blogging about blogging is a sin

Any excuse to link to Buddy.

filed under Categories blogging about blogging is a sin, undergrounds 4 Comments

Okay, first, a couple of brief updates:

1. Okay, so I didn’t realize that the alternate Earth on which the Fantastic Four movie took place was numbered after Jack Kirby’s birthday (Earth-828) until folks brought it up in the comments. Post has been updated accordingly.

2. In the comments on Friday’s post about the Superman story and the cutting of Siegel and Shuster’s credits, it was pointed out that Tom Brevoort did a very thorough job outlining the changes in the different printings of that story. So, basically, my post was more or less redundant, and I could have saved everyone some time just by linking to that post in the first place, had I known about it.

I think the bafflement of my younger self trying to work out the internal logic of the story still stands, however.

Anyway, used to be in ye olden dayes I’d scour the internet making sure I wasn’t going to trod over well-traveled ground with all my posts about, for example, how great All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder and Frank Miller’s The Spirit were. I would go down the list of the recently updated sites on the Comics Weblog Update-A-Tron 3000 to see what other people posted that day before I wrote my post and anyway, I’m feeling much better now.

Can’t say I’m never going to cover a topic not already covered by someone else. If I do, I’m not trying to step on any toes. But at the very least, I promise to bring my own spin on things, my personal perspective. No cheap listicles here! …Unless that’s all I’ve got time for, then LISTICLES AHOY

• • •

I am still taking your questions or topics, so query/topic-ize(?) away! Just follow the rules, please, and take it easy on your pal Mike.

I’ll probably start answering these pretty soon, so Watch This Space for your responses!

• • •

Thing I was not expecting here in the Year of Our Lord 2025…a new Robert Crumb comic:


Man’s 81 now and doesn’t seem to have slipped at all artistically. His writing has been…hit or miss, sure, but one more comic from the old master is certainly something to which we should pay attention.

Now, if we could get a new Freak Bros. comic out of Gilbert Shelton, well, I’m sure I’d just about plotz.

In which I complain about reading too few comics.

filed under Categories blogging about blogging is a sin, nancy, this week's comics 5 Comments

So it’s been a while since I’ve done just straight up reviews of the new comics on this site, which is primarily because I don’t tend to read the new comics during the week they’re new. Either I’m reading things well ahead of time (as the Marvel and DC books usually show up at the shop a week before their on-sale date), which is rare, or I read them well after release, which is more likely.

My eyeball troubles during their initial phase, when my vision was cloudy or just blacked out entirely, kept me from reading more or less anything for about a year and a half. I was able to read text on my computer screen by enlarging fonts, doing high contrast white-on-black colors, etc. But comics were a no-go for a while. And while I still continued to accumulate books to read during this period, they went unread for quite some time.

I’ve got quite the backlog, even with deciding to give up on some titles to thin out the stack. Adding to the problem is that now I’m able to read again, I’m not reading as quickly as I used to. And this is just comics. I’m not even bringing the prose books I’ve gathered up recently into this.

I’m trying to make time to read comics and get through these stacks. I have entire series that I’m eventually going to have to sit and buzz through their runs. I just did this with Ahoy Comics’ Second Coming and The Wrong Earth, and Howard Chaykin’s Hey, Kids! Comics! is up next.

Graphic novels are kind of a roadblock in this process, in that I could read 1 graphic novel or I can read (x) number of comics in that same period of time. Again, I read more slowly than I used to, so it’s a real decision to make.

But it’s no decision at all when Bill Griffith gets a book out:


I mean, of course I’m going to read a biography of Nancy creator Ernie Bushmiller. It’s a dense retelling of not just Bushmiller’s career, but of the history of comic strips in general, going into details of the business from Bushmiller’s era. It’s not as emotionally devastating as his previous biography, Nobody’s Fool, the story of real-life pinhead Schlitzie, but watching Bushmiller’s rise and developing his methods of operation are both compelling and exciting.

There are several asides, from Nancy and Sluggo themselves (using redialogued Bushmiller art), and from Griffith himself, making appearances as the curator of an imaginary Nancy museum. Certainly strange, certainly fitting given the comics being discussed.

Good book, well worth spending the time absorbing this work. I would highly recommend this to anyone interested not just in Nancy and Bushmiller, but in the business of strips.

