VintageComics

Comics were made the Marvel way, so it was a collaboration and you can easily tell the difference in storytelling between Marvel and DC comics of the same era. They had different flavors when reading them. In DC stories the artist and writer were definitely separate entities. The storytelling felt more wooden and dry. Marvel's stories felt synergistic and exciting by comparison, but if you remember when Neal Adams took over Batman and GL at DC, the flavor of the story writing changed, and I bet Neal Adams brought over some of that Marvel magic to DC. It wasn't just the art that made Adam's work great. It was the overall story telling experience and you can only have that with writers and artists collaborating together. My apologies for forgetting to mention Denny O'Neill. The guy was brilliant.

The problem is that it's long and most people's attention spans will avoid it and they'll miss the gold in there. It is quite literally the greatest post on the MCU I've ever read with articulation, intelligence, insight and sensitivity I've never found elsewhere. This is what real journalism and discussion USED to be like.

There is NO WAY I would call Fantastic Four a B title in the 80's. The title was incredibly good reading, it sold well and it was well collected. The 80's would have been my peak collecting years as I got married in 1991 and dropped out of comics for a decade and I vividly remember FF #1 being the top book through most of the 80s in the OSPG. No. Way, IMO. Does anyone else agree that the FF was a B title in the 80's? How old are you? Are you in your 40's, 50's or 60's? I always assumed you were my age but now I'm not so sure.

That's actually a great observation. Why didn't I think of that? From a story writing perspective, and in line with Stan's target audience which were teenagers at the time, it would have been much harder to push a highbrow Thor at the audience than a lowbrow Hulk smashing things. That's why he was everywhere. He was the perfect foil. Thor is like Superman. It's tough to make him relatable and fun, unlike the Hulk, the bickering of the FF and the bullying and teenage troubles Parker had to endure. I DO think that one of Stan Lee's most ingenious skills was being able to throw a net to catch a wide audience, and Thor was likely meant to capture not only the highbrow audience but ALSO to remain as a character that the lowbrow teenagers would eventually grow in appeal as the original audience matured. It's a brilliant marketing strategy. Thor quite literally was waiting for the target audience to grow out of the silly comics and into more mature, adult ones.

This is probably the greatest post in the history of MCU discussions anywhere on the internet, anywhere. You quite literally nailed it and were able to articulate things to me things I didn't even know why I felt about the movies, but as I was reading through your post I just kept feeling bells go off with each sentence. Thanks for taking the time to do that. Having someone articulate something in such a detailed manner (and even though the post is long, it's actually quite concise). Effing brilliant. I give this prof an A+.

You're talking about franchise and marketing power in the movie age. He's talking about pre movie age. Pre movie age, FF was defeinitely an A lister for the first 30 or so years and possibly 40. The X-men became A listers after Adams and Cockrum / Clairemont / Byrne propelled them to the top in the 70s and 80s. In fact, you could argue that X-men rivalled Spider-man in the 90s. Why else would Marvel put such a push behind the Jim Lee X-men #1 of the 90s? Have the X-men not been A listers since the 90's? No 'team' was as popular as Spidey, Wolverine (or Batman) but then no team will EVER be as popular as a single character, but Wolverine was certainly the driving force behind X-men and made them an A lister. Easily. And they seem to have been able to stay there for over 50 years.

I'm not as old but I can agree with this. Thor was Kirby's favorite title to work on and it shone through his work. Thor was definitely an A lister. X-men are probably the top franchise after Spidey now but they were HORRIBLE in the mid 60's after Kirby left. I only collected the title as a completist but between roughly '65 and until Neal Adams started it was pretty bad. If many younger people don't know, Marvel quite literally put Neal Adams on to save the title. From what I understand Adams was so confident he only wanted to be put on failing titles so he could ressurrect them and he did exactly that, everywhere he went. Talk about a man's man. Dude had gonads the size of Kansas.

