Slashdot Mirror
Original Marvel Comics Going Online
An anonymous reader writes "In a tentative move onto the internet, Marvel is putting some of its older comics online Tuesday, hoping to reintroduce young people to the X-Men and Fantastic Four by showcasing the original issues in which such characters appeared. The publisher is hoping fans will be intrigued enough about the origins of those characters to shell out $9.99 a month, or $4.99 monthly with a year-long commitment. For that price, they'll be able to poke through, say, the first 100 issues of Stan Lee's 1963 creation "Amazing Spider-Man" at their leisure, along with more recent titles like "House of M" and "Young Avengers."
Comics can only be viewed in a Web browser, not downloaded, and new issues will only go online at least six months after they first appear in print.
Dark Horse Comics now puts its vibrant and large images of 'Dark Horse Presents' up for free viewing on its MySpace site.
DC Comics has also put issues up on MySpace, and recently launched the competition-based Zuda Comics, which encourages users to rank each other's work, as a way to tap into the expanding Web comic scene."
"Comics can only be viewed in a Web browser, not downloaded" - except for the fact that they have already been downloaded. Print screen, anyone?
bomb the us up set someone
Marvel is trying to compete with the torrent community in this, since an increasing amount of older comics can now be downloaded through Bittorrent.
What's to stop people from screenshotting the pages and placing them into a pdf?
In the long term, this is of course a good thing. However, the idea that issues 1-100 of X-Men will encourage anyone to take it up is, at best, optimistic. Let's face it; they may have been good at the time, but nowadays they're extremely dated. Of course, it does have Iceman looking like a snowman and Cyclops being called 'Slim' which might be good for a laugh, but overall I don't think they'll encourage many people.
Oh, from the article:
Even as their creations -- from Iron Man to Wonder Woman
Ahem.
Interesting concept of putting comic books online. But nothing beats having a hard copy. That just takes me back to being a kid and getting excited when a new issue came out.
The game.
I am not a big comic gal, but I used to read Xmen. I stopped when they split it into a handful of titles. I have a buddy that got fed up with reading Spiderman, for a similar reason. He needed multiple titles to see what was going on. It was a blatantly an effort to make those of us who were into it, buy more. It didn't work for us, we stopped collecting. I started reading indi artists.
I think the older comics, before they split up all over the place.
Nothing hides evidence like a stew. -Gus Pratt
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
As with everything else, the older stuff looks great because we forget about all the junk that no one ever bought. That being said, there is some classic Chris Claremont stuff and John Byre stuff from the 80s that I keep on reading even now.
.cbr format from a .torrent site. :-)
The first 50 issues of New Mutants. Uncanny X-Men 100-200, Fantastic 4 140-175. Good stuff all around.
That being said, I have all of these in print and have no moral reason against downloading them in
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I've been out of comics since the X-Men animated series. Ever since I started playing City of Heroes, I've been wanting to get back into them, already bought a lot of Transmetropolitan. Here's hoping they'll eventually put up something like Civil War, so I can see it and hate myself for reading it.
$10 per month seems a little excessive to me. In fact this looks more like a cash in than a 'let's get a new generation interested'. The only people willing to pay that sort of cash are Baby Boomers reliving their childhoods.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Look, if they want to promote interest in their current work by getting us hooked on the classics, great. But that's marketing. And they want to charge us for their marketing?
These things are ancient and should be in the public domain anyways.
And guess what... if they were, they'd already be promoting more intrest in their current work!
Does your significant other love shoes?
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
... Stan Lee and Steve Ditko 's 1963 creation "Amazing Spider-Man" ...
I wait for Spider-Ham.
and you will NEVER have to pay for another comic book ever again
My copy of Grab It! is ready!
Is this anti-hero called StanLee Man, he gives artists a very basic idea and takes all the credit for their work. Does anyone think Marvell will be interested?
ComicMix.com - no drm, back issues, original issues, solid community, etc.
I have stacks of old Spiderman and X-Men comix at home.
I leave them laying out for my grandkids (10-13yrs old) to read at their leisure.
I thought they would go "WOW! COMICS!" and then curl up in a corner to read for hours and hours....
They browsed through them, then left them to go do something else.
If they go on the computer, they want to play games or watch funny things on YouTube.
"Hey Kids, look! Here are some static images on the computer! Look!"
I don't know, maybe there is something wrong with them....
