Revealed at Last: The Secret of the Perpetual Motion Comics Machine

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big box of comics, bookmans, comic books, fifty cent rack, Mars Will Send No More, perpetual motion

Today, after nearly nine years of blogging, I want to tell you something I’ve never told anyone before.

Once upon a time, I reversed entropy.

In the early years of this blog, I sometimes mentioned my “top secret fifty-cent rack” where I got ridiculous deals on vintage and contemporary comics. I mean, they were ridiculous. For example, someone would dump Grant Morrison’s entire run on Animal Man, immaculately bagged and boarded in VF+ to NM condition. At fifty cents an issue, that find cost me $13.

If you’ve recently tried to collect that run, then you understand what I mean by ridiculous deals.

Or I’d find half of the Lucifer series, or an uninterrupted chunk of Sandman issues I was missing. Or, on two separate visits, I’d piece together the entire hologram cover series from a 1990s X-Men crossover. Then I’d find near-mint copies of complete story arcs from the Ultimate X-men series, plus random underground comix from the 1970s, current indie publishers I’d never heard of, and a staggering pile of colorful vintage awesomeness.

Don’t get me wrong. Nobody was dumping Fantastic Four #1 from the 1960s. I wasn’t getting bloody rich at the fifty-cent rack. But I discovered so much there and did quite a bit of collecting. It was the best time to love comics.

Then it went away.

Forever.

Since it is gone for good, and the sacred secret no longer has any power over my destiny, I will divulge to you the fountain of comic book infinitude that fueled the early days of Mars Will Send No More.

Drum roll, please.

It was the Bookmans Book Store at 19^th Avenue and Northern in Phoenix, Arizona.

Now, don’t be sad for the store. It did not die in a cataclysmic Crisis on Infinite Crossover Wars event. It is still there, selling second-hand books, video games, movies, toys, and musical instruments. You can take stuff in, and they offer you cash or a significantly larger store credit. You can also drop in empty-handed to shop for decent deals on slightly used stuff.

But several years ago, the top-secret rack died. And it died without a warning.

I had no idea until one day I walked in and discovered the horror they had made of my paradise. The shelves were moved to a different location and changed to a dollar rack. The quality of the comics decreased, the shelf size decreased, and the price went up.

A golden age had ended.

The epic was over.

But I recall when the golden age began. At a friend’s invitation, I visited Bookmans for the first time with her. It did not take her long to wonder what horrifying hell she had created for herself. The comic book rack was a huge set of shelves with not just hundreds but thousands of books. I spent hours looking through them all! Every single one! My friend told me it was okay and went to one of the posh reading corners to enjoy a book.

But just between you and me, she never invited me there again.

I’m just kidding. We went back there a bunch of times together. And I got hundreds of comics from that place. Stacks of hundreds at a time. Every couple of months, for years.

It was not merely a fifty-cent rack. If I brought in comics to the “trade counter”, and the books were in reasonable condition, Bookmans gave me twenty cents of store credit for them.

Do the math. If I have old comics I don’t want to read, then I take them to Bookmans and get twenty cents credit per book. But all I am there to do is buy their fifty-cent comics. With my credit, those now cost only thirty cents. If I come back and trade a stack of comics I picked up on my last visit and paid an effective rate of thirty cents for, and I get twenty cents credit for them again, then they only cost me ten cents in the long run.

If that sounds like a perpetual motion scam, then realize that the thermodynamic friction in the system was that I loved a ton of the books I found there, and I kept them.

Also, friction means, “You must work for it.” You need to feed energy into any system to power it. Every system is always losing energy through friction, expressed in terms of heat loss, which is called entropy. If you don’t add work to a system, it eventually stops.

So, I looked for ways to feed into the system for the lowest cost. Three things proved especially effective.

One, I scoured the city for “quarter” bins, especially where you could get five for a dollar. If I could get five for a dollar, then they cost twenty cents each, which was exactly how much store credit I could get for trade-in at Bookmans. I got some things worth keeping and re-reading from those bargain bins, and I traded in the rest of it for even better stuff at Bookmans. As a bonus, the stuff I traded in was fun to read and discover. It was not always material I wanted to keep, but it was something I was glad I had a chance to see, and occasionally would sell on eBay for more than I paid for it.

In another attempt at perpetual energy and comic books forever, I bought a collection from a friend, cleaned it up, sold a few things on eBay, kept a few gems, and traded in the rest. I did slightly better than break even on that venture, minus a little time and elbow grease, plus a few cool vintage things for my collection, and a bunch of fun stuff I scanned for this blog before parting with it.

But of all the perpetual motion schemes I tried, one remains unmatched in all of time and space. It was like I had broken the laws of physics and economics simultaneously. Anything and everything seemed possible.

Acting on a tip from a friend of a friend, I bought several long boxes at a pawn shop for a stupidly low cash price. I threw maybe $20 or $40 at this purchase, max.

I am such a social retard that I spent a couple hours in the parking lot behind the place, doing what I had to do to get the collection in order. Any civilized person would have fucked off and done his work in private. But to be fair, I did ask the shop if I could park in back and go through the goods. And they said yes.

They just didn’t realize I meant for maybe all afternoon.

In a dirt-alley parking lot with a beat-up old truck I later sold at a loss after some drunk driver totaled it, I cleaned up the collection, took stuff for myself, threw out damaged worthless issues, and organized other issues into runs that belonged together.

I picked out a couple things that sold on eBay for just enough to cover the entire cost of the long-box purchase. I broke even on the purchase through eBay sales, and still got twenty cents of store credit at Bookmans for a couple boxes’ worth of stuff I didn’t want. Hundreds of dollars of credit.

Take that, Isaac Newton. For one glorious moment in time, I stumbled upon a perpetual motion machine of comic books that generated pure profit and excess reading enjoyment.

That is how I reversed entropy, cheated thermodynamics, and ended up with forty short boxes of comic books lining the walls of my former office.

For a few years, it was comic book heaven. At one point, I took bagged and boarded comics and nailed them to the walls in orderly rows and columns—not through the book, just the bag and board. For a couple years, I changed the display every few months. One month my office would be nothing but Wolverine covers. Two months later: four walls of seven stripes in the colors of the rainbow, one color per stripe. Next, two walls of covers featuring awesome solo shots of my favorite heroines, and two walls of dinosaurs.

I went through a fuck-load of nails, bags, and boards.

But every single day, it was geek heaven to walk into that office to get some work done.

Yes, I miss it. Life happened, and I needed some cash, so I sold about thirty boxes from that collection. Though I didn’t get rich, and it was a desperate attempt to break even, I made a small profit when all was said and done. I took the profit I worked my ass off to get and immediately spent it on rent.

For my efforts, I was left standing with a few short boxes of my favorite comics.

As the old song goes: “Regrets? I’ve had a few.”

Until recently, I regretted selling off some of my treasures. But in the last couple of years, thanks to this blog’s readers, I’ve reacquired editions of the most awesome stuff, the stories I consider indispensable and love to read and re-read, even if they come back to me in an Omnibus or TPB format instead of the original issues. I got a hell of a bargain on them the first time around, and now this blog’s readers support me in getting a second chance.

Along the way, we discover new treasures.

Thank you.

Come on and Give It to Me: A Ragman Memoir

Tags

Batman, Brave and the Bold, comic books, dad, DC Comics, joe shit the ragman, memoir, ragman, ragpicker joe

When I was a kid, Dad had a term for people who looked disheveled and messy: Rag-picker Joe. Eventually, I discovered it was a mild version of “Joe Shit the Rag Man”. Maybe Dad picked it up in the Marine Corps. It’s listed on a site of Marine slang, and Dad was a Drill Instructor in the early 1970s, when this phrase seems to have been at the peak of its popularity.

Rag-picker Joe made regular appearances in my childhood: sometimes as me when I couldn’t get my shirt tucked in or my cowlick to lie down, and sometimes as random people on the street seen from a car window, or someone in a retail store. Rag-picker Joe was everywhere.

In the summer of 2019, while looking through my late father’s personal effects, I found papers about a family tree that seemed to be the work of Dad’s mom—my grammy, who died in 2005. I’m sure it was her distinctive handwriting.

Back in the mid-1980s, I asked both sets of my grandparents for any information they could contribute to my junior-high genealogy project. They gave me next to nothing to go on, so I suspect Grammy gained additional information over the years.

Reviewing her notes was how I learned that Rag-picker Joe was not just a bit of slang. He was one of my ancestors.

I forget his last name, but his first name was Joseph, and he was from enough generations ago that I didn’t even bother to figure out the great-great-great or however many greats it was. His occupation of record? Ragman.

If you don’t know what a ragman is, don’t feel bad. I didn’t know either, and I had to look it up. A ragman collected what we might think of now as junk or scrap, and even bones. I don’t know why people would buy bones, but I assume it was either for their nutritious value (soup stock, perhaps?) or for their household utility as material for buttons and knife handles.

