500Club

Hopefully they are both knocked out in the first round....... What's wrong with Winnipeg? Gives Oiler fans a Canadian team to watch, during their annual post golf rounds at the clubhouse.

Who?

The one has nothing to do with the other. How much is ASM #667 worth? Now how much is the ASM #667 1:100 worth? This was the comment that teed off the debate - the idea that because Ross virgin covers are selling for $600+ now, we could infer anything as to whether the dealer could be right.

Passive-aggressive white flag?

Things that are stamped as ‘hot’ or ‘collectible’ right out of the box rarely turn out to be so.

I'm of two minds. In a vacuum, this would be a one-off, throwaway concept. Norman uses the Carnage symbiote for his purposes, and ultimately the symbiote reverts to being property of Cletus Kasady. In a case like that, this would probably be a flash in the pan. Lately, though, Marvel has shown a fluidity in jumping on hot concepts. If they decide to roll with this like they did with Weapon H, it may be a more open ended outcome.

He died over 40 years ago. Some creativity and new character creation would be nice.

I notified the mods a thread had gotten off topic. Unfortunately, they weren’t very concerned, as they’re trying to help OJ find the real killers.

They did that with Spider-man for Brand New Day, and that's what led me to give up on Marvel altogether. The underlying problem is that their branding is their characters, so they need them to be recognizable. But as a monthly publisher, they also need their characters to change in order to tell interesting stories. These two things are at odds with each other. Personally I think Marvel would be better off going a "New 52" route and restart everything from scratch every so often. They could have done that with the Ultimate line. They should have let that replace the original line; then they could have let the characters from the original line have their stories come to some logical conclusion, rather than continuously shoving them back to the status quo. Then in another 20 years you start up a new line that's more in line with society then. Then each new #1 would actually mean something. I was thinking more in terms of getting back to the essence of the characters. I’d agree that BND was a bit too much of a deus-ex-machina finger snap. Ideally, just get Peter Parker back to an everyman trying to deal with the responsibility of being Spider-Man, while trying to manage day to day life. At this point, though, they may have muddied the water so much that your solution may be the only realistic one.

This is classic Marvel thinking of late. ‘Oh, no, Legacy has been running THREE MONTHS and orders haven’t doubled! We need to do something!’ Just take a consistent approach, and return the characters to the form that led to their popularity in the first place.

Mattina is my favorite of the hyped cover artists as well.

rumors arn't spoilers You spoiled the rumor for me. Now, if I hear it elsewhere, it just doesn't mean as much...

Have you ever read Moon Girl or Ms. Marvel? No. Are they good? I was talking in more a line-wide sense. Most of Marvel's properties bear little resemblance to their counterparts in other media, and it'd be pretty damn tough to try to explain to an Avengers fan how to get into reading the Avengers comics.

So when they do come in, it'd be nice to have a quality product to keep them coming back. Not sure if Marvel gets that.

Observation dead on. BUT - not a sustainable model. File under penny wise, pound foolish.

Fingers can be pointed at Gambit and Archangel as well.

This. I mean, in Sean Howe’s book, ‘Marvel Comics: The Untold Story’, it was recognized in the 90’s that every time Marvel did a gimmick, sales spiked, then settled to a level lower than before the gimmick. I get that the thinking is that Marvel publishing doesn’t really matter to Disney, save for as an R+D entity, but they still need readers to function as such.

What a joke Marvel has become.

For the bulk of my collecting history, which began in 1980, the gestalt, to me, was that MK was a much more visible character. I’d say that, in the last ten years, and particularly the last couple, that that has significantly changed.

Huh? How is he not even Moon Knight level? A character that has had multiple series be "cancelled" recently. You know they only cancel these now to pump up #1 sales again, right? BP is a staple of Marvel. When they actually understood the meaning and value of diversity. You're partly right. Overall, I'd agree MK has been B level and BP has been C level, but your last sentence may be the key reason for this to change.

And looks like both you and me need to quit the pipe. Punisher war journal was a Jim lee (& c Potts) book. And 6&7 was wolverine not GR Getting old. Need to double check what I write. (although my intention was to note WJ as the Lee book)

Lee didn’t do GR. It was Saltares, IIRC. Might you be recalling the War Journal 6,7 books that guest starred GR?

Yup. Guys get stale, as previous posters have said. There's only so many ways a guy can apply his particular worldview and writing style to a particular set of characters, especially this type, where the characters are usually frozen in time. I'm happy to see Bendis take a run at DC.

Nice to see that work out for you.

Wait, you finally had some alone time, and you spent those precious moments opening up old Rob Liefeld comics, instead of furiously cranking it? Priorities, man. (Unless you were furiously cranking it to the Liefeld comics, in which case, uh...I'm backing slowly out of the thread.) To cut him some slack, it WOULD mean he doesn't have a foot fetish.