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Craiggers posted:Can anyone suggest a good mail order comic service? There aren't any good shops in my area and I'm still addicted to physical copies of books. DCBS is the biggest mail order comic retailer in the friggin world. And they undercut prices like crazy.
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Nov 7, 2014 02:02
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I used Heavy Ink for a while and liked them alright. I especially liked that you could add or remove books almost up to the day they ship. Regular shipping took a while, though (~1 week), which was annoying. And the one time I didn't get an order, they made me wait 30 days, then some of the books I originally ordered were out of stock and I had to get replacements elsewhere. I stopped after they changed their prices and the local shop became more competitive (even if they gently caress up my pull list at least once a month). Also, one of the guys turned out to be a total douche. I'm not sure if he still works there, but a lot of people stopped using them around that time. http://comicsalliance.com/heavy-ink-arizona-shooting-corcoran/
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Nov 7, 2014 02:10
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Gavok posted:The link is pro-click, not for the crap I wrote, but for the guy in the comments losing his poo poo over how Mar-Vell is getting disrespected and everyone should boycott. That guy's a big Rodney Dangerfield fan, I bet.
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Nov 7, 2014 03:36
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Uthor posted:I stopped after they changed their prices and the local shop became more competitive (even if they gently caress up my pull list at least once a month). Also, one of the guys turned out to be a total douche. I'm not sure if he still works there, but a lot of people stopped using them around that time. I mean, I gently caress up people's pulls at least once a week. But if I do and they get angry I give them a discount and that usually smooths things over. I handle our entire comic operation so mistakes do tend to happen. If we added mail order I'd be screwed.
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Nov 7, 2014 03:40
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Rhyno posted:I mean, I gently caress up people's pulls at least once a week. But if I do and they get angry I give them a discount and that usually smooths things over. I handle our entire comic operation so mistakes do tend to happen. If we added mail order I'd be screwed. It's a combination of them loving up, not being too apologetic, never ordering enough so they are sold out of any extras by the time I get there (noon Wednesdays), and almost never actually reordering the books they miss to get them to me in a week or two like they say they will. It's pushed me to trade waiting or going digital for anything that isn't from the big two. The few people I know that shop there all complain about it, but the next nearest shop is a 45 minute drive away. I like that shop, but I'm not going to spend $10 in gas just to go there.
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Nov 7, 2014 04:27
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Uthor posted:It's a combination of them loving up, not being too apologetic, never ordering enough so they are sold out of any extras by the time I get there (noon Wednesdays), and almost never actually reordering the books they miss to get them to me in a week or two like they say they will. It's pushed me to trade waiting or going digital for anything that isn't from the big two. The few people I know that shop there all complain about it, but the next nearest shop is a 45 minute drive away. I like that shop, but I'm not going to spend $10 in gas just to go there. I tend to default to supporting local businesses, but it sounds like they don't care about keeping your business, so I don't see why you should support there's. If subscriptions work for you go with that, and if there's a book worth driving 45 minutes to get, drive the 45 minutes. If you think that other store is good enough, you might just move your pull list there and only pick up every two weeks or so. As long as you show up at least once a month, they should be willing to pull whatever you want.
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Nov 7, 2014 04:45
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Like I said, I get a lot of TPBs and digital now. I get like ten floppies a month, mostly as an excuse to meet up with a friend for lunch once a week. They meet that bare minimum for me.
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Nov 7, 2014 05:11
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Rhyno posted:DCBS is the biggest mail order comic retailer in the friggin world. And they undercut prices like crazy. I will second this. It's run by good people and their prices are really really low.
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Nov 7, 2014 16:45
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Senor Candle posted:I will second this. It's run by good people and their prices are really really low. 
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Nov 7, 2014 16:55
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I believe it was in the chat thread that there was mention of the comics code and how it was used to basically end crime and horror comics. Is there an essay or brief history that someone can recommend to learn more?