I like microcars
If they really wanted people to pay for this, they'd put up the late-70s through late-80s stuff. That was the PEAK of Marvel, as far as writing/storylines goes. Before that...eh. There was some good stuff, but not all that much. And pretty much ALL of the good stuff from the early days is widely available in "compilations" that are dirt cheap. As in, clearance-bin cheap, most of the time.
I'm burying this.
Azural - instrumentals
Marvel, and comics in general, have a problem here. It is the same problem that the other entertainment industries are facing. Scanned comics are already a reality online. They are on the torrent sites right beside the music and movies.
However, one thing that makes digital comics a little different from other media is that the community has had to create their own file formats, standards and viewing software. While the means to play movies and music files have been built in for as long as they have been technically possible, there is no long standing computer format designed to show a series of pictures. So, the community has created their own standards in using re-named zip and rar files and viewing applications created to display them.
So, now Marvel is trying to get into the digital market. They have a problem here though. The market already has some well defined segments. The first is the people who already read comics on the computer. This is going to be a hard segment to win over. Not only do they have their own practises and conventions, but their selection is up to date and in-depth. 99.9% of the (surviving) comics ever produced by Marvel or DC are available, from WWII right up to the new releases each Wednesday. Trying to compete with this using not simply a limited, protected format but one that is incomparable will be vary hard.
The next market segment is comic fans who do no already download. This is going to be a small market. It is limited to those who are not digitally inclined and thus poor targets for any digital service, or who have chosen not to download for various reasons.
The final market available are people who are not currently into comics. Unfortunately for Marvel, traditionally when launching a new service the smallest returns are going to come from outside the established fanbase. And those who become interested are likely to divert to the 'pirate' comics scene if only to avoid having all the surprises spoiled six months before they can read them.
Is this worth doing? Absolutely. I suspect that it won't take much interest for Marvel to at least break even. Costs on this have to be minimal, and much of it can be written off as basic archiving work that is necessary anyways or possibly already done for other projects in the past. It is also good to see them start to look at new distribution channels. As an industry, they have been fossilized for the past 20 years.
Still, you would think that after a watching each other, one of the various entertainment industries would work with, or at least follow, the communities when it came to digital media.
At $4.99 they probably are selling for a higher price than they originally did (~5-10 cents each). Still not a bad deal if you are a comic book fan.
The alt.binaries.dcp.comics group stopped posting zero day releases a couple weeks ago on usenet, purportedly due to a DMCA takedown notice to the chief uploader of the group. SPeculation is that the notice came from Marvel. I wonder if these events are related?
I HAVE CUBIC WISDOM THAT TRANSCENDS AND CONTRADICTS ONE DAY GODS
I don't really care. But, it seems to me that the real money is in the movies.
If they put up the old comics for free, maybe ad supported, it might generate more interest in the movies.
You might be interested to know that the online trading and downloading of comics is just as active as music or video trading- perhaps less popular, but still very active. A comic site I visit regularly has "Release Wednesday" download links in the forums, right on that Wednesday, and almost all of the major comics released that day. I think Marvel is doing this to combat that as well as falling sales.
I personally think it's great, and plan to buy in. It won't put a huge dent in comic piracy, as it won't include the most recent titles, but it's great for me to get the back-issues I might read once or twice without having to hunt them down or shell out $1/each.
Hopefully they'll start making online releases sooner and sooner after paperback releases, but it's a step in the right direction.
Anything that post-dates Mickey Mouse is not.
Whether it should be or not is a matter for another thread.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
this company just wants money. they screw their artists
to the point they leave in disgust. they have stories
run in multiple books to milk the cash cow even more.
their dated characters rehash the same stories over and
over to infinity. they have forgotten about making a comic
into a engaging story and relied upon art to sell the books.
marvel attracts kids, dc keeps the adults. too bad when
you printed groo you only went into bankruptcy instead
of an outright failure and disappreance. i look over your
offerings and just puke. i wanted this internet delivery system
10 years ago and wish you had the brains to develop a handy
portable reader. we would download comics to a memory stick
for keeps! your subscription model can kiss my ass. i hope
your company once again goes bankrupt and your ashes regrow
into a company worth reading its products.
the company has nothing left to offer and it has not created
anything significant in decades.
and the EULA requires that they do not own the money, they cannot pass it on to any other entity without my permission and they will require a license transfer payment.
