(Sorry, no “100 Things I Love About Comics” list this year…just had no time to put one together. But I still love these three hundred things: lists 1, 2, and 3. Then again, I could have done a list this year where all 100 entries were All Star Batman….)
You know, sometimes, you just gotta post about the Winslow. For some reason, I found myself rereading my run of Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire yesterday, and was reminded of just how cool a critter the Winslow was.
What is the Winslow? Well, in Phil Foglio‘s comics, the Winslow is a small, reptilian (yet furry) critter that is 1) immortal, 2) indestructible, 3) the object of worship by approximately 3/4ths of the sentient species in the galaxy, and 4) not very bright (or is he just playing dumb?).
And he’s cute as all get-out, too. He’s the big green fella in the cover to the right, there (taken from Buck Godot #5, which you can get for, coincidentally, a buck…one slim dollar…right here). He’s not to scale in that image, in case you’re wondering.
The primary WWW (Winslow Wide Web) page would be the Slag-Blah Church of the Winslow, which also features the original three-page Winslow debut from 1985.
The Wikipedia entry covers all currently revealed info about the Winslow. (EDIT: Commenter Tom has additional publication history.)
He’s part of the cast listing for the Girl Genius Online webstrip. “He’s everywhere. All hail.”
Buy official Winslow merchandise…baffle your coworkers with the Winslow mug.
This page repeats a lot of the same info on the Winslow as other pages, but does have a swell original image of the critter.
This person is selling a sculpture of the Winslow.
The Winslow pops in at #40 on pal Tom’s “100 Things I Love About Comics” list. That’s higher than Alan Moore on that list, mind you.
I’m not a gamer, so I don’t know much about this Button Men game, but apparently the Winslow piece is “a special die type guaranteed to cause chaos in any tournament. Hi!” I can appreciate that. Plus, if I did know something about the game, this statement:
Someone using Dunkirk with Winslow in place of his Shadow Swing does not have a Shadow Winslow. That’s just too ugly for words.
…would probably make more sense to me.
The secret origin of the Winslow is revealed in this interview with Phil Foglio. Alas, the site and images thereon are Not Safe For Work, but some risks must be taken for the acquirement of knowledge, surely.
…well, more or less. I’m really terrible at this sort of thing (go see Dave for a good year-end review, and not just because he said something nice about me in it…Alan David Doane and Chris Allen have a good’un as well), but I did it last year, and by golly, I’m gonna do it again.
Actually, the temptation was to go all movie-reviewer on you, and just make a year’s-ten-best list comprised entirely of comics that came out this week, but, well, I’ve been a jerk enough this year, I think. Not that’ll stop me from being a jerk anyway.
Favorite comics: I know I’m gonna leave some things out of my “favorites” lists, but lemme try anyway — Simpsons/Futurama Crossover Crisis II (a funny and imaginative follow-up), Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman (only one issue, and they’ve already impressed), Morrison’s Seven Soldiers project, The Stuff of Dreams #3 by Kim Deitch (one of my all-time favorite cartoonists), Fell (good and inexpensive), Love & Rockets (a perennial favorite), and several others I’m sure I’m overlooking. I really need to plan for these year-end posts.
Favorite conniption-causing comic book: Countdown to Infinite Crisis was a contender, if only because the death of the Blue Beetle caused everyone who previously couldn’t give a rat’s hinder about him to suddenly declare their undying love and affection, which almost certainly will not translate to sales for DC’s forthcoming Blue Beetle series.
However, I gotta give it to Frank Miller and Jim Lee’s All-Star Batman & Robin…I admit I wasn’t sold on it with the first issue, but once the second issue came out, I got into Miller’s “big budget Hollywood action movie on paper” vibe. The fact that he’s also screwing with the uptight Bat-fans is a plus.
Favorite trade paperbacks/graphic novels: Daisy Kutter: The Last Train (sci-fi western with appealing cartoony art), Demo (a handsome collection of the excellent Brian Wood/Becky Cloonan mini-series), WE3 (Morrison and Quitely cybernetic animal comic…attractive and affecting), Black Hole (Charles Burns’ terrifying horror comic, finally collected after its decade-long run), the Complete Bone (every issue of Jeff Smith’s fantasy series, collected into one volume at the bargain-of-the-century price of $39.95), the new Acme Novelty Library (in just under the wire), and Absolute Watchmen (finally bringing the extras from the old Graphitti Designs hardcover back into print).