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Nov 9, 2014 17:11
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If you really really want to go in-depth about it, there's the Ten-Cent Plague. It's a very well written and researched book about the death of horror and crime comics by the Comics Code. Unfortunately I don't really know any quick articles about it.
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Nov 9, 2014 17:46
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Another good book is Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code, by Amy Kiste Nyberg.
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Nov 9, 2014 18:26
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With Marvel planning some sort of new Secret Wars silliness next summer I started wondering: does Battleworld from the original series still exist? Last I saw of it was some ancient issues of The Thing where Ben Grimm stayed behind so he could switch to human at will. And as a side thought, was it ever referenced that a big chunk of Denver disappeared at the same time the heroes were whisked away? Seems like that would be a pretty big deal but the Daily Bugle only cared about New York crime rates.
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Nov 9, 2014 19:15
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Thanks much, Hurt and Lou.
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Nov 9, 2014 20:30
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Odonata posted:With Marvel planning some sort of new Secret Wars silliness next summer I started wondering: does Battleworld from the original series still exist? Last I saw of it was some ancient issues of The Thing where Ben Grimm stayed behind so he could switch to human at will. I am sure it got mentioned once or twice. Molecular Man brought it back. It seems that once Ben Grimm left it was destroyed.
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Nov 9, 2014 20:35
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Shitshow posted:Thanks much, Hurt and Lou. Not to be a shill, but I actually have a copy of Seal of Approval for sale, listed in my SA-Mart thread. I won't be offended if you aren't interested, though.
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Nov 9, 2014 20:40
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Big Bad Voodoo Lou posted:Not to be a shill, but I actually have a copy of Seal of Approval for sale, listed in my SA-Mart thread. I won't be offended if you aren't interested, though. Thanks for the offer, but pretty much all digital these days.
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Nov 9, 2014 23:08
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bobkatt013 posted:I am sure it got mentioned once or twice. Molecular Man brought it back. It seems that once Ben Grimm left it was destroyed. What planet were they on in the Beyond mini? I only read it one time and it didn't really stick in my head.
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Nov 10, 2014 00:42
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Shitshow posted:I believe it was in the chat thread that there was mention of the comics code and how it was used to basically end crime and horror comics. Is there an essay or brief history that someone can recommend to learn more? After World War II superhero comics lost a lot of their popularity, and crime/horror comics filled a lot of that void. It's kind of worth noting that even through the period of Golden Age Superheroes being hot, and crime/horror comics being hot, and then Silver Age comics being hot, some of the best-selling comics were still consistently family friendly stuff like Archie, Gold Key Disney/other cartoon books, etc. American society in the post-war years was pretty squeaky clean, at least in terms of media. Films had enacted the Hays Code since the mid-1930s, television was following at least as strict an internal code, and even 'girly mags' on the level of Playboy basically didn't exist outside of only marginally legal clandestine distribution methods. A lot of the crime and horror comics (not just EC, but plenty of other publishes) were pretty shockingly gruesome and dark in a society where films were free of blood and curses and anything but the lightest suggestion of sex existing. People were also pretty paranoid about ~SECRET INVASIONS~, whether by communist agents or fugitive Nazis or Satanists or Negroes or who knows what. Plus, youth culture as it exists today also emerged in those times. The kids coming of age circa 1950 were some of the first kids to ever have what we consider real childhood/adolescence, given the simultaneous development of child labor laws, compulsory public education, the industrial revolution, wider spread literacy, the development of mass media, the emergence of a middle class, etc. You could argue a lot of these were coming into play earlier, but there were two huge wars and a worldwide Depression that probably spoiled a lot of kids' leisure time. A lot of people were startled to discover that kids got up to bad poo poo even given this idyllic setup. The whole concept of "juvenile delinquents" really caught on around then, and people were grasping at straws as to why kids still did bad stuff. A little later on people