Apr 072015
 

nomad1cov‘The Glut’ was not all crap, though you had to look hard to find stuff worth keeping.

I’ve decided to post a few example here on the site to give an idea of what Silverwolf and Greater Mercury Comics were competing against.

Up first: Nomads of Antiquity by M.E. Comix.

There’s practically no information available online about this company, which is a shame. Here’s what we know: ‘M. E.’ apparently stood for McNeil Enterprises, after Pierre R. McNeil. The company was based out of Atlanta, Georgia and this first Issue was published in January, 1987.

Altogether, there would be 5 issues of Nomads of Antiquity published. The series’s covers featured limited color and the art by John Skoglund was actually decent for a ‘Glut’ book. I’d have to put it near par with much of what we saw from Greater Mercury Comics.

Click for a Larger Version

Click for a larger image.

Continue reading »

Mar 292015
 

gnome (nōm) n.

A pithy saying that expresses a general truth or fundamental principle; an aphorism.


Gnome #2:

People generally don’t like movies with birds in them.

(Gnome #2.5: Pterodactyls count as birds. Perhaps penguins.)


gnomeIt’s true. I don’t claim to understand it entirely, but throw a few birds into the plot of a movie and suddenly it’s Q Score goes through the floor. 

Perhaps the most infamous of them all…Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. A lot of people will tell you that The Birds was a classic and is their favorite movie of all time. They’re lying. Continue reading »

Mar 272015
 

I keep referring to ‘The Glut’ that occurred in the B&W comic book markets in the late ’80s, and came across this great series of re-posts from the Comics Journal. Of course, I cannot re-post the whole thing, but here is the pertinent page from the article, one that explains it all perfectly.

I highly suggest anyone trying to understand just how the heck the comic book industry destroyed itself once upon a time read the whole thing over at The Comics Journal; http://classic.tcj.com/history/a-comics-journal-history-of-the-direct-market-part-two/


From A Comics Journal History of the Direct Market, Part Two by .

Black and White and Dead All Over

(Originally published in The Comics Journal #116, July 1987; reprinted in The Comics Journal #277, July 2006.

Page 2:

The bloom was off the rose in December [1986] or, if you were slow about it, January of last year [1987]. What rose, you ask? The most sacred and cherished rose in America: the belief that the American public will consume limitless quantities of useless garbage.

This idea ran afoul of a very basic economic reality: you cannot shovel shit into a finite market forever. The profiteers who jumped on the black-and-white comics-publishing bandwagon within the last year learned this when the black-and-white comics market collapsed. (The ripple was felt in the market for color comics and other formats, too.) From December through April at least, publishers have reported a drop in sales from 15 to 50 percent across the board. (That means even comics you may have thought were rock-solid have suffered.) The sales of some black-and-white comics may have plummeted even more dramatically over the four or five month period. The cause of the glut and subsequent collapse was partly greed and partly passivity on the part of “publishers,” distributors and retailers. One must wonder why, with all the breast-beating of the distributors and the ballyhooing of the innumerable trade shows held all year, there wasn’t a single mechanism within the entire infrastructure of the direct-sales system that could have foreseen or mitigated the disastrous economic collapse. Part of the explanation is that the infrastructure’s primary purpose is to create a self-perpetuating consumer frenzy at the expense of any responsible or even sane sense of proportion.

The crash began as a boom and the boom was in black-and-white comics. You would’ve had to have been particularly inept to publish black-and-white comics in 1986 and fail. As nearly as I can piece it together, this is what happened: Continue reading »

Mar 262015
 

OK, I got this one off eBay. The seller had a sketchbook full of ‘Hot Dog Chasing a Doughnut’ sketches and he was selling each separately. I didn’t ask, but I assume he went around a convention all day having every artist he could draw the same thing…a hot dog making after a doughnut.

Frankly, nearly all the others were rather unimaginative on the subject, but that is why God created Tim Vigil.

Click on this image for a larger version. You are welcome.

Nailed it.

Mar 242015
 

Forgive me for I have sinned…I went and paid money to see The Gunman. And you know it was not all that bad, but also nothing to write home about.

The movie was well made and had a long spot of suspense, waiting to see what was going to happen. Then that went way. It’s not a bad movie, just not good enough to necessarily bring up at the water cooler the next day either.

It’s just sort of there.

Given what is out at theaters, it’s far from the worst choice available but not worth changing you’re regular schedule to fit in.

Spoilers! Continue reading »

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