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Most Important / Impactful Living Artist
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159 posts in this topic

12 minutes ago, vodou said:

Yes. And I would give them, among others, as my examples too. Plenty of good stuff happening, past and present, in the non-Big Two space. And that's just US, so much more non-US too. My gripe as very specifically with the characters which unfortunately points more to brand loyalty than art appreciation (words and/or pictures).

complete agreement. I wish they'd just focus on the 10-20 % of their product that's good-to-great, and get rid of the junk that gets pushed to have more titles on shelves. I think it makes it incredibly hard, especially for new readers / people interested in becoming readers, to find good Marvel stories to read. It becomes a shoot that doesn't have good odds, and so some get lucky and throw the right dart, but most do not.

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15 hours ago, The Cimmerians Purse said:

by style over substance I meant specifically that they spent so much on cheesecake artists that there wasn't any money left over for decent writers. So it was all about the look of the book instead of the story, and a lot of *at least what I read during the time* was flashy art and writing. And there was so much of it, that it was hard to find any of the diamonds in the rough at the time.

anyway thought the clarification of intent would be appreciated.

Marvel just followed their sales impulse. If an artist was hot, they'd milk it for all they could. If a character got hot, they'd have him appear in multiple titles. It hasn't been about 'stories' for a very long time. 

You can trace the mindset all the way back to the Golden Age with that company.

The Shield is hot over at MLJ? Let's create Captain America! Romance? Lets copy! Horror? We can do horror too!

When DC brought back superheroes in the late 50's, Marvel followed.

Kirby's hot? Have him do all the layouts and let's teach other artists to draw like him.

Whatever sold... they catered to. Always.It was always about style over substance for Marvel.

What they did in the 60's was tap into a new generations mindset... heroes that have everyday problems, just like me and you and notice things like war protests going on and the Beatles... they saw a response to that and they milked it.

Once Shooter turned it into a factory like mentality, and ran off the creative force, it was a machine that couldn't be stopped.

15 hours ago, The Cimmerians Purse said:

 

I also think Marvel should take a significant share of what happened. Because I think they started it. They also gave all of the Image kids their shots. I think if Marvel started it, Image brought it too new realms. I may be biased though, because I wasn't reading Marvel comics at the time. I didn't grow an appreciation for Marvel books until later in life when trades of earlier stuff became available.

It's not really that they started it... the history of comics is all about greedy publishers trying to sell, sell, sell. 

What Marvel actually did to almost destroy the market was to create their own distribution and break away from Diamond. They wanted to eliminate the middle man and make more of the profit. It had devastating effects. (Interestingly, this wasn't the first time they tried something along these lines and almost bankrupted themselves because of it)

For all the concern everyone has over the glut of publishing from that era - it was what it was - no one HAD to buy it. But what Marvel did with Heroes World (their own distribution company) was throw the whole system into turmoil... smaller stores could no longer afford the minimums, Diamond scrambled to make ends meet, shortages ran rampant as Marvel's Heroes World struggled to do what even Diamond struggled to do - be efficient. (Shortages and misshipments cost everyone money - but distribution can somewhat swallow that - but small stores in competitive markets can NOT).

All of the variant covers or foil covers or artists doing so many covers, etc.... thats all the fault of the FANS for buying all of that junk. Not the publishers. If you pay me $10 a day to pick up a piece of dirt off the ground and feed it to you while I pretend it's filet mignon, that's YOUR fault. 

The strange thing is, DC actually DID what everyone complained someone should do during that time. They pulled BACK from the variant cover craze (at a certain point, they did their share for a while) and mostly just straight published. They got good writers, and artists, many of who defected from Marvel - and even ramped up their reader line of comics - Vertigo. And the numbers were just ok.

Because the real issue in all of this is the FANS. 

Everyone complains about the variants, the special issues, the new reboot, etc., but SOMEONE is buying those books and making Marvel think... we have to keep feeding them dirt! They like it!

Ultimately this is all the FANS fault. You buy chit, they're going to sell you chit. We've gotten what we deserve. 

