ITT: characters who got inconceivably long runs back in the day but are complete jokes/vanished/irrelevant today.
>Morbius got a 32 issue series in the 90s
>Alpha Flight got 130 issues throughout the 80s and 90s

>>149157276 (OP)
Pretty wild that ROM was just some action figure tie-in comic and it ran for 79 issues counting annuals.

>>149157276 (OP)
Arak Son of Thunder got around 50 issues. While it's nothing compared to Batman or Spider-Man, that's almost half a decade it was in print. No small success, especially back then.
The same ia true for Vigilante that also lasted exactly 50 issues.

>>149157276 (OP)
Morbius had TWO books at the same time back in the 70s, taking over Adventure Into Fear, and getting the lead feature in the Vampire Tales magazine, he was getting solo material by his third or fourth storyline. He got cured after both books were cancelled, but had a comeback in the 90s, with that series, but by the time of his movie this had all been memoryholed so badly that the average 'Marvel fan' genuinely seemed to think Morbius was never anything but a Spider-Man villain of the month.

>>149157305
It's even more astounding considering Rom was just one figure, with no other related toys, and the comic outlasted the toy by years.

The original Guardians of the Galaxy are a good example. After a one-off debut story in the 60s, they appeared in a number of 70s Marvel books, including their own series for 10 issues. After disappearing for ten years, a 1990 relaunch lasted about 5 years, plus a spinoff mini. They've hardly ever been seen since, and have been completely overshadowed by the new version of the team that span out of Annihilation Conquest.

>>149157276 (OP)
The Human Fly, a comic that took a real-life masked Canadian stuntman and dropped him into 616, lasted for 19 issues in the late 70s. Which is actually a pretty short run for the time, but 99% of Marvel characters couldn't manage that now.

>>149157276 (OP)
>>Morbius got a 32 issue series in the 90s
>32 issues is inconceivably long to people now

I want to cry but I can't help but laugh.

X-Man, 75 issues. Ran from 1995 to 2001.

>>149157543
If it wasn't for Strange Brain Parts, I never would have known about the Human Fly or its background. In short it was just a soulless cash grab taking advantage of the Evel Knievel craze of the time. And Marvel was licensed to make the comic, the Human Fly was owned by a pair of Canadian brothers.

>>149157276 (OP)
Patsy Walker had two comics that lasted 124 and 110 issues before she was Hellcat.

>>149157565
To be fair, even well-established characters like Captain America and Iron Man are struggling to reach even 25 issues before relaunching for a new writer. Lower-tier characters have little chance of lasting a year anymore. It's the absolute state of Marvel in the 2020s. A 32 issue run for someone like Morbius would seem impossible by modern standards.

>>149157276 (OP)
So like.....every 1992 ongoing?

New Warriors
Darkhawk
Sleep Walker
Thunderstrike
X-force
Nomad
Secret Defenders
Darkstars
The Ray
WildCATS
Maxx


should i keep going?

>>149157543
Oh, that’s who this guy is.

>>149157619
>college or a career
How times change. Now you need a doctorate in quantum mechanics just to mop floors at a KFC in Detroit.

>>149157619
Pretty much all girls comics of the 60s would count here.

>>149157611
It's actually a pretty fun comic, imo. One issue is about a crazed former daredevil setting out to try and kill the Fly during his latest stunt because the guy had attempted the same one 30 years ago and failed, then didn't get any recognition in the papers the next day because Pearl Harbor happened. They don't make 'em like that anymore.

>>149157543
I remember another Fly guy except he was powered by some fly in amber type gem. Barely recall it since I only thumbed through it in a comic shop once.

>>149157641
The Maxx was a wild ride, but it's obvious it had no direction at the start. Kind of amazing it managed to last as long as it did.

>>149157611
>In short it was just a soulless cash grab taking advantage of the Evel Knievel craze of the time.
The comic might have been, but an IRL Evel Knievel knockoff would still have to be doing similar stunts, so the real Human Fly must have been pretty based.

>>149157670
Kirby did a character called the Fly for Archie Comics, might be that?

>>149157669
>They don't make 'em like that anymore.
They kind of do. I don't know if they're still around, but Binge Books did some very retro superhero comics made by industry veterans. The oldest being Sal Buscema whose inking at 80 still looks better tahn most modern inkers' output. He also draws some of the covers.

>>149157276 (OP)
Two-Gun Kid lasted 93 issues (technically 136, but everything after 93 were reprints).
Rawhide Kid lasted 115 issues (technically 151, but again, reprints).

Unlike DC with Jonah Hex and the like, Marvel has never really done much of anything with their old Western characters. They've never even been adapted into other media.

>>149157670
Sounds like the 90's iteration of Archie's the Fly.

>>149157641
X-Force actually did have a lasting legacy though, it keeps getting relaunched and is considered an iconic part of the X-Men franchise.

>>149157740
What is this? An image for flies?

>>149157699
IIRC he did only a couple of stunts and the comic was active longer than the real Human Fly.

>>149157276 (OP)
I think Alpha Flight is Marvel's longest series that still remains mostly uncollected and is thus most of it isn't available on Marvel Unlimited.

>>149157738
>Marvel has never really done much of anything with their old Western characters.
Two Gun Kid travelled to the present a few times, he was an Avenger once. Also, they turned Rawhide Kid gay for a publicity stunt.

>>149157780
Even just one stunt would take more courage and balls than most of us will ever have, though.

>>149157732
This looks dope, I'll check them out. Thanks anon.

>>149157780
IPI Comics, an Australian outfit, has been doing Fly revival stuff in the past year. I wouldn't say it's been particularly great, but they run with the conceit that the 70s comic is canon and part of the mystery now is if it's the same guy under the mask 50 years later, which is pretty fun. They're about to launch a Kickstarter for the next arc, which is going to be Jim Krueger writing the Human Fly vs Dracula. I *will* be reading.

>>149157740
That was it.

>>149157276 (OP)
You know what's insane? Morbius' ongoing series lasted more than any series Blade has ever been in. In fact, if you add up every volume of Blade's solo series together, he's only ever had 43 solo issues total in 50 years despite being such an iconic character. That's just sad, the exact opposite of the topic.

>>149157863
Glad to help. Their site Sitcomics actually has digital versions of some of their books for sale. I got a few floppies of the Blue Baron and I was pleasantly surprised. It was a bit cheesy, but 100% genuine without modern day sarcasm or irreverant meta commentary. Don't know if that's changed, but I hope it hasn't.

>>149157678
It also sort of petered out at the end too. The universe just sort of collapsed and everyone woke up as alternate universe selves that were never doing the human/villain thing at all.

>>149157763
They are also mostly considered a joke of 90s era bleeding edge and meaningless splash pages.

>>149157632
That's the part that makes me want to cray and laugh. Even a C lister used to be able to carry a book longer than an A lister can today. You had to be a massive fuck up to not get at least a issue 25 and marvel was willing to give books a chance to actually catch.

>>149157641
I liked Silver Sable.

>>149157945
>The universe just sort of collapsed and everyone woke up as alternate universe selves that were never doing the human/villain thing at all.
The way I understood it was all the characters were fundamentally broken people, from Julie to Maxx to Gone to Sarah. So their only hope was to start over in different worlds and hope they get dealt a better hand.
Which is kind of depressing for how real it is.

>>149157954
The quality of modern comics is so low that 90s edginess is a bounty by comparison.

>>149157276 (OP)
>>149157740
>>149157975
Got this got that and got that. I used to really like the design of The Fly

>>149157954
You're judging a book that lasted 10 years on just the first year. And you are not too good to enjoy early X-Force.

The later 'death squad' iterations of X-Force seem to more influential on subsequent relaunches than the original team are, thoughever.

>>149158003
The whole story slowly evolved into a cry for help by the creator who apparently self inserted as Mr Gone and recreated his real life story of being repeatedly raped by his aunt. Shit went off the rails at that point.

>>149158148
Going to need a source for that, anon, otherwise you're just talking shit.

>>149158128
I hate the fucking death squad concept. I know people love the remender book but fuck me if I don't prefer the classic X-force 90s cheese and all. It at least felt more sincere and not some pretentious edgy bullshit play at maturity with the baby hitler bullshit.

Tomahawk (a Revolutionary War frontiersman) debuted in Star Spangled Comics in 1947 and ran as a feature in that series until 1952. He was popular enough to be featured in a second title at the same time, World's Finest Comics, but running even longer, from 1948 to 1959. On top of that, he also got a solo title that ran 22 YEARS (!!!) from 1950 to 1972. So in other words, dude was in THREE fucking ongoings from 1950 to 1952!

>>149158318
that's an awful lot of buzzwords, dude

>>149158318
Agreed, but even the previous deathsquad version was preferable to the Remember run trying to be deep, mature and thought-provoking. It was unapologetic action schlock for the 2000s in the way original X-Force was for the 90s.

>>149158479
I'm getting Commander Mark vibes from the cover.

>>149158216
Zoomer bitch Sam Keith talked about it decades ago. Read fucking anything faggot

Any of these actually good?

>>149158947
no

>>149158947
depends on (You), the reader

>>149158947
Some of what's in this thread is alright.

>>149160333
Stop being a fag.

>>149157276 (OP)
While Morbius still gets trotted out from time to time, his 90s series is persona non grata due to the behind the scenes drama that went on with it

>>149157276 (OP)
Those were the days.

>>149157543
A friend tells me that this book was published in Spain but no one knew why since it was so obscure.

>>149161088
Go on.

>>149161153
Len Kaminski wanted the book to be more ore less similar to the old 70s Morbius stories and full of meladrama and angst over Morbius being a vampire again.

