Meet the She-Hulk

A friend of mine sent me a link to an article about a breast-cancer campaign in Mozambique starring female comic-book heroes: Superheroines Give Self Exams In Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign.  That led to a bit of back-and-forth about one of the featured characters, the She-Hulk, who happens to be one of my favorite comic characters.  So I reckoned I'd pass along a few words about the Savage, Sensational She-Hulk, aka Shulkie, the Jade Giantess, and the Jolly Green Glamazon.

She-Hulk's an interesting character, one of my favorites in all comic-dom.  She was the last superhero created by Stan Lee at Marvel. She was not created out of a burst of energy or late-1970s women's equality, but instead to preempt the copyright for a female version of the Hulk because the Incredible Hulk TV show had proven to be so popular.  (Marvel feared the TV production company might come up with their own female version of the Hulk for which Marvel wouldn't have a license.)

She-Hulk is Bruce Banner's cousin Jennifer Walters, who's an attorney and gained her powers from an emergency blood transfusion from Bruce.  Unlike the Hulk she usually keeps her intelligence when she's green & hulky. She's also interesting in that her inner conflict between herself and her superhero identity is that she generally has a lot more fun being She-Hulk than being an attorney. Her attorney-dom comes into play pretty often, though.  She's undoubtedly the top lawyer superhero in all the land.  Somehow the fact that an attorney superhero was created out of a copyright pre-emption move fits just about right. And despite the dubious legal motivations for her creations, she's turned out to be one of the more interesting comic book characters of the last thirty years.

Her first comic was Savage She-Hulk (1980-1982) which had a decent 25-issue run in the early 80s, mostly battling gangsters in Los Angeles.  It was a pretty straightforward comic, and though it didn't feature some of the clever narrative devices of later incarnations, it was enough to launch She-Hulk as a legitimate hero in the Marvel Universe.  After Savage She-Hulk ended its run in 1982, Shulkie popped up in a lot of the team books, especially Avengers, where she's been a member on-and-off since the early 80s, and the Fantastic Four, where she took over for the Thing for a few years in the mid-80s.

In 1989 she got her own book again, and the 60-issue run of Sensational She-Hulk (1989-94) was a genuinely ground-breaking comic.  John Byrne wrote and drew many of the issues.  In this book She-Hulk often broke the fourth wall, addressed the audience directly, and was very aware that she was in fact a comic-book character.  This was fairly unprecedented in superhero comic books, and served as a genuinely clever plot device at times. When Sensational She-Hulk ended its run five years later, it had become the longest running series for a Marvel female superhero to date.

She-Hulk also had a pretty good solo run in her own She-Hulk comic that ran in two volumes (Vol. 1, 2004-2005 and Vol. 2, 2006-2007) in the mid-2000s. For much of that run she was an attorney at a law firm that dealt with the legal havoc wreaked by various superheroes and supervillains. After a superhero mishap left her disbarred she took work as a bounty hunter.  That run only lasted a few years, and was best for the first 30 or so issues when Dan Slott was writing it and filled it chock-full of Marvel-Universe in-jokes.

That was before Slott got promoted to write Amazing Spider-Man.  Aside from the general sales challenges that comic books starring women superheroes often had, that seems to me to have been one of the biggest problems in sustaining a She-Hulk comic book.  When somebody talented took over and had a good run, they got promoted to the bigger titles. The flip side is the good thing about She-Hulk. Because she's a second-tier character, writers and artists can take chances with her that they wouldn't take with a marquis character like Spider-Man.  So you tend to get a pretty uneven assortment of brilliance and dreck that mostly just serves as an excuse for artists to draw some panels of green cheesecake. (Not, mind you, that there's anything wrong with a nice slab of green cheesecake! I just prefer my cheesecake with the clever writing and plotting that's been the hallmark of the best of the She-Hulk books.)

And that, my friends, is more than you ever wanted to know about She-Hulk.

Ryan Claytor Artist Lecture and Exhibit at Mott Community College

If you're interested in comics, graphic novels, or visual arts, you might want to head up to Flint this weekend to catch Ryan Claytor's Artist Lecture at Mott Community College. (Noon, Friday, October 7th; Visual Art and Design Building, Rm #129; 1401 E. Court Street; Flint, MI 48503.) The lecture is accompanied by an exhibit of his work that's running until Tuesday, October 11.

Those of you who have dropped by the ol' Patio Boat before have heard me plug Ryan and his autobiographical And Then One Day series. But if you haven't heard of him, his work ranges from funny and telling anecdotes to some very interesting examinations of comic art itself. He also doubles as a comic studio art instructor at Michigan State University, University of Michigan - Flint, and Mott Community College, and his classes have consistently produced some of the more interesting self-published student work I've seen.

