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You must know that this of course is my own opinion and this narrative may go into total obscurity or may be disagreeable at any point, but they are my own personal observations based on my own research and findings give or take whatever critiques may be introduced at future intervals.
If you enjoy this articles by all means let me know, otherwise I don`t care.
WHY I DESPISE THE NEW "LOOK AND FEEL" COMICS
On a side-note comic book paper has changed drastically; starting somewhere between 1998 and 2003, I believe. The preference is finalized the end result of the particular publisher-(s).
Additionally, they are more delicate than the old look and feel comics apart from the glossy interior shine; however it is the cover wrap (back and front) which gets squashed somewhere during or after production of the particular book-(s) being published and in my opinion makes for worse conditions even before hitting the newsstand or comic shops.
This results in a bad crease down the entire length of the spine; degrading the book from what would otherwise be at least a 9.0.
For today`s consumer buying many of these new “look and feel” comics are discouraging to the comic collector. I am a collector myself and am working on full runs of various Marvel titles, in the main silver and bronze age books as most of my early childhood collection went south due to unforeseen financial problems, which is my own personal business.
As it went my entire collection of over 400 + comics, books and memorabilia became lost, today I have 80% of those books recovered and now own over 616 books with titles I am working to build and put in my library.
Many of these new look and feel books have a thinner semi-glossy newsprint interior and a thicker glossy to semi-glossy exterior; cover to back.
I am overjoyed to have the privilege to collect books and fill-in the blocks of my growing runs and collection. My latest addition was completing the story of the second appearance of Howard the Duck with an 8.0 copy of Man-Thing #1 (1974) to complete the story of the first appearance of Howard the Duck in adventures into Fear #19 (Dec 1973).
Marvel, back then at least to encourage buying their books, split the stories up almost always in 2 parts or 2 books, some were crossovers into other titles and some were not. However when you look at any particular book imagine it blank, it is the same comic as any other comic just the title and prints are diverse.
When I began adding newer books to my collection NOT from my original collection and not from the Bronze Age (books I wanted because they appealed to me or had some cool features, origin, story arc) or having read or seen them online, I acquired.
What I did not realize was that the “look and feel” with respect to the paper texture has changed. My first acquirement was the story arc of HULK 2008 (aka Red-Hulk). The first issue in which the Red-Hulk was introduced (suggested earlier by Kenneth Johnson) from the Incredible Hulk TV series starring Bill Bixby Lou Ferrigno and now deceased Jack Colvin.
When I got it in the mail I was disappointed not at the fact of acquiring the first appearance of the Red-Hulk, but by the look and feel of the book itself –and I did not like it. First my complaint is that the spine was not rounded; it was creased, as though someone had taken special care to use their thumbnail and crease it too tightly. This made me think that if I opened the book cover too often the cover would tear away from the rest of the book, and to date I have not re-read the book out of fear that this might actually occur.
The new look and feel was also very dissimilar to the books which used newspaper print with a glossy cover and back, (silver-age, bronze-age, etc) although enticing for whatever extended life the thicker and glossier look was distasteful to me (in my opinion) and I wondered why the majority of publishers went this route, especially when the books could fall apart when the spine is creased like someone folded it so it would tear apart with the gentlest tug at the wrong time.
I searched Google out to seek as to what material the books were made of; turns out they were merely thicker newspaper prints with higher gloss, but the fact remained that spines were creased too much; which devalued the book and disgruntled many a collector, including me. This I suspect was due in the main to the chosen printer, who instead of considering the collector in their selling practices, print large volumes and smash them together in such a way that the spine becomes creased as though rubbed several times with the fingernail and thumb.
If you take an average piece of blank paper and fold it in half, you will find that in order to tear each half apart equally, you will have to re-fold it reversely. That is fold it back over to increase the crease. Then by using one`s thumbnail you can go over the crease down the length of the fold, then fold it back over until you are able to tear each half apart without “ripping” the two half unequally, an easy way to get two halves.
To break this down a little more, what this means is that by folding and refolding the center crease, the paper weakens at the crease the more you do it and thus the paper will spate more easily without rips or tears outside of the intended crease to bring about two halves.
This is exactly what the crease on the new look and feel comics look like, which indicates that printers are careless with comic printing process and distribution, which in turn means they don`t care about collectors and are only interested in making a profit.
