This post is Filed Under:
Home page Highlights,
Interviews and Columns
Captain America #600 cover
by KC Carlson
We’ll return to our discussion of big Comic book Events, and specifically, marvel Comics’ current big Events, after this minor digression – which I pledge will make sense later. thank you.
The Digression
In the summer of 1992, I was back working at DC and living in northern new jersey in a small town that had no comic shops, although it seemed like there was a sports card shop on every other block. At this point, a lot of card shops hadn’t gotten involved much with comics, but that was all to change with the boosting influence of lots of superstar artists and the speculation around their high-profile projects, like Todd McFarlane on Spider-Man. Smelling money, lots of of the card shops started putting in racks of comics – mostly just the top sellers, the evident Marvel, DC, and image titles.
This is exactly what happened at the card shop in my neighborhood. While walking by one Saturday afternoon, I observed the comic racks in the window. I stopped in to check it out and swiftly realized that the selection was what I just described above. With not much to interest me, I think I picked up the current issue of WildCATS (then with Image), which confused the clerk. I swiftly discovered he was the owner as we struck up a conversation. He was undoubtedly new to comics and was fishing for information about what was popular and why people were getting what they were buying. For me, he wanted to know, “why are you not getting any DC or marvel comics?”
I explained that I worked for DC and that getting comp copies of a lot of of the DC and marvel comics was one of the perks of the job at that time. “Oh, so you read them, then?” he asked, like it was a foreign concept for him. I told him that, yes, I undoubtedly read them and that I had been reading them considering that I was about five years old. “Really?” he asked, and I began to think that I was the first person that he had ever met that read comics. speculation on comics as an investment was huge in those days, and apparently, that was the only kind of comics buyer he was getting.
It was a very odd conversation, nearly like two people talking different languages. He also had trouble understanding that I was only getting WildCATS because I liked the artist (Jim Lee). I explained that there were lots of reasons that people gotten comics, but that the major ones were because people really liked the characters, the stories, or the artwork.
“You don’t get them for the money they will be worth later?” he asked.
“No, that really doesn’t enter into it for me,” I replied. “I normally like to read them.” I acknowledged that the investment angle was becoming a bigger part of the industry, and it was also a main reason for people getting comics in those days. but I alerted him that normally only very old and/or very scarce books would be worth real money and that speculating on which current comics were going to be useful someday was a potentially hazardous thing to do, as only a very few ever got to be worth anything.
“So you’ll help me then, okay?” he asked me.
“Well, no, I can’t really do that, because I’m really not interested in what comics are worth,” I said. “I can tell you what comics I like to read, but that won’t help you much, because my tastes aren’t always in the mainstream, and I don’t always understand why some comics get popular and some don’t.”
“But you work at a comic company? You need to be smart about these things.”
I laughed. “No one really knows about these things. They just happen sometimes.”
And then The death of Superman happened.
And then my “friend” at the card store wasn’t delighted that I hadn’t told him about that. “I missed out on that,” he said, kinda blaming me without saying the actual words.
In actual fact, nearly everybody missed out on that. Certainly, no one at DC suspected that it would take off like it did. The creators themselves thought that they were just doing another in a long line of “Death of Superman” stories, a tradition going back for decades. this time it was presented a little a lot more elaborately – with Superman not appearing in his own comics for several months – which inadvertently fanned the flames after the mass media picked up the story on a supposedly “slow news day.” The death book itself, Superman #75, sold out instantly, leading to multiple reprintings, special editions, and collected editions – and boosted sales for all of the other Superman books and widespread speculation on the part of “investors” as well as lots of comic shops.
Because there were so lots of inexperienced merchants (like my card shop “friend”), lots of people over-ordered on the reprints, leading to an eventual glut in the marketplace, which led to the inevitable devaluing of the books. It was a nasty learning eKC COLUMN: into EACH LIFE SOME reign need to FALL, SOME DAYS BE DARK and DREARY (###) This post is Filed Under:
Home page Highlights,
Interviews and Columns
Captain America #600 cover
by KC Carlson
We’ll return to our discussion of big Comic book Events, and specifically, marvel Comics’ current big Events, after this minor digression – which I pledge will make sense later. thank you.
The Digression
In the summer of 1992, I was back working at DC and living in northern new jersey in a small town that had no comic shops, although it seemed like there was a sports card shop on every other block. At this point, a lot of card shops hadn’t gotten involved much with comics, but that was all to change with the boosting influence of lots of superstar artists and the speculation around their high-profile projects, like Todd McFarlane on Spider-Man. Smelling money, lots of of the card shops started putting in racks of comics – mostly just the top sellers, the evident Marvel, DC, and image titles.
This is exactly what happened at the card shop in my neighborhood. While walking by one Saturday afternoon, I observed the comic racks in the window. I stopped in to check it out and swiftly realized that the selection was what I just described above. With not much to interest me, I think I picked up the current issue of WildCATS (then with Image), which confused the clerk. I swiftly discovered he was the owner as we struck up a conversation. He was undoubtedly new to comics and was fishing for information about what was popular and why people were getting what they were buying. For me, he wanted to know, “why are you not getting any DC or marvel comics?”
I explained that I worked for DC and that getting comp copies of a lot of of the DC and marvel comics was one of the perks of the job at that time. “Oh, so you read them, then?” he asked, like it was a foreign concept for him. I told him that, yes, I undoubtedly read them and that I had been reading them considering that I was about five years old. “Really?” he asked, and I began to think that I was the first person that he had ever met that read comics. speculation on comics as an investment was huge in those days, and apparently, that was the only kind of comics buyer he was getting.