Favorite reprints: DC’s Showcase line…like Marvel’s Essentials line, only with better printing and a more interesting (to me, anyway) selection of comics. Dark Horse’s Little Lulu series also continues to impress.
Favorite comic strip collection: While the Fantagraphics collections of Peanuts continue to excel, the Complete Calvin & Hobbes takes the cake, just for the sheer spectacle of it. I mean, holy cow.
Biggest surprise: For me, anyway…being nominated for the sexiest man in comics. Or, at least, of that comments thread.
The other biggest surprise…being linked to by a National Review column.
Biggest disappointment: No announcements of further digest-sized reprints from DC (unless I missed something, somewhere).
Best irony: Liberality for All, a “satire” of left-wing attitudes, primarily being purchased by liberal-minded folks to laugh at, not with.
Best comic book related toy: Thanos. Just look at it. It’s a freakin’ huge chunk of plastic.
Best comics related thingie in another medium: The fact that they were apparently mispronouncing “Constantine” in the Constantine movie. Oh, okay, seriously, the Batman Begins movie was surprisingly good, proving once and for all a healthy dose of Michael Caine can improve anything. (Jaws: The Revenge notwithstanding.) The Naked Cosmos DVD is just barely comics-related, but it stars Love & Rockets‘ Gilbert Hernandez, and that’s good enough for me. Oh, and it does come with a comic book, so there you go.
Online trends that need to stop: Page by page, panel by panel, angry and allegedly-humorous screeds lambasting certain “event” comics…pal Dorian should have been the final word on this sort of behavior, but alas….
Favorite “meme:” …And by “meme,” I mean “quiz/questionnaire/fad that everyone posted in their weblogs.” I’m gonna say the “100 Things I Love About Comics” craze from Valentine’s Day, which started with Fred Hembeck, continued with Alan David Doane’s magnum opus, and eventually copied by me. You can find links to more Top 100 lists in my post.
Most needed mercy killing: The ill-advised Doom Patrol revamp, featuring a “all previous versions of DP retroactively did not exist” angle that everyone else working in the DC Universe pretty much ignored.
Favorite weblog: Usually, I cop out and say I love everybody, since I don’t want to play favorites and hurt anyone’s feelings. I do love reading all the different weblogs out there, don’t get me wrong…but I do want to point out a weblog that started at the beginning of the year, written by another fellow in the funnybook selling business: Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog. Go, visit, enjoy.
And enjoy the other comic weblogs out there as well…there’s a little something for everybody!
1. Sell-outs, baby! We actually blew through our copies of the first issue of Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, selling more copies than we normally do of Adventures of Superman and Action. We also sold out of Firestorm #11, which makes it like the second or third issue of this series in a row to sell out on the rack. (I’m pretty sure we’d adjusted orders, so we should have enough of the next issue.) Also, surprisingly and/or annoyingly, G.I. Joe Reloaded has sold out…the G.I. Joe comics as a whole slowed down, we cut orders, and now sales are suddenly back up. I hate when that happens. Um, not the “increased sales” part, the “trying to guess customers’ random buying patterns two to three months ahead of time” part. There are just some things cycle sheets can’t predict.
1a. Not that I cared for this comic at all, but I could use a reprint or something of Space Ghost #1. Of course, this late in the series we’re not likely to see one, but I still have people asking us for copies all the time.
2. On Wednesday…it only took two people asking me if the new Age of Apocalypse one-shot and mini-series were reprints of the original ’90s series to make me to put up “ALL-NEW!” tags with those comics.
3. Bjorn hits us with his 100 Things He Loves About Comics, German-style. He was good enough to list members of the ACAPCWOVCCAOE as some of his favorites, which we all appreciate. Thanks, Bjorn!
3a. Speaking of which, I need to add several more links to my list of other Top 100 lists, but I’m still pondering what direction to go with the sentence o’links…I’m running out of ideas! In the meantime, Fearless Fred Hembeck is keeping track here, just past the halfway point on the page. (More like the 5/8ths point.)
