bronze_rules

Really amazing capabilities. And improving daily, IMO.

How about regretting buying one comic over another?

I once had an option to pay $200 for a...

slabbed 8.0 FF 48 

or a raw VG/Fine Showcase 27 with a huge spine crease from mailing (not that visible but it's there).

Guess which one I chose? And that FF 48 sat on the comic store (hole in the wall) shelf forever.

Looking back on that, I felt I overpaid on the one I got.

It's an interesting quandary. I wonder what happens to AI art that contains copyrighted characters like Spider-Man, Super Man, etc.

I guess it's something like using bytes from songs and not having to pay original owners anything.

From what I've seen, at this point it's very time consuming to generate images, I have to wait minutes to generate one or two (mostly garbage) images. So there is the work of sifting and filtering content to arrive at a good product.

On 4/22/2024 at 12:01 PM, F For Fake said:

I'm looking forward to revisiting Micronauts, but I'm going to hold out for a sale price. With four covers, and I'd assume a similar audience appeal to the Rom omnibus, I'm hopeful that it'll hit 50-60% off at some point. I have so many other books on my wish list, I'm not in a hurry. The Golden art looks fantastic, of course.

Similar to you, I'm now expecting the title to eventually drop in price (esp. with four variants). What I did is first purchase the digital version to read on kindle/iPad. I'm starting to like digital for everything (too bad we don't get both for one price). If it never drops, I have the material. I also have the Michael Golden AE edition, which is very difficult to get now. And I'm sure many of the omni readers are kicking themselves for missing it.

Insanely good deal on spawn digital collection.

43-Volume Todd McFarlane's Spawn & More Comics Bundle (PDF Digital Downloads) (slickdeals.net)

On 1/24/2021 at 3:33 AM, HotKey said:

I saw this cover and all I immediately thought was "old, fat Steven Seagal"

I thought about it for a while, and thought the same. Glad you didn't put the answer first.

On 2/4/2024 at 8:06 AM, letsgrumble said:

Thanks for sharing both sides! As tempting as this is, I have all the DHOKF omnis and IF epics including all digital as well.

I need to resist as running out of space.

On 1/8/2024 at 6:00 PM, CJ Design said:

As a Fan of Tiki/Hawaiian/Polynesian Pop I've done a series of Black Velvet style on Black Bristol Board...this is the 1st

 

Nice. Brings back memories of this.

On 12/18/2023 at 9:21 PM, AbsoluteCarnage said:

I went on a king marathon in late September right up to about Halloween. Silver Bullet was crazier than I remember it from way back. Psychological terror to say the least lol. I have quite the collection of his films. Always a pleasure to watch some King stuff. Dark Tower by far my favorite King books and really hope they redo that series from scratch at some point as that series deserves a solid movie run.

+ for Dark Tower being done well. I thought they were going to do an HBO series at one point - not sure what happened. That was one of those huge series I challenged myself to read and complete, but really found it enjoyable.

It seems like every time I walk into a bookstore, I see a new novel or two under his name. What an incredibly prolific author.

On 12/16/2023 at 11:38 AM, THE_BEYONDER said:

That’s the tagline for Howard the Duck 

Yep, Howard the Duck was my first thought. I was actually surprised to see it elsewhere without the trapped.

I usually think of or recall this statement as "Trapped In a World He Never Made." To me it's like a fish out of water.

The hero is trapped (as many of us feel everyday) in a world they must struggle to survive through. 

Excellent explanations about Marvel lifting from poetry and literature in this link about MARVEL'S HISTORY OF QUOTING POETRY IN ITS COMIC BOOKS.

In the next issue, the Howard the Duck feature by Gerber and Brunner (with Tom Palmer now on inks) opens by describing Howard as a "strange fowl in a stranger land"...

This is a reference to the Robert Heinlen novel, Stranger in a Strange Land...

Which, in turn, is a reference to Exodus 2:22 in the Bible, “And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.”

That story led to Howard getting his own ongoing series, and the tagline for the book, right there on the cover, was "Trapped in a world he never made"...

The line is from the A.E. Housman poem, "The Laws of God, the Laws of Man"....

Obviously, "trapped" is added, but the gist is there. And so now you know the origins of Howard the Duck's famous tagline!

One other interesting facet about all this, is I was thinking that a blue chip title (analogous to DOW component) would be something like AF 15.

Yet, I would guess that (unlike dow components), there will be pockets of really high volatility (Marvel Movie explosion, Covid, crazy comic surges last decade).

So, it would be hard to create similar indices, I think (bellweathers don't move much, but small titles should be more volatile) or baskets.

