Oh, if anyone's after late-run Titan books...

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Cliffjumper
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Oh, if anyone's after late-run Titan books...

Post by Cliffjumper »

...Forbidden Planet branches are, unusually, worth a look - US material TPBs for £1.99, hardbacks for £2.99.
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inflatable dalek
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Post by inflatable dalek »

Considering how many copies of them still seem to be about and how cheaply they sell for (not to mention the Forbidden Planet in Brum still has Dreamwave's books on the shelf) it's amazing IDW make any cash at all from their money for old rope titles.
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Post by Cliffjumper »

Mmmm, haivng picked up Last Stand and Treason for something to read on the train back from London, I was briefly tempted to just buy up a cheap set. Sadly, it looks like Beginnings goes for actual money (i.e. more than £2.99) and it ended there.
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Post by Auntie Slag »

I headed straight for my local Forbidden Planet after work today after reading this thread during morning breakfast... and the bastards had diddly-squat!

I like the hardback stuff (baby!), picked up both hardback editions of G2 sometime last year for £2.99 and £3.99 respectively and love the format (after years of reading scans). Would've loved to have found some more, but they seem to be rather scant on the ground round these here parts.

On the plus side, I sudden breeze blew me into Oxfam just opposite and I found a mint copy of Gitaroo Man (obscure japanese PS2 game where you fend off evil using your guitar and a robot dog sidekick. Much better than Guitar/Band Hero).

Great, because I always get sniped when bidding for it on eBay. So every cloud.:)
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Post by inflatable dalek »

I think I would trade up from the paperbacks to the hardbacks if I ever came across a store selling them all that cheaply, in retrospect there's just something lovely about the idea of the comic getting the proper book treatment.

I was actually looking the other day at getting the first two IDW Premier Editions, two nice big hardbacks with the main decent stuff in topped off by Maximum Dinobots and LSotW when it comes out in trade. then use the indervidual issues of all the chaff to sell on or for firewood or something. The second one is on Amazon fairly cheaply for the amount of content. the first seems to be out of print and the cheapest on Marketplace (it doesn't seem to be on ebay) is 150 smacker. How the hell can that work out more expensive than out of print completely good TF comics?

Oh, and as there's no real place else to put this and it doesn't deserve it's own thread but is still an interesting but useless tidbit: I picked up the Thrill Power Overload hisotry of 2000 AD this week and learnt that not only did John Ridgeway base little Sammy "Man of Iron" on his own son but later recycled the character design into onging Galaxy's Greatest Comic character Luke Kirby from Summer Magic.
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Post by Auntie Slag »

Yo, Dalek. you can order Matrix Quest for £2.99 on-line in Forbidden Planet's sale right now. I ordered mine a couple of hours ago (it's £1.99 plus £1 P+P).

The cool thing is anything else you order seems to get lumped in with the same postage costs. Thus I could've ordered Energon at no extra postage charge, but couldn't be arsed because I once bought Energon Vol.2 and it was worse than Dreamwave's 'Prime Directive' series.

I can't tell if it's a hardcover or not, but the cover artwork style (i.e. not a weird photoshopped montage by Wildman) along with the TF logo and typeface titling (and original RRP) suggests it is the hardcover edition.

I like paper copies of stuff. And the hardback one's look, and smell very nice.

Never underestimate the smell.

And big thanks to CJ for bringing this all up in the first place. Because I would never have had this or Gitaroo Man otherwise for the cost of a few pints otherwise.:cheers:
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Post by inflatable dalek »

Auntie Slag wrote:
I can't tell if it's a hardcover or not, but the cover artwork style (i.e. not a weird photoshopped montage by Wildman) along with the TF logo and typeface titling (and original RRP) suggests it is the hardcover edition.

That's definately the paperback cover in the link, looking at the hardbacks they have in the similar product section those are still closer to full price (and more than they are in store). Harback or not though it's still as cheap as chips and makes up for all of Matrix Quest not being in it (which I never understood, the way things worked out one of those two collections had to have one more issue in it than the other but why not make it the second book so all of MQ can go in it? Were the Primal Scream issues wierdly short or something?).
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Post by Auntie Slag »

Aw, what a kick in the teeth it not containing the Primal Scream bits. I think you're right, there wasn't a massive amount of issue space devoted to Primal Scream as I recall, but it was pretty iconic imagery nonetheless (Senior's artwork, Bludgeon and lots of fighting).

Scans are great, but I typically don't tend to move when reading a monitor screen, the your neck and body end up feeling stiff after so much time spent motionless. I guess with a proper comic in my hands I end up moving around a bit more.

On a side note, I never really thought that much of Thunderwing as a personality, but I loved his crew (the Triggercons, Spinister etc). I'm sure it was just for the flowers reference, but it marked them out.

[Edit]Yeah, you're right again. The Forbidden Planet website does highlight whether it's a hardback edition or not. Oh well, still wonderful rose-tinted memories of yesteryear to go alongside the fantastic Wreckers stories of today.
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Post by Cliffjumper »

Yep - they're the sixteen pagers that tended to have TFU profiles for whole subgroups in; check the late fifties and early sixties near the bottom of this page. Personally I don't think Titan ever quite topped naming the first book All Fall Down when it didn't have "All Fall Down" in it.

