• Adventure Comics #1 – DC’s new title starring the newly revived Superboy, and co-starring the Legion of Superheroes, giving that particular property yet another try in the hopes that it’ll stick. I do love the Legion, but I’m getting pretty tired of reboots/revamps. Also, the “retailer incentive variant cover” is apparently going to be Adventure Comics #504, which is a mean trick to pull on someone who may have a pretty good run of issues near the end of the previous incarnation of Adventure, up to issue #503.

  Rats. I’ve been trying not to pick up the variants, but I think I may have to go for this one.

• Big Questions #12 – This is a neat little comic…you can see a brief sample of it here.
• Blackest Night #2 and Blackest Night: Batman #1 – This event has been a huge hit at the store, and even the tie-in series Tales of the Corps has been selling through on multiple reorders for us. We ordered strong on the Batman tie-in, so hopefully that’ll continue the sales trend.
• Booster Gold #23 – Unlike other comics that have bumped up to the $3.99 price point and took a bit of a hit in sales (like, oh, say, the Avengers books), Booster Gold sales actually went up. Okay, not by a lot, but still it took us a bit by surprise. I guess that Blue Beetle back-up did the trick.
• Cable #17 70th Frame Liefeld Variant – Okay, first….it’s Rob Liefeld drawing mutant comic stuff. It’ll sell. Second, didn’t we have Marvel’s 25th anniversary at some point in the ’80s? Just more of that creative number juggling that results in #1 issues from Marvel suddenly becoming numbered in their hundreds.
• Captain America Theatre of War: To Soldier On – This reminded me of something that occurred to me recently: when Superman “died” in that big hoohar in the early ’90s, he was pretty much gone from comics for a period of months. He wasn’t in any specials or one-shots, he wasn’t guest-starring in other books, he wasn’t in any out-of-contuity stories…or if he was, he was in very darn few of them. At any rate, the end result was that it felt like, for the reader, that the character was actually, honestly gone. Okay, you knew he was coming back eventually, but it was still kinda weird to know that Superman just plain wasn’t around for the time being.

  Now with Bruce Wayne and, to a lesser extent, Captain America, we didn’t get that. The Wayne Batman is still appearing in one-shots and Confidential, Cap was still getting one-shots, and an alternate version of him was popping up in Ultimates. And then there was that Captain America: White thing, which had one issue, with more perhaps theoretically coming, someday. In other words, the characters may supposedly be dead ‘n’ gone, but you never get a chance to miss them because they never go away. Lessens the impact a bit, I think.

• Grimjack: Manx Cat #1 – Just the other day I was talking about Grimjack over on Alan’s site about Nexus and the failure of its most recent series in the direct market. Alan puts the burden of the blame on retailers, and I’m not saying he’s entirely wrong…I heard from enough people who had no idea a new Nexus series was out, and never saw it in their local shops. But my counterpoint was that the fault was in Nexus itself…you can read my specific reasons over in my comment on Alan’s post, but it can be summed up as “too hard to get into, for new and old readers alike.” (A year between issues didn’t help, either.)

  My example of a revival of an ’80s property done right was Grimjack, which gave us a standalone “back to basic” story with that first IDW mini-series from a couple of years ago. Yeah, sure, as someone who was reading Grimjack during its original run, I would have liked to have seen stories that picked up from that point, but the continuity…the explanations required to set up just what’s going on with Grimjack, would almost certainly have been too much for anyone new to the series to bother with. With prices going up and money tight, you gotta keep that cost of entry low, and giving readers a continuity-lite story to reintroduce your long-dormant characters seems to be the way to go.

  That’s a pretty roundabout way of saying I’m looking forward to more Grimjack, but there you go. I’m looking forward to more Nexus someday, too, but hopefully they’ll have better luck next time.

