retailing

World famous beagle goes against laws of God and nature…

filed under Categories pal plugging, peanuts, publishing, retailing, sir-links-a-lot 7 Comments

…by SPEAKING:


AAAAAUGH! It’s terrifying! Demon! Sorcerer!

Well, okay, Charles Schulz just gave Snoopy a speech balloon instead of a word balloon, which he did once or twice over the years. I think we can cut the man some slack. But still, this is the sort of thing that always stops me dead with its…wrongness, somehow. There’s a measure of communication between human and animal characters in Peanuts, of course, but never do the animals explicitly “speak” to any of the children (unless there’s something I missed).

However, there is a strip later in the volume where I spotted the above panel (The Complete Peanuts: 1985-1986) in which Marcie calls Snoopy by the name of “The Lone Beagle,” a sobriquet Snoopy used to refer to himself during one of his flights of fancy in the previous days’ strips. At first I believed it could only have been communicated to Marcie via direct speech. Then again, perhaps Marcie was able to infer the name by observing Snoopy’s acting-out of his fantasy, which opens up yet more questions regarding Snoopy’s undoglike behavior and its general acceptance in the Peanuts universe, but perhaps that’s far enough down that rabbit hole.

In other news:

  • There’s some interesting stuff going on between Fantagraphics and Dave Sim regarding the possibility of new packaging of Cerebus material being covered by the Moment of Cerebus site. No idea if it’ll ever happen, but it sure is fascinating reading the back-and-forth of what would be required to make such a project materialize.

    This is all in response to Sim’s statement in the last issue of Glamourpuss that he’s pretty much done with comics, and how some folks responding with the desire for him to be able to continue producing work. One of my readers asked for my thoughts on the matter, particularly from the retail end, and…well, heck, let’s just do it here instead of putting it off for another day.

    Now, I liked Glamourpuss. Its weird combination of fashion parody and comic strip history was a little mindboggling, but it worked, somehow, and kept me entertained through its entire run. It started off with having me wonder what Dave was up to, and as time went on, I realized the only real answer to that was “Dave was doing something I find entertaining and informative” and that was good enough for me.

    It started off relatively well as far as sales go, too…I don’t have the exact numbers in front of me, but if memory serves it was selling at respectable indie title levels. But, as time wore on, sales did drop, until we had just a couple of holdouts still hanging on and reading the book ’til the end. I don’t know if those readers who dropped the book were expecting Cerebus II and didn’t get it, were looking forward to new Sim material and just didn’t care for it, or just stopped buying comics entirely (a sadly realistic possibility). It’s just the simple fact that Not Everything Catches On, and I’m sorry this didn’t go as well as it did for Dave, and I certainly don’t want him to leave the industry (though I couldn’t blame him if he did).

    I think he a good job promoting Glamourpuss, sending out promotional copies (I still treasure my signed copy of #1), calling stores personally (alas, he got our answering machine…when I called him back, I got his voice mail, answered by “Glamourpuss” herself!), his crazy variant covers (“zombie” variants, and variants featuring his Zatanna parody), and free overships of issues (which sometimes sold for us!). This certainly ensured good sales early on, but obviously their effectiveness wore off as time passed.

    Now, did I do enough to promote Glamourpuss at the shop? As a funnybook seller, it’s my job to be an advocate for every comic for, you know, the customers I think would enjoy said comic. I can’t shout out across the shop “I think everyone will enjoy this issue of Swamp Thing!” as much as I’d like to, simply because I know it’s not for everybody. And Glamourpuss was always bit of a hard sell. I mean, it was easy (if a little nutty) to describe to people, but hard to find the people who might be interested in such a thing. And given the number of comics we carry and the number of customers with differing tastes that we have and simply given the number of hours in the day, sometimes the most advocacy I can give a comic is just making sure it’s visible on the rack, and occasionally pointing it out to people I think would like it.

    I mean, I did what I could. I bought it, I enjoyed it, we carried it at the shop, I occasionally discussed it with folks, but if I could save every comic I liked from cancellation singlehandedly, Jupiter would still be on the stands.

  • Pal Jim is still blogging Hellblazer comics in his extremely intelligent and captivating way over at The Laughing Magician. He’s up to issue #3…only 292 issues (at press time), plus all those annuals and tie-ins, to go, Jim!

