by tripp
and i miss all kinds of drama. of course, your definition of drama might be different than mine — most all of this news is more torrent news.
it seems that pirate bay isn’t taking over for oink anymore, which kinda suxors.
that’s sad, but the real meat was about z-cult. let’s say that zcult is the oink of comics. marvel and dc sent nastygrams to zcult, causing them to shut the trackers off for several days, until serj (the head of zcult) realized how bogus the claims really were. so they came back up.
as might be expected, christopher bird (mightygodking) has a nice take on the situation — it basically comes down to ‘we all know that sharing digital files increases interest and usuage in products. and if you hate this, don’t fight it, join it.’ you know, the same thing that has been said about music for years now.
anyway. somewhere in the back of my brain, i had a comic post. let me see if i can pull it up now, for those of you who are bored by talking about torrents and p2p geek stuff.
i have stopped reading comics.
for those of you who haven’t ever seen my comic collection, this might be very little. but i probably have 20 longboxes, thousands and thousands of comics. i started reading them with ‘web of spider-man’ #17, which seems to be from august of 1986..
i read comics until i got to college, which, curiously, is about the time girls started liking me.
so i stopped reading comics for several years then, but picked them back up senior year of college. and then, sometime a couple of months ago, i just lost interest.
not like a downtime, but i just stopped cold turkey. i canceled my subscription and the stack of 2 months worth of comics have been sitting by my bed, unread, for months now. looking back, it happened sometime around july, but that doesn’t tell me anything at all about why it happened.
i do know that it has to be significant somehow though. you don’t go cold turkey on a 20 year old hobby without it meaning something.
in the back of my head, i have been blaming high cover prices and dc’s inability to tell a frackin’ enjoyable story. i really don’t know. i still read all the comic blogs and know every plot twist that is happening in most every book. without reading them.
anyway. it seems important, but i’m not sure why. the good news is that i am on a reading spree these days, tearing up library book after library book. i need to get on goodreads as meg asked months ago.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Web of, #s 1-13! I migrated over to image for a couple of years, then dropped out entirely. Big into Jim Lee and Texaria (sp?)(Wolverine, Union, etc) then nobody else seemed very good–somehow, everything just got shinier… and not in a good way.
ray :: nov 26 2007 :: 2:36 pm
oh, there have been tomes written about image and the crapfest that was the 90s. there is some good stuff out there right now and a flood (comparatively) of actual critiques and essays and such about comics these days.
its unfortunate — the business side is floundering (shrinking readership, unwillingness to explore true online offerings, etc), while the actual content is some of the most diverse ever.
and yes, web of spider-man #13 is what really kicked me into comic mode, #17 was the first one i bought with the intent to be a regular reader.
tripp :: nov 26 2007 :: 3:30 pm
I used to ride my bike to the store and pick up gi joe and transformers as a kid ($0.60/ea!). I dropped out of it for a while then years later I saw an X-Men title that was apparently Jim Lee-inspired. That sent me back to pick up old copies of Jim Lee work wherever I cold find it–the style was just so different from the early stuff I’d seen. That lead to picking up a large chunk of Wolverines. I stopped that shortly after he lost his metal coating and started *snkt*-ing people with bone claws. Meh.
And, yes: Girls = death of comics. For me at least. And I’m frankly not sad at all about that.
So what was written about Image? I’m not up on my history. All I know is that “Deathblow” well, blew, Union was pretty but basically a big puss, WildCATS seemed to be penned by someone with ADD. I hung on with Spawn for a while but then that, too, got repetitive. Beautifully drawn, though. I’m still faintly interested in whatever happened to Angelina… I think she got her own miniseries?
ray :: nov 27 2007 :: 12:20 am
i can’t believe we have never bonded over comics before, since it appears we read them over roughly the same span of time. weird.
and image comics?
well, mike sterling, comics should be good, and savage critic are the first that sprang to mind…sterling esp, as he often speaks about the 90s comic bubble (and the death of superman stuff)
also, wolk, from savage critic just released a book called ‘reading comics’ that i picked up this week…there’s not a ton of image stuff in it but the few sentences are more than unkind.
and there’s more out there if you dig. but yeah, generally the 90s is not looked back upon favorably.
and, for a trip down memory lane, how about a vote on the best x-men eras?
tripp :: nov 27 2007 :: 1:54 am
Hmm. Well, my exposure isn’t overly broad, but I thought that Jim Lee/Chris Claremont stretch of X-Men was great.
But then I could also see why the 90s would be looked down upon: see, now we’ve got a lot of fat gen Xers writing about our joys from childhood, and there’s that awkward cusp as we tripped from children into ‘adults’. Of course we were disatisfied with that era, there wasn’t anything there to guide us through it. Secondly, I find the vast majority of comics to be for our inner, ever-present 12-year-old, no matter how old we become. Sure there are illustrated novels or whatever you’d like to call them that reach beyond the age and into deeper subjects, but stuff like civil war and such is little more than a child’s play. Sound and fury… signifying nothing.
ray :: nov 27 2007 :: 4:37 pm
woah. i hate to say this so bluntly, but you’re full of it. you basically just dismissed an entire medium — much like my sister used to say ‘i don’t like animation.’
a lot of the mainstream superhero comics are, i will grant you, ‘widescreen’ — essentially jerry brockheimer episodes.
however, there are quite a number of exceptions, even within the superhero genre, even within the confines of marvel and dc. alan moore, grant morrison, brian k vaughn, ed brubaker spring immediately to mind as people who have crafted superhero tales that break out of the molds you are thinking of. (this also sidesteps non-superhero comics, as well as the art/indie movement which is flourishing beyond belief these days. and even all that avoids manga…so yeah, there is a lot of variety out there. and a lot of differing qualities. but tons of it is actually really really good.)
i can give you a list if you like (and perhaps even things to sample should you enjoy reading on a computer). the ‘reading comics’ book i spoke of above also goes into some of this, as does how to read superhero comics and why.
ill wax nostalgia about comics and the 90s, but i wont let you slander the entire medium.
tripp :: nov 28 2007 :: 11:54 am
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Cool your horns, Hellboy. I didn’t just slander an entire medium. Perhaps the word “vast” was an overstatement, but please note my following words:
“…there are illustrated novels or whatever you’d like to call them that reach beyond the age and into deeper subjects…”
And, yes, lots of what you mention, I’m all over. But in the same way that in TV, every once in a while you get BtVS’s “The Body” or “Hush,” so must you have an innordinately higher proportion of “Dancing with the Stars” and “Fear Factor.” BTW, I SO think they should make a comic book version of Joe Rogan, but that’s neither here nor there…
ray :: nov 28 2007 :: 4:16 pm
the ‘whatever you’d like to call them’ tone made it sound like that was said with an air of ‘call if whatever you like, it’s still shit…’ kind of thing.
now go look at some liefeld.
tripp :: nov 28 2007 :: 4:26 pm
No, no. The “Whatever you’d like to call them” part was, well, shit, what the hell are they being called these days. Shit, that makes me sound o.l.d.
Re: Liefield. I looked through that. And then realized: I have a shitload of those covers…
ray :: nov 28 2007 :: 8:30 pm
graphic novels.
tripp :: nov 29 2007 :: 12:46 am