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Messages - Jim_Campbell

#1
Film & TV / Re: Current TV Boxset Addiction
27 March, 2024, 08:25:45 PM
Quote from: Hawkmumbler on 26 March, 2024, 09:24:52 PMOutside of that, well it gets more complicated

Seriously?! I think I suffered a minor aneurysm halfway though the first paragraph...
#2
Film & TV / Re: Last movie watched...
26 March, 2024, 06:28:34 PM
Quote from: Funt Solo on 26 March, 2024, 06:15:14 PMFinally got around to watching Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, which I'd been avoiding because it was so clearly sun-scorched compared to the rather bucolic original Knives Out.

Yep. It's great. Someone on Facebook was suggesting today that Knives Out 3 should be a Muppet movie, like Christmas Carol with Daniel Craig as the only human character... which I think is nothing short of genius. :)
#3
Off Topic / Re: Boys Adventure comic blog
25 March, 2024, 07:18:02 PM
Quote from: Richard S. on 25 March, 2024, 06:30:59 AM'Eureka' - one of those comics that never was.

Yeesh. That lettering, though!

(Fascinating post, BTW — I'd never heard of that!)
#4
Megazine / Re: Meg 466: Shoot ’em up
20 March, 2024, 10:53:14 AM
Quote from: IndigoPrime on 19 March, 2024, 08:51:38 AMReprint! Some Hellman, which is fine.

Although, I notice that the reprint credits Mike Dorey as the artist on Hellman but everything after the first episode is definitely Jim Watson.
#5
General / Re: Angela Kincaid
19 March, 2024, 09:42:48 AM
Quote from: JayzusB.Christ on 19 March, 2024, 07:43:35 AMI paint and draw for a living, and I've tried drawing comics - I just can't do it.

It's murderously hard work — I've said (numerous times!) that drawing comics is probably the most labour-intensive way imaginable of trying to monetise artistic talent.

I've sort of enjoyed the tiny number of sequential pages I've drawn over the years... but I just find it takes so long. You have to design the characters, the costumes, the environments, you have to design the pages themselves so that they're both readable and serve the requirements of the script...

And that's all before you've actually drawn a single panel. Then you have to make sure all that stuff you designed is consistent across multiple pages. Figure out the lighting, camera angles, make the characters 'act'.

It's a frickin' miracle any one does it all, never mind for the money most comic gigs are offering!
#6
General / Re: Angela Kincaid
19 March, 2024, 07:21:43 AM
Quote from: JayzusB.Christ on 18 March, 2024, 09:29:27 PMI was just rereading the first Sláine story, and it struck me that it was a real shame she couldn't have stuck around the prog a bit longer.

IIRC, Angie Kincaid was primarily a book illustrator at the time and comics really weren't her forte, with the pages of that first episode getting sent back by the editorial team for revision/redrawing multiple times... to the extent that McMahon had completed many of his episodes before that first episode was judged ready for publication.

Obviously, for it to take months to get six pages to a point where they're publishable is unsustainable — economically for the artist, and logistically for editorial, who are feeding the ravenous content beast of a weekly anthology and need stuff to arrive ready for lettering/colouring with minimal intervention on their part.

(Plus, even back then, comics didn't pay that well and I'm sure that book illustration paid more money for less work.)
#7
Quote from: PsychoGoatee on 16 March, 2024, 10:09:20 PMI've heard some songs and the White album, just haven't really become a fan.

For my money, peak Beatles is Rubber Soul and Revolver — they'd matured as musicians and song-writers, but hadn't yet disappeared up their own arses. Two fine albums.
#8
Film & TV / Re: Current TV Boxset Addiction
16 March, 2024, 06:28:53 PM
Quote from: Angry Vince on 16 March, 2024, 06:08:05 PMWere people just pissed that Dani turned evil and John didn't become king? Oops spoilers...

Basically, yes. (At least that's what the vast majority of the whining I saw online was about.)

I had several issues with that final season, but those specific things weren't amongst them.
#9
Quote from: Vector14 on 15 March, 2024, 02:48:14 PMJust Hypothetical,and I was being a bit tongue in cheek due to the tonal shift between FTB and the regular strips like Thistlebone.

You're not wrong about the tonal shift, but the thinking (I suspect... again, no hotline to TMO here) is that kids these days don't actually like serialised periodicals, so anything from Regened that can (could) comfortably sit in the prog gets a run there, before being quickly packaged up into a collected volume, a format which the YA audience much prefers and buys in very large numbers.
#10
Quote from: Vector14 on 15 March, 2024, 12:04:02 PMBut what are you supposed to do if you have a kid who is a fan of FTB from regened and they are desperate to keep up with the latest episodes?

