Mikester

I want to A your Qs.

filed under Categories question time 53 Comments

Well, I just spent a lot of time writing a post that, ultimately, I decided I should let sit on the stove a bit more before I serve it up, which leaves me with nuthin’ for today. Thus I’m going to depend on you folks for content, and it’s been about a year since I did this last, so…QUESTION TIME!

Once again I open the floor to your questions, which you can place in the comments section to this very post here. JUST ONE QUESTION PER PERSON, PLEASE: I don’t have the blogging time like I used to, and I’d like to finish answering everyone’s questions before the end of the year. I’ll try to answer every serious question seriously, but if you give a silly question or you’re just trying to troll me for some reason, well, there’s no telling what I might do. I’M A BAD BLOGGER ON THE EDGE. I reserve the right to not answer a particular question if it’s too personal or may cause more trouble than it’s worth.

Anyway, please leave your questions in the comments. I know the trend right now is away from allowing commenting from users, but by and large my readers have always had good and interesting things to say, and I have always been grateful for it. I like getting comments, and I read them all, and I would like to encourage especially you folks who’ve been reading my site and have yet to chime in. If you have a question, please, feel free to speak up. I’d love to hear from you.

And by “they” he means “Mike Sterling.”

filed under Categories blogging about blogging is a sin, self-promotion 1 Comment

So the latest Trouble with Comics question time entry is a little different, in that it’s a roundtable discussion with the TwC contributors on the topic of “comics blogging: what was up with that?” Okay, Alan was a little more eloquent with how he put that particular query, but we all chimed in with our thoughts, and though I wish I’d contributed a little more, I’m in the mix nonetheless. So go on over and relive those long-ago, nigh-mythical days when comic blogs existed.

Swamp Thing Day may not go over so well since I won’t give up any of my Swamp Things.

filed under Categories retailing 5 Comments

bdcomicSo Batman Day fell this year on its traditional date of September 26th, just like last year when it fell on the traditional date of July 23rd, and…boy, I was trying to remember what we did for 2014’s Batman Day, and I couldn’t remember a single thing ’til I looked at that DC press release. And okay, yeah, now I remember the Detective Comics #27 reprint giveaway (featuring Bill Finger’s first cover credit on that particular story, I believe) and the Bat-masks and such. I don’t think we made much of a big deal around it at the time…just gave away masks and the comic to folks who popped by and that was that.

I have to admit, I didn’t think too much about this year’s Batman Day. I mean, I ordered the free comic (pictured to the right), and I took advantage of Diamond’s special deals on stocking lots of graphic novels, but…I didn’t really plan too far ahead on this event beyond a general idea of making a small Bat-display in the shop and putting the free comics on the counter next to the register. I didn’t even get around to putting the Batman Day poster up right away, because…well, I have no really good reason. I just kept getting distracted by other stuff, I guess. I finally put it up a week or so ago, and I guess I really should have started earlier because it immediately got customers to ask me “just what is this Batman Day business, anyhow?”

Of course, the go-to gag explanation is “DC’s trying to introduce folks to this new Batman character” — a variation of which appeared on my store’s website — and…well, it’s not much more than just basic promotion, and a way for DC to move some graphic novels and such. If they can make this a regular day during the year, and not just moving the date around to tie into other Batman events, like, say, the launch of a Bat-related show’s second season, maybe it can build up to something. And maybe create “days” for other characters, too. “Come Celebrate Vibe Day at Your Local Shop!” “…I beg your pardon?”

Given the number of folks that were asking me about Batman Day, I decided I’d better do something a little more than just putting up a shelf of Batbooks and hoping for the best. Now, I didn’t do a whole lot…aside from spending a few days plugging it in the shop and on my site and Facebook, I didn’t get a lot of promotion out for it. I set up a big table inside the store, with all my Batman graphic novels at discounted pricing, four boxes of Batman-related comic books I was selling for a dollar each (got my hands on a bunch relatively inexpensively, so I wasn’t losing money, believe it for not), gave away the free comics at the counter, and that was that.