I do love the cover, taken of course from one of Bushmiller’s more nightmare-inducing strips:


…which I of course used as a wallpaper on my original flip phone, and also appeared in my Sluggo Saturday feature. (I see someone else out there is using the “Sluggo Saturday” name — ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES.)

The book does bring up his use of assistants of course, which I was aware of even when I bought this original Nancy strip a few years back. Like I said in that post, even so it was nice to have something produced under Bushmiller’s watch. And seeing that period of Bushmiller’s career in Griffith’s book, it was nice to think “I have something from this point in his life.” It’s a solid, real connection to this story, and in its way, maybe Three Rocks is as affecting as Nobody’s Fool, at least to me and my personal minor link to Bushmiller.

Social muddy-a.

filed under Categories blogging about blogging is a sin 1 Comment

Hi pals…sorry for the short post today, was just too tired last night to get anything together.

I’m just going to leave a brief note about the current Social Media Shuffle…I’m still on Twitter, while the duct tape is still holding everything together. And I have a Mastodon account, which is fine but is just mildly complicated enough for it to not quite feel “Twitter-like.”

The current point of exodus appears to be Bluesky, where you can find me under “mikester.bsky.social.” It’s invite only at the moment, but my account there should be publicly accessible eventually, along with everyone else’s. Here’s hoping…it looks like it may be the site of choice, but I thought that about another place until policy decisions an’ such caused folks to bail.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens. Everything could change again in a few weeks. But mikesterling.com will still have links to wherever I’m at, though I need to update it again (and probably drop off the social media accounts I don’t intend to keep around).

So this was going to be a real post…

filed under Categories blogging about blogging is a sin, predictions 4 Comments

…about one of two different subjects, but the first one was going to be the first of a series, which was a problem as I’m starting the look back at your 2022 comic industry predictions next week. And the second one…turned out to be a lot more complicated than I thought it would be at first glance, and I can’t really stay up ’til 3 AM getting it all puzzled out. So, those are for another day then!

But speaking of predictions, you do remember that I’m looking for YOUR 2023 comic industry predictions! Put ’em in this little chromium comments section here, so long as you mind the very important rules.

Thanks everyone…I know this wasn’t much of a post today, but you’ll be looking back on it fondly once I get crackin’ on the walls of text looking back at those older predictions. Gird whatever needs girding before then, and I’ll see you on Monday!

“Get me the Instagram account of Spider-Man!”

filed under Categories blogging about blogging is a sin 6 Comments

Okay, this is the last time I’m plugging it this year, and I probably won’t mention it again ’til I start doing follow-ups in just a couple weeks to the last time we did this, buuuuuuuut…

…get me your 2023 comic predictions, soon! Like now! Do it quick like the bunny! Just follow those rules I have posted there, please!

This is also the second year, I think, where I posted my own predictions. I did it last year, so I’ll know how I did soon enough.

Anyway, I know blogging here hasn’t been as thick and meaty as it normally is, and I could go back and retype that into something less unpleasant but I refuse to. It’s just…Christmas and end-of-the-year stuff and Surprise! Migraine! and other things just getting in the way of doing the important work…blogging about that menace Spider-Man! (Actual image of me blogging about Spider-Man above.)

But I’m not going anywhere, hopefully you aren’t going anywhere, and we’ll all meet back here at the start of the new year with me providing The Content, and you providing The Eyeballs. I’ll also see if I can’t scrape together some kind of “Best of the Year” entry about comics I did manage to read, despite being desperately behind. And of course, as noted, I’ll be covering your predictions for 2022 in the next few weeks, which will have you begging for more lean times on this here site.

So thanks for reading, pals, and I hope everyone has a happy and safe New Year’s Eve/Day!

Hey pals!

filed under Categories blogging about blogging is a sin, self-promotion 4 Comments

Yeah, I know my posting has been along the light side over the last couple of weeks, but I’ve been busy with Christmas and family and both stuff. But I appreciate your engagement on the posts I have been making. Speaking of which, don’t forget to paste your prognostications into this post asking for your 2023 comic book industry predictions! Remember, three per person please, and also if you were going to prediction “Aftershock declares bankruptcy,” you’re too late!

