I hope Overstreet lists them as “no copies better than VF exist.”

filed under Categories collecting, employee aaron, publishing 7 Comments

So the big news this week is that several new comics showed up “damaged” to retailers this week…and to be honest, this damage wasn’t immediately obvious to me, so I figured I lucked out and didn’t get any of those copies. However, a customer did later point out a couple of minor spine creases on Absolute Batman #20, which apparently affected the entire print run (along with Absolute Martian Manhunter #11 and Barbara Gordon: Breakout #1).

I mean, honestly, the “damage” I’ve seen so far on these books appear to be well within the acceptability of new sales. I just looked at my own copy of Absolute Batman #20 and there is one single little spine break…I’ve seen a lot worse on new comics I’ve received that didn’t get all this hubbub. I also examined my personal copy of the new Absolute Martian Manhunter and I don’t see anything I’d call damage.

The instigation for this is, of course, the people who want to get those “9.8” returns on the Absolute Batmans submitted to CGC, since those are Big Money right now. Had this same thing happened to, I don’t know, Aquaman, we wouldn’t be hearing a peep. I don’t know, maybe I did get lucky and only have minor issues with my copies. Maybe other stores’ copies were absolute (heh) disasters.

Anyway, DC is putting out free “2nd printing” replacements for all these, which…I don’t know, I suppose that’ll keep the comic-flippers happy since Absolute Batman reprints also still seem to be “hot” and “collectible.” And DC announced that they’ll be talking to the grading companies like CGC about the linewide damage on these books, to…I don’t know, make them consider these books “Near Mint” even with the spine ticks? Or call them “Qualified 9.8” which, as I’ve probably noted before here or on the socials, a meaningless grade?

Sigh. But still, it’s an ill wind that blows no one any good (as per this eBay listing sent to me by former employee Aaron):


So technically, still not Near Mint because it’s been repaired. Would’ve been better off just leaving the comic alone.

And frankly, given the printing, handling, and shipping processes comics go through to get to the local comic shop, folks should be glad they show up in one piece at all.

The worst Civil War prequel.

filed under Categories collecting, low content mode, marvel 9 Comments

Someone came by the shop and donated a short box full of comics…not really much of interest in there, the usual smattering of random ’90s Marvel comics, but it did have:


…nineteen copies of West Coast Avengers Annual #3 from 1988. That’s a book value of up to tens of dollars!

You know, I’ve never actually read this particular comic. Now’s my chance to…well, probably not do so again.

That’s our JJJ!

filed under Categories low content mode 6 Comments


Hi pals…I’m going to enter Low Content Mode for at least today, maybe the week, as I need a little time to recharge the ol’ batteries. But I’m still here, keepin’ an eye on you, so you better watch yourselves!

In the meantime, drink in that portrait of J. Jonah Jameson as drawn by Steve Ditko, in an image I personally took directly from one of the early issues of Amazing Spider-Man back when I had a whole lotta them (like these two).

I’ll be back on Wednesday with a little somethin’ or ‘nother…or maybe even a full post, we’ll see how I’m doing!

If we had any sense, we wouldn’t be comic book retailers.

filed under Categories retailing 4 Comments


So the new hot book of the week is Dynamite’s Ben 10 #1, based on the cartoon from some years back and apparently in short supply in these here parts. Notably, this wasn’t an item that flew off the shelves to the normal New Comics Wednesday crowd, but rather primarily moved to new customers who came in the next day…presumably fans who heard about the book online via whatever fan channels exist for the property.

Apparently it had relatively high orders for an indie book, though as that article breaks it down, actual regular copies available to all stores (outside the “blind bags” and the retailer exclusives) were only about two-thirds of the print run. And like every book from Dynamite, there were multiple free-to-order variants, and multiple ratio variants, and the pricier foil covers, and so on.

I got multiple calls to the store looking for copies of this, from, as I noted on the Blooskees, increasingly more distant area codes, so it very much appears that demand far outsripped the available supply. And when something like that happens, the speculators start to get involved, further diminishing available copies for anyone actually interested in reading the comic.

