The Real Comic Book Revolution Of The Past Decade!!

There have been a lot of changes to the comics world since I started my blog. But for my money, the most significant change is this: soon, every comic book ever may be available to us.

Consider the days of my youth. You could find the current month's comics at virtually any newsstand, book store or supermarket. But if you were looking for older stuff? Or if somehow your preferred stop didn't get Amazing Detective #1527 that month? Good luck finding it!

Finding older stories was a scavenger hunt at best--flea markets, garage sales, clearance bins at K-Mart, whatever. No matter how much house ads you saw in the back issues taunted you with fantastic looking comics that you had to read because OMG those covers, well, your chances of finding those particular issues were virtually nil. If you were lucky, the local library had copies of Superman: From The Thirties To The Seventies and Batman: From The Thirties To The Seventies, so you could constantly check them out and read the hell out them. And there were the reprint titles Marvel published, and the reprints DC would run as back-ups in some of their titles.

The advent of the local comics shops helped, of course. But it was still haphazard--your access to all of the legendary old stories was constrained but what collections they had bought, and how big your wallet was because Quarter Bin aside, these old comics cost actual money!!

The real revolution started around the time I started this blog, when Marvel licensed GIT Corp to produce CD-ROMS (and then DVD-ROMS) of their older comics. Talk about manna from heaven--suddenly you could own every issue of of Amazing Spider-Man *ever*--for only $50!! Sure, it wasn't necessarily the same as owning the physical comics, but come on--500+ comics, right there on my hard drive, a click away? So, yeah, I snarfed those suckers up.

And the internet soon proved to be the aficionado's greatest friend. Sites sprung up with scans of thousands of public domain comics that you could read or download--for free! Marvel ended their deal with GIT Corp (boo!), but created their own internet buffet, letting you read as many comics as they put online for one yearly fee. Comixology came online, and yes, you had to pay for individual issues, but lots of stuff that had never been available before except as pricey collectors' items were suddenly available for a couple of bucks. That hot new series you missed out on that everyone is talking about now? You can get caught up pretty damned easily.

And now, the companies cannot seem to pump out physical collections fast enough, to feed the voracious appetites of libraries and bookstores (and their corporate bottom lines)--Omnibus and Absolute and Epic and Masterwork and whatever other labels they want to slap on these collections. Whatever the name, these suckers collect lots of classic comics at a damn reasonable price (usually). And the beauty part is, they can't stop publishing them, or their books department will show a decline in sales versus last year, and man, you can't do that at a big mega-corporation--so find more stuff to publish!!

Look, I know all is not perfect. There are many issues/stories that have been lost to the ravages of time. There are issues of creator rights and compensation that must be dealt with, and issues of licensed characters that have gone to other companies mean that there are some stories we just may never see (then again, we got Master Of Kung Fu reprints, and I thought that would never happen...). A lot of stuff, even some relatively recent, is lost in the byzantine bankruptcies of various companies that are no longer with us. Releases can be haphazard, and too often focused on popular or hot characters, while some of the fringier books/character get ignored (I'm especially looking at you, DC!). And few seem interested in doing complete, cleaned up versions of many of the brilliant but orphaned public domain stuff out there, and the lost classic horror comics, and romance comics, and western comics, and war comics, and...

But look at what we do have. The next volumes of Golden Age Omnibus for Superman and Batman take us into 1946!! Soon enough, every single Batman and Superman story from the Golden Age will be in print, and available! Every single one!! And it's not completely insane to think that, by my 20th blogiversary, every single Superman and Batman story will be collected, in print and online. Take that, Superman: From The Thirties To The Seventies!!!

I've always joked that I wanted to read every single comic book ever. But now, thanks to industry trends, there's just the slimmest chance that that might actually be possible before I shuffle off this mortal coil. And that is revolutionary.

The Answers Man's Wrongest Answer EVER!!

From the Ask The Answer Man column in Adventure Comics #455 (1978):

I love you, Bob Rozakis, but this is so wrong!

Leaving aside all of the economic issues--sure, I know they couldn't continue to produce 100 pages monsters for 50¢ or 60¢--I'm really not sure you can say "contains no reprints" as a positive, and not a negative.

Nothing against new stories, but for a comics fan of the right age, those reprints were a godsend.

Recall, if you will, in that mid-70s era, these old stories were nowhere as nearly accessible as they are today. Comic shops certainly weren't as available to the majority of readers. There were no trade paperback collections or omnibi awaiting us in bookstores. There was no internet or Comixology, no place to legally (or even illegally) download gigabytes worth of old comics.