And if they break the agreement (by, for example, stopping me reading the comics because "I'm not paying rent any more") then I'll take the money back.
What, did you think you OWNED my money just becuse you supplied a service to me? Pah! What an outmoded concept.
Successful web comics have the same formula. The comic is free online, of decent quality, has a decent archive / mass to it, and is updated regularly. Money is made from merchandise related to the comic and/or advertising. Given their huge amount of material, Marvel could have went this route and not only made a killing off the merchandise, but massively increased their fan base. By charging for access they've pretty much guaranteed that most of the readers will be old guard comic fans who want to read all of this stuff. They'll make money from this, but it will amout to more effecient mining of their existing market share, not building or growing their market, which should have been of much higher priority to them. It would not only have made them a lot more money, it would have given them much better long-term viability to survive as a company.
This isn't marketing, this is trying to find a new market for old content.
If I had the comic-book fan mentality, I'd be really excited by this. After the first Spider-Man movie came out, I was sufficiently impressed to go out and buy some reprints of the early comic books.
Two big disappointments: the reprints are available only as line drawings, which destroys a lot of the impact of this kind of comic. And the stories were just plain dumb. (I mean jeez, they show a Mercury space capsule flying around like an airplane.) But a serious comics fan (and there are a lot of them) would overlook the second issue, and gladly pay $5/month to avoid the first issue.
This post reminds me of a DC panel at one of the Cons where a fan asked some DC execs "How's it feel to be whipping Marvel's ass?" (during the post-Infinite Crisis DC sales implosion) and was promptly laughed out of the room by the entire audience. Seriously, besides JSA and Hellblazer (which is Vertigo, so it doesn't count), there's not much worth reading on the DC side of things. Well, except the couple times a year an All-Star Superman sneaks out...
Even assuming that were true, then at least they still remember the damn art, unlike most DC stuff. And to say the company that's printing Daredevil/Captain America/Hulk/New Avengers/Iron Fist/New Universal is the one which has forgotten how to write an engaging story is the same as saying "I don't (ever) read any Marvel books but I'm going to give you my opinion anyway." I'll take the company with Bendis/Brubaker/Ellis anyday. See, funny thing is, I work at a local comic shop on occasion. Spend a lot of time there when I'm not working. More adults do buy DC comics, than kids, true, but that's because no one's buying DC comics. Meanwhile both adults and kids are snatching up Marvel titles so fast I'm actually having trouble getting some of my regulars (boss stole an Iron Fist out of a customer folder for me this past week, for instance...) At least they're not strangling under some parent company that won't let them do anything interesting with their characters out of fear of ruining the movie properties based on them (ala Warner Brothers and Batman). Give me a break.Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Can you GET THE FUCK OVER YOURSELVES?!?!?
"...Marvel is putting some of its older comics online Tuesday, hoping to reintroduce young people to the X-Men and Fantastic Four by showcasing the original issues in which such characters appeared... For that price, they'll be able to poke through, say, the first 100 issues of Stan Lee's 1963 creation "Amazing Spider-Man" at their leisure... Comics can only be viewed in a Web browser, not downloaded..."
So: the shit is forty-four years old. What's the big fucking deal if people print it? Or download them so they can read them while on a flight? You don't have to give up your copyrights. It's not like you're releasing the characters into the public domain and all of a sudden you'll see stickers on the backs of Chevy pickups depicting Spider-Man pissing on a Ford logo. (Not that copyright laws have prevented Bill Watterson's 'Calvin' from being abused as such anyway.) You're not making it available to all to print infinite copies--just your typical "personal use" type of thing. And what if people do start printing them, binding them, and selling them? Guess what: that means there's a market, shitheads! Print NICE collections at REASONABLE prices and watch them fly out the door.
I can only assume that Stan Lee and the others learned a lot about their craft by a) reading old stories and myths and b) looking at old art. What if the complete works of van Gogh, da Vinci, Homer,* Shakespeare, and all the rest were under such draconian control? Would you even be an artist if Sonny Bono had been alive in 1000 BC? Why even charge at all, you hypocritical fucks? You've already made some money once. Releasing them for free might actually grow the comic audience. That would inspire some new fans (and probably some new artists.) Rather than always trying to get a bigger slice of the pie, why don't you try to make the whole pie bigger?
"The publisher is hoping fans will be intrigued enough about the origins of those characters to shell out $9.99 a month, or $4.99 monthly with a year-long commitment."