Matrix Quest was one of the hardbacks they had in the London FP for £2.99 (Thunderwing on the cover - one of Patrick Lee's, IIRC), if that's any help - I didn't pick it up because I was fairly sure I had some version or other of it kicking around somewhere.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

I remember seeing the ad for All Fall Down in one of the titan magazines I was browsing in Smith's (Dreamwatch?) and as well as being hugely excited also being completely wrong about what issues was in it after trying to work it out based on the title. Though in fairness they probably weren't expecting to do any more after the initial two (which seem to have been a Furman vanity thing Titan weren't completely convinced by) so just gave it a cool title with little thought to later collections.

They really lucked out there all things considered, they got the licence for the trades just before the 80's nostalgia thing kicked off and likely got it cheaper than they would have a year later but still got all the mollah from sadoo twenty somethings trying to recapture their lost youths. Weren't the initial sales surprisingly good, even if it did drop off badly as they headed towards the fag end of Budiansky. I seem to remember some speculation over if they'd bother to do the last few trades based on the sales...
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Post by Cliffjumper »

IIRC the Furman ones and the first couple of Budiansky ones did alright, but yeh, then sales dipped badly as people started to seriously question spending £15 a time to chart Bob's mental breakdown. The print runs for the last couple must have been fairly small, and yet there still seem to be a lot of them kicking around. Mind, there seems to be a lot of all of it kicking around - FP had a three or four foot shelf solid of the Matrix Quest TPB, no exaggeration. I regret not taking a picture, actually. Pretty amazing when you consider the stock must be 7-8 years old.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

It might just be a Forbidden Planet thing, I don't think I've seen any in another bookshop for a couple of years but every single FP (bar Slag's) seems to have an abundance. Perhaps they brought up a load of warehouse stock cheap or something?
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Phwooar, tee pee bees!

Post by Auntie Slag »

Call me a saddo 30-something, but that's definitely a 7-8 year old I'd be interested in.

what?
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Post by Halfshell »

The second hand/charity bookshop in Cambridge (along from Waterstones near the market square - opposite Lakeland's) had several of the Titan TPBs in a year or so back.

[/not helpful]

FP Cambridge is rubbish since the refit. Unless you're after Star Wars tie-in novels or overpriced t-shirts I really wouldn't bother. For anything. Ever.
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Post by Auntie Slag »

Galloway & Porter? Christ, I would never have thought to look there.

FB Cambridge struggles to get any Transformers comics in most months, although for some reason they seem to like stocking the Bumblebee mini and Nefarious.

Weirdo's.

[Edit] Is it worth putting up a sticky on this forum that we can post in whenever we come across great bargains on the comics and/or DVD's, like the 'Thread of outstanding TF sales & deals' in the Toys & Merchandise thread... or have I just answered my own question?
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Post by Halfshell »

Auntie Slag wrote:Galloway & Porter?
I think that's it, yeah. The tiny one that I always think is Oxfam Books but isn't.

It was a year or so back, but it's probably worth sticking your head in there just to see if their stock increased after Borders went tits up.
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Post by Auntie Slag »

Huzzah! got my copy of Matrix Quest through the post today. That represents my first transformers comic through the letterbox since 1993 (which comprised of G2 issues 1 & 2, and ish 1 had the silver gatefold cover. Very cool).

Inflatable Dalek was right, it is the softback version. I would've preferred the hardback but hey.

I opened randomly to a page, and the first thing I see is Backstreet, Override and Dogfight quietly tilling a farm on an alien planet.

That's a rather sedate, 'Harvest Moon-esque' approach to Transformers, compare that with the savage imagery of Rotorstorm getting his brains splattered across the landscape.

Maybe this is what it the mythos would've been like had Nintendo made TF's.

On a separate note, yeah... Galloway & Porter are about to bite the bucket after being on that site since 1902. I patiently await Galloway & Porter: Generation 2 in the next couple of years.

This is not your father's Galloway & Porter.

Also, couldn't find a sniff of any Titan books in there. May they rot in hell.
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Post by Cliffjumper »

The Triggerbots never grabbed me for some reason... they just felt like knockoffs of the Sparkabots in the comics. It might just be that the Sparkabots got there first (and that I had all three... I seem to remember being absolutely in love with the special action feature of Sizzle's chromed engine block being able to pop off, and clip back on again... Automorph? Pah!), but I never latched on to the Triggerbots as a result - though Override won big points in that G2/GI Joe crossover issue where Prime sent in seven random Autobots to die for no apparent reason.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

I always found it daft the American comic introduced both groups in the same issue even though there was only something for three of them to do.

Was Hasbro really so keen to push the Triggerbots they couldn't wait a few months and use Flames of Botox as their intro? Especially as the later wastes time presenting their special skills like we haven't already met them.
REVIISITATION: THE HOLE TRUTH
STARSCREAM GOES TO PIECES IN MY LOOK AT INFILTRATION #6!
PLUS: BUY THE BOOKS!
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Post by inflatable dalek »

One thing I noticed whilst doing some research the other day is that Amazon actually has to a lot of the Titan books still in stock, I don't just mean the second hand marketplace but proper Amazon as well. They're not as cheap as the FP copies (the hardback Rage in Heaven is still 16 quid) and a lot are down to their last one or two in stock but if anyone's got a gap that still needs filling it might be worth a look.
REVIISITATION: THE HOLE TRUTH
STARSCREAM GOES TO PIECES IN MY LOOK AT INFILTRATION #6!
PLUS: BUY THE BOOKS!
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