  • Well, well, well…look who’s back. …It’s Adam at Comics Make No Sense! The People have demanded that he revive his fun-filled weblog, and lo, it has come to pass. Go make the man feel welcome!

  • Bully, Schrodinger’s Bull Who Is Simultaneously Little and Stuffed, brings us a Ten of a Kind featuring really, really angry folks on comic book covers…which ends in the only way it can, with comics’ greatest symbol of unrestrained rage.

  • Look at what was in our pog haul. JUST LOOK AT IT.

There might be a minor spoiler or two for The Omen, which is nearly 40 years old, but you know someone would complain.

filed under Categories doctor who, mad magazine, misfit toys, retailing 18 Comments

So the other night I saw that The Omen was on Netflix Watch Instantly, and I realized a couple of things. One, it had been years since I’ve seen it…in fact, I probably wasn’t any more than about 10 years old, and I probably only saw parts of it on whatever local pay-cable channel we had as a precursor to HBO at the time. Two, my memories of the movie were primarily of the Mad Magazine parody from issue #189 (March 1977):


Actually, that’s not the panel burned into my head, but the ones specifically concerned with the fate of David Warner’s character, which might be a bit much to hit you with without any warning, so I picked that panel above as being a little more representative of the parody as a whole.

I wonder how many more movies and TV shows with which I have passing familiarity mostly because of the Mad parodies, versus actually seeing the darned things. I keep meaning to get around to watching A Clockwork Orange, which, yeah, I know, I haven’t seen it yet, I’m a bad person, but I’ll tell you I still have images from the George Woodbridge-illustrated Mad parody stuck in my brain. And since it seems like I’ll never get around to actually watching Blade Runner, I should find its Mad parody and just settle for that.

Anyway, speaking of what happens to David Warner’s character, I thought I’d be a smart guy and post this to the Twitter the other night:


I thought I’d just remembered the images from the Mad parody involving this scene, but apparently I remembered the joke, too, since I apparently just up and stole it. (Not the “pageboy haircut is adorable” part, but the “losing your head” part. Though David Warner is adorable in this movie.)

Another thing I hadn’t remembered about the film is that Patrick Troughton, Doctor Who‘s Second Doctor, has a significant part:


…Which of course caused me to make Yet Another Obvious Twitter Joke™:


Yes, I think I’m hilarious.

…And this has been another installment of “What Mike Does in His Spare Time.”

• • •

A couple of you had more questions from the other day, re: Spawn and related merchandise:

Heli asks

“…Have you covered the ‘party Angela’ phenomenon?”

For those of you who aren’t familiar with this, I’m going to strip away your innocence forever: McFarlane Toys produced an action figure of Spawn supporting character Angela (the warrior angel character created by Neil Gaiman), but, alas, lacked the paint job beneath the figure’s loin-armor or whatever that is to give her warrior angel-appropriate undergarments. Thus, this figure, and, according to my brief-but-probably-getting-me-on-watch-lists Googling, other figures that have similarly gone commando are referred to as “party” figures. And in case you’re wondering, that term does seem more appalling the more you think about it. …I remember a brief hubbub about it at the time, but it seemed to die down once people realized they were getting overly excited about a toy not having paint-panties, and hopefully that nipped it in the bud. Well, except on eBay, where no bud is ever nipped.

Tim O’Neil asks

“What about modern sales of Spawn? Has the series picked up new readers since it entered its 20 year anniversary with all the variant covers and such?”

I haven’t seen any real boost in sales, no…I think we may have gained a new reader or two on the series, but otherwise sales have been very consistent as a low-to-mid range seller. During 2010, when only four issues were released, that may have…well, “put the nail in the coffin” is a bit strong. Maybe “pushed it down the stairs” is more like it.

• • •

COMING NEXT WEEK: Yes, I’ll probably talk about Swamp Thing #0, don’t nag me. Also, more comic book talk! Maybe! And not so much about the pogs!

 

Special thanks to Bully the Little Stuffed Bull for providing the Mad image.

Was Todd six inches or only three?

filed under Categories misfit toys, retailing 10 Comments

In response to Monday’s post, where I rambled on at length about Spawn toys and their lack of secondary-market interest, readers Corey and Doc Arkham brought up the first issue of the Spawn comic book. To quote Doc, in his response to Corey’s comment about Spawn #1’s ease of sale:

“Spawn #1 is an easy sell, but every 90s collection is almost guaranteed to have at least one copy in it. It’s such a readily available resource that it doesn’t even figure into an offer price.”