Consider the other angles. I am not a huge comic fan. But, it's a big part of our culture and yes, I would kind of like to see how Spidey, the X-Men, and all the rest came about. If I did, maybe I'd become a fan and start buying the current stuff. But I do not care enough to pay and jump through a lot of hoops. So I'll continue to be the non-comic-buyer that I am.
It's a very simple question: do you want to a) gain new fans or b) milk your existintg fan base? I think we all know the answer. Probably because that's an easier sell to the bean-counters: rather than possibly making a huge pile of money by exponentially increasing the market, they'd rather just have a smaller but predictable amount--"Lucas has shown us the way. X% of existing comic buyers will pay $Y per month for whatever we shove down their throats. That will net us $Z in 2008."
Also: "can only be viewed in a Web browser, not downloaded"? I guess these douchebags never heard of screenshots, either.
* no, not Simpson, I mean the old Greek guy.
PS: sorry for all the swearing, but this stuff really, really, really pisses me off.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
i just want to chime in that, as a comic geek, i kinda look forward to this. i buy a lot of single issues every month. if marvel got in the habit of putting up _everything_ six months later on their website, then i would totally go that way instead of the floppy route. then, if i really liked something, i could go buy the hardcover. if they put up all of brubaker's captain america and warren ellis's next wave, i'm in. patric
read my comics, please, at http://www.funfactorycomic.com
Issues 1-100 are better than what you probably would allow kids to mess up.
-- Boycott Shell
These were all on CDROM recently. I know because I saw a stack of boxes at "Half Price Books" for $5 each. And you owned them for that $5, and could read them whenever you liked throughout the year, without having to pay $120.
I know they also have X-Men, Iron Man, FF, Captain America sets and probably more. Seems much more economical than renting them for a monthly fee.
if this had been an article about streaming music from some company of 40 year old recordings of pop music we'd have tons of posts howling that the copyright system is broken and that it's just plainly wrong to expect payment for such old works and how if the works were free both as in beer and as in speech that it would be a great advancement for civilization. people would be cursing the riaa and others would shout about boycotting, blah blah blah.
with comic books we have people saying that it's great and that it's really not to bad of a price considering the size of the catalog. not one word about how evil copyright is or any banter about how the home recording act should absolve people from wrong doing because of some obscure passage that doesn't relate to recordings at all. only one poster so far has even mention copyright and it was just a tangent, one person putting down on dc for being a rip off institute. a couple of people talking up torrents and everything else seems to be gravy. ain't that just incredible. somehow charging for 40 year old comics is fine and dandy but charging for music made last week is a sign that the system is broken and that everyone who's ever been elected is corrupt and anyone who actually supports paying an artist is a shill. i just love this place.
I don't remember if it was marvel or another one, but does anyone else remember the Warp! comic? Lots of stuff about gems and near nude girls, etc. Things like that. I has the first few issues years ago. This reminds me of it for some reason.
I applaud Marvel for doing this and I wish more entertainment content was available this way. If it was, I wouldn't be torrenting so much. In fact, I believe this kind of content will drive the use of the tablet style PCs, it's much easier to read a digital book with a device like that than on a laptop or desktop.
Two off-topic notes:
1) Stan Lee functioned as an editor at Marvel. He owned the company and through his contracts with the writers and artists, gave himself co-creator credit.
2) Why does Slashdot allow anonymous submissions like this which are little more than advertising? It's happening more and more lately. Why not just sell them ad space?
Yes, they certainly have been downloaded. Most of them are sitting on my shelf in a DVD case.
.cbr and .cbz formats, get a program called "cdisplay". cbr and cbz are just rars and zips of jpegs, so you can easily create your own "comic book" files of photographs if you choose and use cdisplay to read those, too. cbr and cbz are interchangable as far as cdisplay is concerned. It's really a pretty useful image viewing program.
My favourite place for comic downloads is zcultfm.com. Get yourself a membership there and check the "newest submissions" forum every day. You'll never lack for comics again.
Or, if you don't want to bother with that, just go to the bittorent site of your choice and type in "dcp" for "digital comics preservation". You'll see weekly packs of new releases there.