The cousin of Joe Shit the Ragman was the Bone man, and these nearly extinct characters from more than a century ago went from town to town, supporting themselves on what meager coin they could make from selling other people’s cast-offs and throwaways.

Bleak as it sounds, the rag-and-bone man was a mobile thrift store and scrap yard, and he was “upcycling” before any of us invented hipster words for re-using old garbage. I imagine that being a ragman required Joe Shit to be a salesman, and no song expresses that rag-selling energy as well as Rag and Bones by the White Stripes.

Sell me that old junk, baby. Come on and give it to me!

In the fifteen months that passed since discovering the ragman of my childhood was part of my family, I have often wondered if Dad ever put that connection together. I wonder if he knew Rag-picker Joe was his great-grand-uncle or whatever it was. Did he know this bit of information when I was a kid, when he used Joe as an insult on a regular basis? Or did he, like me, have an epiphany about Joe when he saw Grammy’s research?

I also wonder about things the genealogy documents didn’t tell me but seem apparent from reading between the lines. If you go back just a generation or two beyond my grandparents, my family tree is full of immigrants who came to this country and survived in abject poverty, somehow, even if it meant carrying bones and rags from town to town in a fucking wheelbarrow.

It upsets me to see our national attitude and policies becoming so obviously anti-immigrant and anti-poor. But this isn’t the first time. This always happens in our country whenever our economy is disastrous or when people feel threatened. Anti-immigrant and overtly racist attitudes flourish in times of economic trouble. The rich pit the middle-class against the poor as enemies, and the rich get richer. These aren’t mysterious ideas any longer; they are statistical conclusions verified with data from more than two centuries of U.S. history.

I only bring it up because I think of Joseph, my distant relative, a man who died long before I was born. A man who died before he became a piece of slang in the urban dictionary. A man whose station in life was used as an insult, even though he was family. A man who must have lived at the absolute ass-end of society, but somehow survived to be listed in my family tree.

In memory of Rag-picker Joe and Joe Shit the Ragman, I’ll share with you the complete issue of The Brave and the Bold #196, where Batman teams up with Ragman.

I had this comic when I was around seven years old. Coming back to it forty years later reveals why I loved it so much. The prose from Bob Kanigher could use a little editing for adult readers, but his captions are more fun than most prose I see in novels these days, and Jim Aparo’s artwork is in fine form here.

This is obviously a comic for boys and, though I was a boy once, I would not recommend it to adult women due to the short shrift the women characters get here. None of them pass the Bechdel Test. They only exist as motivating plot points for male action.

This issue also has some too-convenient plotting in the way that serious injuries take exactly as much time to heal as the plot requires. Is that how it works when falling out of a window? I should fall out of the motherfuckers more often. In spandex.

Also, the re-cap of Ragman’s origin is pointless filler and stupid. Getting electrocuted with other people does not give you their traits. That’s the lowest rung of idiocy on the ladder of superhero origins, right below “Holy shit, gamma-ray exposure makes me bad-ass!”

Actually, gamma rays kill you. I’d prefer that authors stop insulting me with bogus reasons for powers, and instead tell me a story about an awesome character who has powers.

For these reasons, I wouldn’t put this issue in my list of all-time favorite comics, but it’s a cool time capsule from the late 1970s at DC, and it stars one of my ancestors.

Now let’s see how my great-great-grand-uncle Joe Shit the Ragman teams up with Batman to kick all kinds of ass.

Collector’s Guide: The Brave and the Bold #196; DC Comics, 1983.

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indie box: Sin City

Tags

big box of comics, comic books, Dark Horse Comics, frank miller, indie box, Indie Comics, John Byrne, sin city, sin city tpb

It’s no secret that one of my favorite pieces of fiction is Frank Miller’s Sin City series. I discovered it at the Las Vegas public library about eighteen years ago when I checked out the A Dame to Kill For TPB. It was the most awesome thing I’d ever read, with over-the-top brutality and an atmosphere that was darker than the blackest noir. It was so intense about being intense that it was funny and morbidly serious at the same time, and the first thing I did after reading it was read it again. Then I tracked down the other stories! One had dinosaurs.

For a while I had the complete series in an awesome collected edition, but those books were smaller than the full-sized TPBs, and there’s just something about this series that suits being as big as possible. The original TPB collections also appear to include more pages than were printed in the original serialized formats, such as extra splash pages for multiple perspectives of Dwight holding a dude’s head underwater in a toilet in The Big Fat Kill. The one missing ingredient in the earliest TPBs is color, the use of just one primary color as an accent to individual stories, such as the yellow highlights in the TPB for That Yellow Bastard. Still, I’m okay without the color if I get a bigger page size!

The black and white art is insanely melodramatic, as shown in a couple pages of Marv walking in the rain from the first Sin City TPB, later titled The Hard Goodbye. The text is like a hard-boiled detective novel with the volume turned up to eleven. I not only love this scene, I love that it goes on for ten whole pages — eleven in the TPB!

While writing last week’s post about Next Men, I looked into some other John Byrne works I hadn’t seen yet, including his stint on The Sensational She-Hulk. That run is best known for relentlessly breaking the fourth wall and having the characters be aware they were in a comic book. Byrne based the fiftieth issue on a gag that he had been killed, and the cast needed to find a new writer and artist. So, he showed how some of his friends in the industry would do a She-Hulk story. That’s how we got a couple pages of a Sin City She-Hulk.

This post was made possible by this blog’s readers who use my affiliate links to buy comics. Recent store credit made it possible to reconnect with the Sin City TPBs that first hooked me on the series. Thank you!

big box of comics: New 52 Batman

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Batman, batman tpb, big box of comics, comic books, Greg Capullo, new 52, scott snyder

DC’s New 52 is now old news, and it came and went without my paying any attention to it. But the one thing I missed that I really wanted see was Greg Capullo drawing Batman, beginning with Bat’s first New 52 adventure The Court of Owls. So, last year, with some of the store credit I earned thanks to this blog’s readers who use my affiliate links to find books, I got the first paperback collection.

It’s a wild ride, and I’ve since read a digital version of the rest of the Snyder/Capullo run just to see what happened next. I plan to get the second TPB, but after that one, the series began to lose my interest. The second TPB features an amazing Mr. Freeze story, and if you’re expecting the cartoon silliness of Arnold Freezinator from the movies, you won’t find any of that. Snyder writes Freeze as a mentally and emotionally disturbed villain, playing up the sympathetic tragedy and ultimate self-delusion that drive his maniacal actions.

After that, the series goes into a Joker story that starts off well and is exquisitely drawn but eventually collapses under its own weight. It asks us to believe that everything that happens is all a part of a wildly complicated “evil genius” plot, kind of like the Saw movies or virtually any of the “serial killer” thriller films, except there’s no way anyone could plan for all the eventualities, and much of it is downright implausible. Then the series goes into a lengthy plot involving Commissioner Gordon becoming Batman, and a whole lot of “Batman’s early days”. I didn’t care for either development.

The first two story arcs for Court of Owls feature an inventive mix of crime, horror, and superheroics, and it’s a perfect blend of genres for a “world’s greatest detective” who dresses like a frickin’ bat. I can’t even describe how glorious it is to see Capullo drawing Batman in action, and the first arc does an inventive thing with page layouts when Batman is caught in a maze and hallucinating his ass off. I won’t spoil it for new readers, but I will say that I got just as turned around as Bats did at that point in the story, and I thought that was brilliant.

While Court of Owls and its follow-up arc are dramatic and gripping, it soon becomes apparent that they lack any consequence. For example, Bats is subjected to unimaginable beatings and torture, but then a few pages later, he’s totally fine. No bruises on his face. No long-term disability from being stabbed almost to death and drowned. He just sort of gets back to business. I was worried he was going to die, but then he’s okay because the plot demands it?

Plus, the Owls succeed in killing off many prominent local politicians and governmental figures, but all this does is give the rest of the Bat-family an excuse to jump into the story to protect whoever is still alive. If you killed most of the public officials in a city, there would be ramifications, but Court of Owls never deals with them. I didn’t want a series exploring the politics of Gotham—although I loved Brian K. Vaughn’s politically themed Ex Machina—but I did want some sense that what happened in the story mattered. Instead, it’s glossed over as quickly as Batman’s mortal wounds.

There are a few other details like this. The Owls figure out where the Batcave is, but after Bats defeats the cave invaders, that knowledge is never used again. That’s powerful information! They wouldn’t—I don’t know—send an email to Lex Luthor with the GPS coordinates? Or spam every person on the planet? Or announce it on Twitter? Are they serious about Bat-termination or not?!

Also, in the first issue, Bats uses an amazing facial recognition technology that is never mentioned again. It only serves as a plot device to give us information dumps about characters—apparently to get new readers on board with the cast by disguising the info dumps as Bat-science. It’s a cool trick, but it’s a tech without any lasting consequences.