4. So we currently have the Casper photo clip thingie in stock, and I’ve had more than one customer refer to it as, um, the Casper “roach clip.” Complete nonsense, of course. However, it does look great on our shelves next to the Hot Stuff “birdseed scale,” the Baby Huey “indoor greenhouse,” and the Little Lotta “novelty water pipe.”
4a. (It’s a sad world that makes this necessary.) I’m only joking.
4b. Everything I know about “drug culture” I learned from The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Does it show?
5. Last yesterday afternoon I started swapping around some of the promo posters we have above the new comics shelves…one of the new posters was for the forthcoming event comic DC Countdown. Boy, they didn’t do any favors to this image by blowing it up to poster size, did they? Get a good look at it the next time you’re in your local comics emporium.
Quickie linkies:
1. If you haven’t gone to see pal Dorian’s list of 100 things that annoy him about comics…well, go look already. I didn’t want to encourage a “Top 100 Things I Hate” trend, but if anyone had to do that sort of list, who better than the birthday boy?
1a. Yeah, that’s right, it’s Dorian’s birthday today. I’m sure he didn’t want me to say anything, but then, according to #44 on his list, I’m not a nice guy and thus he should have expected me to do something evil, like, say, reveal his darkest secrets. (insert maniacal laughter here)
2. Also on the ACAPCWOVCCAOE* front, pal Sean has put up the latest installment of “Surviving Geek Heaven,” his guide to the San Diego Comic Con. Check it out, kids.
3. A big congrats to pal Ian, for somehow blackmailing the staff of The Comics Journal into running a couple of his reviews in the newest issue!
Just enough time for a brief note, before I’m off to work (what with a bunch of auctions ending today)…I wanted to express my appreciation to everybody who did the 100 Things I Love About Comics thing over the last few days. I know we have a couple more apparently still in the offing, but when they’re done, I’ll add them to the link list in my post. Speaking of which, look for that sentence (the one that currently reads “And here are quite a few more fine lists that I have found”) to become longer and even more awkward as more lists turn up. That sentence started out as “and here are some more” with only three links originally!
I did see the idea casually mentioned here and there about lists of 100 Things we all hate about comics, but that seems almost unnecessarily negative. Besides, I’m not sure I can come up with that many…and I’m sure too many of mine would be specific to managing a comic book store (“72. People asking me for the next issue of Battle Chasers“).
However, coming up with the top 100 was no problem. In fact, in no time at all I had a handwritten list of about 150 or so, and could easily have gone to 200. Well, there’s always next year.
Alan provided 100 Annotations to his list of 100 Things, and while I don’t think I’m quite up for that, I did have a friend of mine did ask why I picked Elliot S! Maggin over Cary “Mr. Surprise” Bates (both primary ’70s Superman writers) for my list. Well, I do like Mr. Bates’ work, and had the list gone to 200, I would have certainly had him on there. But, I gave the nod to Maggin as I really appreciated 1) the backstory and future-history he worked out for the Superman saga and continually referred to in his stories, and 2) his intelligent, arrogant, and somewhat quirky Lex Luthor who, while overwhelmed with hatred for Superman, was not an unfeeling monster…occasionally even being treated sympathetically. I don’t have time to go into detail right now, but you might get the idea by reading some of the stuff on Mr. Maggin’s own site.
And yes, I promise…next time, Gorilla Grodd’s on the list!
Remember…keep checking my post for additional links to other lists…I’ll add ’em as I find ’em! (Fred’s keeping a list, too.)
Now this is something else…inspired by Fred Hembeck’s wonderful cartoons (under February 10th), Alan David Doane posted his awe-inspiring image featuring his own list of 100 things he loves about comics. (And I’d like to say thanks to ADD for including my little ol’ site on there.)
Anyway, I thought that was such a good idea, I’m gonna steal it. Well, maybe not the “image for every entry” part (the bandwidth, the bandwidth!), but a full-on list of 100 things that I love about comics, posted on the most appropriate day possible, Valentine’s Day. Look for it on Monday…and I hope everyone else on the comicsweblogosphere chimes in with lists of their own.
Yes, I know, the fella what hates the “memes,” encouraging others to participate in one. “Irony sense…tingling!”
Of course, the challenge is to make my list distinct from ADD’s, as it appears we like a lot of the same things. Though how anyone can prefer the first Superman/Spider-Man team-up to the second…. (Oh, I’m only kidding!)
