I went wondering the web in search of comic news today. I know, I know, that’s like walking alone in a dimly lit, seedy area of town near some railroad tracks while counting a bunch of money, just not a good idea. Well, today I could have had wads of cash falling out of my pockets, ‘cause there is nothing out there. Nada, zero, zilch… no comic news.
So, I’m going to tell you about Chuck’s weekend, present an idea, review a couple of books and get home early for once on a Monday.
Chuck the Champ…
I don’t know too much about what and how it went down, but Chuck Grigsby is back in his winning ways again this time in Russia. Chuck was in Eastern Russia to fight this last weekend. He won a second round decision and as it was described to me by his wife Sara, he was dominate enough in the first two rounds to have the fight called before a third round was even started. I would have some great pics of a Grigsby punch finding a face, but I’m not smart enough to figure out how to download them into this post. boo. sorry.
Binding Comics 101…
Last weekend I was wondering around the web looking for comic book news. (See, only bad comes of the internets. Stupid Al Gore for creating something so evil.) I came across a post on Bleedingcool.com about book binding for comic collectors. The post was about a specific place in Texas, which I’ve later found to be, in comparison to a lot of other places, rather reasonable and how they were going to stop binding comics after the company was purchased.
I was intrigued. What was this comic binding thing? I did some digging. What I found was a sub-set of comic collectors who, after collecting a run of comics, take or send their collection off to a book binder and have them made into hardcover collections.
Holy bad-ass books Batman!! I wanted to know more and wanted to know how I could do this with some of the series I’ve got piling up and annoying my wife in walls worth of white boxes.
There are several companies doing this across the country, but no one, that we could find, currently and actively doing it in Des Moines. So, we contacted a local book binder to see if he would have interest in doing something like this. We talked at length and probably scared Matt at our excitement in getting stuff bound. (I’m guessing he doesn’t deal with excited people getting medical journals and old bibles bound up very often.)
Matt took a run of Hourman (Yes, the DC book from a decade ago, it was good, shut up) and took some light information from us and a couple of days later we had a bound volume of Hourman in our hands. It looks great is something DC will NEVER republish in softcover, let alone in hardcover. Ah, but now it is.
The ideas for binding are limitless. That complete run of Fantastic Four you have all neatly filled away now could be in a matching set of hardcovers or that run of Fables or Preacher trade paperbacks, collected together in beautiful hardcovers at a much reduced price then what DC is charging.
So, you might be wondering what this costs. We are talking with Matt tomorrow and trying to get a good price nailed down. Last week he said it would run about $50 per collection and he could fit about 25 issues or two inches of paper into a collection. I compared this to the places on the web and with shipping costs added in, that is what most places end up costing. However, group discounts, a bunch of work at a time, could get us a discount.
I would love to present this to you as one more option for your collections. If you think this is something you might have interest in ask to see the one of a kind hardcover edition of Hourman we have. I think you will be surprised at how nice it is. Then talk to Kyle or I about the next step in getting those comics bound up.
Reviewing the Comics…
On the review docket today is some great space adventure, a renewed and revitalized classic and a book that could drive me quite mad.
Detective Comics…
First with the madness. Detective Comics is a fantastic example of the best and the worst of our artistic and literary medium. On the one hand is the art by J.H. Williams. Easily Detective has the best and most innovative layout of panels being done on a mainstream book. Pencils and inks are off the charts and the color, by industry award winner Dave Stewart, is unlike most comics, it is noticeably spectacular. There is not one bad thing you can say about the ART in Detective Comics. Too bad that is only one half of the whole.
The writing is so bad I admit I only looked at the pretty pictures. Greg Rucka is a long way away from the days of Whiteout, easily his best work. Rucka also writes one of the non-super Superman titles. I don’t remember which one and frankly, I care so little, I’m not going to get up to check which it is. His writing on which ever not-super title it is, happens to be better than his writing on Detective. What I’m getting at is that in the span of less than two issues he has made me not care for his character, not care for her supporting cast and actually wish harm on them. I’ve read A LOT of Batman comics over the years and have a full run of over four hundred (nearly five hundred) issues of Detective Comics. There have been bad issues and great issues in that run, but never did I wish they would just cancel it, until now.