Despite those flaws, Snyder gave Capullo some amazing, moody material to work with visually, and the first couple of Snyder/Capullo TPB volumes deserve a place in a “best of Batman” collection. And, if you don’t mind implausible “serial killer movie” plotting, the third volume with the Joker is also a visual feast.

indie box: Next Men TPB

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2112, big box of comics, collection, comic books, Dark Horse, indie box, John Byrne, M4, Next Men, Next Men TPB

Once upon a time, I had the complete Next Men series, except for the Hellboy issue. Though I read the series three or four times, I’ve missed having it around ever since I sold it. This month, thanks to this blog’s readers who use my affiliate links to find books, I earned enough store credit to get all six of the 1993 trade paperback collections. Reading the series again reminds how much the series blew my mind the first time through, and as a bonus, it includes the Hellboy issue with pages drawn by Mike Mignola.

Hellboy’s appearance in issue #17 makes it the most expensive one to collect. It’s easy to collect all the other original, single issues for less than $3 each, but #17 will cost as much or more than all the other thirty issues combined. That’s not a problem with the collected paperback.

Hellboy might be part demon, but he is a far cry from the absolute evil of the series’ main villain. Sathanas is the remnants of a mutated energy vampire who kills people by draining their lifeforce, and since so much of him got blown up, he survives in a mechanical suit. Despite his silly name, he’s among my favorite John Byrne villains.

Despite the fun of the paperbacks, they have three disappointments, possibly because they were made more than a quarter-century ago before TPBs became so popular. These days, we expect the TPB to include all the original covers and, if any, all the variant covers. But the Next Men covers get treated terribly, reduced to about 1/6 of the page size and combined in a “gallery”. It’s an odd design choice, considering that there’s a useless page between each “issue” that just splits the words “Next Men” across its front and back. That would be a lovely place for a cover!

Second, the story is so intertwined with the short graphic novel 2112 that the original Next Men series isn’t complete without it. This oversight is forgivable, since the events of 2112 get summarized by one of the characters.

What’s unforgivable is the omission of the entire series of “back-up” stories, M4. These were short episodes with characters who, at first, seemed only tangentially related to the main series. But the stories intersected eventually, and the M4 characters were essential to the finale and resolution. Leaving out the M4 pages makes these characters appear to pop out of nowhere in the main storyline, which makes for utterly confusing plot developments for unfamiliar readers. Plus, M4 had its own covers, featured on the back of the single issues where it ran, and the TPBs have none of them.

For the completists: When IDW reprinted the series in color in 2009, they included M4 but not 2112. IDW’s 2011 reprint series (“Classic Next Men”, in three TPBs) includes both M4 and 2112, and it’s also in full color. I’ve only ever seen it in stock on Amazon for around $40 per volume in paperback, but you can get them for $10.99 each for Kindle and Comixology, and as a set with the sequel for a total of $43.

Even with these omissions, I loved re-reading this imaginative and intricately plotted series that features some of Byrne’s most humanized and fully realized characters. Consider what he does with three wordless pages to show Jasmine’s emotional state as she flees from an attack in underground tunnels. Her old, perfect life was taken from her, and she’s not adjusting well to reality, where trauma awaits her at every turn. Without a single line of expositional captions or thought balloons, Byrne portrays her fragile condition in these pages.

indie box: Metalzoic

Tags

comic books, DC Comics, graphic novel, indie box, Kevin O'Neill, metalzoic, Pat Mills, review, science fiction

This is the second time a book published by DC Comics has broken the rules and earned a place in my indie short box. This time, it’s Metalzoic by the legendary team of Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill, and there’s not much about it you can call “mainstream”. Metalzoic takes place in a future where the Earth is ruled by intelligent, mechanical beasts patterned after modern and prehistoric animals — and boy, do they love to fight!

Yes, you just witnessed a brutal showdown between a gorilla with a saw blade on his head, and a lion with a chainsaw for a tongue and metal skis for feet. Do I really need to say anything about the story’s plot, or is that cool enough for you? Two of my favorite pages show a shark attacking a caravan of wooly mammoths during a trek across the ice.

It’s like some sort of psychotic nature special! I can almost hear David Attenborough narrating it for a BBC documentary.

O’Neill always delivers wonderfully twisted artwork, but he pulls out all the stops to illustrate Metalzoic‘s endless mecha-menagerie.

The story is interesting, especially since the main character — the saw-blade gorilla — is a brutal, amoral hell-raiser whose brawn and ferocity might be the only thing standing between the Earth and total destruction.

And just look at him go!

When all this takes place and how it came to be are slowly revealed throughout the story. We don’t get a clear timeline until about 50 pages in. It might have been helpful to see a historic summary earlier in the story, so here it is.

If you’re like me, and you wish Godzilla movies would cut out most of the human-related nonsense and just show more monster fights, then this 64-page epic adventure is the book for you!

Collector’s Guide: Metalzoic; DC Comics Graphic Novel #6, 1986. Though it’s often out of stock at MyComicShop, you can usually find it on Amazon for between $15 and $30.

Son of Big Box of Comics: Turtles, Surfers, and Science-Fiction Mayhem

Tags

Avengers, big box of comics, color classics, comic books, deeper and stranger, John Buscema, Paul Chadwick, review, Roger Stern, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, world below

The big box of comics series is a tribute to the fun things I wouldn’t have in my life without the readers of this blog who help me earn store credit at MyComicShop.com or Amazon.com every time they use my handy “Collector’s Guides” links to make a purchase.

It’s a symbiotic relationship — much like when an alien symbiote bonds to your nervous system and drinks your adrenaline for survival.

Actually, it’s nothing like that, but you could read that story in the Spectacular Spider-man TPB #1 by Paul Jenkins and Humberto Ramos.

This month, thanks to readers’ generosity, I put together a run of inexpensive reprints of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #2–5, courtesy of IDW’s “Color Classics” versions of early TMNT. A few months ago, readers helped me reunite with the ridiculous majesty of TMNT #6, and I couldn’t go on without reading the preceding issues at least one more time!

Was it fun? Oh, hell yes. But maybe not as great as I remember from my black and white collections or the original colorized graphic novels from First. IDW’s coloring is part of that, since they put dark colors over the original Zip-a-Tone midtones, and obscuring the mid-range tends to flatten the artwork and make it less dynamic. Also, one of the pages in one issue seems to be a misprint that duplicates a page from earlier in the story.

But in terms of being an affordable way to read the Turtles’ earliest adventures, these reprints did the job admirably. Because #6 is one of my all-time favorite comics, I enjoyed reliving the outrageous plot that led up to it, and seeing how the storytelling evolved and improved in the early days. As a bonus, I got a few issues from the second volume of Color Classics, including a solo Michelangelo adventure in a kind of Lone Wolf & Cub fantasy of feudal Japan mixed with mystic lizard demons from hell. That issue includes one of my favorite Turtles pages:

Also from the second volume, a color version of an issue of the Return to New York story that’s a favorite of mine.

Along with the batch of ninja nostalgia, I picked up some bargain-priced Fine copies of Paul Chadwick’s The World Below. It’s no secret I love Chadwick’s Concrete series. World Below and its sequel, the four-issue Deeper and Stranger, don’t have the same depth of storytelling and lush rendering as Concrete, but they are a fun romp through Chadwick’s science-fiction imagination.

I like the sequel better than the first series. The sequel uses black and white art with no color, which is almost always how I prefer to see Chadwick’s art. And, the first series suffered from too many flashbacks trying to make me care about characters I never properly met, since the story started right in the middle of the action. Each time a character faced a crisis I wasn’t invested in, the character flashed back to a similar situation in their early life to beat me over the head with how huge an emotional deal it all was. That didn’t work for me.

Also, I could have lived without seeing the characters say, “eff this” and “eff you, you effing effer” instead of using the actual profanity. Those pages in World Below #3 were physically painful to read, and even old-school characters like F@%$ would have been preferable.

It seems to me that if your dialogue depends on using the word “fuck”, then you should probably just say “fuck”.

The narrative problems (mostly) smooth out in the sequel, which has my favorite issue of the series and an unexpected ending that blew my mind. Deeper and Stranger fulfills the promise of the first World Below and the tagline on those covers: the deeper you go, the stranger it gets!

Finally, this month’s box of comics included a favorite from my Avengers collection that I sold off a few years ago. Recently, someone commented on my old post about the Stern/Buscema/Palmer run on Avengers in the 1980s. It reminded me that while I basically memorized those issues after reading them so many times, Avengers #266 featuring the Silver Surfer really needed to come back to my modest “Avengers favorites” collection.

Let’s get this out of the way right now: the issue is a post-script to one of the most god-awful, tragic dumpster fires Marvel produced in the 1980s: Secret Wars II. Don’t even get me started.

But this issue focuses on two powerful beings—one a respected hero, and one a reviled villain—who need to work together to heal a cataclysmic wound in the Earth before the planet falls apart and kills everyone. All in 32 ad-free pages, in which the fate of the world might depend on one total nerd’s desire to watch sitcom re-runs with his girlfriend instead of letting the disaster take its fatal course. It’s so insane!

