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Post by G on Jan 29, 2012 10:32:42 GMT -5
I did find out that the store that put backing boards in front of the comics was prepping the new delivery. They evidently put spacers between the comics. Regardless of the reason, the store should be shopable when a customer walks in. Poor stocking methods if you ask me. df1 I still say if you're going to do that, put one comic in a bag and board that way you can see the comics that lie behind the backing board. If you walk into a store and see nothing but white backing boards where all the new comics are, you deserve to go out of business. That's just asinine. Even if you are prepping for the new comics to be put on the shelf, you've done ruined the experience of those who came in that day looking to look at new comics. That's a store I would likely never return to if I seen some dumb shit like that.
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Post by G on Jan 29, 2012 10:40:26 GMT -5
I was posting part time at the STL comics forum that discusses variants, printing defects and collectible oddities. The board has very little activity. One of the members trolled the board, started flooding the board with shit and insults. No one challenged his behavior, so I got fed up with the board and left. I manually deleted some 150 posts so they'll get the idea that it was 100% unacceptable. The board also has a lot of lingering spam. The moron troll was responding to spam. He followed me to another board and started doing the same there also, but backed off quickly realizing he wasn't going to get away with it for long. There are NO messageboards that I deem so sacred that I'll put up with idiots very long. I'm actually ashamed to even mingle with many of the collectors I encounter online. Metarog has dropped in on my board a couple of times. He's probably checking to see what was up. He's pretty cool as what the owner of the board. The owner just doesn't have the time to maintain the board properly. If a messageboard is allowing others to spam it, then it's clear they are no longer paying much attention to it. I might not have much activity here, but I do make it a point to visit my board every day. There are times I can go a week without a post, I'm still checking to see if anything new has happened. If someone suddenly came here and started spamming, I would put a stop to it immediately. I know my board is dead and I stand as an island unto myself. But in general I'm finding message boards are not what they once were. Message boards seemed a lot more exciting to people when the internet was still young and hadn't branched out into everywhere and everything. Of course I think places like Facebook and Twitter did a lot of damage to message boards as well because that is where the social activity is now. No one wants to read all about it anymore. They'd rather have everything in bitesized nuggets of info. I think overall, it has hurt message boards. I hardly see any that are as strong as they were 5 years ago. Regardless, I think being absent is inexcusable over a period of time. If you can't keep it clean, you might as well terminate it.
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Post by defiant1 on Jan 29, 2012 15:44:58 GMT -5
Repost from my board... bit.ly/xXfEm1 I was asked on Jim Shooter's blog to take a look at the following comics from the 52 series. I did not buy them. I skimmed them over in the store. None of these characters have ever interested me enough to buy them. I own a few Superboy comics. I own the very first O.M.A.C. comic done by Jack Kirby in the 70's. It was bought in a bulk purchase when I was buying comics in mass for 10¢ a piece average. I own quite a few Swamp Thing comics and the only ones that interest me are the old Wrightson issues. Were they written by Len Wein? I'm too lazy to look. Don't care anything for the Vertigo stuff I picked up in bulk (10¢ a piece). Here is my rating of the elements of the new relaunch titles on a scale of 1 to 5: Animal Man #1Story - 1 Pacing - 1 Art - 2 Cover - 1 Plot Setup - 1 Colors - 2 Notes: The cover is horrible. It is bland and generic. It gives me no glimpse of what will be interesting in the comic. Nothing tempts me to look inside or make me care. The art is stylistically a distraction from the reading experience. It's very amateurish. The angular panels and poor use of depth are all a distraction. Lots of wasted space. I consider that a lack of respect for my time and money. Do I really need 3 or 4 pages dedicated to Animal Man chatting with his wife about whether he goes on a mission? I have no familiarity with the character or his powers. He a "C" class superhero that has never interested me. A summary of who he is or what he does that's interesting would be a huge help. The comic offers nothing. The pacing is horrid. Stuff happens, but so what? Where is the plot. The last half is him dreaming. My dreams are more interesting. His are somewhat nightmarish... yawn. Horror tends to bore me. The fact that it's a dream leads me to believe he's connected with something. No hints or clue as to why it matters. Didn't care to look at the second issue. Whatever they are building to isn't interesting. O.M.A.C #1 & #2Story - 4 Pacing - 5 Art - 2 Cover - 1 Plot Setup - 1 Colors - 2 The cover was forgettable. So forgettable that I've forgotten what it was. Nothing enticed me to want to open the comic. The