Though I have to admit, my comics-retailer sense (in that if any of us have any sense) was telling me that most of my inquiries were coming from the fans, not the folks looking for eBay-flipping opportunities. So realistically, I don’t know how many Ben 10 #1 were immediately packed away into Gemini cardboard mailers addressed to CGC, but I’m sure it’s a non-zero percentage.

And that being the case, the big question is…what to order on #2? The Final Order Cutoff date on the second issue is next Monday, which gives me a few days to gauge actual demand. Now, I could probably have sold two to three times the copies of #1 over what I initially ordered, which wasn’t a huge amount (more on that in a moment), but it could be a mistake to drastically raise my orders on the next installment.

One, it’s a first issue, where demand is generally highest. Two, a lot of the folks weren’t regular comic buyers, which isn’t a bad thing, of course, but they’re just not in the habit of returning to a comic shop once a month to get the latest issue, and many may not return having had their interest slated with a single comic. And Three, there’s the speculator factor, who are only interested in comics were demand outstrips supply, and certainly won’t pick up any copies of a reasonably ordered second issue.

That’s not all cut ‘n’ dried, of course, but that’s just a basic distillation of what I have to consider. And then there’s the reason I didn’t order overly high in the first place, and that’s the gradually diminishing returns on Dynamite’s cartoon nostalgia comics.

Most of them started strong: Thundercats, Gargoyles, Space Ghost, Thundarr, and so on. But as time and series and spin-offs wore on, sales on the first two shrank to a very small core audience, and Thundarr‘s sales collapsed almost immediately. Space Ghost remains a relatively strong seller, but even that is only moving about half the copies it did when it first arrived on my racks.

That’s perfectly normal…most comic book series see attrition over time (with the possible exception of the perpetual motion machine that is Absolute Batman, but even that may see its time eventually). It’s no comment on their quality, it’s just a thing that happens. But when it came time to order on a Ben 10, I had to consider the apparent diminishing returns on these sorts of comics, and the fact that previous Ben 10 releases, like graphic novels, barely moved at all for me.

And I had to consider, “who was going to buy this?” I get a lot of kids who pass through the shop, but in general they don’t pay any attention to the Old TV Cartoons That Are Back in Comic Form genre. I mean, there’s always one or two, but usually they’re more interested in manga or Dog Man or the like. But I account for those sales too. Then I had to think “how many of the adults who come in here are going to care about a Ben 10 comic?” and I figured “probably the same number that still care about Thundercats and Gargoyles,” so that went into the ol’ brainpan for some thinkin’.

What I usually don’t consider (and this may be a bit of a broken record for you longtime readers here) is The Secret Other Thing, which is “people who don’t normally buy comics coming in to buy comics.” You can’t depend on that. There are plenty of comic books that come out every month were you can say “well, the general public may decide they need This Comic, so I better order lots!” but 99% of the time, they won’t.

But this 1% of the time, they did. And, that’s just what happens I guess. It’s nice when it does, and even nicer if I’m prepared for it, which is almost impossible to be so. But I did have copies on the shelves for the few lucky people who popped by and called early enough on Thursday to grab some copies, so I at least made some people happy.

What to order on #2? Probably more than I ordered on #1, but I’m not going to go buckwild. This could be a case where the demand normalizes right away, or drops almost entirely, like an Image Comics second issue, and I’m stuck with a few issues and need to drop numbers on #3. Or demand will meet my educated guess and I’ll be able to satisfy a larger number of new customers. I’ll find out in about a month or so.

My Fantastic Four-ay: Part Seven.

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So I spent a lot of time talking about John Byrne’s 1980s run on the Fantastic Four, probably focusing too much on the specifics without saying, in the big picture, that it was classically-done superheroing. Imaginative, usually well-drawn, stories that, with the occasional exception, paid off and rewarded the reader for their investment of half-a-buck or so.