This issue has many examples of Stern’s dialogue that endeared me to his Avengers. Namor and Hercules bust each other’s balls like only gods can do, but below their arguing I sense a mutual respect born of the knowledge that they are both beings of power, and maybe they need each other to call each other out sometimes to help keep their rages in check.

She-Hulk isn’t turned off at all by Hercules’ temper tantrums; she flatters him and straight-up asks him to dinner, which is almost as awesome as that time she hooked up with Juggernaut. Jennifer’s a being of great power, too, and she seems perfectly comfortable and relaxed about it.

Hercules’ thoughts on nobility and heroism after the villain supposedly “loses his powers” while saving the Earth — also a lovely piece of internal dialogue.

But my favorite part is the final scene where the villain reveals he never lost his powers at all, and that the hero was complicit in this deception.

But why?

The Silver Surfer’s comment on courage and vulnerability really sums up what I love about this Avengers run. Sure, it’s all fun and games in spandex with lots of punching and the fate of the universe at stake, and there’s no shortage of expositional thought balloons. But every now and then, Stern’s humanistic and thoughtful depictions of his characters meld with John Buscema’s and Tom Palmer’s artwork to create high points of visual literature.

You know what? I might need to reclaim a few more of my favorite story arcs from this run — especially the Kang saga and the assault on Avengers Mansion.

That’s it for September’s big box of free comics, and I am excited to tell you about the October box that is on its way!

more free comics

Tags

big box of comics, comic books, Dreadstar, Eclipse Comics, Epic Comics, Jim Starlin, MiracleMan, Neil Gaiman, review

Just when I’d wrapped up a series of posts about the big box of free comics I got thanks to readers who used my affiliate links to find books at MyComicShop.com, another note from the retailer arrived to say I’d earned an additional $80 in store credit. That same week, I’d found a good deal on eBay to replace one of my favorite (and previously sold) action/crime series, DC/Vertigo’s The Losers, so I was left with very few holes in my collection. The Dark Horse Conan stories I’d like to read again were either too pricey or currently out of stock, so I dug around in my short boxes until it hit me: I still don’t have the complete original Miracleman series!

Over the years, I’d tracked down affordable copies in respectable condition of issues #1–20, and this quest was aided near the end by Marvel’s reprints of the original series. As Marvel made new, high-quality reprints available, the ridiculous prices for the original books decreased. Issue #15, one of the last gems to enter my collection, used to run from $150 up to several hundred bucks, for example. Now I have a copy in wonderful, though not perfect, condition, and it didn’t cost an arm and a leg.

I didn’t worry too much about collecting issues #21–24 because Marvel reprinted #21 and 22 in their repackaging of Neil Gaiman’s Golden Age storyline, and it seemed that Gaiman was slated to finish the Silver Age story that ended with a cliffhanger and was never completed due to Eclipse Comics’ demise. But here we are, years later, and we still haven’t seen the end of that story. I’m glad for Gaiman’s recent success with American Gods, but it isn’t a project that interests me. The gods I want to read about have “Miracle” in their names!

So, armed with some store credit, I picked up issues #21-23 of the original series, leaving me with only the rare (and still a bit pricey) #24 on my wish list. I’ve read them all before, thanks to scans posted online, but it’s just a different and more satisfying experience to read the physical copies. (You can find scans of the original series at https://readcomiconline.to/Comic/Miracleman-1985)

Those three books ate up most of my store credit, but I had just enough left over to pick up another story I’ve read before but was partially incomplete in my collection: The Price by Jim Starlin. Sure, I have the color “remastered” version that was the Dreadstar Annual, but I have never seen nor owned the original magazine-sized black-and-white edition, and I just love the black-and-white painted art of the original Metamorphosis Odyssey that appeared in Epic Illustrated and started the whole Dreadstar saga.

The original art reveals just how much the coloring/painting process enhanced the artwork’s mood and the story’s vibrancy. The original feels cold compared to the color version. It lacks the brilliant reds of the robes worn by members of the Church of the Instrumentality, the eye-popping colors that bring various cosmic and mystical energies to life on the page, and the powerful emotions suggested by the reprint’s color artwork.

However, the front and back-cover paintings are rendered in their original full-color and full-size glory, unlike in the reprint where they are shrunk and surrounded by additional cover elements that distract from their beauty—a complaint that at least one reader expressed in the original letters column of Dreadstar when the Annual was discussed.

I’m pleased to now have both versions of The Price in my Dreadstar collection, and the original was the one piece I’ve felt was missing over the years. How I assembled, lost, and re-assembled the entire original series four times is a saga of collector triumph and tragedy, but I’m happy to now have every issue I ever wanted from one of my all-time favorite stories in any medium.

Now if we could just see the end of Miracleman, all would be right with the universe.

Thank you, readers and fans of sequential art for visiting this site and using it to find the books you want!

Collectors’ Guide:

Miracleman #1-24 (original 1985 series, Eclipse Comics)

Miracleman (reprint series by Marvel Comics, includes original issues #1-16)

Miracleman Golden Age (reprint series by Marvel, includes original issues #17-22 )

The Price (original magazine-sized b&w edition, Eclipse Comics)

Dreadstar Annual #1 (full-color reprint of the original, Epic/Marvel comics)

 

Big Box of Comics Part 4: Planetary Omnibus

Tags

big box of comics, comic books, John Cassaday, Laura Martin, Planetary, planetary omnibus, review, Warren Ellis, Wildstorm Comics

This post is part of a series about what was inside this month’s big box of free comics.

What can I say about Planetary that hasn’t already been said in the 20 years since its first issue? From the series’ chronic delays of up to years between issues, to the Eisner-award-winning artwork, Planetary has been documented about as thoroughly as the weird events in Elijah Snow’s annual “Planetary Guides”.

The 864-page hardcover Omnibus edition looks like one of those Guides when you remove the slipcover, and that’s just one example of the high-quality design that was a hallmark of the series. People might have waited months or years for the original issues, but when each one finally came out, it looked damn good. So does the Omnibus.

Reading the Omnibus cover-to-cover puts Planetary in a fresh light. I gained a greater sense of the series’ continuity and complexity since I could read each chapter with the previous one still fresh in my mind. I got an even stronger impression of the amazing work by colorist Laura Martin (with assistance from Wildstorm FX). Although writer Warren Ellis and artist John Cassaday usually get the credit for the series, Martin’s contribution is integral to its visual splendor and the emotional effect of every page and panel. Maybe Planetary could have been good without Martin, but I doubt it would have been legendary.

The Omnibus also dissipates the major annoyance I had when I was originally piecing the series together from single issues; namely, a feeling that every installment consisted only of the three main characters visiting a random location where they met a random person who delivered lengthy exposition about a scenario based on pulp fiction or vintage superheroes, and that this exposition filled most of the pages before reaching a vague and hasty conclusion tacked on as an afterthought to the “cool concept” of the issue.

While several chapters do this, they are not as numerous as I remember, and they mostly take place in the beginning of the series. Reading the Omnibus makes it clear how the individual chapters fit into the big picture; it was just difficult to sort all that out with a series that took ten years to publish 27 issues, and because it was challenging to find affordable copies in complete chronological order if you came to the series late like I did.

Though I’ve thought highly of Planetary since the day I discovered a beat-up copy of #5 at a used bookstore, the Omnibus made me enjoy and appreciate it even more.

Buyer’s Guide:

The Planetary Omnibus is sometimes out of stock at MyComicShop.com, but usually available on Amazon.

 

Big Box of Comics Part 3: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Tags

big box of comics, comic books, eric talbot, Jim Lawson, Kevin Eastman, Mirage Studios, Peter Laird, review, steve lavigne, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, TMNT, triceraton

This post is part of a series about what was inside this month’s big box of free comics.

The Return to New York story in the original TMNT series #19–21 is even better than I remember. I think I was in turtle overload when I read it years ago, and I’d forgotten much of it. Visually, it’s one of the greatest TMNT stories of all time, with stunningly detailed artwork, creative layouts, extensively choreographed fight scenes, and incredible double-splash pages.

The black & white artwork creatively uses both black and white ink in addition to detailed screentone shading (sometimes called by the brand name Zip-A-Tone). The result is some of my favorite artwork in any TMNT story, and it’s a joy to watch the Turtles hack and slash their way through sewers full of enemies while their new Triceraton friend destroys everything in sight with his blaster.

But I was in for a shock when I read issue #6. It wasn’t just the wraparound cover that’s even more awesome than I remember. It wasn’t just the visual splendor of Turtles and Triceratons in combat. No, the shock was the discovery of just how many ideas I apparently stole from this single issue for my fiction series, The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches.

Issue #6 has asteroids, dinosaur-type aliens in a combat ring fighting to the death, a ruling body referred to only as the High Council, silly satire, aliens who dislike mammals (“Shut your face, you puny piece of mammal droppings!”), heroes who insult the dino-aliens (“Where I come from, bozos like you know their place—in museums, displayed as skeletons of long-dead ancient freaks!”), fight scenes that last for several pages with scant dialogue, and a shoot-out while attempting to board a spaceship. Somehow, this mid-1980s masterpiece burrowed so deeply into my brain that I was unconsciously drawing on it for inspiration decades later.