I see early Spawns all the time. In fact, I purchased part of a collection at the shop yesterday, but passed on those very Spawns. Spawn comics, especially #1, are among those where far more people are interested in selling them to me than buying them from me. (Kinda like sets of Marvel trading cards, but that’s a story for another time.) I do sell those #1s on occasion, but too often people who ask about it are trying to price their own copies and are often amazed that it isn’t hundreds of dollars. Now, Spawn comics from about issue 50 to 100 or so…those I could use.

To clarify some of my comments from Monday…yes, while a lot of McFarlane toy sets warm the pegs quite nicely, there are certain figures I could always use. Some of the more famous modern monster figures, like Freddy Krueger or Jason, I could sell those all day. Or this Six Faces of Madness series…that was an enormously popular set. Or Spawn. Not “Medieval Spawn” or “Spawn as He Appeared on the Cover of Issue # Whatever” or Wings of Redemption Spawn. Just plain ol’ Spawn, with the chains and the big cape, as he appeared in that first issue. I could probably sell those.

As for the Todd McFarlane figure, Heli has this to say:

“Unless I’m mistaken, that figure was actually originally thrown in with some Spawn movie playset or other as ‘the bum,’ and then carded and resold through the club.”

That did stir some ancient memories in my tired brain, and that set was Spawn Alley. That linked page includes the note that the “Todd the Bum” figure (pictured here) was only in the sets distributed through Diamond Comics. My memory was that the movie playsets were actually produced at a smaller scale than the standard Spawn figures (like at about 3 inches), while that Collector’s Club figure was at the usual 6-inch Spawn scale. However, the “Todd the Bum” and Todd McFarlane figures are the same sculpt (with different color schemes), even if they are, possibly, if I’m recalling correctly, different sizes. Please correct me if any of you out there know for certain. I know the Spawn.com listings have them at the 6-inch scale, but I’m certain at least one of those sets was at a smaller scale.

One final comment, from the amazingly-named Suckmaster Burstingfoam:

“Do you really wear a toupée? Interesting.”

To paraphrase an old David Letterman joke…if I needed a toupée, would I buy one that looked like this?

In which I just sort of run off at the mouth about things you don’t care about.

filed under Categories dc comics, publishing, retailing 15 Comments

THINGS YOU DON’T WANT TO DO: Somehow completely forget that the comic order is due, like, THAT EVENING, and you completely drop freakin’ everything to get that bastard typed into the computer and then suddenly there’s like a thousand different Uncanny Avengers #1 variants you have to figure out and you’re all “Uncanny Avengers, oh dammit Marvel” and you’re trying to balance out order plateaus and ratios and what have you to get the right amounts of everything and oh Lordy I was actually feeling nostalgic for the time when we were only dealing with pre-bagged copies of X-Force #1, each with a different card.

Anyway, the order’s in. Hopefully I didn’t have a slip of the finger while speedily entering the order and accidentally got 5,000 copies of the Before Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan statue. I mean, I only need a thousand.

Also, there are some Avengers Vs. X-Men follow-up series, which hopefully won’t go the way of the Fear Itself follow-ups, where we went from the main series selling pretty well to the series that followed having us think “hmmm, well, maybe we can glue these back together into trees.” My general feeling is that once the main event is over (whether it’s Avengers Vs X-Men or Fear Itself or whatever) then the readers are pretty much done with that particular idea, too, and don’t need these supporting series after the fact. It’s like “yeah, okay, we did that, what else you got?” I mean, nothing against the comics themselves…maybe they’re fantastic. But it’s better to move on before the diminishing returns set in, which is something that goes against everything that’s ever happened in the comics industry ever, but still, c’mon.

In other news, a lot of hay has been made about Superman and Wonder Woman hooking up in Justice League, which, yeah, I don’t know. Hasn’t the point of nearly every previous story featuring an attempted Superman/Wonder Woman romance been “Superman and Wonder Woman really shouldn’t be romantically involved?” Well, okay, maybe not Kingdom Come, and I’m sure there’s another story somewhere I’m forgetting. But, hell, why not, so long as DC’s new publishing policy is “throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks,” this isn’t any better or worse than other decisions they’ve made. And I’ll link to this news story about it because the headline is kind of amazingly crass. This is showing up in real world news sources too, which is even more amazing.

