rebellion to reprint MISTY

[Dark Jimbo]

I presume he means their existing readership of 40-and-older blokes that buy 40 year old black and white UK comics.  Not sure that market share is a particularly big one, but Maryanddavid would know better than I would.

Er... if teenage girls in 2015 are not reading 40 year old black and white comics, it isn't because of an aversion to typeset lettering.

[maryanddavid]

Its great news! I have never read Moonchild, but I do remember The Four Faces of Eve. My sister had a collection of annuals and The Best of Misty Monthly, and the Four Faces did freak me a little.

It will be interesting to see how its marketed, 2000 AD and Titan's Egmont collections of older material would rely, I think, on nostalgia for some of their sales, how well known creators involved, and how well known the actual strip is, along with packaging and reviews.

Misty wont have much nostalgia for a lot of 2000 AD readers, Misty is known by a lot of people but by reputation only.
Unlike 2000AD or the Eagle, there are no characters like Dredd or Doomlord that are well known.

It will have Pat Mills name on the cover and that will sell copies, and while the artist may not be known as well as others, it quality stuff.

Rebellion have proven that they know how to package and sell older material, the success of this will depend a lot I think on word of mouth telling how good the material is.
Its very different to Battle or Scream, or even early 2000AD. Much less action, much less violence, but they are there, what is there in abundance is great storytelling and some genuinely creepy moments too.

Halo Jones is not a bad comparison to the style of storytelling that Misty has.

Looking forward to this, and if it reached the audience that it should, there will be a lot more similar collections.

On the other hand, Rebellion my ignore the 30-40 nostalgia buying male collectors and go for the Jackie style annual collections that were hugely popular a few years back. The drawback of an annual collection though is that there is a very short shelf life and then its the discount shops.

Whatever format, I have my sisters Christmas present sorted for 2016!

[M.I.K.]

I presume he means their existing readership of 40-and-older blokes that buy 40 year old black and white UK comics.  Not sure that market share is a particularly big one, but Maryanddavid would know better than I would.

Er... if teenage girls in 2015 are not reading 40 year old black and white comics, it isn't because of an aversion to typeset lettering.

...or because of lack of colour, considering most teenage girls who read comics in this country, read manga.

[M.I.K.]

Its great news! I have never read Moonchild, but I do remember The Four Faces of Eve. My sister had a collection of annuals and The Best of Misty Monthly, and the Four Faces did freak me a little.

Whereas I've read Moonchild, but not The Four Faces of Eve. I've got all the annuals except 1986 and Moonchild was reprinted in the 1983 one.

I've also got that Misty Special from 2009 that Pat Mills keeps slagging off, in spite of the fact he doesn't seem to have actually read it. There's sod all wrong with it. The most likely reason other folk have been telling him they didn't like it is because it didn't have any of the more well known stories in it, ie; the stuff they remember most, ie; the serials, which would have been a stupid thing to put in a one-off special. I think whoever put it together did a damn good job. So there.

[Silent_Bomber]

I'd rather they were done in kind of a Graphic Novel style, with the story's title on the cover. The reprint books that look like old annuals seemed cheap and nasty to me, like they had little faith in the material.

Its difficult to judge what would sell better though. Personally I really wish that Titan had released their Spider and Steel Claw books as "phone books" similar to the case files, where it comes to those series' I want quantity and value for money, the stories got better as they went on and they never got near the better stuff.

[Professor Bear]

What middle aged blokes like in a comic may be different than what 8-14 year old girls like in a comic.  I'm just throwing that out there.
Although I do like your observation about manga, as manga was huge in the 1990s, but the market for it collapsed spectacularly in the 2000s when publishers listened to weeaboos who said they wanted the reprints to be as close to the original material as possible.

[TordelBack]

Weeaboo

Tordelback's New Word of the Day. Very handy.

[Colin YNWA]

What middle aged blokes like in a comic may be different than what 8-14 year old girls like in a comic.  I'm just throwing that out there.
Although I do like your observation about manga, as manga was huge in the 1990s, but the market for it collapsed spectacularly in the 2000s when publishers listened to weeaboos who said they wanted the reprints to be as close to the original material as possible.