would be able to blame rock n roll and marijuana and civil rights agitators, but a group of people (not created but eventually figureheaded by Frederic Wertham, a child psychologist) noticed a lot of these young offenders were reading comics. And once they took the time to look at the comics that these kids (and plenty of non-criminal, well-behaved kids) were reading, pearls were clutched and monocles popped across polite society. This led to alarmist newspaper and magazine articles (several penned by Wertham), protests, book burnings, boycotts of shops carrying the offending comics, a best-selling book by Wertham (Seduction of the Innocent, which for what it's worth thought superheroes and funny animals and all comics in general held secret bad messages for kids) and eventually a Senate hearing where a lot of narratives will claim "comics were exonerated" but the conclusion was remarkably similar to the similar hearings held regarding heavy metal/rap music in the 1980s and Mortal Kombat/Doom in the 1990s: the Senate basically said "your industry needs to get its poo poo together on its own or else Congress might need to pass laws against you." So in 1954 the Comics Code Authority was set up with some really strict rules on what could and could not be in a comic, and 90% of the publishers agreed to voluntarily submit their books to the Authority, and pretty much all of the distributors and printers and newsstands agreed to only carry Code approved books to avoid any further protests. You can read the whole thing here but some choice bits: code:The second big wave of superhero comics came along a few years later, and then in the early 1970s there was pressure to slightly revise the code to allow for things like a villain getting away after being thwarted, mentions of monsters, and the occasional suggestion that you know, maybe once in awhile a person in authority might not be the best person in the world. This period is mainly memorable for everyone and their brother all putting out Dracula, Frankenstein, Mummy, Zombie comics in the same six month period. By the 1980s the direct market started to take a bigger chunk of the market and the weirdos who ran the second wave of comic shops didn't give a poo poo about the code, so you could hypothetically sell a non-Code comic somewhere other than the nearly-dead network of headshops that (barely) supported underground comix in the 1960s and 1970s. Pretty much none of the publishers to emerge since then (Fantagraphics, Comico, First, Eclipse, Image, Valiant, etc.) ever bothered to sign up for the Code, imprints like Epic and Vertigo ignored it, and in 2001 Marvel decided to stop bothering with it. By then no one was buying comics off the newsstand and watchdog groups were too busy panicking about the Internet and whatever, so it more or less went out with a whimper. I remember Archie stopped running the code a few years back and when some reporter asked them about it, they confessed they weren't entirely sure when they stopped sending them to get approved, they just had a blanket approval because it's not like Archie is going to have anyone get killed or turn out to be gay or be a zombie. Not in an ARCHIE comic! Anyway that's probably more information than you wanted but less than reading a whole book on it.
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Nov 10, 2014 01:55
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Dr. Hurt posted:If you really really want to go in-depth about it, there's the Ten-Cent Plague. It's a very well written and researched book about the death of horror and crime comics by the Comics Code. Unfortunately I don't really know any quick articles about it. Just want to second this book. It gives a really good over-view of the society at the time, the history of comics, and the absolute insanity that went into trying to get comics banned.
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Nov 10, 2014 02:07
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Edge & Christian posted:Anyway that's probably more information than you wanted but less than reading a whole book on it. Actually, no, this is an awesome summary. About 20 years ago I read David Halberstam's "The 50s", and this is one aspect of the time that that he completely overlooked, so I find at all fascinating: Edge & Christian posted:The kids coming of age circa 1950 were some of the first kids to ever have what we consider real childhood/adolescence, given the simultaneous development of child labor laws, compulsory public education, the industrial revolution, wider spread literacy, the development of mass media, the emergence of a middle class, etc. You could argue a lot of these were coming into play earlier, but there were two huge wars and a worldwide Depression that probably spoiled a lot of kids' leisure time.
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Nov 10, 2014 17:54
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I always wondered what went on at the CCA, since they were always so secretive about their review process. By the '00s I'm amazed at some of the stuff that had the code on it - one issue of Action Comics where there's implied murder-by-super-rape had CCA approval - so I can only imagine they were just rubber-stamping poo poo towards the end.