• Hellboy: Wild Hunt #5 and B.P.R.D.: 1947 #2 – Now, I love the Hellboy comics, but with the BPRD series essentially a monthly ongoing, I feel like the…”specialness,” I guess, of the properties is getting diminished somewhat. It almost feels like I’m getting too much Hellboy-universe stuff. That’s a terrible, terrible complaint to make, since it’s not as if I’m not enjoying BPRD, but…I can really use a break from it, I think.
• Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers #4 – I enjoyed this series far more than I really expected. Yeah, I know, it included yet another entry in Marvel’s Obama-exploit-a-thon, but at least it was handled with some humor. And frankly, if you’ve got Frog Thor in your comic, you’ve pretty much got the wind at your back.
• Luke Cage Noir #1 – Okay, we’re just getting silly, now.
• Red Circle: Inferno #1 – I liked the Hangman one-shot last week, and while the last thing I need is more superhero comics in my life, I have enough of a nostalgic feeling for the Red Circle line to at least continue checking the books out.

  However, “Red Circle nostalgia” isn’t the enormous sales influence one would expect, he said sarcastically, since we’ve barely moved any copies. Even pointing out that 1) hey, I liked it, and 2) that J. Michael Straczynski guy wrote it, you guys like him — nope, not a lot of interest yet. We’ll see if things hopefully improve.

• Sonic the Hedgehog #203 – Just noting that this is up to issue 203. And the kids at our shop still go crazy for it.
• Star Trek: Nero #1 – I was going to say “maybe a bit too late to take advantage of the movie,” but it’ll be in a trade by the time the new Trek film is on DVD, so there’s that. Okay, so DVD releases have never impacted related comic book sales ever, but one can always hope.
• Ultimate Comics Avengers #1 and Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #1 – Hopefully the bad taste left in people’s mouths by the Ultimatum series won’t negatively affect sales on these relaunches. But that magic “#1” does tend to counter many an ill feeling.
• Wednesday Comics #6 – I still do love this project, but 1) nicely illustrated boring Superman stories are still boring Superman stories, and 2) seriously, I can’t plow my way through that Wonder Woman strip anymore.

  Still really enjoying everything else, though. Kyle Baker’s Hawkman is a delight, and oh Lordy, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez Metal Men – that’s some four-color ambrosia right there.

JULY 1993

NEVER FORGET
So we were processing a bunch of back issues at the shop on Saturday, when Employee Aaron whipped out this particular splash page and we just sort of giggled at the goofiness of it all. Yes, we giggled, what’s it to you? Anyway, while I of course remembered the generalities of this storyline (Batman gets crippled by Bane, is replaced by guy nobody likes), I’d forgotten some of the specifics. Like, for example, that classy full-pager with Bane shouting “…BREAK YOU!” in big bold letters. (Bane’s obviously finishing a sentence he began on the previous page…I think it was “Trying to carry a second mortgage in this economy will….”)

Aaron also said something interesting while perusing this comic. He said that back in ’93, when Employee Aaron was but The Adventures of Little Aaron, the whole Breaking the Bat/Knightfall/Knightsend/Knightrider saga was the talk of the playground. There was one little kid, he said, who would even make up elements of the story, like Bruce Wayne having a super-mechanized wheelchair that could transform into, I don’t know, a battletank or something. (Well, come to think of it, I really didn’t follow this particular saga…maybe Bruce Wayne did have a transforming mecha-robot wheelchair.)

But mostly I just like the idea of current comic book events being a topic of discussion among school-age kids. That’s not something I’ve considered, mostly because 1) I’m not a school-age kid, and thus don’t know what they usually discuss nowadays…I just assume they were all talking about that rock ‘n’ roll music and hula-hoops, and 2) the general feeling is that kids nowadays don’t care about superhero comics, which is such an overwhelming perception that even I get stuck in the mindset from time to time despite seeing, on a regular basis, with my own eyes, in our very own shop, kids buying superhero funnybooks.

Of course, during the time Aaron is talking about, comics were going through a boom period, and the likelihood of the number of comics-reading kids reaching a certain critical mass to allow for general discussion of comics was much greater, I’m thinking. I’m sure it wasn’t the whole playground, naturally…may very well have been just Aaron’s circle of oddball friends, but still, I like the idea of kids getting caught up in comic book storylines and having their roundtable discussions of them.