While this accusation has merit; it goes without saying that better service means better customer loyalty and when print come out the way I have seen them (not all BTW), it shows a general disregard for customer satisfaction, detail and transparency. Tell you what if they were my comics and I was printing them and I saw that, I would definitely sue, complain or do a re-print to make sure that such errors were rubbed away.
This can be exemplified by the 1950`s surge in personal service and attention to detail. Unless you’re a youth you may or may not comprehend this; during the 40`s and 50`s Television was barely getting started, entertainment was at the theater, dance, big bands and rising celebrities etc, etc. Comic books were a definite source of entertainment because back then there was only the radio, and hence everyone was into them. But along these same lines personal service was the call of the day, guys in white outfits came out of gas stations to serve your every need, check tires, and shine your car, give you a beverage and you`d be filled up and on your way with a smile. Many companies followed suit, providing attentive service such as milk bottles at your back doorstep; the newspaper was delivered properly, department stores would detail your every need and there was a generally friendly atmosphere whenever you went to shop. Soda fountains, malt shops, drive-in theaters and food were customary, America was at its highest happiness and things began to peak.
Greed gain its headway, with the rise of corporations and the decline in the quality of life as the French used to say, complexities arose and lines were crossed. Gone are the days when service and politeness was a major factor in retaining a customer base, now there are warehouses, assembly lines, multi-nationals, buzzbacks and lack of customer service outside of monetary compensation, value transformed into corporations and mom and pop shops partly died.
There is a long list to this change, but it`s just products and customer manipulation via advertisements that they seek and through various outlets, psychological deceptions and suggestive advertising. It generally means a lack of concern for customers and a focus on profit. Ah…the good old days!
But in a sense it might be better or worse –who knows.
Back to the look and feel of the new comics, I took the liberty to do a comparison using my digital camera showing a few books which have these creases, in comparison to a silver-age book of Tales to Astonish #43, the other two are the new look and feel higher gloss thicker page books from captain universe #1 (First App. of Blue Hulk), and the last is a copy of Mister X #3 from vortex comics, which you can clearly see on both these new look and feel comics have this same creasing on the spine.
This goes without saying that a percentage of these books were ordered online from mycomicshop dot com. MCS has a history of jipping people, fact is, they even did it to me on one particular order and never bothered to re-fund the differential between the actual order and what I received. I no longer order from them, and find their service disreputable, even though they do an impeccable job at protecting the orders through the mail. Which I suspect is their little secret to the may complaints they have received, just take a look at the fluctuating complaints on their eBay site as opposed to their website.
Therefore the real culprits behind the lack of concern for collectors may indeed not be the printers, it may have come from MCS and or other comic book sellers. The reasoning for this is due to the fact that if you visit a comic shop you will discover that the books are tightly packed together in boxes making it difficult to retrieve and return them back into the boxes. MCS has thousands of titles and thus come from a major warehouse distribution center where orders are taken explicitly online. The sloppiness of the employees indicates that there in it for the money and really could give a shit less, as you can see from the added dis-benefit of the mailing prices in addition to the price of the order. Not to mention the multitude of consignors on MCS who, BTW, overprice their books with respect to the comic book price guide -- ESPECIALLY on graded CGC/PCX and CBCS certified comic books some 5 to 9 times the going price. Even mailing comics can be risky, since packing them tightly against other books in the rsh to fulfill order can lead to the creased spines as described.
LEFT CLICK ON ANY IMAGE TO ENLARGE
Now while I DO enjoy the benefits of these new look and feel books, they do have an allure and good story in which makes them superior over the old look and feel of comics, but I myself prefer those as opposed to the new one, even though I do purchase them. Hey maybe I`m a critic or an imbecile judge for yourself.
HOLLYWEIRD AND COMICS
In 1985 DC Comics came out with various issues called pre-crisis and Crisis on Infinite Earths (12 issues), which changed the DC continuity forever. This was due to inaccuracies in the DC character universe which were inconsistent with later issues. For example, superman could only leap and bound when he began and could not fly.
Robin was murdered by the Joker, the original Flash wore a tin cap, and Green Lantern originally had a cape, and so on down the list. As the characters developed stories and characters diverged from their original powers with development or things which happened later that indicated they were inconsistent with the DC timeline and the DC universe continuity. Initially this took some time for DC to reconfigure to end that continuity with a rebirth in Crisis on Infinite Earths. This story arc basically tells the story of the multiverses convergence and the death of of one with the reemergence of the new one.