The artist however was a huge fan of the edgelord comic book Faust and basically kept telling Kaminski he's a faggot and demanding he be allowed to draw X-rated violence and gore and since Kaminski is a well known asshole, convinced the editor to fire Kaminski and give him control over the book.... Only for the editor to get his first scripts, which were X-rated gorefests and told him "no just no" and revoked his writing privileges, leading to him quitting after clashing with the new writers rushed into the book to keep it on schedule.

Ironically the book still sold the best out of all of the MS spin offs, which is why it outlast the others but Mark Gruenwald, the only one at Marvel who liked Kaminski, was embarrassed and pissed that his friend got screwed over and repeatedly buried the book, which carried over to other editors long after Mark wws gone

>>149157863
nice cover

>>149157276 (OP)
Firestorm had a 5-issue miniseries in the 70s and then in the 80s got an ongoing that ran for 100 issues. He also got another run in the 2000s that went for 35 issues

>>149157276 (OP)
Blackhawk somehow lasted 243 issues, and strangely enough, it was originally published by Quality Comics but when DC bought them they kept the Blackhawk series around and kept its original numbering.

>>149161329
>>149161153

>>149162422
Always in safe hands with Sienkiewicz.

>>149161329
>While penciler on Morbius, the Living Vampire, [Ron] Wagner repeatedly came into conflict with the Comics Code Authority due to his insertion of sexually explicit content into his backgrounds.

>>149162698
I completely forgot about Blackhawk! Wild that that comic is still going right up until the mid 80s.

>>149162731
>And that, as much as anything else, led to my drinking problem.

Silver Surfer's hardly an obscure character but his solo run lasted near 150 issues.

>>149163040
lol

>>149157276 (OP)
Shang-Chi's solo run in the 70's lasting just over a hundred issues is pretty wild. He also had solo stories in Deadly Hands of Kung-Fu to add to that count a bit more. Tomb of Dracula and Werewolf by Night going for 70 and 43 issues respectively is also pretty impressive.

On the larger scale, weren't the Legion of Superheroes always on shelves until they got cancelled in the New 52? I've never really read them but my impression is that from the 60's to 2010's they were being consistently published, like the Flash or Justice League.

>>149163159
80s Legion is really good

Mayday has the longest run of any female marvel character at 104 chapters, followed by another 46 chapters. She kept MC2 running singlehandedly. Now she just makes minor cameos in Spider-Verse content completely out of character or overshadowed by other Spider-Girls.

>>149157975
It’s the problem of the market refusing to buy and read anything that isn’t muh nostalgic childhood favourite book.

>>149163069
Surfer was very popular and is still a classic cosmic character, that’s why he keeps getting miniseries all the time

Night Man fascinates me.
>23 issues in Vol 1 and 4 issues in volume, but that's still plenty for such a character
>a crossover with Gambit
>his own TV series (which I actually like, pure 90s camp at its finest)
>completely memoryholed by Marvel alongside the rest of Ultraverse

The movie ended up being it's own weird cult hit, but the original Thunderbolts did pretty well for its self: 75 issues of the original run from 1997 to 2003. And even after that they'd try to use the name for weird shit with some of the originals showing up from time to time.

Really, its biggest claim to fame is completely changing the course of some of the side characters. Songbird was a nobody, a fucking sidekick to a schmuck villain. Now she's a sort of C-Lister hero who's been allowed to hang onto her massive character development. Same with the original Beetle, now Mach-Whatever.

>>149163159
Shang-Chi was capitalising on the kung fu craze

>>149163401
Is there not some rights issue or royalties deal that prevents/dissuades Marvel from using the Malibu characters? Something like that.

>>149163406
Always tickles me to think that, as you say, Songbird has been a kind of notable character with a lot of development for decades at this point, but her actual debut was as one of several blatant Female Furies knockoffs.

>>149163159
The Legion is weird in that it's a huge influence on tons of creators and a bunch of X-Men stuff in particular is directly inspired by or in some cases reused ideas (rejected or otherwise) from it, but it's just not really that big a deal anymore, and the Legion isn't really known to wider audiences.

>>149163406
>The movie ended up being it's own weird cult hit
>hit
Kek, you wish, drone.

>>149162698
Military comics used to be really popular. Take "Our Army at War" for instance, it's the book that gave us Sgt. Rock (he made his debut in issue 83 and he then took over the book), it lasted 302 issues, but it didn't get cancelled it was renamed Sgt. Rock and lasted until issue 422.
And over on the Marvel side, Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos lasted 120 issues.

>>149163069
if fags like maximilian know him and want him in mvc, he's not obscure

>>149163886
Isn't there some war story anthology punlished in the UK that's still going?

>>149157641
Dollar bin comics. someone look up impact comics. Also everything by Valiant. Shadowman, Solar, Turok, Archer & Armstrong, XO. Maybe also Malibu comics.

>>149163927
>hardly an obscure character

>>149163159
That era of 70s exploitation with Shang Chi, Iron Fist, and Powe Man/Luke Cage is weird. Luke Cage had like triple the comics that Black Panther had yet received no recognition from Disney/Marvel until Netflixed got the character.

All of Cyclops' children had a solo series, and for some reason he didn't.

>>149164196
Commando. I don't know how much is new stories and how much is reprints these days, though.

Zombie Tramp has been going for like 10 years and no one knows what it is aside from the few of us who check in on Action Lab. She has a brand new book too by what appears to be a whole new company so time for another 10 years of total obscurity.

>>149164370
This makes me wonder if Hack/Slash is still going.

>>149163635
Adding the word "cult" makes his point come across clearly. Not a mainstream hit, but cultivated a small, devoted fanbase.

>>149164376
iirc there was a Hack/Slash crossover with Zombie Tramp or Mercy Sparx not too long ago

>>149157738
I think that Kid Colt showed up as a fictional character in a movie Howard Stark was producing in Agent Carter.

>>149164561
>but cultivated a small, devoted fanbase.
But it didn't.

>>149164290
It really annoys me that there is no Mayor Luke Cage comic.

>33 chapters
>Sleepwalker himself only has 89 appearances in total
>20 of which were after 2018

>>149157276 (OP)
>Alpha Flight got 130 issues throughout the 80s and 90s
x-men and related to x-men characters were that popular back then.

>>149161329
>Kaminski is a well known asshole
Pity, I liked his books.

>>149157975
>Even a C lister used to be able to carry a book longer than an A lister can today

>>149163406
It sucks.

Books now are artificially pushed now like Rainbow Rowell's She-Hulk.

>>149166765
What does artificially pushed even mean? And wasn't the book cancelled over a year ago?

>>149165719
People growing up in the 90s have nostalgia for him. Even though the only interesting thing about him is the character design and the sleep gimmick

>>149167613
It means they don’t like that the book exists, didn’t immediately get cancelled after an issue and that other people claim to like it

>>149163294
Meanwhile Marvel is dead set on trying to get Spider-Gwen over for some reason despite perpetually failing.

>>149168185
Because Spider-Gwen sells merch.

>>149164376

>>149163033
Actually it got canceled in the late 1960s with issue #243, came back for six issues (#244-250) during the DC Explosion-Implosion, before coming back for a final 23 issues (#251-273) in the early 80s when Steven Spielberg tried to get the filn rights.

>>149165529
There was his negligible Gang War tie-in.

>>149165719
Sleepwalker is great and I'm glad he doesn't really show up in modern comics

>>149167613
Pushed despite low sales?

American Flagg has 50 issues. Never heard of it until last year.

>>149164370
>>149164567
>>149168254
Gonna binge read it and Hack/Slash soon.

>>149169751
That's just every comic in Current Year.

>>149162519
Crazy how a character can go from a 100 issue series to being lucky to get background cameos.

>>149164291
>All of Cyclops' children had a solo series, and for some reason he didn't.
I don't see a Stryfe series anywhere, anon. Cable was a breakout star character before he got retconned into being Cyclops' son, and X-Man was an AU version of Cable that took over Cable's title for the Age of Apocalypse event, and ended up being one of the four AoA characters who got carried over to 616. Being an AU Cable was more significant to him than being an AU son of Cyclops.

Cyclops is a team book character with no life outside of his team, you wouldn't try to push him as a solo character any more than you'd try pushing Invisible Woman or Iceman as a solo character.

>>149161329
>and since Kaminski is a well known asshole
He is? What did he do?

Does the way late 90s Marvel tried to bury anything from his Iron Man run have anything to do with this?

>>149163027
>While penciler on Morbius, the Living Vampire, [Ron] Wagner repeatedly came into conflict with the Comics Code Authority due to his insertion of sexually explicit content into his backgrounds.
Jesus, what was he putting in the backgrounds?

>>149162731
>Martine was Morbius' love interest since his debut
>got turned into a vampire several times
>got killed in a random ASM issue in 2010
I don't think anyone brought her back for any of the Morbius solo books since.

>>149169948
Problem with AF is that no one wants to acknowledge the bob Chaiyjen issues to the point that 90% of the series is lost media due to no one wanting to reprint those issues

Kaminaki is just a huge piece of shit and one who got work purely because he was one of the few true blue loyalists to Gruenwald.

He was such a piece of shit that his family pretty much abandoned him to a crooked nursing home that stole all of his money and even after Steve Grant got Rich Johnston to publicize his plight, no one offered him any help.

>>149157276 (OP)
Ms.Tree had 50 issue run and was popular enough for Marvel to try to rip off with Dakota North.

>>149157276 (OP)
Dreadstar has run for something like 70 continuous issues plus a handful of standalone trades across four separate publishers. Only Starlin diehards are interested.