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4 hours ago, Chuck Gower said:

But what Marvel did with Heroes World (their own distribution company) was throw the whole system into turmoil... smaller stores could no longer afford the minimums, Diamond scrambled to make ends meet, shortages ran rampant as Marvel's Heroes World struggled to do what even Diamond struggled to do - be efficient. (Shortages and misshipments cost everyone money - but distribution can somewhat swallow that - but small stores in competitive markets can NOT).

Let's not forget that this action by Marvel resulted in the destruction of Capital City, who by most accounts were the good guys of distribution (I only know what I've read though, surely there are many sides to the thing). I do know when they went bankrupt, according to Gary Groth, Fantagraphics was owed around $100k which that bk discharged but Capital's John Davis and Milton Griepp made Fanta whole anyway later over time and out of their own pockets. That's says a lot to me, about the loss of "their" enterprise to the hobby and as "good" competition to Diamond ending up with a monopoly (for better or worse? I dunno...many sides thing again).

4 hours ago, Chuck Gower said:

Ultimately this is all the FANS fault. You buy chit, they're going to sell you chit. We've gotten what we deserve. 

Have to agree with this 100%.

The individual has little market power standing off to the side by himself, but the collective buying public has tremendous power in all things a "for profit" enterprise does business in.

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1 hour ago, vodou said:

Let's not forget that this action by Marvel resulted in the destruction of Capital City, who by most accounts were the good guys of distribution (I only know what I've read though, surely there are many sides to the thing). I do know when they went bankrupt, according to Gary Groth, Fantagraphics was owed around $100k which that bk discharged but Capital's John Davis and Milton Griepp made Fanta whole anyway later over time and out of their own pockets. That's says a lot to me, about the loss of "their" enterprise to the hobby and as "good" competition to Diamond ending up with a monopoly (for better or worse? I dunno...many sides thing again).

Have to agree with this 100%.

The individual has little market power standing off to the side by himself, but the collective buying public has tremendous power in all things a "for profit" enterprise does business in.

Capital was certainly a champion of the small independent publisher, versus Diamond Distribution/Steve Geppi and their policy to try and police morality on what they distributed...

Them becoming a monopoly was not a good thing.

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1 hour ago, vodou said:

Let's not forget that this action by Marvel resulted in the destruction of Capital City, who by most accounts were the good guys of distribution (I only know what I've read though, surely there are many sides to the thing). I do know when they went bankrupt, according to Gary Groth, Fantagraphics was owed around $100k which that bk discharged but Capital's John Davis and Milton Griepp made Fanta whole anyway later over time and out of their own pockets. That's says a lot to me, about the loss of "their" enterprise to the hobby and as "good" competition to Diamond ending up with a monopoly (for better or worse? I dunno...many sides thing again).

Have to agree with this 100%.

The individual has little market power standing off to the side by himself, but the collective buying public has tremendous power in all things a "for profit" enterprise does business in.

Agree 100%.  Marvel is milking some characters with c***p.  Yesterday night I just could not finish the latest Old Man Logan issue , which is the nth reboot of the nth version of the character...and I was like why have I bought this s**+t anyway.  I hope they will not do the same with House of X...finally some X-books that are readable.

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6 hours ago, Chuck Gower said:

Marvel just followed their sales impulse. If an artist was hot, they'd milk it for all they could. If a character got hot, they'd have him appear in multiple titles. It hasn't been about 'stories' for a very long time. 

You can trace the mindset all the way back to the Golden Age with that company.

The Shield is hot over at MLJ? Let's create Captain America! Romance? Lets copy! Horror? We can do horror too!

When DC brought back superheroes in the late 50's, Marvel followed.

Kirby's hot? Have him do all the layouts and let's teach other artists to draw like him.

Whatever sold... they catered to. Always.It was always about style over substance for Marvel.

What they did in the 60's was tap into a new generations mindset... heroes that have everyday problems, just like me and you and notice things like war protests going on and the Beatles... they saw a response to that and they milked it.