Whether you've run into Ryan before or not, he always has insightful things to say about comics, art, and the challenges of being a working artist. So, it'll be well worth your time to stop by the lecture. Alas, Monique and I will be off at a wedding this weekend, so I won't get to hear what he has to say. However, I did manage to shake free from work last Friday afternoon to drive up to Flint to check it out. So I can at least share a quick review of this excellent exhibit of Ryan's work.

First off, let me assure anybody who remembers the raging controversy from the positioning of Ryan's exhibit in the Small Press Spotlight exhibit at the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum that the restrooms are far, far away from this exhibit. Inconveniently so, really ... at least a hundred feet away. You practically need to take a taxi to get there.  You can barely see them even with the zoom lens pointing down the hallway from the entrance:

(Click on any of the images to enlarge them.)

So, instead of a wall next to the restroom, Ryan has an entire gallery room all his own, and he makes great use of it.  Two of the walls are covered with sequences of original artwork from his books:

Another wall has a fabulous piece of his titled "Ceci n'est pas une intervalle de temps" which is based on René Magritte's famous painting "La trahison des images" ("The Treachery of Images").

This is the piece in this exhibit that really hit me. I had come across it before in one of Ryan's books, but for some reason I had mistakenly thought that the original was on standard comic art board. So you can imagine my surprise when it turned out to be the full height of the wall! It's a great, thought-provoking piece, and I spent a good deal of time looking it over from several different angles. The full size suits it.

The far wall of the exhibit also contains some very interesting work, a series of the three posters that Ryan created for the last three MSU Comics Forums with both the original art and the finished poster presented side-by-side:

Of greatest interest in this particular poster is that it represents an entirely new phase in Ryan's work. This is the period in which he abandoned a career built on bright, insightful autobiographical visual narrative to instead latch onto the coattails of America's #1 Internet Superstar Canine, Katie the Beagle!

Obviously this is a dramatic shift to commercial opportunism for Ryan.  I expect that from here on out his work will mostly consist of portraits of the Kardashians, Paris Hilton, Lassie, and other members of the glitterazzi who move in Katie the Beagle's circles.

By the way, if you're wondering how these sorts of exhibits collect up these series of works, they rely on the generosity of keen patrons of the arts:

I must say, this in particular tickled me. I've always seen these little cards thanking the donors who made an exhibit possible. But when I started to collect up a few bits of comic art that I liked, I never in a million years imagined that I'd one day be a patron of the arts with a piece that would be needed for an exhibit.

Ahhh, "The Magee Collection." Yeah, I like the sound of that: the Rockefeller Collection, the Getty Collection, the Magee Collection....

If you want to check out the work on loan from the Magee Collection, or other (obviously lesser) Ryan Claytor works that haven't come from such luminous heights, you have until Tuesday, Oct. 11. Your best bet if you're running up to Flint is to do it Friday and catch Ryan's lunchtime lecture, too.

After October 11th you're out of luck. Unless you have access to the fabled Magee Collection, that is.

 

Ryan Claytor Artist Lecture

Friday, October 7th, 2011 at Noon

Mott Community College

Visual Art and Design Building, Rm #129

1401 E. Court Street

Flint, MI 48503

~and also~

Ryan Claytor Gallery Exhibition: Comics and Visual Narrative

Monday, Sept. 26, 2011 – Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Gallery Hours: 8am-5pm M-F

Mott Community College

Visual Art and Design Building, Fine Art Gallery

1401 E. Court Street

Flint, MI 48503

Musings from the Navel Observatory

The manager of my friendly local comic-book shop asked me a pretty good question yesterday about the cover of a comic book that showed just about every anatomical detail *except* for the title character's belly button. It set off an exchange on navel arcana that I thought might be of interest to folks who have a belly-button of their own.

In an attempt to boost my hit count with the Google image crowd while pumping up my PG-13 street cred, I present the salacious-yet-belly-button-bereft cover in question for Warlord of Mars: Deja Thoris, issue #5:




Gretchen: Why does Dejah Thoris not have a belly button? I was looking at the cover for today's issue and no belly button. But then on the inside art she does. Then looking at a lot of older covers she has no navel. Is she not supposed to have one since she's an alien?

----------

John Magee: That's a really good question. She's not human, that's for sure. (I've seen human anatomy, and what's on those covers ain't quite human.)

I've been meaning to go back and re-read my old Edgar Allen Burroughs John Carter books -- it's been a couple of decades -- and I'll try to see if there's anything in there on Martian birthing or umbilical cords.

In semi-related belly-button viewing information, I know that the costume designers on the original Star Trek had a lot of issues because they were prohibited from showing belly buttons during a prime-time broadcast in the late 60s. (Oh, the navel-gazing issues they had in the sixties....)

