The current state of disarray at Marvel

[jjreason]

Start here, I'm sure it's as awesome as it looks.

[Tom Foolery]

I was impressed by the GotG trailer, so much that I wanted to check out some of the comics.

And I found that, in anticipation of the new movie, Marvel took all their GotG trade paperbacks out of print.

Luckily, they're releasing new collections to tie in with the movie. They come out four days after the movie hits.

So much for reading up before I go to the theater. Really shitty logic on Marvel's part.

Marvel reinvigorated its "Cosmic" line about (holyshithasitreallybeen) ten years ago. Ironically, it began with a Thanos ongoing series that only lasted 12 issues. I think that's where they brought back StarLord. He was on a prison planet with Thanos. There was also a Drax mini that completely rebooted the character from the big dumb cape wearing buffoon from the Infinity Watch era into the knife wielding tattood badass in the film.
Those series sowed the seeds for Annihilation (Annihilus invades from the Negative Zone) which had four minis starring SuperSkrull, Ronan, Nova, and Surfer.
Then Annihilation hit and the new Nova series spin out of that.
Then there was a follow up Event called Annihilation:Conquest (The Phalanx Technarchy invades while everyone is still recovering from the Annihilus wave) which had four minis including StarLord, Quasar, and Wraith.
And the new Guardians series spun out of that.
Then the third Event was called War of Kings (the Inhumans led Kree vs Evil Summers brother Vulcan led Shi'Ar) and had tie ins including a cool Darkhawk series. It also had some fallout minis under the Realm of Kings banner focusing on the Imperial Guard, Inhumans, and Hulk's Son.
The final Event was The Thanos Imperative. With that, both the ongoing Nova and Guardians series ended.
After that there was a lull for a couple years until we got the new Sam Alexander Nova series and Bendis' GotG relaunch.

But the first Annihilation series is where they re-intro'd most of the cosmic players. If you can find that TPB it's a good starting point.

[anarky]

Holy fucking shitballs, it took a few years, but this makes me conclude Disney buying Marvel was truly a great thing.


Seriously, mock me all you want, but FUCK YEAH!! Imaaaaaaaaaaaginaaaaaaaaaation!!!!

[Tom Foolery]

At first I was 'who's the twat magician, and why does Lockheed look like that?'

Then I realized it's not Lockheed. Meh.

[anarky]

I smell someone who's never been to EPCOT Center. It's physically impossible to visit there and not love Figment.

[Diabolical]

Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio's goofy looking love child with a cracked out muppet version of Lockheed?

[jjreason]

Lockheed would get figment drunk & fuck her, then move on to the next dragon bitch. He's a playa like that.

[Tom Foolery]

No I've never been to Epcot, and I'm sure that ride is awesome in a vintage 1983 kinda way. Like watching Bosom Buddies reruns.
But clearly whatever Disney peon designed it was a huge X-Men fan and liberally cribbed Lockheed and hoped nobody would notice.

[Diabolical]

Seriously though, what the fuck is that...?

[anarky]

He's a Figment of the imagination.

And he wouldn't be on the receiving end with Lockheed. (Though, yeah, no doubt at all Lockheed was an inspiration.)

[jjreason]

Lockheed has been an inspiration before. May I present St. George, Chance's pet dragon from Leave it to Chance. Also drawn by Paul Smith, who drew X-Men around the time Lockheed first appeared.....

[anarky]

I'm noticing Disney fans are apeshit about this, and Marvel fans think it's aped shit.

[Tom Foolery]

Here's something I noticed while reading this weeks books. It's a tad alarming.

The book only had 28 pages.

I noticed for the last couple years, the print ad situation in Marvel comics has deteriorated. The standard 22 pages of story to 10 pages of advertising ratio we all grew up with had mostly become Marvel in-house ads for other comics and/or 3rd party ads that directly advertised Marvel related Merchandise. So on a whim, today I looked at and counted the ads in the latest issue of Avengers. Here what they had.

1. IFC- Marvel Puzzle Quest App available on google play and AppStore.
2. Pg 7. Marvel Animated film Avengers BW/Punisher on BluRay.
3. Pg 11. An ad for mycomicshop.com (Spidey Theme)
4. Pg 15. Half page split for AwesomeCon in Washington DC and Third Eye Comics in Maryland.
5. Pg 22. In house ad for Original Sin 0 and Digital Copy code.
6. Pg 26. Ad for C2E2 in Chicago in April. (Capt. America Theme)
7. IBC- DK Publishers as for Marvel Encyclopedia and Marvel 75 Years of Cover Art books.
8. Back Cover- Harley Davidson ad pimping Cap:Winter Soldier movie.

Not counting the 3 cover ads, that's only FIVE PAGES not devoted to story and/or recap & letters page. And 2 of those were directly Marvel ads, and 2 were probably heavily discounted/incentivized for using Marvel Characters. I looked in a few other issues this week and it's the same(and not just Marvel, IDW is also 28 pages).

Now, I know Marvel dropped their story count from 22 pages to 20 pages awhile ago. This was to accommodate the Recap page formula and they just dropped the second page to ease up on their artists and avoid fill ins(I guess?). That's spilt milk as far as I'm concerned. But I guess the lack of outside ad revenue was to the point that it didn't seem to justify that extra sheet of paper per book? (8 sheets folded inhalf and stapled is 32 pages, not counting the cover. Now it's only seven sheets for a total of 28 pages.)

I guess in hindsight losing 4 pages of ads that weren't being sold isn't as alarming as all that. But paying $4 or more for less content than ever before IS worrisome. At some point I'll back track to when they ditched those 4 pages.

[jjreason]

Very interesting. I guess the insides of the comics haven't been all that compelling lately as I never seem to feel like they're too short (quicker to read for sure, but I thought we concluded that was because of the decompressed nature of the books these days, not a reduction in pages of material) - I'm usually just glad they're over.

[Tom Foolery]

I went and looked in some early issues of Superior Otto from last year and they also only had 28 pages. I guess I'm just not that vigilant.