So here are a few issues of the digest-sized gaming ‘zine The Dungeoneer from the late 1970s that we received in that nearly-bottomless role playing collection we just acquired. I thought these had some interesting covers and thought I’d share them with you…also, these nearly triggered my ‘zine-collecting obsession and almost kept them for myself, but, alas, we’ve already sold them off and I just have these scans for memories:
ISSUE #5 (APRIL/MAY 1977)
ISSUE #7 (MARCH/APRIL 1978)
Now, issue #6, seen here:
…is sort of amusing, in that there apparently was some delay in getting the darned thing out, resulting in this cover blurb:
…and this cover date:
If only certain comics were this honest with cover dates, when they bother to have them at all.
So I was just going to leave this post (and my smartypantsiness on the Twitter) to be my comment on the whole “Before Watchmen” prequel thing, since that’s been discussed to death by everyone already. But (and you knew there was a “but” coming), I did have someone come into the shop a couple of days ago to buy a copy of the Watchmen trade paperback, telling me the specific reason he was buying it was because of the prequels announcement. “The prequels look interesting,” he said, “and since I never did read the original, I thought I’d better get it before those prequels started coming out!”
Now, for us, sales peaked on the Watchmen trade just prior to the movie’s release, then dropped to almost nothing as soon as it was out. (You know, as usual with comic book movies.) We used to reorder the book every week prior to the movie ever being a factor, ordered tons of the book when the movie was a Big Deal, and now if I reorder the book more than once every few months, I’m surprised. The local market may just be saturated after the big movie-inspired sales bump, on top of the fact that we’ve been selling the darn thing for twenty five years and most comic fans who had even the vaguest interest in giving Watchmen a go have already went.
On the other hand, we may be experiencing a Howard the Duck event, in which the reputation of a once highly-regarded comic has been supplanted by the reputation of a not-so-regarded film adaptation. Any new customers spotting Watchmen on the shelves will think “oh, yeah, that dumb weirdly-violent movie,” not “hey, isn’t that the ground-breaking deconstructionist comic about the state of the superhero genre as it stood in the mid 1980s?”
I’ve no idea how sales on the Watchmen trades have been overall. I can only go by how things are doing at our shop. Maybe its sales haven’t dropped as drastically everywhere else as they did for us, but this is a quarter-century old comic that’s been consistently available for sale, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it isn’t moving like it used to.
So there you go: the Watchmen prequels could very well get those last few stragglers who haven’t picked up Watchmen to maybe try it out, bumping up interest in an item that may have hit some rough times in its post-film adaptation era. I’m basing this entirely on the single data source of our store, and on one customer transaction, but I’ve written posts for this site on shakier foundations, so why would I stop now.
But of course it’s promotion to help keep one of DC’s most famous evergreen graphic novels alive, but going from one famously self-contained graphic novel to, eventually, a shelf of eight graphic novels could be more of an imposing detriment than a long-term sales boost. I guess we’ll see.
Now speaking of which…I have no idea how to order on these prequel mini-series. I’m hoping DC will make the first issues of all of them returnable, so I can order high in case these really take off, but not get stuck if they receive the “check this out, comics based on that crappy movie” reaction. Yeah, yeah, I know everyone online threw a huge shit-fit when “Before Watchmen” was announced, but if actual sales were tied to online reaction, All Star Batman and Robin wouldn’t have been the best-selling comic on our shelves in any given month it deigned to come out.
I suspect they’ll sell reasonably well, but I don’t expect they’ll have the life expectancy of the original, which probably didn’t need to be said but I said it anyway. At the very least, however, it’ll hopefully get a few new people gaining an appreciation for Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen…even if it’s only by comparison.
I realize none of this gets into the moral or artistic issues of whether or not DC should be doing publishing new Watchmen comics. There are already plenty of other folks arguing about that right now, and maybe I’ll discuss it in a later post, if I feel like getting more grey hair.
For another look at this whole prequel hoohar, here’s the presumably-pseudonymous Sleestak with the article “Controversy as Advertising.”
• • •
In other news, I was looking at DC Comics’ site to check some info on the Watchmen stuff, when I saw this headline:
“ANNOUNCING SMALLVILLE SEASON 11”
OH GOD NO…oh, wait, it’s just a Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8/9-esque comics-only follow-up. I hope it’s just page after page of never quite showing heavily photo-referenced drawings of Tom Welling in his Superman suit…like, he’s always in shadow or behind potted palm trees or something.
