bins afterwards.

And when I say comb, I mean comb. Go through the stacks one by one, as they may not be alphabetical. You never know what you’ll find, and you may pick up a stack of issues missing from a run.

Don’t be afraid to try something new if you can grab a few issues cheap. I was listening to Fanboy Radio a while back and remembered one of the interviewees, (Max Collins, I believe) talking about the series Ms. Tree, from Renegade Press. I found a few issues in the bargain bin and gave them a shot, a good choice indeed.

3. Paraphernalia and Sale Terms:

The sale will probably be the best time to pick up that action figure that you never got around to buying, or maybe that character T-shirt. The store will likely post the sale terms somewhere and be sure to read carefully. You probably won’t get any discounts on new items, issues or graphic novels, so sales are best for retro-collecting and buying the items you probably don’t grab on your regular visits.

4. Free Comic Day:

If the sale coincides with free comic day, when you pick out your comic(s), pick out something new, that you haven’t read before. It’s free, so you can afford to try something you don’t know anything about. Quite a few Free Comic Day books serve as an introduction to an up-coming or on-going series, so you may even introduce yourself to a new favorite series.

The Legitimacy of Sequential Art: Part II - The Rest of What You Know is Also Wrong , or Readership and Comics

“In North America we have long had the hang-up that comics are only for kids. [That] a grown man who reads comic books must be a total freak, nerd, geek, fan-boy, loser, dweeb, social misfit, […] or butt-head.”
-Mark Groenewold

Without getting into a lengthy debate about first amendment rights, censorship and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, I would briefly like to discuss the demographics of comic book readers. Scott McCloud, author of Understand Comics and Reinventing Comics, sums up nicely popular conception of comic books, calling the medium “Crude, poorly-drawn, semiliterate, cheap, disposable kiddie fare.” The majority of non-comic readers (even, and sometimes especially former readers) still consider comics to be a medium primarily directed toward young readers. Scott Berg tried to challenge this conception in a Washington Post article from September 7th, 2001 entitled “Comic Books Grow Up.”

“It's easy enough to keep comic books stored away in this nostalgic closet, frozen in time, never to change or grow older. But if your impression of comics remains one of anatomically overcooked men and women POWing, BIFFing and BLAMming their way through a world full of loquacious and colorfully dressed bad guys -- surprise! The runt of American popular culture has grown up, and comics are now smarter, better and wiser than ever.”

Berg points out that, by the mid nineties, the maturation of the medium of comics was “a decades-old trend,” thanks to innovators such as Will Eisner. The medium, continued it’s evolution as “comics artists […] began to rapidly accelerate [… the trend ] of taking on more and more serious adult subjects and receiving more and more serious adult recognition.”

Dan Jurgens, a comics artist in both senses of illustration and writing, known for his work on several Superman titles, Justice League, Teen Titans, the Zero Hour mini-series, and the now defunct imprint, Tangent, of DC comics, was questioned about his work on the Marvel title Thor. In an interview by Richard Caponetti on Alvaro’s Comic Board.

RC: You matured the title considerably-fifteen year olds can still read the book, but they have to be smart fifteen year olds to really get it. Why was your time on the book the right time to do this?

DAN JURGENS: The older market is now the only market. We, as an industry, have given up on the younger market. So, what we did in Thor was not unique-it’s what the market is demanding right now. It is an older reader that we have right now.

Jurgens himself admitted regret that the younger audience is marginalized, if not segregated, by the industry at present, but recognized, as a contributor, the direction of the medium. Later in the interview, Jurgens comments that “we [as an industry] have abandoned the kids market, which breaks my heart. We all started as kids. I have kids . . . who don’t know a single kid in their entire school who reads comic books. And I can see why they don’t: Because we don’t give them a product!”

The industry itself has long since acknowledged, even as society blinks against the recognition, that the medium has shifted from youth to adult oriented. Readership, however traditionally conceived, is also no longer limited to the concept of singularly masculine audience, if this was ever actually the case.

The collegiate newspaper, The Carolinian, extrapolated information from a recent Diamond Distributors Reader’s Survey. The paper reported that the “average age of comics readers is 34 [years old]. 45 percent of respondents were college-educated, [and] 33 percent had [at least] finished highschool. Unfortunately, only 13 percent of respondents were female.” While the medium still is dominated by male readers, Berg also noted in the September 7th, 2001 Washington post article “the ever-increasing involvement of women in the creation and consumption of comics.”

...

Now that we have come to an understanding that comics are not kiddie fare, we can examine whether or not the medium consists solely of crude, poorly-drawn, semiliterate, cheap, disposable material or if it is in fact a legtimate medium.

The Legitimacy of Sequential Art: Part I - Everything you Know is Wrong, or Comics on Film

What do you really know about comic books?