We received this Flash poster by Michael Turner on Wednesday, which got me thinking two things: 1) why’d they go with that picture, when this Turner cover is much more striking (and actually shows the Flash running), and 2) when was the last time I actually had a comic book poster on my walls at home?
Well, it’s been quite some time…more than ten years, at least, but the two comic posters I had on my walls were the Groo poster Marvel put out (the one with Groo fighting an army outside a castle…one of those huge, highly detailed crowd scenes Sergio Aragones excels at) and a group shot of the cast of Nexus, painted by Steve Rude. Oh, and there was a third that I had up for while…the movie poster for Comic Book Confidential (it looked like the image at the bottom right at this page). I can’t find any online images of the first two posters, and I’m not entirely sure where my copies of the posters are (it was a few moves ago).
And, yes, I do have Swamp Thing posters, but I’m just lazy and haven’t bought frames for them yet. Yes, frames, stop that snickering.
Anyway, all this meandering has brought me to my new Friday Question (here are the results to the last one):
Do you currently have any comic book posters on your walls at home? If so, which ones? Leave a comment…satisfy my nosy nelliness.
Hoo boy, comments beget comments beget comments, and I told myself I was going to restrict CEREEBUSTALK to just this week, so I’ll try to cover a lot here in short order.
From Monday’s post, here’s JohnJ with
“…Even got a photo I took at a Capital City Distributors show published by Dave as a back cover. It was a shot of Dave, Colleen Doran, James Owen and Martin Wagner all mugging for my camera.”
Oh, do you mean…this photo, from the back cover to Cerebus #174 (1993)?
(I whited out your last name, in case that was a state secret or something.) Huh, it’s a weird the longer I’m online, the more people tangentially related to the comics I’ve read have found me online. Neat!
JohnJ also say (not a typo, was trying to rhyme)
“…It did seem like he dug a hole by promising 300 issues and having to stretch his story to get there. I found the small type impossible to read so kind of flagged on it as it neared the end.”
I’ll address the second part first, in that the overreliance on text pieces to carry the story in the latter part of the series was…unfortunate. In the “Jaka’s Story” and “Melmoth” sections it worked surprisingly well…usually throwing a giant text piece in the middle of your funnybook generally functioned as a big ol’ speedbump, and a bad habit of a number of 1970s comickers. (I will however give Steve Gerber a pass on this.)
But then we started getting into “Reads” and the text pieces there, which were at least readable, but contentwise a bit…well, we’ll say “alarming.” And then those issues that were almost all text with the pseudo-religious screeds that few if any tried to plow through, what amounted to wasted pages that could have gone to story but instead just supplied pages that could be stapled together to make a full-sized comic.
That sounds awfully harsh, and to reiterate: Dave’s comic, he could do what he wanted with it. But this was a ride that I, and many others, just couldn’t go on. It was literally a period of looking at the two or three pages of comics in each issue and skipping the text pieces and just filing the book away in my Cerebus box. Maybe someone will drop by here to yell at me for missing “the important stuff,” and I do mean someday to try to tackle it again, but…well, What Can You Do™?”
In looking something up, I came across the entry for “Lord Julius” (the Groucho Marx-inspired character) in a Cerebus Wiki, which included what Dave had to say about an unused story idea late in the series:
“[I] wanted to do Groucho as an old man somewhere in the course of Latter Days and just not having room for it. I was going to make Palnu this last lonely outpost completely surrounded by Cirinists and the place was just one big rotgut distillery with Lord Julius and Baskin running everything pretty much by themselves….”
If I may, perhaps a couple dozen or so fewer text pages could have made room for one more appearance by one of Dave’s more delightful characters. I mean, it’s not like the actual Groucho’s later years weren’t rife with the need for some kind of commentary. There’s even a lady who latched onto old Groucho in her own attempt to achieve fame, and if that doesn’t sound like something right up Dave’s alley, I don’t know what does.
Anyway, I’ll save that for my Cerebus fan fiction.
“Sim did a lot of good work around creators’ rights back in the day. And 300 self-published issues is a huge accomplishment. It’s a shame all that gets overshadowed by his sad Light and Void ramblings.”
