Mikester

Just a thought or three about some new comics.

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Running a bit late here, so lemme jot down a few thoughts I done thunk about a few of this week’s comics:

  • The Flash #1 – Still seems like this is all entirely unnecessary, aside from being a repair job caused by the torpedoing of the franchise, but…well, it all seems pleasant enough, I guess. If there has to be a Flash comic book, this one will do…things are set up quickly, appropriately enough, and we jump right into the action, and we’ve got the Rogues, and we’ve got superspeed stunts, and it’s all very much a Flash comic. Not sold on the art yet, despite a couple of individual pieces standing out nicely. Maybe I’m just not used to it, in that the art feels…gentler than what I’m accustomed to seeing in edgy, no-holds-barred, in-your-face modern superheroic adventures.

  • Brightest Day #0 – Spins right out of the plotlines left dangling at the end of Blackest Night. I know some respected colleagues of mine hated this comic with a passion, but I think it looks like it could be an entertaining tour through the DC Universe. Or it could crash and burn completely. I don’t know…it’s all set-up, delineating the multiple plotlines we’re going to be getting over the next year, so we’ll see how it goes. Knocking down the number of issues in this year-long event book from 52 to 26 seems like a very good idea, given that DC’s last 52-issue mini was painfully thin on plot.

  • Black Widow #1 – A lot of “wait…another Black Widow comic?” from the customers, since this new issue came right on the heels of two designed-to-be-collected-into-TPBs-for-the-Iron-Man-movie mini-series. Still sold a few, so why should I complain, right?

  • PunisherMAX #6 – Dumb name, but still a great comic. The Kingpin storyline of the first few issues transitions nicely into this new Bullseye story, and it’s ridiculous and gross and remarkably entertaining. Plus, there’s a bit of business in here reminding you that 1) The MAX version of the Punisher was in the Vietnam War, and 2) he’s totally in his late 50s/early 60s by now. I really like the idea of Nearing Retirement Age Punisher.

  • Irredeemable Special #1 – Good book featuring three short stories detailing backstories for some of the supporting characters. Howard Chaykin draws one of the stories, which involves a house of ill repute and lots of girls in skimpy underwear, so it pretty much needed the Chaykin treatment.

    Also, this time I went for the Retailer Incentive Variant, presenting all the previous “Giant Letter” variant covers from the series that spelled out the title. Thought it was pretty cool, couldn’t resist it.

Third thing to go: the ability to beat kids at video games.

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Sorry for the Low Content Mode over the last day or two…I’ve been otherwise occupied with, you know, things and stuff, which hasn’t been leaving me with a lot of prime blogging time. And, frankly, I’ve been going through a bit of a low point re: blogging enthusiasm, and I needed to recharge the batteries a little. Writing a longish review/reminiscence for another site (which should be up soon) helped pull me out of that funk a bit, so hopefully I’ll be back to normal in short order. Thanks for your patience, internet pals!

In the meantime, let’s see what other people who do have something to say…er, have to say, I guess:

  • Congrats to Tim O’Neil, who reached his 1000th post, and cites me as one of his inspirations, which is extremely nice of him. He and I have been doing the blog thing for more or less the exact same amount of time, except he did the smart thing and only posted when he felt like it. Anyway, Tim is one of those few bloggers whose posts I immediately jump to whenever I see he has something new up in my feed reader, and I’m always rewarded with something insightful and amusing. Like, for example, this initial installment of his examination of the work of Frank Miller, which already promises to be a good read.

  • Tom Spurgeon reviews The Art of Jaime Hernandez, which is absolutely a beautiful-looking book, and highly recommended. I’d been meaning to mention that our store gets kinda/sorta mentioned…not by name, but as the “local comic shop in Ventura” that was the first to carry the original self-published version of Love and Rockets. I seem to remember seeing that original #1 in the local Big Indie Record Store at the time, too, but maybe I’m remembering wrong. I am old, you know…the brain’s the second thing to go.*

  • I’ve mentioned before that Andrew is one of my favorite comic bloggers…intelligent, witty, and has a fantastic Bostonian accent that’s a pleasure to listen to over the Xbox Live chat function, helping to ease the pain of his unerring ability to slaughter me repeatedly whenever we play Grand Theft Auto IV together. Anyway, all that preamble is about is to get you to visit this link to another entry in his ongoing series “Nobody’s Favorites.” This time he talks about a character in a comic that I see all the time at the shop, but I think, to this day, I’ve never actually looked inside it. And Andrew’s post makes me glad I haven’t.