I wasn’t planning on picking up the original ten issues of the series, but after reading #6, I want to read the whole storyline again!

Buyers Guide:

—Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #6. Reprinted in: Ultimate Collection Hardcover #1.

—Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #19-21, Return to New York. Reprinted in Ultimate Collection Hardcover #3.

Big Box of Comics Part 2: Conan in Queen of the Black Coast

Tags

Bêlit, becky cloonan, big box of comics, Brian Wood, comic books, Conan, Dark Horse, queen of the black coast, review

This post is part of a series about what was inside this month’s big box of free comics.

I really wanted to like this story, which is split across the fifth and sixth Conan Omnibuses. I hoped the negative reviews were simply cynical. But I couldn’t even read the whole thing. In the interest of expanding Robert E. Howard’s original tale, this version adds characters I didn’t need, adventures I didn’t care about, and questionable depictions of Conan and his pirate queen. Least believable is how Conan allows himself to be beaten, chained, and imprisoned in a ludicrous subterfuge to plunder a town. This goes against everything we know about Conan’s forceful character. Cloonan, whose artwork I usually love, chose to portray Conan with a slimmer, more realistic anatomy—something more like Steve Rude’s Nexus than your typical comic-book he-man—but that doesn’t fit Conan either. Conan is larger than life, and if there was ever a character who should appear large, intimidating, and insanely muscular, it’s Conan.

Just as troubling was the treatment of Bêlit. She has a crew of strong, skilled sailors who worship her like a goddess, but she lacks the fighting ability we would expect from a battle-hardened pirate. Instead, she gained leadership of the crew by leading them on a somewhat cunning mission in which her main contribution was planning. While I like the idea of Bêlit using her brains and not just her brawn, this approach gives us zero reason to believe her pirate crew would revere her so devoutly. She appears to have a hypnotic sexuality, but it takes more than being sexy to command a pirate crew. She comes across as a horny waif, not a total bad-ass, and that does her a disservice.

The visual depiction of her is even more troubling than that of Conan. Bêlit looks like a raving psycho with madness in her eyes, a slender goth sexpot on the verge of a breakdown instead of a conquering queen of the seas. Though she’s drawn with a nice enough figure, her face could only inspire fear, not love. What exactly does Conan see in her? To make matters worse, the colorists usually make her skin a stark white. She isn’t simply “pale” with “milky skin” as described in the text. She’s been painted bright white like she’s auditioning for Marilyn Manson or the Misfits. (Oddly, her skin is given a normal flesh tone in some scenes or issues, and this just makes the pasty white look seem even more out of place.) The color of Bêlit’s skin is one thing this adaptation should have changed from the original text, because it never made sense to have a sailor with milky white skin. Unless she was a sailor in Arctic seas, she would have been quite tan from exposure to the sun on the deck of her ship. Instead, she is someone’s goth-rock fantasy girl, and Conan is her long-haired boyfriend who listens to Joy Division, and it’s doubtful these two could command a ship, much less conquer many of them.

The story expansion also screws up the final, poignant scene from the original story. Bêlit’s fiery burial at sea is spliced in chunks with an unnecessary scene from after the funeral, where Conan is talking to someone in a tavern, someone who can see what an emotional wreck Conan is. If this scene was entirely cut from the story so we could simply witness the burial, we would know Conan was wrecked because we would be wrecked with him. Instead, we keep getting pulled out of the moment to visit the uninteresting tavern.

That’s just a few of the problems in this adaptation, and despite my enthusiasm about female pirates in general and the original Queen of the Black Coast specifically, I cannot recommend it.

Buyer’s Guide:

Conan Omnibus #5: Piracy and Passion.
Conan Omnibus #6: Savagery and Sorcery.

Big Box of Comics Part 1: Concrete

Tags

big box of comics, comic books, Concrete, Dark Horse, indie, Paul Chadwick, review

This post is part of a series about what was inside this month’s big box of free comics.

Concrete is just as good as I remember, except for the Fragile Creature series in which Chadwick experimented with a Moebius-influenced line story that is less beautiful than his other artwork on the series and lacks the physical weight suggested by a heavy character like Concrete. Plus, I found the story boring compared to the 10-issue series and the six-issue Think Like a Mountain.

Mountain features one of my favorite scenes: Concrete walks underwater along the Pacific Northwest coast. He encounters a shark swarm, a hidden octopus, and a horrific “ghost net”: a fishing net lost at sea that traps fish, birds, seals, and other animals in its inescapable tangle until they die.

Like Mountain and the story about building a sustainable farm, the six issues of The Human Dilemma focus on Chadwick’s ecological concerns, which he discusses in more detail in supplementary articles and responses to readers’ letters. Chadwick does a remarkable job of giving his characters opposing viewpoints to argue and question, so that even if some characters are preachy, it doesn’t feel like the storyteller is preaching.

Instead, the stories reveal the complexity of taking action or even reaching a solid conclusion about environmental concerns (and everything else in life). Characters reach a decision then find reasons to doubt they made the right choice. They change their minds. Characters make bad decisions and suffer the consequences, or even suffer for their more noble actions. Besides telling a damn good story, Concrete invites readers to question, ponder, and re-evaluate.

Chadwick’s art is a delight. Although I liked the full-color art in Mountain, Concrete shines brightest in black & white printings that show off the compositional beauty of every page. Chadwick uses creative points of view in many panels, such as in Dilemma when we see a character through a wine bottle that distorts his image, which is perfect for a scene in which the character’s emotions are out of control and leading him to make a poor decision.

The first six issues of the original series were collected, in pairs, in three slim paperback volumes. The first two paperbacks are worth getting for the additional pages of story Chadwick had room to include in those editions, pages which are not simply “deleted scenes” but enhance the story. I got all three paperbacks and the original single issues because the reprints do not include the original back covers I am so fond of.

I was surprised to find the final two issues of Dilemma were not in the big box. But this is a mistake that turned out well. When I went to MyComicShop.com to order them, I found my missing ninth issue of the original series had become available. Yes! Into the shopping cart! (I even had just enough store credit remaining to pay for them and their shipping. Bonus!) I did not replace some issues of odds and ends, nor the Killer Smile limited series I don’t recall being thrilled with; but aside from the hard-to-find second volume of collected short stories, I’m happy to once again have a Concrete collection that includes the best of the best.

Buyer’s Guide: 

—Concrete #1-10.
–The paperback reprints of the first six issues: Land and Sea. A New Life. Odd Jobs. All ten issues are reprinted in Complete Concrete or the Concrete TPB series.
–Concrete: Think Like a Mountain. Also in TPB.
–Concrete: The Human Dilemma.
–Concrete: The Complete Short Stories.

inside the big box of free comics

Tags

affiliate program, big box of comics, blogging, comic books

In the first five months of 2019, Mars Will Send No More earned just over $200 in store credit thanks to readers who followed links to find and buy comics at MyComicShop.com. That store credit means a big bonus box of comics for me this month, and it does more than justify the endless hours I spent finding various issues and series in the store so readers can get right to what they want with a single click. It means hours of happily reading old favorites and exploring new books! So, let’s open the big box of virtually free comics and see what awesomeness awaits!

Note: Although this post celebrates the results of affiliate links, every hyperlink below leads to a previous post here on MWSNM where the books are discussed in more detail.

First up: Armadillo #2 by Jim Franklin. This off-beat 1970s underground publication by Rip Off Press cost 50 cents when it came out, and I sold my copy in VF+ condition for $50. The book is on my list of 20 All-Time Favorite Comics, and I have sorely missed it. This time around, I got a VG+ copy that was selling for about $9, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that other than some creases along the spine and a few dings on the back cover, the book is in outstanding shape. For some surrealist art featuring armadillos, see my post with images from the interior.

Next up: Wolverine #75 and Wolverine #100. Both of these feature Wolverine holograms, and #100 has Wolverine switching back and forth between his costume and his skeleton. Yes! I don’t even care much for the interiors of these books, but of all the books I sold with holograms in 2013, these are the two I regret not having on hand. I’ve posted about both these books and scanned the hologram covers, so see my posts about Wolverine #100 and about the Fatal Attractions event that features a slew of holographic X-Men covers.

Next, something I’ve wanted for a long time: replacement issues for the complete Concrete collection I used to have! I didn’t covet every issue, just the ones I loved most. Last year, thanks to another dose of store credit, I started to put the series back together. I am still missing #9 of the first 10-issue series, and Volume 2 of the Complete Short Stories, but I am looking forward to re-reading the six-issue series Think Like a Mountain, and The Human Dilemma, plus the gorgeous covers and interior art from the original series. You can view the glorious back covers and more in my post about Concrete.

