Comic Book Industry death spiral

found this nice article about the reasons the comic book industry is in decline..though to me its simple, once you lose the young reader your done…and who can afford to spend the kind of money these books cost now

Price and hassle? You used to be able to get comics for one or two bucks, even less, and they were at grocery stores and things.

Now they're at bookstores and specialty stores and _expensive_. Meaning you can pay five bucks and up for a _single_ normal-sized 17 page comic. So people wait for the trades. We didn't _have to_ have a Free Comic Day back when there were full quarter bins and lots of independent publishers. Edit: Then again we didn't have bookstores _closing_ and going out of business left, right and center either.

Too much shock and awe? It used to be, at least with Marvel Comics, that the things were about _good artwork_ and relatable characters. But with the past ten years of event after event after event....a lot of the characters people grew up with are just killed or discarded. Not to mention, the artwork has suffered a LOT over the years, and I blame the Wizard Promo (tm) for this as much as anything.

Everybody draws the over-rendered splash page now. Or they draw and paint these "perfect" shots that are near-photorealistic....and posed and stiff as a board. Or they go too far the other way and do things _sketchy_ or in too much of a manga-wannabe style. This ends up producing some _odd_ results when your penciller goes one way (like oh, Humberto Ramos on his X-Men runs) and the inkers and colorists are in "splash-page" mode, painting a manga image like they're Alex Ross.

So basically, nerd-rage aside, people are tired. Tired of the grind of events that never end, and tired of paying through the nose when the comics don't have narratives or art styles they _Like_.

Imagine that, not paying $5-6 U.S. for a single comic book that irritates you. Will wonders never cease?

tales of the Legion of superheroes 318

superbly and the legion of superheroes

Howard Chaykin

I always loved his work ever since he did the original star was adaption, he had a very pretty defined style, especially faces, no one could draw a slutty broad like Howard Chaykin, though most of his men tended to look alike.
  I think every artist has a specialty and a drawback , some can't draw hands others have trouble with hair, i think Chaykin was especially good at drawing eyes

Howard Chaykin's Midnight Men

one of the things about collecting so many comics from so many year,and collecting them by art, is you get something happen like this….i find this comic from 1993, part of Marvels Epic line, Howard Chaykins Midnight Men, I read issue 1 then i'm stuck. Did i collect the whole series, don't know…so i have no idea what happens next.

   The story is fairly simple, a sharp jewel theif, with a heart of Gold, somehow gets involved with a scumbag who likes to beat up his girlfriend and has no problem killing people..the jewel robbery goes awry when a super hero similar to Batman crashes the scene….as it turn out its not the guy but the guy the guy trained to take his place…the DarkAngel is killed trying to save our hero…and the original DarkAngel decides to train our man, having seen something in him that he likes.
   I guess i can figure out what happens next, we have our villain, our Hero, the old hero who trains the new, all we need is the love interest and something for all them to fight for.
  Knowing Chaykin our hero will prevail in the end, though things will probably get messy…though i would love tp know what really happens

Spiderman gets bitch slapped

Not for nothing but DR Octopus beats the hell out of spiderman in issue 3

a bunch of mean bastards

one thing about the villains in the marvel universe they were mean rotten bastards, has the phrase          " insolent dolt " ever been used so much, I don't know who was meaner: Dr Doom or Dr Octopus, i would say it was a tie, but they both had similar dialogue