art looked rushed. A good inker could have made it better, but this looked like it was more true to the pencils which again look rushed and sketchy. I'm not a fan of Giffen's art even when he started on Defenders. I seem to recall his early Legion issues weren't bad when he started in the 80's(?). His art looked much better in those. The art is very Kirbyesque, but it uses elongation and curving in the legs which is a distraction even when Kirby did it to a lesser degree. The pacing is excellent. It was easy to follow. It does offer a story with a cliffhanger. Since I'm not familiar with the character much and I've had no inclination to pick up back issues, all I know is that he comes across more like a mindless Hulk. He has no vocabulary. His appearance looks stupid. There is no introduction. Storywise it's palatable. The art is a distraction. The color are gaudy, but more pastel if I recall. Passable if the art was not such a distraction. Giffen's page composition skills weren't bad. I would expect that since he's an old school artist. Of all the comics I looked at, this was the only one that interested me enough to pick up the second issue. My feelings towards it are similar, but I thought it was a rip off because the character appears on the splash page and the last half of the second book. If it wasn't sketch art and if the character appealed to me more I might consider buying it. Personally, I have no interest in buying any DC book until Dudeo is gone from the company. I consider him responsible for the big picture of what DC is offering. SuperBoy #1Story - 1 Pacing - 1 Art - 2 Cover - 1 Plot Setup - 1 Colors - 1 I think the character sums it up in the story... "Soul crushingly boring". Too much wasted space. The art is uninspiring. This was the last of the 4 comics I looked at. I was actually tired of looking at them when I got to this. Gaudy coloring. Boring cover. Immature version of a tiresome boring character. Swamp Thing #1Story - 1 Pacing - 1 Art - 3 Cover - 1 Plot Setup - 1 Colors - 3 As far as art goes, this was the most tolerable of the four. One page stood out for some digital processing. I found that distracting. I 'think' it was the use of grey instead of dark black inking. That annoys me, especially when it's done to a decent artist's line work. I didn't look to see who inked it. My guess is that inking helped a lot. This suffers from a big taboo. Swamp Thing is on the cover, he's not in the comic. That alone is enough for me to be pissed. The pacing again is horrible. Too many pages are spent of him looking at a wood pile. I get that he has a problem with what he's seeing. Have some d**n respect for my time and move it along. The cover tells me nothing about the interior. More generic crap. Essentially the book offers no story. It's just setup. As some people have said... things just happen to the characters during the course of the comic. Superman makes an appearance. He's not on the cover. I guess I'm supposed to buy Swamp Thing to read a Superman story. Doesn't Superman have 10 other comics that he's in a month? Anyway, I expect all the categories I rated to be a three or higher if I'm going to be enticed enough to buy it. A competent writer that has instilled trust and knows how to pace a book right can make me forgiving on the cover and storyline "build up" drama. It does not make me forgiving of mediocre art and elements of distraction like gaudy coloring. Four duds with O.M.A.C being the best of the 4. Defiant1 Your view pretty much summed up the way I was feeling when I was buying new comics. I could never find a comic I was caring about. Even long time comics that I have a long history with were not interesting me. Some of the gripes I have you pinpointed and I've mentioned numerous times here. For instance, covers. We've been going through nearly 20 years now of dumb, mindless covers. Ever since Image came to being and started the poster shot cover, we've been bombarded with it ever since. It used to give me some idea of what was going on inside the comic. It used to be a teaser. Now looking at a wall of new comics is like looking at a bunch of coloring books side by side. It's just poster shots. You could rip the covers off of one month and put them on different months and its all the same. There is no meaning to them. Characters and Storylines - Where is the feeling of caring about a character anymore? Where is the everyday life? The love interests? The struggles and accomplishments? The situations that make it worth wondering how this is going to turn out? Far too often I was dropped into a maddening storyline that involved numerous other storylines and battles to even begin to figure out what was going on. Besides that, the character was changing, either dies or gets replaced or locked up and someone new stepped in. Nothing resembled the characters that you could count on month after month. Instead there is 15 Batman's running around. Capt America is dead, no he's not. Whos that in the uniform? Spiderman is black, no hes not married but nows hes in the Fantastic Four. I really think the guys that run comics are clueless and only see the here and now. They have totally destroyed long time buyers. How many times you go to a comic store and see people buying comics? I typically see kids playing card games in droves and could barely care about comics at all. How do these guys stay in charge with a track record like that? Coloring - Man, I miss the old school way of coloring. Talent with your hands and eyes have now been replaced with talent in photoshopping. Very unrealistic colors going on. Nothing looks real. Often pages are blinding and give you a sickening feeling when looking. And yes, what happened to just plain good inking? I feel sorry for the inking greats of yesterday. They are hardly needed anymore and they used to add so much. And regular hand colorists have been made completely obsolete. I could go on and on but I feel like Im preaching to nobody anyway and Ive said it all before. People at the top need to be fired. Not demoted or moved to another department. Fired. They've ruined comics. What really gets me is when someone says "You must not have seen so-and-so..." I'm supposed to go searching for one title out of dozens and buy that knowing the creative team will only last 6 issues at most. I shouldn't have to go searching for something good. Everything should be good. It's like "Where's Waldo" on the comics rack. One comic buried in the midst of hundreds of shit? Give me a break. df1
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Post by defiant1 on Jan 29, 2012 15:49:19 GMT -5
I was posting part time at the STL comics forum that discusses variants, printing defects and collectible oddities. The board has very little activity. One of the members trolled the board, started flooding the board with shit and insults. No one challenged his behavior, so I got fed up with the board and left. I manually deleted some 150 posts so they'll get the idea that it was 100% unacceptable. The board also has a lot of lingering spam. The moron troll was responding to spam. He followed me to another board and started doing the same there also, but backed off quickly realizing he wasn't going to get away with it for long. There are NO messageboards that I deem so sacred that I'll put up with idiots very long. I'm actually ashamed to even mingle with many of the collectors I encounter online. Metarog has dropped in on my board a couple of times. He's probably checking to see what was up. He's pretty cool as what the owner of the board. The owner just doesn't have the time to maintain the board properly. If a messageboard is allowing others to spam it, then it's clear they are no longer paying much attention to it. I might not have much activity here, but I do make it a point to visit my board every day. There are times I can go a week without a post, I'm still checking to see if anything new has happened. If someone suddenly came here and started spamming, I would put a stop to it immediately. I know my board is dead and I stand as an island unto myself. But in general I'm finding message boards are not what they once were. Message boards seemed a lot more exciting to people when the internet was still young and hadn't branched out into everywhere and everything. Of course I think places like Facebook and Twitter did a lot of damage to message boards as well because that is where the social activity is now. No one wants to read all about it anymore. They'd rather have everything in bitesized nuggets of info. I think overall, it has hurt message boards. I hardly see any that are as strong as they were 5 years ago. Regardless, I think being absent is inexcusable over a period of time. If you can't keep it clean, you might as well terminate it. That was the main reason I downsized mine. Less visible content to maintain since I'm not buying comics. JayJay logged in yesterday. Probably because of my link. I gained a new non-active member. All because I posted a link to my reviews at Jim Shooter's blog. df1
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Post by defiant1 on Jan 29, 2012 15:59:33 GMT -5
I did find out that the store that put backing boards in front of the comics was prepping the new delivery. They evidently put spacers between the comics. Regardless of the reason, the store should be shopable when a customer walks in. Poor stocking methods if you ask me. df1 I still say if you're going to do that, put one comic in a bag and board that way you can see the comics that lie behind the backing board. If you walk into a store and see nothing but white backing boards where all the new comics are, you deserve to go out of business. That's just asinine. Even if you are prepping for the new comics to be put on the shelf, you've done ruined the experience of those who came in that day looking to look at new comics. That's a store I would likely never return to if I seen some dumb shit like that. It was two "kids" working the store. They know nothing about the history of comics. It's just a job they thought would be fun. The store has no old back issues, so I rarely ever go there. When I'm meeting the girl I date, I'm usually 20 minutes early and she's usually 20 minutes late. I drive like a bat out of hell and don't let people have contact info. She always has distractions from her business, family, and guys that want to win her over . If not for the time gap and having to kill some time, I would not have stopped at the shop. I would chat with the old manager. He used to write a comics article that was rarely about comics in the same magazine that published my cartoon. He moved to a different store. df1
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Post by G on Jan 29, 2012 17:38:16 GMT -5
How good are comics today? Guess what this is? It's a Comic's Store! Nuff Said!!!!