Onto some other matters…while my short-form, spur of the moment micro-blogging is primarily done on the Twitters, the inept management by the new owner has all of us wondering about the continuing vitality of that particular platform. Especially in the wake of the decision (which may or not be rescinded, who the hell knows) to ban links, or even in some cases mentions, of certain other similar social media outlets. Especially those that have benefited most from departing Twitter users looking for places to land.

Well, let me remind you again of other places where you can find me, right here on a site not owned by Elon Musk. I can make my own dumb decisions, thank you.

I am “mikester” on Mastodon, Cohost, Tumblr. I am also “mikester” on Counter.social.

And of top of all that I am “mikesterling” on Post (yeah, I know, got to my name a little late. Ah well, What Can You Do?

Okay, that’s that, I hope everyone has a good holiday, where applicable! Will hopefully be back to normal posting next week.

This isn’t really a variant covers post.

filed under Categories blogging about blogging is a sin, jab, variant covers 2 Comments

So I apologize…I’ve been getting home lately feeling under the weather and pretty worn out, so “typing out long-form commentaries at the computer deep into the night” hasn’t been a huge priority for me for the last few days. It’s just a bug I’m fighting (NOT COVID, I ASSURE YOU) and I should be back to whatever passes for normal within a couple of days.

In the meantime I’ve been lazily watching a lot of television, with a good dollop of YouTube mixed in. Now, I don’t usually watch comic book-related YouTubery, preferring instead to let the sound of this video drape over my wearied brow.

But I happened to find this one, discussing the history of variant covers:


Unlike my long-running and currently waiting-for-new-content series on this here site, where I jumped all over the place discussing this, that, and the other thing, this video gives more of a chronological context to what was going on.

What surprised me was that I was cited in the course of the video, when the Jab #3 from Adhesive Comics was featured. You know, the one the publisher straight up shot with a real bullet. Specifically, the usage of a panel scan from that post was noted in the video, and a link back to my website was provided in that video’s notes, which was nice. I do feel like that post provided a lot of the info used in that specific segment, beyond the one panel, but eh, Information Wants to Be Free an’ all that. Happy to be a research source.

I should also note not all those Spider-Man #1s were the same price, as the black bagged version was two bucks. Why was it two bucks and not $1.75 like the others? Because they could charge two bucks for it, that’s why. I wrote about this infamous first issue here.

Anyway, it’s a good video and you should watch it. Also, kudos to the fella for pulling a Silver Surfer #50 off his rack and revealing a U.S. 1 underneath.

• • •

A couple of brief responses to comments here:

Scipio asked

“Any idea why the Comic Treadmill old posts are inaccessible?

“All of H and Mag’s work.. .gone?”

I just took a look, and yeah, the last few posts are on the one page, but the post calendar is way out of date on the right there. I feel like that may be a page template error or something, like it hasn’t been updated for current browsers or something. I’ve been in contact with H recently, so I’ll send him another email and ask what’s up.

And then Gregory Burgas said on the topic of the comicsweblogosphere

“I think the ‘Golden Age’ was around 06-11/12 or so. Before that, it was a bit Wild West, but around 06, everything seemed to be humming, but around 11/12, people began to drop off. Of course, those years are fluid, but that seems about right. I’m glad you’re still cooking!”

I’m still standing, as it were. I don’t plan on going anywhere soon, I’ve still got posts about the Death of Superman and Frank Miller’s The Spirit to write.

But yes, the 2006-2012 timeframe sounds pretty close. I started this site in late 2003 (with BBS stuff and LiveJournal before that), and there were a few earlier than me (like the immortal Neilalien). The late, lamented Journalista daily linkblog by Dirk Deppey from the early 2000s on drove a lot of traffic to sites, including mine…and I’ve told Deppey plenty of times that a lot of what I’ve accomplished today, including opening my own shop, stems from him pointing out my dumb site in one of his updates. The exact quote:

“…Definitely one of the better new comics bloggers to emerge so far this year.”

…made me very happy, particularly coming from The Comics Journal, a magazine I’d long read and admired. Hopefully my long decline since hasn’t made him regret his statement.