Once Shooter turned it into a factory like mentality, and ran off the creative force, it was a machine that couldn't be stopped.

It's not really that they started it... the history of comics is all about greedy publishers trying to sell, sell, sell. 

What Marvel actually did to almost destroy the market was to create their own distribution and break away from Diamond. They wanted to eliminate the middle man and make more of the profit. It had devastating effects. (Interestingly, this wasn't the first time they tried something along these lines and almost bankrupted themselves because of it)

For all the concern everyone has over the glut of publishing from that era - it was what it was - no one HAD to buy it. But what Marvel did with Heroes World (their own distribution company) was throw the whole system into turmoil... smaller stores could no longer afford the minimums, Diamond scrambled to make ends meet, shortages ran rampant as Marvel's Heroes World struggled to do what even Diamond struggled to do - be efficient. (Shortages and misshipments cost everyone money - but distribution can somewhat swallow that - but small stores in competitive markets can NOT).

All of the variant covers or foil covers or artists doing so many covers, etc.... thats all the fault of the FANS for buying all of that junk. Not the publishers. If you pay me $10 a day to pick up a piece of dirt off the ground and feed it to you while I pretend it's filet mignon, that's YOUR fault. 

The strange thing is, DC actually DID what everyone complained someone should do during that time. They pulled BACK from the variant cover craze (at a certain point, they did their share for a while) and mostly just straight published. They got good writers, and artists, many of who defected from Marvel - and even ramped up their reader line of comics - Vertigo. And the numbers were just ok.

Because the real issue in all of this is the FANS. 

Everyone complains about the variants, the special issues, the new reboot, etc., but SOMEONE is buying those books and making Marvel think... we have to keep feeding them dirt! They like it!

Ultimately this is all the FANS fault. You buy chit, they're going to sell you chit. We've gotten what we deserve. 

Yeah I wasn't really trying to dive deep into what Marvel was doing. I hated 90s marvel and DC and didn't read them. I think a lot of what they were doing was trying to fluff up their numbers any way they could because they didn't have Todd Mcfarlen / Jim Lee / Larson / etc, etc, etc writing and drawing for them any more. A very large chunk of the top names in the industry went away from the big two and so DC/Marvel were using smoke and mirrors to sell issues any way they could to stay afloat.

...But, where Image could have been really great having all the big names etc, what did they do instead of getting creative and forging new ground in comics? For the most part they stuck with the same old ideas, and produced tons of comics that felt like knock offs of big two line ups. and so even if you didn't like what the big two were churning out, you didn't even have good any-where-else to go. Pacific, and the tide of other small scale publishers were dead or dying. Image wasn't truly the "cause" of all of comics ruin of the 90s... obviously that kind of inertia needs to be built up over decades of bad acting (as described above). But, they certainly were a powerful catalyst. And while I do agree that the customer has to bear some of the burden here. Nobody wanted to believe that comic books were truly going into the toilet. and so there was a lot of "well this new thing came out I'll give it a try, because maybe it's going to be a decent story." and that kind of sales scheme by Marvel worked until the customer base finally got so fed up that they just stopped buying comic books.

The publishers bear their side of the blame too, however. I wouldn't want to paint a scenario that felt like "ah it wasn't Hitler's fault, he was just giving all those evil people what they truly wanted, kind of vibes." I know I'm being grandiose, but to serve a point. Bad acting is bad acting and blaming it on a faceless mass of people only helps to serve an "it's not my fault" mentality. And when people truly love something like I think we all love comic books, then you're willing to give stuff a chance for a while, until you finally aren't. And publishers tried to take advantage of that, until people said f-you, we're not buying it anymore. I know I stopped reading comics for just about a decade myself. And the publishers were too stupid to understand that would be exactly what happened. Most publishers now understand they have to balance storytelling with profitability, because decent story telling is what drives longevity. Image has certainly learned that lesson. Although, I will say that I think that Marvel is forgetting that again with this whole "Hire one big team to drive an event, but then publish 25 satellite titles that are to go with it" mentality.