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Gretchen: Whoa! my husband and I are watching the whole original star trek run; we just finished the first episode of season 2. Now i'm going to have to look for that. Strangely though, there was one episode with this girl wearing overalls and nothing more, and there were definite side-boob shots. Weird that they'd allow that but not navels...

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John Magee:I came across another good nugget in the same interview with that costume designer for TOS. He said that what they tried to do for those sorts of outfits was to create the appearance that something could slip and expose more. That *that* was much sexier than just exposing the skin in the first place. It's something I've always noticed in costuming since then, and it's quite true.

Also on the navel observatory front, the possible exposure of America to Barbara Eden's belly button was rumored to be a constant challenge for "I Dream of Jeannie." And supposedly Mort Walker used to always include Miss Buxley's belly button in panels of "Beetle Bailey" specifically because his comic syndicate forbid him to draw her belly button, so it always forced his editor to remove them from the panels with an exacto knife. He allegedly had an entire jarful of Buxley belly buttons by the time he retired.

I have no idea how I've picked up this much belly-button trivia over the years. Just imagine if I had spent that time putting useful knowledge into my head!

No Comics for Me This Week!

At lunchtime today I went to stop by my friendly neighborhood comic-book shop, "Comic City" in Novi, to see what was new on the racks this week.

Alas, when I got there, it turned out that it had been stomped by Godzilla.

I *hate* when my local comic-book shop gets stomped by Godzilla. No comics for me this week! I hope they rebuild quickly.

P.S. No need to panic, comic-book fans. It's just a comic cover promotion that IDW ran for their new Godzilla comic in which comic stores that made a large pre-order could get their own cover of their shop getting crushed by our big, radioactive friend. Here's the story from BleedingCool.com: All Eighty Variant Covers Of Godzilla #1 From IDW.

Booty from the MSU Comics Forum

Yesterday I zipped out to East Lansing to swing by the annual Michigan State University Comics Forum. Over the past few years the MSU Comics Forum has become one of the best events on the calendar each year for anybody interested in comics. Alas, I got out there a bit late and missed the first couple of sessions, but I did get a chance to attend one creators' panel (with Joe Foo, Jeremy Bastian, and Nate Powell, moderated by Jay Jacot -- more on their work later) and to spend some time in the Forum's Artists' Alley, which had a really nice assortment of mostly Michigan-based comic artists.

As usual at this sort of thing, there was more cool stuff than I had dollars, and alas, a some really cool items from some great artists went unpurchased. Alas, you just can't buy all the cool comics. (Trust me, I've tried!)

But I was pleased with my stack of treasures when I returned with them, and am doubly so now that I've read them all. So, without further ado, here's a list of my booty:

(Oh, wait. One last bit of ado: apologies in advance for some of the blurriness in the pages I scanned below to give you a taste of some of these treasures. Rest assured the fault lies with me, and not with the artists.)

Let's start with this nifty bookmark from Ryan Claytor's Elephant Eater Comics:

"What's that, you cheap #%&%*&@?" you say, "You had all of Ryan's swag in front of you and you came back with a freebie bookmark?!"

As regular Patio Boat followers know, I've plugged Ryan's work frequently and enthusiastically, and honestly I already have all of his books (you should, too!) so Ryan went home without any of my cash this year. But I wanted to mention him at the start because he did much of the organizing of this year's event. He also created the nifty poster at the top of this post, featuring media superstar Katie the Beagle. (Um, "featuring" Katie the Beagle if you look closely enough. That's close enough for me, anyway, and that poster's goin' up on the wall!)

If you want to be a cheap #%&%*&@, too, and check out Ryan's work for free, you can do so at his website, where he's rolling out his latest issue of And Then One Day at a steady one-page a week clip.

Next up: a 24-hour comic from Jay Jacot:

For those who haven't encountered them before, 24-hour comics are comics that are written and drawn in a single 24-hour stint, usually at a "24-Hour Comics" session with a gathering of local comic artists. The resulting comics can sometimes be a bit sketchy -- as is the case with The Chase: A Twist of Fate -- but since the purpose is often shaking artists out of their usual process, that's hardly surprising. I always find them interesting to read because they tend to have a really raw and fresh vibe to them.

If you haven't seen Jay's work before, I'd recommend checking out his sci-fi detective Tao of Snarky comic, either in the Tao of Snarky compilation, or at his website where he's publishing pages from his new Snarky comic at a page-a-week pace.

What's next? Why it's The Amazing Cynicalman by Matt Feazell:

This wee eight-page Cynicalman chapbook was a freebie for drawing Cynicalman on a post-it note, a blatant bit of Artists' Alley self-promotion that worked just dandy. I hadn't picked up a Cynicalman collection in a couple of years, and this one had a couple of strips that genuinely cracked me up. You can check out Cynicalman yourself at Matt Feazell's website.

