VintageComics

I don't even know who she is. Keep stirring. Or whatever it is you're doing.

I actually refuse to watch the Thor movie, it looked so bad. And JIM was one of my favorite collecting runs of all time. I can understand how women in some circumstances may have felt "put down" looking back through the lense of the past. A look at bondage covers from the GA illustrate this as women are put into compromising positions for entertainment value, so that is definitely something to consider but it's also important to consider that the culture around an event or occurrence is just as important to consider as the occurrence itself, and roles change over time. For example, there was a time when the role of a man and woman were clearly defined through biological relationships. The man was the hero and the woman was the damsel in distress and BOTH MEN AND WOMEN generally agreed to those roles. Those roles aren't as clearly defined these days but those are for INDIVIDUALS to work out among themselves, not for the media to work out for you. Putting down ANY person to make a message more profound was always considered wrong, but these days it's the MO and it's completely counterproductive to the greater cause. You don't NEED to put anyone down to lift yourself up in this day and age, and quite frankly lifting EACH OTHER up is really the only strategic, productive and long lasting way to do it. We may go faster separately but we go further together. But if you predicate your ideology in lifting up some at the expense of others, you're just doing exactly what you're trying to prevent and creating new problems for the future.

I am absolutely DONE dealing with these satellite pick up points. DONE! Last week I had someone mail me documents to a UPS facility, "hold for pickup". We abhor UPS in Canada on a good day but they insisted so I didn't want to be difficult. This was sent overnight, it got held up in customs (should NEVER have been held up it was a simple document), arrived days late and when I went to pick it up, the woman there spent all of less then 10 seconds looking for it (no really, SECONDS!) turned to me and said "we don't have it". I was like, "but you signed for it". "Yes, but just because there's a signature, it doesn't mean we signed for it." Wait, what? "We get a large shipment, we sign for everything at once, but we can't find your shipment. You need to call customer service." I complain that she hasn't done her due diligence and that my only recourse is to call and start an investigation. Furious, I leave, because I KNOW IT'S THERE! Her HUSBAND SIGNED FOR IT. I leave, I get an offshore call center, hang up after 2 mins and call back. Finally get someone helpful. They're about to open an investigation when the lady from the UPS Store calls to LMK that she found my package. No ownership. No accountability. Just a statement saying how I should have done such and such before shipping it. In fact, I did everything they asked. Then she wanted to charge me $10 for signing for it. I looked at her point blank and said "You want to charge me $10 for losing my package, sending me away, stressing me out and making me come back?" "OK, this time you don't have to pay." she replies. These people deserve to get torched online. I'm done with them.

I think a lot of people recognize it but Social Media would have you believe that everyone wants another system (like capitalism or socialism). The fact that they think they can replace an entire system with a "better one" after the human race has been trying for millenia shows that none of these people have ever read a history book or understand how human nature works. No matter WHICH system you have the problem is human greed, so if you don't have better people running a different system you'll still end up with corruption. This is Kindergarten psychology 101. And how to have better people? Well, I hate to repeat myself, but the answer to most human problems is the same: Raise better children and have better families. That really is the solution to everything and the fundamental reason things are not going well. Everything else is secondary. So who is opposed to better family units? The answer is easy to see. Those that try to break it apart and keep it apart.

I agree, but more accurately, it's the love of money and not the money itself that causes corruption. Money is just a tool. When profit is the single motivator everything will eventually fall apart because intent matters. It's not the business that causes trouble, but how people go about their business. So if you have someone in business who wants to make a profit but their intent is to do 'good things' like care about their employees or how their business affects others, you see that philosophy expand outward in a positive fashion. But if profit is the only goal that philosophy expands outwards in similar fashion, but with destructive forces eventually. It's inevitable.

This is how business is conducted these days. Stall, hardball, no goodwill, let the chips fall where they may. It's always been this way, with awareness increasing through social media, people are just realizing now how pervasive it is. Finding an employer who actually cares about employees is very hard to find. I've had a few and they are priceless.

Nobody has an issue with "girl power" movies. I have 3 daughters, a step daughter and love all the women in my life. I also like pizza. But if people keep ramming pizza down my throat I won't like pizza anymore. It's that simple. The problem is not the message. The problem is the over-compensation of the message and that sort of thing breeds resentment and bitterness. People are looking for art, not preaching. Until the art form becomes the driving force behind a story, it's going to continue to suffer. And it should.

You know. The stuff you like.

If only these people cared more about what's going on OUTSIDE of Hollywood, then Hollywood would be a better place. But no.

Yup. Local establishments, food places, shipping and receiving services, banks - everything imaginable. It's not just the movie industry. It's all the industries that support the movie industries.

As is happening in every other business, powerful legacy corporations are losing their grip on the public's attention. They've been churning out pablum for too long and people are getting fed up, making independent filmmaking much more appealing. Who needs a bloated set when you can make a much better movie at a fraction of the price with no strings attached to anyone? It's all the strings attached that are literally choking the life out of the industry. It'll be refreshing to see what new life comes out of this, much like when the big players broke away from Marvel and DC in the 90s and just started their own genres and spawned an entire new industry. My LA friends are making independent movies and flourishing.

Good. This stuff needs to go.

Yeah, but can you believe nobody's notified on this thread that it's not a comic book movie?

Congrats on your Purchase of Blackstone!

Haven't we already seen a FF movie with a Silver Surfer story line built in there about some 15 odd years ago? Yeah. It was carp though (the fish Lizard2 loves, not the doo doo). Disney is so obviously going to redo the entire Marvel Universe. They didn't spend $100BIL to squat on it. Like I said, they are S-T-A-L-L-I-N-G until contracts expire so they can restart the franchises. They've just been biding their time with all of these other stinkers they put out.