The fun doesn’t end there. I have never stopped missing my complete collection of Planetary, so this time around I got the Planetary Omnibus. It’s a giant beast, with more than 850 pages, and beautifully done. Even though I know the whole story, the artwork in Planetary is just incredible to look at. This is the one I am most looking forward to devouring, and you can take a look at my posts about Planetary to see what madness and mayhem fill its pages.

Speaking of mayhem: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Once upon a time, I had a lovely reprint collection consisting of the four full-color Mirage “Graphic Novel” editions, plus 3 or 4 of the black & white “Collected Book TPB” editions, and about a dozen other single issues of the original Mirage series by creators I liked. They were fun to read and fun to own, but I was only sad about selling a few of my favorites. This time around, I got the three Michael Zulli issues that are super weird and dark, the three issues of the Return to New York story that feature a Triceraton from the earliest stories, and issue #6 of the original series, which features a fun drawing of Turtle vs. Triceraton on the cover. There are still a few Turtle goodies on my wish list, such as issue #10, but this batch will keep me in Turtle heaven for a good long while.

Completing this massive stack of comic books are the two books that collect the entire Queen of the Black Coast story as told a few years ago by Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan in Dark Horse’s ongoing Conan series. I used to have a complete set of the first 51 issues of that series, plus the reprints with Frank Frazetta covers, and I considered trying to replace all of them because of how awesome they were. But I was in the mood for something new, and despite the mixed reviews I’ve read about this version of the Conan classic, Queen of the Black Coast is hands-down my favorite story from the original Robert E. Howard publications. Considering my obsession with female pirates, that should come as no surprise.

I’ll let you know what I think of the Conan story. Until then, thank you for dropping by to plunder my comic book archives, and for your generous use of my affiliate links to find books you want to buy.

The Martian Top 40

Tags

comic book blogs, comic books, quarterly report

Mars Will Send No More is approaching the end of its eighth year, so I’ve been doing maintenance on it, clearing out dead wood and tidying up a bit. With more than 1500 posts, this garden of artistic obsessions requires pruning now and then. But I don’t mind. It’s fun to take a trip down memory lane and re-experience the ramshackle madness and mayhem upon which this blog was founded.

It’s a strange time for comic book blogs. Lloyd Wright at Diversions of the Groovy Kind is celebrating ten years of bronze-age comics blogging with nearly 3000 posts, and he’s musing on how life has changed since he started. He’s returned to writing comic books after stoking the fires of his nostalgia, and he’s a grandfather now, so he plans to post less frequently. Lloyd was a big influence on Mars in its formative days, so visit Diversions to wish him well and check out his latest original creations.

Paul O’Connor at Longbox Graveyard was an early supporter of my blogging endeavors when Mars was getting off the ground, and he’s been through changes, too. His “graveyard” has long since been been pruned and organized into a collection of his bronze-age favorites. He’s survived Californian fires, moved to Canada and returned, and is doubtlessly pondering his next conquest in the wake of leaving Twitter and putting his blog on indefinite hiatus. Drop by the Longbox to explore his entertaining collection of personal musings and generous guest blogs by fellow comic-book fans, and let him know we’d love to see him back.

Here on the distant frontiers of my Martian outpost, I’ve got no plans to abandon these virtual fortifications any time soon. We can always find something to rap about, whether it’s poetry, writing, art, food, or cats. But in honor of Lloyd and Paul and all the comic book bloggers out there, I’ll share an update about the comic book posts that have been the most popular here. Some of them overlap with my twenty-two all-time favorite comics, which you can find on the Archives Page. Some of them are from the earliest days of this blog, and others have recently rocketed to the top.

Here they are, in descending order starting from the currently most-viewed. Thank you for indulging and sharing my obsessions and joys, and stay creative.

Our Top Forty Most-Viewed Comic Book Posts
Magneto Rips out all of Wolverine’s Adamantium!
First Appearance of Spider-man’s Black Costume!
The Death of Barry Allen: Crisis on Infinite Earths 8
EC Comics & Ray Bradbury: There Will Come Soft Rains!
KISS: 1977 Marvel Comics Super Special #1
Dinosaurs of Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson!
Animal Man 5: The Coyote Gospel!
G.I. Joe 21 – The Silent Issue!
Miracleman 15: Nemesis!
Origin of Starfire!
X-Men: Fatal Attractions Wrap Around Covers With Holograms!
The Conception and Birth of Nightcrawler!
Wolverine Aces the Red Skull!
Jack Kirby’s 2001 A Space Odyssey – First Issue!
Complete Jack Kirby Portfolio from 1971!
Wolverine Aces the Hulk!
Origin of Galactus by Jack Kirby
Michael Zulli’s Ninja Turtles!
Black Cat: She’s So Totally Amoral!
Your Guide to Getting Started Selling Comic Books on eBay
All I’ve Got to Worry About Is Shooting My Dinosaur!
Jim Starlin’s Psychic Battle Motif: Thanos vs. Galactus
Jim Lee X-Men Posters 3!
A Look Inside Bruce Jones’ Run on the Incredible Hulk
Jim Lee X-Men Posters 1
Robert Crumb’s Meatball!
Todd McFarlane’s Torment of the Lizard!
Scenes from Jack Kirby’s Black Hole Adaptation!
Do You Want to Know More about the Creepy Guy at the End of Avengers?
Jim Lee X-Men Posters 2!
Anatomy of a Comic Book Bad Girl!
Origins of OMAC: Made of the Future: EC Comics
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Graphic Novel Collection by First
Preeeeeeeesenting… The Women’s Texas Championship!
Rick Griffin: Man from Utopia!
Tygers: Alan Moore’s Legendary Empire of Tears!
The Human Head According to John Buscema!
What If Spider-Man Had Stopped the Burglar?!
Wolverine Gallery 22: Jim Lee
Judge Dredd versus Satanus, the Black Tyrannosaur!

Movies vs. Comic Books: Who Controls Time?

Tags

authority, Avengers, Civil War, comic books, film, Mark Millar, movies, narrative structure, planet hulk, superhero, thor ragnarok, time, Warren Ellis, widescreen comics

Now that films based on comic books and superheroes have firmly entered the mainstream of popular culture, characters and storylines we comics readers have enjoyed for years regularly come to life on the big screen for a wider audience than comics ever reached. Long-time readers are often thrilled to see their favorite heroes in live-action movies, but some feel a bit of regret. After all, it can be disheartening to hear people discussing characters as if the movies tell the entire story, when many readers have followed the characters in-depth for years or even decades.

Compressing years of story into a two-hour theater experience means a lot gets left out, as anyone who read the Planet Hulk stories can tell you about the movie Thor: Ragnarok, or anyone who read Marvel’s Civil War comics can tell you about the Captain America movie of the same name. Plus, the big screen and the printed page are two distinctly different mediums, each with its own storytelling conventions, so they deliver distinctly different stories.

Movies usually follow a formulaic narrative structure. From the inciting incident to the hero’s crisis, predicting the next story beat in a movie is pretty easy. Comic books often employ more flexible and unusual structures—a point in their favor in my opinion. This is true despite a trend toward making modern mainstream comic books more cinematic in their approach to storytelling.

Near the turn of the century, Warren Ellis used the term widescreen comics to describe the blockbuster-movie style he was creating in The Authority with artists Bryan Hitch and Paul Neary. After 12 issues, writer Mark Millar and artist Frank Quitely came on board and kept up the cinematic approach. Millar, Hitch, and Neary soon combined forces to reinvent the Avengers as The Ultimates—the forerunner of the current film versions of the Avengers. For a more in-depth look at widescreen comics, and how they influenced movies as much as movies influenced them, see Peter Suderman’s article for Vox.

As far as I’m concerned, there hasn’t been a movie yet that equals those first 29 issues of The Authority. But it’s more than just the awesome stories, vicious dialogue, and stunning artwork. What makes the printed page most enjoyable for me can be summed up in two words: time control.

In a film, time passes at a fixed speed determined by the flow of film through a projector, or its digital equivalent these days. Yes, a movie can use slow motion or speed up time, but all of that is determined by the movie itself. Moviegoers have no control of it in a theater. Time passes at a pace determined exclusively by the filmmakers.

With printed pages, the reader controls time. The reader determines how long to spend on a panel or page. Readers can turn back the pages to see something again if they did not absorb it on the first read. The reader can set the book down and walk away, then come back to it and pick up again from any point in the narrative. Movies only provide this convenience if you own or stream a copy at home and can rewind it or freeze the frames.

While I enjoy movies, I tend to enjoy their comic-book source material far more due to time control. An awesome action scene might be over in seconds or minutes on the big screen, but I can linger on it for as long as I like with a printed page. A stunning visual appears on the screen for fleeting moments, then moves on to the next one. It leaves me feeling unsatisfied when I want to spend more time taking in all its detail and beauty. With a comic book, I can pore over the artists’ rendering and take time to appreciate every line and shape, every bit of hard work that went into inking and coloring the picture. Instead of having it all fade away as I leave a theater, I can come back to it again and again with a book.