But I can’t say when I first noticed the dropoff. I know a lot of my online pals with whom I most directly interacted started to cut the blogging habit as the years wore on, and boy, I sure heard “blogging is dead” a whole lot over the last few years. I know the big thing is video, or image-heavy stuff on Instagram and the like, and giant blocks of text like the one you’re currently enduring being somewhat on the outs. But folks are still out there writing and posting on their WordPress installs and their Blogger sites, so The Blog is still hanging in there.

I mean, for your sake, it better…you don’t want to have to look at my face on TikTok or whatever for your comics content.

Anyway, I said I wasn’t doing a long post since I’m feeling yucky, and here I am still trying. I do tend to be a creature of habit, which may be as much a reason as any for my continuing to write here, even when I should be in bed sleeping off my sickness. So, thanks for reading pals, and we’ll all meet back here again in a couple of days.

A most sinful post.

filed under Categories blogging about blogging is a sin 5 Comments

Look, I know I still owe responses to some old comments, and that said responses will be a bit time-intensive for me to slap together so I’m doing lazy posts like today since I’m still a bit not-altogether-there and extended thought processes are falling into a jumble of nose fish bicycle, so please bear with me while I get my act together here.

Let me respond to a couple of comments re: blogging from the other day.

Walaka of Earth Two crosses the dimensional barrier to say

“…The comixweblogosphere was robust and diverse with snark over here and nostalgia over there and scholarship in the corner. And none of it was homogenized or monetized or corporate. That era was way too short.”

I think I’ve mentioned in the past that during Peak Comics Blogging, before I’d write my post for the day I’d zip through all the blogs in my sidebar and make sure I wasn’t duplicating anything my blogging brethren or sisteren had already covered. Of course that’s the behavior of a complete madman, particularly when I realized the value of “a personal blog” is one’s…well, personal insight and perspective. Sure, we were all talking about ALL-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, but was anyone talking about it the exact same way I was talking about it? I think not.

I do miss the cross-pollination of blog posts and comment sections and all that jazz between the comic blogs at the time, and I look at (as Andrew points out) my almost entirely-rotted links page and lament the loss of many of those voices. Which is why I’m lamenting the possible loss of Twitter, as several of those folks turned up there so they’re not entirely gone.

Someone, and I’m sorry but I forget who, was going through all the old comic blogs, indicating which ones were still going, which were still up but clearly ended, which were gone entirely, what happened to the folks running them, etc. I thought that was a pretty interesting, if sometimes depressing, series…though that person ironically enough shut down his own site before getting to me and this ancient blog of mine. Dang it, the site name is on the tip of my tongue and I just can’t remember it. I even plugged it here once or thrice. Ah, well, I’ll think of it eventually.

But anyway, I’ll reiterate a pledge I made to y’all before, that I promise not to disappear on you with no warning. When I take my rare-ish break from the site and I say “I’ll be back soon,” that’s not the death-knell we’ve seen so many times on other blogs. I really will be back, honest! As long as I’m in this terrible industry, and still slinging comics, I’ll keep this site going. Or if for some reason all traditional blogging software goes kaput and I have to move to a new platform, I’ll let you know. I mean, I suppose if I am retired…you know, permanent-like, against my will, the site’s done, but I wouldn’t be able to help that. But if I can run this site from beyond the grave, I will.

I suppose being in comics retailing as long as I have is what’s kept this blog alive all these years (coming up on its 19th anniversary in just a couple of weeks!). I can’t imagine it surviving my departure from the business…for one thing, I suspect I’d not want to talk about comics after that. But, with any luck, that won’t be an issue. So long as, you know, people keep buying comics from me.

Okay, that’s enough of that. Not sure what I’ll be posting for Black Friday, as who’s gonna be reading blogs on Black Friday, but I’ll come up with something. Thanks for reading, pals, and I’ll talk again with you soon. Honest. No foolin’.

I could always go back to LiveJournal.

filed under Categories blogging about blogging is a sin, how the sausage is made, video 7 Comments

Hi pals…I’m a little under the weather (not COVID, don’t worry) so I’m going to try to keep this reasonably short today.