One time (warning: name-drop ahead) Scott McCloud asked me what was the current title on the stands that perfectly encapsulated the standard of A Superhero Comic. What was “One Exact Unit of Superhero Funnybooking,” one could say. At the time, in the late ’90s, I told him “Avengers by Kurt Busiek and George Pérez,” and not just because Scott and Kurt are old friends. It was genuinely the Platonic idea of a superhero comic…well-written, well-drawn, rewarding to read. Had Scott asked me a decade and a half earlier, I would have said John Byrne’s Fantastic Four.

But all things come to an end, and Byrne’s run, having begun in 1981, finally reaches its end in 1986’s #293:


First of all, it doesn’t feel like Byrne’s run was only five years long, given its reputation. It is a significant milestone in the series as a whole, essentially “resetting” the series that had, to some extent, gone a bit off the rails in the years following Lee and Kirby departures from the book. Byrne’s “Back to Basics” approach gave the title a new baseline from which to work, a several-year run that was almost entirely jumping-on points for new readers.

And it’s not like five years is anything to sneeze at. Every issue, plus the annuals, written and drawn by Byrne (with #266 mostly penciled by Kerry Gammill, though Byrne inked it all and did pencil three pages of it), even while he was working on other projects. This did affect the art somewhat, ’til Byrne wisely brought inkers on board to assist in the back half of his tenure.

Second, #293 has only the second cover on one of Byrne’s FF issues to not have been drawn by him (the other being Eliot Brown’s Doctor Doom mask cover). I’m pretty sure I knew already that Byrne was going to be departing, but it was a strange thing actually to see that David Ross/Joe Rubinstein image on the physical copy of the comic in my hands. Even looking at it to this very day makes me recall that sense that there’s a monumental change afoot.

I was in my mid-teens then, but this may have been the time I had personally experienced such a transition on a comic I was following. I was used to multiple teams of artists and writers on comics, of course, but I think Byrne was my initial exposure to The Superstar Creator, the Big Name doing Significant Work on a signature title. Such an immense talent, I thought, would be a hard act to follow. In fact, how could one follow Byrne on a title that he so very much made his own?

It’s a feeling I would have again, when Alan Moore left Swamp Thing, when Peter David left Incredible Hulk. Absolutely classic runs where the creators left their imposing marks, and also giving readers the feeling “who could possibly even follow that?” In the case of Swamp Thing, we got Rick Veitch as the next writer/artist of the series, who turned out to be just the guy to pick up where Moore left off, giving us his own wild run that, while unfortunately truncated at the time, is ginally getting its due.

In the case of Incredible Hulk, it took…a little while longer for the comic to find its footing, though it became very clear that David’s long run did away with the viability of the simple “Hulk smash!” formula that he disdained. The more successful follow-ups delved more deeply into the variable personalities of the Hulk character, such as the immensely popular Immortal Hulk series from a few years back.

Fantastic Four was more a case of the latter than the former, where Byrne’s run cast a long shadow, and the creators that followed found they had big shoes to fill. Eventually, we’d get some significant new directions, but the path from here to there did hit some rough spots along the way. For next time, I’ll delve a little more deeply into this specific story that ends the Byrne run, and where the book goes from there. A lot of changes are ahead, as folks come aboard and try to deal with the pieces that were left behind by this sudden departure of so outsized an influence.

“OM OO DAY.”

filed under Categories free comic book day 12 Comments


Well, let’s get this out of the way first. Last year’s Free Comic Book Day event was far and away our most financially successful yet at my shop (that shop being, of course, Sterling Silver Comics in lovely Camarillo, CA). In fact, the numbers were so good, I didn’t really have the expectation that we’d do better this year.

And yet, we did. Now FCBD ’26 is our most financially successful event yet. Which of course is going to give me performance anxiety next year as I can’t imagine surpassing that new total.

Money isn’t the point, of course, but as a small business owner in a retail niche not necessarily known for swimming in cash, it’s nice to have it come in. But it is one measure of gauging response to the event itself, short of doing a head count tally throughout the day, and geez louise we’ve got enough to do on Free Comic Book Day.