Just wanted to say, yes, Dave was (and still is, presumably) a primary supporter of self-publishing. Making it all the way to 300, in whatever form it took, was astounding, and I’m sure he had to do it with naysayers all around him telling him there was no way he was going to succeed.
“I’m sure the phone books still make him some money, but not as much as they would have if he had reined in his worst impulses and stuck the landing.”
I do wonder how well they are selling. I imagine well enough, since they’re still being carried by Diamond, he’s still printing new editions, and I even still sell a volume here and there. Despite how we may feel about how the book went in the end, it’s still a major work in the comics field, and gets attention simply just for that.
“…The last few years of the run we had dropped from about 30 people getting it, to just two (and we were only ordering one extra for the rack -that never sold, and then just went to back issue).”
That has me trying to remember how it was selling for us as Cerebus hit that magic 300. I think we still had a few diehards hangin’ on ’til the very end, including yours truly. My hunch is that sales dropped over time, but ordered a few extra for the last issue because that was a fairly momentous occasion. I don’t remember if we actually did sell more of #300 or not. I was even blogging at the time and didn’t make a mention of how it was selling. Ah well, maybe next time. (“What?”)
“I’m always eager to pick up other Dave Sim work just to look at what he’s working on. The Alex Raymond book is Fantastic.”
I’m glad to hear that. I was enjoying the strip cartoonists stuff in glamourpuss, and even told Dave during that phone call I was really looking forward to it. Alas, it’s another victim of my eye troubles as it’s in the backlog of goodies I need to read.
“I was seriously going to try to finish Cerebus, or at least get through Jaka’s Story, because of Tom’s blog posts, but then I read Tangent again.
“Tangent, dude. Tangent.
“Cerebus deserves to die alone, unmourned and unloved.”
Yeah, that link is a gathering on Dave’s writings re: feminism. SPOILER: he don’t like it, not at all, nuh uh. Also, it’s very, very long, and uses the phrase “feminist-homosexualist axis,” so, uh, you’re warned, I guess.
“There were a couple of specials but I cannot provide reprint status: A-V in 3D (with Neil the Horse), Cerebus Zero and Cerebus Jam. You need not skip these to evade the awful stuff.”
This gives me an excuse to add another break to this massive wall of text with that great Cerebus Jam cover by Bill Sienkiewicz:
Cerebus Jam (which I’ve talked about before) is a collection of short Cerebus stories by Sim with other artists, like Will Eisner, Terry Austin, and Murphy Anderson. Fun stuff, don’t think any of it has been reprinted.
A-V in 3-D is a sampler book of various titles being published by Dave’s company Aardvark-Vanaheim at the time, all in glorious three dimensions. According to the Comics Database link, it’s almost all been reprinted elsewhere except the Cerebus story. (Note to Tom W – there’s your answer!)
Cerebus Zero is a one-shot reprinting those issues of Cerebus that, I said last time, were not included in the “phone book” reprints for dumb reasons. Honestly, they should totally be in there, c’mon son.
Also of note is Cerebus World Tour Book 1995, reprinting the short stories produced specifically for the early pre-phone book Swords of Cerebus reprint volumes. Most stories feature Dave collaborating with other creators, like Gene Day or Joe Rubinstein. A six pager entirely by Barry Windsor-Smith is also included, as is a run of strips from the Comic Buyers’ Guide with the in-universe parody of Prince Valiant.
“And the excellent three-pager in Alan Moore’s AARGH!, a publication raising funds to combat Britain’s homophobic Section 28 law which it now seems deeply surreal Sim contributed to. Spoiler: the Sacred Secret Wars Roach has urges.”
Oooh yeah. If you can find this book, it’s great. The Alan Moore/Steve Bissette/Rick Veitch “Mirror of Love” is astounding, but Dave’s contribution delivers a pretty solid, if dirty, laugh.
“Sim’s views have never put me off Cerebus for one big reason: his ideas have absolutely no effect on anything, except maybe some of his most ardent admirers. […] He is basically screaming into the, er, void.”
That’s likely true…there may be some of The Usual Suspects on Xwitter still who are all “right on, man” assuming these comic fans actually read any of his comics (or any comics, honestly). But even given his the effective reach of his opinions are nil, they still impact the work itself, which is the real problem. What could have been a masterpiece is…well, I spent two posts already talking about this, you know what I’m going on about.