Just to touch upon a topic I’ve noted before, the social media hoohar is still going on, as everyone is casting about trying to figure out what the new Twitter is going to be. Frankly, I think the new Twitter will be “the old Twitter, only worse” but in the meantime I’m trying out Mastodon, I’m there on Cohost, and I’m also on The Hive (user name: “mikester” natch), which is phone-app only but looks promising. I even revived my Tumblr, for Pete‘s sake.

I don’t know where we’re all going, but we’re certainly going somewhere. I do expect Twitter to survive, even despite current ownership, and as someone said they’re going to discover themselves engineering back to the solutions that already existed when their thoughtless whims all come crashing down. The trick is whether or not the advertisers and the power users will stick it out ’til everything settles down.

But whatever happens, you can always find me here, and you can see what else I’m up to (or had been up to) at mikesterling.com. And that reminds me…I’ve long lamented the fact that “mikester.com” was registered only a few short months before I thought about doing so, and after years of being what appeared to be a mostly-inert webpage it is now in the hands of some domain sales site at the low, low cost of nearly $4000. So, for about 4% of the price I registered “mikester.net” instead. It just forwards to mikesterling.com. Hey, that’s a whole four characters less! A real timesaver!

Okay, so this isn’t just me blabbing about social media and domain names, here’s some actual comic book content. It’s the Wizard-a-like Hero Illustrated‘s video magazine #2 from 1994! Warning: may be hard to take all 25 minutes in one sitting. Features a Rob Liefeld interview and commercials for a video game I don’t remember.

“Overly talky” versus a book that had Chris Claremont writing for it.

filed under Categories blogging about blogging is a sin, dc comics, marvel 9 Comments

So back in Ye Olden Dayes of this blog, when I wrote about specific comics, all I had to do was dip into the Vast Mikester Comic Archives and pull out a copy of the book I wanted to discuss. “Ah, yes, fetch me that copy of Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #106, would you Jeeves, that’s a good chap,” as I reclined into my Marc Newson Lockheed Lounge Chair, quill in hand, ready to pen the latest enthralling installment of Progressive Fancypants dot com.

Well, that changed when all thoughts of fancypantsness went out the window as I opened up my own comic book store, and the Vast Mikester Comic Archives became The Dismal Dregs once I gave over my personal stock to shop stock. Now when I want to discuss a particular book, it’s either one that I came across at my store, one I can pull images from DCUniverseInfinite.com, or I can bum pics off a pal, usually Bully.

It’s particularly frustrating when the books I want to discuss are definitely ones I bought off the stands at the time of release, and long since given up to the shop, such as 1985’s Heroes for Hope Starring the X-Men from Marvel Comics:

and Heroes Against Hunger from DC Comics:


Produced during that time pop culture remembered that Africa was having some problems, these were fundraising comics to aid the fight against starvation. Honestly, I don’t know how much money was raised by these projects, given each had a price tag of $1.50, so the wholesale price was about half that (unless there was a different discount structure in place for these particular books, which is possible), and unless those distributors also donated their share of the profits…well, that wasn’t much per issue going to charity. It’s a little better once you multiply that portion of the cover price by however many copies were sold to retailers (for which I have no info, so I’m gonna make the rough estimate of about 300,000 for the X-Men book, and half that for the DC one), then maybe you’re talking some real money. Maybe not “We Are the World” money, but not nuthin’, either.

I’m sure some enterprising person out there already crunched all those numbers and I’ll hear about it shortly, but that would take some kind of “internet search engine” to locate something like that. I’ll have to ask my man Jeeves to look into it. Anyway, that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

No, what I’m here to talk about is the impact these books had on me, and possibly also on cultural awareness overall (as far as “comic book fandom cultural awareness” goes on something like this). And all this came about because I was processing a collection the other day that had a copy of the Marvel benefit book. That in itself isn’t terribly unusual…copies of this title show up in collections all the time, far more frequently than the DC counterpart, which is why I presumed earlier the vast disparity in printruns.

