Didyaknow? Stan Lee has an archive at the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center. Materials in the collection range from manuscripts and scrapbooks, to photos and comicbooks, to fan letters and correspondence with celebrities, to original artwork and beyond! Heck, the collection even includes Captain America View-Master slides from the 1970s. (Though, sadly, there’s no viewer to properly enjoy them with. Still, you have to admit that’s awesome.) Oh, and that’s only the paper materials. We’d be remiss not to mention the boxes upon boxes of audiovisual items containing vintage TV interviews, speeches, news coverage, radio appearances, home movies, and even some conversations with familiar faces like Kevin Smith and William Shatner. These gems are housed on a plethora of mediums, many of them old school style, such as DVD, VHS, Betamax video, 35mm film, CD, cassette tape, and reel-to-reel audio. You can even find a few video games sprinkled in there!

Intrigued? Here’s a handy inventory of the collection from the American Heritage Center’s website if you feel so inclined to peruse Stan’s papers:

“The Stan Lee papers include manuscripts and working drafts of many Marvel Comics productions including the Spider-Man daily comic strips and Vera Valiant as well as a host of other comic book lines such as the Silver Surfer, the X-Men, Captain America, the Tomorrow Chronicles, the Fantastic Four, and the Incredible Hulk. Also included is fan mail and correspondence. Much of the correspondence is between Lee and business associates regarding the management and operation of Marvel Comics Group and its production of comic books and other publications. There are numerous magazine and news articles about Stan Lee and Marvel Comics Group, and there are other professional and photograph files that relate to Stan Lee, Marvel Comics Group, and the comics industry. Also included are audio-visual materials including audiotapes, DVDs, and numerous videotapes of Stan Lee interviews and Stan Lee events such as presentations, autograph sessions, conventions, and talk show appearances. There is a small amount of material related to Lee’s Internet site, Stan Lee Media.”

(Fun fact: If you print this file (available on the website link below), it’s over 40 pages long!) What are some items you’d choose to view? I, for one, still want to hear some of those Merry Marvel Marching Society records – on cassette tape.

That is the good news! What’s the bad news? It’s not online! ARRHG! Yes, all the information lists of what the archive contains, is there but to see the actual items on the list, you have to physically go to the library, in Wyoming,  to view it. Maybe someday we’l have an online museum of this type for all to see.

As we mentioned, the Stan Lee Papers are open to the public. So, if you’re ever in the Laramie, Wyoming area, we highly suggest dropping in and paying the collection a visit. If you do plan on stopping by, you can also contact the archive in advance and they can assist you with any questions you may have; the entire staff is fabulous and very accommodating.

(Source: Read more about this @ therealstanlee.com and the University of Wyoming  site.) 

The Dreaded Deadline Doom of August and September 2018 is winding down. But it’s not going out with a whimper! This has been one of our busiest years in recent memory. It certainly has, without doubt, been the busiest since we began this web site 10 years ago. Most years our high school football program magazine deadlines are spread out over the 2 month period. This year we had 4 due in one week! That may not sound like much, but for a small staff it can be somewhat stressful. These books range from 88 pages to 156! That’a a lot of scanning of photos and art, resizing and adjusting photos, adding clip art, and a ton of type setting. Then there is also prepress preparation. Even though football programs are the main time consumers during our crunch time, there are also plenty of business cards, letterhead, brochures and forms which come due during this time. Hopefully, if all goes as current trends show now, we’ll have more time to post next week. As for they post we’re keeping very short this time. Next week we’ll try to do better. Thanks for your patience.

The Hits Keep On Coming!

Another short and late post this week due to the Dreaded Deadline Doom we experience every year at this time. As we clued you in last week August and September are the busiest time of year for us here at the Creative Compound of MCG. It’s not comic book related work but rather all school and sports related publications, forms, books, magazines and more. In addition to the schools there are many businesses which do more work in August and September as well and which require print services, layout and design. Also, this is an election year, so we have all the campaign related printing and design work to do as well. This is the busiest August we have seen in the printing business for at least 12 years. The economy really seems to be picking up. But still, once September comes and goes, things should get back to more manageable levels of stress! 😉

New Pencil Art From Mark Poe

A few weeks ago Mark agreed to do some sketches for an up and coming title!  This gentleman’s name is Captain Blitz and he is soon to be a featured character in a series called Phenomenal Tales.  There are four more characters slated for this title at present but all is still in the planning stages. This is not a Mega Comics Group project. Well, not as yet, anyway, but who knows? Anything is possible.

We don’t have a lot of information about it right now. There are some more concepts from a friend and fellow CCAS (Christian Comic Arts Society) member by the name of Edgar Campusano and some of his associate creators. We thought we’d just tease you a little with this sketch and whet your appetite for more. We’ll give you more details and more artwork in a future post once we get the lowdown from Edgar and get past the annual Dreaded Deadline Doom which doth hang over our heads in these waning weeks of summer! So stay tuned for more!