While many recent comic-book movies do look great, the awesomeness always go by too quickly for me. I never have a chance to fully appreciate it before its gone. And when the theater lights come on, fun time is over unless I want to buy another ticket. The experience is transient and ephemeral compared to a physical book I can keep for years.

None of this should be taken as an argument over which medium is “better”. Enjoy what you enjoy. This is only an attempt to articulate a feeling I’ve had for years but never explained very well to people who expect me to be super excited about recent superhero movies. It isn’t that the movies are bad; they simply lack one of the biggest things that gives me enjoyment with comic books: time control.

 

On a less serious note: a video.

throw another comic book on the bonfire

Tags

auction, comic books

Now, now. Don’t really go burning comic books… unless you post a video of it on YouTube, and then I’d like a hyperlink. Here is a quick rundown of goodies I recently listed for sale on eBay.

New Gods #9 has seen better days. It’s the issue that got me into this series, and the Bug’s pathos-drenched speech is a favorite comic book monologue of mine.

Issues of the Elektra limited series used to be priced higher, but they’ve come way, way down since they got reprinted in TPB editions. Miller and Sienkiewicz offer up a mix of action-movie firepower and hallucinogenic sequences of mental illness, medication, and demons from hell. It’s a wild story.

The Essential Iron Fist Vol. 1 “phone book” style reprint includes all the legendary Claremont/Byrne issues. They don’t rock my world as much as they did when I was a teenager, but I got this just to sit down and read them all in order in one go for once in my life! Mission accomplished.

Turtle Soup is a cool one-shot that belongs in any true Ninja Turtles fan’s collection. It has a cool dream sequence by Steve Bissette, which we’ve posted scans of before.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #9 and #10 have a few spine creases, but the three-page splash fold-out in #10 is a thing of wonder. I’ve posted scans from it before.

This first issue of Punisher War Journal features some of the earliest work Jim Lee produced for Marvel Comics, along with Carl “Alien Legion” Potts. It’s pretty good, but I think a true Punisher afficionado will appreciate it more than me.

Gobbledygook is another Ninja Turtles-related treasure from Mirage Studios in the late 1980s. It’s a sprawling affair with “pin-up” Turtle art, stories from various artists, and lots of non-turtle weirdness.

Last but not least, a 7-issue Avengers run that includes the complete Red Zone storyline. The art is super cool, and the story of a red cloud of infectious agents released from a lab under Mount Rushmore is pretty compelling. Plus, She-Hulk totally rages out of control, and Black Panther gets fed up with Red Skull’s racist nonsense and punches his bloody jaw right off his face.

virtual viking funeral of comic books

Tags

auctions, comic books

If you really want to make this a viking funeral, take your monitor or mobile device and set it on fire. Otherwise, let’s just take a nostalgically informal tour through my recent eBay sales.

Clutch is one of my favorite rock bands, and this album has some great jams on it. (My favorite album of theirs is Blast Tyrant.) The buyer turned out to be a huge Static-X fan, and was very excited about the Wayne Static postcard included in this shipment.

I got lucky and found these two issues of Freak Brothers years ago for 50 cents each, so I made a few bucks on these in the auction. This stuff cracks me up.

I got this historic appearance of Wolverine for free from MyComicShop thanks to the affiliate program on this blog and my angelic readers who click through links to buy comics. I thought I’d make $10 or so in auction, but someone walked away with a sweet deal on this at 99 cents final bid. Plus, I packed a few extra 90s-era X-men goodies with shiny silvery covers. The buyer called it the best eBay transaction ever and effusively praised me and my ability to totally rock. Even if I made zero dollars, it was fun to spread the joy of comics across the globe.

I’ve posted scans of Michael Zulli’s work on these three issues of Ninja Turtles, and they get a stupid amount of page views sometimes. Why? Because they’re friggin’ awesome, that’s why. These would have a higher resale value if the covers didn’t have visible wear, and the buyer again walked away with a steal of a deal getting them for less than $2.

These babies retail for $10-15 a piece in this condition, but they don’t sell very fast. So I opened the auction at 99 cents, and someone got a murderous deal at less than $5 for the set. Rick Veitch did the story in these three issues, and it has some of my favorite pages from the original Mirage Studios series.

This 2009 edition of The Arabian Nights is a gorgeous hardcover production complete with gilded page edges, a cloth bookmark, and full-color illustrations. I read a few, and felt the repeated abuse and sexual enslavement of women did not make for entertaining reading. Even the consensual sex in here is described using the language of violence. It’s neat to look at this as a reference on an ancient culture, but it just made me think the culture in question was full of assholes. Sold for 99 cents!

I was excited about IDW bringing the Turtles back, until these first issues turned out to be a kind of rehashed origin story with changes that seemed utterly pointless. I love these covers, but honestly I’d rather have them as posters than be reading the series. Fortunately, they’ve retained their resale value, and someone overseas will be enjoying them for what I paid for them brand new a few years ago.

Like Arabian Nights, Jules Verne’s story Tigers and Traitors (which you might also see referred to as The Steam House) kind of convinced me that people of history were total assholes. On the other hand, by being everything I did NOT want in a story, it helped me define my own kind of ultimate story. A story where the women kick ass, the cats totally destroy and reign supreme, and imperialists are crushed beneath the bloody heels of the rebellion. You know, a happy story!

I expected that everyone who wants a copy of Old Man Logan already has it, considering how popular it was and how many printings the issues went through. But, even though my collection of the complete story included some well-worn early issues, it turns out most of the Old Man Logan issues are worth more than their original sales price in VF+ or better. I got nearly $40 for the set on a 99-cent auction, and stuffed the envelope full of all the Wolverine-related items it could hold.

Last but not least, I sold four individual issues from the original New Gods series by Jack Kirby. I had assembled a nice but affordable set of these in VG+ to FN condition over the years, but the glossy five-issue reprint is good enough for me. My favorite issues are #6, #7 and #9, so I put the rest of them up at 99 cents each. #1 still has a decent street value even in a somewhat battered VG condition, with a final bid of about $14.

 

 

Ten More Top Ten Favorite Single Issues

Tags

comic books, top ten

Since we posted Our Top Ten Favorite Single Issues in October, 2011, our fan-blogging obsessions brought many more printed treasures to our attention. One by one, we added them to Mars Will Send No More until today’s post can link you to every one of them for in-depth exploration.

Qualifications for inclusion on this list are simple: The issue cannot be from a series already covered in our original Top Ten, and it must be brain-stunningly awesome. Six of them are black-and-white books, and we had only read three of them before we started this site in 2011. Allow us to present, in no particular order, Ten More of Our All-Time Favorite Single Issues. Click their titles to learn more about each one!

Armadillo Comics #2 by Jim Franklin; 1971, Rip Off Press

Man from Utopia #0 by Rick Griffin; 1972

Lone Wolf & Cub #28; First Publishing

Devil Dinosaur #1 by Jack Kirby; Marvel, 1978

Cartoon History of the Universe #1 by Larry Gonick; 1978, Rip Off Press

Anarchy Comics #1; 1978, Last Gasp

Silver Surfer #1; Marvel, 1968

Super Villain Classics #1; Marvel, 1983

World Around Us #15: Prehistoric Animals; Gilberton, 1959

Psychotic Adventures #2. Last Gasp, 1974.

Runner up:
Spectacular Spider-man #21; Marvel, 2003.

But what about…?
Several noteworthy series have not made it into our Top 20 single issues. This includes works like DMZ, Clan Apis, Frank, 100 Bullets, and Sin City, where the entire series as a work of art outweighs any single issue. We might rectify this with future lists!

Your Guide to Getting Started Selling Comic Books on eBay

Tags

comic books, eBay, guide, how do i sell my comics, selling comics on eBay, what are my comics worth

Since we started this blog, many people have asked for advice on selling their comic books. Often, someone ends up with a big box of comics and no idea what they are worth. Or, they have an idea about what they hope the comics are worth, but no experience selling comic books on eBay. This post will serve as your introduction to the basics of selling comic books on eBay. We will discuss estimating value, packaging comics as collections vs. single issues, some simple shipping options, tips for making a great listing, and some alternatives to the traditional auction-style listing.

ESTIMATING VALUE – What are my comics worth?

Most 80s and 90s comics have a very low resale value right now. Many books considered collectible at that time have slipped into near worthlessness now. That’s the bad news.

Of course, not all comic books have become worthless from a resale perspective. But how do you know what you have? You may or may not know the difference between a nearly worthless stack of comics and the handful of them that have serious resale value.

If you know what you have, and you have a realistic sense of its current market value, then your job is pretty easy. If you don’t, you could waste your time trying to sell worthless stuff. Or, worse, you could let some valuable things go for nothing.

Let’s use Wolverine as an example. The Miller/Claremont limited series from 1982, in first printings especially, can still fetch a worthy sum on the market. Anything more recent than the first 25 issues of the Larry Hama series, however, probably languishes in bargain bins across the USA now. The number of people dumping their comic books in a hurry since the recession began several years ago makes estimating value even more confusing. Retailers often price Wolverine #100, with its awesome hologram cover, in the neighborhood of $10, but we found a copy for 50 cents in a used bookstore a few years ago.

