I guess “GLUB” counts as a sound effect.

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Jim Starlin, the creator of Thanos, returns with artist Ron Lim to fill in a gap or two in the character’s past while setting up yet another Infinity Something-or-other series, which is fine with me, actually, so long as Starlin will be involved. The annual comes with three variant covers, and of course there’s only one choice as to which I’d get.


Collecting Jason Yungbluth’s longform post-apocalyptic Peanuts (and other comic strips!) parody, both from previous print appearances and the online strips, plus other goodies new to this collection. I’ve been a fan of Weapon Brown since first encountering it in Yungbluth’s Deep Fried comics, though I sort of fell behind keeping up with the webcomic and am glad to have it all here in one giant lump.


This is supposed to be the “Batman ’66” variant, though that mostly has translated to “‘characters drawn by Mike Allred in the usual Mike Allred style’ variant,” which is perfectly fine, don’t get me wrong. But everyone’s costumes need to be, I don’t know, a little baggier, maybe? At least one giant “KA-POW!” sound effect, somewhere? Swamp Thing (looking more like the Dick Durock portrayal from the first film) dancing the Swamptusi with an Abby Arcane who looks suspiciously like Eartha Kitt in a white wig with black stripes?


Been digging Matt Kindt’s covers on this series. The story’s interesting as well, giving us outsiders’ views of the Original Trilogy’s core characters. I suspect this and the other ongoing Star Wars monthly may be the last hurrahs for these characters in this form for a while, as the franchise switches over to Marvel and the ramp-up to Episode VII begins.


This issue goes a long way to establishing that the Fantastic Four are dangerous and possibly crazy people, which is something that probably should have been obvious from the get-go but James Robinson has a lawyer really go after the team on this and it’s hard to argue that the lawyer is wrong. It’ll all wrap up with our heroes coming out of it just fine, surely, or at the very least forgotten when the next writer comes along or the new first issue comes out, or both, but it makes for a compelling story in the meantime.


Was actually sort of surprised this wrapped up as quickly as it did, in only six issues, but there probably isn’t much more to say on the topic, really. A lot got squeezed into these comics, and the tone of the last issue swings from touching to appalling and back again, in true Garth Ennis fashion.


REMINDER: Swamp Thing appearance in Aquaman this week, about seventeen years since the last time that’s happened, so, you know, we were about due. Also, I have just dropped dead from old age, in case you were wondering.

I am generally disinterested in all things Woody Woodpecker, but I shall make an exception for this comic.

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Found this 1953 promotional comic while just sorta randomly going through the Grand Comics Database, and now there is almost nothing I want to know more than how our friend Scotty MacTape, of the Clan MacTape, helps Woody defeat an invading fleet of alien spacecraft with rolls of Scotch Tape, new formula or no.

I’ll have to track down a copy of this for myself someday, though perhaps I can wait ’til a slightly less dear example happens along. In the meantime, I’ll just assume Scotty uses his taping powers to strap together a whole bunch of cabers into one giant uber-caber that Woody, using the immense strength borne of his nigh-infinite well of anger, tosses into the Martian forces, giving them what-for and all that.

3,000 copies of the Swamp Thing one-shot should be about enough.

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So on Friday I sat down and started crunching some numbers on how to order the coming Futures End 3D covers. As I’m sure you remember, the last time DC tried 3D covers, it turned out production time was longer than they expected and they couldn’t fill initial orders. This time around, however, retailers are being asked to send in orders well in advance of release to allow (hopefully) sufficient lead-time for DC to print enough copies.

Last time, sales were driven by demand created by news of short supply. People were more or less interested in the 3D covers as it was, but the news that retailers weren’t receiving full orders created a huge buying frenzy, much higher than anyone would have expected. It’s hard to say, had initial orders been filled in full and no short-supply sales frenzy had ensued, just how accurate my original estimates of sales would have been. I think I would have been close…numbers enough to cover pull lists and rack sales and then a reasonable number of extra copies to handle what I guessed would be the additional sales the fancy covers might have attracted. There was no way to predict that 1) DC would end up allocating orders, and 2) that panic buying would have resulted.

