Martinex1: Today I have a couple of questions to ponder. Clue us in to where your mind wandered.
QUESTION 1: How much did anticipation of what was to come add to the comic collecting experience? How important were "Next Issue" blurbs, letter page hints, and in-house advertisements in building your anticipation? A related query - how much does a movie preview impact your want to see a movie? Were "Coming Attractions" in the Bronze Age more influential than they are today?
QUESTION 2: Did you read "classic" comic adaptations? What did you think about them?
12 comments:
Boy, I. Oils discuss this at length!
In retrospect Marvel excelled at building expectations with house ads, soap boxes, checklists, cross overs... And I loved it!!! I still remember that ad for Avengers 2 King Size!!!
I read classic adaptations a lot the past 20 years as a cliff note surrogate to decide if I want to read the original. Rarely was I inspired, lol. More later... driving through the hills of Tennessee.
I have read a few solid adaptations of classics I think from Caliber Press; Canterbury Tales, Dante's Divine Comedy, Abelard and Heloise... very well done! Worth seeking out.
1) I am SUCH an easy mark. These things always worked on me. And the agony of having to wait a month for a cliff-hanger ending was unendurable. In fact, when I was very young, the rare occurrence of a favorite TV show episode ending with "TO BE CONTINUED. . . NEXT WEEK!" could potentially reduce me to tears. Hunh-- maybe that's why I didn't love BATMAN as much as so many other folks did?
In the realm of comic-collecting, there were certain holes where it even took years to acquire "the rest of the story". Avengers #81; Hulk #137 and #166; X-Men #100 (THERE was an unfortunate issue to miss! Somehow never made it to our local spinner-racks. . . ). In that circumstance, those issues end up acquiring their own little personal mystique for you, a status of private-Holy-Grail. . . so that, while acquiring them is never a let-down (and those examples are all darned good issues), you do come to realize that when all is said and done, they were simply installments in a series of issues-- pretty much on par with the other ones around them.
Most over-hyped series probably EVER?-- Yeesh, anyone else ready to raise their hand for NOVA? All of the house ads, all of the Bullpen Bulletin hype, all of the "chatter" about how this book was going to be the best thing EVER. . . and then boy, it surely wasn't. It was. . . an epitome of mediocrity, as it were. But I was at an age where I fully bought into all of the hype-- and it wasn't until about 4 issues in that I actually asked myself "Is this book even good? Shouldn't I be enjoying it more than this?"
LOVED how movie trailers used to be produced, like, 30 years or more ago. Since then, the studios have ridiculously abandoned the idea that you shouldn't give away THE WHOLE FLIPPIN' MOVIE in the trailer. It does not take a cinema-phile genius to recognize when a film's climax/pay-off is being shown right there in the preview-- which makes watching the bulk of the movie itself irrelevant. Drives me banana-boats.
2) I. . . don't think I've read any of either iteration of Classics Illustrated. BUT-- so many of those excellent Gil Kane covers do ring a pleasantly nostalgic bell (from the House Ads), don't they?
HB
My first thought is the house ad for Alpha Flight #12, forecasting the big death to come. Granted, I saw the ad at the back of Alpha Flight #11, so it was a safe bet that I was going to get it anyway, but it still made the event seem special (the only other time I remember seeing the ad was in a Fantastic Four issue that I bought months after the fact).
Similarly I loved the NEXT ISSUE box at the bottom of the letters page, but typically it was in a comic I was already reading. Still, definitely added to the sense of anticipation.
I think the most effective advertising to get me excited about an issue I might not have been aware of was in the Bullpen Bulletins "Hype Box", which I used to enjoy reading, and which would pique my interest in other series.
Movie trailers are cool. But I've been disappointed enough at this point to also not get my hopes up based solely on the trailer.
-david p.
1) I sometimes looked at the coming attraction ads before I read the comics I bought. I always liked to see what else was in the works, whether it was the series I had or anything else. I even got goose bumps looking at some of the pix you posted here. Glad to hear others felt the same way.
2). I had a lot of the old Classics Illustrated series. My local drug store didn't carry comic books, but they did carry CI. I also read Marvel's editions later in the 70's, but my school had those in paperback form, B&W.....at least the first few Marvel published. They did inspire me to read a lot of the actual books.