So for a lot of those older Silver Age stories, and especially the Golden Age tales, these 100 Page Spectaculars were literally the only source a couple of generations of comics fan had to access them, aside from the random garage sale or flea market.

My first exposure to Kid Eternity, and the Silent Knight, and the Star-Spangled Kid, and Superman Red/Superman Blue, and Wildcat, and Johnny Quick, and...well, let's just say that for me, and no doubt a lot of today's creators, our first exposure to a massive chunk of DC history came from the reprints in these humongous comics.

Marvel, of course, had a much shorter history. Yet during this era they had entire books dedicated to reprinting the early Silver Age stories of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, the Avengers, etc. Meanwhile, aside from the reprints in the 100 Page Spectaculars (and a few other similar projects), DC showed little interest in sharing its past.

So, yeah, yay for Dollar Comics. But boo for no reprints!!

Strange Colors!

One of the earliest rules I learned from blogging is: be careful when you're presenting material from a reprint as opposed to the original publication.

Sometimes art has been re-drawn; sometimes words have been altered to eliminate mistakes or conform with more recent continuity. That's why I try to note when a story I present panels from is a reprint, because it just may different than the original.

Trivial but profound example: a Google image search for something else led me to this panel...or rather, 4 different versions of this panel, from 4 different websites:

Now, none of these websites identified where they scanned/clipped the panel from. But the story, originally from Strange Tales #138 (1965) has been reprinted a jillion times, many of those times with a different colorist credited for the reprint (GCD lists "Stan Goldberg (?)" as the original colorist). And aside from the Doctor Strange figure, there is nothing in the panel that's the same color in all four versions, save a few black areas.

Now, I'm not going to tell you that one of these panels is preferable to the other, that one is superior. Indeed, such re-coloring might be necessary due to time and/or unavailability of the original materials.

But think about this: if one relatively inconsequential panel can differ so much from printing to reprinting to re-reprinting to re-re-reprinting...what about everything else in the story?

So remember--when you're reading a reprint, or even a presentation of the original one on of these new-fangled digital platforms, you may not be seeing same thing the contemporary readers saw when they grabbed it off the rack. Even in a particularly important comic from an artistic legend.

Tales From The Quarter Bin--The DC Event You Never Knew Existed!

I'll bet that most of you have forgotten one of the vary first DC "events":

What? War Against The Monsters? What did I miss?

Don't worry...

It was merely an issue of DC Special, which managed to find clever and enticing ways to package reprints:

Of course, that was back in the 1970s, when DC actually seemed proud of their back catalog, and not embarrassed. Seriously, in 2014, who the hell would want colorful and cheap bundles of classic tales when you can have over-priced, overly-rendered angst filled reboots?

Oops, this wasn't supposed to be a nu52 rant--that just sort of slipped out. Sorry.

Still, when you look at the shockingly low quantity of Silver Age DC available on Comixology (especially as compared to what Marvel has available there and on their own site), it does get a bit frustrating. That you only read a huge portion of DC's past in black & white "phone books," or by trolling quarter bins, doesn't seem right to someone who grew up seeing DC constantly and enthusiastically giving us these reprints.

The High Standards For DC Reprints, Circa 1976

In the letters column of Batman Family #4 (1976), prolific letter writer Bob Rodi has some criticisms of the choices DC was making for the reprints in each issue--too much Batman, not enough Family:

Gee, DC trying to ignore it's rich history...who ever would have thought?

Anyway, Bob Rozakis has a reply:

Ah, yes. We've seen before that in this era, DC was ultra-concerned that stories from their past might not be up to "modern standards." They simply couldn't allow the majesty of 1976 DC to be tainted by stories that aren't "worthy of being reprinted." (Of course, modern DC loves putting out expensive Archives or Omnibi; the fear of reprinting "lower quality" work has been trumped these days by their love of money. Or else DC no longer has standards. Discuss)

Oh, and reprinted, in the very same issue, an example of a story that DID meet those alleged high standards:

Seriously. 

Set that bar high, DC. Set that bar high.

 "Batman Meets Fatman" is originally from Batman #113 (1958)

Marvel 1971 Week--X-Men #69

Well, we've reached a sad point in Marvel 1971 Week...

We're out of new comics to review!!