Whoops, and Daniel also mentions Dave’s wonderful lettering. I wasn’t copying Daniel, I swear!
“…High Society and Church and State show him to be an intelligent, thoughtful writer with a firm grasp of ideas and history.”
Yes, exactly…there are so many good ideas in the comic that when the bad ideas show up, it’s a real showstopper.
“I know that I’m not the first person to point this out, but Sim really created biggest problems by proclaiming it a 300 issue story early on and then not being able to admit ‘I was young and brash’ to stop when the story really needed to stop. Pushing to fill those last 100 or so issues seems to have ‘forced’ him to let any ideas get on the page.”
to which Daniel T replies
“It is of course entirely possible he had no plan for all 300 issues, but I always thought whatever he might have wanted to do with the character over the last 100-150 issues became less important to him than getting his ideas about things in front of people.”
I don’t know for sure just how far ahead, and to what detail, Dave planned out the Cerebus storylines. But I do have at least one piece of evidence in favor of him having done so, at least to some extent.
Swords of Cerebus, published in 1984, reprints among other issues Cerebus #22 from 1980. In this issue Elrod (Dave’s parody of Michael Moorcock’s character Elric) is killed, but finds he becomes a ghostly spirit who can possess the living (in a parody of DC Comics’ Deadman). Swords of Cerebus includes text introductions to each issue, and for the reprint of #22 Dave says “we’ll find out why Elrod was able to do this around issue #175.” (Or thereabouts, I don’t have the book in front of me right now.)
In 1984, when this volume of Swords of Cerebus was published, Cerebus was around issue 55 or so. In issue #180, published in 1994, we do indeed find out what Elrod’s deal was.
So I think Dave had at least some plan in place…at least with large swaths of the story (“okay, Jaka and Cerebus will journey back to Cerebus’ home town at this point of the series”) while leaving enough room to maneuver for new ideas and plotlines, such as they were.
“…you should absolutely read the Last Day.”
I mean, yeah, probably. If you’re going to go at least partly into Cerebus, knowing how it’s supposed to end with #300, you should probably see how it all wraps up. There are some…sour notes even here, given it is late in the series, but the very final scene is pretty wild.
“I am very curious about what the letters pages were like throughout the series…but particularly the last third. Can you share a bit about what reader response was, as seen through the lens of what Sim allowed into this space?”
Hoo boy, that may be more than I’m able to tackle at the moment. I seem to remember Dave doing away with the letter column entirely at some point, replacing them with more text pieces. A sample issue from the “Latter Days” period I popped open to check had almost half the book dedicated to a piece titled “Islam, My Islam,” and oh dear.
The letters column was a wild ride, particularly during the “High Society” and “Church and State” days, but a more detailed description may have to wait until I can take a more thorough overview of the issues. Suffice to say, when the letters column existed, it was never boring!
“…Is it reasonable to see parallels between the last third of the Cerebus run, and the last third or so of Steve Ditko’s published work? It seems like they are both characterized by a domination of ideology over storytelling, and become more and more challenging, dense, alienating, choose-your-term-I’m-trying-to-be-nice…to the reader. Likewise, regardless of public opinion they both remain absolutely unique creations, doing things creatively that no one else could (or would choose to) do, and immediately recognizable as that creator’s work. That lack of regard for public opinion and attitude of ‘this is what I’ve got, take it or leave it’ seems have driven both men’s output.”
I think that’s not a terrible comparison, leaving out the actual content of their positions. Both had the fortunate-for-them apparent freedom to do what they wanted, marketplace be damned. As I’ve repeated over and over again, Dave had the right do whatever he liked with his comic. He can look at everything everyone said here in criticism of Cerebus, and he can say “you guys are all dummies, you just don’t get it,” and he’d completely be in his rights to do so. Dave created something that is uniquely his, representing his ideas as he wanted them expressed, and completed the project with issue #300 as he’d planned.
It may not be the work we ultimately wanted, and some of the ideas we may find repellent. We may mourn the loss of what could have been unambiguously a classic. But there it is, all Dave’s, for us to examine, to interrogate, to debate, or simply to ignore. It’s that last option which is the real shame, but unfortunately work itself tries very hard to encourage that response.
