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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 132620
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| Posted: 24 April 2012 at 8:21am | IP Logged | 1
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Technically, isn't "all-age" the perfect product?•• You'd think… However, writing truly "all ages" comics is HARD WORK. And as we have seen demonstrated all too clearly in recent decades, the industry is increasingly controlled by people who have no interest in doing WORK, let alone HARD work!!
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Bill Mimbu
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 14 April 2008
Location: United States
Posts: 7364
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| Posted: 24 April 2012 at 8:33am | IP Logged | 2
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I'm not sure if Stan Sakai's USAGI YOJIMBO book falls under "all ages" due the number of (stylized) deaths occurring every issue, but I seen a lot of parents bringing their kids to meet Stan at SDCC and Wondercon, so I assume that the book might be getting exposure with younger readers.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 132620
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| Posted: 24 April 2012 at 8:35am | IP Logged | 3
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Perhaps a greater truth is lurking here...
Or is that just TOO subtle. . . . . . .
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Neil Brauer
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 10 February 2012
Location: United States
Posts: 714
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| Posted: 24 April 2012 at 8:46am | IP Logged | 4
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What puzzles me--the creators are approximately the same age as a lot of us, they had to have read and I would guess admired the same comics of their youth. How did they stray so far afield? Were they all that much of the fanboy fringe? I haven't followed his work, but Jim Lee is the publisher of DC, does he not have a clue? Or is this model a mandate from on high?
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Chuck Wells
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 27 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 1244
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| Posted: 24 April 2012 at 8:47am | IP Logged | 5
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That image looks like someone peeling the covering off of a shiny new toilet that comes preloaded with its own crap.
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Neil Brauer
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 10 February 2012
Location: United States
Posts: 714
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| Posted: 24 April 2012 at 8:59am | IP Logged | 6
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That's a good one...not too subtle...too true.
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Erin Anna Leach
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 21 February 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 746
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| Posted: 24 April 2012 at 9:12am | IP Logged | 7
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Thank you John, for the great laugh this morning with your improved DC logo. I do not understand why the current keepers of superheroes don't understand how to do their jobs right. I have been reading the Spider-man Essentials, just finished up issue 100 written by Stan Lee with Gil Kane on the penciling duties. If someone is looking for a great example of how to write an all ages comic book, all they have to do is go and look at how Stan did it. There are of course other great examples like John Byrne of course. My point being is,if you wanted to write a highly sucessful comic book, why not look to how it was done when there was a lot of comic books being sold.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 132620
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| Posted: 24 April 2012 at 9:16am | IP Logged | 8
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What puzzles me--the creators are approximately the same age as a lot of us, they had to have read and I would guess admired the same comics of their youth. How did they stray so far afield? Were they all that much of the fanboy fringe? I haven't followed his work, but Jim Lee is the publisher of DC, does he not have a clue? Or is this model a mandate from on high?•• I've told before of how, when I was breaking into Marvel, one of the things that struck me was that there seemed to be a lot of writers, artists and editors who were basically saying "Remember all that great stuff that Stan and Jack and Steve used to do? Let's not do that!" Fortunately, back then there were still some of the Old Guard running the show, so even tho much of what Marvel produced in the Seventies (when I was getting in) was crap, it was at least crap that contained some echoes of former greatness. Today, when so many are concerned with "leaving their mark" and showing us their "vision" for the characters, the echoes, at Marvel and DC, more and more faint.
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Neil Brauer
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 10 February 2012
Location: United States
Posts: 714
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| Posted: 24 April 2012 at 10:01am | IP Logged | 9
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Was the 70's really that bad? Some of my favorite storylines were from the Disco era. PROJECT PEGASUS was a great one in MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE of all titles. THE SPHINX, SALEM SEVEN in THE FANTASTIC FOUR. Maybe my mind is clouded with nostalgia.
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Robert Bradley
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 20 September 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 4834
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| Posted: 24 April 2012 at 10:57am | IP Logged | 10
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There was plenty of great titles in the '70s - Jim Starlin's ADAM WARLOCK, Don McGregor's BLACK PANTHER, Steve Englehart's AVENGERS and CAPTAIN AMERICA, Steve Gerber's HOWARD THE DUCK and Chris Claremont's X-MEN among them - but there was an awful lot of crap being put out at the same time.
Marvel was much more scatter-shot in the '70s, trying and abandoning titles for characters very quickly in many cases (the Cat, Skull the Slayer, Black Goliath, Bloodstone, the Beast, Doc Savage, Frankenstein's Monster, Red Wolf, the Living Mummy, Devil Dinosaur, the Eternals, Night Nurse, the Inhumans, Son of Satan, Red Sonja, the Champions, the Human Fly, Nova, Spider-Woman, Omega the Unknown, Machine Man, and the Gunhawks among them) and they tried every craze that came along.
We saw a lot of reprints (westerns, science fiction, humor, girl's titles, horror, golden age, silver age, you name it), licensed material (Godzilla, Hanna Barbera, Tarzan, Kull, John Carter) and half-baked ideas. It was almost like they were having a hard time coming up with as many titles as they wanted to publish.
The limits that National put on Marvel when they were distributing Marvel's comics in the '60s was a blessing when it came to the quality of the comics published.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 132620
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| Posted: 24 April 2012 at 12:25pm | IP Logged | 11
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Was the 70's really that bad? Some of my favorite storylines were from the Disco era.•• Over the years I have met many people whose introduction to Marvel happened in the 1970s. They became diehard fans, and I have often said that stands as mute testimony to the power of those characters.
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Andrew W. Farago
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 July 2005
Location: United States
Posts: 4079
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| Posted: 24 April 2012 at 12:52pm | IP Logged | 12
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When Disney bought Marvel, I was cautiously optimistic that we'd see a big push toward making their books all-ages again, and that Disney would throw around their weight to make newsstand distribution a priority, whether as standard comic books or something magazine-sized, like Archie's Life with Archie comic. They made a four billion dollar investment in the company, and I'd bet that a "mere" four million dollars could have gone a long way toward making that happen. (Imagine buying a $40,000 car and only having to spend $40 to get it a new paint job, state-of-the-art stereo system, GPS, an anti-theft system and an engine upgrade...)
And once Marvel did that, Warner Bros. would follow suit and make kid-friendly comics a priority again, too. We'd still have comics for grown-ups, but any character that appeared on Saturday morning cartoons would only appear in comic books that an eight-year-old could read without fear of being grounded. We'd see a new golden age for comic books, and MAD Magazine would once again be the most dangerous thing a kid might pick up from the newsstand. Guess that didn't happen...
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