I get some folks at DC want to try new things, which is cool, and I’m sure the attention doesn’t hurt, but DC Comics only has itself to blame for teaching me over the years, among other important life lessons, that Supes and Wondy aren’t meant for each other. Besides, I prefer the Batman/Wonder Woman romance that they sorta danced around in JLA.

Also at DC, Rob Liefeld is outta there, apparently unhappy with how things were going behind the scenes. I honestly figured he’d be done and gone three issues into Hawk & Dove, but he worked on ’em all, I believe, and went on to do even more titles, at least for a bit. Ah, well. …I was thinking “maybe Marvel can get him back again” and then I was wondering what the absolute last title would be that he would do, and Howard the Duck was the first thing that popped into my head. I would break my “no non-Gerber Howard the Duck ever” rule for a Liefeld Howard.

For some reason, I was reminded of Image United…if you don’t remember this as yet uncompleted mini-series, ask your grandpa if he recalls buying it off the stands. Anyway, checking with the distributor, issues #4 and #5 are in the system, with “scheduled” shipdates for the end of the year. I put “scheduled” in quotes because they both have the same date, the last shipping day of 2012, which makes me think they’re placeholder dates and not the real thing. I guess we’ll see. We’re not quite up to Ultimate Wolverine Vs. Hulk levels yet, but soon. Soon.

The opposite problem of Ultimate Wolverine Vs. Hulk.

filed under Categories retailing, this week's comics 13 Comments


Well, this is certainly my favorite comic of the week, a complete reprinting of the original Popeye #1 published by Dell Comics in 1948. 48 pages of comics, plus inner covers and back cover plus a swell front cover, all filled with fights and jokes, which I know you people like, for only $3.99. Worth every single penny.


Mike Allred draws the new issue of Daredevil, and…okay, don’t get me wrong, I think Daredevil as written by Mark Waid is a great comic, and currently one of the best, if not the best, Marvel has to offer right now. Even the non-Waid annual, which was written and drawn by Alan Davis, was a lot of fun. But there have been an awful lot of Daredevil comics recently, and double-checking the invoices…sure enough, there have been three regular issues plus the annual released over the last five weeks. Of course, the indicia does say “published Monthly except in May and August” but still, I don’t know you want to push your readers’ pocketbooks quite that much, especially with current economic conditions and with an audience base that’s looking for pretty much any reason to reduce their disposable income expenditures. Flooding the stands with consecutive issues of a series on what appears to be no set schedule is a good way to overwhelm your readership, and cause them to cut even titles they like if they think they can’t afford to keep up.

I mean, I get it. It’s a publishing and marketing strategy, designed to push other comics off the shelves, and force customers to devote more money to your popular “essential” titles while taking money away from your competitors’ titles (and hopefully not from too many of your own, though that inevitably happens). And it’s the kind of short term profiteering necessary in the current depressed comics marketplace, where you have to grab that money while it’s being shoved in your direction, as trying to build up a solid readership over an extended period of time takes, well, an extended period of time, and who has time to wait for that, amiright?

…That’s a long-winded way to say “I wish they’d stick to a schedule,” because cranking out a new issue of a series every one or two weeks causes my customers to increasingly groan “another new issue already?” even on titles they love. And that’s not an attitude anyone in this industry can afford to encourage.

Okay, wasn’t intending to rant about that. The new Daredevil is great. And let’s end this on an up note:


So this relaunch of Supreme by Erik Larsen and Cory Hamscher, picking up from the Alan Moore run from a few years back, is a bit of a hidden gem, I think. It’s a hoot and half, despite that bloody cover I scanned up there which fits in fine in context, honest. There’s all kind of crazy stuff going on in this series, and Invincible fans may want to pick up this particular issue. That the Moore issues which preceded this series are out of print and not always readily available in back issue bins is a shame, and may have hurt this restart’s chances with those stories being mostly out of memory. But, hell, just jump on in…it’s a lot of fun, and it’s not like you’ve read every single issue of, say, Batman before you read your first Batman story. You’ll live.