This time, my planning includes numbers enough to cover pull lists and rack sales and then a reasonable number of extra copies to handle what I guess may be the additional sales the fancy covers will attract. The comics won’t be here for four months, two more months than the usual gulf of time my precogniscent comic-ordering abilities normally have to span, and if I have trouble predicting an out of the ordinary comic-buying frenzy two months out, I don’t have a chance at four months.

Now, it’s not hard to guess on some titles. The 3D covers for Batman and Harley Quinn and Justice League and other top-tier titles will probably sell great, and will continue to sell for some time to come, assuming no panic-driven immediate sell-outs. Orders for other titles, like Trinity of Sin: Pandora, with readerships about half that of my grocery lists, can probably safely be ordered at significantly lower numbers. Again, assuming no panic-driven immediate sell-outs.

Perhaps you sense a recurring theme. “I should have enough, assuming something I can’t reasonably predict doesn’t happen.” I can order enough to cover regular sales. I can, in general, guesstimate orders on enough extras to cover additional sales driven by interest in the 3D covers. I can’t guess if there will be, say, a mass media driven frenzy from people who don’t normally buy comics coming into stores to grab what they can. Or, some other kind of interest spike that will come as a surprise.

Will this be Superman #75, the Death of Superman issue, where retailers’ orders of lots of copies were completely overwhelmed by an insane amount of consumer demand? Or will this be Adventures of Superman #500, the “sorta the beginning of the return of Superman,” which retailers ordered huge numbers on, anticipating an demand equal to that of Superman #75, and, well, go ask some retailers how many unopened cases of that book they still have. But not me, or I might throw an unopened case of, um, a certain unnamed book at you.

There are lots of outcomes here. Given the extra lead time to print these new 3D comics, every retailer should get what they order. But will too many retailers order well in excess of what they actually need, assuming a demand similar to what happened with the 3D covers last year, resulting in a flooded marketplace and depressed sales? Will retailers order too conservatively, with the possibility of perhaps supply only just meeting, or just barely not meeting demand, giving the impression of more shortages which will cause, like last year, a spike in demand for books simply because they’re “hard to get?”

And there is that unpredictable factor I mentioned several times already, that a huge demand will come out of nowhere, or at from outside the usual comics-buying market, outstripping anyone’s guesses or predictions, causing the 3D cover supply to dry up yet again.

My best guess right now is that, this year, everyone will order just a few too many, that there should be plenty to meet expected sales, and there probably won’t be an unpredicted excessive demand stripping our shelves of these books. But, as mentioned to me by Ralph…remember Ralph? co-owner of the store and owner of all the old comics Ralph…if everyone orders too much this year and gets stuck with copies, then if they do this again next year, everyone will cut orders, and there won’t be enough to go around, and I’ll have to go through this again but with any luck I’ll finally be in my dream job of deep sea fishing by then and won’t have to think about any of this.

Regarding this year’s crop, however, we’ll see how I did on my ordering in a few months. Hopefully at that point this site won’t turn into “Mike Sterling’s Progressive 3D Cover Marketplace” where I try to get you guys to buy a different Futures End book each day. On the plus side, that’ll get me back up to posting seven days a week.

• • •

Between my writing this post Friday night and finishing it Saturday night, there was of course that terrible shooting in Isla Vista. I attended UCSB in the late ’80s/early ’90s, and would regularly wander through I.V. between classes, have lunch, shop at the record and book stores, or just hang out. It was an interesting and crowded community, and to hear about this awful tragedy there was just sickening. My sympathies to everyone there, to the victims of the violence and to their family and friends.

Hi, pals.

filed under Categories blogging about blogging is a sin 4 Comments

I started writing a long ol’ post about comic book ordering, but I’m not going to finish anytime soon, and it’s already really late, and your pal Mike needs his beauty sleep. I mean, really needs it. Have you seen Mike lately? Sheesh.