I don't want to make a thread for it but in terms of the opposite one thing that surprises me is how short some of the more famous Euro Comics are. Asterix has been going since 1959 and only has 40 issues

>>149171444
You have to remember that Franco-Belgian comics release a new album a year at most, and often it's 2 or more years. Those albums range from 48 to 60 pages, although they're on larger paper, drawn more detail, and have more panels than American comics.
The format is just completely different.

>>149157632
I remember thinking the mid-00's Darkhorse Star Wars comics lasting "only" 50 issues seemed short. Nowadays it's practically unheard of at all.

>>149168213
duh, make a movie about mayday and she would sell merch too

>>149170741
I have 2 sets of the comic.

>>149171275
Titsstar...... mmmm

>>149169948
More than that. There was a second volume.

It was the second biggest indie comic of the 80s. At its peak it was selling 100,000 per month.

>>149171088
Also had a volume from DC. One of the best series ever.

>>149171275
Another one of the best series ever.

>>149168213
no she doesn't

these modern characters are not as popular as you think they are

>>149163027
Well? Examples please?

>>149161329
>The artist however was a huge fan of the edgelord comic book Faust

Ron Wagner wanted to be a Tim Vigil type? That seems really odd considering he had such a classic style more like Jerry Ordway than anything edgy.

>>149163159
Legion is kind of like Doctor Who, people come across a run they like but when it hard reboots they rarely stick around and every time DC resets they always have to proto-retcon the Legion to synch with current continuity. The silver-bronze age fans were hit the hardest because unlike any other ongoing teen books the characters got older, had families and their fanbase were very loyal.

>>149165719
>"Sandman done the Marvel way"
-Tom DeFalco

>>149169948
American Flagg, Grimjack & Jon Sable: Freelance were all put out by First Comics and they're worth reading.

>>149168254
Wake me when Katie comes back

>>149165719
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LslbGxOWGwU
wrong!

>>149173319
>>149171275
I'm a fan of Starlin but never read Dreadstar. I really need to fix that.

>>149164376
Crossover minis, can't remember the last normal comic.

>>149174207
You should. Give it until issue #3 of the ongoing to judge it. That's where it REALLY gets good.

>>149171275
It's his best work.

>>149175673
It definitely runs out of steam as it goes on, but when it's good it's REALLY good.

>>149168254
>>149169988
Read it yesterday, was terrible
Good art (compared to other published western comics) and some decent secondary characters wasted on a shitty story with no payoff. Cassie (Hack/Slash protagonist) acted completely out of character by letting Zombie Tramp "go", almost admitting that this is nothing but a dumb collaboration comic with no meaning at all. Vlad not making an appearance should be an indicator of "no fucks given" by the authors.
After the good collaboration comic with Body Bags, I can no longer justify this crap.

>>149157603
It was very strange.

>>149157565
It's mostly inconceivable because Marvel and DC relaunch books after two years.

>>149157632
It's not that they struggle, it's that faggots like Brevoort think big numbers scare off readers when constant relaunches make it more confusing.

Books of Magic got a 75 issue long run over 6 years in the 90s.
Like this was a book about a child character on the periphery of Vertigo most well known for being the audience insert for DC's "Magic Explained" Miniseries.
And yet somehow despite it all Tim Hunter got a whole 75 issue run which then transitioned into a new book in Names of Magic (same story but a new creative team for the rebrand) the next year that lasted 5 issues which was a prologue to another run Age of Magic that lasted another 3 years and 25 issues, before getting another 15 issues as Books of Magick: Life during War before concluding.
There was basically an entire 11 year run of Tim Hunters adventures over 120 issues from 94-05 and I have never once heard anyone talk about these books ever. Admittedly only the initial 75 issues were actually good but its still an insane number and shows how much momentum Vertigo had in its day.

>>149163406
I want Karla back as a main character.

>>149177616
I had no idea that got an ongoing.

>>149177616
The initial mini series was an evergreen so the fact that it got a follow up ongoing isn't strange at all. If anything, if there was never any more Books of Magic comics then that would've been weird.

>>149157305
Rom was pretty ok and it ended well.

Marvel published Groo for an entire DECADE.

>>149164370
I don't remember the details, but there was some legal stuff going on for a while with Mendoza having to get the rights back from Action Lab.

>>149157619
I like that they went meta with that by making it an in-universe publication. It's a fun bit of backstory for Hellcat.

>>149176522
Damn, that sucks

>>149177554
To be fair, those 90s obscure ongoings probably outsold several of the current high profile ones, it's just how bad things got.

>>149178293
Fun fact: Groo is why the term "Marvel Zombie" exists as the book was hated by a huge chunk of the Marvel audience but most of the hate mail from fans about it, referenced the fact that the bulk of its readership were "zombie" type fanboys sho blindly bought EVERYTHING Marvel put out, even if they hated it because it was a Marvel comic.

>>149177635
Isn't it true that one of the chief reasons Moonstone has been buried as a character is due to the fact that she's more popular than Carol, to the point that the brief Dark Reign run where she replaced Carol outsold the rest of the run where Carol was Ms Marvel?

>>149177616
The ongoing wasn’t as good as the miniseries

>>149173820
A shocking amount of First Comics output is solid considering how quickly they folded

>>149180578
They had good creators

>>149158479
So correction to OP but Tomahawk had continuing ongoing content from 1947 to 1972 which is impressive for a DC comics character. He was also one of the characters chosen to feature in the Superbook dictionary too. Crazy he's all but forgotten today. I think he was retconed to being part of either Blackhawks (another long ongoing DC feature) and Hawkman (as a reincarnation of Carter Hall?) but not sure if that's canon anymore?

>>149157763
X-Force always seemed like a very early Image team Marvel book. I mean aren't Youngblood and WildCATs and Gen13 basically parodies of X-Force?

>>149157740
Yeah it's so weird in the 90s DC did the Impact line of revisioned Archie superheroes. Why, I have no clue?

>>149157787
Alpha Flight is also odd in that although a spinoff of X-Men most of it is largely forgotten unless you counted sometimes showing up in Wolverine.

>>149157939
You can tell from his early 70s adventures they really wanted Morbius to be a spinoff from Spiderman continuity. He wasn't even linked to the Tomb of Dracula stories. Then in the 90s they tied him and Tomb of Dracula characters and Ghost Rider and other Marvel horror characters into Midnight Sons tie-ins but only GR emerged with a popular long running series from that.

>>149177616
Books of Magic was always in a weird spot because of the suspicious similarities with Harry Potter.

>>149162519
Don't forget Firestorm got pushed in the Superfriends cartoon as a new hip Justice Leaguer like Cyborg but today Cyborg only made it as classic member of JL.

>>149180399
I just assumed that someone at Marvel really liked Sergio and wanted him employed? Groo to be fair was a pretty shitty Conan parody. I don't even think Sergio A even read the Conan comics it was just kinda it's own thing.

>>149177616
>John Ney Rieber
>Gary Amaro
>Peter Gross
>Jane Yolen
Who tf are these people? Did they do anything else for DC? Never fucking heard of them before and I read DC comics in the 90s.

>>149181655
Peter Gross was the main artist on Lucifer and The Unwritten.

>>149181280
DC seemed to dabble more in licensed properties than Marvel but it was odd that they'd experiment with other lines of superheroes when DC already had the deepest bench imaginable.

I mean...who was asking for First Wave?

>>149181384
Ghost Rider wasn’t even actually popular, they purposefully kept the book in print despite not good sales because iirc there was a GR movie deal in development for ages and Marvel wanted to capitalise on it if the movie ever came out

>>149181773
So wait you're saying Morbius was more popular than GR? I don't believe this

>>149181710
That's basically just Dynamite comics with Batman.

>>149181676
>Lucifer
Oh well yeah I read some Vertigo series but avoided that shit and Sandman so figures.

>>149180441
That's fair, the miniseries had a singular intention behind it and did so with beautiful art and good writing.
The ongoing was a bloated behemoth that was more a bunch of smaller vertigo style stories happening around Tim Hunter which drag him in rather than being a book about Tim till the last 25 issues pivot to a larger more focused storyline that gets him acting and recontextualizes why Tim spent the book letting things happen to him.

>>149157619
I don't think Englehart gets enough credit for really codifying and popularizing the idea of mining old comics and continuty for characters and concepts that could in turn be used in new ways. Like Lee's use of Namor and Cap isn't particularly different from what came before and are just continuations of what had already been done. Thomas was kind of the same. But Englehart going back to the old Archie ripoffs to take Patsy and make her a superhero or going back to the 1950s Cap stories to reconcile them with modern continuity leading to the creation of William Burnside and Jack Monroe. Lee (and Kirby) were the OGs and Thomas wanted to use the old Golden Age characters he loved but Englehart was among that first generation of guys who came of age reading the Silver Age stuff and took their modern fandom and geek sensibilities and had an interest in finding new ideas in old stories codifying a lot of how cape comics have been written ever since.

>>149180399
This is delusional nonsense that you either made up or are parroting from tumblr or where-the-fuck-ever.

>>149181177
Did you even read the post you're replying to?

>>149181177
You're thinking of Nighthawk who was retconned into being a past life of Hawkman

>>149181467
>classic member of JL
moderate chuckle, people only care about Cyborg as part of the Titans, nobody gives a fuck about him as a Leaguer

>>149163347
And yet they replaced him in the latest movie...

>>149157276 (OP)
Just wait OP. It'll be morbin' time again one day

>>149173820
>American Flagg, Grimjack & Jon Sable: Freelance
These all lasted a while and you can bet barely anyone has heard of them. Adaptations are the only way comics get popular.

>>149184998
Jon Sable actually did get adapted into a TV show, it's just that no-one remembers that either.

>>149184998
Everything about this post is retarded.

