‘Twas the Wednesday before Christmas….
In case you were wondering, new comics are on schedule for the regular Wednesday release this week. And, as you’ve probably heard, Diamond is distributing no comics during the week between Christmas and the New Year. However, if your retailer remembered (like…ahem…I almost didn’t) to get themselves on Santa’s Nice List, your local funnybook shop should have Blackest Night #6 for sale during that dead week, a full week earlier than those other naughty shops. You might want to pop into the shop that week anyway, because there may be a sale or three going on to make up for the lack of new books.
In a way, I’m sort of looking forward to a skip week where I don’t have to pull comic savers or redo the racks or anything. At last, I’ll have time to brush up on my breakdancing skills for the big year-end competition, Employee Aaron will have time to drag a comb through his hair, and Employee Timmy will, I don’t know, do something British, I guess…have bangers and mash or queue up somewhere, or something like that.
So here are a few of the comics that are coming our way this week that I feel like saying something about:
- Angel Annual #1 & Angel: Only Human #5 – Is it just me, or are there suddenly more Angel comics than the market can really bear right now? At the very least, I’d like to see an end to comic adaptations of the television episodes since the target audience probably already owns them on DVD and the comic versions just feel a bit like grabbing that audience’s money just because they can. Or maybe those fans are clamoring for comic adaptations for episodes, so what do I know?
- Archie #604 – It seemed for a while that interest was going to dip in this “Archie Marries Anything with A Pulse” series of stories, once people finally caught on it was an “imaginary” story presenting possible futures for the red-haired boy and his lady pals. However, sales did go back up, and I’ve had to place reorders a number of times for some installments. Part 3 seems to keep selling out, for some reason.
- Bart Simpson Comics #51 – After last issue’s tour de farce (hey, get it, get it? You see what I did there?) featuring cover-to-cover Sergio Aragones, this issue features Sergio on his regular short feature “Maggie’s Crib,” with other creators filling out the rest of the book. The Simpsons comics tend to be pretty solid, so don’t let less Sergio scare you off from trying the book.
- Black Widow and the Marvel Girls #2 – Talking with pal Dorian about this the other day…that Marvel is apparently putting out a lot of Black Widow comics right now so that they’ll have Black Widow trade paperbacks available for sale to tie into the character’s appearance in the Iron Man 2 movie. We both noted that we’re not seeing enough emphasis on War Machine, since it’s that character’s appearance in the trailer people seem to be getting excited about.
- Captain America Reborn: Who Will Wield The Shield one-shot – I haven’t been keeping up…isn’t this spinning out of the last issue of the Captain America: Reborn mini? The as-yet-unreleased issue?
- Ender’s Game: Command School #4 and Ender’s Shadow: Command School #4 – not sure why we needed two concurrently-running Ender’s Game comics, but there they are.
- Hellboy: Bride of Hell one-shot – drawn by Richard Corben. Man, I do love Corben’s Hellboy art.
- Image United #2 – I mentioned on the Twitter that the first issue of this series didn’t do so hot for us, which resulted in a really defensive response from Image Fan #1 telling me the comic did great, it sold 50,000 copies, so in conclusion, shut up. Well, yeah, I’m sure Image printed 50,000 copies and sold them to stores. And I’m sure some stores did gangbusters on them. But our store, and a few other stores I’ve been in contact with…yeah, they just kinda sat there. The “bonus variant extra whatever” cover by Jim Lee was the variant cover that sold the best. Even the Spawn cover and the Witchblade cover barely moved any copies. That the Shadowhawk cover didn’t move one copy at all came as little surprise.
I mean, nothing against the comic. I like the idea of it, with the Image creators each contributing the artwork for their own characters in this crossover. Kudos to them on the amount of work and planning that went into making this possible. Just…well, no one’s terribly interested in it in our neck of the woods. Hey, sorry, not everything can be a hit.
- Iron Man Vs. Whiplash #2 – Guys, I’m telling you, Whiplashmania is going to hit our country like never before once people see him in the Iron Man sequel. Men will tremble, women will faint, and anyone left standing will be pounding on our doors insisting on every single copy of every Whiplash appearance be presented to them immediately.
…Okay, I shouldn’t joke, because I can guarantee there’s this one guy who comes to our shop who will start asking for Whiplash appearances once the movie is a little closer to opening.
- Punishermax #1 2nd printing – This comic is really taking off, and it really is good. Hope a 2nd printing of #2 is coming soon, because we can sure use those, too. Hey, for once Marvel’s 2nd printings are coming in handy.
- Wall-E #1 – Sure, #0 was depressing, but it was a cute depressing, and I suppose I’ll be back for this issue.