Now we come to a couple of items from Megan Rose Gedris. The first is a graphic novel, Yu+Me: dream, Vol. 1. This collects up the first four volumes of her Yu+Me: dream webcomic, a romance that chronicles the coming of age of a high school girl in Catholic school who discovers that she may be a lesbian. This collection is filled with interesting characters, some beautiful images, and some very compelling storytelling.

The web comic ran from 2004 through October 2010, and the story is now complete on the web. I really liked this book a lot, so I'm sure I'll check out the webcomic to see how it all turns out.

Since I bought a volume of Yu+Me: dream, Megan was kind enough to throw in a chapbook with the first ten pages of her new webcomic: Meaty Yogurt, the tale of a girl growing up in a small town.


This one really caught me up, too, so I can tell that Megan Rose Gedris's various webcomics are going to get a lot of traffic from me in the next few weeks.

Now, for something completely different, the Tales of a Checkered Man webcomic by Denver Brubaker, the adventures of a middle-aged aspiring superhero.

I picked up a little two-dollar chapbook with the first 23 strips of this webcomic, and a few of them cracked me up. Check it out for good-natured almost-superheroic fun.

This seems a good time to break up this list of reviews with a bit of discussion of the web and comics. This is a great time to read comics. The growing popularity of webcomics has given all sorts of artists a platform on which they can publish essentially for free. And more and more artists and storytellers are rising to that challenge. Every year I grow more and more impressed at the depth and breadth of the talent that is out there toiling in a world beyond superhero comics and the comics page in the newspaper.

Don't get me wrong ... I love my paper comics. But one of the big pieces of hype about the Internet in the 90s was that it would unlock a new platform for artists of all genres and democratize creativity. But it was one thing to speculate that the web might do that back in 1995, and it's another thing entirely to stand here in 2011 and watch it happening in independent comics. There is a new generation of artists out there who are doing some amazing things, and part of the reason is that they have always been free to draw their story the way they wanted. I can't wait to see what the next fifteen years brings from them.

And now, with that little pep talk over, it's on to another webcomic collection: Desmond's Devastating Dozen by Joe Foo.

This limited-edition book (hand signed and numbered with a sketch by Foo, natch) collects up a dozen of Foo's favorite panels from Desmond's Comic, the adventures of a wolverine who works as a character in a popular video game. The webcomic updates once a week on Tuesdays, and I can see I'm going to have to add another regular Tuesday stop to my lunchtime comics browsing!

Now, just when you think you've seen everything that can possibly be done with Zombies, we get Apooka: The World's Most Adorable Zombie written by Jon Hickey with art by Mike Roll.

I suppose this is perhaps more of a children's picture book than a comic in format, but there's no denying that Apooka is cute as the Dickens. Apooka is not a webcomic, but you can pick up an adorable copy of your very own of this book or its sequel via the web at the Apooka online store. This is without a doubt my favorite zombie book that I have ever read. (Though I must confess that I haven't yet read Night of the Living Trekkies, which I picked up from the Science Fiction book club last month. We shall see who remains my top zombie after that.)

We come now to the girl who put the "Booty" in this post's title, Cursed Pirate Girl: The Collected Edition, Vol. 1 by Jeremy A. Bastian, which collects up the first three issues of the Cursed Pirate Girl comic.

Before we go any further, click on the page below and check out the enlarged version:


So why did Cursed Pirate Girl put the "booty" into this post's title? Because when I came to Jeremy's table I picked up the book, paged through a couple of pages, and realized that I was three dollars short of the purchase price. So I grabbed my jacket, walked outside, and strolled around East Lansing in January in single degree temperatures until I could find an ATM. That's right, the art in this book is so cool that it made me wander around Michigan on the coldest day in January so that I could find enough booty to buy it. Now that I've had a chance to see the entire book, it was well worth it. Anybody who knows how I feel about Michigan in January knows that this is the highest compliment I can possibly pay to any artist. Any further praise I could heap on this imaginative and brilliantly detailed comic would just be redundant.

Speaking of the Interent and comics, this book has an Internet story of its own. The money to fund this printing was raised through Kickstarter, an Internet site that lets fans collect up enough money to fund an artistic project. One of the great advantages of established publishers is their ability to provide writers and artists with an advance on a project. Kickstarter creates an alternate way to raise the sort of capital that you need to make full-time work on a project possible for most folks. It might not be the right path for a lot of projects, but in this case it's been a huge success.

Finally, despite my Michigan-Winter defying love for Cursed Pirate Girl, we come to my absolute favorite of the treasures I brought home: Swallow Me Whole by Nate Powell, the keynote speaker for the 2011 MSU Comics Forum.