>>149157732
Is that any good? The style right down to the coloring comes off as very Marvel circa 1997 which is actually pleasant to look at in comparison to a lot of overdone modern art.

>>149158318
2000s comics were utterly obsessed with superhero black ops squads for whatever reason. That was just the zeitgeist. Fuck at Marvel alone, you at one point essentially had X-Force, Secret Avengers, Secret Warriors and post-Civil War Thunderbolts. That's four, FOUR, books about black ops superhero teams being published at more or less the same time it's completely absurd.

>>149157975
>I liked Silver Sable.
It's kind of a shame that Steven Butler basically got stuck doing Sonic slop because I really feel like he should have had a good career as a Marvel guy. His Silver Sable and Spider-Man art was really damn good, always looking nice and keeping in with the general visual style of the time period but not tripping into its pitfalls.

>>149170646
You're likely reading something from the dipshit who headcanons behind the scenes shit about old comics because he thinks nobody can disprove or argue with him since most posters here are zoomers who have never read the comics he's talking about. You can always tell it's him because he writes big posts that boil down to "X fought Y because X or Y was an asshole" in ways that are both specific but also vague enough to be hard to challenge.

>>149163159
Legion was legitimately DC's most popular team during the 1960s and '70s. When it was leading/taking over Adventure Comics or Superboy it was pretty much outselling anything that wasn't Superman, including Batman (bar the bump it got for a year or two from the Adam West show). By the 1980s the only thing outselling it at DC was Wolfman's Teen Titans. All the fuckery created by COIE and then Five Years Later is what tanked it leading to the spiral of reboots and confused continuity that ran its popularity completely into the ground.

>>149186241
>fuckery created by COIE and then Five Years Later is what tanked it leading to the spiral of reboots and confused continuity that ran its popularity completely into the ground.
Mind writing up what happened for someone who has never read Legion? The DC Finest for it is super cheap so I might pick it up, I had no idea it used to be really good.

>>149163513
Nobody knows. Various things have been speculated from royalties/rights issues to Rosenberg still retaining some form of creative/producer oversight to Marvel simply seeing no value in trying to revive the characters or untangle whatever the mess is that would let them use them or even just release collections. All we've ever gotten are a few people saying it's not because of rights (and then turning around and saying that it partially is because the contracts were shit/complicated) and some vague statements from Quesada and Brevoort about NDAs.

>>149173820
>>149180578
Quality Comics, Comico, Eagle Comics, First, even Valiant had good stuff. I really hope some day people will wake up and realize they skipped a bunch of great series because it didn't thave a Marvel or DC logo on it. Like there are so many obscure comics way better than entire runs of Spiderman or Superman.

>>149178293
I love me sum Groo. I have some of the Marvel issues and some of the ones before Marvel. Also the Dark Horse ones. Basically I love Sergio Aragones.

>>149180426
No? What actually happened is that Bendis and Ellis undid all of the character development she had undergone under Busiek and Nicieza to have her go right back to essentially an extreme version of her pre-Thunderbolts characterization and pushing her as Carol's villain/rival. On top of it, Marvel's basically done everything they could since Secret Empire to bury the original Thunderbolts because it doesn't fit with their desire to make it into Bucky's black ops team. So all the mainstays of that book like Abe, Atlas, Moonstone, etc. either don't get used anymore or have been killed off (or in the case of Zemo, constantly having his characterization whiplash all over the place). Songbird, at one point, was easily one of Marvel's more popular female characters, being like B-rank below your Rogues and Storms and the like; probably about on par with where Carol was in the 2000s and was starting to get into video games and shit. Now she basically hasn't made any significant appearance since the Secret Empire era Thunderbolts series until the One World Under Doom mini. It's atrocious how Marvel's treated the team, the characters and the entire concept over the last 20 years.

>>149181800
He might be right cus there is not a lot of Ghostrider comcis. I think he was a left over from the 70s biker fad.

>>149181419
It's basically a problem where it gets labelled as ripping off Harry Potter despite the opposite being true (the miniseries came out in 1990 which is totally conveniently the same time that Rowling said she just happened to get the idea of a book about pretty much the exact same character right down to physical appearance).

>>149187336
Too bad Gaiman himself dismissed any plagiarism
And I mean that, it's too bad

>>149186573
Basically, a lot of what people liked about Claremont's X-Men or Wolfman's Titans came directly from Legion. There's a lot of goofy Silver Age stories but there was also a sense of ongoing evolution and soap opera: characters would fall in love and get into relationships, new members would come and some would dramatically leave and characters could even die. So you take that and then add in that it's a bunch of attractive teenagers/young adults and it builds up a loyal following that then really hit in the 1970s when you started getting even more soap operatic and dramatic plots and artists like Dave Cockrum and Mike Grell to make the everything and everyone look cool and beautiful.

But the problem is that it was heavily tied to Superboy as a core part of its history and regular member. When Superman was relaunched after Crisis, one of the Superman editorial decrees was that Superboy never happened. This is a problem because he's integral to the Legion and Legion is one of DC's top books at the time. So there was a convoluted series of attempts to fix this, first by saying the Time Trapper created a pocket universe with Superboy (but didn't explain all the other stuff like Supergirl) and then Glorith recreating things again and replacing Superboy with Mon-El as the Legion's inspiration. There was also the SW6 Legion, younger clones of the now adult pre-5YL Legion (the post-Zero Hour reboot Legion was based primarily on the SW6 Legionnaires using the same style costumes, codenames and personalities).

>>149187878
(cont.)

In 1989 it was decided to relaunch the Legion book with Giffen as the plotter and Tom & Mary Bierbaum as his co-writers. Giffen, at this point, was influenced a lot by South American/indy comics and shit like Watchmen so he wanted to Watchmenify the Legion taking things in a way darker and more serious direction with a scratchier, grittier artstyle. The whole book is just grim and morose; Sun Boy becomes an eternally suffering flaming sekeleton, Earth is blown up, etc. The Bierbaums were longtime Legion fans so they used their position (because Giffen really didn't give a shit about the plot or general integrity of the Legion) to basically do whatever they wanted in ways that aligned with their headcanon. This is where the infamous retcon, for instance, that Element Lad's girlfriend Shvaughn Erin was really a guy named Sean Erin who was in love with Element Lad and using science stuff to become a woman. Because see, there was a long time belief among Legion fans that Element Lad was gay. Why? Because his costume color was pink/magenta; that's literally it. So basically the Bierbaums were free to do shit like this because Giffen and editorial were completely checked out on the Legion and things became such a confusing mess that it was eventually decided to use Zero Hour to completely reboot the team. Because unsurprisingly, turning the team into a confusing clusterfuck of retcons, double retcons, triple retcons, clones who may not be clones, and fan-created headcanon nonsense tanked everything and took the Legion from near X-Men levels of popularity to a punchline that fans don't want to touch.

>>149187477
Well Gaiman was a "nice guy" and male feminist so he wasn't about to accuse a woman writing the most popular book series in the world of ripping him off. But everyone knows she ripped him off.

>>149187963
Oh I forgot, I'm sure other people can chime in but the Bierbaums were also not above ruining characters they just flat out disliked. Dawnstar was one of the most popular members of the team but the Bierbaums hated her so they brought her back possessed by an entity called Bounty, had her wings ripped off and then put into a coma after Bounty left her never to be seen again. Again, is it a wonder why the team ended up in the state it did?

>>149187878
How they never thought to have the legion be inspired by adult fucking Superman instead of all this crazy nonsense is beyond me

>>149157305
More amazing what Rom affected in the Marvel universe from then. From a nobody new character too.

>>149188432
The Legion started out as teenagers for a start but more than that, he was an actual member. Superboy wasn't just a character who showed up now and then, he was a main member. Removing Superboy would erase all the stories he'd taken part in which is effectively the team's entire history. Erasing him was like erasing Cyclops from the X-Men. They theoretically should have just rebooted with Crisis but the team was at its peak popularity so they likely saw no reason to becauae the large readership was attached to the stories that had built up.

>>149157523
Also wild that the 90's run is still the longest unbroken Guardians run, in terms of issue numbers.
Granted, nowadays the book would've been relaunched after Valentino was fired.

>>149157276 (OP)
I have no.doubt alpha flight will get either a movie or a tv series

>>149187963
>The whole book is just grim and morose

You're exaggerating.

>>149158479
Robin the boy wonder

>>149157276 (OP)
Morbius still makes appearances from time to time. How is it inconceivable? Is it inconceivable that characters like Cable or Silver Sable had a comic back in the 90s?

The British Sonic comic lasted for 184 issues and was basically the canon for UK kids in the Classic era. Nowadays it's only remember for it's take on Super Sonic shoving up in an FNF mod.

>>149185809
The few Blue Baron comics I read feel like a late 80s early 90s saturday morning cartoon put on a page. And I mean that in the best way possible, as in the comics were a fun blend of action and adventure.

>>149157632
25? They're fucking relaunching Iron Man after just 10 issues.

Between that and a whole bunch of shit going on lately it wouldn't surprise me if there were serious problems internally at Marvel

>>149180399
I've never heard of this claim. Do you have a source or are you actually making it up

>>149189611
>it wouldn't surprise me if there were serious problems internally at Marvel
You realized this just now?

>>149186241
>You're likely reading something from the dipshit who headcanons behind the scenes shit about old comics because he thinks nobody can disprove or argue with him since most posters here are zoomers who have never read the comics he's talking about. You can always tell it's him because he writes big posts that boil down to "X fought Y because X or Y was an asshole" in ways that are both specific but also vague enough to be hard to challenge.