Speaking of which, it was very busy that day. As most of you know, ever since COVID descended upon the land, I moved the giveaways to outside the front of the shop…something frankly I should have been doing from the start. Here’s a shot of a couple of the tables, with a third visible in the background (in front of another storefront that always nicely lets me set up there when I need to):


What happens every year for FCBD is that the aforementioned anxiety creeps up and has me wondering if anyone’s going to bother coming to my humble little shop, surrounded as I am by other, larger shops with flashier attractions and more presence.

But as always, I needn’t have worried. While last year the line-up prior to the beginning of the event didn’t start happening ’til about ten minutes before, folks started showing up much earlier than that this time around, And it certainly looked like a lot more people waiting than last time. Alas, I didn’t take a pic of the line prior to the shop’s opening, but my dad did take this shortly after everything started:


“Mike, is that Doctor Strange there monitoring the line and also posing for the camera?” Yes it is, more on him momentarily.

I did take this shot right after opening, from behind the register to which I was affixed for several hours that day:


And because it will be asked…yes, we had plenty of kids coming to FCBD. Lots of them. There were kids in the store when I took that picture, but I tried to time it right so I didn’t catch any in the image. Rest assured, however, there were plenty of ’em. Part of it was that the music school/entertainment venue located in the same strip of shops as me was presented a well-attended play put on by children, nearly all of whom beelined to the comic shop as soon as the show finished. There was one little girl from said show still sporting her mustache. Sadly, a better mustache than my own.

One big reason we had such a good crowd was, of course, the return of comics writer Amy Chase to the FCBD folk at the shop.


She’s great with customers, especially kids, answers lots of questions (I heard her get “how do you get into the business?” more than once), and is just generally a magnetic personality who easily attracts attention even in the midst of free comic madness. Plus she’s cool and fun to hang out with. By the way, look for her new comic Fixation, drawn by Return to Sleepy Hollow‘s Savanna Mayer, coming this fall as part of IDW’s new crime imprint:


So, everything went smoothly, with, as may be inferred from all my money talk up front, the in-store sales more than covering the cost of the books being given away. As I’ve said before, even from back in the days when I was doing this at Ralph’s Comic Corner, from the very inception of FCBD we never lost money on the deal. It always shocked me way back when to hear of some stores who didn’t bother with participating, thinking it was a net loss for them, when it would take only the slightest effort to make it profitable. I think now the naysayers have mostly dropped away, as most shops have figured out how to make it work.

And I’ll just drop this in here, as I always like to emphasize that, as always, I had no limits on how many different FCBD offerings one could take. And, as always, it caused no problems. Some people took one of each, some people only took a couple, it all worked out.

By the end of the day, I’d given away about 90-95% of what I ordered, which is just about as close to ideal as I want on my FCBD orders. The relatively small number of leftovers I had went into the freebie box that I keep at the store year-round, which is good because I had people come by on Sunday who couldn’t make it Saturday, and I moved a good chunk of my remainders. I also had at least one teacher pick up a bunch for her classes, which I’m always happy to provide.

Given I was mostly behind the register for the day, I didn’t get much chance to peek outside and see how things were going, but it was reported to me that the comics most in demand were the Sonic the Hedgehog giveaways, both for his own title and the DC Comics crossover issue.

And judging by what was left over, the only real clunker was the Archie Comics offering, which seemed like it had barely been touched. Frankly, that doesn’t bode well for them, especially given the number of kids that had come by. The company feels increasingly like a nostalgia line for Gen Xers instead of a current, active property attracting its assumed target audience. That’s not to say I didn’t have at least one young lady that day buy a bunch of the facsimile editions off the rack, but that’s a real exception. Which makes me a little sad, as I love Archie comics. Here’s hoping that’s just a regional thing and there are kids in other parts of the country just eating them up.

I did have some leftovers of, like, the DC Comics “Next Level” promo and Marvel’s “Spidey and His Amazing Friends” title, but not unreasonable numbers of such, and they’ll do well in my freebie box. The Spidey comic especially, as I always have parents looking for something appropriate for children, and whipping out a copy of the Spidey book almost always works.