More New Items from the Mega Graphics Print On Demand T-Shirt Shop 

T-Shirts, hoodies, buttons, mouse pads, travel mugs and more! We told you a little about the new online t-shirt shop last week. What we did not tell you was how you can  not only order all kinds of cool garments and other items with your favorite Mega Comics Group cover art or some of El Marko’s stunning mascot cartoons, but also customize them any way you want. That’s the beauty of a Spreadshirt store! You can use the Create Studio App right on the web site to add your name or catch phrase to the art designs, size them up or place them in any position and almost any place on the item to be printed. You can have the designs printed on mugs, travel mugs, mouse pads, posters, buttons, and lots more cool products.  It’s all part of our 10th Anniversary the MCG Web Site Celebration! So don’t delay, be a Mega Comics trend setter in your world today!

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It’s That Time Again!

Some folks care nothing for football other than the NFL. A lot of comics fans don’t care for American football on any level. Most around the Mega Comics Creative Compound here enjoy watching the sport with a few exceptions. El Marko, for instance is a big Crimson Tide fan. Freazie doesn’t care much for it, but if a game is on he can get interested.  Some of us do work for a local off-set printing business who does a lot of work for local High Schools including printing up program magazines for the school football teams. So it is always at this time of year, for at least a month some years a little longer, we have very little time to work on anything else. Those deadlines are on us again so this weeks blog will be brief.

We Have Printed Copies of Mega Tales #1

The printed copies of the 2nd printing MCG 10th Anniversary Edition of Mega Tales #1 are in!  Yes, Ka-blam Printing did a great job with the printing. The color of the new, reformatted pages are brilliant! You might need shades to read this one. 😉  Ka-blam still has the first printing in there IndyPlanet store. So even thought you can get the new printed book the new digital copy is still not available from IndyPlanet. But that will change any day now. The new, 2nd printing, digital edition is available from DriveThru Comics.

Speaking of  DriveThru Comics, the Mega Tales #1 printed proof is on it’s way also. So we should start to have printed copies available as POD (Print On Demand) from Drive Thru as well as IndyPlanet. Yes, all our books will be available from each source.

New Items In Our T-Shirt Shop Which Are Also POD

Mugs, Shirts, Mouse Pads and more. We lunched our new T-shirt store a couple weeks ago but we have no intention of stopping with just offering your favorite Mega Artworks on garments. Heck no! We are branching out into mugs, travel mugs, mouse pads, posters, buttons, and…. well, pretty much anything we can get to stay still long enough to imprint it! We had a source for t-shirts, mugs and posters back in 2008 when we first got started with the MCG web-site. Well, that company changed it’s policy and it was no longer viable to use them but now he’s found the fine folks at Spreadshirt and were back in business. Jus tin time for our 10th Anniversary the MCG Web Site Celebration! How ’bout that! Be the first in your neighborhood to set the style!

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So you say you can’t afford to buy all the comic books you want to read? Is that’s what’s bothering you? Hey! We hear ya, bub! In these days of inflated prices on our favorite reading past time, all of us have to really budget our buying and collecting habits. Didyaknow, you can read practically all the books you want to without paying for ’em? No, really. We found a website which makes available a ton of NEW comics plus some which have been out within the past 3 years or so. Seriously, dude and dudettes! We kid thee not! “But how can they possible do that?” you might well ask. Well, we couldn’t find much info from the site developers but judging by the amount of ads, the site, as well as the cost of the books must be supported by advertisers. It’s an age old concept. It’s how things like TV USE to be free and in some case still is. When you have sponsors bankrolling the broadcast, or in this case, web publishing, it’s a win, win situation. That must be what this site is all about. Right? It’s called…

Read Comic Books FREE Online

To good to be true? Most likely. This is just one of several sites offering this service. While it is true they are supported by advertising, these sites are actually pirate sites. Part of the infamous Dark Web! These sites work somewhat like a news aggregator. The comic books are uploaded to a server farm somewhere, probably in another country, and the sites actually serve up links of entire comic books and entire series  from the server farms. So we can actually read comics without paying for them. The problem is, this is being done without the permission of the publishers. Yes, this in fact is piracy of comic books.

The above banner is from just one site. There are are actually more sites serving these links up than we could count. There are many domains registered with similar names as depicted on the banner. A little research on the web exposed that these sites are indeed pirate sites. Some of the cover art you see depicted here in this blog posting were pulled from one of the sites. These are new comics only released in the past month. There are thousands of new comic books as well as many from years past. We saw some that dated back to the 1990’s.

When Is Free Not Free?