That's the guy who keeps pretending to be a Marvel Insider. And you're right, he has a very distinctive writing style. He says shit like that to make guillble people like >>149165949 fall for his fanfic

>>149189643
There were a bunch of people in denial about it on here.

>>149157276 (OP)
>Written by Christopher Priest
>Was meant to be Supermans anti hero rival
>Play crucial role in crossovers
>Literally matters less to the Superman mythos now than Nuclear Man

Comics is such a strange place.

For what its worth, the idea of Superman having a rivalry that isn't just another villian but an other hero would be kind of cool. Sucks that DC is so tunnel visioned on promoting the core four that they dont even try to branch out anymore

I wouldn't say it's LONG but Nomad getting a two year long solo series (and a miniseries prior to that) and then falling into irrelevancy until Brubaker unceremoniously killed him to bring back Buttfucky in one of the shittiest retcons ever should count, right? You can argue that Andrea Sterman (who debuted in that first miniseries) is now a more relevant character than him thanks to Moon Knight.

>>149186934
>even Valiant
Certainly not.

>>149190255
The Shooter-era Valiant stuff is good.

>>149183712
Similarly when he went over to DC he brought back Hugo Strange (who at that time hadn't been seen in decades) and Deadshot (who at the time only had one story from 1950)

>>149190255
They did.

>>149163513
>>149186821
I was told there are three problems:
One is that the original paperwork of ownership, royalties and participation rights are a mess and in some cases the people involved are dead so they'd have to track down the estates.

Second is that since Marvel was acquired by Disney everything has to go through Disney's legal department which actually bills other departments for jobs like this so Marvel would have to be ready to pay to get it all untangled and during the process any of the creators and their estates could challenge whatever Disney came up with and drag it all out in court.

3rd is that the characters are just not considered valuable enough to have go through all this expenditure and risk of opening up a can of legal worms.

>>149190430
Most certainly not.
>>149190457
If by good stuff you mean below average capeshit, then sure.

>>149190517
You have below average taste, sure

>>149190511
That still doesn't explain the NDAs though. Stuff related to Rosenberg is what's always made the most sense to me because simply because that guy is one of the slimiest to ever enter the industry.

>>149190673
The irony...

>>149157619
I was reading a bunch of Archie and old rip offs and this one always fucked my mind. One of the more successful Archie rip offs, aimed at girls, and it was fucking Hellcat. I didn't read her so I had no idea this was her origin

>>149188953
they got everything Disney wants in a Marvel movie. There would be a gay character, cgi character, diversity characters and a woman leader after the man leader gets killed off.

>>149181255
>I mean aren't Youngblood and WildCATs and Gen13 basically parodies of X-Force?
No, none of the early Image books are parodies, as that would imply some comedic intent. Conceptually, Youngblood is more like the Avengers than a renegade outlaw vigilante group like early X-Force. WildCATs is basically X-Men but if they have powers because they're aliens and descendants of aliens, instead of the mutant stuff. Gen13 is a teen superhero book, but the most 90s teens imaginable.

A lot of the early Image team books did have action-heavy stories built around the early X-Force style of "team jumping from an aircraft into a battle", and the same artists being involved meant a lot of characters had a similar design aesthetic.

>>149178701
It's a very odd decision, Marvel basically had their own, female-lead version of an Archie-type book, that ran for years, but after it ended, they turn her into a superheroine, and discard all of her previous history as non-canon, so Hellcat is effectively just an OC anyway. It sort of kills any later opportunity to ever relaunch the original character.

>>149181319
Alpha Flight's early appearances were in X-Men, but aside from Wolverine's ties to the group, conceptually it's just 'Canadian national superhero team' more than 'X-Men spinoff', which probably made it harder to get X-Men fandom to care.

>>149181384
Morbius' 1970s solo material isn't really linked to Spider-Man, either. It's it's own thing, and some of it is weird and insane even by the standards of 1970s Marvel.

>>149181773
I don't know how it sold in the 70s, but 90s Ghost Rider was very popular for about 4-5 years, the whole Midnight Sons line launched out of GR being that popular. It eventually declined so badly Marvel cancelled the book mid-story though.

>>149186047
I really liked his Spider-Man work, but his Silver Sable run has me convinced he really should have been working on more Marvel or DC heroine titles. Even DC had the Catwoman solo, but Marvel never really went in for the excesses of the 90s bad girl craze, IIRC Silver Sable and Elektra were the only heroines to get ongoings during those years, plus She-Hulk already having a book since the late 80s. Marvel really should have tried giving some of the X-Men and Avengers girls solos during that era, with artists like Butler, and just seeing if something stuck.

I mean, it's good for Butler that he got regular work after he left Marvel, but an artist like that is wasted on drawing talking animals instead of hot girls.

>>149186976
>Songbird, at one point, was easily one of Marvel's more popular female characters
You broadly had a point with the handling of the original Thunderbolts, but that part has never been true.

>>149163406
>Same with the original Beetle, now Mach-Whatever.
He's Mach-Dead is what he is

>>149187963
>Because unsurprisingly, turning the team into a confusing clusterfuck of retcons, double retcons, triple retcons, clones who may not be clones, and fan-created headcanon nonsense tanked everything and took the Legion from near X-Men levels of popularity to a punchline that fans don't want to touch.
I feel like this has basically been happening to X-Men over a 20-25 year period, but the fandom is so large that it's just taking forever for it to gradually decline to the levels of "this used to be huge but now it's almost irrelevant" like happened to the Legion and the Titans (outside of their cartoon).

>>149190853
It was the 90s comic that they kept publishing for couple of years despite the sales tanking

>>149190703
Isn't he also one of the guys who financed Awesome Comics and strongarmed Rob Liefeld into signing over the rights to a lot of his characters to them, leaving that guy owning Youngblood and Supreme?

>>149190730
There was no indicator that the Patsy books took place in the MU since they predated it. Her showing up in a Fantastic Four story caused a lightbulb to go off in Englehart's head and when he took over Amazing Adventures he decided it'd be a trip to take this Archie style character, who now existed in a world of Spider-Men and Doctor Dooms, and further integrate her into the setting by making her a superhero. Which then opened the door for further integration of all these disparate teen humor and western and monster and other characters into the setting too.

>>149188938
Valentino wasn't fired, he was one of the guys who left to start Image. Though IIRC Valentino had wanted to keep writing Guardians for Marvel and Liefeld had wanted to keep plotting X-Force, but things got so heated with the Image exodus that it became impossible.

That book was a jarring change from 70s GoTG though, in terms of a lot of the characterizations and relationships (Starhawk was the best original Guardians character and the 90s run kind of sucks for him in particular and he's away from the rest of the team a lot of the time), though I can understand why they shifted from the future being so different to present day Marvel as to be completely alien, into the 90s book's style of constantly introducing future version of Marvel characters who were popular.

>>149190255
Babe, we are talking about classic Valiant.

>>149190951
Maybe that's overstating it but Songbird in the 2000s into the 2010s was definitely popular and unlike Jessica Drew in the 2000s or Carol in the 2010s her popularity wasn't forced. She should have been made an Avenger sooner, at least after Avengers/Thunderbolts and definitely after Civil War. Instead by the time it happened it was 10 years too late and in a third string gimmick book with
a jokey name post-Hickman and put with shitters like Sunspot and Squirrel Girl when the Avengers name stopped meaning anything.

>>149190978
Yes, also got the rights sold to a film adaptation of a comic (Cowboys vs. Aliens) that didn't actually exist so he had to get a miniseries shit out after the rights were secured. He's a grade A huckster.

>>149191034
>into the 90s book's style of constantly introducing future version of Marvel characters who were popular.
Aw man, that's all they do with 2099 now too. Sucks.

Death's Head might count as having appeared a lot, and has had multiple versions exist, but he's just a footnote and a catch phrase these days.
Marvel UK might count overall since he did go on for a long time, but outside of maybe two maybe three characters, I don't think anyone could name a single one.
page 1

>>149191194
page two

>>149188506
Yeah, on reflection it's pretty insane that he was an active character in 616 instead of just being in his own universe.

>>149174096
I am weirdly invested in Vampblade.

>>149191952
A lot of the licensed comic guys were the main universe.

>>149192365
Yeah, Micronauts, Shogun Warriors...I'm surprised that Inhumanoids comic wasn't.

>>149191194
>>149191196
The short-lived (even by 90s standards) Death Metal established the existence of an omega-level technopathic/telepathic mutant as an unborn child.

>>149190703
The NDAs are mostly about how much of a cut the creators are supposed to get in perpetuity.

>>149191194
Marvel UK was a strange time - Death's Head 1 has met both Doctor Who and the Transformers.

>>149181255
No. Gen 13 is basically a 90s teen superhero book. WildCATS is kind of like if the Kree and the Skrull continued their war on Earth as the X-Men and Brotherhood. Youngblood is a government super team, which X-Force isn't

>>149181773
>>149187117
The fuck are you talking about

The only things that were outselling Ghost Rider in 1991 and 1992 was usually X-Men and Spider-Man stuff

>He might be right cus there is not a lot of Ghostrider comcis

Ghost Rider got Spirits of Vengeance as a spin-off title during the early 90s

>>149157276 (OP)
i read the morbius comic from the 90s and i liked it.

>jokes/vanished/irrelevant

blame the writers for that. morbius is a geneticist so he could work on projects with beast and lizard

as a living vampire he could go incognito and infiltrate real vampire covens in team ups with blade

he would still fit in with the supernatural setting on a midnight sons team

>charactes who got inconcievably long runs
sleepwalker?