Never again.

Dude, I was almost at 104K at the start of the year. When Mike banned me from the Water Cooler (people got tired of being schooled) I lost over 3000 posts.

This makes no sense to me, as someone has forged your signature. It seems to me they open themselves up to claims that the package was never received and wouldn't be able to prove you signed for it because, you know, you didn't sign for it and the signature they can produce will look nothing like yours. This is very common (for a driver to just sign and drop a package). These aren't exaggerated isolated incidences. It is REALLY, REALLY bad out there. It's literally impossible to have customer service that's bare-minimum reliable. Everything is a crapshoot these days. And it's going to get worse. More and more parents are being removed from children's lives, less and less kids grow up knowing how to communicate or understanding how to be a good employee and the lack of a reasonable expectation of customer service is causing society to slowly collapse in so many ways. And it won't turn around until people start changing, which will likely be never. The world is turning into one big ghetto. End rant.

I have to say, this idiocy is one of the most ridiculous ideas ever to come out of a shipping company. On WHAT PLANET did these buffoons think shipping to a GROCERY STORE was going to be a good idea. I just got out of a FedEx Pack and Ship location and the person working there is so USELESS that it took me a half hour to do what should have taken 5 minutes. We went well after closing time and he was going to ask me to leave without fixing a label on the package. I stopped, looked at them and told them I am going to need them to put on the pouch and the waybill onto the box before I leave. Like, WTF? Who the F does that? The company, like the world is slowly falling apart. Literally at the seams. That was my 3rd FedEx store after their site recommended a closer one THAT WAS CLOSED FOR 3 WEEKS and then the next one WAS NOT EVEN A DROP OFF LOCATION. It was a pickup location in a hotel. Falling. Apart. Just like the rest of the world. Nothing works properly anymore. Nothing.

I'm a Gen X'r born in 1970 and I would NEVER purport to see the truth better than any another generation. If anything, I can admit I was WRONG. I just don't know at this point when the light will fade, but this is FAR too convenient a time to build a case that the sky is falling is during the single greatest asset correction in world history with record inflation, record energy prices, record number of wars yada, yada, yada. This is quite literally an unprecedented time in modern history and you can't draw hard and fast rules around this unprecedented time. That's about as subjective as you can get (and I am not trying to sound condescending). Actually, I do and have for years. I've for YEARS griped about how when the market gets too hot it's not good for the hobby. The movie bubbles, the asset bubble of 2021 - I spoke out against all of those things and everyone knows I have. But MOST won't. They'd rather play the game disingenuously.

People worry more about how the demographic will affect their hobby than the rest of the world. Kind of silly because if you really think about it we're headed into catastrophic waters based on demographics and things like health care in the West that may collapse Western civilization but nobody cares. But when it comes to comics we all care. I've been on the "demographic is destiny drum beat ever since the economy collapsed in 2007-8. That was my late 30s and it was about the time I REALLY started paying attention to the world. Before that I was too busy raising kids. The most powerful minds in our hobby have been discussing "demographic is destiny" in the Gold is $500 thread in the WC for over 15 years now and not a SINGLE ONE has been fully accurate. Along the way you hit a few wins but over all, human nature is such and variables are so myriad that nobody will ever be able to predict any market with precision. Nope. NOTHING is indefinite. Not even death, IMO. But most people who have already factored in the demise sound exactly like the people who did the same 5, 10 and 20 years ago on this very forum (or 50 years ago if you're that old - because that's how long people have been talking about comics being too expensive in my lifetime). Imma say at some point it's all going to go away, but literally NOBODY knows when. These are the same posts that I've been reading for 20 years. I even GENUINELY believed the collapse was going to happen in 2010 as we were waiting for a massive credit crunch post 2007-08 and even told my partner at the time that. Didn't happen. No person is able to predict the future no matter the field: stocks, weather, comics - anything. I'm done trying to predict, especially after reading about the same thing over and over for 20 years from 100s of boardies. It's a fool's errand.

Anybody who understands business and economy understands this. You can tell who is invested in their argument. I remember 15 years ago when people starting pumping stocks on here when the Marvel movies took off. It was ridiculously obvious who had a vested interest and who didn't. You may as well call the Movie Forum the Comic Book Stock Exchange because IMMO that's the main reason it's become so popular.

We have a pirate on our team? So, a little voice inside my head told me to pack this just as I was leaving for Collector's Summit. True story. Now I know why.

Speaking solely about AF #15, which is what we were doing, you'd be totally wrong if you looked at the 2017 data, which was an inflated market build entirely on outliers but OK. And comics have been "dying" since this chat forum was formed over 20 years ago so it's hard to take that sentiment seriously when someone says this is the death knell and we're in the final 15 years. People have been saying it for much longer than the last 20 years. I might be a dealer but I genuinely don't care either way.

Well, the driving thing I am hyper aware about because I'm an avid car enthusiast and drive and have paid attention to people's driving habits since I got my license in 1986. As for the rest, I think I'm reasonably objective. I think each new generation these days is just willing to take less chances (which definitely reduces your ability to succeed and grow) because there are so many creature comforts available to everyone. In the past you were challenged by your natural habitat but as a general rule, life is so good and so easy these days - even with the hard times we're experiencing we are still living in the top 2% in the world, and I think people need to challenge themselves more to stay sharp and very few do. The movie Idiocracy is a reality these days.