Is this illegal? Yes, it is very much illegal. Just as the music uploaded for people to download from the site called Napster several years ago, which was  eventually forced to shut down due to a court order. Uploading copyrighted digital comic books to any website or archive, other than for your personal use, is a violation of law according to the terms of purchase when you buy a book. A digital comic is no different than a printed comic book according to the law. If you were to buy the latest issue of, say, Ant-Man and The Wasp and use a color photo copier to duplicate a copy, or several copies, even if you are only giving those away, that is illegal. The same applies to sharing digital copies.

“Could I get in trouble viewing these comics on the web?” You probably would not be in any legal jeopardy just for viewing the pages of the comic. If you were to download the comic book, that’s a different matter. Then you could find yourself in the same scenario many people who started downloading what they thought was free music a few years ago. Several people were prosecuted and had to pay some stiff fines for copyright violations just for downloading their favorite songs. Bear in mind, technically your web browser downloads a copy of each web page you are viewing as you go from page to page on any give web site, so the case could be made that just viewing pages is actually the same as downloading a complete copy of the comic book. That is a technicality, but it’s one layers love to exploit when given the chance.

Here’s another concern:  It may or may not be against the law for individuals such as you and I to view comic book pages on the web, but there may be other risks for you personally. If site developers and hosts have no qualms about the legality of hosting a service to illegally distribute material protected under copyright law, would they have any problems stealing your personal information via spyware? That’s a real possibility we have to consider these days on the world wide web.

How to spot pirate sites: Look for information who is hosting the site. If the owners are unidentified and there is no “About Us” anywhere on the home page links or anywhere else on the site readily available, most likely, the owners do not want themselves easily identified because they know what they are doing is not legal or ethical.

The proliferation of these Read Online Comic Book sites may be a pivotable point for the comic book industry. Just as it was with Napster and other sites which allowed the uploading and mass distribution of “free” music mp3’s, no industry will tolerate the theft of their livelihood. No one can do that and stay in business. However, there is a possibility that publishers could recognize the opportunity here of an audience, like what we presented at the beginning of this article with the comparison to the sponsored supported existence of free TV broadcasts. After all, Napter inspired companies like Apple to create online stores where people could purchase their favorite songs for $1 per download and a whole industry was saved.

REAL Legal & Free Read Comics Web Sites

Yes, there are some places you can both view and download free comics on the web. These are sites which host Public Domain Comics mostly from the Golden and Silver Age of Comics. The first one we have for you is also the “No. 1 Free & Legal” read and download web site. It’s called Comic Book Plus and  was established in 2006 which makes it one of the oldest still around. El Marko claims there was one around back in 1997 which he remembers but can’t recall the name of it. Comic Book Plus has a large collection of Public Domain Comic Books including many of the ol’ Charlton and Tower Comics from the late ’60’s. You can find Steve Ditko’s Captain Atom and Blue Beetle among theses as well as Wally Wood’s Thunder Agents. Comic Book Plus has a great catalog system and viewer. You can read the comics right in you browser or download a copy to read on your computer or iPad Comic Reader App later. Your choice. Another very similar site which has a lot of mainly Golden Age Public Domain Comic Books is the Digital Comic Museum. There are others sites which host Public Domain Comic Books which you can find by searching through Google, Bing or your favorite search engine.

There are also PAY sites you can purchase digital copies ala carte of comics OR join and UNLIMITED READING club . Marvel was the first to do this with Marvel Unlimited. Marvel Unlimited features fairly new comics, usually within 6 months to a year of the release date. Marvel Unlimited also has almost all it’s Silver Age and most of it’s Bronze Age titles available.  With the success of Marvel Unlimited,  Amazon’s  Comixolgy has followed them with their own Unlimited Reading Plan. Comixology not only has a lot of the Marvel Titles but titles from several other publishers like DC and Dynamic to mention a couple. You pay a low subscription rate each month and read all the comics you want. Both the above plans are less than $10.00 per month and for the amount of book you have access to that’s a great deal.

As you can see, there are some safe and legal alternatives to the Napster style comic book pirate sites. Check ’em out!

Project Super Powers 2018

Dynamite Entertainment is at it again! Project Superpowers is Back! Written by Rob (Suicide Squad) Williams, illustrated by Sergio (Swords of Sorrow, Superman) Davila, and featuring an all-star roster of cover artists, this introductory priced issue is the perfect starting point for the most ambitious superhero story of 2018.

An all-new threat faces the Earth, while the team faces turmoil from within and must overcome all obstacles to prove their worth and value in a world that desperately needs its heroes. The Death Defying Devil, Samson, Black Terror, Masquerade, Green Lama, Scarab and more are all here as the adventure begins again.

Featuring an introductory story leading right into the all-new #1 next month, Project Superpowers #0 is action-packed and introductory priced. Includes bonus materials and 16 pages of original story. (Source: Dynamite Entertainment )