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Post by Cei-U! on Mar 8, 2019 12:01:44 GMT -5
The Hulk series would never have lasted if he'd stayed grey. Ditto Iron Man. We can gripe about it to our hearts' content, but that was the reality of the marketplace in the early '60s.
Cei-U! I summon the harsh truth!
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Mar 8, 2019 12:17:15 GMT -5
The Hulk series would never have lasted if he'd stayed grey. Ditto Iron Man. We can gripe about it to our hearts' content, but that was the reality of the marketplace in the early '60s. Cei-U! I summon the harsh truth! To be fair, the original Hulk series didn't last. I'm not disagreeing with you.
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Post by berkley on Mar 8, 2019 12:29:36 GMT -5
The colour grey for some reason never worked for me in the old 4-colour comics - at least, neither the Grey Gargoyle nor Dragon Man (from the FF) was a good visual, to my eyes. And the Black Panther didn't look as good with the black and grey as opposed to the black and blue colouring. Pure whites were always a bad idea too: the Silver Surfer always looked way better when they used those blue highlights
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Post by Reptisaurus! on Mar 8, 2019 12:32:59 GMT -5
Grey Iron Man is the only true Iron Man.
Grey Iron Man was freaky. It's annoying how quickly all the horror elements were excised from the early Marvel characters (Spider-Mam and even the Fantastic Four had a lot of horror in their early DNA as well) - probably to make them more kind friendly?
I definitely think Daredevil and the X-men would have worked better if they were just a little more adult. a little darker, ala the grey Hulk and Iron Man.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 8, 2019 14:15:37 GMT -5
Reptisaurus, I read the book Webslinger, a while back, containing essays about Spidey.
Darren Hudson Hick, a Ph.D student in philosophy at the University of Maryland (the book was published in 2006), discussed whether Spider-Man is a horror character. I can't obviously share every word, but this caught my eye:
In Spider-Man, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko gave readers all the elements of horror - nuclear fear, alienation, metamorphosis, and category mistakes - but wrapped them up in a colorful unitard. Spider-Man was something the comic-reading public had never seen before - the archetypal horror character, presented as an archetypal superhero character, a mixed message that captured the attention and imagination of readers.
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Post by MDG on Mar 8, 2019 14:23:00 GMT -5
The colour grey for some reason never worked for me in the old 4-colour comics - at least, neither the Grey Gargoyle nor Dragon Man (from the FF) was a good visual, to my eyes. And the Black Panther didn't look as good with the black and grey as opposed to the black and blue colouring. Pure whites were always a bad idea too: the Silver Surfer always looked way better when they used those blue highlights Gray was hard to do in four-color comics, since the black plate was usually just the line art. To get gray would mean using zip-a-tone or Craftint for the original art. For Batman, his uniform was supposed to be gray, but was actually the lightest tones of blue and red. Not sure what they did at marvel.
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Post by codystarbuck on Mar 8, 2019 14:23:13 GMT -5
Archie and DC need to do an Amalgam-style crossover, so Miss Grundy can be reunited with her long lost brother, Solomon! Also, who wouldn't read Jughead and Matter-Eater Lad? Wait, what ..... there's a female Grundy?
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Mar 8, 2019 14:37:03 GMT -5
Wait, what ..... there's a female Grundy? Solomon is not a biological Grundy. He must adopted.
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Post by adamwarlock2099 on Mar 8, 2019 14:41:30 GMT -5
Wait, what ..... there's a female Grundy? It's obvious I haven't read a lot of Archie. Sorry for ruining your joke with me needing it to be explained Cody.
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Post by tarkintino on Mar 8, 2019 14:51:55 GMT -5
It'd be like a cab driver looking at his meter and saying, "I know it says £10, but the journey is usually £13-14. Pay up!" I like the Hulk's smart/Pantheon days, too. But I enjoyed the evolution of the character during Peter David's run. I think change is good. It gets boring otherwise. I like the "Savage Hulk", but after 100+ issues of him battling air force personnel/the threat of the month, that could get tedious for a long-time reader. They could have offset the "Hulk smash!" repetition by adopting more of the TV show's model early on (which ran from 1977-82), with a pathos-heavy version pf Banner, with the Hulk as an accent to his troubles, instead of the focus. Some of the Trimpe-era Hulk comics tried this approach, but it was never consistent or as successful as the drama Banner would get in his TV adaptation.