Just when I thought I was out…they POG me back in.

filed under Categories pogs, retailing 32 Comments

So the boss had some friends who came into the possession of a storage unit full of material that once belonged to the distributor of a certain product. Those friends had no particular use for said product, and they said to the boss, they sez “here, you can have it all, and see if you can get anything for it.”

And thus, on a warm Sunday afternoon, the boss pulled the rental truck up in front of the shop, and this was the scene within:


And here we are, a little closer and at a slightly higher angle:


Yes. Oh, yes indeedy. So, we meet again, my old enemy:


Yes, that’s right, boxes and boxes and boxes of POGs and milkcaps and slammers and carrying tubes and oh sweet mother an entire CASE of Ultra Pro POG sleeves and uncut cap sheets and a generous handful of SLAMINATORS:


This fellow was apparently a distributor and / or manufacturer of cap products during the height of fad, in the early ’90s, and these rare jewels have apparently been resting in storage for nearly two decades since. I haven’t had much of a chance to actually go through the boxes, since mostly we were just hauling them out of the truck and making a giant POG box pyramid in a corner of the shop. However, one employee drew the short stick and he’s going to go through and sort everything out…and when I’m back on Tuesday, I’ll begin the process of getting these things on the eBay and finding homes for them.

Yes, this means I am back in the POG-selling business. …Don’t you judge me.

As we were hauling boxes into the shop, I was carrying a smallish box which caused some wag to call out “Hey, Mike, way to pitch in!” to which I replied “Here, you hold this box” which was filled with brass slammers and thus heavier than your mother:


And if you don’t know what “slammers” are, please don’t ask me to explain. Speaking of which, another customer, a young fellow of about twelve, asked us what POGs were as he’d never heard of them, and I envied him his youthful innocence.

By the way, SHAQ POGS:


And all of these caps were presided over by their true and rightful king:


Just to allay any concerns, I took this pic on top of one of our glass cases, so Pogman isn’t directly sitting on top of our copies of Daredevil #7 (1965), Marvel Tales Annual #1 (1964), or X-Men #8 (1964), as it may appear.

There was one of these as well, a videotape sealed in its original shrinkwrap, and thus presumably the “6 Collectible Wackers” are still included:


The back, since I know you’re curious:


Oh, there are no winners here.

Most terrifying part of this video?


Yeah, there was more than one in this series. Seriously, I am tempted beyond all belief to pop this open and watch it.

In an odd sort of way, I’m sort of excited, just for the sheer “OH MY GOD WHAT’S THIS” entertainment of it all, not to mention seeing what actually does sell and for how much. And believe you me, I’ll be taking full advantage of the “pogs” category on this site if I find any more treasures.

In the meantime…drop by the shop! Scale POG Mountain! See Mike just kinda stand there and shake his head in bemusement!

There’s probably a reason why I don’t get interviewed for articles like these more often.

filed under Categories retailing, self-promotion 11 Comments

So a while back, Matt Wilson (he of The Supervillain Handbookfame) asked me “if superhero movies are so successful, why aren’t people buying more comics?” And I said “because people are big poopie-heads.” Well, okay, I didn’t say that, but you can see what I did say by looking at Matt’s article right here. My response is hardly the be-all/end-all answer to that particular quandary, but, you know, it’s a start. Oh, and some other people responded, too, but pfffft, they’re obviously not me.

Nothin’ says lovin’ like Hulk from the oven.

filed under Categories collecting, retailing, the eBay 13 Comments

So it can be difficult to buy things at the shop at times when people bring items in that they’ve already “researched” on the Internet, particularly when they see prices like these:


Note: the “used” copies start at $150, and work their way up into the $500s.

Now, I know this is not a terribly common item, and that the 1970s Fireside paperbacks are usually in-demand collectibles. Even in pristine shape, though, the books in the line don’t sell for that much, at least to my knowledge. We had a copy of the Fantastic Four Fireside paperback in Near Mint condition that sold for about $60, and it took forever to move it. We also had a…rather well-read copy of America at War, the Fireside reprint of DC’s war comics (and, I think, one of the most sought-after volumes from this series, next to the romance book), that sold for about six bucks.