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Nov 10, 2014 18:41
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I remember someone saying that companies are required to send each issue in for approval, and at one point the CCA was shutting down or moving and folks had to clear out a room filled with unopened issues.
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Nov 10, 2014 20:53
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Just an addendum on EC, Bill Gaines, the head of the company, gave a well intentioned but disastrous defense of comic books during the televised hearing. No other publisher at the time even bothered, probably because they hoped the outcry would just blow over. The Comics Code was basically created by other publishers to destroy EC by prohibiting comics with the words 'weird', 'horror', 'terror', 'crime', and 'fear' in the title. Anyone familiar with EC's output can see that that kills the entire New Direction line. Though they did struggle on with weird titles like Psychoanalysis before throwing in the towel and focusing on Mad, there was no way to recover.
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Nov 10, 2014 23:04
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StumblyWumbly posted:I remember someone saying that companies are required to send each issue in for approval, and at one point the CCA was shutting down or moving and folks had to clear out a room filled with unopened issues.
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Nov 10, 2014 23:43
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A Strange Aeon posted:The Comics Code was basically created by other publishers to destroy EC by prohibiting comics with the words 'weird', 'horror', 'terror', 'crime', and 'fear' in the title. Anyone familiar with EC's output can see that that kills the entire New Direction line. EC employed a lot of really great/beloved people and did a good job of building a fanbase by printing those people's names and encouraging fan clubs and etc. They also really put their stamp on the period thanks to reprint efforts and/or the whole Tales from the Crypt television series, but the whole concept of "the code being created to put EC out of business" is misleading since they weren't putting out exceptionally disreputable content compared to their contemporaries, they weren't outselling any of the major players. I mean, maybe people were pissed off at the Senate testimony, but really that would be about it. The title thing would only keep them from being able to publish Vault of Horror and Crime SuspenStories (Crypt of Terror switched to Tales from the Crypt about four years before the CCA was ratified). That leave pretty much everything else, at least in terms of title if not content. The Code and EC's refusal to conform to it (they submitted some comics to it, but after like a year and a half of refusing to do so and it was a last ditch effort that lasted all of a couple of months) definitely led to the folding of the line of comics, but that was collateral damage/a principled stance, not any sort of intent on the part of the other publishers. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Nov 11, 2014 |
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Nov 11, 2014 01:28
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If Batman survived with Terror, Crime, Fear and even Horror not allowed I'm pretty sure most could have.
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Nov 11, 2014 03:50
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Aphrodite posted:If Batman survived with Terror, Crime, Fear and even Horror not allowed I'm pretty sure most could have. Yeah, but Batman spent that period transforming into a baby and the Joker just played harmless pranks on people.
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Nov 11, 2014 03:52
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Aphrodite posted:If Batman survived with Terror, Crime, Fear and even Horror not allowed I'm pretty sure most could have. Batman wasn't carving out the eyes of young women.
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Nov 11, 2014 04:01
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Edge & Christian posted:I mean, the code only prohibits the words "horror" "terror" and "crime", and there were a TON of books with CRIME in the title back then. EC's weren't the longest running, nor were they the best selling. I mean that both in that books like Lev Gleason's CRIME DOES NOT PAY started in 1942 before Bill Gaines even took over EC, and it outsold everything EC was putting out. Interesting; whatever I read must have had a real pro EC bias then, since that was how I'd always thought it went down. Thanks for the knowledge! For some reason I thought EC was a much bigger player than they apparently were. Might be from all the EC reprints I bought growing up, where Russ Cochran (I think that's the name of the guy) seemed on a holy mission to reprint the entire New Line and there was a picture of an old, bearded Bill Gaines in some of the issues as a kind of memorial. Made it seem all important to me as a kid, I guess.