And I did okay. Even with the last minute effort, with Batman Day (rightly or wrongly…mostly wrongly) low on the list of priorities, I was still able to put together something that made a lot of customers happy and brought some income into the store. As I said on the Twitters, it was no Free Comic Book Day, but it still got people in the door, looking for that free Bat-comic and finding some good Bat-deals in the process. And though, in discussion with a little stuffed bull friend of mine, I had said that Batman Day wasn’t really A Thing yet, so I wasn’t expecting huge crowds of people. But I did get some people, and a lot of them even dressed for the occasion in their Batman t-shirts, so, you know, maybe it’s becoming A Thing after all!

I did get one phone call from a person asking if they had to dress as Batman to get the free comic. This close to saying “Yes, yes you do” just to see what would happen. …BUT I DIDN’T, I was a good comic shop owner. This time.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, but when next year’s Batman Day rolls around (in, like, April or November or something) remind me to plan things out a little earlier. And yeah, I know I’m basically dancing to the tune of a large conglomerate…but it is customer outreach, and it does bring people into the store. While the character probably doesn’t need promotion as such, the comics medium can use all the help it can get, and this is the sort of thing, like Free Comic Book Day, that reminds folks that, oh, yeah, comic books exist. And every little reminder like that helps.

The Jimmy Olsen Fan Club is a story for another day.

filed under Categories superman 4 Comments

So anyway, there’s Jimmy Olsen with two members of the Jimmy Olsen Fan Club at their campsite out in the woods, about to sit down and have breakfast, when suddenly Brainiac strikes! One thing leads to another, with Brainiac wreaking havoc with his Enlarging Ray, and ultimately Brainiac is defeated, and Jimmy’s got hold of said Enlarging Ray. Meanwhile, Superman is at the bottom of a steep hill, his life endangered by a giant piece of Kryptonite! (Which used to be a small piece of Kryptonite, until Brainiac enlarged it, and, well, there you go.)

Jimmy is stuck about how to help Superman, because he and his pals can’t climb down the hill due to being bitten on the legs by giant fireants (the Enlarging Ray, again), until inspiration strikes!


After the guys rescue Superman (by enlarging a giant lead tackle between Superman and the Kryptonite, thus depleting the Enlarging Gun of all its juice, so too bad, Bottle City of Kandor), Supes asks “what the hell were those giant tire-things you rode down in?” if I may paraphrase slightly. Jimmy thus ends the story with a blatant bit of product placement that beats out Superman: The Movie by about a decade:


I did a little Googling research, and all I can turn up was that Superman was licensed to Kellogg’s in the 1950s for Frosted Flakes, and that DC didn’t team up to produce comics with General Mills (makers of Cheerios) ’til 2011. Granted, “licensed characters on cereal boxes in the 1960s” is not my particular field of expertise, so I could very well be missing something, but it looks like Cheerios was just used as the punchline for this particular story, no deals attached…unless there’s some kind of backroom deal we didn’t know about, or DC Editorial was fishing for some free boxes of cereal. “Thanks for featuring our product…have this truckload of Cheerios on us!”

If someone has any additional background on just what was going on here, or if it simply was “we’ve got a funny gag involving Cheerios,” let me in on it please!
 
 

from Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #116 (December 1968) by Otto Binder, E. Nelson Bridwell and Pete Constanza

If that Swamp Thing book existed, I would never fall behind on it.

filed under Categories collecting, pal plugging, self-promotion 1 Comment

Well, now I’m at the point where the to-read pile of comics is beginning to creep every so slightly upwards each week, as I find myself with decreasing amounts of time to keep up with them. The side effect of owning a store, surely, particularly since it’s still just me running the place seven days a week, so “free time” is no longer the easily-obtainable commodity it once was. “Read ’em at work,” I’m sure someone may cry out, but I’m generally too busy trying to make some coin of the realm while at the shop, and I’m sure it wouldn’t help matters any for comic book guys ‘n’ gals across the nation to perpetuate the idea of “wow, a job where you just sit around and read comics all day…sounds like hard work, har har.”