Swallow Me Whole was released in 2008 and won the 2009 Eisner Award for Best New Graphic Novel. When I came to Nate's table he had a little pile of them on the front with a sign that said, "Winner of the 2009 Eisner Award." I looked at the sign, looked at him, and said, "Wow, this book won the Eisner Award? That's commendable. I guess I should buy a copy."

This is the dorkiest thing I have ever said to any creator in any forum. Really. Winning an Eisner Award is "commendable"? Good heavens.

Um, sorry, Nate. My bad. But thank you for talking to me kindly after that opener, nonetheless. And thank you for creating such a fabulous book. Swallow Me Whole is a graphic novel about a teenage girl and her family as they deal with mental illness. What makes this book so moving and powerful is the way that Powell uses the artwork to reflect the inner landscape of the characters. It's well worth seeking out.

And that's it for now. Thanks again to Ryan Claytor and everybody else who worked to make this year's MSU Comics Forum such a great event. I'm already looking forward to 2012!

The Charlotte's Web Original Art Auction

As most of you know, I like to collect comic-book art. As hobbies go, it's a bit off the beaten path but pretty understandable since I grew up reading comic books and still read a few favorites. I think it's a pretty fun hobby. Some of the pages are a nice trip down nostalgia lane because I remember reading them in the original comic twenty-five or thirty years ago. Some of the pages are from new comics that I've enjoyed. And some of them just look cool.

I also like that it's production art. I've always liked things that are of use. And these pages are a tangible relic of the work, care, and creativity that went into what is generally considered to be a one-month-and-forgotten art form.

If you've never seen original comic-book art, the original pages often have a lot of detail that doesn't come out on the comic page, especially the pages of older comics published before digital printing came into vogue. Monique and I have framed a few of the best pieces and hung them on our walls at home. I've also taken quite a few in to work and put them up on my cubicle walls over the years. I like to rotate them in and out there. It ensures that I haven't just stored them away forever in a dusty portfolio book, and I think they look pretty cheerful in my cube.

It's a relatively inexpensive hobby as collector hobbies go. Most of the pieces I've bought have been in the $10-$25 range on e-Bay. I've gone up over $100 for a couple of particularly cool pieces that ended up on our wall at home, then reigned myself in for a few months afterwards to make up for it. That's not to say that you couldn't spend a lot more if you wanted to -- some of the truly iconic pages of comic-book history could easily cost upwards of $25,000. Honestly, though, for $25,000+ I'd rather have a nice, new boat.

In fact, I've never really felt the collector bug that says I should spend anything like significant money on what is, after all, a silly little side hobby.

Until now, that is.

That's because part of the estate of Garth Williams -- the illustrator of Charlotte's Web -- is being auctioned off on Oct. 15, and more than 40 of those original illustrations are up for sale. (Yes, most of my pages are from comic books, but children's book illustrations have much in common and many of the top illustrators worked in both fields. In any case, I suddenly find that my inner two-year-old collector has wriggled free, and to my annoyance it's yelling, "MINE!")

Alas that most of the pieces have opening bids of $750 or $1,000. The cover illustration is estimated to go for $20,000 - $30,000. Since Charlotte's Web is (I believe) still the top selling children's book in history, my guess is that the cover illustration may very well go for more than that. Doubly alas that all the free funds for a foreseeable future were frittered away frivolously on hooking our house up to the sewer. In retrospect, I'm sure we could've just rolled with a Port-A-Potty for the next few years, right? Triply alas that I just spent my bonus from work on ridiculous stuff like paying off the bills.

(Okay, full disclosure in the midst of my whine. Remember those truly iconic $25,000+ pages I mentioned a few paragraphs ago? I spent a wee tiny bit of my bonus on the cover art from Silver Surfer #7 by John Buscema. No, I didn't suddenly qualify for a ridiculous Wall Street bonus. It was a freshly inked reproduction that cost about 1/500th what the original page would've cost. But it looks cool, and I can put it up on my cubicle wall without worrying about locking it up every night.)

The original spectacular, iconic cover of Silver Surfer, Number 7 ... um, sort of.

So, despite the fact that my birthday is just a few months away and a truly loving blogosphere would understand my need, I've sadly concluded that the only way original illustration art with a pig gets up on my wall is if somebody puts a few pages from Peter Porker: The Spectacular Spider-Ham up on e-Bay. But in the meantime, I copied a few of my favorite Charlotte's Web drawings into my "Screen Saver Photos" folder, and I thought I'd share them with everybody, just for fun.

Fern with baby Wilbur. One of my favorites.

Well, of course he's terrific. Just look at him!

Charlotte checks out the competition at the fair.

"Some Pig." Kind of an odd one to be my favorite of all, but it is. Perhaps it speaks to my love of the written word, wherever it may appear.

Review Ragout Two: Part 1, The Comics

I've once again fallen behind in my book reviewing, so here's another big roundup in the next few posts. If you don't want to read 'em all, skip down to the final review to read about my favorite book in quite some time.

