The Last Boy On Earth!

[athelind]

So... DC is releasing the first ten issues of KAMANDI... as a $50 hardcover.

I'm sorry -- I'm a hard-core Kirby fanatic who loved Kamandi, but I'm not shellin' out $5 an issue for a fancy hardcover that I'd be afraid to hand my grandkids.

These guys are so screwing up their product. They shouldn't be targeting these old reprints at the teeny tine nostalgia market of adult comic fans. They need to be flooding the magazine racks with cheap newsprint reprints of this stuff -- in nice, thick, Shonen Jump-style packaging, perhaps -- and using it to pull in new readers. .

Especially stuff like Kamandi: Last Boy On Earth. It's the perfect gateway comic.

It's self-contained, it's colorful, it's got the kind of way-out concepts that ten-year-olds love. Mutants! Disasters! Tracking Site! Morticoccus, the ultimate germ! UFOs! Animals that walk like men!

And don't tell me that 'kids today are more sohpisticated'. I have grandkids. I see what they watch: Pokemon, and Yu-Gi-Oh... and the old HB Fantastic Four cartoon that I grew up with in the '60s.

Phil and Kaja Foglio have it right -- in this market, your periodicals, the monthly and quarterly comics on the rack -- that's your advertising.

In the '70s, DC and Marvel knew what to do with their vaults of old comic stories -- they expanded their books and crammed reprints in the back. They did whole Annuals and Giant-Sized issues and big tabloid-sized books that were nothing but reprints. It was "added value" with little or no overhead -- all it cost was the extra pulp.

As a result, they raised a generation of hard-core fans who loved the sense of history that the old "Golden Age" and "Silver Age" classics gave them.

Comments

Right on the mark!

[breimh.livejournal.com]

Well said, bravo!

The trouble is, most of these marketing directors are looking at the market base (in this case, readers/readership) and saying to themselves, "We can get the kids by putting out expensive reprints that their seniors will buy and try to keep out of their grubby little hands". You know the way it works, and it is a psychological tool that many marketing directors have used even in our time as kids.

But, I do wish they'd allow for new readership in the way you've pointed out they used to do.

[drakegrey.livejournal.com]

Ah, Kamandi.... wonderfully bizarre and prefiguring FurryMuck, with its legion of creatures.

I was half tempted back in the day to make a human character named Kamandar, the Last Boy on Furrymuck. But sanity prevailed and I realized that long blond hair and running around in nothing but cut offs would have been a formula for disaster. A Great Disaster, even. :D

Oh, and agreed on your points. Even if I DID just spend $35 at Amazon for the hardcover reprints of 'Magnus, Robot Fighter' and 'Dr. Solar, Man of the Atom'. :P

--Drake