But whenever I get a copy, I poke through it and marvel (so to speak) at the creative teams they put together for the short vignettes within…usually only two or three pages long by a specific creative team. There is a bare thread of a storyline connecting everything, but the real meat are the small character bits each short provides, as the various X-Men face personal, emotional challenges. Harlan Ellison and Frank Miller presents Wolverine rising above his savage instincts, Chris Claremont and Brian Bolland have Storm confronting her various self-images, Stephen King(!) and Bernie Wrightson have Kitty face off against…well, hunger (there’s more to it than that, didn’t flip through it agin to refresh my memory, but boy that “Good God, let’s eat!” still sticks with me). And then there’s this, which I took an askew shot of at the shop to post onto Twitter:


…contrasting Magneto’s Holocaust survivor background with the future he may bring about with his battle for mutant superiority over the common folk. I mean, Hitler shows up on this page to praise Magneto, it ain’t exactly subtle. It’s Alan Moore in a very rare bit of Marvel work (his only new post-UK work for the company, I believe), drawn by the underground comix legend Richard Corben. Not shown (except a bit in the last panel of that page there) are the great rotting corpses that only Corben could create. It may very well be one of my favorite bits of X-Men comics.

Here’s the thing about not having these comics readily accessible in my collection any more. I have to depend on my memories of having read the books. Yes, I said I get the Marvel book in collections all the time, but I’m not spending time to flip through each copy that shows up. It was only the other day where I thought “you know what’s good? this Moore/Corben sequence” and decided to take a picture of it so I could say so on the Twitterers. Many of the images and events of this comic stick in my mind clearly, nearly 40 years after I first saw them. That emaciated Kitty Pryde, Wolverine standing triumphant, Storm in her various guises, a guilt-ridden Magneto. I don’t remember a whole lot else from the comic, but those have been living in my brain a very long time.

Now let’s take the DC book. Similar in structure to the Marvel comic, it’s made up of short 2-3 page sequences each by a different creative team, strung together into a semblance of a story. I have two primary memories of this comic, which I definitely bought and read at the time.

The first memory is of a review I read of it in, well, probably has to be Amazing Heroes. Basically the complained about the inconsistency of the writing, specifically citing that Lex Luthor’s characterization would change from segment to segment. An inherent problem, I suppose, in having this many writing cooks in the kitchen.

The other memory was of Luthor weeping when put face to face with starving people. I mentioned that scene online, and it was Twitter pal BobH to the rescue, snapping a pic of that very moment:


As BobH pointed out, that’s by Barry Windsor-Smith and Catherine Jones, an impressive art team by any measure. He also mentions Bernie Wrightson inked by Mike Kaluta (wow!) and Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez inked by Jerry Ordway (another shot from BobH):


A look at the credits shows lots of other impressive (and weird) combos. I mean, Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson! Curt Swan inked by John Byrne! Walt Simonson inked by Steve Leialoha! (That one’s gotta be weird!) C’mon, Kirby is in this! There’s a lot of what should be some spectacular work in here.

I just don’t remember any of it. Nothing from the book stuck, except that one image of Luthor. (Which I liked, by the way…I always preferred the “yes he’s a bad guy but not a complete monster” pre-Crisis Luthor to the nigh-irredeemable post-Crisis Luthor we’d get only a couple of years after this.) Otherwise my mental image of the book was that it was…cluttered and cramped, overly talky and not as visually memorable or striking as the X-Men comic. The DC one even had its own Big Name Horror Writer in Robert Bloch, for a sequence also drawn by Wrightson, and hand-to-God I couldn’t tell you a single thing about it.

Not to say the X-Men book totally ruled and the DC one drooled or anything. The former had a bit by Mike Baron/Steve Rude, a creative team I normally like, which I looked at briefly in the copy I had at the store and gosh darn if I could tell what was going on. And frankly the DC book sounds a lot better than I remember, but I still feel like it does just sound that way, that something in the execution made it a less memorable offering that the Marvel release.

Lot of words to throw at you to essentially say “I remember one book more fondly than the other” but this is just one of those things I go through as an older fan who’s had a lot of comics pass through my hands. Interesting in that both Jim Starlin and Wrightson were involved in creating the storylines for both.

Anyway, I put this here so that I can maybe get some feedback on the books, about what I’m not remembering, about what was outstanding about the DC book that should be remembered as well as those top-flight stories from the Marvel comic. But I have to be honest, it’s gonna be hard to beat that Magneto strip.

EDIT: Everything old is new again! I just reminded myself that I wrote about these books on the site before, because of course I have! Here I am talking about the Marvel one, and here’s DC…more images (and some linkrot) for your perusal!