Let's start with a few comics collections in this post:

--The Chronicles of Conan, Vol. 18: Isle of the Dead and Other Stories by Bruce Jones, John Buscema, Marc Silvestri, and others (Amazon.com) -- I've been working my way through the Dark Horse reprints of the old Conan the Barbarian comic from Marvel for several years now. They really are beautiful collections with the original artwork -- mostly by Barry Smith and John Buscema -- re-colored with full-color modern colorization in the place of the original four-color coloring used in the comics of that era.

This is the first collection after Roy Thomas left the helm of the comic that he launched and either wrote or oversaw as editor for a decade. Unfortunately, the change really shows in these collections. Under Thomas the Conan comic was ever so slowly re-tracing his career based on the outline of Conan's career from the original Robert E. Howard stories. Afterwards, Conan kind of became a wandering do-gooder, following a chivalric code that seemed further and further removed from the Barbarian's rough-hewn sense of right and wrong. The art is still beautiful, but the story has lost its direction.

If you're interested in reading one of these Chronicles of Conan collections, I'd really recommend the first few volumes with the beautifully detailed Barry Smith drawings or possibly Vol. 12, which ends with the finale of Conan's time as a plundering pirate with his greatest love, Bélit, Queen of the Black Coast.

--Captain America, #1-#50 (2004-2010) by Ed Brubaker and several artists
--Marvel Secret Wars, #1-#12 (1984-1985) by Jim Shooter and Mike Zeck

Enticed by a half-price special run in conjunction with the new Iron Man movie, I took the plunge last month and bought a one year subscription to Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited.

Alas, I found to my dismay that some of the older runs that I had hoped to read aren't yet digitized, or only have a few issues digitized, for example the full run of The Thing from the 1980s and John Byrne's 1980s run on The Sensational She-Hulk both of which I really wanted to re-read in their entirety. I also discovered that most of the newer titles don't make it into this format for at least a year, so as not to cannibalize single-issue and trade-paperback collection sales. And a few titles will never make it into this format. (For example, all the old Marvel Conan and Red Sonja comics whose rights are now owned by Dark Horse and Dynamite, respectively.)

But there's still a lot of good stuff in here, either in terms of classic single issues, or good runs on some of the more modern books that I didn't read at $2.99 or $3.99 a pop. I'm pretty determined to get my money's worth, so expect to see me include some of these runs in the "books I'm reading" box and in my sporadic reviews whenever I think I've hit a run long enough to add up to one or more TPB collections. Now on to the two runs I have for us today

--Captain America, #1-#50 (2004-2010) by Ed Brubaker and several artists -- Ed Brubaker's run on Captain America -- in which Bucky returned and Captain America died -- has been the stuff of comic legend and award nominations. But when I picked up a few individual issues, I found that the combination of its immensely complicated plot and the decompressed pacing made each individual issue feel a bit lacking to me. But read in a vast 50-issue swath like this, it's a gripping read and that decompressed style really serves the story and pacing well. And whereas this wasn't a favorite of mine in the single-issue format, this story works great in this online collection format.

--Marvel Secret Wars, #1-#12 (1984-1985) by Jim Shooter and Mike Zeck -- The first comics mega-event that I remember, and one of the most influential. Honestly, I remember this as being better than it was when I reread it now, 25 years later, though I rather suspected that would be what I discovered upon rereading. There are still some good bits, but the whole things suffers a bit from a format in which all of these characters seem oddly compelled to engage in huge Good vs. Evil splash-page battles in every issue. Not a bad read ... just not as good as I remembered.

A Close Call for Spider-Man

My subscription to Amazing Spider-Man expired a couple of months ago. At first I meant to renew it as a matter of course, but ... well, one thing led to another and I didn't get around to renewing it for a couple of months.

And what worried me was that I didn't feel any particular urgency about it.

Now, you have to understand that Spidey and I go way back. I may not have been around when he made his debut in 1961, but I do remember reading old Spider-man comics in the early 1970s at one of our neighbors' houses when a friend's older brothers would let us into their comic book stash. You see, there was a lot about Peter Parker that I could relate to and respect as a character, and by the late 70s I was hooked in an addiction that would carry me pretty steadily all the way through until the early 90s.

By then I was moving around a lot and pretty broke, and Spidey was entering the second or third year of the incredibly overgrown "Clone Saga." (The Clone Saga was originally a six-issue storyline that got stretched far too thin over something like fifty episodes because it was selling well.) So, at some point in the early 90s I lost track of Spidey for five or six years. But eventually I hopped back on the bandwagon towards the end of the decade via subscription and have been reading pretty consistently for the last dozen or so years.