To read the nifty
Worst...Simpson's Joke...Ever.
pun intended ;)
What a steaming pile of schlock. First it takes me 4 minutes to just access marvel.com. Finding a comic, (any comic,) I might be interested in seeing takes another 10 minutes. Then flash-player popup window malfunctions after the first page, (something about mysql_db_connect throwing an exception - They're clearly getting lagged into oblivion,) leaving me staring at a blank screen with a stupid look on my face, wondering how I'm going to get the last 20 minutes of my life back. Oh, and it forced me to register with marvel.com. Pass
and new issues will only go online at least six months after they first appear in print.
Only six months?
C'mon, guys, we follow a strict "OYATM" policy to let the publishers get their fair share! Let's not go undercutting...
Oh, waitasec... Heh. Nevermind.
More seriously, what gives with only putting "teaser" issues online? As with almost all traditional media, they just don't seem to grasp that I can already obtain their entire back-catalog in high-res (higher than the original printing, in most cases - you can distinctly make out the halftoning in most cases) digital form.
They, as the rights-holder, have three distinct advantages over that - One, legality, which we all prefer when given the choice (under reasonable terms); Two, potentially near-perfect quality, which for older material even the best of scanners can't obtain (even if you could get a mint condition unfaded Spider Man #8, who the hell would unbind it to scan???); And three, "extras", such as commentary by Stan Lee or preliminary sketches or deleted panels that never made it to the final print.
But no. They want to offer, for a (admittedly reasonably) fee, something less impressive than what you can already download for free. That should work well for them...
Works for everything I've tried it on. I imagine other browsers have a similar function or will soon enough if this sort of thing becomes common.
actually i would take this as a sign of something being right with them. comic books are trash.
wasn't that what the whole reset thing from a few ago was all about?
yeh, brilliant idea.
"To stop the terrorists."
O RLY?
"Looking closer at Market Share, Marvel led 41.02% Unit Sales to DC's 38.98%, and 38.98% to DC's 36.30% in Dollar Share."
I meant that discussion deserves a thread of its own and shouldn't derail this thread.
Now in order to get this post marked off-topic, I need to give my opinion.
Personally, I think "a limited time" in a legal sense is sometime less than the maximum human lifespan. The oldest verified living person was Sarah Knauss who died at 119 years of age just two days before the Y2K scare. From time to time there are claims of people living past 120. If I were a court, I would immediately strike down anything over 120 years as clearly "not limited."
Below that, there is a lot of wiggle room for the lawyers. A "fair" copyright limit would be the longer of the "average remaining lifetime" of creators, that is, the average time it takes between the time a work is created and the time the person dies, or the life of the individual creator, whichever is longer. For corporate or collaborative works, use the "average remaining lifetime."
The "average remaining lifetime" is probably something on the order of 40-60 years, more or less.
A simplistic copyright would be a flat 50 years.
Of course, there is also the whole problem of orphan works, which is also deserving of a thread of its own.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Scene rips of comics use the excellent Comic Book Archive file format, which is an archive (usually ZIP or RAR)
How does DjVu compare to CDisplay's ZIP/RAR archives?
Da Blog
So, any thoughts on vi vs emacs?
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
vi rules. vi emacs. it is installed on every unix.
i was not defending DC at all. both really tick me off,
just marvel more so.
it is not even worth selling old comics the market has
been trashed to heck and back.
thank god for bob burden and people like him. go flaming carrot!
Like drug monopolies, copyright monopolies pay for all the works that were financial duds.
If there were no copyrights or other intellectual-property monopolies or they expired quicker, some creative works would never happen.
On the other hand, if they expired quicker or never existed, some creative works that don't happen would.
As a matter of public policy, we should strive to maximize the quantity and quality of creative works that come into being and which are made available to the public to enjoy.
Whether this means copyright terms of 0, 20, 50, 100, or 1000 years is a matter for behaviorists to study.
As a matter of constitutional compliance, anything greater than "a limited time" is illegal even if it would be the theoretically best time period. Of course, I don't think it is. I think the theoretical best time period will be far less than the current 95+ years.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"I think this attempt is doomed to failure, at least in terms of growing their readership and fan base. Charging a monthy access fee? Who do they think will pay this? You want to hook new readers on to your stuff, but tell them "hey, it's great, trust me. Pay up and you'll see how great it is!"? That's not going to fly."
:)
$4.99*12/2 = £30. Sounds good to me.