So I still think that at a macro level the image creators were a big catalyst of how comics are made today, by being the match that nearly destroyed comic books in the past. And are my most influential living artists.

Edited by The Cimmerians Purse
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3 minutes ago, The Cimmerians Purse said:

Nobody wanted to believe that comic books were truly going into the toilet.

 

3 minutes ago, The Cimmerians Purse said:

And publishers tried to take advantage of that, until people said f-you, we're not buying it anymore.

The straw for me was the slate of new #1 issues with Liefeld and Lee returning to Marvel in 1996. I saw that for what it was -pure gimmick, after 5-7 years of endless gimmicky, oh please. My interest in Marvel at that point was only in keeping long runs current and whipping through them barely remembering the story ten minutes later, those had already stunk since, at least, the Galactic Storm era (U G H). So all those long-running series (Avengers, Cap, FF, Thor) were end-pointed and that made it so easy to just walk. I did and have not ever gone back to floppies again, 24 years and counting. I'll only buy highly-acclaimed collections that have stood the test of time from the Big Two, and those are typically written/drawn by folks that came from elsewhere, played at Big Two for a bit, and then went back to elsewhere keeping their indy credentials intact throughout...no House pets wanted or needed.

House of This or That, Old Man Logan, more Secret Wars, World War Hulk...etc...I have no idea what that stuff is and likely never will. Who cares? (Somebody...but not me.)

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18 minutes ago, vodou said:

 

The straw for me was the slate of new #1 issues with Liefeld and Lee returning to Marvel in 1996. I saw that for what it was -pure gimmick, after 5-7 years of endless gimmicky, oh please. My interest in Marvel at that point was only in keeping long runs current and whipping through them barely remembering the story ten minutes later, those had already stunk since, at least, the Galactic Storm era (U G H). So all those long-running series (Avengers, Cap, FF, Thor) were end-pointed and that made it so easy to just walk. I did and have not ever gone back to floppies again, 24 years and counting. I'll only buy highly-acclaimed collections that have stood the test of time from the Big Two, and those are typically written/drawn by folks that came from elsewhere, played at Big Two for a bit, and then went back to elsewhere keeping their indy credentials intact throughout...no House pets wanted or needed.

House of This or That, Old Man Logan, more Secret Wars, World War Hulk...etc...I have no idea what that stuff is and likely never will. Who cares? (Somebody...but not me.)

Preach! My rule is either very well received, or by creators that I know and love.

although I will say I have been enjoying House of X / Powers of X... but Hickman required being able to call all of the shots on those two before agreeing to do them. reading it as it's coming out breaks my normal rule, because I've only just been discovering his work via Black Science. and now his Xmen series. knowing how he made sure he had complete story latitude, and the gushing they were doing over it on 11'oclock podcast.. was enough to convince me to give it a read. Glad I did.

I'm also super excited for Daniel Warren Johnson's Wonder Woman mini series. A) because it's him, and B) because he told me at heroescon that he was only going to be willing to do it if they gave him complete latitude for the story. So I'm super excited for that, and whole-heartedly recommend it. For anyone who hasn't experienced DWJ's books do yourself a favor and read Extremity and Murder Falcon. ***Warning... Murder Falcon will make you cry like a small boy who's lost his puppy (I don't want to say at what point and spoil, but in the second half). So, be cognizant of where you are and who you're with if you pick it up.

 

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3 minutes ago, The Cimmerians Purse said:

House of X / Powers of X

and

3 minutes ago, The Cimmerians Purse said:

Daniel Warren Johnson's Wonder Woman

I can only do if there's zero continuity knowledge required. I'm 24 years out with no interest in ever "catching up".

Tempted by DWJ, I've enjoyed everything collected so far -even his really early stuff- except MF, haven't picked that up yet, waiting for trade, that out yet?

I would love if the fat weekly manga anthology model ever made it over here (made it = not just tried once but popular and profitable, becoming paradigm). That's the way I (and others in a similar boat re: trusting publishers) could try out a lot of new things, in a single cheapie newsprint volume, without feeling ripped off. I'd say that's about the only chance of pulling me back into the pull-list fold.