>>149157603
i would like to actually read this but there's no volumized version of it. i thought it was interesting dark beast, who isn't a psionic character, was able to avoid nate so many times

>>149194975
Can't normal vampires tell something's up with Morbius? I thought they shunned him

>>149187975
Yeah but he didn't say anything later when he turned against her when she started killing trannies in her new book with a machine gun

>>149157678
>>149157945
Yeah I read the comic after watching the show and was really disappointed by the awful comic ending
The show ends up being better than the comic honestly

>>149194987
probably, yeah that's a good point, so they might have to use magic, which would be a good excuse to ask dr. strange for help or use other magic based characters that are in to necromancy for an effective disguise with or without blade

>>149189322
Nah, dick sonic from fleetway is a popular joke and well known in the community

>>149192391
It died without even finishing adapting the five episode pilot of the show, maybe it would have been had it continued.

>>149187963
That explains alot why i never gelled with those legion issues
They felt very fanficy and it was now
Sometimes trying to canonize fan stuff really can be detrimental

>>149157543
Is it true that he's Earth X Daredevil like what Xitter says

>>149186573
Legion went to shit for a couple of reasons:

1. They took it and several of their top team books (Titans, Outsiders) and started selling it directly to comic shops and forcing newstand only buyers to have to wait a year to read the stories via a poor selling reprint line that ended abruptly after they finished reprinting the end of the Sensor Girl saga.

2. Crisis removed Superboy from canon along with Supergirl. Originally Byrne and Levitz had a gentlemen's agreement where Levitz could keep Legion lore intact so long as he didn't make any explicit references to Superboy and Supergirl outside of easter egg bits (which in turn is why Sensor Girl got turned from Supergirl in disguise to Projectra). But the kike Mike Gold, freshly hired to be one of DC's top editors, HATED Crisis and the rebooting of Wonder Woman and Superman and threw a screaming temper tantrum demanding they explain away Superboy in the Legion, purely on the idea that it would kill Legion as part of Gold's kike desire to destroy DC from within for daring to erase his beloved Silver Age status quo.

3. While Byrne and Superman editorial were BFFs with Paul Levitz, they HATED who replaced him on Legion when Levitz got promoted to top guy at DC. Keith Giffen was a dickhead plagerist, Mark Waid like Mike Gold DESPISED the post-Crisis Superman and made no secret he wanted to fuck over DC and the Superman crew for greenlighting the Post-Crisis reboot, and Tom and Mary Bierbaum were a pair of toxic Legion fans/Waid's BFFs who were basically given card blanche to be the REA L writers on Legion, after Giffen admitted to Waid that in spite of becoming famous because of the Legion, Giffen didn't give a shit about the franchise/it's lore and basically only wanted to write Legion so he could butt-fuck it into becoming a part-Watchman part-Euro-scifi comic that Giffen was actively ripping off at the time with his artwork.

>>149196396
>>149196396
The grim dark TMK run and Waid (as an editor) greenlighting a story from another anti-Post Crisis Superman hack (Allen Bennett) for a Christmas special that pretty much stated that Supergirl was still alive but now a ghost ala Deadman, led to editorial taking the Superman crew (now without Byrne around to mediate) to ban Legion from using Superman and it's lore. Basically damaging the franchise's lore. Giffen had to change Mon-El into Valor (and create Andromeda to replace Supergirl) and in recent years, Waid has confessed that they nearly also had to erase Brainiac 5 from Legion lore too, only managing to save him by literally prostrating themselves to Levitz and basically begging him to intercede (only for the Beirbaums to stab Levitz in the back by turning Levitz's waifu creation Shvaughn Erin into a tranny because of the fact that the Beirbaums demanded Element Lad be a faggot, simply because his costume had pink in it.
But even with this, the 5YL shit had a lot of bad things going for it that drove off readers. Waid and the Beirbaums got rid of 90% of the cast and explicitly killed off two of the book's most popular characters (Wildfire and Phantom Girl), the former being killed off because "he wasn't a real Legion member" due to Waid and the Beirbaums hating everyone who joined the team after the Adventure Comics run. And besides the tranny shit, you had Projectra turning into a weakling/having all of her character development as Sensor Girl wiped out, Lightning Lad having never been resurrected/simply having Proty 1's mind transferred into the revived but mindless body of Lightning Lad, Cosmic Boy being depowered, Dawnstar having no wings and acting like a completely new character and no one noticing that she was running around as Bounty, Sun Boy as a traitor, Timber Wolf a mute giant hulking beast monster, the SW6 Legion (which was the Clone Saga before the Clone Saga), etc.

>>149196409
While it's romanticized today as a failed experiment, it can not be understated how much fucking damage the 5YG and Mark Waid/the Beirbaums/Giffen did to the franchise. Mark Waid in particular, as he was the one who ultimately gave the kill order to reboot the franchise and keeps rebooting it every time a Legion incarnation strays from his myopic "Adventure Comics #300-380 are the only Legion books that count" view.

>>149196109
I reread Earth X fairly recently and don't remember anything that suggested it. Either I missed it completely or it's something that's been implied outwith the comic.

>>149196109
Do you even have to ask? Of course not.

>>149196109
i don't think so
Daredevil is explain in a comic Marvel released in 2020.

>>149181710
NGL for a minute I thought Doc Savage had a huge blonde afro

>>149196109
The last Earth X mini was a prequel that ended with the reveal that the protag was DD.

>>149194987
Oddly, Morbius' second storyline had him able to turn other people into regular vampires by biting them, and it happened again in one of his last 70s solo stories, but it's not usually something he can do.

>>149196396
Thanks, ChatGPT

>>149157305
Excellent comic in all ways

>>149194079
Ghost Rider’s popularity wasn’t stable in the 90s, that’s why they cancelled the title entirely after eight years because they had kept it on life support after sales plummeted.

Tim Drake can't headline his own ongoing today

>>149171275
Sc-Scarlett and Destro?

>>149203400
Hasbro owes Starling a check the size of the moon.

Do you think the cancellation line at Marvel/DC is too generous or too harsh for niche/outright brand new characters?
Say what you want about Invincible but a comic like it could've never lasted as long at Marvel or DC with the sales it got (and even then Kirkman admitted it likely would've had to end early had he not done the big twist ahead of time)

>>149202729
It got cancelled in 1998 when Marvel was basically at its lowest point. Other long running books like X-Factor, Excalibur and Silver Surfer were cancelled too that year. Daredevil likely would have been outright axed as well if not for Smith. Go look through what Marvel was putting out that year, it was almost all shit.

>>149203422
That image for ants looks like it says it's from 1985, Scarlett was one of the original GI Joe team from 1982, and Destro was introduced the following year.

>>149203568
Due to Marvel's bankruptcy, by 1998 they were cancelling books if their sales were falling to a point where later issues were projected to go below cancellation numbers, instead of waiting for them to actually sink that low.

X-Factor and Excalibur didn't actually hit cancellation level though. X-Factor was meant to be on a one year hiatus and replaced with Mutant X during that time, but that book was selling better than X-Factor, so it kept running for 3 years and X-Factor never came back until a relaunch years later. Excalibur was just one of the lower selling X-books, and they ended it as an excuse to bring Kitty, Nightcrawler and Colossus back to the main X-Men books.

>>149203641
That's actually a reprint of the earlier Dreadstar #1, which came out in 1982. The Destro-looking Syzygy Darklock debuted in the OGN "The Price" in 1981.

In Dreadstar the main culprit of ripping off Starlin is Starlin himself, though - Syzygy is just Adam Warlock, Teuton is just Drax, Skeeve is Pip the Troll, the High Lord Papal is Thanos with a little dash of Magus...

>>149203641
Excalibur lasted as long as it did because Harras had a stick up his ass that he would never cancel an Xbook because of how it would make him look. The only reason he killed Excalibur was that 1998 was the 35th anniversary of the X-Men and Harras got the idea from the success of Heroes Reborn to restore the classic pre mutant massacre line up but with Scott and Rachel replaced with Marrow and Gambit. Which meant killing Excalibur.

>>149203428
The market has refused to support new characters pretty consistently for the past twenty or so years. There’s only handful of exceptions to this precisely because occasionally something happens to gain enough popularity that the company actually puts an effort in pushing the character instead of immediately pulling the plug when sales aren’t great

>>149157276 (OP)
Does Cerebus count? Obviously it didn't come from a big publisher, but it's a huge run, pretty important for its time, but doesn't seem like anyone really gives a fuck these days. Probably in no small part to Dave Sim's general Dave Sim-ness.

>>149203428
Modern American consumers aren't adventurous at all. Think about Japan's best manga and if it had been produced today at the same quality but published at DC or Marvel do you really think it could get past 12 issues? Even if a comic has a fanbase that wants to see it succeed they have to be super cautious about promoting it or else you'll see huge "anti-shill" push back. That's where we're at nowadays. People lionize not reading comics.

I really like this thread. I rmeembwr researching this (for marvel) a few years ago.
I think they decide to make movies amd tv series based on appearances and also number of issues form the characters runs.
This is why I think aaalpha flight will somehow appear, even if as cannon fodder to die in the first act of a movie
Unless they think that using the name in the marvels equals a reference to the team

>>149204921
>This is why I think aaalpha flight will somehow appear, even if as cannon fodder to die in the first act of a movie
Feige does seem to love adapting things Bendis did, so that's alarmingly possible.

>>149157954
Citation needed

>>149203817
To be fair, Excalibur was never close to cancellation numbers, it was just a low seller for an X-book in the 90s, and being set in a whole other country made it harder to tie in to things happening in the other books that much.

The only X-books to get cancelled in the 90s before 1998 had been reprint books, but Maverick was the first cancellation that was actually because of low sales, so that probably took away any of the stigma to just canning Excalibur so the three former X-Men members could go back to the main team, the book would have just died without them anyway.