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Nov 11, 2014 04:15
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Gavok posted:I'm doing an article on all the various versions/adaptations of Infinity Gauntlet. I'm wondering if I'm missing anything: It's a bit of a stretch, but Pinball FX 2 has an Infinity Gauntlet table, and it really does have a bunch of the story in it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5iuF8dLUdM
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Nov 11, 2014 04:36
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A Strange Aeon posted:Interesting; whatever I read must have had a real pro EC bias then, since that was how I'd always thought it went down. Thanks for the knowledge! It's just the modern retelling of the story that places them front and center and the source of everything memorable/edgy/popular about comics pre-Code. I actually wrote about this a few years ago. Think of EC Comics as like, the Velvet Underground or Joy Division rather than the Beatles or U2, if that makes any sense as a tortured metaphor.
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Nov 11, 2014 05:34
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Edge & Christian posted:EC is unquestionably significant historically and artistically, for all the reasons I mentioned. The fact that they were reprinted and lionized repeatedly over the past thirty years is kind of a chicken-egg thing, in terms of it reinforcing their significance but also they wouldn't have been lovingly remembered/reprinted if they weren't significant already. Great article that exactly points out how that Fairy Tale version isn't accurate. I haven't read 10 Cent Plague in years myself, but that's probably where the anti-EC comics crusade impression I had came from.
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Nov 11, 2014 14:05
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Edge & Christian posted:It's just the modern retelling of the story that places them front and center and the source of everything memorable/edgy/popular about comics pre-Code. I actually wrote about this a few years ago. Think of EC Comics as like, the Velvet Underground or Joy Division rather than the Beatles or U2, if that makes any sense as a tortured metaphor. So you're saying that EC published comics that were actually good instead of being popular. Got it. 
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Nov 11, 2014 14:21
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EC might have been lionized in the post-CCA world, but they were also just publishing good comics that not many others in their field were. Just a couple months ago in the Sentimental pages thread someone posted the Judgement Day story unprompted. And that wasn't a one off, there was Wally Wood's Perimeter story, and Blood Brothers, and many more. So yes they've probably received too much 'credit' as being the main target for the CCA, but I think they would have received a just amount of credit regardless.
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Nov 12, 2014 08:25
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prefect posted:So you're saying that EC published comics that were actually good instead of being popular. Got it. Oh, so you've never heard the White Album or Joshua Tree, then? That's sad, they're really good.
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Nov 12, 2014 17:54
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I'm currently reading the Great Darkness Saga from Legion of Super-Heroes; was this the first time Darkseid was used as the villain for a major story arc outside Jack Kirby's stories?
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Nov 13, 2014 00:45
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Metal Loaf posted:I'm currently reading the Great Darkness Saga from Legion of Super-Heroes; was this the first time Darkseid was used as the villain for a major story arc outside Jack Kirby's stories? No, in the 70's he turned up in the JLA as part of the annual JLA/JSA crossovers after Kirby left DC. I think that was the first time that the New Gods characters had been used since Kirby. By the time the Great Darkness Saga came along, Darkseid was the villain in the Super Friends cartoon for the final season.
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Nov 15, 2014 07:04
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Question about the Batman Beyond TV show. Figure you guys would know. In The Call (Season 3, episode 7), Superman is taking out the Justice League and Bruce busts out the Kryptonite saying, "This isn't the first time Superman's gone rogue." What's that referring to?
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Nov 15, 2014 19:04
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Uthor posted:Question about the Batman Beyond TV show. Figure you guys would know. In The Call (Season 3, episode 7), Superman is taking out the Justice League and Bruce busts out the Kryptonite saying, "This isn't the first time Superman's gone rogue." What's that referring to? Superman was brainwashed by Darkseid in one episode of Superman the Animated Series, which is the same event that got Professor Hamilton to join Cadmus. WickedHate fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Nov 15, 2014 |
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Nov 15, 2014 19:06
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