LITTLE ARCHIE VERSUS SHARK.

LITTLE ARCHIE VERSUS SHARK.

LITTLE ARCHIE VERSUS SHARK.

from Little Archie #110 (Sept. 1976)

from Planet of the Apes #3 (Dec. 1974)
by Doug Moench, George Tuska & Mike Esposito

Okay, that doesn’t look much like him, but it’s close enough. You all know the scene, anyway.

So long, Charlton. Didn’t always agree with you, but you were in Planet of the Apes, Ben Hur, and The Ten Commandments, and you were game enough to make an irony-laden cameo in the Planet of the Apes remake, so thank you at least for those.

I also cut out the name of the winner because, well, who knows how he’d feel about this now:

from Shadowman #42 (Nov. 1995)

The second page features the runner-up Shadowman rap, which begins thusly:

“Comin’ to ya live from the Big Easy

The sun goes down and he gets a little queasy

His blood starts flowin’, he starts throwin’

Thugs to the ground as his chest starts glowin’“

Silly, sure, but I think I like these more than the poems from Sandman‘s letter pages.

To repeat: SHADOWMAN RAP CONTEST. The world is large enough to contain even this.

Since I may have confused one or two people yesterday, here’s the source image for that post:

That was DC’s “characters that have been around for a while may actually be alien infiltrators” mini-series from a few years ago. I’d been meaning to do that mash-up ad for a while now, and I guess the day after the new “alien infiltration” series Secre Invasion came out was as good of a time as any.

Secret Invasion seems to be selling well so far…not with the frenzy that Civil War did, but it’s doing okay. As long as it avoids 1) scheduling issues that drag the whole main Marvel publishing line down with it, and 2) Clone Thor, it should go well. Not that those two points ultimately affected Civil War much at all, other than annoying retailers and fans (but not to the point where they stopped reading or cut orders). I’m also wondering how any real world coverage (if any) is going to work out…though I suspect Kevin is right on the mark.

One side thing to the Secret Invasion is the “random” Skrull variants for various Marvel titles. This week Young X-Men and New Exiles had these variants, which were just the regular covers with one of the characters given a green face (and arm, in the case of the Exiles book). And next week Spider-Girl is supposed to have a Skrull variant as well. These variants are apparently inserted into the orders randomly, with no particular ratio of regular cover versus Skrull cover, and as variants go, they’re…not really impressing the customers all that much. It’s just a little green ink on an otherwise “normal” cover…everyone just thinks it’s silly. (As opposed to the deadly-serious 1/500 glow in the dark sketch covers, but let’s not get into that.)

Anyway, didn’t buy it. Bought this, though:

Many Happy Returns features a new Crossfire story by Mark Evanier and Dan Spiegle, new installments of Licensable Bear™, and, best of all, a new Journey short by William Messner-Loebs! There are a couple of other short strips rounding out the book that didn’t do a whole lot for me, but your mileage may vary, as they say. But, really, Crossfire, Licensable Bear™ and new freakin’ Journey should be enough to get you to part with your hard-earned coins.

And in the interest of full disclosure…yes, I’ve known publisher Nat for some time, and like him quite a bit, so I may be biased, but c’mon. New Journey, man! And we can apparently look forward to collections of old Journey material from IDW in the near future.

Can you tell I liked Journey? Boy, did I enjoy that series.

Still going through the Box of Misfit Variant Covers that I talked about last week, scanning ‘n’ prepping them for sale in the eBay store. And seeing these two comics in the box reminded me of how immensely popular these titles once were:

Dark Minds and Warlands were strong, popular sellers, at least for a while, and it seemed like every time you turned around, there was some new tie-in/crossover/mini-series popping up related to one or the other. And there were about a million variant covers pumped out in association with these series as well. Okay, maybe I exaggerate slightly.

Here’s the Warlands “Dynamic Forces Exclusive Alternate Canadian Cover,” only 2,500 printed:

Hope all you Canadians out there enjoyed that. Sorry for the crooked scan.

This next variant is…well, it’s appallingly ugly, frankly:

The appeal of a variant (aside from any alleged “scarcity”) would be, I’m assuming, a compelling alternate cover image that far outshines the non-exclusive, non-variant cover that all the common folk would own. While the original covers for the above series are no great shakes, that variant is just plain yucky. And maybe that Dynamic Forces logo could have been a bit bigger.