I've rattled on about how the X-Men were demoted to a bimonthly reprint book back in the early 1970's. But, unless I'm going to do Millie The Model or Our Love Story, I've already covered every new comic Marvel put out in 1971!! (Not that I didn't want to cover a Stan Lee/Gene Colan romance story, but I don't have the issue!).

We'll talk more about that after the jump. First, a couple of brief points about the stories covered in this issue of X-Men.

First up, a reprint of X-Men #17 (1966), the conclusion of the first Sentinel saga:

"Jay Gavin" is a pen name for Werner Roth...

And I've said it before, and I'll say it again--those costumes are the worst thing Jack Kirby EVER designed!

And now, a question about Professor X:

I know it was a fairly dire emergency, but really--controlling their minds? Couldn't you have just beamed a "help me" into their minds, instead of "forcing them to obey"? Doesn't that seem more like something a villain would do??

It seems to me an awful lot like the Jedi--using the Force to "influence" the "weak-minded" sounds an awful lot like a Dark Side power to me, as it's just another phrase for "taking away someone's free will and making them a puppet." But you never see a Sith using it, only Jedi. I guess, like Charles Xavier, they think it's OK to do bad stuff if you're good guys...

And, of course, the issue end with Bolivar Trask, creator of the Sentinels, undergoing the least convincing transformation from racist to good guy since Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino:




This was a double-size issue, so we leap to the next story, from X-Men #19 (1966):

This is the story that introduced Calvin Rankin, the Mimic, who could gain the superpowers of anyone, as long as he stayed close to them.

So, he accidentally stumble across some X-People in their civilian identities, and since he gains their powers, figures out who they are. He decides to go and gain all their powers...

He kidnaps Jean, and reveal his secret origin, which is essentially that of Barry Allen...

Man, getting super-powers was easy back in those days.

Anyway, his scientist dad was trying to develop a machine to make the powers Cal absorbed permanent, but an angry mob, and explosion, and a cave-in killed him--and buried the machine!

So that's why he needs the X-Men's powers--so he can dig dad's device from the debris! But, Professor X briar patches him into using the device...why?


Ha ha...it's good for Professor X to use his powers like Zatanna in Identity Crisis!! Yay!!

ELSEWHERE IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE:

As discussed above, Marvel didn't actually have that many new titles being published in 1971. They only had 12 all new non-super-hero title for the entire month!! (OK, I'm counting Sgt. Fury...sue me!)

What was up? Well, Marvel had only recently gotten out from under the thumb on the terrible distribution deal with a distributor owned by DC, which limited the number of comics they could publish each month (reports have had it between 8 and 12). So why no "Marvel Explosion"?

This is all speculation on my part, but I suspect they just didn't have the manpower yet. Literally every comic in April 1971 was written by Stan, Roy or Gerry; Jack had just left, and they didn't have that many artists, either...certainly none who could come close to matching his output.

Within a few years a new wave of talent would be put to good use--Englehart, Wolfman, Wein, Gerber, Friedrich, for example--but until then, Marvel just didn't seem to have the bodies to produce more new books

But, I'm guessing that didn't want to cede the rack space (and sales dollars) to DC...so why not do reprints?

What other reason, for example, could there have been to have three--3!!--separate Western monthly Western reprint titles being published?



Not to mention innumerable monster/horror reprint books, that rotated on a bi-monthly basis?

Not to mention several super-hero reprint titles??



Not that I have anything against reprint titles. To fans back in those days, they were probably the only way to get access to many of these stories, barring lucky finds at garage sales or flea markets.

Not to mention, many of the younger fans probably didn't even realize these were reprints--just more Spider-Man and Thor stories!! One of the earliest comics I owned was a coverless copy of Marvel Triple Action, reprinting the classic Avengers #16...but it was years until I realized it was "just" a reprint!!

And in those pre-internet, pre-Showcase and Essentials era, these reprint titles were the best--if not the only--way to learn about Marvel history and back story, and in convenient 15 or 25 cent doses! And, of course, reprint or not, they helped build the Marvel brand name in kids' minds.

Nowadays, of course, reprints are in trades or expensive Omnibi or Masterworks or Absolutes, which is nicer for reading and collecting, perhaps, but obviously much harder for young readers to afford (various "read the first issue for a dollar" reprints and Walking Dead Weekly are obvious exceptions). Part of me wonders if, for the sake of attracting new young readers, Marvel or DC shouldn't try and experiment with a floppy reprint series or two, just to see what happens...