It was a very odd conversation, nearly like two people talking different languages. He also had trouble understanding that I was only getting WildCATS because I liked the artist (Jim Lee). I explained that there were lots of reasons that people gotten comics, but that the major ones were because people really liked the characters, the stories, or the artwork.
“You don’t get them for the money they will be worth later?” he asked.
“No, that really doesn’t enter into it for me,” I replied. “I normally like to read them.” I acknowledged that the investment angle was becoming a bigger part of the industry, and it was also a main reason for people getting comics in those days. but I alerted him that normally only very old and/or very scarce books would be worth real money and that speculating on which current comics were going to be useful someday was a potentially hazardous thing to do, as only a very few ever got to be worth anything.
“So you’ll help me then, okay?” he asked me.
“Well, no, I can’t really do that, because I’m really not interested in what comics are worth,” I said. “I can tell you what comics I like to read, but that won’t help you much, because my tastes aren’t always in the mainstream, and I don’t always understand why some comics get popular and some don’t.”
“But you work at a comic company? You need to be smart about these things.”
I laughed. “No one really knows about these things. They just happen sometimes.”
And then The death of Superman happened.
And then my “friend” at the card store wasn’t delighted that I hadn’t told him about that. “I missed out on that,” he said, kinda blaming me without saying the actual words.
In actual fact, nearly everybody missed out on that. Certainly, no one at DC suspected that it would take off like it did. The creators themselves thought that they were just doing another in a long line of “Death of Superman” stories, a tradition going back for decades. this time it was presented a little a lot more elaborately – with Superman not appearing in his own comics for several months – which inadvertently fanned the flames after the mass media picked up the story on a supposedly “slow news day.” The death book itself, Superman #75, sold out instantly, leading to multiple reprintings, special editions, and collected editions – and boosted sales for all of the other Superman books and widespread speculation on the part of “investors” as well as lots of comic shops.
Because there were so lots of inexperienced merchants (like my card shop “friend”), lots of people over-ordered on the reprints, leading to an eventual glut in the marketplace, which led to the inevitable devaluing of the books. It was a nasty learning eral is getting better at managing these things and learning from past experiences.
Cap Is Back?
Is any individual really shocked that Captain America is back? I’m not. I was mostly shocked at how long he was gone (and was very amused to read in Ed Brubaker’s recent marvel spotlight interview that he was originally only going to be “dead” for a few months).
Captain America #600 was a little disappointing after all the build-up, considering that there was no actual appearance of the man in question, just the possibility that he may still be alive. The chapterized anthology technique actually worked against the story, I thought. (Although that made it much much easier for the lots of hands working on the extra-length story to all hit their deadlines.) It was the only way to opt for the fragmented-by-necessity nature of the story. The story went off in too lots of directions and spent too much time setting up other stories or recaps rather than just getting to what everybody wanted to see – Cap’s return, which we didn’t get.
I was very delighted to see that Roger Stern and mark Waid’s stories weren’t reprints, as I originally feared. (Note to marvel Previews: Please spend a lot more time being exact with issue descriptions instead of being – allegedly – clever. thank you.)
Stern’s story was a touching tribute to the characters of one of my favorite “eras” of Cap, the Brooklyn Heights era, and I was very delighted to see them again, if only for a few minutes. Waid’s story was also excellent, a touching and multifaceted tale about memorabilia and its true value.
Captain America: Reborn #1 was a little shocking in how super-hero-y it all was, which on the face of it is a pretty absurd thing to say considering that Cap is pretty much the utmost superhero. I had become so accustomed to Brubaker’s espionage-like stories in Cap’s regular title over the last couple of years, accompanied by noir-like character treatments and artwork by Steve Epting, Butch Guice, Luke Ross, and others. After their potent-yet-old-school art treatments, it was unusual to see the in-your-face superhero dynamics of Bryan Hitch – although Guice inking Hitch was a great idea. Although we’re seeing a lot of Cap “unstuck” in time here, he’s still not actually back to being the Captain America. The excitement of actually seeing that is still a few months away. So, while I rate this series very highly, my delayed expectations are keeping me from absolutely raving about this book until I see its outcome. I anticipate this will be much better read as a graphic novel, upon its completion.
Secret Reign
“Delayed expectations” seem to be a watchword at marvel these days as actual storyline resolutions seem rarer and rarer. I’ve come to expect that the one-story-leads-to-another method of serialized storytelling has been a lot more and a lot more elongated by decompressed, for-the-trade pacing, but it now seems that actual resolutions only happen when creators decide to stop their run and step on to something else. nowhere is this a lot more obvious than in how Marvel’s secret invasion begat the current Dark reign “storyline”. (The reason for those quotes later…)
Secret invasion Cover
Secret invasion was great in the way that old ‘50s sci-fi motion pictures and roller coasters are – they’re a lot of fun and even scary while they’re happening, but they wear out their welcome and can even make you sick if you do too much of them at one time. Thus, I was really delighted to see the Skrull invasion storyline come to a conclusion at the end of SI, because it was just long enough. I am much less delighted to see the unresolved threads of SI still lingering, including the status of lots of of the replaced-by-Skrulls characters, a lot of notably the delayed explanation of the what and when of Jessica Drew: Spider-Woman. There’s also the matter of the Skrulls’ role in the larger marvel universe (alluded to in secret Invasion: Inhumans and – I guess – being