EVERYONE, HOLD EVERYTHING: I’ll get back to movie comics next time, but first I must address this inquiry from Matthew Murray:
“…Ignoring condition, what is the ‘least valuable’ comic? Or, since that question is more or less unanswerable, what would the criteria be that you could use to narrow down this search?”
It’s very hard to point to a specific comic as being “least valuable,” because as Thom H. says further down in the comments
“…Someone somewhere will pay money for any first issue.”
And if I may amend that, someone out there could pay money for any comic so long as there’s someone out there filling holes in a want list. Even Thom’s example of Brigade #9, just some random issue in a middle of a run…even that might be picked up by a fan who needs it. You never know. Granted, probably not very often, maybe one time a year a fella going through a back issue bin might pull a bagged and boarded copy out and declare “dear God in Heaven, at last, it’s Brigade #9! My collection is complete…COMPLEEEEETE!”
Basically, you have the (forgive me for using this term) “key” comics, the ones with current collectors’ value, sought after by fans and speculators, the often command premium prices. They regularly sell and trade in the marketplace. Things like first appearances, (some) first issues, Big Event issues…you know what “key” means, you don’t need me to explain.
Then you have the stuff that isn’t necessarily “key” but will regularly attract sales. Like pretty much any issue of Batman or Detective or Amazing Spider-Man or Sgt. Rock, or appearances of certain villains, or stuff with cool covers, or produced by certain creators, or sometimes just first issues in general. I mean, whatever reason that would attract a reader to pick up a comic outside of pure “hotness” of the issue. Not necessarily expensive…could be pricey, might not be, but are in higher demand than your average comic. Speaking of which…
…there are the “box-fillers,” just issues not in any particular demand, just there to fill out runs and be there just in case someone pops in looking for Sun Devils #2 and lo and behold, here you have it! Not comics that have any sort of immediate turnover, maybe you’ll only ever sell the one in your lifetime, but they’re there in case anyone needs ’em. A lot of recent comics come to mind, especially on series that ended quickly and were replaced right away by a relaunched version of the same title. Sometimes not much separates these from…
…the bargain bin comics, stuff which you’ll be happy to get anything for, and enough people want cheap comics that they’ll likely sell more quickly there than they ever will in the regular back issue stock. Frankly, I should probably put that Sun Devils #2 in there. Anyway, they’re usually cheap, and possibly cheaper if you buy in bulk. My boxes start at $1 each, or 15 for $10, and so on, all the way to $50 for 100. This is kind of the “last stop” for comics in the shop, and I try to put things in there that are overstock, or maybe damaged but readable, or things that were dumped on me in collections.
This isn’t necessarily as cut and dried as all that. Comics can shift between these categories all the time. I remember after the 1989 Batman movie came out, we started fishing around in the cheap boxes at my previous place of employment, looking for all the copies of the once-moribund-now (then)-hot Joker #1 (1975). Or once hot comics getting relegated to the bargain bins (sorry, Pitt).
And then there are the comics that price out at even cheaper-than-bargain-bin prices, stuff that maybe grade as a, I don’t know, Good Plus and costs $0.65, but it’s a Name Book That’s In Demand (like say a What If) and will sell much faster in the regular bins than mixed in with the chaff.
I’m sure this quick list doesn’t cover every nuance and possibility, but it should get across the idea that nearly every comic (assuming sellable condition) has some value, at least to someone. Even vastly overprinted comics like Valiant’s Turok Dinosaur Hunter #1 has some demand now. Black and white boom comics that were cranked out by the truckload, mostly moldering in backrooms or in forgotten bins, now see some demand from folks interested in that particular period of the industry.
The trick is learning when a comic moves from one “level” to another. Usually that’s decided when it’s time to throw stuff in the dollar box, and sometimes it’s keeping tabs on the market when a forgotten $3 book in the bins suddenly shoots up to $35 because it features the elbow of a background character who might appear in a forthcoming movie.
I believe someone mentioned Woody Woodpecker comics. Well, believe it or not, I had a couple of different people regularly buying those from me a while back. The Warner Brothers comics, like Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig, are traditionally very slow sellers, but I have a recurring customer who pops in every few months to grab one or two. Back at the old job, I had a customer in Japan who’d regularly mail order stacks of Tom and Jerry from us. So you never really know.