The best run is still the first ten years or so and probably climaxed with the death of the Green Goblin in issue #122. That run was mostly written by Stan Lee and illustrated first by Steve Ditko (issues 1-38) then by John Romita, Sr. with help from a few other well known comic artists, including John Buscema and Gil Kane. I hopped on board a few years later, around the time that Spidey's greatest foes list had devolved from the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus to the Rocket Racer and the Hypno Hustler.

Ahhh, the Hypno Hustler, Supervillain King of the Disco Era.

But I digress. The point here is that Spidey during the time I've followed him has had a few great issues, a few truly terrible issues, and mostly a vast sea of decent-to-good issues. As a flagship comic there are usually some pretty talented writers and artists working on Amazing Spider-Man. However, since Spidey is a flagship character, he tends to appear in a lot of other series and special event comics, which sometimes causes his own comic to be a bit of an afterthought. And a few times Spidey has been re-launched or re-imagined with some new creators and a slightly new direction. But for the most part I've truly enjoyed the ride with ol' Peter Parker as he's tried to learn how to make the best use of the proportionate strength and speed of a spider.

For a long time there were three monthly Spider-Man comics, Amazing Spider-Man and two others from a lineup that over the years has included Marvel Team-Up, Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man, Web of Spider-Man, and a handful of others with similar names. A few years ago Marvel combined them all into a single comic that came out three times per month, which was fine with me. The old three-different-comics method kind of meant that you were following three different stories at the same time, so it was always slightly disjointed to have to jump from one storyline to another as each comic came out. So making it one comic the same frequency as all three made a lot of sense to me. As it's played out, you tend to have some of the same disjointed effect as you move from writer and artist to writer and artist, but most of the writers and artists are on the book for three- or four-issue arcs and at least it's consistent within a single month.

But somehow, when it came time to renew this time I just didn't feel the urgency to make sure that I didn't miss an issue. And for a while I couldn't put my finger on what it was. But then it came to me.

You see, the reason I stayed on the ride all these years was that it felt as if the ride was going somewhere. And to me that was always the great strength of the Marvel comics over the DC comics. Superman and Batman have generally been the same guys all along, especially in terms of their secret identities. Yes, Superman eventually married Lois Lane and Batman's cycled through a few Robins, but the Superman of seventy years ago was mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent by day while the Batman of seventy years ago used his image as dissolute millionaire Bruce Wayne to through everybody off the track.

But over in the Marvel universe, characters grew and changed. Heck, over in Fantastic Four the Invisible Girl became the Invisible Woman, married Mr. Fantastic, and they went on to have a couple of super-powered kids.

And Spidey? Well, first of all, he wasn't really Spidey. To me he was always Peter Parker, a guy who happened to be Spider-Man. And therein lies a considerable diffence. But beyond that, he was a character who was slowly growing and changing and trying to work his way towards becoming a better person. He graduated from high school; then went to college; then dropped out for a bit; went back; graduated from college; went to grad school; and eventually became a working stiff with a bit of a growing career. He had a first love that he lost tragically; then he dated around for a bit; then he found a great second love; married her; and they went on to have a great and challenging marriage with ups and downs. There was tragedy and triumph and a recognizable life, even within the context of a nighttime gig crawling on walls and swinging from webs.

And sure, all that happened at the speed of a 12-times-per-year comic for most of the run. But that story was going somewhere.

But then a few years ago Marvel decided that they needed to appeal to a younger demographic, and that the kids today just couldn't relate to a married guy. And so -- through a plot twist so ill-conceived that I won't even begin to explain it -- they wiped out the last 30 or so years of Peter Parker's life and sent him back to being a mostly unemployed and poor early 20s slacker.

And that broke something important. Peter Parker stopped being a character who learned and grew, and instead became a character frozen in time. And something was lost there.

I suppose it's a dilemna that faces almost any long-running fictional character. Either they go the route of Hercule Poirot and become increasinly elderly and fragile, or they stay as they were when they first blazed on the scene, eventually cramming hundreds of adventures into what could only be a year or two of time. And so, the kids of For Better or For Worse eventually grow up and have kids of their own, while good ol' Charlie Brown is still standing on his pitcher's mound, essentially the same age as when Sparky Schulz first drew him.

But darn it, that's why I cast my lot with Peter Parker. He wasn't trapped in amber like a fossilized insect. Be it ever so slowly, he was going someplace.

And now he's not. And maybe he never will.

It makes me a bit sad every time I open up a new issue of Amazing Spider-Man.

That's why I just didn't feel any urgency to renew my subscription. It now feels as if I'm not going to miss anything if I miss a few issues or a few months or a few years. I can hop right back in and Peter Parker will be exactly the same as he was when my subscription lapsed.