Nowadays, with readership as low as it is, I imagine the “critical mass” I mentioned is never reached in, say, your average school full of kids, so I wonder if anyone is having that kind of discussion anymore. I mean, sure, probably…we do tend to find our own, but with the advent of the internet no one is ever truly on their own. They could always talk about these things on a message board, or, God help them, a blog.

Which got me to thinking about how often I talk about comics and storylines and such. Well, in my case, it’s my job, so of course I talk about it at the shop. But outside the store…yeah, okay, there’s this blog thing I’m doing. But in actual, face-to-face conversation, outside the work/blog context…not very often, come to think of it. My girlfriend sometimes asks for backstory on the occasional character or situation we see in a comic-related TV show or movie (and I fall down on the job trying to pull out specifics regarding some X-Men characters, much to her disappointment), but that’s about it.

How often do any of you folks talk about comics just as part of your regular day-to-day conversation? Not at the comic shop, not on comic book internet sites, not as part of your comic-creating/publishing jobs, but just…you know, you get home from work, finish dinner, and then give your pal a call, during which you ask “Hey, did you happen to read the newest issue of Dr. Glockenspiel?” in between some casual talk about the weather and about how much you hate your job. You know, like that. Like I said, I don’t do it very often…but then, I already have a couple of outlets for that kind of discussion.

So, yeah, that was kind of rambling. Sorry about that…to think all I wanted to do was post that pic of Bane cracking Batman. That is a pretty awesome picture.

image from Batman #497 (July 1993) by Doug Moench, Jim Aparo & Dick Giordano

ad from Green Lantern Corps #204 (Sept 1986)

Some please tell me that they have a copy of this “Starship” album this is advertising, or, at the very least, have heard the one minute promo clip.

If there exists a rock ‘n’ roll battle adventure featuring the Star Trek crew (or reasonable facsimiles thereof), I would like to know.

ORIGINAL CH’P

“FUNNY ANIMAL” CH’P

GREEN LANTERN MOSAIC CH’P

ZOMBIE CH’P

---

In other news:

• The first episode of The Variants has gone live, so go check it out! It’s about life at a comic shop, a subject near and dear to my heart, and it’s a lot of fun.
• Chris Sims and his fun-time comic pals Chris Piers and Steve Downer present chapter two of Woman of A.C.T.I.O.N., an absotively, posilutely free online comic book adventure!
• Andrew has had another installment of his ongoing series of Nobody’s Favorites, featuring this nekkid character from The Defenders.

  Andrew has also had a little fun with Angel Love, DC Comics’ odd if strangely-appealing series, as does Kevin Church.

• New blogger Huey has a little more discussion regarding Marvel Comics’ recent acquisition of Marvelman.
• A big congratulations to pal Nat and his lovely wife on the latest addition to the Gertler household!

images from Green Lantern #148 (Jan 1982) by Paul Kupperberg, Don Newton & Dan Adkins; Green Lantern Corps #203 (Aug 1986) by Steve Englehart, Joe Staton & Mark Farmer; Green Lantern: Mosaic #2 (July 1992) by Gerard Jones, Cully Hamner & Albert DeGuzman; Blackest Night #1 (Sept 2009) by Geoff Johns, Ivan Reis & Oclair Albert

So I’m currently in the process of rereading the current Green Lantern series from the beginning, just because, you know, I’m on bit of a GL kick and I’ve been meaning to reread the whole Sinestro Corps War thing and I figured, what the heck, let’s just start with the first issue. And, as I noted to someone who asked if I was going to blog about it when I mentioned I was doing this on the Twitter, I didn’t intend to write about it on the site. I just wanted to reread some comics from my collection without having the thought of “must use this to generate content for Progressive Ruin” hanging over me.

Well, the fact that you’re reading this means I haven’t been entirely successful, but I found that I wanted to note some continuity/backstory changes regarding one of the characters. Thus, it’s away from the reread of the current GL, and back to one of the previous series….

