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Comics are NOT Graphic Novels!

Started by joe_collector,

12 posts in this topic

joe_collector

joe_collector

Posted
Posted

Okay, I was reading the Captain Marvel TPB tonight, which incidentally is supposed to contain one of my favorite Bronze Age storylines.

 

While I was reading it, my synapses were in disagreement with how the issues were presented, but I put it off to not having read it for years.

 

Then I come to the part where Captain Marvel 32 should have been, and since it's one of my top covers and books from that era, I caught the omission right away.

 

They DELETED the splash page, art, dialogue and all!

 

Then I went over the TPB again, and there were many instances of deleted content, switched pages and panels, edited/hacked segments and other horrible editing work. Now this was obviously done to hack and slash a reprinted comic series into a "more seamless graphic novel", but it's offensive to the extreme.

 

Some hack (who incidentally couldn't shine Jim Starlin's shoes) decided after the fact, that this incredible work needed further toning, so he/she sliced it up into a new, abridged, Reader's Digest version that no longer resembles the original?

 

Marvel needs to get a life and stop letting hacks get their scissors anywhere near the work of true geniuses of the industry. It's like letting Roger Corman re-edit Roman Polanski. makepoint.gif

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comicwiz

comicwiz

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Then I went over the TPB again, and there were many instances of deleted content, switched pages and panels, edited/hacked segments and other horrible editing work. Now this was obviously done to hack and slash a reprinted comic series into a "more seamless graphic novel", but it's offensive to the extreme.

 

Tally-up another notch for commercialism.

 

A similar example is when a hit song gets airplay on a radio station. If the song doesn't abide to the 3 min airplay formula for the music formatted radio station (to insure the maximum alloted ad time), they start to butcher the song until it is barely reconizable. Nothing irritates me more and I just plain stop listening to those particular stations.

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fiendish

fiendish

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Speaking of butchery, "Goodfellas" was on the Lifetime network tonight. WTF? makepoint.gif

 

Moral of your story: only read original graphic novels.

 

BTW: Marvel used to do the same thing (to a lesser degree) in its 70s reprint books. I read some FF storylines in "Marvel's Greatest Comics," and was surprised to find (once I could affort the original FF issues) that they routinely eliminated some of Kirby's full-page panels to squeeze the story down to the reprint format.

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PovertyRow

PovertyRow

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Posted

Speaking of butchery, "Goodfellas" was on the Lifetime network tonight. WTF?

Watched the 1st Matrix on something like AMC or Sci-Fi a month or so ago. When Neo gets pulled in by the feds and Trinity is watching from her motorcycle she says "Shoot" - not sh*t!"

 

When they extract the bug from Neo instead of saying "Jesus Christ that thing's real?" he says - and this is a real quote - "Jeepers creepers that thing's real?"

 

At that point I spent 10 or so minutes rooting the dvd from a box and watched it.

 

Oh, and JC, perhaps "Graphic Novels Are not Comics" may be better! grin.gif

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Aces

Aces

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I didn't notice any covers or splash pages in the USM TPBs I'm reading that I got from lighthouse.

 

I never read the originals so I don't know what I'm missing but it just "feels" like something isn't there that should be.

 

frown.gif

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Kevin Boyd

Kevin Boyd

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The Life of Captain Marvel TPB was prepared at a time (late 1980's) when Marvel was perfectly happy to "retool" the work for the TPB format, and did re-edit many stories to suit the reprint format. Some brilliant editor thought to eliminate unnecessary subplots and repretitive story elements to make it a single story. If you look at other Marvel trades from that era you will see similar tampering.

 

Why Marvel chose to reprint the edited version rather than reprint the originals can simply be credited to laziness, pure and simple.

 

When asked a couple of years back why Marvel didn't do more TPBs of classic Silver and Bronze age comics Quesada said something to the effect that the comics were so full of dated continuing subplots and filled with characters that no longer exist that it would be virtually unidentifiable to the new reader without some re-editing...

 

Essentials were ok because they did reprint everything in order so that new readers could follow the stories properly. Ditto for Masterworks, although the original Mastewrworks were tampered with slightly, and supposedly fixed for the latest printings..

 

I'm happy to say that we live in a time when tampering is considered sacrilige when reprinting comics material. New TPBs are complete reprintings. Just picked up Conan Vol. 3 - this is what Marvel should have been doing in the first place.

 

Kev

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Aman619

Aman619

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Speaking of butchery, "Goodfellas" was on the Lifetime network tonight. WTF?

Watched the 1st Matrix on something like AMC or Sci-Fi a month or so ago. When Neo gets pulled in by the feds and Trinity is watching from her motorcycle she says "Shoot" - not sh*t!"

 

of course the all-time classic TV clean-up was for Godfather 1.

When Sonny tells the capos at dinner before Michael is to be picked up his big meeting with Sollozzo (to kill him) that Tessio better plant the gun perfectly cause:

 

"I dont want my brother comin out of there with just a stick in his hands!"

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Mephisto

Mephisto

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Posted
Speaking of butchery, "Goodfellas" was on the Lifetime network tonight. WTF? makepoint.gif

 

BTW: Marvel used to do the same thing (to a lesser degree) in its 70s reprint books. I read some FF storylines in "Marvel's Greatest Comics," and was surprised to find (once I could affort the original FF issues) that they routinely eliminated some of Kirby's full-page panels to squeeze the story down to the reprint format.

 

Marvel Tales would also switch things to bring up the story line to a more current time. I was reading a reprint of ASM Annual 1 in Marvel Tales from the early 80's and Aunt May said she had to get home so she could see the Dukes of Hazard...which of course wasn't around in 1964 when the book came out.

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joe_collector

joe_collector

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Oh, and JC, perhaps "Graphic Novels Are not Comics" may be better! grin.gif

 

Now you've really got me confused. 893frustrated.gif

 

My beef is that Marvel is taking a set of comic books and shoe-horning them into an abridged TPB format.

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