Cleared out a lot of books with the in-store sale, with DC’s Absolute titles, Invincible, and miscellaneous manga being unsurprisingly popular. Also, my Little Golden Book rack got just wiped out. It’s going to take all the money I made just to restock everything. I did try to blow out the remainder of my Funko Pops for super cheap, since that fad feels good ‘n’ done, but alas there were few takers. Looks like I’ll have to fashion those into a giant boat so that upon my eventual death, my body can be pushed out to sea upon it.

I couldn’t do this all by myself, so as usual I wrangled my dad (whom I already mentioned), and my girlfriend Nora (resplendent in her Amazing Fantasy #15 t-shirt), who were of valuable help. And standing in for the otherwise-occupied-this-year pal Dorian (who I greatly missed having around this time) was pal Deon, a fella I’ve known since first meeting him when he’d come into the previous place of employment decades ago. He’s a Cool Guy, and offered some time ago to help out when I needed him…and I needed him for sure!

There I was, prior to opening, kneeling on the ground pulling comics out of boxes to put on the tables, when suddenly there were boots and blue pants with a flowing red cape in my line of sight. Startled, I looked up…and there was pal Deon, decked out as Doctor Strange! Not requested, not expected, initially started the hell out of me, but very welcomed, and everyone seemed to enjoy his outfit combined with his cheerful enthusiasm.

And…that was that. Gave away a lot of comics, had a full store nearly the entire day, sold a lot of stuff, and your pal Mike is still feeling the aftereffects of the proceedings as he writes this. It’s a lot of work, but it’s also a lot of fun, and it’s always rewarding. Big thanks to everyone who helped out, and to everyone who came to the shop…and it was nice to have folks thanking me for doing this. And so long as Free Comic Book Day exists, and my poor beat-up body can handle it, I’ll keep doing it. Beyond all my finance talk and “what sold” and “what did or did not go over” talk, the important part is that it made everyone happy. It’s worth doing just for that.

It’s Free Comic Book Day!

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Get yourself to a participating comic shop near you and pick up some swell free comics being offered today! And maybe take advantage of any in-store sales that may be going on to help the store’s owner subsidize the cost of the freebies!

But above all, have fun and enjoy the comics!

The “Happy Holidays Vs. Merry Christmas” of comics.

filed under Categories free comic book day 2 Comments


Not sure you need the reminder, but…there’s the reminder. Free Comic Book Day returns to comical-book stores this Saturday, so go forth and load yourself up with a bunch of swell free funnybooks.

What’s nice is that I’ve not come across too many people who weren’t aware of FCBD this year, which is an entirely unscientific poll given that I’m asking people who have literally walked into a comic book store. A non-representative sampling, shall we say. All my regulars know about it, of course, but a surprising number of folks I’ve never seen before had already heard the Good News and were aware of the forthcoming festivities.

Of course there were some folks who didn’t know about FCBD, which gave me a chance to spit out the spiel, specifying “the free comics will be ON TABLES OUTSIDE THE STORE.” That didn’t stop the “will all the comics on the wall/in the boxes be free?” questions, but that’s okay.

Pretty sure I got the word out sufficiently, despite the lack of promotional support from the current owners of “Free Comic Book Day,” having pulled control of it out of the collapsed wreckage of Diamond Comics. Don’t know if they didn’t have the time or the will to slap together at least the usual posters and/or window clings I could have displayed, but as I said last time I talked about this, I just made up my own and hoped that did the trick. I mean, having the Free Comic Book Day buttons and pens and balloons and stickers and merchandise bags would have been nice too, but maybe next year. (I still have extras of some of these items, so I’m not too put out.)

One thing I’m decidedly not doing is promoting the event as “Comics Giveaway Day” at the shop. The other major comics distributor didn’t make a deal with the distributor that actually owns the “Free Comic Book Day” name, so instead of showing a unified front, we’ve now got two different names for the exact same thing. Leave it to comics to take a successful marketing tool and dilute it. Nothing builds business like consumer confusion.