>>149194975
If you really want to read X-Man then you shouldn't have any trouble tracking down the initial run. I doubt you'd even have to pay more than a dollar per issue if you're willing to hunt. That said, you ain't missing much. Pretty close to the nadir of 90s X-books, only thing worse I can think of is the Mackie era X-Factor.

>>149203641
Ghost Rider did have good sales in the early 90s, but in typical Marvel fashion they decided "if that many people will but a monthly book we should expand and try to convince them to buy an entire line if books." That oversaturation also killed Punisher's sales in a similar timeframe.

>>149205198
Speaking of irrelevant characters, aren't most of the things people like about Ghost Rider from when Danny Ketch held the mantle?

>>149204505
Oldfag here
I'm convinced 80% of Cerebus readers were really buying it just to read Sim's editorials and responses to letters which could all be summed up as "Capeshit sucks, amirite?" and the cult was around him and not the character.

>>149205198
Yes. That action also coincided with the peak of comic overproduction. Ghost Rider only fell further down the charts in 1993 because there was an excess glut of new material. You got DC doing Reign of the Supermen, Knightfall; Image was launching multiple titles, Valiant was doing Turok #1 and other new anticipated launches, Image AND Valiant were doing the Deathmate crossover, Dark Horse was pushing out Comics' Greatest World, Malibu was launching the Ultraverse. And that's not even getting into Marvel competing with itself with a lot of books.

They oversaturated Ghost Rider with a Midnight Sons line in a time when the comics industry itself was oversaturating. Then when the crash happened somewhere around late 1993 or early 1994, everything started being in freefall and a lot of shops began closing en masse over the following years.

1995 was when Marvel fucked up the industry by buying their own distributor, causing everyone major to panic and go with Diamond

Late 1996 was when Marvel when bankrupt

>>149206452
It would be more like 50-60%. There was definitely a cult in the way that people believed Sim's advice for going into self-publishing and not with a company and it's the kind of thing that sound feasible (because Sim had success in it) but in reality it's not for everyone because Sim had advantages that other people wouldn't have, and some people had to learn the hard way

>>149204505 is kind of right only because several things happened:
Sim went and challenged Jeff Smith to a fight and did more inflammatory editorials. This made it more awkward for people who previously defended Sim's work to defend Sim's work and so they kinda just stopped talking about him altogether, except in snark.
This might also extend to comics news coverage too, but that's affected also by a number of different things.

And some time after that the Cerebus books fell out of print, which made it harder for anyone to read it.

>>149206710
>Sim had advantages that other people wouldn't have
qrd? i don't know much about the beginnings of cerebus

>>149205171
i did a few years ago and they were two dollars an issue. i couldn't find all the issues and gave up after a while. i've only partially read it, it still don't understand the scope of how dark beast could be an antagonist to an omega level mutant, and i feel like it could have been made in to something really important but probably wasn't

i did however manage to get all of the mutant x issues and annual together though. was able to read them all and traded them in to me LCS for store credit (in this way, ive been able to read more comics than anyone i will probably ever know. shelf threads show pics of people buying brand new shit and letting it sit there. those are amateur readers)

>>149203825
The only time new characters are supported is when they're endlessly forced everywhere by editorial ala Miles, Kamala, X-23 and Spider-Gwen.

>>149205171
>mackie era x-factor
LOOOL if that consists of the ending two or three dozen volume one x-factor issues yes i read those and liked them at the time

>>149207884
Those are all characters that proved popular on their own and then editorial started to push them more widely.

>>149206452
>editorials and responses

ha, if you think his responses are dumb or trite, you should read his intro to Puma Blues. it's such a waste of time holy shit

>>149207719
He started Cerebus in the 70s. That was when direct market distribution was in its infancy, there wasn't that many indies, and Marvel/DC stuff was at a reasonable level, so it was way easier to get noticed. Sim being able to put out work on a regular basis also gave him an edge over other indie creators

Compare that to making an indie book in the 90s, if it was early 90s you'd have to be competing with Marvel and DC glut, and also indie glut. Some people like Jeff Smith managed to weather it and come out on top but there's a bunch of other indie titles that used to be praised but for some reason or other have since been forgotten

>>149206353
Yes. They think it's simple to get Ghost Rider popular by making him Johnny Blaze again and giving him Ketch's look/personality. As we've seen it doesn't work that way.

>>149207911
I read Puma Blues when it was published and dropped it hard.

>>149208182
i read a hardcover of the whole thing a few years ago and liked it.

>>149207964
makes sense, thanks for taking the time anon

>>149157523
>It's even more astounding considering Rom was just one figure, with no other related toys, and the comic outlasted the toy by years.
The comic was way better than the toy and it was cool to see the dude interact with the Marvel heroes. He's also the reason why Rogue became a hero.

>>149173247
>duh, make a movie about mayday and she would sell merch too
They had all the time to make a movie about the DAUGHTER of Spider-Man. You'd think they would've done that for the girl power push instead of Madame Web. Especially if they had Tobey play Spider-Dad.

>>149207964
Smith didn't quite weather it. He had health issues around #27/28 (which was the culmination of a major storyline) that caused the climax of the entire arc to get delayed for about a year or two and it took forever for him to heal back up and get the book back on regular schedule; by which time everyone and their mother (and Wizard Magazine as well) stopped giving a shit about Bone and the series ended up ending with no one giving a shit about it and with zero publicity.

It wasn't until the late 2000s, when Smith consented to colorizing the entire series and reissing it as digests via a deal with Scholastics, that people started giving a fuck about Bone again purely because Scholastic flooded local book fairs with the series combined with people going "wait, Smith actually finished Bone?", resulting in lapsed readers picking up the Scholastic trades when they ended up at comic shops too. Smith churned out an omnibus collection for those who wanted the original B&W version in regular format size. But for a while, Bone was a massive cautionary tale for indie writers for how fickle audiences were.

Regarding Ghost Rider....

The character was deader than disco for a while after they depowered Johnny Blaze but around 1989, Marvel learned their ownership of the trademark for Ghost Rider was about to lapse, so they got Howard Mackie to create a brand new Ghost Rider from scratch for a planned 10 issue mini (same length as Steve Gerber's Foolkiller revival) as part of their big "Stars of the 90s" push in 1990.

But sales pre-orders for the first issue of Ghost Rider were so fucking high that almost immediately, Marvel turned it into an ongoing and it proved to be a huge fucking hit. Blaze was brought back as a bad-ass normal and later, turned into a cool looking cyborg, let alone spawning the Midnight Sons subline.

But the constant crossovers to prop up the spin-offs, Roy Thomas not wanting to be part of the subline due to the launching of Secret Defenders (resulting in him being taken off the Dr Strange book and the book becoming part of the line, ironically just as it was dying out), and Mackie being Mackie in terms of purposely dragging out revealing who the new Ghost Rider spirit was (and Mackie's infamous temper tantrum when it was finally revealed by the writer who replaced him), and the debacle where Marvel explicitly refused to publish the last issue of the original Ghost Rider series that wrapped up the book's main stories made Danny Ketch Ghost Rider kind of radioactive and Garth Ennis was the final nail, as he despised Ketch/only knew Ghost Rider from the 70s series/Johnny Blaze and wanted to write "a comic book that appealed to outlaw bikers" while being paired with an artist who only knew GR from the 90s series (hence why Blaze now looks like Ketch), which fucked up the character even before Daniel Way and Jason Aaron further fucked up the character and his backstory.

>>149208648
It's crazy how badly Danny's been fucked over when he's really Best Rider.

>>149207897
No they didn't, what the fuck? Spider-Gwen keeps getting series despite the fact that all of them are cancelled within a year for low sales. Miles and Kamala also don't sell and are forced into central roles in everything, especially outside media. X-23 was Quesada's pet character and he constantly made sure she was in books despite, again, her books never selling all that well. That's a central theme with forced characters: they don't sell but people higher up insist that they get put in everything and are never, or very rarely, without a comic of some sort.

>>149208648
>as he despised Ketch/only knew Ghost Rider from the 70s series/Johnny Blaze

Is there any proof he was aware of Marvel stuff in the 70s? Seems to me he was way more interested in 2000 AD and all that. To me it seemed more like he didn't give a shit who was Ghost Rider while editorial was convinced going with Johnny Blaze was the best option (which turned out to be the wrong option, but still)

>>149208540
Disagree. Compared to other indies that died out in the 90s there was still more mention of Smith and Bone from time to time during those years (when he got a book out) and he actually concluded the story. Wizard was already losing power by the early 2000s and news coverage was scattered through CBR, Newsarama, and others.

And you're wrong, it wasn't late 00s, the colorized versions from Scholastic started a year after he already concluded Bone. The final issue was out in 2004, the first color Scholastic book was out February 2005. If they had it ready to go in early 2005 it was in the works long before Smith completed Bone.

>>149209532
It was the previous Marvel Knights Ghost Rider book that reverted to Blaze as GR, and that was by a different writer, who never read the 90s run and only knew Blaze. IIRC it was Devin Greyson. Blaze was already Ghost Rider again when the Ennis run started, the Ennis book was launched because of the first movie, which was about Blaze.

>>149209950
It's weird because Ketch feels much more like a character that would appeal to Grayson than Blaze.

>>149209950
>>149210123
With how much Marvel was pushing stuff for movies it wouldn't surprise me if they just let her use Johnny Blaze because they wanted Johnny Blaze to be the main Ghost Rider

>>149209204
What are some other pet characters? Not sure if Jack of Hearts is one.