  • I haven’t linked to them in a while, but every week I download and listen to War Rocket Ajax, the Podcast That Walks Like A Man, and you can listen to the newest episode right here. This is a shorter episode, with Chris and Eugene shootin’ the breeze for about an hour. Good stuff, and one of the very few comic podcasts I listen to.

  • Who’s got webcomics for sale in print form? Why, Agreeable Comics does, with new print editions of She Died in Terrebonne and The Loneliest Astronauts available at prices too low to mention here! Also available for sale is the first book collection of The Rack, which features one strip written by ME!!!!!!!, and a bunch of strips by some other guys whose names escape me.

  • I should note that I’ve been working on The Bureau Chiefs site, the home of the folks what brung you Fake AP Stylebook. One feature I work on has a name that may be familiar to longterm fans of my site: “This Is A Fetish for Someone.” Mostly it’s just pics of terrible things found by me and the rest of the Chiefs, combined with a short comment or two from me. I also assist pal Dorian and the other Chiefs in the production of his News Briefs column, providing smart-alecky commentary on current events. It’s a lot of fun, and I hope you folks enjoy it as well. Or, at least, aren’t terribly offended by it.

Hmmm…well, I actually feel a bit of that blogging enthusiasm coming back after writing all that. I guess the cure to “not feeling like writing” is “writing anyway!”

* The first thing to go? “Lack of excess ear hair.” Look forward to that, younglings.

Another real short post…sorry, gang.

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  • Oh, hey, the first batch of Free Comic Book Day comics is showing up this week! The event looms ever closer. We ordered even more comics than in previous years, so we’ll see how this works out. Not “works out” as in how the actual event will run…our FCBD events are always successful. I’m just wondering where I can stow the boxes ’til the balance of the order comes in and I can start sorting everything.

  • That Chris Sims guy reviews bad movies he gets from the Netflix over at Heavy.com, and this week he’s covering Comic Book Pajama Party. It’s girls talking about comics, and there’s pajamas, and there’s…well, terrible, terrible things. I almost rented this for website fodder myself a couple of years back, but decided I didn’t want to have to explain to the girlfriend why I’m watching a video called Comic Book Pajama Party. Anyway, Sims took the bullet for the rest of us, so do the man a solid and read that review.

  • I mentioned this on the Twitter, but I’ll bring it up here, too: calling the store to ask us about something is best not done while you’re also placing an order in a fast food drive-though. I mean, c’mon.

Your Sunday Swamp (And Man-) Thing update.

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It’s a short’un, so here you go:

  • As has been emailed to me, and as also been popping up in my “Swamp Thing” Google alerts (yes, I’m the guy with the Google alert set for occurrences of “swamp thing.” And “progressive ruin.” And the word “the”), the guy who made the movie Cube (which ain’t half bad) also would like to make a Swamp Thing flick. Not that I expect to happen, ever, but I’d like to see it.

    Someone in the comments says this:

    “Has to be better than the first two campy Swamp Thing movies.”

    Sir, those two Swamp Thing movies are genius. The second movie has Swamp Thing escaping from explosions and gunmen by driving a Jeep with Heather Locklear in the passenger seat. Just as God intended.

  • In other swamp creature news, Siskoid covers that one What If story where Man-Thing retains the mind of Ted Sallis, the poor sap what got himself all swamped up. I’m kind of glad he did, because after being reminded a week or so back that I do not have this particular comic in the Vast Mikester Comic Archives, I looked at the shop for it…and we don’t have it there, either? What’s a boy to do?

    Yeah, yeah, I know, look on the eBay for it, or something. I’ll get around to it someday.

  • More Swamp Thing stuff…a Googling revealed this item at Walmart, a DVD featuring “10 Favorite Episodes” of the Swamp Thing live action TV series. Frankly, I’m surprised they managed to find ten. Meanwhile, at Best Buy, there’s an “Eight Favorite Episodes” DVD for the series, which is, perhaps, a little more keeping with expectations. Hey, it’s $12.99…financing available!

Sometimes the cards ain’t worth a dime if you don’t lay ’em down.