Really, I have no data to support my observations (I'd hazard a guess that neither do you) but the massive and apparently popular selection of material available in my Nerd Shop and I see elsewhere would suggest that its still doing okay.

As for the Misty material hopefully if its of the quality that its reputation holds it to be it'll find a market, they'll be enough of us 40 year olds who are curious enough to find out if it holds up who'll plumb for it, there maybe a nostaglia market for people who read it back in the day to be tapped into AND younger readers who stumble across it and give it a whirl by whatever marketing channels people smarter in such things that us know to expliot.

If the whole thing is an experiment to find out if such markets exist then not tampering with the material and therefore increasing the cost of something your not sure will find a market will make sense I'd guess?

[Dark Jimbo]

Weeaboo

Tordelback's New Word of the Day. Very handy.

[Professor Bear]

LOL!  YIFF IN HELL WEEABOO SCUM!

Really, I have no data to support my observations (I'd hazard a guess that neither do you)

/takes off a single silk glove
/attempts to effeminately slap Colin
/realises Colin is on the other side of the internet

but the massive and apparently popular selection of material available in my Nerd Shop and I see elsewhere would suggest that its still doing okay.

As the buckets of manga volumes going for 99 pence a time in my LCS can attest, "visible" is not the same as "successful".  Pricey localised translations by the likes of Dark Horse remain popular and successful, but then there's the largely-unsold volumes of cheapo, knocked-out product with a serialised format, unflipped pages, literal translations, and poor proofing which comprises the majority of contemporary manga product.
That the latter is what reduced the western manga industry is open to debate as the industry obviously prefers to blame outside factors such as piracy (scanlations) rather than their shifting to a more niche product, but manga is unquestionably not what it was in the 1990s, when it was such a cultural phenomenon that Marvel had at least two weekly titles (Havok and Meltdown) dedicated to reprinting manga and/or their own manga-themed books (although this just meant a Marvel title with a lot of speed lines in the bg, like Deathlok or the Danny Ketch version of Ghost Rider), as well as sharing shelf space with Titan's long-lived Manga Mania anthology, which managed to reprint Akira in its entirety over the course of its lifespan.

To be entirely fair, apart from reports of a recent bounce in book sales, the rest of the publishing industry is in the crapper, too, and manga can be viewed in that context.  I can understand Rebellion not wanting to invest too much in restoring and re-presenting the Misty material, but I try not to let the fact that I'll definately be buying it myself obscure that they're aiming at a smaller audience than they could otherwise potentially reach.

[rogue69]

[I am happy to say there will be another announcement shortly about another non-2000 AD collection, so keep a look out for that. Naturally when we look at material and consider if we can publish successfully, existing links with 2000 AD makes that task easier.]


Should be interesting to see what else they are trying to release

[Professor Bear]

If you check around that Jinty blog for some of the old stories that title ran over the years, there's quite a few contenders for reprinting, from Disaster 1990-pipping Fran Of The Floods to Pat Mills-penned skateboarding class-war social drama Concrete Surfer.  Quite a few 2000ad alums in the mix.

[Silent_Bomber]

Weeaboo

Tordelback's New Word of the Day. Very handy.

As a 2000AD fan I run into more Freeaboo's

"Our comics suck, American comics are much better, they have classic writers like Moore, Morrison, & Abnett"

[Hap Hazzard]

[I am happy to say there will be another announcement shortly about another non-2000 AD collection, so keep a look out for that. Naturally when we look at material and consider if we can publish successfully, existing links with 2000 AD makes that task easier.]


Should be interesting to see what else they are trying to release

I sent a question into the podcast about it based on them being able to get the rights to Misty, asking if Scream was next on the list. Answer was lots in the pipeline they can't talk about, so I'm taking that as a "yes but we aren't able to announce it yet".

[Hawkmumbler]

Really hope this doesn't effect Hibernia in anyway....