>>149210185
The Ghost Rider mini that brought Blaze back was in 2001. Marvel had been trying to get a GR movie made since the 90s, and after Blade in 1998 and X-Men in 2000 led to Hollywood wanting to get more Marvel movies made, Ghost Rider was one of the Marvel movies that was in development, but it took until 2007 to get made, and the rights had changed hands from Dimension Films and Crystal Sky to Columbia/Sony by then.

It's possible that a 2001 mini brought Blaze back just because that's what the movie was going to do, but the movie was so far away from actually being made at that time that Grayson may just have wanted to bring back the only GR she knew. Marvel seldom planned that far in advance with movie synergy, and look at 2008, the year the MCU launched with Iron Man and Incredible Hulk, and look at how anti-synergy the Iron Man and Hulk comics of that year were, with Initiative-era Tony, Red Hulk, and a de-powered Banner.

>>149210263
Englehart with Mantis.

>>149208456
>They had all the time to make a movie about the DAUGHTER of Spider-Man.
It's hard to see any situation in which Marvel don't fight Sony tooth and nail to stop them doing that. Sony's current arrangement with Disney limits what they can do in live action with Spider-Man himself to whatever the MCU is doing, which would make it hard to get a proper Spider-Girl movie off the ground at the moment.

>>149210263
Jaime Reyes and Jonah Hex's books were kept around for far longer than their sales would have allowed because DiDio personally liked them (and in Jaime's case wanted a prominent hispanic hero). Although in this case it helped that unlike, say, Miles their books were good.

I'm also thinking more of editorial pet characters. I really stopped following DC after they gave up on Rebirth so I'm not sure who the clear editorial pets are besides Damian, Jon Kent (post-faggeing) and maybe Jo Mullen. Characters who don't sell, nobody really likes but keep getting shoved into everything regardless.

>>149208983
ketch is the best

>>149189037
>Robin the boy wonder
yeah Star Spangled Comics had Robin's first solo comics as one of it's features in the late 40's

>>149164376
>This makes me wonder if Hack/Slash is still going.
it just finished a crossover with Body Bags a month or two ago(which teased more Body Bags comics to come in the future)

honestly the fact that Body Bags has managed to survive Jason Pearson's death a couple years ago is pretty amazing in and of itself(especially how badly Jason Pearson had dropped the ball in the years leading up to his death due to his amazingly terrible work ethic)

>>149188640
>They theoretically should have just rebooted with Crisis
that's in general the problem with COIE(and happened again with Flashpoint/New 52), DC didn't do a full linewide reboot, and that just led to continuity headaches that lasted for the rest of the Post Crisis era and indeed have never truly left DC

>>149210650
>I'm also thinking more of editorial pet characters. I really stopped following DC after they gave up on Rebirth so I'm not sure who the clear editorial pets are besides Damian, Jon Kent (post-faggeing) and maybe Jo Mullen. Characters who don't sell, nobody really likes but keep getting shoved into everything regardless.

Damian isn't an editor's pet. Hell! Editorial has tried to get rid of him multiple times, but somehow, he just barely survives.

There was his death, where afterwards they were casting for his replacement as Robin, with Carrie Kelly, Duke and Harper Row, all of which failed and so damian was brought back.

There was his exile out of batman editorial to the superman editorial, so he could be used to push jon kent, ending with him being turned evil in teen titans for 5G, so Bendis Jon Kent could have a magneto. But that was poorly recieved and 5G was cancelled so it was put on hold and Damian went into limbo for a while.

Or Batman vs Robin by waid, which original ending had him suffering a tragedy, but then James Gunn wanted him for the movies and Tim drake Robin's book failed to match the sales of the damian's recent run. So the ending was changed and several months later he got another book.

Look you might hate Damian, but he is liked by some. He is just a divisive character who sells reasonably well, not great or amazingly, but not badly either, so he keeps getting books, even if editorial rather replace him, all because of luck and the failure of his possible replacements.

Honestly if modern tim wasn't such a failure, like if one of his recent pushes, whether young justice bendis or the latest gay one worked. Then Damian would probably already be gone.

>>149206452
>the cult was around him

If you look into old fan magazines and the like, it seems to support this theory.

Didnt quasar get 50 issues? Or 30 i dont remember

>>149212289
60, it ran for 5 years.

>>149194079
I'm talking about 70s GR

>>149210871
Danny IS the best. Hell, Johnny wasn't even interesting until Danny came along. The only thing unfortunate about Danny is that he was created by Howard Mackie.

And the clownsuit era.

>>149209204
They were all characters that organically became popular with fandom and that made editorial want to push them more. Gwen in particular had tons of hype when she debuted. They don’t sell well because basically nothing new doesn’t sell anymore because everyone just wants to read the comics they read as a kid. While pretending they want new things.

>>149213664
Absolute horse shit. Spider-Gwen showed up in a preview and Marvel IMMEDIATELY declared she was popular with cosplayers and gave her a series. Kamala was the self-insert of an exec who's the the fucking cousin of Hillary Clinton's longtime Girl Friday and doesn't actually do anything. With Miles, they had articles ready to go as soon as he was announced declaring that disliking him was racist.

X-23... I assume you're a zoomer or weren't reading comics at the time but nobody liked her. Everyone knew Quesada had a boner for her because she was Girlverine at a time where Wolverine oversaturation was at critical mass. Everyone made fun of her for it, made fun of her being a hooker (further reinforced the idea that Quesada had a literal boner for her since she was a Wolverine a guy could fuck). She got immediately shoved into Uncanny where nobody liked her. Then got shoved into New X-Men when that failed where the fans and the writers openly disliked her (and disliked her even more when the writers got kicked off for her creators; by the way the sales bump was temporary and Yost/Kyle otherwise did similar sales to DeFilippis/Weir). When that failed she got moved to X-Force then got a solo series that nobody bought, even after her (supposed) popularity boost from MvC3. When it died, she got shoved into Avengers Academy where again nobody reading the book wanted her and the book tanked and was cancelled. From there she was in Arena, then got shoved into the Wolverine name she's had ever since.

X-23 is the definition of forced popularity. She's been around for 20 years and has never not had either her own book or been a major character in one despite her solos never selling and her presence in team books either doing nothing to boost sales or actively making them worse. Despite this, she is given chance after chance and spotlight after spotlight by editors obsessed with making her popular. And again, 20 years later and it's yet to work.

>>149214017
Samefagging but X-23 and these other losers keep getting chances that other characters mentioned ITT never did. Wendell disappeared and was eventually killed off when Gruenwald couldn't write him anymore. Characters like Darkhawk or Danny Ketch who were more popular in their heyday than Miles or Spider-Gwen today got tossed in the trash. Mayday was never excessively popular but she had a loyal and consistent fanbase who bought her books, more than can be said for Kamala who we know for a fact only ever sold the first TPB of her original series yet Mayday is treated with scorn by editors and not given prominent roles in outside media like Kamala.

Again, that's forced popularity. These characters are less popular than marketing and editorial would have you think because marketing and editorial WANT them to be popular for various reasons usually related to being pet characters of people with clout. Mayday and Arana and Danny Ketch aren't so they don't get discarded when their books are axed and reduced to bit roles.

>>149214017
X-23 was pretty neat when she was something resembling friendship with Finesse which ended when Finesse used her unconscious body as a weapon.

>>149214073
I can understand why they're scared to drop Miles but for the life of me I will never understand why Gwen sticks around.
>But merch
She's a Spider character you could make any related character a sticker on a ice cream cone machine and they'd sell okay.

>>149214318
>She's a Spider character you could make any related character a sticker on a ice cream cone machine and they'd sell okay.

Then why doesn't Silk sell as well

>>149214318
If that was true then Ben, Kaine, Silk, Spider-Woman, Arana, Spider-Boy, ans all the Spiderverse versions including 2099 etc. would have individual ongoing comics selling gangbusters.

>>149214399
Because she's Asian.

>>149214441
Does Gwen's comic even sell all that well?
>>149214399
less adaptations, also no Spider Mask.

>>149214966
Gwen keeps getting new comics because there is a certain level of continued interest around her.

>>149214441
2099 probably could do fine if they gave him more than a mini and gave it to someone who knows what they're doing, which is certainly not orlando

>>149215082
If the miniseries would sell high they would give Miguel a new ongoing.
>Well if they just gave the book to a different writer it would sell!
That is not how publishing works.

>>149214318
Spider-Gwen was a prominent and heavily marketed character because at the time Marvel was leaning heavily into Gwen because of being played by Emma Stone in Garfield-Man at a time where Stone was one of the most popular actresses in Hollywood so plastering a "cool" Gwen with a cosplayable design all over the place made sense to editorial/marketing. Debuting in a story that is, for worse, one of the two most seminal Spider-Man stories of the last 15 years (along with Superior) also helps. Plus I imagine that someone in editorial (Cebulski, Lowe, whoever) likes her and thus keeps giving her books.

>>149164290
People (faggots) put on a holier than thou act that 70s and 80s exploitation is inherently bad and should thus be buried.
If they had their way, Black Dynamite wouldn't have happened.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70xGy44ZV90

>>149215056
imagine being this delusional

How do people even see sales numbers now, anyway? I thought they weren't being reported these days.

>>149157276 (OP)
This cover SLAPS

>>149181419
>>149187975
Do you really think a lower middle class working mother in the 90s read alt comisc? I don't like HP, but its roots lie in mystery and boarding school series. Plenty of kids going to magic school series existed before Rowling and Gaiman.

>>149216699
Legit feels like The Worst Witch could be a direct inspiration, but maybe they have a point with the character design?

>>149157276 (OP)

The Penance Stare was actually scary at one point in time.

>>149217095
I don't know why writers have so much trouble understanding the Penance Stare. It's never seemed very complicated to me.