Well, the thing with Avengers Classic is two-fold:
1) They're only paying for eight or so pages of original material (outside issue 1), so the sales required to make a profit on each issue will presumably be correspondingly lower.
2) They're using it as an excuse to "remaster" the issues, in preparation for reprinting the first Avengers Masterworks book. Presumably, the budgets have been shifted around such that that makes this look like a more attractive way of doing so than simply reconstructing the art directly for an AvMW reprint.
Well, the thing with Avengers Classic is two-fold:
1) They're only paying for eight or so pages of original material (outside issue 1), so the sales required to make a profit on each issue will presumably be correspondingly lower.
2) They're using it as an excuse to "remaster" the issues, in preparation for reprinting the first Avengers Masterworks book. Presumably, the budgets have been shifted around such that that makes this look like a more attractive way of doing so than simply reconstructing the art directly for an AvMW reprint.
Maybe it's a type of artistic Darwinism. Those pices of artwork good enough to be recognisable as art remain intact, the rest go in the dustbin...
Having read those original issues, I'll be totally astonished if Avengers Classic lasts beyond twenty issues.
Yeah, I'm an Avengers fan, and even I started picking up the Essentials with volume four. The early stuff really wasn't that good, okay in a cheap format, but, to paraphrase Hawkeye, not like this.
Still, Marvel think the Avengers franchise is a cash cow right now, so they're going to milk it for all its worth. I'm not sure it's the Avengers themselves, because after all, they couldn't muster 100k sales before Bendis and Millar came along, and I find it hard to believe that suddenly fandom sees the potential in the characters.
The other thing is that fans in the UK will already have had access to remastered versions of these stories from Panini's Avengers United, and with better value for money too.
I actually like that Klaxon's song less since they replaced the video. It just makes it seem so much more pretentious and it does slow it down and suck all the energy out of it. Glowing rubik's cubes don't compare to a drunken mix of Op Art and CSO.
1) They're only paying for eight or so pages of original material (outside issue 1), so the sales required to make a profit on each issue will presumably be correspondingly lower.
That's about what Classic X-Men had going on at first; eventually the original material was dropped from the format and the book still folded at some point in the mid-90s. Probably for the best, as a) it was approaching a period of crossover-dependent storylines (and had already become quite incomprehensible in instances involving the New Mutants or the Beyonder); and b) in the long-run the market and the fans seem better able to bear just keeping the cheapo reprint trade catalog alive through the Essentials.
That Klaxons re-videoing is just... bizarre. You're right - the original is just better. It's actually mildly trippy through its attack and relentlessness, and the cuts are more in time with the song's increasing momentum.
(The re-make increases the density of imagery mildly, but it isn't even a fraction as effective)
The higher budget video doesn't even really work well with the record - it's early Klaxons. I can get the bit of a budget on later Klaxons - which always SOUND like they had money, but Gravity's Rainbow sounds like a Garage Band trying to play 303 basslines behind a fairly standard indie record pepped up by the E-chorus.
But yeah. Bizarre.
KG
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