What is called to mind when someone mentions comic books? Does it consist solely of serialized adventures of spandex clad beings who spout pseudo-science constantly being pressed to the brink and saved by convenient instances of dues ex machina.

Granted, this has been and occasionally is the case in some comic books. The previous description applies to the majority of silver-age comics, and even to some current series that celebrate the nostalgia of classic comics by emulating the campy and unsophisticated stories of the formative years of comic books.

I will also grant you that in every medium, including literature, film and comic books, there are poorly written works. Unfortunately, pop culture embraces the medium of film more easily than any other medium, perhaps becuase of it renders participation virtually unnecessary. Worse still, Hollywood's reductive and revisionist films hardly ever do justice to the origin of its material. Hollywood loves a concept or a name, but all too rarely shows any respect for the heart of the story or medium. How much of what you know of comic books and superheroes is based on what television and movies has distorted for you?

Up until five years ago, Hollywood regularly maligned comic books horribly by creating a self-perpetuating cycle of lowering the average movie-goer’s expectation that further demeaned the genre by offering more films catering to same the a pop-culture understanding Hollywood created .

What Hollywood forgets is the epic quality of comic books. Certain Characters have continued uninterrupted for more than fifty years, often branching out into several different titles. If we were to consider the quality of comics as a continuous art form and relate them to the serials of early film history, some comic book characters would hundreds of hours of “filmed” history.

Truthfully, every issue cannot be counted among this “filmed” history, as comics often undergo ret-conning removing large collections of issues from continuity. Too often comic books continuities are ignored by Hollywood and abandoned to create, as in the case of the ill-fated film, Superman Lives, “‘[re-imaginings]’ which [borrows] the names of [a] franchise and its characters, but little else.”

However, let’s consider one example, the Flash of DC Comics. Discounting every appearance outside of the Flash Volume 2, so as not to include guest appearance in other titles, mini-series, maxi-series, annuals and even the previous volume of the Flash, the series runs 230 issues. The equivalent serialized “filmed” history would be three times that of Heimat 2, which is recognized as the longest film ever produced, lasting more than twenty-five hours.

The point of this “filmed” history is to remind the casual movie goer and non-comic reader that these characters have lives outside and pre-existent to film, and this existence and storied life should be drawn upon, not only to respect the origins and heart of the characters but to also finally embraces the previously established fan-base.

Forget what you “know.” Abandoning every misconception TV and Film offers is one of the first steps to understanding the legitimacy of Sequential Art.

New Comics: January 25th 2005

I realize as I write this post that I’m being counter productive. The new understanding of the comics that I intend to present could be seriously hindered by these "picks" I’m presenting. While everyone has favorite aspects about anything they enjoy, I find that my "picks" post barely scratches the surface of comic books and detracts from the serious, relevant discussion I intend to engage. This having been said, I will, after this week, be radically reformatting these posts so that we may delve deeper into the possibilities of the comic art medium.

For this week, however, we will have one last comic geek hurrah. The truth is, to the uninitiated, your general fan boy (or girl) loves an inside joke and revels in comic trivia. The more obscure the reference, the harder we laugh… and the further freakish stigmatism outsiders attribute to comic geek-ness. I’m afraid I can’t hold back the inside jokes this week, but I will do my best to let you in on the joke.

Top Pick: Amazing Spiderman #528 (Marvel Comics)

To begin with, Amazing Spiderman #528 is the final chapter of The Spider-Man: the Other event. This event simply is the future of Spider-Man.

Spider-Man is perhaps the most accessible off all heroes; Peter Parker is a fragile-hearted every-man with an indomitable will, gifted with amazing powers and burdened with self-imposed world-crushing responsibility. Any good Spider-Man story, as does Amazing Spiderman #528, offers a near-perfect blend of humor, pathos and adventure.

Page three of Amazing Spiderman #528 has an excellent moment that employs a subtlety that is typically obscured in the medium of comics. Three identical panels, one devoid of dialogue, that allowing the reader to grasp the quite intensity of the scene. While I’ve heard criticism of the use of repeated images as lazy, I appreciate the occasional use of repeated static images. The downside of the unlimited possibility comic storytelling offers is that one might be tempted to lean towards constant movement and the unrelenting excess of visuals at the risk of glossing over the stillness of life. I appreciate beats of silence, stillness and other common subtleties of life when they are recognized by comic creators.

The bottom line is that Spider-Man: the Other is unequivocally the most important development in the history of the character, barring only his inception in Amazing Fantasy #15 (August, 1962), and even if you missed the other eleven chapters of The Other, Amazing Spiderman #528 will fill you in on the most important details. If you don’t find that Amazing Spiderman #528 alone does not answer all your questions, the other key issue for understanding Peter Parkers self-perception, nature and rebirth is Amazing Spider-Man #527, if you can get your hands on it.

