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Posts: 11114
Feb 18 07 6:02 PM
Registered Member
Quote:one of my boyhood friends was a Marvel fan and after reading his Marvel comics I was hooked!
Posts: 1753
Feb 19 07 12:18 AM
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. The status of many of DC/AAs heroes has been inflated over the years by the JSA, and better revivals. In fact, many that seem minor, like Air Wave, have more stories than ones that are considered major like Sandman or Spectre. Meanwhile, Timelys backups, who had comparable numbers of stories, didnt have the same post-Golden Age advantages, and thus seem more like footnotes.
Posts: 442
Feb 19 07 2:02 AM
Feb 20 07 6:29 AM
Quote: still feel many of you are trying to impose the standards and values (both of business and of comic-book enjoyment) of today (or of your youths) onto those of the mid-1950s. I don't think you're putting the nature of reading comics into the correct social, cultural and historical contexts.
Feb 20 07 12:13 PM
Feb 22 07 2:48 PM
Posts: 4344
Mar 11 07 10:35 AM
Mar 11 07 10:44 AM
Quote:Well....Having just, finally, finished reading the Atlas Heroes Vol. 1, I think I can safely say just why the line failed back in the mid-fifties.THEY WERE DREADFUL COMICS!!!I have NEVER taken this long to read a Masterworks volume before. It took two bloody weeks, because the stories kept putting me to sleep. EVERY story was about the Red Menace, every story had the same structure and resolution, the villains were completely goofy (yes, even the Red Skull). Frankly, the only redeeming feature was the Everett art on Marvel Boy and Sub-Mariner!Now, I know that I read at least 25% of these stories back in the late sixties to mid-seventies, as reprints in Fantasy Masterpieces/Marvel Super-Heroes or in those Giant-Size issues that Marvel experimented with. And yet, not one of the stories remains in my memory in the slightest. This book contains EVERY Marvel Boy story printed in the fifties, so it has to contain the three or four Marvel Boy stories I read in the sixties -- but re-reading it now does not trip any memories whatsoever. It's like I never read them, even though I can recall virtually every other story I read back in the day.These were sloppily-assembled books from the get-go. Kudos for trying to deal with the 4-year absences of the Big Three characters in the Young Men issues, but they can't keep their stories straight! In the first several issues, it's established that Steve Rogers and Bucky are at a private school ("The Lee School" , but by the fifth story that continuity has been thrown out the window and they're back in the army. It's established that the Big Three characters know each other in one story -- but that's about the only acknowledgement. Namor's Atlantean race is sometimes pink-skinned, sometimes blue-skinned, sometimes green-skinned. And one of the promotional blurbs at the bottom of one of the Torch stories calls Toro Bucky!Romita's art on the Cap strips is terrible -- the Red Skull looks comical, more like Red Skelton or something you'd find in Not Brand Echh. Compare Romita's Red Skull with Kirby's version ten years earlier or ten years later -- a pale imitation, at best.I'm sorry, folks. While I will probably continue to buy the Atlas heroes line, I surely won't recommend this to anyone as a "Masterwork" on any level. This is a historical curiosity, nothing more. I think I would rather read Millie The Model than another volume of this.Just to cleanse my palate, after I finished this voume, I picked up another Masterwork I recently purchased: Hulk Vol. 3. Now, no one can tell me that this is the pinnacle of Green-Skin's career, but THIS volume I was able to finish in one enjoyable 4-hour sitting. What a world of difference ten years makes....
Posts: 11307
Mar 11 07 10:50 AM
Quote:every story had the same structure and resolution, the villains were completely goofy.
Mar 11 07 2:18 PM
Quote:OK, you've just described every Timely/Atlas comic through 1961 and every DC comic through 1970! What's your point?
Posts: 3767
Mar 11 07 2:31 PM
Quote:And one of the promotional blurbs at the bottom of one of the Torch stories calls Toro Bucky!
Quote:While I will probably continue to buy the Atlas heroes line
Quote:I think I would rather read Millie The Model than another volume of this.
Posts: 4382
Mar 11 07 8:42 PM
Golden Age
Quote:the Red Skull looks comical, more like Red Skelton
Mar 11 07 11:56 PM
Posts: 5970
Mar 12 07 12:24 AM
Mar 12 07 2:06 AM
Quote:My brief take on why they didn't work is because of timing. If you're trying to revive something, you'd better make sure you're reviving something that people actually miss. It had only been a few years since the Timely heroes had gone away; they had had their 40s heydey and needed to just go away. The 50s revival was pointless; nobody felt any nostalgia about those characters; it had been too recent. Their original readership was in college by that time and too old for comics. Younger kids had moved on to other genres. By the early 60s, when the heroes came back...it meant something. By then Cap was a piece of nostalgia...he'd been gone technically for almost 15 years. Dads who'd read him in the 40s were buying it for their sons. There was a lot of nostalgia--he'd been missed greatly, and needed in the 60s as a symbol of America. Remember in Avengers #4 when the cop saw Cap return and broke into tears? It was a funny scene, but also very poignant...it meant something. That's all about it, right there in those two panels. The 50s revival meant nothing; the 60s revival meant something. That's all.
Posts: 709
Mar 12 07 11:43 AM
Quote:Only Everett's Subbie rose above that and even his work was stuck with "classic" dialogue like "Suffering Shad!"
Mar 12 07 12:21 PM
Mar 12 07 5:42 PM
Quote:They were just a feeble attempt by Stan to revive the line; an attempt that was about five years premature.
Mar 12 07 6:59 PM
Quote:And to the point that others are making, excusing the material for being lame because "they were restricted to 7 and 8 page stories". Might I remind you all that EC (being done contemporaneously with the Atlas revival) was also restricted to 7 and 8 page stories, and yet those stories were compelling and well-written.
Mar 12 07 9:27 PM
Quote:I would argue the point
Quote:that ALL of the writing being done for EC at the time was compelling and well writen. Certainly, some of it was, but reading them back-to-back ala the Archives, they are just as repetative and formulaic as their contemporaries.
Quote:It's also much easier to write a 7 or 8 page story about nobody than it is about somebody. A continuing character has to have time to develop and to build a retinue of secondary characters. Writing about a different husband killing his wife every month doesn't require continuity or a back story. Plus you can kill off the star of the story in each story!
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