Remember when comics bloggers were all concerned about “snark?”
Hiya pals! I’m still recovering from my recent eyeball bugaboos, so please be patient as I slowly get the hamster-wheels running on the ol’ Progressive Ruin website again. In case you missed it, I did have a couple of smaller posts over the last few days, and I think that may be par for the course for a little while as my vision continues to defog. So you’re not rid of me just yet.
One thing I wanted to post about last week is the fact that the new DC solicitations include the beginning of the direct market-available reprintings of the new content from the Walmart-exclusive 100-page giants. My thought was that they were probably going to collect those stories into trade paperbacks, but nope, they’re going for periodicals, each containing two installments from the giants. $4.99 cover-priced periodicals, natch, but What Can You Do? I’m sure the trade will follow eventually.
The Superman one (cover pictured here in the post somewhere) is titled Superman: Up in The Sky, and the Batman one is Batman Universe. I particularly like the title of the Superman book, and quite frankly I’m surprised it hasn’t been used yet. Or maybe it has, I don’t know, there are lots of Superman comics. Batman Universe is a pretty good title, too. Hopefully the eventual collection of the Swamp Thing stories from the Walmart giants will be called…what? Swamp Thing: Out of the Muck? Swamp Thing: Born on the Bayou? Swamp Thing: Gotta Defuse It Before…? …I bet they go wtih Roots of the Swamp Thing. Y’know, again.
The interesting thing about this…when I made a comment about this on the Twitters, about how nice it was to be able to get these stories since no local Walmarts carried these comics, well, the following happened:
THEIR EYES ARE EVERYWHERE. Though I notice they didn’t comment on my rather cynical observation from a couple of years prior. …Yeah, that’s a tad snarky. Not as snarky as this, but still.
Okay, enough of these shenangians…time to return my eyes to th evault. I’ll be back midweek. Thanks for sticking around and I’ll see — well, “see” — you then.
I haven’t had serious thoughts about snark in a long time. Either that’s a good thing, because snark has gone down, or it’s a bad thing because it’s escalated into where the politics are today. Either way, I don’t miss it.
I wonder how different their response would have been had you changed “get the stories” to “sell the stories.” Hmmm….
It’s probably partly generational. Snark, and sarcasm writ large, is very much a Gen X trait, given its verbal characteristics (we were the folks communicating by phone, whether as youths, or using cell phones as actual phones when they emerged). Millennial and postmillennial bloggers — if blogger is even the correct appellation any longer there — have seeming transitioned to other forms of irony more conducive to online-based written language (or at least better expressed via emoji instead of the three or four emoticons we used BackInTheDay™).
Now, saying this, part of me wants to connect the transition from “spoken” thought balloons to “written” narration boxes in comics to the generational shift in assistant editors…
The info given from my comic shop says that these first issues of Walmart reprints are from issues #3 and #4. Not sure what they are doing with the first two of each of them.
Just went to my local Walmart today and picked up Superman and Batman #10s and the number #3s of the other four books. $30 for 21 issues of content that would be $84 at current cover prices. Shadowpact is the only title out of these that I have originals of, so I still think I’m getting a decent value.
But I still wish these were available through Walmart’s website.
“Look! Up in the sky!”
“It’s a bird!”
I always smile when I hear this. The second speaker’s excitement and enthusiasm over seeing what he thinks is a bird seems…well, a mite excessive.
I suppose one could argue in his defense that what is amazing him is not the site of a mere ordinary bird, but a man-sized blue and red one flying over a big city. However, he does not say “It’s some strange kind of bird” or “I’ve never seen a bird like that before.” He simply says “It’s a bird!” One is left with the impression that he would have reacted the same to a robin or a jay, and one is made to imagine the rest of his sojourn in Metropolis (probably his first time there): “Look! A car! And another car! And…is that a truck? Hey, I’m walking on concrete! Wow, there’s glass in all these windows!”
The title of the Swamp Thing comic should be SWAMP THING: EARTH REALLY NEEDS YOU.
Unless the story involves Arcane. In that case, the title should be SWAMP THING: ARCANE IS BAD FOR SURE.
This is probably the only place on the whole wide Internet where someone will get this joke.