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« Comics: October 2006 | Main | Comics: December 2006 » ComicsI know you don't like to miss these Paul O'Brien's October Marvel sales analysis. By fnord12 | November 28, 2006, 4:56 PM | Comics | Link From Dave's Long Box. I agree with them all*, but Batman is the funniest. By fnord12 | November 28, 2006, 4:12 PM | Comics
& Liberal Outrage | Comments (3)| Link We are having a video game revival over here. We're a generation behind, but we are tearing through some games. I've just basically given up sleep and have been a zombie at work, but my philosophy has been if i'm going to be miserable i ought to be tired as well. Monsters first, and then get the treasure, dammit! The only bad thing - and i see this a lot in all different types of roleplaying games - is that by the time we got to the end of the game we were super-powerful and there wasn't really a challenge anymore. We had millions of heal potions and raise dead amulets, super-mega attack spells, and even my wizard was killing the bad guys in a couple of hits. After we beat the game on Hard, we unlocked the Nightmare level and we started that up and loaded our characters... and it wasn't much of a Nightmare at all. Blue Valkyrie shouldn't shoot food. Yellow Warrior shouldn't shoot potions. Red Knight shouldn't shoot--- are you people even listening to me? There's a Secret War in my Xbox, and everyone's invited! The only real problem is the upgrade system - sometimes when you go up a level you get a point, and sometimes you don't. Sometimes you use points to upgrade your powers, and sometimes you have to pay money. And some powers you can't upgrade until you are a certain level, which is odd (they should just make it so that it costs enough points that it's restrictive to buy at lower levels, just for consistency). But that's a minor complaint; superheroes don't really "upgrade" their powers very often anyway. Who will be master Baten? Using an X-X-A Combo to Fight the Power! By fnord12 | November 19, 2006, 12:06 PM | Comics
& D&D
& Liberal Outrage
& My stupid life
& Video Games | Link Other than Iron Man, everything i've been reading lately has been great. I just read all the Brubaker Captain Americas, and not only do i no longer mind that they brought Bucky back, i actually think it is cool. They made Bucky a cooler character in general, and the story as a whole is fantastic. I also read Brubaker's Daredevil, which is also really, really good. And i finished reading the Runaways, which is also great. I read series 1 after series 2 because i had some trouble finding some series 1 issues, but it was actually kind of cool seeing a lot of things being set-up that i probably would have missed if i read them in the right order. Unlike just about everyone on every message board or blog i've seen, i am loving Civil War. I think it's a great story, i think it's as tightly knit and consistent as a crossover this large can possibly be, and it seems like this event is going to have long term repercussions that are going to be very interesting. I'm also reading Astonishing X-Men, Dr. Strange, Eternals, and Annhiliation and they're all at least very good. It's a great time to be reading Marvel comics, in my opinion. Just wanted to share a little comic book love since my last post was a complaint and i see so many complaints about the direction of Marvel right now. By fnord12 | November 18, 2006, 7:19 PM | Comics | Comments (1)| Link So in Iron Man #210 (1986), Happy Hogan was training a promising young boxer, and he went to Tony Stark to ask if he could lend him the money so that he could become a boxing manager. Unfortunately, the boxer turned out to be the Spymaster, who trapped Iron Man. But Happy Hogan, using his boxing skills, was able to beat up the Spymaster. It's not a great story, but it was pretty good. just a random issue of Iron Man that I had as a kid so it stuck in my head. In the most recent issue of Iron Man (#13), the Spymaster show up and tried to kidnap Happy to use as bait for Iron Man. But Happy Hogan, using his boxing skills, was able to beat up the Spymaster. During the fight, Happy talks about how he still keeps up his boxing, and then says "I just knew... someday I'd get a change to rip one'a you pantywaist super-goons a new one." So i looked it up and it turns out the original Spymaster died in Iron Man #220 and this is a new guy. But still, Happy's comments are totally oblivious to the fact that he had essentially done this before. I guess i shouldn't demand that writers and editors be familiar with every issue of the characters they are writing, but i nonetheless do demand it, dammit. Both Spymasters have a total of about 35 appearances. It doesn't seem to be too much to ask that writers do their research before writing a character. I dunno, tell me i'm wrong. By fnord12 | November 18, 2006, 7:03 PM | Comics | Link 5 of first 10 posts on racmu are currently about the Heroes tv show. Screw that, i wanna read about comic