Anyway, I know my site has been a bit light in content lately…I’m still here, I promise. My goofin’-around-on-the-blog time has been in short supply, and some nights I’ve been getting in too late, too tired and too scatterbrained to put together an entry of any real substance (not that scatterbrainedness has ever been in the way before).

My comic ordering post should be up on Sunday, then I’ll be back on Monday and I’ve got an End of Civilization post coming this week (already? are months like only two weeks long now or something?) so I’ll be back up to speed soon.

I was going to maybe do a Sluggo Saturday post, but I almost can’t bring myself to get up, go to the other room, grab the stack of Nancy comics and flip through ’em for inspiration. This is terrible. My mind is going, I can feel it. Daisy, Daisy, give me…your answer…do

Armageddon 2019.

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So here they are, the images that will comprise the lenticular cover for the Swamp Thing “Futures End” one-shot due out in a few months, which I’ll be ordering, along with a few dozen other similarly-covered comics, in the next week or so with what will be my best, but likely ultimately incorrect, guesses as to how they are going to sell.

I first assumed, upon seeing that cover, that we were in for something similar to this long-ago issue of Swamp Thing by Alan Moore and John Totleben, where our hero, during his exile in space, tries to build a body from a biomechanical entity and ends up some sort of weird robo-Swampy. That, at some point between the present DC Universe and the 5-Years-Later DCU, Swamp Thing becomes a Robot Elemental and, hell, I don’t know.

The actual solicit on the DC Comics website, which is probably in the Previews I looked at a couple of weeks ago but I’ve been trying not to think about, notes that Swamp Thing is going to war against “the avatars of Bacteria and Metal,” so that’s Metal Thing, I suppose, though “Metal Thing” brings something else entirely to mind. But that’s a pretty neat cover image anyway, so I definitely made sure to save a copy of that animation to help give me an idea of what that slightly-blurry 3D final product was supposed to look like.

As for some of the other covers: I’m all for the return of the Sand Superman; this cover makes me laugh (“GAH! Where’d you come from?”); but not as much as this cover. Man, the Stranger never catches a break. And, they don’t have the animated version of this cover up yet, but I hope they producers of Smallville send the helmet prop over to NBC so we can see this eventually happen in the Constantine TV show.
 
EDIT 5/21: special thanks to reader Geoph for the improved GIF!

So the question remains…

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…is our anonymous felt-tip pen commentator referring to Conan or Conan’s lady friend, or is s/he jumping to conclusions based on the admittedly-handsome hands of the green scaly crypt-deity? We may never know.
 
 

Conan the Barbarian #52 (July 1975) – art by John Buscema, Tom Palmer, and John Romita)

In which Mike talks about things you’re already sick of hearing about.

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So there’s the trailer for that Constantine TV series, based on that little-known Swamp Thing supporting character, and…it looks pretty good, I think. To be honest, I had no idea they were this far along in producing the show. I thought it was more along the lines of “well, yeah, someone got the rights from DC and we might see a pilot or something that may or may not be picked up in a year or two,” but nope, there it is, in living technicolor and lifelike stereo sound.

John Constantine certainly looks like John Constantine, the character seems to have the right tone in what little we see of his personality, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see how his name’s pronounced:


I was asked by quite a few folks on the Twitterers and in what passes for my real life if I was looking forward to any possible Swamp Thing cameos. It’s my understanding, and I could be wrong on this, that the Swamp Thing media rights are still fairly well locked down by whoever was responsible for the movies and cartoons and whatnot. Doesn’t really matter, I guess; nothing’s necessarily missed from the Constantine concept by not having that Swampy tie-in. In the comics, Swamp Thing was more of “yet another weird adventure for ol’ Conjob” than “A VITAL PIECE OF CONSTANTINE’S BEGINNINGS” so if all we get in the series is maybe a vague reference to having to “deal with some plant creature in Louisiana” that’ll be okay with me.