In the past, when we’ve had copies of the Marvel Superheroes’ Cookbook, they were usually in Good to Very Good condition, and, if memory serves, we usually sold them for around ten dollars or so. Or maybe it was the Marvel Strength and Fitness book…basically the same type of book, with about the same level of demand and desirability. Basically, it’s a book that’s an interesting novelty item, but not really comics as such, and not with an excessive value.

At least, that’s what we generally believed. A quick look at one online store lists a Mint copy as being in the $150 range (theoretically, as they don’t have any in stock). And a look at completed eBay auctions shows that a couple of copies have sold in the $40 range, which may be a more realistic assessment of this item’s value:


…since this is showing what prices people are actually paying, as opposed to, as shown in the Amazon image above, what prices that sellers are trying to get.

But I don’t know…maybe I’m wrong, and Amazon sellers are turning over copies of this book all the time at hundreds and hundreds of dollars. But we have to base our pricing and purchasing on what we think we can sell it for, and what we’ve sold it for in the past, and not on what high hopes others might have. And frankly, I would have zero confidence in getting prices like those on Amazon for this copy of the book. I doubt we would have even really approached those eBay prices, but it’s all a moot point since we couldn’t come to terms on the book with the seller anyway.

Ah, well, At least Chris wrote up this description of the Marvel Superheroes’ Cookbook we can all enjoy.

There’s gold in them thar funnybooks.

filed under Categories collecting, market crash, retailing, turok, valiant 9 Comments

While the Valiant Comics collectability heyday of the 1990s is now a distant memory, along with most collectability of ’90s comics for that matter, there still remains some market desirability for certain Valiant releases: the early “pre-Unity” issues (Unity being Valiant’s line-wide crossover event series), the last issues of some of their series (with their smaller print runs, you see), the early video game comics (Captain N, Super Mario Bros.), some of the #0s and mail-away/promo books, and the gold logo/gold foil variants of some of their regular issues.

Now, it’s been a long time since I’ve thought about how these gold variants were distributed to retailers…I don’t think it was like how variants are doled out by the big publishers today, where you get one special variant for every 10, 25, 100, whatever regular covers you ordered. I suspect, at least in some cases, that the gold editions were just mailed out to retailers for us to do with as we wish. In any case, in recent years these gold variants have been selling for a pretty penny on the eBay, and the few we’ve acquired in collections over the last few years turned over some sizable profit via the online auctions.

However, I suspect we may experience where the line is drawn vis-à-vis Valiant gold-logo collectability with this recently-acquired golden edition:


It’s probably a bit hard to tell, but that’s a gold corner box and a gold foil logo on that Turok #1. Now, as I’ve written before, Turok #1 was, if not a cause, at least one of the primary symptoms of the ’90s market crash. Hot collectable company produces what should be a hot collectable #1, every retailer on the planet orders a royal assload of said #1, #1 comes out, nobody cares. So all those retailers end up with a huge ol’ turkey that they try to blow out in their bargain bins in the subsequent decade or two since.

Now, it’s possible that someday we’ll experience the Shazam! effect, where the greatly-anticipated release of Shazam! #1 in 1973 resulted in a huge abundance of that comic in the marketplace, with many copies going straight to quarter boxes. There they sat, thumbed over and exposed to the elements, until suddenly…oh, hey, it’s awfully hard to find mint copies of that comic nowadays, and now price guides have mint copies of Shazam #1 at, I don’t know, $40, $60 maybe? I don’t have my guide in front of me, but you get the idea. But if that happens to Turok #1, ever, it may not be until after I’m long dead, so, you know, in ten years or so. But basically what I’m saying is that Turok #1 is not seen as a desirable collectable by pretty much anyone, and I suspect even having a gold logo may not make that much of a difference. This site, which has been monitoring online Valiant sales, notes the market value at about $12, but ain’t too bad, I guess, but not really a patch on some of the money we’ve made on other gold Valiant variants.

But still, that gold edition Turok is nice-looking. And I do like Turok comics. Maybe I’ll just keep it.

Speaking of gold editions…this strictly isn’t just a variant, as such:


…but a second printing, which DC indicated by changing the frame of the cover from the first printing’s dark blue to this printing’s gold adding a gold border (thanks, Old Bull Lee!). Mostly I was just going to bring up the fact that Deathstroke, at one point in history, was popular enough in his own title (due in part to a brief renaissance of the Teen Titans franchise at the time) to warrant a second printing for his first issue, but then, oh yeah, it happened twice.