1. Yes, all those comic hooks got me. The checklists, the blurbs at the bottom of the page on Bronze Age Marvel's, the house ads. Especially the house ads. I remember being incredibly stoked when Marvel was advertising their upcoming "Giant-Size" books. "This is the month of Giant-Size Super-Stars!". I couldn't wait to hand over my coins.
HB- you're not alone in considering "Nova" rather unremarkable. I only lasted a few issues when it came out...
2. Have never read a "Classics" comic, although I have an old copy of Classics Illustrated "War of the Worlds" in a box somewhere. One of the very few books in my collection remaining unread. One of these days...
1. In Germany on the back cover (I mean the last page) there was a preview of all covers of Marvel titles for the next month. We were years behind the USA in reprints, so all next months covers were ready and known. This cover gallery was an extraordinary incentive to buy the next issue. In fact, for a whole month I looked at these thumbnail covers and tried to imagen what might happen in these issues. I loved the Marvel covers. Every cover was a promise of a wild ride of super hero fantasy.
2. There were no real "classic" comic adaptations during my childhood in Germany.
To answer the second question, I've never read any classic lit adaptations for comics (unless you count Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs as classic ... which I guess I do).
As for getting pulled in by ads and all that ... I can't remember picking up any specific (new) comic just because of an ad. The next issue blurbs were interesting, but half the time the story would be interrupted by a filler issue, so I learned not to trust the next issue info too much. But generally I read comics I was interested in, so the ad campaigns had little effect on me.
Same for movies today; I usually know what I want to see, and the trailers either confirm it (like for Spider-Man Homecoming, Wonder Woman, Kong Skull Island, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, or Atomic Blonde ... all of which were great) or sometimes convince me not to see the movie (like The Mummy, or Suicide Squad). I'm also one of those rare people who doesn't care about spoilers, so I'll still watch something even if I know what's going to happen. (For example, I'd already read the novelizations of Force Awakens and Rogue One before I saw the movies, but I still loved the movies.)
Thanks for commenting everybody. Like others I found my imagination leaping to great conclusions based on the next issue blurbs, letter page boxes, and ads. Sometimes I was disappointed by the conclusion, but most of the time those short phrases and brief glimpses kept me intrigued for another month.
Regarding movie trailers, I am in HB's camp. The amount they show in a trailer nowadays really baffles me. Not only do they often include shots of the climactic scenes, but for comedies they often reveal the funniest punchlines. I am the "old man on the porch" again, but I think they need to take cues from the Bronze Age when previews just offered enough of a glimpse to excite you.
On Question 2, my library had a lot of the classics on hand in the black-and-white hardcover Pendulum Press versions. I read Frankenstein and Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde over and over. The first 12 issues of Marvel CLassics (to my understanding) are reprints of those B&W books, but the later issues were all "new." I enjoyed some and others less so. It did often give me interest in the original novels when I was growing up. The Verne and Wells works particularly caught my eye. The Marvel series actually ran fairly long, but I never saw it on the spinner rack. If I had any - I picked them up elsewhere.
By the way, that Starhawk book as advertised in Marvel Superheroes and pictured in today's post never materialized and there is not much known about it. It is not the Starhawk we know but something different. Fascinating to me that they would advertise the coming issue and have it just be lost in the fog of time. I guess the anticipation is still building.
Sorry late to this conversation; I have say on the "next issue" blurbs - as per HB's comment about 'holes' in one's collection - that the bane of my very early comic reading years, when I was solely dependent on the spinner racks in the one or two grocery stores in which my mom did her shopping, was getting to the end of the story and seeing "continued next issue!" That always meant there was a good chance I would never see that issue. For a while I actively sought out done-in-one stories just for that reason (and that's largely why I detoured into funny animal and Archie comics in the 3rd and 4th grades).
And Martinex's point about that mysterious Starhawk feature never materializing reminded me of a Dr. Strange house ad that appeared in several of the comics I had at the time (which is now posted all over the internet) announcing Frank Miller as the new artist on that title during Roger Stern's run ... and that never happened.
As for trailers, I think the internet has really led these to become an art-form, or at least sub-genre, all on their own. So much work is put into them, and I can't believe there's even a thing called 'teaser-trailers,' basically a trailer for a trailer, that get 'leaked' onto YouTube, etc. a year or more before the movie's actual release date. That's kind of bonkers. And yes, I think they do often show too much - although that can have it's advantages: last year, I saw the trailer for the latest Ninja Turtles feature in the theatre, and I remember leaning over to the guy I was with an noting that "we've probably just seen all the best parts of that movie..."
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