I don’t care about the art being so great, I want my Batman back.
Rucka doesn’t make us care for this new character. He needed to give us something we would latch on to as DC forced this change of No Batman onto us. I don’t care that she is a lesbian. It isn’t even a relevant part of her character that has no back story and not one scrap of interesting plot that would make her better then than having the Huntress in the book instead.
I shouldn’t be so angry at this book, and wouldn’t be if I had a choice in collecting it, but after four hundred issues, I can’t drop it. I figure Batman will be back and make things right eventually, but in the mean time I’m stuck with paying more for. (YEAH! A question back up story I don’t read either and it doesn’t even have decent art.) I blame DC’s Editor in Hell, er, Chief for this horrible choice. Yes, we are all better for reading about multi-cultural aspects in our comics. Right, Right Blue Beetle and the Atom, those worked out too, but do we have to have Batman and Superman missing from the industries oldest continually running comics that are known for those characters carrying through good times and bad?
Fantastic Four…
Speaking of old stalwarts, The Fantastic Four is back and SO much better than it was just a few months ago. If you read this column you know my less then favorable love for Mark Miller’s writing. I understand he has a following, I am not in it. I did not make it through the first issue of his arc of FF. It was terrible and I was unwilling to torture myself with Ultimate FF inside the regular Marvel Universe. I’ve read the Fantastic Four since I was seven. I know good and bad first family stories and his was terrible. Oh, and sales showed too dropping in half during his inconsistent output. Now out of his shadow has come a far superior take.
I wasn’t sure what Jonathan Hickman would bring to the title. Writer of Nightly News and Pax Romona, he has written very little in the main stream of comics. And you don’t get much more main stream then the FF. The fore mentioned stories of his were not of a necessarily mass market reader friendly variety and with that he strode in and sent Mr. Fantastic to join a consortium of Mr. Fantastics. The plot of the first arc has Reed meeting alternate realities of himself and deciding if he wants to join this meeting of the minds to right wrongs and “solve everything.”
Frankly, this is something Grant Morrison would write. It is a breath of fresh air on a rather stale comic and hopefully will breathe life into sales on the book too. I don’t just recommend this book, but Curt does as well and he does NOT like the Fantastic Four. Pretty high praise.
Abnett and Lanning Space Opera…
If these two names don’t make you smile, then you need a healthy dose of Marvel Space Opera. Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning have been writing good space opera (a term used to descried fast paced space oriented Sc-fi like Star Wars) for a long time. The first I took great notice of their style’s of SO was on Legion of Super Heroes back in the late 90’s. They were taking a rather run down series that had seen a lot of miles (AND had gone through a re-boot about five years before) and made it into one of the best written series in comics.
Sales on the other hand didn’t reflect the writing skill that was being shown and eventually the books got yet another re-boot and destroyed all the good the dynamic duo had done. (I’m still bitter at Mark Waid for his lies. He and I have unfinished business.)
Well, flash forward nearly a decade and we see these two at Marvel and writing a group of somewhat similar books. AND they are all so very good. I’ve never been into the Marvel space characters, but Abnett and Lanning are making me a big fan.
The group of books that they are writing includes Nova, Guardians of the Galaxy and all of the War of Kings stuff. They were at the helm of the Annihilation Conquest, which was very good.
They have taken over a huge corner of Marvel and it looks like they are being left alone to do as they wish. When they were on Legion of Super Heroes it was sort-of the same thing. Left to their own story telling and not effected by crossovers they had a great run. Now, they have multiple books to work into their own universe inside the Marvel U. In the latest War of Kings book, Who Will Rule the answer is simple, it is Abnett and Lanning. You can not go wrong with any of their books.