books! By fnord12 | November 8, 2006, 1:51 PM | Comics | Link Wow. I've never seen Paul O'Brien so angry: You can probably guess where this is heading, can't you? In October 2005, Marvel shipped a month of comics containing a frankly outrageous quantity of adverts. In some books, the adverts actually outnumbered the story in terms of page count. Not surprisingly, there were complaints. Adverts are distracting, quite intentionally. They disrupt the flow of the story. A certain amount can be screened out, but when the adverts outnumber the story pages, you've got a real problem in terms of readability. The quality of the product is seriously compromised. Marvel apologised, and cheerfully announced that it wouldn't be happening again the next month. Of course, on a close reading, that was partly because they just didn't have as many advertisers lined up for next month. But still, they acknowledged the problem. They apologised to readers. Joe Quesada ended up telling Newsarama that it wouldn't happen again. Now, if recent history is anything to go by, Marvel will probably deny that they ever said any such thing. So, just for reference, here's the passages. Joe Quesada, on 21 October 2005:- Joe Quesada, on 11 November 2005:- I'll just repeat that last bit in case you didn't get it. Well, once again we have a vast quantity of adverts this month, and it turns out Joe Quesada was not telling the truth. No effort whatsoever has been made to group the adverts at the back of the book. Not only that, but Marvel themselves have made the situation even worse. This comic contains 23 pages of adverts between the first and last page of a 22 page story. Of those adverts, one is a double-page house ad for Incredible Hulk, one is a full-page house ad for newuniversal, one is a half-page house ad for Iron Fist, and one is a half-page house ad for Bullet Points. The half pagers may just about be forgivable, because they're needed to fill out the page due to the dimensions of the paid advertisements. But three pages of house ads in the middle of a 22-page story already fit to burst with adverts? A full spread house ad in a story that already contains no less than three double-spread paid ads? Are they on crack? Nobody could seriously argue that this story is unimpaired by the adverts. Take, for example, page 15 of the story. It's a big explosion that's meant to be a cool, dramatic moment. But it's stranded miles away from any sort of context - the preceding two pages are adverts, and so are the next three. Here's the thing. Marvel acknowledged, just twelve months ago, that this was unacceptable. They accepted that it damaged the quality of their product. They claimed to have heard the complaints. They said that if they had this many adverts again, they'd group them at the back. Well, so much for Marvel's word. And do you know, it's the strangest thing. Because Marvel love quality. They tell us so, every time one of their flagship titles is running several months late. It's because something unexpected has come up, yet again, and Marvel is willing to stick with the creators, because they care so much about quality. Heaven forfend anyone should suggest that Marvel has a chronic lateness problem because they indulge primadonnas who think their Jerry Bruckheimer story is Citizen Kane; artists who somehow find time to draw magazine covers when their regular title is six months late; and TV writers who put their TV work first and have no discernible intention of handing in their scripts on anything remotely resembling a deadline. Heaven forfend anyone suggest that Marvel's scheduling department appears to consist of six monkeys and a dartboard, and that the company persistently announces comics on schedules that it knows full well will never be achieved. Dear me, no. It's all because the unexpected continues to occur with clockwork regularity, and Marvel care so terribly much about quality. Well, if Marvel truly care that much about quality, why are they shipping comics with 23 pages of adverts in 22 story pages, something that they've previously acknowledged is unacceptably damaging to the product? Why didn't they keep to their word and put the adverts at the back of the book? Why didn't they just turn some of the adverts down? Come on, you're always telling us how you're willing to sacrifice short term profit when it comes to indulging your big name primadonnas! Where's the same effort when it comes to the adverts? You people do realise that at the end of the day, paying customers are supposed to read these bloody things? I'm not a happy customer. I'm a seriously angry customer. Of course, it could be worse. You could be reading Ant-Man #2. That book contains a 22 page story interpolated with 25 pages of adverts - and since that apparently isn't bad enough, they've chucked in the letter column to make it 26. So the adverts outnumber the story pages by 18%. Look me in the eye, Joe, and tell me this is acceptable. By fnord12 | November 8, 2006, 12:45 PM | Comics | Link |