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So pretty much out of nowhere at work yesterday, Employee Aaron whips out this decade-plus old bit of promo material:


That’s a sticker, measuring about 4 inches across, advertising the Hawk and Dove mini-series that I don’t remember a single thing about. Oh, I remember that it exists, and that we have it in stock at the store. I just couldn’t tell you anything that happened in it, if any of it is still relevant to current continuity, etc. I didn’t remember the sticker, either, since we obviously didn’t use it. Neat design, though…nice play on the whole yin and yang thing.

Speaking of Employee Aaron, we had this conversation at the shop:

Aaron: “Hey, what’s this comic?”

Me: “That? That, m’boy, is U.S. 1.”

Aaron: “What’s it about?”

Me: “Truckin’.”

Aaron: “AWESOME. I’m buying it!”

And time will tell whether I did a good thing or a bad thing.

I did wonder momentarily if U.S. 1 experienced the same phenomenon that other normally scorned and shunned comics seem to have in the past…that after a decade or two of being ignored and dumped in bargain boxes and such, people are starting to realize that, maybe, actual mint copies of the series are hard to come by. And, as such, maybe prices on the books are beginning to creep up.

Now, the other two examples I had in mind for this sort of thing are DC’s Shazam! revival of the 1970s (way overprinted beyond demand, as I recall), and Hex (DC’s sci-fi revamp of the western hero, rejected by a readership not ready for its total awesomeness). They pretty much lived in quarter boxes for years…until relatively recently, when the prices jumped up quite a bit for the nice copies. But these two titles had other advantages, such as the characters involved still being around in one form or another, and thus still in the public eye and memory. U.S. 1 was pretty much self-contained, rarely referenced after the fact, and, at this point, yet another forgotten Big Two mini-series. Plus, it was critically reviled at the time, though it’s not like the ’70s Shazam and Hex were exactly embraced by the audiences of their respective times, either.

Anyway, upshot to all this: U.S. 1 guides in Near Mint at $2.50 a pop, so I guess it’s not yet begun its upward price creep. Though I’d be surprised as hell if anyone’s selling it for $2.50. $2.50 for a full run, maybe. (And I’m sure someone’s put one in a plastic “officially graded” sealed slab and sold it for $100 or something dumb like that. Please don’t tell me if that’s the case.)

In fairness, there’s nothing particularly wrong with U.S. 1…it’s a goofy, dopey, and fun comic book that just takes its premise and runs with it. We could use a few more U.S. 1s on the rack nowadays.

Many space-leopards died to provide those tunics.

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So reader Chuck was nice enough to send me a copy of this here book, Star Trek: The Truth Machine (Random House, 1977), which shows that no matter in what medium he’s presented, Captain Kirk is one handsome S.O.B.:


The ’50s monster movie-style “giant lizards menacing the city” scene on the viewscreen is pretty awesome, too.

Anyway, the story’s about some alien thugs who lure our heroes down to their primitive planet and try to coerce them into giving up the tech details on the Enterprise’s warp drive. However, the aliens are just advanced enough to be able to force the answers via their Truth Machine, hence the title. Also, these guys are totally into The Phantom:


The story wraps up pretty much as you’d expect, with our heroes getting the better of these geniuses, and with Spock layin’ down a little Vulcan whup-ass:


My favorite parts of the book are the brief snippets of exposition and explanation for the various elements of the Trek universe, written plainly and simply for the intended younger audience:

“The crew hurried to the transporter room. When they stood on the transporter disks, their molecules in their bodies would be taken apart, sent through space, and put back together on the planet’s surface.”

Urgh. Put like that, no wonder McCoy didn’t like beaming up or down anywhere.

“Although Spock’s mother was born on Earth, Spock had been born on his father’s planet, Vulcan. And like a true Vulcan, Spock never showed any feelings.”

Is that so, Mr. Narrator? Then what do you have to say about…THIS:


Well, um, come to think of it…what could you say?

Actually, that’s just Spock expressing Vulcan’s most common emotion, Total Smugness, during his explanation of how he outsmarted the bad guys’ Truth Machine not by lying about the warp drive, but by simply not offering up important details the aliens didn’t specifically ask about. Okay, sure, good move, Spock, but you don’t have to be a self-satisfied jerk about it. Sheesh.

Thanks again to reader Chuck for the swell book!

Hawkman will fly that extra mile for a joke.

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Please note the polite laughter of the Flash and Green Lantern. Well, the Flash is probably just being polite, anyway. This actually strikes me as being right up GL’s alley humor-wise.

image from Super Powers Collection: Hawkman (1983)