CCW 4.3 LAST RANTS: MARVEL’S BROKEN PROMISES & THE GOLDEN LOEBS

CCW 3.94: LAST RANTS (or) “WE WERE RIGHT!”

Check out the original article on Bleeding Cool

And here is the Darwyn Cooke video:

CCW 3.91: Our Trade Paperback Picks of the Summer!

CCW 3.88: LAST RANTS (or Why Some Comic Shops SUCK)!

CCW 3.77: LAST RANTS! The return of classic Brian Bendis?

CCW Question of the Week

Two weeks ago I asked all of you your opinion on who was the best comic publisher this year. An overwhelming majority of you choose DC over Marvel. Then last week I asked if Blackest Night was living up to the hype and again the vast majority said that it has. Which now brings us to this week.

We have been focusing a lot on DC here lately so it’s time to talk some Marvel. Marvel Comics has fallen out of favor with many comic fans, myself included, over the last year or so for a variety of reasons. I am going to try to put together a post of what I perceive to be Marvel’s strengths and weaknesses and how Marvel could win me back over. That’s where you all come in.

This week’s 2 part question:

What do you think are Marvel’s greatest strengths and weaknesses?

What would Marvel need to do to beat DC as the CCW Nation’s Publisher of the Year next year?

I would like to take you answers and suggestions and incorporate them into my post which will go up sometime in the near future. I am really quite interested in what you guys have to say on this subject.

J.

BND = One More Dollar : Dan Slott Rebuts

Since comments aren’t readily visible on this blog, in the interest of fairness I wanted to post Dan Slott‘s (Amazing Spiderman, The Initiative) rebuttal to my last post:

“I am happy to tell you that your friend is wrong, sir.

This was a SPECIAL LARGER SIZED issue of ASM– featuring an extra 3 pages of lead story, three back up tales, a special fact sheet by Romita Jr. (in the style of those old Ditko fact sheets: How Spidey’s Mask Works, Who are Spidey’s Friends?, etc.), and a return of the letters page!
A total of 14 extra pages of art and story (plus one editorial page) for just one buck!

And… With THIS week’s AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #547, the price goes back down to the AVERAGE price of $2.99! And that’s where it’s staying, sir! $2.99 an issue! Three times a month!

So… Both THIS Weds. and NEXT Weds… EXPECT to GET 22 pages a pop of ALL-NEW STEVE McNIVEN ART!

With covers… That’s 46 gorgeous Steve McN pages!!!”

I stand corrected. I will say again, for the record, that I really would like to see Mr. Slott’s career take off from this venture. I have no personal vendetta or ax to grind over the whole OMD scenario (outside of paying for reprinted material), and I can even play the advocate for the ‘hows and whys’ certain creative decisions were made. But I do feel like sometimes we get played as fans and it just comes out pretty snarky.

And in his defense, it must suck for Slott to be constantly on the lookout for the kind of snark that can affect a person’s career. (Not that I expect this lil’ blog to be all that influential, but hey, he took the time to write.) Bad press, misinformed opinions, all can sink even the most well-meaning endeavors.

I’ll try to be mindful of that in the future.

The market has spoken!

So…Stephen Colbert has this bit that he does on The Colbert Report, where for the longest time he didn’t believe in global warming until An Inconvenient Truth came out. No, he wasn’t convinced by Al Gore’s powerpoint, but by the film’s box office revenues. The movie made money, so it must be true. The Market had Spoken.

Now, by a similar rationale, the Spiderman: One More Day storyline, the arc that ‘erased’ the marriage of Peter Parker to Mary Jane Watson, was a great story!

Why? For all the bitching and moaning about ‘wiping out 20 years of continuity’ and Joe Quesada‘s disdain for Peter Parker’s status as one of the ‘ball and chained‘, the book sold like gangbusters! Sales figures so far have each of the Spidey books that were included on the OMD ‘mini-series’ ranked in Marvel’s top ten selling books, outselling even some of the X-titles.

So my question to all those fanboys (and girls) who’ve been fuming and flaming on the message boards: If you hated the story so much, why did you buy it?