Now, I’ve gone on before about how Kilowog’s upper arms bother me a bit. When he first appeared, he had spindly upper arms and bulky forearms, sorta like Popeye:

In later appearances (perhaps starting with the character’s appearances in one of the Justice League books, I think), his arms started bulking up a bit, with his formerly pipecleaner-thin arms now bulging with muscle. And that’s how he’s been drawn ever since.

I know it’s a dumb thing to focus on, but every time I see Kilowog in a new comic with those bulky arms, I can’t help but think “they’re doing it wrong,” even though that’s how they’ve been doing it for 20+ years now.

Anyway, that’s my problem, not yours, and I’m sure they make some kind of medication for that. But here’s the other thing I wanted to point out: when Kilowog was first introduced (way back in Green Lantern Corps #201, June 1986), he was a figure of mystery and suspicion. None of the other characters knew who he was, and there was some speculation as to his true intentions:

In more recent times, starting with (I believe) the Emerald Dawn mini-series retelling Hal Jordan’s entry into the GL Corps, Kilowog was retconned into being a trainer of Green Lantern recruits, and thus was a Lantern that everyone supposedly knew. I thought that was an interesting repurposing of the character, and don’t get me wrong: I like that current status. But occasionally I miss the seemingly simple, straightforwardly innocent personality of the Green Lantern Corps-era Kilowog, versus the tough-as-nails, no-time-for-your-crap, will-kick-your-ass Kilowog that we have now.

While I was looking that up, I was reminded of this fellow from Green Lantern Corps #202:

Okay, that’s (SPOILER, I guess) another character in disguise, and brother, what a disguise. Poor Man’s Transformer is a great idea for a costume.

images from Green Lantern Corps #201-2 (June-July 1986) by Steve Englehart, Joe Staton & Mark Farmer

Been going through some Green Lantern comics at home…you know, I kinda miss having this old Green Lantern Corps Quarterly series on the stands:

Actually, come to think of it, I miss most of DC’s quarterly anthologies. They had a good variety of short stories, by many creators…sure, a few stories weren’t quite ready for prime time, but the good generally outweighed the not-so-good. So, what were the other quarterly titles? Justice League Quarterly, Ms. Tree Quarterly…keep feel like I’m forgetting one. Liked all of three of those, at any rate.

Here’s something to annoy you: these extra-sized comics cost $2.95.

And hey, remember this redesign of the Golden Age Green Lantern?

Woo boy. That particular image was drawn by Jim “Tarot” Balent, by the way. “Get out of there, Alan…your ring is haunted!”*

Inside this issue is a brief reminder of which decade you were in, in case you forgot:

Oh, why, hello, the 1990s!

Green Lantern Corps Quarterly #4 (Spring 1993) – cover by Kirk Jarvinen & Terry Austin

Green Lantern Corps Quarterly #6 (Autumn 1993) – cover by Jim Balent

interior panel from Green Lantern Corps Quarterly #6 by Ruben Diaz, Travis Charest, Ray McCarthy & Agop Gemdjian

* Your Not Safe for Work context, sir.

Had this item show up in a collection recently: a UK Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back hardcover annual from 1980, reprinting Marvel Comics’ adaptation of the film.

However, turns out that across the top strip of the first page, three of the creators involved signed the book:

Well, I thought that was pretty neat.

And here’s something that just now occurred to me as I was scanning this item: what is that reflected in Darth’s eyes, there:

Are those reflections of the artist himself? Reflections of the Hoth landscape before him, even though he’s only symbolically looming over Luke and his Taun Taun and isn’t supposed to be literally there? Visions of Vader’s life aboard the Death Star or some other Imperial vessel? Accidental naked eBay pictures? Who knows? I bet one of you clever people can clear this up.

Batman and Robin #1 3rd Printing – We probably still have enough 1st and 2nd printings to go around, but there’s always someone who wants each and every variation, or perhaps wasn’t attracted by a previous cover and likes the new image, or just plain didn’t see it the first few times it was offered. Even the most unnecessary reprints (like, say, the recent spate of X-Men and Amazing Spider-Man 2nd prints) are usually good for a couple of sales.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer #27 – Sales have been dropping very slightly on this series, and I’ve noticed a minor uptick in requests for the trade paperback collection from the folks who are just coming in specifically for four-color versions of Joss Whedon properties.