Chick Tracts were also mentioned, and I’m not going to link them here because more often than not the supposed “loving” “religious” messages are reprehensible, but you can read them in full on the official site. And everything else aside, a handful of those actually have some excellent cartooning, a detailed grotesqueness that wouldn’t be out of place in MAD or any other EC Comic, for that matter. And while this is a very close candidate for “least valuable” comic, given they are often found “distributed” in public areas for potential converts to pick up for free. They are printed in large numbers, easily thrown out without much thought, and mostly quickly forgotten. That said, there are a number of collectors who acquire these out of ironic interest.
The comic I want to say is the least valuable, mostly due to personal experience I had at a convention decades ago, involves the comic pictured at the top of this site. Shadow of the Groundhog, released in 1986 during the Black and White Book, was one of those titles cranked out to get a little love following the success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There was a lot of “investing” and “speculating” and other…shenanigans going on in the industry at the time, and long story short, I saw some poor bastard at a comic con with a full long box of them. I should’ve picked one up, because now I do want one in my collection, an example of what some dubbed “the worst comic book ever.”
But I look online now? $5, $10, a copy? That’s…well, $5 isn’t too much, but I didn’t check the shipping cost which is probably stupidly high. So there’s either demand, or some retailers think there is demand, driving those prices. Which means this person with the long bx full of ’em is rich, rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Anyhow, I’ll get one someday.
So, I’m sorry, I wish I had an ultimate answer to this question of “which comic is least valuable,” just so I could say, “it’s this one, Purgatori: Goddess Rising #2:
…but it seems there’s even some measure of demand, even for this.
So I got a couple of promotional emails for Comic Shop News, the freebie newspaper that’s been running for decades and given away in comic shops. The emails’ focus was on pushing a multi-part preview for a forthcoming comic and making sure we all had enough on hand…
…but the surprising part was the information that Comic Shop News (CSN here on) was only carried in 10% of comic shops. Or “top 10% of comic shops” as they put it, thank you, I’ll take the compliment.
That number honestly shocks me. I mean, I know personally of shops that don’t carry it, but that always felt to me like the exception, not the apparent rule. I’ve always carried it at my shop (except for the occasional time when Diamond forgets to pack it into my boxes, or somehow manage to send me a single copy of CSN instead of the bundle of 90 or 100, bafflingly). And my previous place of employment always carried it as well, from the very beginning. Somewhere in the home archives, I have a #1…and at that same, you can see the pic of #0(!) which was sent to retailers to sell ads.
Having a print newsletter like this may seem archaic in this modern age of beepity-booping and looking everything up online, and may be part of the reason why so many stores stopped carrying it, or never carried it at all. This reticence seems a little strange, particularly since these shops’ clientele should be predisposed toward consuming print media anyway, so why would they resist a free newsletter?
But the fact of the matter is…not everyone is living online constantly. And if they are online, they aren’t necessarily looking at comic news sites (such as they are). There are some customers for whom “walking into the shop and looking at the rack” is their primary comics news source. Having a free newsletter they can pick up, take home and read seems to be appreciated by all my customers, regardless of how online they may be.
It’s a good sales tool, in that I have a number of folks who’ll walk in with a copy of the paper, folded and marked up with notes, or maybe clippings of specific ads/articles, asking after ordering the items therein. Plus it’s just a good customer relations tool…people like free things. Even those who are just wandering through the store trying to figure out what all this stuff is will ask if they can take a copy, and, you know, sure! Maybe they’ll look through it and, even if they don’t find something they want to buy, they’ll at least get an idea that this is a real business with a whole world of activity that they’d not been exposed to before.
What I enjoy is the occasion person who asks if I print up these CSNs myself. Geez louise, the very thought of putting together one of these every week on top of running the shop just makes me exhausted.
Anyway, I feel like carrying CSN has more positive aspects than negative ones. I can understand if some shops don’t carry it because their budgets are just too tight and need to trim where they can (“do I spend the money on comics to sell, or one a giveaway telling customers what to buy?”). Or maybe they’re just carrying comics as a side thing. But a full-service shop should carry Comic Shop News as well, in my opinion.