Warning: things get totally depressing at the end of this post.

filed under Categories dc comics, jack kirby, pal plugging, retailing 7 Comments

So y’all know Matt Digges, right? The artist of Awesome Hospital? The guy who drew me this?

Well, the man is in need of a little extra scratch, and thus is now taking commissions to draw your favorite character…and if you ask nicely, he might draw characters other than Swamp Thing or Sluggo, too. You can read all the details on his Tumblr-thingie. But in all seriousness, Matt’s a swell cat and well deserving of your dollars, so go give him a few and get a wonderful drawing in return.

In other news:

  • Hey, have I mentioned I’m doing a little lite-blogging on this site for my place of employment? We needed a new blanket site to cover both stores, I ended up doing a quickie WordPress install, and voilà, suddenly I’ve got another blog to maintain. It’s mostly a lot of “hey, look at this stuff we would like you to buy!” but we’re having fun with it. It’s just starting out, and I need to slap another coat of paint on it, but I think it looks nice, though I’ll have to beat Employee Mark if he uses another emoticon in a post again.

  • We got in a copy of the Infinite Crisis Omnibus hardcover, and I sort of wish I remembered to take a picture of it, because this thing is just goofily thick. I mean, physically thick, not, you know, thick as in “not very bright,” which I suppose some of you would mention if I didn’t. But this thing is a real bullet-stopper, the kind of book you’d use to knock out a moose prior to surgery. It has purt’near every tie-in and mini-series to Infinite Crisis, and it’s like four inches thick, and it’s just amazing.

    …Now, there have been similar books, like those Omnibii that Marvel has been doing (for example), so it’s not as if this kind of tome is anything new. But while big ol’ Gutenberg Bible editions of Fantastic Four, Watchmen, and even Howard the Duck sort of receive the “yeah, sure, we get it” reaction, this special Infinite Crisis: Overkill Edition tends to get The People’s Eyebrow and the occasional disbelieving “Really? They made one of those for that?” and all I can say is “hey, I got a dude who wants it, and that’s good enough for me.”

    Of course, that there is not yet a Swamp Thing Omnibus with every 1970s appearance of the character is a crime that comics will pay for someday, oh yes.

  • Pals Dor and Ken have another look at trailers for forthcoming movies…I always really look forward to each new installment of this column!

  • Pal Andrew has another installment of “Nobody’s Favorites” and this time he takes on The King! Yup, one of Kirby’s latter-day creations gets Andrewified, and you can read the results right here. …A few years back, I had a brief discussion on this site about fandom’s contemporary opinions on Kirby’s later output (here and here) which generated some lively discussion (link goes to old commenting system…don’t post new comments there, please!). I only bring those posts up, not just to complement Andrew’s post, but to point out a certain realization I had about fandom’s reaction to that period of Kirby’s work:

    “Okay, we look back on that stuff now and we can appreciate it for what it was. I don’t know if it took us 30 years to catch up to what Kirby was doing, or if it’s just nostalgic fondness for the comics of yore, or if it’s ‘ironic’ appreciation, or just admiration for Kirby’s energy in producing just pure ‘comic-booky’-type comics with no pretense at being anything other than what they were: escapist entertainment for kids. And I’m sure part of it is an unwillingness to take any portion of Kirby’s output for granted, since, obviously, there ain’t no more comin’”.

    “There ain’t no more comin’.” I put in sort of a fake-folksy way, but it doesn’t make that thought any less depressing, and it’s sort of stuck with me all these years since I originally wrote it. Looking at that Witchfinder series John Severin drew last year, and thinking “no more Severin art.” Or “no more Gil Kane drawings.” Or “no more Steve Gerber stories.” The fact that there are still some stories and art from departed creators in the vaults, as it were, such as that Infernal Man-Thing mini featuring Gerber’s previously-unpublished scripts, simply serves to remind that we can only look forward to unearthed archived material, and That One Guy/Gal You Really Liked Who Just Passed Away isn’t sitting at his/her typewriter or art table and working on something brand spanking new at this very moment.

    …Sigh. Sorry. “People die and it sucks” is today’s lesson, apparently.

    Speaking of which…so long, Andy.