And yes, there has been some confusion. I have been asked if “Free Comic Book Day” and “Comics Giveaway Day” are two separate events on different days, if I’m carrying the CGD comics in addition to the FCBD comics, and so on. It’s taken something that was simple (“Free Comics on This Day!” and made it into “Wait, are these different things, what’s going on?” Yes, it’s easy to explain to people if they come in and ask, but I can’t explain it to the people who don’t. And they shouldn’t be put in the position of having to ask that question in the first place.

Now I did get a promo poster for “Comics Giveaway Day” and 1) I’m not putting it up because, y’know, of everything I just said, and 2) I got it like a week ahead of the actual day, so what good would it have done anyway? Sheesh. Alas, some of the comics themselves have the CGD branding, which I can’t help and I expect will have to explain to folks more than once on Saturday.

I’m pretty sure the CGD name is being well ignored by most shops anyway, so it’s diffusion into the general consciousness will hopefully be limited. And that next year everyone will get their respective acts together and it’ll all be back to just “Free Comic Book Day” in 2027, along with plenty of promo material to help advertise the event well ahead of time.

Oh, one thing I forgot to do is to see if anybody once again ignoring the spirit of the season and actually selling this year’s FCBD (and yes, CGD) books on eBay ahead of the event. Here, let me look.

[TEMPUS FUGIT]

Yup, they sure are. Sigh.

Swampy, take the wheel.

filed under Categories obituary, swamp thing, this week's comics 11 Comments

Hey hey hey, they’re finally here:


After very nearly 40 years, the cancelled-for-various-reasons segment in Rick Veitch’s Swamp Thing in which our favorite swamp monster runs into Jesus. Illustrated by the late Michael Zulli, with finishes by Vince Locke, and featuring a nice long afterword by Steve Bissette giving the surprisingly warts-and-all telling of what happened with this comic way back when.

The book is designed to look like how it would have in 1989, including subscription forms and period house ads (Truman’s Hawkworld, anyone?). Inside the front cover is a “Johnny DC’ text piece, written in the voice of those old promotional pages, that gives the story context of this current issue for anyone new to the book. And it’s written by close, personal friend Rich Handley, the one person in this fallen world that I’ll admit has more Swamp Thing knowledge than I do.

But the comic itself…yes, it’s great. I know a lot of folks who’d been waiting for this book since 1989 went back and reread the issues leading up to this story, but I’ve reread those enough that I’ve practically got them memorized, so I’m good, but if you’re coming in fresh, don’t sweat it. Like I said, Rich’s “Johnny DC” column tees you up just fine, and the story itself does enough to give you the idea what’s goin’ on.

I don’t think the rest of the mini-series will be too difficult for new readers, either. A long time ago, the Comic Buyer’s Guide ran plot outlines for Veitch’s then-cancelled final issues for his run. As I recall, the events in those issues should be easy enough to follow on their own, given what you’re told in this first issue.

But how’s the comic? It’s great. It’s nice to read the full, completed thing after I may or may not have seen photocopies of the art many years ago, I admit nothing. But it’s as weird and magical and knowingly irreverent as Veitch usually is, while remaining respectful to Jesus Himself. We get the Vertigo-style twist of an old DC character, we get yet another origin for a certain demonic fella, and all this madness is mixed up and presented in an almost weirdly dreamlike progression. It’s a wonderful return to this era of Swamp Thing…I’m not going to say “it was worth the wait,” because should never have had to wait this long, but I’m glad it’s here.

• • •

So long to the nigh-legendary comics writer Gerry Conway, who passed away this week. While best known for his Spider-Man work, as well as being the co-creator of the Punisher and Firestorm, he of course has also written certain swamp creatures at both companies. He was the co-creator of Man-Thing at Marvel, and at DC, he wrote the inaugural issue of Swamp Thing’s short-term New Look, issue #23 (1976):


I talked about this issue way back in 2004, and it’s an interesting example of serving two masters: attempting to retain the character’s horror roots (so to speak) while transitioning toward a more superheroic tone, a balance I thought Conway pulled off. He would of course return to Swamp Thing in short order, during his stint on Challengers of the Unknown where he would actually reverse the changes made to the character at the end of his own series.