It’s not as if I get all that many comics, either. And I manage to make time to read the Peanuts reprints and last week’s release of Kate Beaton’s new book, so it’s not as if I have towers of unread runs of Those Other Avengers and Swamp Thing’s Kung-Fu Force teetering over me in my Gentleman’s Reading Room. Like I said, it’s a slow creep, a small stack getting gradually, almost imperceptibly higher each week, filling me with no small amount of nostalgic lament for the days when I’d bring home the week’s new comics, and just sit there and read ’em ’til I was done with the stack. Now I have my allotted comic reading time, where I read what I can until I have to go on and do whatever the next thing is.

Okay, it’s not quite as regimented as that, but I’m a little more aware of the free time I have and more careful about how I spend it. Like spending an hour or so every other night writing a comics blog.

Some of the comics that are getting backlogged on me:

The Maxx – Sam Keith and William Messner-Loebs’ weirdo Image comic from the early days of the company, now being reprinted issue-by-issue by IDW. I read the first six issues of the original release back in the ’90s, and cut it from my reading list in a cost-saving measure, I think, and sort of regretted it ever since. I fell behind on reading the newest reprintings, but knowing this is a finite run makes it easier to deal with. I suspect this comic holds together better reading all together over a short period of time, anyway, rather than absorbing it in monthly installments.

Haunted Horror and Weird Love – two of Craig Yoe’s bimonthly reprint series, which are great, don’t get me wrong. However, being as how most of the stories contained within date from a time when comic publishers weren’t scared of piling the text into each panel, it can take a little longer to properly appreciate each issue. Which is great…get that $3.99’s worth out of each installment, but sometimes they get sorted to the bottom of the pile as other, more current, more easily absorbed titles get read first.

Miracleman – well, sure, I read ’em all the first time when Eclipse Comics published them decades ago, and still have those issues in what’s left of The No Longer Quite So Vast Mikester Comic Archives. I’m still buying the reprint issues, partially to appreciate the recoloring/remastering, partially to complain, and partially to support the series so that we can finally get the new Miracleman stories by Gaiman and Buckingham, picking up from where they left off twenty years ago, or whatever it was. Tends to get left for last because I don’t feel like prying off the mostly-unnecessary polybags.

In conclusion, “a bloo-bloo, I don’t have time to read my funnybooks,” which is the whiniest of my complaints ever. I think I’m in good shape, though, so long as I don’t backlog myself into a warehouse full of boxes filled of unread comics, awaiting that day I’m bedridden with some horrible yet non-reading-impairing illness that will allow me to catch up.

And that’s just comics. Here’s a stack of hardcovers sitting on an endtable in the bedroom, and the Netflix queue, and…ugh, someone tell the Grim Reaper I can’t fit death into my schedule for the next few decades, I have too much entertainment to follow.

• • •

This week’s Question Time over at Trouble with Comics addresses the most terrifying of queries: “DO COMICS MATTER?” The answer is of course, NO WAY, NUH UH, FORGEDDABOUDIT…well, okay, we all say they do, more or less. SPOILERS. Also, this time around everyone’s question is put up as a separate blog entry, so this little ol’ link here to this week’s question time should take you to all of them. You’ll need to scroll down a bit to see mine…stop when you find that one somewhat familiar picture of me (which has been altered ever so lightly).

What if…Mike wasn’t dead tired as he was writing this?

filed under Categories marvel 6 Comments

So I was just poking through some old issues of Marvel’s What If…? at the shop (hey, I’m the boss, I can waste a little time looking at comics if I want) and was reminded that the occasional issue would have something like this:

whatif41keith
…a short gag back-up, or an “Untold Tales of the Marvel Universe” story, or…well, more content than what was promised on the covers. I’m generally familiar with the main stories for most of the issues, just from having seen the covers over and over and over again at whatever store I happened to be working at the time. But the back-ups…unless it was an issue I’d actually purchased and read at the time, the supplementary material in What If…? are nearly always new to me.