Look it up on Wikipedia, it’s really a cools story arc and excellent artwork, that`s one reason I got it.
Some years later various stories were published by DC Comics, which led up to the Flashpoint story arc involving The Flash emerging into an alternate timeline, without his powers. Flash meets a different version of Batman, and Cyborg and together they attempt to set things right. Hero’s as well as villains are altered due to the new timeline and it is up to Barry Allen to get his powers back and set things back to the original timeline.
After this story arc and its subsequent delving into the flashpoint universe DC comics then rebooted its entire line of super-stars and the new continuity actually began.
So what about Marvel Comics? What about their continuity? Marvel, as the case may be, sold many properties to Disney (who BTW tries to sue Marvel over Howard the Duck infringement over similarities to Donald the Duck). Stan (the man) Lee went on to do cameos on just about all his character movies and still reigns as the creator of almost all comic book characters which are known worldwide.
Marvel, as you know has been there in the comic industry right along with DC comics and other notables since the early 1940`s. Sub-Mariner, The Human Torch and Toro and Captain America just to name a few.
If you know anything about comics and comic book stories, you`ll know that Marvel didn`t side with DC Comics on this particular alteration of their continuity thang, but they did do a re-boot and many new characters popped out of the woodwork as a result.
The word incarnation should strike up some fanciful feet-rubbing in your free-for-all fabulous world, it means that given a character and it`s attributes that character can have many different incarnations in addition to its original. And because it is fiction, it can reach new levels and more multiverses plots, arc and stories. Like a tree with branching arms.
Unlike DC Comics, Marvel just went on to do their own thing with incarnations. I am an Incredible Hulk fan and by example I can name these incarnations with some level of accuracy.
For instance, there are the incarnations of The Savage Banner, Savage Hulk, Smart Hulk, Banner-Hulk, Gray Hulk, Red-Hulk, She-Hulk, Red She-Hulk, and of late when the Hulk Hulk`s out he becomes Kluh. These “incarnations” are safe to assume because they do not infringe or interfere with the original character, they are like extensions of the character. So they don`t hurt the character in any specific way, for instance, in the original sin story arc (the death of the watcher) 3.1 to 3.4, (known only by the watcher before his death)we learn that a young tony stark tampered with the original gamma-bomb which created the incredible hulk, unfortunately this secret is pretty much kept away from banner`s knowledge in their relationship years later after stark becomes Iron man and Banner the Hulk.
In this same story arc, 5.1 to 5.5, The Mighty Thor learns he has a sister (also known by the watcher) but it was hidden from him by Odin and his mother.
This same incarnation premises are seen in Marvel studio movies, where a re-telling of the origin of characters undergoes minor alterations (except for spider-man and captain America). Bill Bixby who was the major star for the incredible hulk TV series had a different name and the origin was different from the comic book origin (banner originally became the hulk when he was caught in the heart of a gamma-bomb explosion saving a young Rick Jones. Banner`s first name is also changed from Bruce to David.
In the 2003 re-make of the hulk, David Banner is Bruce Banner`s father, who becomes the absorbing man. And finally we neither see General T. Ross, Major Glenn Talbot, Betty Ross or Rick Jones in the original incredible hulk TV series. The show was loosely based on another TV series called the Fugitive, starring David Janssen. Rick Jones never appeared in either of the two re-makes of the incredible hulk in 2003 nor 2008, but the 2008 movie did feature Jack McGee coming across the lawn to film the military fight with the hulk.
Incarnations are such a throw around though and disappoint comic book fans who think that Hollywood and Marvel studios are not sticking to the comics and comic book origins when they do do their movies, and to some degree they are right, because it is a letdown in a big sense to comic book fans even if the story is good, which many have been thus far except for Man-thing in 2005, which I thought was awful and even though I am a Marvelite. If Hollywood doesn`t do a second feature on this movie then the semi-good Man-thing will go down as a murderous creature and the Nexus of all Realities into…?
Hey, but who knows? Perhaps Man-thing returns and this will lead to the next Howard the Duck Movie. Frankly I like the comic book stories better, but I enjoy a good movie too.
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