I know it’s weird I focus on this over all of his other work, both in comics and in television — I remember seeing his name on an episode of Law and Order and thinking “wait, the same Gerry Conway?” — but I always appreciated the fact that he wrote competing swamp monsters in comics. In fact, I once got the opportunity to ask him who’d win in a fight, Swamp Thing or Man-Thing, and you can hear his answer at 1:11:36 in this 2016 episode of War Rocket Ajax. I was happy that I got a chance to make him laugh.

Another loss I learned about just as I sat down to write this post was comics writer Len Strazewski, who was primarily active in the ’80s and ’90s. I remember him most for two things: writing this swell and far-too-short Justice Society series, drawn by the also-departed-too-soon Mike Parobeck:


…and for also popping briefly into the former place of employment and saying “hello.” He was a nice man, who spotted our backstock of Ultraverse titles (an endeavor he also worked for, having co-created Prime) and commiserating with us that we would probably never sell all those. Well, I wish I could tell him we did sell them all, eventually…for a nickel apiece in a bulk sale, which isn’t much but it still counts as a sale!

It’s sad to see two more pieces of my comics fandom pass from this world, but we can always remember them through their work. So long, Gerry and Len.

My Fantastic Four-ay: Part Six.

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I’m just about ready to move on from John Byrne’s 1981-1986 run on the Fantastic Four, but I wanted to touch upon this particular storyline because, among other things, it sets up a character that will return again and again in future creative teams’ efforts on the title.

I remember picking up issue #271 and being quite taken with the throwback cover to the 1950s/early ’60s Marvel monster comics, before Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and friends dived back into the superhero genre:


I’m not sure where I’d been exposed to that era of Marvel monster books initially…perhaps some of the reprints that popped up as filler material in some of the Giant-Sizes I’d collected, or a friend whose uncle had a handful of original copies of these books (before being all destroyed in a rainstorm, having left his box of them outside. But I was certainly familiar with them, and found them amusing and charming enough that I would eventually draw out my own spoof splash page of such a story (“FONDUU, THE CHEESE DISH THAT WALKED LIKE A MAN!”).

Byrne’s pastiche of the Marvel monster period (this time involving a pre-superpowered Reed and Sue as the intrepid humans against the alien menace) takes up the majority of this issue. It certainly succeeds in evoking the essence of that era, even if it suffers a little in retrospect as the bad guy is coincidentally defeated in pretty much the exact same way the bad guy is defeated in Avengers #250, released shortly afterward.

But of interest is the plot element that turns up in the “present day” section of the book…the fact that Reed is suffering memory loss, introduced in this dramatically effective panel:


He continues to say that other memories of his younger years are lost, and attributes this to their recent adventures in the Negative Zone, where Reed’s brain was drained and blah blah I’m not going to get into it, but some alien critter messed with his head and left it Swiss-cheesed.

So it’s decided for some reason that escapes me even though I just reread these three issues right before reading this to go back to Reed’s father’s mansion in California…and I just reread that section of the story and I’m still not clear why they did. Anyway, we learn that Reed’s father, a scientist, had disappeared about ten years ago (“three years” before the team got their powers, leaning into Byrne’s “seven year” span that he assumes the FF had been active).

Eventually Reed discovered that his father had created a time machine that shunted him into an alternate timeline, and in #272:


…the FF use Pops’ machine to follow him into the parallel universe. Look, okay, there are cowboys on flying horses on the cover, and we get some neat bits with a sci-fi tinged Old West in this other timeline, but the big story is that Reed’s father is apparently the hated Warlord, who rules over this world:


And that brings us to Part Three, #273:


…where you can see on the cover there that Reed and his dad finally meet face to face, which is a neat moment, but boy, this issue is undermined by the fact that Byrne decided to not only write and draw this issue, as he had been on the FF for the previous few years, but letter it as well, and, um:


…the man’s no Gaspar Saladino. I think when I first read this issue, even then I was all “what’s up with the lettering” when I noticed that there was no lettering credit on the issue. Eventually I figured out Byrne did it his own self, which kinda blew my mind just a little. I mean, artists lettering their own work was not a new idea to me, as comic strip artists did it all the time, natuarlly. But in Marvel and DC Comic Books, it was always a separate job that you got someone specifically to do.

