Originally published at: The wild story of a new comic book publisher con artist who bought up popular 90s comics IP | Boing Boing
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but perhaps the greatest con job involving the 90s comics industry was the implication that if enough dumb kids bought enough gimicky issues and kept them in little plastic bags, they’d be worth tons of money someday.
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Does the poor spelling and grammar and the insistently convoluted storytelling presented here serve the same purpose that it does in the Nigerian 419 scams (i.e. to better identify the real suckers)?
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Ah gee, that must have been hard—how did anybody figure out anything before YouTube and Wikipedia?
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Might depend on where you lived and how many like minded people were around. God bless fanzines and the local library for info. Otherwise, you’d be taking the staples out of a comic and seeing how the pages were laid out in order to replicate.
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Even with the help of the internet it took me a dog’s age to solve the page layout problem. It probably wouldn’t have taken as long if I’d pulled apart one of my comics, but it was the late 90s and those shiny cover variants were worth good money, especially if they had the hologram.
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OBLIGATORY!
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So much this. But still better than today’s crypto curency craze. At least I can still read my 15 copies of Jim Lee’s X-Men#1.
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This
they tweeted like a 13-year-old boy smashing action figures together and calling it a story.
was so good, if a bit of a spoiler. Reading the real communiques and realizing that was really their style… 
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I’d seen this kind of shit before. It’s a ruse I’d figured out after the nth time some similarly sketchy dude reached out to my shitty high school punk band, using similarly shitty grammar and questionable sales practices in exchange for just a little free promo.
I had something like this happen when I was in HS. I was showing some dude I sorta knew some comic art I drew at the gas station he worked at, and some slick guy in a cowboy hat saw it and was like, “I have a record company and need an album cover…” and there was this long spiel, and he had this weird company name with like a 9 letter acronym. At any rate, I had a phone number and an idea of what he wanted, and went to work on it. But I never could get in contact with that guy again. Rumor was he blew into town, made a lot of boasts and flashed money, and then blew out. Shrug.
I too would love to write comics and think I would be decent at it… so had I known about this I too might have inquired.
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“The way everything is written is just to benefit Andrew Rev and Terrific Production, and screw over writers and artists financially the best way he can.”
So nothing like DC or Marvel, then?
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Ripping off comic book artists with shady business dealings and questionable publishing tactics. A time honored American tradition. Now that I think about it, I’m sure the British, European and Japanese comic industries must’ve done some creative screwing of their own.
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Somewhat related: I enjoyed the recent series of Planet Money podcasts on NPR where the team sought to purchase the IP for one of the many unused Marvel super heroes.
(In the end they found one that was in public domain instead, and brought him back in new comics and merchandise.)
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Snark all you want, but Youtube and other social media have had dramatic impacts on the ability to learn in certain fields. Pre-internet there simply weren’t a lot of learning resources for certain things - you were reliant on books, teachers and/or extensive trial and error. For comic books, you mostly only had access to teachers if you were already within the industry, there were only a couple good books (that you had to know existed, and live in a place where you could access them), and that left years of trial and error to learn something you can just look up in matter of minutes now.
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Exactly!!
I spent the first half of my teenage years in a fairly remote area with absolutely ZERO underground culture in a time before YouTube. I had no creative outlet to speak of until the internet rolled around in the mid-90s and even then, it didn’t help much.
When I finally got out of that place and discovered things like zines and mini-comics my mind was blown. The very idea that I could create things like this was very empowering and helped shape the man I am today.
If I had caught wind of this kind of thing via something like social media or YouTube I almost certainly would have embraced creativity a lot sooner and probably would have been a lot less miserable where I was.
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Ha, I wish! IIRC it was like Christ on the cross with black cracks forming in the sky. I probably still have it somewhere. Given I was constantly drawing/painting anyway, it was good practice.
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This whole story sounds like every White Supremacist recruitment attempt I ever ran into at a punk show.
Was he driving a van. Did he offer to introduce you “chicks who will fuck you”?
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No, he was more of a country music type… with Christian over tones. No freaking clue what his deal ended up being 
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