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Posts: 11114
Feb 16 07 5:57 AM
Registered Member
Quote:Perhaps. But it wasn't and he wasn't.If Goodman had chosen to stick with his superheroes a little longer and had switched to longer story formats and changed the types of villians they fought, then Marvel might have been responsible for the flowering of the Silver Age and it would have occured several years sooner then DC.History is what it is.
Feb 16 07 6:12 AM
Quote:I'd argue that the main reason Flash was tried a second time was that everything else featured in Showcase up to that point had been an unambiguous and resounding failure, and that even a modest success was grounds for hope. I suggest that if Flash had been more than a marginal success, he'd have been brought back for more than a single issue run in #8--and that in turn if the results of #8 had been more definite, there would have been no necessity for a third attempt in #13-14, which finally convinced DC that Flash was worth continuing. The nearly two year spread covered by this series of test runs was a culturally important period of development in American culture--in popular music and televison, for instance. Same thing for comics.
Posts: 10961
Feb 16 07 2:34 PM
Quote:...if Superman is selling (in the million range!), why shouldn't the Flash or some other superhero (not burdened by Jack Schiff's endless aliens, monsters, batmites, etc. in the Batman titles)?
Posts: 11307
Feb 16 07 2:57 PM
Quote:Wouldn't know. Don't buy Daredevil. Primarily because of the covers.Actually I was referring to that fifties period. I have no idea what sells these days, I don't buy any "floppies."And the forties/fifties Daredevil covers aren't dark.
Feb 17 07 10:17 AM
Quote:I just can't picture a scenario where back in 1953, a couple of 10 year-olds were standing around at the local drug store saying: "Ya know, I'd really like to try those new Atlas issues with the Torch, Cap and Subby but, ya know, the covers are just too dark."
Feb 17 07 1:29 PM
Quote:Again, the red, white and blue of Captain America's costume is the one I would have used on the covers. That would have gotten attention. Before a kid buys a comic he has to be interested in it enough to pick it up and look through it or already know it (as the Superman family) and like it. The covers Atlas used were simply not good enough to attract the kid's eye consistantly.
Posts: 2957
Feb 17 07 1:40 PM
Silver Age
Feb 17 07 1:44 PM
Quote:Regardless, your theory is just to subjective to prove or disprove.What I do know for a fact though is that when I was ten years old, back in the summer of '65, (way before such things as "comic book shops" when my friends and I went to the local drug stores looking for the next month's comics, we didn't give a solitary hang about the covers. All we looked for was our favorite characters. In fact, I don't recall a single conversation about comic book covers during my entire childhood. Covers and cover art is a lot more important to me now, as a 52 year old, then it ever was 40 years ago.
Feb 17 07 1:57 PM
Quote:Avengers (SPECIFICALLY because of the cover of Avengers #4 -- Kirby's Captain America classic!)
Feb 17 07 2:44 PM
Quote:What I do know for a fact though is that when I was ten years old, back in the summer of '65, (way before such things as "comic book shops" when my friends and I went to the local drug stores looking for the next month's comics, we didn't give a solitary hang about the covers. All we looked for was our favorite characters.
Posts: 5441
Feb 17 07 3:33 PM
Posts: 179
Feb 17 07 3:38 PM
Feb 17 07 3:52 PM
Quote:My point is not that Timely was as big and prosperous as DC or All-American, but that the runs of its backup heroes werent as miniscule as it might seem.
Feb 18 07 4:04 AM
Quote:Problem with that argument is that by the time the Atlas revival began, all the kids who were familiar with those characters (at least as far as publishers' then-prevalent theories are concerned) had cycled out of comics' customer pool. Cap, Subby, and the Torch were nobody's favorite characters by then, so bold, simple, striking graphic design on the covers would have been a good way to catch the attention of all those new readers Stan was trying to cultivate. Kinda like Avengers #4.
Feb 18 07 12:27 PM
Quote:Yea! Somebody gets it. And explained it clearer than I did to boot.
Feb 18 07 2:20 PM
Quote:Horsehockey.
Quote:The fact that kids were unfamiliar with the old Timely Superheroes has nothing to do with covers being "too dark."
Posts: 4344
Feb 18 07 3:00 PM
Quote:when I was ten years old, back in the summer of '65, (way before such things as "comic book shops" when my friends and I went to the local drug stores looking for the next month's comics, we didn't give a solitary hang about the covers. All we looked for was our favorite characters.
Feb 18 07 3:09 PM
Quote:I wonder, then, how you ever became a Marvel fan, and how your favorite characters became your favorite characters in the first place? Back in the summer of '65, the only place you could see the Marvel characters was in Marvel comics, and SOMETHING must've made you buy your first Marvel comic.
Feb 18 07 3:19 PM
Feb 18 07 5:32 PM
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