Best Lines of Dialogue: Batman #649 (DC Comics)

This is who the Joker is: Bound, beaten bloody, held captive with a knife literally at his throat, and still incensing his aggressor, all for a good laugh.

Joker: Didn’t I kill You? (for "Kill" link scroll to Death in the Family item)
Jason Todd: We’ve been over this already.
Joker: I know, but I like talking about it.

Funniest Moment: Robin #146 (DC Comics)

Robin (III), a.k.a. Tim Drake, is leading three other Teen Titans members through one of Lex Luthor’s secret labs in hopes of finding a cure for fellow Titan Kon-El, the modern Superboy. Robin takes the id signal pods from defeated security droids to keep further droids from identifying the Teen Titans as threats. As another regimen of security droids fie past the quartet unsuspecting, Beast Boy, a.k.a. Garfield Logan, waves his hand and tells the droids, “This is not the titan you were looking for.” Unamused, Cassie Sandsmark, a.k.a. Wonder Girl, says, “Gar, stop bothering the killer robots.”

Although not funny, except in the sickest way, it is ironic that Speedy II, Mia Dearden, asks the others too look for a “speedy fix,” referring to the fact that she is infected with H.I.V, which is unfortunate choice of words for writer Bill Willingham, since the first hero who took that name, Roy Harper, who had been at one time addicted to heroin.

Best Artwork: New Avengers #15 (Marvel Comics)

I’ve been reading Liberty Meadows since it’s syndication in 1997. I knew who Cho was before Wizard Magazine scrambled to explain who Frank Cho was and what Liberty Meadows is when in issue 102, it listed Liberty Meadows #1 as number eight of the top ten Hottest Back issues. The unaccredited author could only question “What the hell is Liberty Meadows?” Frank the monkey boy Cho is a fan boy’s fan boy; better at rendering iconic heroes and idealistic heroines having never officially studied art than many of the Joe Kubert School Alumni.

Best Writer: Revelations #6 (Dark Horse Comics)

Jenkins concludes his this mini-series and finally delivers on all the contradicting evidence and the blessing of lost faith. The conclusion surprised me, no easy feat, especially considering I had figured out the Reveal of DC’s Vigilante #5 by issue three. I found the concept of faith as damnation, or at least an understanding of impending doom as intriguing, even if the case is closer to irrefutable truth and an inability to refuse to believe. Perhaps Detective Charlie Northern explained it best, “I’ve just found out what happens when a man gets given the very thing he thinks he wanted. Not faith. Proof. If you get proof. You lose hope.”

Best Cliffhanger: Green Lantern Corps: Recharge #4 (DC Comics)

Something tells me this book is the unmentioned link in the Infinite Crisis chain of universally disastrous events. Lines have been crossed, truces rescinded, and now Oa’s under fire. Is this once again the end of the Guardians and the Green Lantern Corps, coming so soon after the reforming of the corps? Of course not. That’s just silly. Geoff Johns is writing the series. Batman will get sucker punched for inexplicable reasons, but Hal will swoop in and save the day. What else can you expect from Hal Jordan’s biggest fan?

Best New Series: Next Wave #1 (Marvel Comics)

I almost didn’t buy this book. With as much as I spend on comic books monthly, you don’t want to was it on books you aren’t enjoying. My first clue that this series would not be as trite and boring as a synopsis indicated was the tag line. Even though the encouragement “If you like anything, you will LOVE NEXTWAVE!!!” seemed to beckon the standardless reader, the tongue-in-cheek humor of the slogan “healing America by beating people up,” indicated otherwise. Further confirming the sarcastic spoof was worth $2.99 was Dirk Anger’s speech to his new recruits.

“I’m Dirk Anger, director of H.A.T.E. I’ve been director of H.A.T.E. for longer than you’ve been alive. Except maybe you. You look old…

“I’m older’n you. I’m ninety years old. You know how I look so pretty? I take drugs. Special H.A.T.E. drugs. Life-extending drugs. H.A.T.E. has the best drugs. Because H.A.T.E. loves me. And I love H.A.T.E. Every day of my horrible drug extended terrorist fighting life.

“Everyday I smoke two hundred cigarettes and one hundred cigars and drink a bottle of whisky and three bottles of wine with dinner.

“And dinner is meat...raw meat. The cook serves me an entire animal and I fight it bare-handed and tear off what I want and eat it and have the rest buried. In New Jersey! For H.A.T.E.!”

As icing on the cake, not four panels later, when Anger is called away to a communications room and request that the “etheric loop Recall Televocometer” be deployed, a giant telephone receiver descends from the ceiling above him a la the cone of silence.

Back Issue: Polly and the Pirates #3 (Oni Press)

I like the concepts that Ted Naifeh offered, but have hard a hard time recommending the book to others. The pace is painstakingly slow and redundant at times. Issue three is a good place to start, giving you most of the pertinent information and begins to pick up the pace, although one might prefer to wait for issue four.