I sort of think it would be better to correlate to some type of collectibles market proxy, but even then, there's probably really weird volatility with certain comics.

Anyone else agree/disagree with that?

If you want to look at it from the perspective of a statistician, the central limit theorem shows us more and more data approach the true mean with least variation.

I wouldn't be surprised to see some existing metric for collectibles trends.

On 12/2/2023 at 12:45 PM, F For Fake said:

Yes, that is correct! I was surprised, as I'd only had that happen once before, and I hadn't messaged them about it or anything. Three books are still sitting there unpicked, but the rest of the stuff shipped out suddenly in two separate shipments. Have you contacted them about the order that's hung up? I have had to do that a couple of times in the past, messaged them and suddenly, miraculously, the books shipped out. 

You are charmed! Not only have they historically made me wait until every single item was ready (not kidding about year - one time I waited that long for EC AE and several other new titles), but they rarely answered any emails - and when they did, they basically said too bad. So now if I have any thought about a hot or scarce item, I do my best to just pay separate shipping. And I've given them inordinate amounts of money over the years.

On 12/1/2023 at 6:17 AM, F For Fake said:

My haul from the IST Black Friday sale arrived yesterday, two impressively large boxes. I may have gone a little nuts, but while there weren't any CRAZY deals, the fact is that the added holiday discounts plus repeat buyer discount made many of these the cheapest they have ever been, or likely will ever be. So, it seemed like the best opportunity to knock some books off of my checklist.

For whatever reason, Avengers 2 & 4, and Batman and Robin Eternal did not ship, and in fact, haven't even been "picked" yet. I'll give it a few more days before inquiring. In the meantime, this is plenty to deal with.

NO MORE BOOKS FOR ME UNTIL THE NEW YEAR! AND THEN SOME! 

Great haul! Let me get this straight, did they actually partially ship your order? I have never ever had them do that. If I order 50 items and one is on backorder for a year - that's how long I get to wait for them to ship all of them. It's horrific to me.

On 11/30/2023 at 1:54 PM, media_junkie said:

That is my biggest concern, I just don't know how you do stretchy powers without looking goofy.

And if that wasn't bad enough, dr. strange version made him look really goofy.

On 11/30/2023 at 5:50 AM, VintageComics said:

Millar actually had a history of exaggerating boot heels. It's one of his signature motifs. Once you start looking, you'll start to see it in his art. 

The question is a very interesting one, but even more interesting is who chose to black out the silhouette?

Miller, Janson or Varley?

Any OA people with a deeper knowledge of this have any thoughts?

Thanks for posting that. I really had problems visualizing the front version.

It's like the 'is this an old woman or young girl' illusion.

Found a pretty interesting writeup in the prestigious Nature journal. It does support the 'science' basis of the novel at that time.

"Science fiction: The science that fed Frankenstein"

And another good source of commonly accepted (or not) definitions of what constitutes science fiction can be found at stack exchange. The upshot is there is no absolute accepted criteria.

On 11/28/2023 at 9:13 AM, musicmeta said:

Twilight Zone episode if I recall? Is that right?

Winnah!

Any battle where the power mismatch is completely ignored. e.g. 90% of Flash's enemies. He could run circles around Boomerang, Captain Cold, etc.. or just take off to Tahiti for a moment.

I also expect that he should be more powerful physically than often portrayed, as F=mA.

On 11/28/2023 at 9:00 AM, Sauce Dog said:

Just don't combine that dinner topic with this Frankenstein one, as I don't think you should be using that book as a reference for a recipe to serve your family  

"To Serve Mankind"
SciFi Classic right there

When I think of Science Fiction, a more modern author that comes to mind is Michael Crichton. When he wrote about science, he spent a lot of time discussing the historical and currently accepted hard science of whatever mechanism he was using (e.g. DNA) and modern cautionary tales about rushing to use new discoveries around the known science. What makes Frankenstein different to me, is that very little time is spent discussing the science behind Victor Frankenstein's transformation using electricity to resurrect a dead person to life. In his story, I see the transformation as more of a brief plot mechanism without much grounding nor explanation around the science of the time (and I'm sure most people of the time would find it completely implausible based on the existing science). Now I could very easily see another author like Crichton, re-spinning the tale with a more sci fi bent to it. 

I mentioned in the omnibus thread target had some great sales on graphic novels (3 for 2), and now Tashen library books (XMEN, FF, Avengers, EC, Frazetta $100). Best deal so far for comic graphic novel related stuff. 

My local LCS wasn't so great this year (had 25% off full MSRP).