Employee Timmy wants to see Etrigan and Zatanna in the series, and I have to agree that would be amazing. But not as amazing as if they’d put this special Constantine moment into the show:


• • •

Oh, and then there’s this, posted by Zack Snyder on his Tweetery:


Looks okay to me. Definitely looks like a Batman. Some have noted it’s Dark Knight-ish, which fits with what seems to be Snyder’s concept of an older, been-around-the-block-a-bit Batman for the next Man of Steel movie. As one of the few people in online fandom who didn’t absolutely hate the first film, and have generally enjoyed Snyder’s other films, I am looking forward to the follow-up, even as the film’s DC character pile-on seems to be more a reaction to The Avengers making all the money ever than as an attempt to tell a story. It’ll look nice and be action-packed, though, I’m sure. The theater will probably be air-conditioned, too, and you certainly can’t discount that.
 
 

images from Swamp Thing #73 (June 1988) by Rick Veitch and Alfredo Alcala; Constantine #5 (September 2013) by Ray Fawkes and Renato Guedes

Things to do in Oxnard when you’re feeling yucky.

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I apologize for the extended outage…flu and / or flu-like symptoms struck down your pal Mike after I had seemingly worked them out of my system over the Free Comic Book Day weekend. Alas, they came back in full force early last week and I spent most of the week in bed reading comics, watching television, or (mostly) sleeping.

WHAT I READ:

I reread all of William Messner-Loebs’ series starring his 19th century woodsman Wolverine MacAlistaire, Journey. Originally, when the series was coming out, it took a normalman crossover issue to get me to try it. I liked Loebs’ work so much, however, I ended up continuing with the series and picking up the back issues. The follow-up mini-series Wardrums was never completed, sadly, though we did get a short story in the Many Happy Returns one-shot.

I also reread all of Grant Morrison’s Batman saga, beginning back in Batman #655 from (urgh) 2006, which was about eight years ago, and not the “just the other day” I had been clinging to out of desperation to push away the yawning grave. Overall it holds together pretty well, despite the occasional artistic…misstep, I suppose, and it somehow manages to maintain its overall story threads during the whole New 52 switchover. Mostly by ignoring it, it seems like, which was probably just as well. I’d have to dip back into the Batman boxes from the Vast Mikester Archives for the occasional tie-in one-shot or mini I’d forgotten (“oh, right, Batman: The Return“), and I was bemused by being reminded I’d only bought the Morrison parts of that Ra’s al Ghul crossover and didn’t bother with the rest (sorry, whoever worked on those other parts of the story).

WHAT I WATCHED:

I saw that Son of Batman animated movie, which is what kind of inspired my reread of the Morrison Bat-comics since the film was based on, oh, one or two issues of those comics. It was fine, I guess, with nicely animated fight scenes and some funny dialogue, but frustrating since this is all of the overall story arc we’ll ever see adapted, I’m just going to assume. Not that I’m expecting Final Crisis: The Animated Movie or anything, but there’s enough stuff in Morrison’s run to fill a couple of TV seasons of an ongoing Batman cartoon, and it’s all so much fun craziness that only doing a adaptation of what is essentially the prologue seems like a lost opportunity. Points, however, for being the first Batman cartoon I’m aware of to discuss birth control.

However, I balanced this out by watching most of the third season of Batman: Brave and the Bold on Netflix, which is every crazy thing you’ve ever read in a Batman comic, animated and made completely amazing. On one hand, it’s a damn shame there were only three seasons of this. On the other hand, three seasons of this was far more than this fallen world deserves.

I also finally got a copy of this on DVD after having the soundtrack CD for nearly 25 years. And the DVD comes with…a copy of the soundtrack on CD. Well, sure.

WHAT I DIDN’T READ:

I didn’t read most of the new comics I picked up last week. That’s weird. I will note that Marvel’s prepping you folks for the upcoming EXPLICIT BIRTH SCENES in Miracleman by starting to polybag the comics now, which also totally coincidentally hides the return of the black and white “classic” reprints nobody wants filling space in these issues. Sigh. Everything else in these Miracleman reprints is pretty great, though, so don’t let that dissuade you.

Anyway, how’re you doing?