Captain America: Reborn #2 – Sales ended up being fairly strong on the first issue, after a slow start, but, as I’ve stated previously, it was mostly to the regular clientele. By and large the general public doesn’t seem to be as interested in Captain America returning as they were by his apparently murder. Why, it’s as if there’s a preference for stories of death and tragedy. That’s totally unlike human nature.

Doom Patrol #1 – Well, you know what they say – fifth time’s the charm. Or is this the sixth? I’ve lost count. Anyway, I’m a sucker for all things Doom Patrollish, so I’ll check it out. Hopefully some of our customers will as well. Mostly, though, I’m looking forward to the Metal Men back-up stories, which promise to be pretty entertaining.

Fallen Angel: Reborn #2 – Nearly sold out of the first issue, specifically because of the Buffy/Angel tie-in. Will those people be back for installment numero dos?

Greek Street #2 – Sold a good number of the first issue, thanks to the promotional $1 price tag. Not sure how #2 will do now that it’s at the normal three bones…given that it’s an ongoing Vertigo title that’s not related to the Fables franchise, I don’t expect too much, but we’ll see. I hope it does do well…the line could use another strong monthly seller. (Hell, most lines of comics could use more strong monthly sellers, but let’s not get into that!)

Green Lantern #43 – Okay, that’s just a restock we’re getting this week, but man, we’re getting deluged with requests for Green Lantern and all things related to the GL-centric Blackest Night event. Had a few people even tell me that they got into these comics after seeing whatever BN-related set-up DC had at the San Diego convention. Customers are way excited about Green Lantern. There’s a sentence I don’t get to say often enough.

Irredeemable trade paperback and issue #5 – Having a low-cost trade and a promotionally priced 99-cent issue come out at the same time is a smart move on Boom Studios’ part, I think.

Justice League: Cry for Justice #2 – Yeah, it’s just this side of being kinda dopey, but I liked the first issue anyway. It entertained me, and really, that’s all I ask from my superhero funnybooks. Also, the first issue sold really well for us, so hopefully those folks will be back for the new ish.

Solomon Grundy #6 – Ah, the series only Tim and I are reading. Hey, we think it’s pretty good, right Tim? Right. Still not getting the “Swamp Thing” vibe that this series was allegedly going to be bringing to the DC Universe, but it’s a good series nonetheless.

Star Trek Alien Spotlight: Q – This is one of those series that I think I like more in concept than in execution. I appreciate that there’s a series of comics each focusing on a different alien race. As a Trek fan since apparently before birth (hey, my mom watched the original 3rd season when she was pregnant with me…what can I say), I can dig the effort, here. But the comics themselves have never really grabbed me. It could just be that I’ve read enough Star Trek comics in my lifetime to last me, is all. “It’s not you, it’s me, baby.” But we’ve had plenty of customers like ’em just fine, so don’t pay attention to ol’ Downer McDownerson at the keyboard here.

Ultimatum: X-Men Requiem #1 and Ultimatum: Fantastic Four Requiem #1 – So every time a new issue of Ultimatum came out, I’d flip through it, and as far as I can tell it was about characters killing and occasionally eating each other. Not saying there’s not an audience for that sort of thing, but…. Anyway, now in terms of resetting things in a franchise for an imminent relaunch, this sort of “scorched earth” approach seems a tad extreme. But then again, given that the Ultimate line exists apart from Marvel’s main merchandise-and-media-tie-in driven “regular” Marvel Universe, there’s more freedom to really shake up the status quo, especially since now the stated purpose of the Ultimate line (to provide a jumping-on point for new readers coming in from the movies) has been moot for years. Just kinda wish that revamping of the status quo was a bit less…nihilistic, maybe? Ah, well.

War Machine #8 – Whoa, totally forgot this was even a thing. Well, hold on there, little funnybook…Iron Man 2, guest-starring War Machine for what I’m sure will be a very exciting 5 or 6 minutes, will be out soon enough.