Here’s something else I’ve never seen before, out of our recently-acquired boxes of old role playing game stuff…the first two issues of The Tékumel Journal (1978), a magazine devoted to the fantasy world that was the basis for The Empire of the Petal Throne and other games:
While tied to gaming, these magazines aren’t filled with charts and stats and other RPG-style information. It is solely devoted to exploring the history and the characters of this fantasy setting that, apparently, had been an ongoing project of its creator since the 1940s. Wikipedia has more information about this, thankfully, since I was a bit thrown when I first pulled these things out of the box.
…and actually jumped ahead a bit the night my technical problems began, as I passed the time waiting for utility software and installation-type things to work on my computer by working my way through that pile of Grendel I just happened to have sittin’ here. (In case you’re curious, as of today, I’m about two or three series into the Grendel Tales from the early ’90s, after skipping ahead and reading the harrowing Devil’s Child from a few years ago.)
In the process of rereading these, I was reminded of this particular product, as advertised in the later Comico issues from about ’89 or so:
I’m pretty sure this was the same product available in comic shops and not just through mail order, as at the time we certainly had a stack of about five or six packages of Grendel masks at the shop. (That $34.95 price point sounds about right.) It took us…a while to sell them, but sell they did, and I kind of wish we still had them so I could run across rooftops at night throw ’em on the eBay or something.
Fine, I was joking about the “running across rooftops” thing maybe, but I did have a regular customer of ours ask me way back when what would happen if someone bought one of these masks, wore it while getting up to some hijinks (i.e. of a felonious nature) and suddenly Action News Team 7 is there at the shop’s front door wondering what my part was in all this. I think I told him I’d throw on one of the other Grendel masks and chase them out, because hey, no such thing as bad publicity.
…Okay, I probably wouldn’t have done that, and I’m pretty sure no one who did buy the masks was likely to go out on a crime spree, thanks to my extensive background checks, so I’m pretty sure I was safe from being the center of a media firestorm. Well, at least until a couple of years later when Superman died and fingers started pointing at me — “He’s the one! That comic shop guy killed Superman!”
Anyway, that’s a swell ad, and I hope and pray that was actually Grendel creator Matt Wagner modelling the mask in the photos there, because that would be awesome. Yeah, I know, it probably isn’t, but don’t you poop on my dreams.
Here are just a couple of items recently acquired in a collection of role playing game materials, the first of which may be of interest to comic fans:
This is issue #2 of the Wyrm’s Footnotes, a 1977 fantasy role-playing game ‘zine, which features a front cover image by the late Gene Day (shown above) and a Day back cover:
And here’s a thing I’ve never seen before until I pulled it out that box yesterday…TSR’s 1974 wargaming rules based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter novels, in the same format as those early Dungeons & Dragons digest-sized books:
There really is nothing quite like the illustrations from early TSR books:
While I hurriedly replace all the hamsters in the wheels that run Progressive Ruin Industries, please enjoy this fine Sluggo-riffic post from that best of all little stuffed bulls, Bully. A finer hooved friend one cannot have.
And for those of you who have expressed concern…no, “technical difficulties” is not a euphemism for “Mike is sick…again.” It actually was a computer problem. Things are on their way to being back to normal after many hours of computer hoohar and an ill-advised purchase of a more powerful disk utility tool than the one provided with the system, which I ultimately ended up not really needing, but I guess I have it now just in case I ever do. Don’t make significant purchasing decisions with money you don’t really have at 1 in the morning when you’re exhausted and pissed at your computer, kids!
But at any rate, I’m at the point where the initial problem is resolved, and now I’m just restoring from back-ups and redownloading software and system updates and just plain getting everything back to where it was, so it should be business as usual sooner rather than later.
Thanks for your patience, and I’ll see you all tomorrow.
It’s time again for another entry in The End of Civilization, a once-classic, stand-alone, self-contained story since cheapened and undermined by an endless series of sequels and spinoffs. But the market demands more, so I must provide! Bust open your February 2012 edition of Diamond Previews, throw the Watchmen movie on the DVD player for a little background noise, and follow along:
p. 37 – Star Wars Omnibus Droids and Ewoks TP:
NOTICE: may not contain enough, or any at all, of this:
ALSO: Ewok stories may not contain sufficient amounts of Wilford Brimley. LET THE BUYER BEWARE.
p. 65 – Grendel Omnibus Vol. 1 Hunter Rose TP:
I’d like to think the last week or so of posts on my site had something to do with this…publishing lead times be damned.
p. 103 – Swamp Thing #8:
“Behold the terrifying true potential of the Swamp Thing — a form so fearsome we couldn’t put it on the cover!”
OH PLEASE OH PLEASE:
p. 196 – The Art of Being Spawn:
(CHEAP JOKE IN 3…2…)
Well, at least there’s some art involved somewhere with Spawn.