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Post by defiant1 on Jan 29, 2012 23:48:31 GMT -5
How good are comics today? Guess what this is? It's a Comic's Store! Nuff Said!!!! To me, a shop like this is so desperate to have people come in, that the owner is paying for shitloads of wasted floor space so those people can dick around with their card games and hero clicks. At least the shop you showed has it somewhat segregated and it's a relatively new/clean looking store. Imagine trying to shop at a comic shop with the chairs four inches from the rack you are trying to shop. A shop in a neighboring county has tables so close to the displayed product that you can't even stand in front of the shelf to shop. You have to peek at an angle around some 300 lb guys butt crack 4 inches from the shelf. The guy also has another store and I couldn't get to the back to shop his selection. It didn't really matter. Most of his stock was new crap or stuff worthy of a quarter box. The thing about that is that a store SHAPES it's customer base. A store owner can say "Silver Age doesn't sell.", but does he know anything about it? does he make an effort to attract customers who want it? Does he stock the cool stuff, or what he can buy cheaply? One store that is now closed was a Star Trek collectors heaven. They had everything and people drove for miles to get it. When the manager changed, the new one didn't like Star Wars, he turned it into a Batman lover's paradise. You could pick up any TPB or hardcover. He always ordered enough. Star Trek fans quit shopping there. Retail floor space is expensive. I just don't relate to someone wanting to waste it on gamers who many times aren't buying a hell of a lot. You are basically paying for customers. They pay $10-$20 per square foot of space a month and giving it away to a gamer so he can sit on his ass and annoy real customers into not shopping at the store. df1
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Post by defiant1 on Mar 4, 2012 20:20:49 GMT -5
Working lots of overtime. Comics weren't even on my mind because I didn't even have time to post on my own board.
df1
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Post by G on Mar 4, 2012 20:32:32 GMT -5
Yeah, sometimes I see myself as being in a sort of comics enthusiasts slump where I don't really have any involvement with it and I don't care about its current affairs and I no longer find any joy in it. This doesn't always last but so long with me but I find it happening more and more frequent. For instance, for Xmas my wife got me a $40 gift certificate to a LCS and I've yet to use it nor do I have much of a desire to go spend it. I'm sure eventually I will but the fact I'd rather think about other things says enough. To be honest, the whole time I had my board in maintenance mode I hardly thought about it. I reopened it as an attempt to regain some interest but in reality I'm not too concerned with it. I'm opening it more to see if anything happens with it more than anything else.
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Post by defiant1 on Mar 5, 2012 20:58:52 GMT -5
Yeah, sometimes I see myself as being in a sort of comics enthusiasts slump where I don't really have any involvement with it and I don't care about its current affairs and I no longer find any joy in it. This doesn't always last but so long with me but I find it happening more and more frequent. For instance, for Xmas my wife got me a $40 gift certificate to a LCS and I've yet to use it nor do I have much of a desire to go spend it. I'm sure eventually I will but the fact I'd rather think about other things says enough. To be honest, the whole time I had my board in maintenance mode I hardly thought about it. I reopened it as an attempt to regain some interest but in reality I'm not too concerned with it. I'm opening it more to see if anything happens with it more than anything else. I've just discovered that the things which pique my curiosity does the same in others. Today someone searched about an EC comics variant. My EC page for the title popped up #1 on Google. The girl I date told me a story about shooting at a shooting range. She was firing away and after awhile, a man comes up and asks if she'd like some pointers on how to hit the target. She says "I'm hitting the target." The man says "I've been watching and I haven't seen you hit the target once." They pull the shooting range target close and the man apologized. Every billet had hit in the crotch which was exactly where she was aiming. He expected her to be aiming at the bulls-eye on the chest. In a way, that's why my board stays around. I'm not targeting what other messageboards are targeting, but collectors still relate to my content. df1
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