The first TPB was announced pretty much as soon as the serialised version had finished running, so I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happened this time. Is this question hypothetical, or do you actually know of such a child...?
#11
Quote from: IndigoPrime on 13 March, 2024, 08:01:57 PMthat's a... lot of time to be throwing cash at something if it's not profitable.

David Fickling has his fingers in a lot of pies, and a quick google tells me that his non-comic enterprises include publishing stuff by Philip Pullman, amongst others.

I get royalties from Classical Comics, a publisher I haven't worked for in over a decade, so I know at what point their books moved into profit (and which of them haven't yet done so). Some publishers have enough money behind them to pay a very long game.

I hope the Phoenix makes money, but I suspect there's a very long tail of debt behind it, which the over-arching business structure is happy to swallow. That might be for tax reasons, it might be for entirely altruistic reasons... we can't know. I'm happy it exists, and I hope it continues to do so.
#12
Quote from: Funt Solo on 13 March, 2024, 06:12:27 PMI'm not quite ready to buy into the idea that the generational shift has been so severe. It's not as if we didn't have rather staid, mainstream entertainment on offer as kids.

These two statements don't connect, I'm afraid. We're talking about two generations, with the rise of the internet dumped into the middle of that. Add into that equation the fact that parents are (generally) much more supervisory of their kids' entertainment consumption and the transformation of schools into fascists work camps designed to stamp out cookie-cutter worker units* and we end up with an environment where simply recreating a facsimile of what worked in 1977 is a complete non-starter.

Please note that I'm not saying that Regened hit the magic spot between what worked in 1977 and what should/could work now, only that there is a very big gap between those two points and attempting to hit it is a task I'm glad I didn't have to grapple with.

(Yes, IP, The Phoenix... which is an astonishing outlier that has had an extraordinary amount of money pumped into it over a couple of decades and which no one can confidently say to this day actually makes money.)


*May be hyperbole, but my conversations with teachers suggest perhaps not as much as we might hope.
#13
Quote from: Richard on 11 March, 2024, 12:26:50 PMCue Jim Campbell explaining why it had to be part of the normal prog run for economic reasons...

Ahem.

The reason why Regened ended up in the prog was nothing to do with economics. Keith Richardson (I think) explicitly said in a thrill-cast that the first Regened was supposed to be a special, but the distributor nixed it on the grounds that they thought Rebellion already had enough specials coming up that year. That meant that they would have had to drop another special to make room for Regened.

I'm assuming (as always, no inside info) that a judgement was made that it would be easier to fold the Regened content into the regular prog than to do the same with any of the other specials on the slate that year.

And then we had the pandemic, which made the idea of launching a new title incredibly risky when we were only ever one spike in the R number and another lockdown away from all the retail outlets being ordered to close again. At that point, given that the numbers for having the content in the prog were, by all accounts, pretty encouraging, it certainly did make economic sense to continue with a strategy that Rebellion certainly didn't intend at the outset.

We're in a different place now, so maybe it makes sense to take a step back and review the strategy given the different circumstances. Again, I don't know. I thought, and still think, the idea is a sound one, so I hope that it continues to exist in some form.
#14
Quote from: hellscrape on 09 March, 2024, 04:31:15 PMIt seems there's a new print run out as of recently and prices have dropped to normal.

The most recent three-book set from Rebellion isn't just a reprint — most of the art has been re-scanned or re-touched from the best available sources, and the repro team have worked absolute wonders on many pages, in terms of improving the clarity and level of detail.

Because the new volumes took pages from (I think) three* different sources, there was a mis-match between lettering styles in a lot of the early episodes, so Rebellion asked me if I could replace the original mechanical lettering on some episodes with something a little closer to the hand-lettered pages (mainly by John Aldrich). Pat Mills said he was happy with the results, and he's never slow to let people know if that's not the case... which I take as a huge compliment. :)

*I think the book was assembled from a well-regarded French edition, which had had the lettering removed completely (so the translated text could be dropped over the top), the Titan edition (for which the mechanical lettering was largely, but not entirely, re-lettered by Aldrich) and, when nothing else was available, from the original printed comics.
#15
Quote from: BadlyDrawnKano on 01 March, 2024, 11:45:46 PMI'd really like to check out Elektra Lives Again at some point, but it seems to sell around the £30 mark and given that it appears to be for only 80 pages it's a bit too pricey for me right now.

Story-wise, it's pretty insubstantial (as the low page count attests) but it's peak Miller/Varley — the visual storytelling is masterful and it looks gorgeous.