(CHEAP JOKE DEPLOYED. APOLOGIES TENDERED.)
p. 237 – Occupy Sesame Street T-Shirt:
Well, sure, why not.
p. 344 – Kinky Nylons SC:
Oh, hey, my new “Superheroines Pose Reference” art manual is in!
p. 344 – 100 Baddest Mother F****ers in Comics SC:
Yeah, that’s right.
p. 345 – The Avengers Kit:
“Congratulations, Hawkeye! You are now a full-fledged member of the Avengers!”
“Gee, what an honor!”
“Here is your membership pin…”
“Great!”
“Your Avengers manual…”
“Um, that’s kind of small.”
“…And your miniature Captain America figurine!”
“Wait, what? What do I need this f–”
“DON’T EVER LET US CATCH YOU WITHOUT LITTLE CAP.”
“Geez, okay!”
p. 352 – The Big Damn Firefly & Serenity Trivia Book SC:
Given that the likely market for this book practically wallows in Whedonverse minutia, I’m sure the writer of this book had a devil of a time coming up with real stumpers.
p. 362 – The Punisher “Double Fisted” Red All-Over-Print Previews Exclusive T-Shirt:
I have to admit, the name of this shirt evoked a different image than the one ultimately presented.
p. 365 – “Chillax” T-Shirt:
Seriously, is there a group of superheroes less “chillax” than the X-Men? …Then again, I’m only somewhat certain about the exact meaning of “chillax,” since I am old and am not hep to the slang of you young folks these days.
p. 367 – Joker Skinned T-Shirt:
“Hello! Do you have any t-shirts emblazoned with the most appalling Batman image in recent history?”
“Well, I do have shirt with ‘Are You Retarded? I’m the Godd…'”
“…No, no, I mean something really appalling.”
“Hmmm…okay, let me get the tongs and unseal the vault. Hold on a moment.”
p. 377 – Marvel Iron Man Neon Sign:
At last, my Red Skull with Manga Fox Mask display is finally available!
p. 382 – Avengers Earth’s Mightiest Heroes Action Figures:
I will pay One American Dollar if Captain America uses anything like that Shield Launcher in the movie. “HOLD ON, LET ME GET MY SHIELD GUN!” “Right on, Cap!”
p. 389 – Living Dead Dolls: Kick-Ass Hit Girl Doll:
I’m just going to say “Oh dear” and leave it at that.
p. 389 – Tonner Alice in Wonderland: Tarrant the Mad Hatter 8-Inch Doll:
No. Please stop.
p. 400 – Star Wars Dart Board:
Comes with bonus targets: Jar Jar, Anakin (Jake Lloyd and Hayden Christensen), that two-headed race announcer from Phantom Menace, Shooting-First Greedo, and maybe Lucas himself, but c’mon, surely you’ve forgiven him by now.
p. 403 – Elvis Presley ’68 Comeback Special ArtFX Figure:
Remember when girls would go so crazy when Elvis was onstage they’d cut off their own hands and throw them at him? Man, those were some wild days.
p. 411 – Ikki Tousen Shimei “Jake Version” PVC Figure:
“…Rival schools wage war against each other, influenced by powerful jewels that contain the spirits of legendary warriors.”
…Also, there are naked girls. Because when aren’t there.
p. 416 – Loki Mischief Cologne for Men:
Now, when I make the joke “oh, so that’s what happened to all the snake venom Sigyn collected in the bowl,” you know I’m making reference to the original Norse legends about Loki’s fate (bound beneath ground, venom dripping into his face, wife catches venom in bowl but must occasionally empty it out, allowing venom to hit Loki) and not actually casting any real aspersions upon what must certainly be a fine product, and oh God please don’t sue me I don’t have anything worth taking
p. 416 – Nick Fury Infinity Formula Cologne for Men:
Ah, this will go well with my Nick Fury Vision-Health Eye Drops.
So Greg, on the Twitter, pointed me in the direction of a couple of message board threads in which the Gelatinous Cube is discussed: first, it is wondered what a dead Cube would look like, and lo, it is revealed. Secondly, in another thread, the supposed origin of the Gelatinous Cube is dished out.
Bully, the Little Stuffed Bull, and his pal, Shelly the Little Otter Puppet, try out their new ping pong kit with adorably animated results. …Okay, not strictly speaking “comics,” but it’s awesome and you should go look anyway.
This week’s entry in pal Andrew’s ongoing Nobody’s Favorites is sure to honk off some of you. And I don’t use the phrase “honk off” lightly.