If you don’t have that kind of detailed knowledge of your big box of comics, you can easily look up reasonably current retail prices at MyComicShop.com. Their search function is pretty friendly. It helps to search for both the title and the issue number. If you searched for “Wolverine,” for example, you would get a ton of titles to sort through. If you searched for “Wolverine #100” instead, you get a short list of results and can easily identify yours by the cover.

Now, that gives you an idea of how major retailers price books currently. But remember, the attractiveness of eBay relies on people looking for deals. You should set your expectations for a price on eBay as lower than what a giant online retailer or local comic store would ask.

You can use eBay to see details on listings that have recently sold. Yes, looking at current sales tells you what people think (or wish) their comics are worth. Sold listings, however, give you a more realistic idea of current resale value. For example, you can see search results for “Wolverine #100” are quite confusing, even when limited to the category ‘collectibles’ and subcategory ‘comics.’ But, in the left sidebar, near the bottom, there is a check box to see only SOLD listings. Check that box and you can see how the book is really performing on eBay.

SELLING SETS vs. SINGLE ISSUES

If you have a “run” of a title – a big batch of sequential issues – then packaging it as a set is probably your best bet. You can try selling individual issues if they are especially valuable, but for the most part, we sell complete or nearly complete runs. Or, we sell a set of thematically-related stuff: a grab bag of 20-cent horror and sci-fi Marvel titles, for example.

In fact, eBay’s comic books category has a sub-category designed specifically for selling runs and sets to other collectors: the “Full Runs and Sets” category. (This is a little different from their sub-category “Collections,” which is intended to sell ALL your comics at once, as opposed to the first 50 issues of one title as a set.) You can try and sell single issues if you want, but consider how many listing fees you have to pay to do that. It adds up. Plus, if you are selling a book worth a dollar, why would a collector pay two to six dollars to get it shipped to them? It makes very little sense.

This brings us to the next point: When you put runs or sets together, think about how you will ship them.

SIMPLE SHIPPING OPTIONS

Most runs we’ve sold fit into a Medium Flat Rate Box #1 for USPS Priority Mail Flat Rate. There are TWO sizes of Medium Flat Rate boxes provided by USPS. You want #1, which has a depth of nearly 6 inches and can hold around 60 bagged/boarded issues. Cost to ship through eBay is $11.30

Smaller runs or sets we put in Padded Flat Rate Envelopes, although we always reinforce them with extra cardboard to keep the books from bending or getting their corners crushed from impacts in shipping. Cost to ship a Padded Flat Rate Envelope is $5.70.

On eBay, we also use the Global Shipping Program to pick up some international sales. This means you ship to a distribution center in the USA that ships to your buyer’s country. (We’re assuming you are in the USA – a narrow assumption given our global readership, but it’s what we know best from experience.) You only pay to ship it to the distribution center instead of paying overseas rates. Is it worth the time to do this? Definitely. We have sold both comic books and art internationally quite a few times. Have a look at eBay’s Getting Started page for Global Shipping Program.

You can often find a shipping rate that is cheaper than the Flat Rates we prefer. But, then you have to go buy packaging, weigh things, calculate costs, etc. We usually found that after we paid for boxes and envelopes, our shipping costs weren’t significantly less than if we had just used the free packaging from USPS for Priority Flat Rate. Plus, Priority Mail gets to your buyer in 2-3 days, and they love getting stuff fast. Happy buyer = positive feedback = increased confidence for future buyers = more sales.

But what about using the USPS Media Mail option to get a super cheap shipping rate? Good question. Media Mail is intended for books, CDs, and DVDs that do not contain advertising. Guess what? Comic books usually have ads in them. Technically, they do not qualify for Media Mail. Can you get away with using Media Mail? Well, people have cheated the system by doing it anyway. But, you run the risk of getting your shipment returned to you if USPS decides to inspect it. Everyone from Amazon to our local UPS store has warned us this might happen. So, we do not ever use Media Mail for shipments that do not really qualify for it. Do so at your own risk.

TIPS FOR MAKING GREAT LISTINGS

If you are not an avid comic book collector, you may not understand what matters to people who are. Collectors want to know EXACTLY what you have and what condition it is in. You may not care about a wrinkled corner, but a collector will. You may not care if you have X-men #5 or #11, but a collector will. Do these three things and your chance of a sale will increase:

1. You can upload up to 12 pictures, so upload 12 pics for every listing. Photograph the set, key single issues, anything with a defect, and a few interior pages to show their condition.

2. If there are any defects, state what they are in the listing. You don’t want anyone thinking you tried to pull a fast one on them. (Rolled or creased spines, bent corners, off-center staples, whatever.)

3. List every single issue in the set in your listing. BE SPECIFIC.

Please see our comments section for more details about the fine art of grading comics and describing their condition.

TO AUCTION OR NOT TO AUCTION

We prefer listing things as Fixed Price, not Auctions, and checking the box that allows buyers to send their ‘best offer.’ (Yes, this is a negotiation process, and no you are not committing to accepting best offers. In fact, you can make a counter-offer, or accept, or decline offers.) This way, we don’t lose our shirt or give books away if an Auction only gets a 99 cent bid before it closes. You can always drop the price of a Fixed Price listing if it isn’t selling, or accept the best offer you get. We always make these Fixed Price listings for the duration “Good Until Cancelled” – not seven days or 30 days, but forever.

You should consider what eBay charges for “insertion fees” when using this method. A typical listing fee is 30 cents. Even though your listing is “Good Until Cancelled,” eBay still cycles it through a 30-day period and then “relists” it at the end. Unless you listed under one of their periodic promotions for free listings, you can get hit with insertion fees every 30 days on a lot. 30 cents is not much on a single $50 listing, for example, but can add up fast if you have a hundred single-issue lots that won’t earn you more than a dollar or two to begin with.

ANY OTHER QUESTIONS?

As you might have guessed from looking around this blog, we love discussing comic books. If you have any questions for us, please comment or contact us. If you have some tips and tricks of your own on eBay, we’d love to hear from you!

Secret Holiday Origin of Mars Will Send No More!

Tags

christmas, comic books, garage, gramma, holiday, memoir, origin, vacation

Every geek has their own secret origin, a time when the world of comic books magically came to life for them. I’ve never changed into a costume in a phone booth, but I did transform into a mutant in a garage many times during my childhood vacations.

My family lived in rural Missouri for many years. My parents’ families mostly lived in small-town Ohio back then. In most Decembers of my pre-adolescent years, Mom, Dad, Sister, and I packed our bags to drive roughly ten hours north and spend Christmas with the families.

Mom’s parents had a detached garage off their modest but cozy three-bedroom house. The backyard had trees, a bench swing, a small garden, a clothesline. To get to the garage, I walked along square, concrete tiles with black pebbles in the spaces between. A waist-high chain-link fence separated the small path from the driveway. A wooden door opened into the darkness of the garage, which at that time of year was always cold. When the moon was up or the back porch light was on, I saw my breath.

The garage possessed a unique scent. Grampa smoked cigarettes in there and framed pictures at his work bench. Dust, sawdust, stale cigarette smoke, and mold. Dampness, but frozen. It’s not the bouquet you might associate with happiness, 25 years later – unless you were also there with me to turn on the dim light, squeeze between the cars, and approach the ramshackle shelves on the far wall. Those shelves held every comic book my grandparents had purchased for their four children from the 1950s through the 1970s, and some that Gramma still liked to follow in the 1980s, like Conan, Dr. Strange, and Mike Grell’s Warlord. She always called them “funny books”, whether they were funny or serious.

Every year I dug out a new section of the stacks – hundreds, maybe thousands of books. Some years, I excavated completely unknown buried treasures. Some years, I found an issue I’d read before: a copy of World’s Finest #147 featuring Superman and Batman, or Tales of Suspense featuring Thor, Iron Man, or the Human Torch. With a year between visits to Ohio, it was like meeting an old friend. Early issues of X-men and Spider-man sat under so much dust and time and disuse that I sometimes got sick. I had pretty bad allergies to dust and mold at that age but zero qualms about risking my health to read those books. I would take an armful back inside the warm house, find a comfy spot to curl up, and be absorbed for hours. If the adults wanted to stay up late and play Euchre at the kitchen table, I might even make two or three trips to the garage!

Some of those books wouldn’t interest me now as an adult reader, but many have stood the test of time or have such intense nostalgia value that they’ve appeared on this blog. I regret that I wasn’t able to buy the collection when it was sold in the 1990s. It didn’t sell for much, considering how many decades it had been exposed to the elements. The books weren’t in great shape. But even a collection of Fair to VG+ vintage comics is a wonder to behold.

Those books took my mind on so many adventures and fantasies as a kid, and you can’t really put a dollar figure on fuel for your imagination. But these days, if the nostalgia becomes too acute, I can find most of them at My Comic Shop.