If Dazzler appeared on "Facts of Life," she'd be Alison Blair.

I went to a comics store yesterday.  It didn't have much, virtually nothing that wasn't Marvel or DC, so I only bought a few things out of politeness.  Have to see how my reading ability is at the moment.  I'm going to need it soon.

Detective Comics has passed #1000, I hadn't expected that.  Even more annoying, it's a year or two old.  I started reading the series just before #600 so it's been a while.  Have to admit, I didn't really find it readable and only most of that is my fault.  Not sure how to describe my opinion of superheroes these days but Batman has dropped quite a bit in my view.  At least superpowers give a basis for lack of reality, this just looks ridiculous and that's not mentioning the 'crime fighting' nonsense.

I followed it up with Spawn #312.  It was readable, I'll give it that.  I've had even less to do with Spawn in the last couple decades than Batman.  It was the only Image comic I read when it started and thinking about it, there haven't been many more at all.  I did have less of a problem reading the words, that was something.  It wasn't interesting but it was just odd to see what I did or didn't recognize from a character I didn't know much about.

I'm definitely not a fan of modern lettering or coloring, they just make the pages look too pointless to read.  And of course there's no thought balloons.

The store did have some older comics, but for the most part, either I already had them or at least had read them in some format.  So I went for X-Men and Micronauts from 1984.  Again it was unreadable, possibly because my modified opinion of superheroes has done even more to Claremont's X-titles.  It's not clear what he wrote here with Bill Mantlo.  I assume he and Mantlo had worked out the plot and Claremont wrote the dialogue for the muties.  We'll never know how close they were but Mantlo was one of the very few guest writers on any of Claremont's X-Men, including a (very early) fill-in that had 'evil Xavier' taking over in the same manner as here.

Mantlo was the 'fill-in' writer, stories written for basically every title so that there was always something to go with so that would help explain that, but Claremont didn't work with people like that once X-Men became successful.  John Byrne and Jim Lee would start getting co-writing credit.  I assume Tom Defalco was giving a plot-credit on one issue partially as a bribe to the new Editor-in-Chief and partially because Defalco had something to do with Dazzler who's one of the few characters in that issue.

That last guess is iffy, the characters were from the end of the Dazzler series and as far as I know, Defalco was only involved with the first several issues.  But that leads me to the only noticeable part of X-Men/Micronauts is that it's an interesting picture of how comics were in 1984.

There's a lot of ads for computers.  Mostly video games, but there's an ad for PBS 3-2-1 Contact showing the characters using a computer, a 2-page spread for Atari games and in the story itself, Professor X sends a message via computer from the Danger Room to Kitty in her bedroom.  [The message is specifically about reading her mind, in case you wonder why he didn't just do that.]  Video games were already storming the nation's youth but it's a little surprising to see so many ads in this miniseries.  Amusingly, a lot of ads are for games I'd never heard of before or since.

Hmmm, there's the Facts of Life episode I mentioned a little while ago along with Time's "Man of the Year" and a few movies.  Superman 3 came out in 1983 and it was about computers communicating across the world (and contacting Earth satellites to have them look for Krypton.)  What the hell was being prepared by people who knew about computers in the early-80s?  Anyway...

It's also interesting to see what the company was producing at the time.  Jim Shooter had remade Marvel but it was still pretty small and an easy place to get something interesting done.  Yes, I just said that about Jim Shooter's Marvel.

There's only a couple dozen titles listed in the Bullpen Bulletins and Marvel was trying to figure out how to do miniseries - since there was now a direct sales market where people had to pay for the orders of the final issue before they knew how many they would sell of the first issue - graphic novels and collections of earlier comics.  Obviously it would be harder for Marvel to do this than normal, sensible people, but it's strange how it could be much more difficult.  For the reprints, they already have the finished art and/or printer footage [I'm blanking on the actual term used] and there might be some opposition to selling the same work again, there would be people who like the idea, plus the point that the audience was still expected to change every few years so they wouldn't have read these before.

The mini-series make sense, producing a story with beginning, middle and end without the need to keep the title going until the end of time.  The graphic novels were essentially the same thing, 48 or 64-page books of one story which Dazzler/Jim Shooter had started in the first place.  Yes, better creators had made better comics earlier, usually with larger page-counts, but we'll ignore them.  The production cost would be more but I really don't see any other downside to pushing that market and can't understand why Marvel and DC weren't trying to get there as soon as possible.

They were also trying to do non-superhero comics [GASP!] with the Epic line which would have some potential and some success down the line but otherwise didn't go anywhere.  Dave Sim was already keeping his back-issues in-print as collections although he was still a couple years away from the 500-page "phone book" and I doubt he was the only one doing this.  Will Eisner had been reprinting the Spirit for years by that point and was ready to publish his second graphic novel, run in chapters in the Spirit collections a couple years earlier.  I'm actually surprised that Eisner finished so little work by this point, he spent his last 15 years extremely productive, but here he only had A Contract With God and that was published several years ago.

One thing I'm wondering is if that was the point of Dazzler, trying to make a character who had traits like actual people.  Of course they ignored that in the comics but it might have been a starting-point, as well as the fact that she was promoted like a Hollywood celebrity, even when there was no point.  Marvel created her in league with a record company, Casablanca, whose only hits were the early Kiss years and some disco, but they wanted to get into movies.  Bo Derek was briefly interested in the part, she got into movies in high-school with a married man three decades older than her, not unlike a couple scenes in X-Men/Micronauts actually.

Anyway, I have to wonder if Marvel was working with Hollywood to impose everything they could upon the world.  They certainly have it now.

This isn't writing anything important, just random thoughts about comics and stuff.  Go on about your business.

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