I’ve been doing a lot of collecting recently, and quite a few things that are valuable today weren’t very popular when they first came out. When I was young, I bought a lot of independent comics because I thought I might hit the jackpot a’la Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. If I had just stuck to the old standbys of DC and Marvel, I could have made 3-5X returns on just Dark Knight (Back then 10-20 an issue, today 25-65) or the Watchmen (1-3 back then, 8-10 now.) Even 35 cent comics off the rack at the supermarket are worth many times their cover value today. Any Spiderman comic from the 70’s is worth 18-300.
So my question is: which comic books did you think weren’t very good, but they became huge franchises?
I have several:
Fantastic Four: too much angst. I didn’t read many, but those I did read they spent a lot of time brooding and using thought bubbles to worry about some lame domestic issue.
X-Men: My first exposure was the original X-Men series from the 60’s, the version with the snow cone Iceman and the yellow and blue suits. I thought the art was just terrible.
Anything done by Jack Kirby: I thought the lines were too heavy and I couldn’t make out any details. Later in life, I began to appreciate what a pioneer he was and how he was able to escape the confines of a comic panel.
I never cared for Daredevil. I don’t know what FF you were reading, but here’s your “too much angst”. Strangely, I actually found the movie fairly decent, despite the internet hate machine making it a popular target.
I’m with you on Kirby art. Not my cup of tea, didn’t like it so much when I was younger, but I can appreciate it a lot more in retrospect and in context of the time he was doing it.
Nope, honestly can’t think of any. Loved all the superhero stories I read. Liked war comics, too. Never cared much for Westerns, and never picked up a romance or Archie book.
Ff vs daredevil is a good comparison. Usually, the only panels devoted to non-DD activities had a fairly simple story about the love triangle between Matt, foggy, and the secretary. In an entire comic, maybe 2 pages total and only the first and last pages. The rest was pure DD fighting the enemy. Ff on the other hand, could go entire issues without combat, just them complaining about each other. If there was combat, only a few pages per issue showed it.
The issue that stands out in my mind is the one sue gets brainwashed to be a villain and fights the other three. It was a great fight but only lasted one page.
The Wally west flash? I have the first like 20 issues, for a while it was the most valuable set in my collection until the recent jump of the dark knight.
I felt the same way when I first encountered Kirby. Years later, I realized what he was trying to do. But I still prefer Neal Adams or Curt Swan.
Note that, when I was growing up, you couldn’t buy Marvel comics in my home town (only 80 miles from NYC, too). Marvel had terrible distribution in the 60s. It was when a guy moved next door that I discovered them, but you could stump any comic book reader in town with the question “What’s Spider-Man’s secret identity?”
Still, most of what I read I tended to like. The only exception was Charlton Comics (“Charlton Comics Give You More!”), which some regard highly, though I suspect it’s a combination of nostalgia and where some real talents were given “a place to be bad” as they honed their craft.
I did pick up the first issue of Swamp Thing because I thought the title was so incredibly stupid, but I was proven wrong before I finished the issue.
I wish i could have been mature enough to appreciate early Alan Moore and Chris Claremont. It seems so obvious now these guys were raising the medium, but i just wasn’t mature enough.
I utterly detested the whole Jimmy Olsen schtick. He was an insufferable jerk, and yet he was supposed to be the clever hero. He kept getting weird super powers, and he kept solving mysteries that even experienced police detectives couldn’t solve, simply by spelling the villain’s name backward!
However, to give credit where it is due, the 2010 (“May '11”) DC Jimmy Olsen One-Shot was brilliant. Not by Joss Whedon (by Nick Spencer) but rising to Whedon’s level of clever and funny writing, backed up by some very good art. The best Jimmy Olsen comic EVER!
It kind of makes up for a long, long period in the 60s and 70s of severe Super-Dickery.
When I was a kid I didn’t like superhero comics at all. I thought they were a bunch of over-muscled lunkheads who spent all their time punching each other in the face, or women with impossibly huge boobs. I read a lot of Richie Rich and other Harvey stuff, and Archie. Didn’t discover Marvel until college (except for the Star Wars series, which I’d read in my early teens), when I started hanging out with gamers. Discovered X-Men, Spider-Man, and Doctor Strange, and loved them all. Never really got into Thor, Hulk, or Daredevil. Iffy on Fantastic Four.
Never liked DC Comics. Not sure why, but never did. Still don’t.
I never liked Simon Bisley’s colour art. I loved the black and white stuff he did on ABC Warriors, and his earliest work on Slaine, but then he started to get grotesque, especially all the Heavy Metal covers. But that’s what made him a star (at least he was for a while).
Good, then you won’t feel betrayed when you read Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld’s “LULU!”
A lot of us were okay with the “Revenge of Tubby” storyline (hey, the alternate history put Lulu in that cool steampunk Confederate uniform). But that “love child of Bruce Wayne and Gretchen Grundler” reveal was done really awkwardly.
I was the opposite. I loved DC comics, but couldn’t get into Marvel. And I’m also unsure why.
When I was a child, I loved Gold Key comics. They had all the familiar cartoon characters (the Flintstones, Yogi Bear, Bugs Bunny, and Daffy Duck, among others), and they had no advertising; which, I reasoned, left more room for comics. I outgrew them, but I’ll never forget them.