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Post by Icctrombone on Mar 9, 2019 17:48:50 GMT -5
Solomon is not a biological Grundy. He must adopted. Maybe it was part of the Identity Archie Crisis where Ms. Grundy was taken by Dr. Light and .... nah, I can't say it.
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Post by berkley on Mar 10, 2019 4:04:02 GMT -5
That's a great juxtaposition - Solomon Grundy looks so outraged and/or appalled at whatever Miss Grundy is reading to him!
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Post by Icctrombone on Mar 11, 2019 8:25:54 GMT -5
So it seems that the Wal-mart Dc exclusives only really benefitted greedy dealers doing the speculation game and jacking up the prices after buying them all up. I never got why Dc didn't make them all available in Comic shops to begin with.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 11, 2019 15:23:22 GMT -5
So it seems that the Wal-mart Dc exclusives only really benefitted greedy dealers doing the speculation game and jacking up the prices after buying them all up. I never got why Dc didn't make them all available in Comic shops to begin with. Walmart was looking for an exclusive to get people through the door and wouldn't have carried them at all without the exclusive, so if DC wanted to get books into the mass market, they had to reach a deal with a retailer on the retailer's terms. And according to sales reports, sales per week at WalMart were steady throughout the releases not increasing the week of release and decreasing the other weeks of the month, even when DC changed the release date from 2 books every 2 weeks to 4 books during the same week, so indications are casual customers buy comics at the same rate regardless of release date and so aren't tied to release day purchases as the direct market is, which means books have a longer sales window at WalMart than they do at comic shops where 90% of actual sales to customers for a new release is between Wed and Sat of the release week. As to who benefited, it all depends on how you define benefit. DC got the market research it was looking to get by the experiment, Walmart got the revenue for every copy sold plus whatever else customers who came in for them bought, people in large swaths of the country where there are no comic shops had a chance to buy comics (and actual data indicates these sold well for WalMart despite anecdotal accounts of lots of copies sitting on the shelves). My guess is that the exclusivity deal was likely for a year, and that will cover all the chapters of the new stories that are getting collected. DC has said they will be offering similar products to the direct market moving forward, but no one ever said when that starts, and my guess is not until the continued stories (which will be offered in collected editions in the direct market) have run their course as single issues. -M
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Post by rberman on Mar 11, 2019 17:33:35 GMT -5
So it seems that the Wal-mart Dc exclusives only really benefitted greedy dealers doing the speculation game and jacking up the prices after buying them all up. I never got why Dc didn't make them all available in Comic shops to begin with. Walmart was looking for an exclusive to get people through the door and wouldn't have carried them at all without the exclusive, so if DC wanted to get books into the mass market, they had to reach a deal with a retailer on the retailer's terms. And according to sales reports, sales per week at WalMart were steady throughout the releases not increasing the week of release and decreasing the other weeks of the month, even when DC changed the release date from 2 books every 2 weeks to 4 books during the same week, so indications are casual customers buy comics at the same rate regardless of release date and so aren't tied to release day purchases as the direct market is, which means books have a longer sales window at WalMart than they do at comic shops where 90% of actual sales to customers for a new release is between Wed and Sat of the release week. As to who benefited, it all depends on how you define benefit. DC got the market research it was looking to get by the experiment, Walmart got the revenue for every copy sold plus whatever else customers who came in for them bought, people in large swaths of the country where there are no comic shops had a chance to buy comics (and actual data indicates these sold well for WalMart despite anecdotal accounts of lots of copies sitting on the shelves). My guess is that the exclusivity deal was likely for a year, and that will cover all the chapters of the new stories that are getting collected. DC has said they will be offering similar products to the direct market moving forward, but no one ever said when that starts, and my guess is not until the continued stories (which will be offered in collected editions in the direct market) have run their course as single issues. -M Is it Wal Mart itself that was looking to get people in the door? I thought these comics were stocked in an area of Wal Mart which was being rented by an outside company for impulse candy and collectible sales near the registers. As opposed to having an end aisle display or being shelved with the magazines or books.
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