I should have realized it wasn’t unprecedented, but I don’t think I realized Jim Aparo often lettered his own work, and it was around this time that Todd Klein was lettering his own scripts on Omega Men. Of course in many independent books, this was often the case…the Hernandez Brothers lettered their own work, Dave Sim did some wild lettering in Cerebus, but that seemed different from the usual assembly-line nature of the Big Two.

Regardless, it did seem like A Step Too Far when Byrne picked up the lettering gig for this issue. He was already perceived as being stretched too thin writing and drawing the multiple books he worked on per month, and adding the not-insignificant task of lettering an entire issue felt like one burden too many. Especially when the result was aggressively Not Good. It looked awkward, the lettering was inconsistent, lines of text looked crooked, and even the word balloons themselves were pretty janky. Lettering can’t be distracting when reading a comic book, and this job was nothing but distracting.

Despite all that, the story continues, with Reed pleading his case to the Warlord (only it turned out (SPOILER) to be Reed’s stepmom, who was acting as the Warlord without Pops’ knowledge).


Note that we are here in the third and final part of this story, and Reed is still emphasizing his loss of memory. Which is interesting because ultimately, when the story is resolved and Reed and his dad have their peaceful reunion…the whole “lost memory” subplot is completely forgotten. The problem that launched this storyline remains unresolved. Far as I know, to this very day Reed still lacks all those memories, because at no point over these three issues does he ever get them back.

I remember noticing this at the etime, and wondering what exactly happened to let that plot element go astray. They didn’t forget it was such, and it was brought up in the concluding issue. Just when everything was said and done, the instigating action to drive the characters into this other world exists only as that: an instigating action. It is not a problem to be solved, but a…is Macguffin the right word here? I feel like that’s not exactly it but my English is failing me here.

But it’s ultimately pointless and I think that made me really wonder how such a gaffe could be made in a professionally published comic book. Yes, I knew about Marvel’s “No-Prizes” sent out for folks spotting (and explaining away!) continuity mistakes, but this seemed like a much bigger problem than that. A problem of a creator getting Too Big for an editor to successfully edit? I didn’t know then, and I’m certainly not sure now.

The lasting legacy of the introduction of Reed’s father in this storyline (beyond the “surprise twist ending” of the story connecting him to the time-traveling villain(s) Rama-Tut/Kang) is that Reed’s dad will return in Avengers: Doomsday in future FF storylines, with alternating personalities. While a seemingly benevolent and kind man at the end of Byrne’s issues, he returns in the Tom DeFalco/Paul Ryan issues as a untrustworthy and manipulative figure, then returns again as a somewhat more positive character. But, as I like to say when talking about future FF events, I’ll say more when I get there.

The other note I wanted to add is something I noticed on my most recent rereading…the attempts at pinning down Reed’s exact age. In this panel from #271, Johnny Storm congratulates Reed on hitting “The Big One” for this year’s birthday:


I interpret that as either 40s (most likely) or 50s (still plausible, given Reed’s slightly older status compared to the other 20/30-something superheros at Marvel.

Then Reed says this in #273:


…which still leaves things open a little bit. Reed’s dad vanished about a decade prior, but it’s very possible Reed hadn’t seen him for many years prior to said disappearance. However, if you look closely at the lettering in the second word balloon, the word “twenties” was obviously lettered in after the fact. Apparently someone didn’t want to accidentally “age up” the character by even implying Reed was in his 30s, or older, “10 years ago.”

This run of issues grabbed my attention way back when in good ways (Byrne’s generally fun art and storytelling) and bad (oy, that lettering, and the unresolved plot) that, had I had a blog back then, I almost certainly would have commented upon. It was an experience to get a story with a strong beginning and a clunker ending, leaving me wondering what fell down to allow this to happen. It was just another piece in the puzzle reminding me this comics were made by Human Beings, and sometimes we Human Beings drop the ball, even with the best of intentions.

Next time: the big transition from Byrne to Post-Byrne!