I'll bite if they can quickly build up their portfolio so that I can catch up on the last 20 years of comics that Ive missed. And if the format is convenient and quality/speed up to scratch. And if I find a good enough series I'll probably pop to the local comic book store and read the print version. You see I just had a look at the dcp stuff and yes, I can grab the last 200 days and then keep checking on the torrents that will take 231 hours to complete but...thats quite a lot of hassle to go through. Too much hassle. Whereas £30 to have all the stuff organized and in one place...well you know what? THAT sounds like its worth paying for.
So I think you're wrong. I think there are a lot of older comics fans who will jump all over this when they find out about it AND its going to grow their printed sales. If there is going to be any damage from this its going to be in the back-issues market (and thats going to hurt a lot of smaller shops) but overall I think consumers/fans are going to be big winners.
Now wheres the DC/Independent stuff?
Marvel has had online comics for a while now, but only little teasers. I looked into them last week and they were laid out as swf files which had the text balloons, which then rendered above JPG images of the main comic pages. This is very interesting because you can essentially get the comic art JPGs by themselves...
Now this makes sense for newer comics which are obviously done digitally anyway, but what I'm curious about is whether the X-Men #1 will be like this...I am guessing it is highly unlikely...but it could still be the raw scan underneath with crisper text balloons overlaid anyway.
Unless Archie and Friends comics start doing this. I'm not buying.
though what I do now, is that knowing the folks out there who use Limewire, Limewire can and probably will be able to do that. you can download music, movies, and other computer files off of there, so what's to stop illegal downloads from there?
Well, since slashdot in its transfinite wisdom won't let me see my own anonymous post anymore, I will just make a new post!
So the old issues just have the text in the JPG, and no SWF text balloons
wget http://www.marvel.com/dotcomics_issues/CAPA177/hi_res_col/1.jpg
for example...and I'm sure people are, which is why Marvel is completely hosed right now
in your preferred viewer. If CDisplay/Comix/whatever supports DjVu, the CBR could
DjVu can also contain an OCR layer. I'm looking for a time past CDisplay's "dumb" mode, where we can run OCR and hand enter character tags with dialog. Make the archives searchable. It would be cool to be able to do a search for some combination of heroes and villains or specific dialog that would let me open that actual page. Kind of the way text-based subtitles were added to DIVX rips of DVDs.
Da Blog
Too weak or too strong of a patents and copyright system means we are not promoting the progress of science and useful arts as well as we could be.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Finally got AdBlock Pro configured to kill that double-underline crap from "Intellitxt" but now Yahoo! is doing yet another braindead variation of it. Arrgh.
No, the DRM will disable the print screen key while the comic is being viewed...
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
for my money, so no. I do pay for it.
When the last one changed ToS, I cancelled and didn't pay the termination fee because I told them they changed the contract, so the old one isn't in effect and maybe *I* should get paid a termination fee because THEY stopped the contract. At that point, they gave up.
"Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 31 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment"
The above is why I won't pay squat for slashdot or any related products.
I think you misunderstood my comment. I *love* Vertigo comics. My point is that DC trumpets their big flagship titles while Vertigo quietly works miracles in the corner.
Actually, Hellblazer (and Sandman) are DCU, don't know about the rest. DC tries to to handwaving to make people forget it most of the time, but once in a while a good writer manages to sneak something back in...
And I'm going to start picking up Y trades once the series ends and I have some spare cash.
I didn't mean my initial rant to be so anti-DC, there are good things going on over there and they've proven several times they know what they're doing, unfortunately they keep dropping the ball right afterwards... My favorite example being Day of Vengeance, which was great. Shadowpact was an awesome idea that made good use of a bunch of second-string characters people like to forget about, which I love seeing happen (like in Iron Fist or Blade). They got the right blend of bitter comedy from Detective Chimp and a serious, gritty approach to the magical side of DCU, something very lacking. A dark, serious "fantasy" DC book (It seems they're only allowed to take "magic" seriously in Vertigo w/ Hellblazer/Sandman/Books of Magic). Then the first issue of the continuing Shadowpact series I see Blue Devil and Ragman fighting a giant snake in broad daylight on the first page... And I knew that the creative team didn't know what to do with these characters any more...
I keep coming back to Iron Fist as a counterexample to this. I mean, honestly, who gave a rat's ass about Danny Rand five years ago? Now there's a creative team who knows (and likes) enough old kung-fu and pulp stories to put together an homage to them without coming off as cheesy, and somehow they end up putting a good story and great dialogue in the middle of all the hong-kong-fanboyism.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them