It had a print run of 2,000 copies. I wonder how many of them made it into customers’ hands?

This next variant isn’t from the box of old variants, but is instead from last week’s release of Army of Darkness/Xena #1:

Dynamite Entertainment sure likes its variants. Most of their comics have a set of multiple covers that comprise the regular print run…if there are two covers, the run is split 50/50, four covers 25/25/25/25, etc. So those variants are usually easy to find. In addition to that, there are the “virgin” variants (cover art sans any cover text or logos), and then there is the “negative” variant, with the colors inverted, as above. These are doled out based on orders, like 1 for every 25 or 50 or what have you. I understand the appeal of the virgin covers, but the negative covers? They don’t do anything for me. Do people like how those look, or are they just being bought because “they might be worth money someday?”

Who knows? But they do occasionally sell at the shop, and what doesn’t move at the shop, I try to move in the eBay store, which is why AoD/Xena is going up with the Dynamic Forces stuff. Better to try to find a customer somewhere for it now, while interest is up, rather than waiting ten years and trying to find a home for, oh, say, Demonslayer.

Speaking of which…that Nine Rings of the Wu-Tang comic I was listing last week? Sold it. Almost immediately. Luckily I have more copies of that very comic to relist.

“Luckily.” Sigh.

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In other news:

• Jim at Comics Bulletin has a list of 20 recently-released Marvel ‘n’ DC books, and wants you to pick your favorites.
• Pal Dorian posted some remixed propaganda posters for the comics weblogging community…and the granddaddy of comics bloggers, Neilalien, was inspired to post his own. BEHOLD.
• Have I mentioned The Daily Batman yet? That’s a Batman every day, baby…what more can you wish for? Well, you can ask for wealth and power, but wish in one hand, The Daily Batman in the other, and see which one piles up first.

Ernie Bushmiller sure was fond of using the “yippee” variant name for hippies. Actually, it does makes being a hippie sound like more fun. “Yippee! We’re counterculture! Well, turn it up, man!”

Er, anyway.

I was just going to leave it at that and take the day off, but here’s a couple of things to lay on you to close out my week:

• We were talking about the Owly books, and it was brought up how overwhelmingly sad they could be.

  I suggested that they could be even more depressing, like, oh, say, Owly’s little pal Wormy goes out to play in the rain, but the rain suddenly stops and Wormy finds himself stuck on a sidewalk, exposed to the sun as the clouds part, and he slowly dries out through the rest of the day. Or maybe Owly goes on a trip into the forest with his mouse friends, but they get lost, and eventually, a starving Owly starts eating the mice one by one, secretly, whenever all the other mice have their backs turned, or something.

  And then I said that maybe the characters in the Owly books look like they’re crying all the time because their ginormous eyes require constant excessive lubrication.

  This is what happens at the shop when I’m given a moment to think.

• Sales suddenly bumped upward on Daredevil, She-Hulk, and Utimate Spider-Man, causing us to sell out. We never sell out of Ultimate Spider-Man. Hmph.

  However, the new, guest-starless Power Pack mini doesn’t seem to be moving. Not that any of the previous Power Pack series were big sellers, but having co-stars (Incredible Hulk / Power Pack) did help get a few copies out the door. Power Pack sans super-pals…not so exciting to the general public, I suppose. May be a good seller to kids long term, particularly once the series is collected into a digest.

• And now…the rocking-est YouTube music video…EVER.

I don’t know…the Blackhawks’ “HAWK-AAAA!!!” battle cry just sorta sounds silly to me, once you hear it in action, as opposed to just reading it on the page:

“HAWK-AAAA!”
Or, as the subtitles have it:

“Hawk! Ah!”
Also, Larry “Negative Man” Trainor cameo!

“NEGA-TIIIIIIVE!”
I haven’t watched the “History of the Justice League” documentary yet, but I did watch the preview for the forthcoming Batman: Gotham Knight animated feature. Amusing that long-neglected Batman co-creator Bill Finger gets mentioned in this short, and the other guy, the one that usually gets all the credit, doesn’t get mentioned once.

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The family of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel was awarded ownership of the copyright to the Superman material in Action Comics #1. Read that post and the associated FAQ for more info.