Greetings and Solicitations: Marvel for July

I've become increasingly frustrated with comics publishers milking properties by expanding the number of titles published in a given month for those characters or teams.  While both Marvel and DC have a long history with this practice it's only become worse in recent years. Looking through the July Marvel solicitations I see how harsh this reality truly is. 

 

The Avengers, once supported two books a month - the Avengers, and Avengers West coast.  That seemed reasonable.  Two branches of the same team seperated by an entire continent.  In July we have Avengers, Avengers Academy, New Avengers, Secret Avengers, Avengers: The Children's Crusade, and Avengers: The Origin plus eight or nine more if you include the Captain American, Thor, and Iron Man books.  X-men books account for 14 current continuity books, more if you add alternate reality / ancillary books.  It also doesn't include Deadpool who gets seven (yes 7) books in July.  Does this seem like madness to you?   

 

For an excercize let's say I'm being selective.  Say I've decided that I will be following Captain America.  What books would I be buying this month if I wanted to buy books related to Cap?

1. Captain America #608
2. Captain America: The 1940's Newspaper Strip #2 (not an actual strip from the 40's, it's a new retcon tale by Karl Kesel - I'm tempted to get this and I DON'T follow Cap these days)
3. World War Hulks: Wolverine versus Captain America (which now puts me on the hook for World War Hulks most likely)
4. Steve Rogers: Super Soldier #1 (the original Cap and he's back, how can any Cap fan NOT purchase this?)
5. Avengers #3
6. Avengers Academy #2
7. New Avengers #2
8. Secret Avengers #3
9. Avengers, Thor and Captain America: Official Index to the Marvel Universe #3.  At this point I might as well throw that in. 

Granted, Cap and Steve are only featured in TWO Avengers books, but if I'm following Avengers, it'd probably be nice to get the whole story.  They might be seperate for now but in 6 months when the next big event happens, and everything that happened in every Avengers book comes into play, I'm gonna be missing out.  Can't have that.  So there's nine books, following Captain America pretty conservatively.  A lot of those books have strong ties to other events and characters so chances are I wouldn't be able to stop there. 

 

Since I have a World War Hulks book on there that could easily lead me to another 4 books.  Avengers could easily pressure me into getting the Iron Man books.  Wolverine's involvement in the WWH book and the Avengers means I'll probably want the context of Wolverine's current circumstances, which are detailed in seven or eight other books and that turns into an even bigger mess with the X-men family.  All because I wanted to follow Captain America.  I've been reading comics religious for twenty years and even to me this seems like an impenetrable mess.  My solution? 

 

For now I'm sticking to Marvel's cosmic books, which in most months means Nova, Guardians of the Galaxy, maybe a mini-series or two.  And there's a LOT of diversity among that small handful of books. This month that happens to mean one book: The Thanos Imperative #2. 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted via email from Newtronika

Testing, testing, nothing to see here.

Testing

 

 

This concludes the test. ^^

Posted via email from Newtronika

Plaid vinylmation custom concept

Posted via web from Newtronika

Posterous

Testing out a Posterous site with auto-updating to Blogger for now.  Trailed off on blogger because I got tired of the interface, we'll see how Posterous does. 

Posted via web from Newtronika

Meanwhile on Earth-N...

A new regular feature, in which I tell the world how the comic industry is running on Earth-Newton.

Recently on Earth-N:

Andy Kubert got it together and started turning out a consistent 22 pages a month again. Shortly after proving his commitment to timely production of work he returned to work on Batman, this time working with writer Alan Grant. This team produced a two year run on Batman that is largely considered to be the definitive Batman story.

Dan Didio went back to working in television, Geoff Johns took over as Editor in Chief, while maintaining writing chores on two books a month.

DC and Marvel, seeing a future where current comics formats would require a $4 cover price to continue, adopted a number of cost cutting initiatives including;

1. Single issues have largely become a thing of the past. Japanese style anthologies are now the norm. 300 pages for around $10 each issue, covering 10-11 different titles.
2. Coloring practices no longer allow for extreme embellishment on the part of computer colorists. Coloring jobs are simple and complimentary to the art, instead of complex and dominating the art.
3. DC and Marvel each secured a news stand distribution agreement that placed the monthly comics anthologies at point of sale locations next to Archie Digests, and celebrity gossip rags
   
4. The mature readers lines, Vertigo and Max, were transitioned into OGN business, with releases ranging from 48 page one shots on nice paperstock with cardstock covers, to 200 page hardcover over-sized graphic albums.

John Romita Sr., Joe Kubert, and George Perez now provide a certification for comic book artists for entry into the CBAG - the Comic Book Artists Guild. Certification can be obtained by portfolio review or by successful completion of a three month intensive study course in sequential storytelling. DC and Marvel hire ONLY members of the guild. While many independent studios hire non-guilded artists, they often work with new artists to help them obtain membership.

The Miracle on Lambert

So about 4 weeks back I sat down to play some HD Remix with my friend Nick, to discover that the mic jack and 2 buttons on my primary Tournament Ed. fight stick were not working. Due to collision between operating hours of the MadCatz support line and my normal work schedule, I couldn't do anything about it till yesterday when I took a day off to sit with Anna while she was home sick.

So I called up MadCatz, heard the recording that I needed the product serial number, and plugged in a stick to see which one was the bad one (both sitting on the shelf next to each other). First one worked fine, plugged in the second one. It worked fine too. Couldn't test the mic as I don't have an active gold sub right now, but that's not a big issue anyway.

For now, I'm back in business with two working fightsticks. Yay! Hope it doesn't go out for good later on. Looking forward to KOFXII and BlazBlue later this year.

New Year in Games Part III (or: Revenge of the Indies)

Yes, I know it's April, and I assure you this is the final "New Year in Games" post. This was meant to be the 'new years resolution' subject for this series, which was to have originally concluded in January. In truth I may have never even got around to it, had it not been for this week's episode of Co-Op (the totally awesome internet show about games by gamers that anyone who likes gaming as a whole should check out).

In short, over the years, I've made a habit out of ignoring indy game development. Which is odd given that whatever I'm into at a given time, I'm usually at least paying attention to independent artisans. In high school and college it was music, film, and comics. Post-marriage it's restaurants; truly, independent restaurants make up at least 90% of our dining out. But, for some reason I've always been carelessly ignorant of independent game design. Two of my favorite games published in 2008 were games from independent developers (Braid and World of Goo, for those wondering). This has finally made me sit up and take note.

Independent developers are a real treasure. Completely unhampered by the demands of bean counters and publishing house executives who crave another COD or Gears clone, talented game designers are creating new ways to play in the electronic medium. In recent years, online distribution channels for the sale of digital downloads has afforded these free-thinkers the ability to expose their work to us all, and not starve. I'm paying attention now, and if you care about games, you should to.

Check out the newest episode of Co-op, below. Some choice links do follow.

Tag: The Power of Paint - developed as a student project at Digi-pen
Cortex Command - not done yet, but buy now and you are entitled to all future updates
Zeit2 - Definitely a game I want to see make it to XBLA
Fez - not featured on this episode, but the creator is featured on this episode throughout.
TIGSource - independent gaming news