I think people are just tired of bad movies and pick certain films as the starting point to where Marvel seemed to go down a different road. Seminal films have a way of doing that with people. Are you sure that FF wasn't an A lister in 1993? I wasn't reading then (stopped around 1990) but FF was still pretty big then. ------------------------------------------- Is everyone aware of the corporate warfare over the FF in the last decade between Marvel and Fox? Fox owned the movie rights and Marvel owned the comic book rights, but the movies were fueled by the comics previously, so comics had the power to change the movies. Marvel, quite literally tanked their own franchise in comics a few years ago, the FF, just to destroy Fox's ability to market the movie franchise. This in turn led Fox to selling the movie rights to Disney. They literally shot themselves in the foot to bankrupt Fox. Now that they've flipped the tables, the MOVIES have the power to change THE COMICS. It's the movies that bring in the coin and the comics are now the supporting cast. Think about that on a corporate level. It's mind boggling that they can reverse directions of entire industries just by starving out their competition. That's how big money works. It's literally warfare. Do you think they worried about the employees working on either the FF franchises at Marvel or those involved with FF at Fox? Nope. They just had their sights on which franchise they wanted and were willing to sacrifice whatever it took to get it.

I actually didn't realize that was you in the photo. Sorry I missed it. Good job! I guess the last line is what confuses me, when we say "we're not there yet". What would be the metric by which we'd know if we were "there yet"? Because that's a question that is often asked about MANY things and yet nobody can give a real answer, but without knowing THAT answer we're really just headed down an open ended path whereby anything goes and those pulling the strings can decide when enough is enough.

I think it was Bendis who propelled Iron Man into a key role by writing Civil War I remember that now that you mention it. So Bendis' run was before Ultimates? I vividly remember Iron Man breaking into the forefront around the mid 2000s or so. This was punctuated by the OSPG in 2006 when all of the Marvel keys exploded in value. TOS #39 and JIM #83 went through the roof that year, 2 years before the 1st movie release so buzz (not Buzetta) was already building. Who remembers the 2006 OSPG? There was definitely a slow build to the character leading up to the 2008 movie release that may have predated the 1st movie by a decade.

In peer reviewed studies, it's been proven that if you put a hot lead in the main role, viewership will steadily increase over time.

I get a lot of that but if you really look closely, I look nothing like him. It's flattering but I don't see it.

I'm not very well versed in moderns but I did read the Ultimates 20 years ago, and I think it's safe to say that Ultimates propelled (or was partly responsible in propelling) Iron Man into being the A-lister he is today. I don't think he was before that, was he?

I literally have had people stop me to ask me that. That's way better than the Weird Al comments I get from time to time.

DUDE! You gotta put spoilers in SPOILERS!

Interestingly enough, my only two relationships (13 and 11 years) were completely different in regards to the workforce but wholly identical in their personal relationship roles. One wanted to be a homemaker their entire life and ended up doing so. The other wanted to be a corporate professional their entire life and was never content to just remain a homemaker. They managed 10 figure accounts and could do her job like it was a part of her DNA, meaning she was better than anyone in her field. And yet, despite being extremely different outwardly in the workforce, both considered themselves traditional outside of the workforce.

What the HECK are you talking about? Nobody is talking about ANY of those things. We're simply speaking from personal experience. Do you have any to share?

Hammer meet nail. After reading what Nick Furious wrote, that's what I concluded as well but was waiting for others to get there without my spelling it out. I believe this is exactly what happened. As people we tend to think small, but you don't run a company with a market cap the size of a small country's GDP (what is it? $150 Billion?) by thinking small.

Translation: Everyone is going broke so we need to grind.

I thought I'd like CM but could NEVER get into Mar-Vell for some reason. I even tried Starlin's arc because I was a massive Starlin fan from his Warlock stuff, but it just didn't do it for me. I was never into the cosmic stuff and I considered Warlock to me more magic than cosmic, which is probably why the original Captain Marvel (Shazam) appealed to me so much. What you're missing in this observation is that Disney is culturally trying to break the traditional feminine stereotype that those roles previously upheld, and unfortunately I know a LOT of women who disagree with that new philosophy. In fact, I would say that the overwhelming majority of women I've personally known (including my daughters) and my exes or women I've dated have clearly stated to me that they LOVE being traditional women and these newer movies are unrelatable to them in many ways. I would say in my experience maybe 1 or 2 in 10 women prefer being in a non-traditional relationship. Of course, take that for what it is. It's just anecdotal but across the board that has been my experience. Traditional in the sense that each have their separate roles in a relationship, and yet every woman I know is also extremely strong, independent and intelligent (in fact, I think my daughters are smarter than most men ) And so in trying to reinvent women's roles I believe they are alienating the very segment of society that they originally built their success on. I think Disney are doing what they THINK the public wants but the public is speaking out in the loudest way possible: with their wallets. People can spin it any way they want, but there is no more definite indicator than that. The proof is in the pudding.