For example, I remember finding out that there was a Man-Thing story in the first series of What If…? But, darned if I could find it, because as it turned out, this was the comic it was in:

whatif26cvr
…and not a Man-Thing to be seen on that cover, alas. Of course, eventually the Internet would spring into being and never again would I ever have any trouble tracking down that exact bit of information I need, and I’d finally put an end to my half-hearted seeking of this issue.

There are plenty more short and funny pieces located in those old What If…?s, with issue #34 (of both the ’70s and ’80s/’90s runs) basically being an issue filled with those same shorts. Don’t know if they had space to spare in these new What If…? comics that are Coming Soon to a Shop Never You for gags like this, but it’d be nice.

I’m really not kidding about Sugar and Spike.

filed under Categories dc comics, retailing 1 Comment

The cancellation of a few DC titles was just announced, and, well, it was a mix of surprising/not totally surprising.

Gotham by Midnight was the most surprising to me, as, while not a huge seller, my sales on what was essentially a Batman horror series was slowly creeping upward. But I guess it was doing so too slowly, so that’s that.

Justice League United was another semi-shock, but of late getting a Justice League book going that isn’t the main series is bit of an uphill battle. It’s no comment on the quality — and in fact the recent new direction of the series has been fun — but more a comment on just how many different Justice League comics people really want to buy. Even the newest iteration of Justice League of America has shown a dip in sales from the first issue, but we’re only three issues in so who knows if this is a trend or just settling in at a particular sales level.

The Omega Men title was a little surprising, too, if only because of the good buzz it was getting. Alas, good buzz doesn’t always equal sales, and though it was beginning to get something of a following at the shop, it was too little, too late. Were people put off by the title, remembering that there was an old series by that name and thinking this was a continuation? Was there not enough Batman in it?

Now Lobo…the traditional problem with Lobo wasn’t his character design, but his overuse. We saw an awful lot of the character in the ’80s and ’90s, and I think most of us are still kind of burnt out on him. The solution probably wasn’t this New 52 redesign, which took our biker-tough ruffian Lobo and turned him into this sleek, sophisticated assassin with style. But, I guess, they had to try something, and if it didn’t work…well, that’s okay. I expect Lobo will return with a back-to-basics (well, not too far back) approach soon enough.

Doomed, according to the article linked about, simply doesn’t have an entry in the new solicitations, so the assumption is that it’s cancelled. Who knows if it’s gone or not. Wouldn’t surprise me, since the first issue barely sold for me, and the later issues don’t sell at all. I mean, literally…I get one copy for the shelf, and then a month later I back issue it and put one copy of the next issue on the rack. Funny, I sell a lot of comics here….

Now, the problem with this series is the problem we’ve seen lately with follow-up series/mini-series to Big Events: by the time the Big Event is over, everyone’s pretty much done with it and don’t necessarily want to revisit it right away. Like, after Fear Itself was finished, out came Fear Itself: The Fearless and that was mostly given a hearty “no thank you” by the market. Same with this…we just endured approximately 1,000 “Doomsday” crossover event issues in the New 52’s Superman line of books, and then here comes yet another Doomsday-themed comic, and not even starring the Man of Steel.

I mean, I guess DC likes that Doomsday money, but aside from 1) having Doomsday turn up in the Superman books every month or three, or 2) having a series starring the actual Doomsday (which would be crazy and I’d absolutely read that) I don’t know how else they’d continue that specific subset of the franchise.

I’m glad at least DC is trying some new stuff and revisiting some old properties, though, like I’ve lamented before, I wish DC would just try some of these things out as mini-series first, since “the mini-series has reached its conclusion” sounds a lot better than “more books got canned.” I hope this doesn’t put the kibosh on that Sugar-and-Spike-as-adults mini. I am so looking forward to that.