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14 minutes ago, vodou said:

and

I can only do if there's zero continuity knowledge required. I'm 24 years out with no interest in ever "catching up".

Tempted by DWJ, I've enjoyed everything collected so far -even his really early stuff- except MF, haven't picked that up yet, waiting for trade, that out yet?

I would love if the fat weekly manga anthology model ever made it over here (made it = not just tried once but popular and profitable, becoming paradigm). That's the way I (and others in a similar boat re: trusting publishers) could try out a lot of new things, in a single cheapie newsprint volume, without feeling ripped off. I'd say that's about the only chance of pulling me back into the pull-list fold.

For house of X / Powers of X only basic knowledge of X-Men is required. I.e. knowing who the main characters are, in this case mostly just the classic Xmen, and knowing basics about their struggle for the right to exist. He doesn't glom onto continuity at all.  I'm in same boat. Haven't touched X-men in at least as long. So I'm going off of limited, and old memory of Xmen and still really enjoying.

YEAH! DWJ is the STUFF! The only one I haven't read yet is Space Mullet. And I just picked it up, so that'll be remedied soon. Dude's a damn genius. And his OA is fantastic!

I'm not sure if MF trade is out now or not. It should be right around the corner if it isn't.  I read them digitally... I don't like collecting floppies anymore either. So digital reading is my happy medium for when I want to read something now, but also not have to store it, or give it away later. I'm hoping they do a hard cover for Murder Falcon. I want it for my bookshelf, and it was so good that I'm willing to buy it all over again lol.

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28 minutes ago, vodou said:

and

I can only do if there's zero continuity knowledge required. I'm 24 years out with no interest in ever "catching up".

Tempted by DWJ, I've enjoyed everything collected so far -even his really early stuff- except MF, haven't picked that up yet, waiting for trade, that out yet?

I would love if the fat weekly manga anthology model ever made it over here (made it = not just tried once but popular and profitable, becoming paradigm). That's the way I (and others in a similar boat re: trusting publishers) could try out a lot of new things, in a single cheapie newsprint volume, without feeling ripped off. I'd say that's about the only chance of pulling me back into the pull-list fold.

Murder Falcon Trade does appear to be available on Amazon. Enjoy, and hail Bruticus :headbang:

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25 minutes ago, The Cimmerians Purse said:

HECK YEAH! I'm glad to hear it! Just finishing up Sweet Tooth first, and it's next on my list. Really looking forward to it. :)

Oh man you're doing my reading list from last year; I read everything Lemire that's been collected, all in the space of a month or so. I kind of got burnt out actually.

This year was Stray Bullets. Nearly 90 issues straight. That one I never got tired of.

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21 minutes ago, vodou said:

Oh man you're doing my reading list from last year; I read everything Lemire that's been collected, all in the space of a month or so. I kind of got burnt out actually.

This year was Stray Bullets. Nearly 90 issues straight. That one I never got tired of.

Man, he's so good. I started with Black Hammer, now Sweet Tooth, Which of his series do you think I should read next? I'm looking forward to the new one he has coming out with Phil Hestor, Family Tree. It sounds super cool. I love his story driven writing style.

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On ‎9‎/‎17‎/‎2019 at 11:27 AM, glendgold said:

I like Larsen's work and I especially like seeing his posts on social media explaining why he does what he does. Even if you don't like it (and I'm sure he'd be fine with that), it's cool to see how much sweat he puts into figure out how to tell a story.  And doing 245 issues of a comic really is a creative achievement.  Even if you're, I dunno, Jack Chick. You might not like it, but the argument "I don't like something and thus it's bad" doesn't really sway me. 

 

Hiya, Glen

This is pretty far into the thread, and the long story short is that I could respond to your quoted comments above, but due to the number of back and forth emails that will arise from you and others, I decline.  Sometimes, posting on this thread is too...exasperating and not worth the effort required.

I will say this: The topic of this thread is "Most Important / Impactful Living Artist", and this is a topic that should never, ever, include Erik Larsen.

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