I actually don't know if I would have considered Iron Man an A-list character in 2008. I think Marvel was trying to get him there pre 2008 in anticipation of the growing cinematic universe by strategically building support for their MCU characters through comic book storylines, but I grew up reading Iron Man in the 70's and 80's and I don't think ANYONE would've called him an A-lister back then. But just slow down for a second and think about how much effort and time Marvel put into building this cinematic universe around Stark. The Ultimates came out in 2002. That story arc was the cornerstone of the MCU. Why the heck else would we have had a Nick Fury played by Samuel Jackson IN THE COMIC BOOKS except that by 2002 Marvel had already decided they were going to build an MCU...and they'd already been planning it for a few years before that. They started preparing the audience by salting the mine in the comics, then 6 years after The Ultimates they came out with 1 lone Iron Man movie. After that we had Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America - The First Avenger - still building Iron Man's legacy, and then finally it all culminated into Avengers in 2012. So what you had was a long term, 10+ year project spanning 2002 - 2012. Add in that they probably started planning well before 2002 and you probably have 12+ years of planning to create the Avengers franchise. It's actually the same when a city builds a new sports arena. The day you see them breaking ground, this is not even the DECADE they decided this was going to happen. In civil planning this started 20 years ago sometimes. It's usually a decade or two from the inception of the idea to the shovel breaking ground because they have to account for EVERYTHING from road / plumbing / sewer infrastructure to population change to traffic flow and even things a small as waste removal. It's really that way for every every industry whether it's entertainment, or large current events in the news or building a billion dollar corporation. It just looks like it happened overnight because you and I weren't privy to the discussion going on in the background. But the discussion in the background is where the real action happens. Once the groundbreaking happens, it's already been a done deal for years. Ironically, and to prove my point CGC took over 20 years before it was taken over as a billion dollar company.

If the book has a microspeck of ink missing anywhere, or any fuzz anywhere, it's not getting a 9.9. They literally are looking for a perfect book. And that's just one thing. If you're not comfortable identifying micro-specs the rest won't even matter.

The perfect counterpoint is Tony Stark. Marvel literally built a new universe around Stark Industries because they didn't have any other way to have a proper Superteam, having sold off FF and X-men. So they slowly built up an entire universe, one character at a time and formed a believable, powerful, drama filled Superteam from scratch and it not only worked, it's one of the greatest story arcs in movie history. Fast forward to Captain Marvel and it feels like they rushed something out to fill a hole and it isn't working. In fact, it's very similar to what DC did in trying to keep up with Marvel. They literally rushed their projects and blew it. It took Tony Stark a decade to get there as opposed to just a movie or two for CM.

This is a great observation and one that flies against the face that people say that some of us just want it "like it was in the comics". That's not the case at all. I've always been totally OK with changes to the cannon, and have openly stated why: You can't make movies true to the comics because they don't translate well. Do you really want to see Spider-man running around in pajama tights like in the comics? Do you really want to see how Thing and Alicia "Netflix and chill"? It's biologically IMPOSSIBLE. But the changes need to be driven to make a better end product, not a 'better accepted' end product. If you have a good product, it will be better accepted. It's a fundamental law of nature that's immutable. People always generally choose what's better over what is worse. Of course. Who wants to be patronised? It's an insult. That's an excellent point and one I hadn't heard of. So why ARE they doing the opposite of what they'd originally intended? The answer is actually quite easy to solve: Money. If you can convince any corporation that they can make more money going down a new road, they will go down that road with full force. Except what looked good on paper has failed, and so they are back peddling with more force than they initially used to go down that road in the first place. Money has no soul itself, but it does project the soul of the person managing the money and someone messed up huge. From everything I've read, Disney is losing money so quickly they're in serious trouble on many fronts. But I don't think that it's just Disney. We've already discussing this in Comics General. It's Hollywood in general as people are becoming disenchanted with Legacy corporations and their greed and lack of accountability in EVERY industry. Independent projects are thriving because they are putting out what people REALLY want to see and putting put what people actually want is the Golden ticket.

I submit many vintage books in the hopes of a 9.9 regularly. I've gotten 6 or 7 ever in 20 years of submitting. Moderns are much easier, though as the production quality is much higher,but vintage stuff is near impossible. You can submit what you think is a perfect book and it still won't get it 99.99% of the time.