Oh, I re-upped my subscription for another year today. But I didn't make the call to Marvel because my Spider-Man subscription had lapsed. I made the call because my Fantastic Four subscription had lapsed. You see, unlike Peter Parker those characters are still growing and changing, albeit ever so slowly.

But while I was on the phone renewing my Fantastic Four subscription, I decided to give Spidey another year. Peter Parker's been a friend for a long time, and in the end I'm pretty loyal. But I'm really not sure I'll make the same decision next year. There are a lot of comics out there that I could read. I'm not sure I want to spend my money reading the same story again and again, even if I really liked it the first time I read it.

We shall see. But it feels as if I may be closer to the end of my Spidey days than the beginning.

P.S. There's a really good comic out there called Spider-Girl, or occasionally a variation thereof since it occasionally changes titles and has returned from cancellation several times thanks to its devoted following. It takes place in an alternate universe in which Peter Parker and Mary Jane are still married and have two kids. Peter has retired from web-swinging to become a crime lab technician and his teenage daughter May Parker picks up his web-shooters. It's odd, but in a lot of ways that has begun more and more to feel like the main Spider-Man comic to me, since that's the comic in which the characters that I remember are still growing and progressing.

P.P.S. And Stan Lee decided to keep the married Peter Parker in the Spider-Man newspaper strip. So if my newspaper still thought it was in the newspaper business and would deign to occasionally deliver a paper, I suppose I could find Pete there, too.

Comics from the University of Michigan - Flint

Yesterday I went down to Vault of Midnight comics in Ann Arbor to attend the in-store signing by Ryan Claytor's comics studio class at the University of Michigan - Flint. I always enjoy student work in a variety of fields because it's a chance to see people trying something new and different. And I especially appreciate when people are willing to put their work out there for other people to see.

By the time I got down to Ann Arbor, there were seven creators with seven books left. I put a good dent in my comics budget for the next couple of weeks by making a clean sweep at three bucks a pop. Here's a panel or two from each:

From Ew by Garrett Blondin

From A Small Collection of Comics by Chelsea Case

From Stars Beneath Stars: 3 Short Comics by James Barclay

From Tales of Marvinism by Marvin J. Dabideen

From Art in Sequence by Brian Hunt

From The Tales of T. by Travis Larkin

From The Extraordinarily Ordinary by Elizabeth Sevick

Each of the books contained three parts: an artistic statement a wordless comic, and another short comic. I saw a lot of Ryan's influence on the artistic statement sections in each. (Though that could also just be that Ryan's the only comics artist I know who has dedicated multiple books to exploring a theory of autobiography, so any comic statement of artistic self-examination is likely to remind me of his work.)

Not surprisingly, they were all a bit uneven, but all of them contained interesting images and cool bits. There were a few things that particularly struck me: Elizabeth Sevick's feel for facial expressions, Travis Larkin's storytelling in The Tales of T., James Barclay's "A Night in Amsterdam", and Chelsea Case's amazing anthropomorphic sponge, Gary the Loofah. I've read a lot of comics, but I've never see one that featured a loofah sponge as the protagonist.

Ryan also taught a class at MSU this semester, and he has both another MSU class and three UM-Flint classes in the Spring. If you get a chance to attend one of their signings next Summer, stop by and pick up a few. You'll see something entirely different, and the students can probably use your three beans more than the corporate overlords of DC and Marvel.

General Weirdness in Today's News

Perhaps it's just that this is the first Sunday in quite a while that I've had opportunity to lounge about in the morning and read the Sunday papers long enough to make it to the news sections of the papers -- I always try to ease my way into the day by starting with the sports and comics before I get to the silly sections -- but lately the news seems to be weirder than the comics.

Let's take it from the top. In the midst of this summer's silliness around the health-care debate comes this sobering news: Blue Cross hits customers with 22% rate hike.

The good news? Blue Cross tried to make it a 56% rate hike, but couldn't get that past the Michigan attorney general's office. In defense of Blue Cross, their basic problem is that right now the private insurers are shedding sick folks as fast as posssible and shoving them over to Blue Cross, which is required by state law to cover everybody.

And yet a vocal minority still thinks we don't need fundamental health care reform in this country.

Speaking of the health-care tempest. I do owe the right-wing crazies one apology. It seems that we are on the verge of death panels: Wall Street Pursues Profit in Bundles of Life Insurance. From the story:

The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.

The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return — though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money.

Forget government bureaucrats with death panels. Wall Street investors will now have a vested interest in seeing you dead.

Yes, this was the winner in this morning's "make John feel as if he's arrived in a strange science-fictional future" contest. Given the chronic shortfall in state government budgets, can it be long before we see a state lottery offering based on a similar death-pool premise? A reality TV show can only ensue.

I'm tempted to pass over the most ridiculous partisan tempest in this weekend's teapot of recent news weirdness: the bizarre right-wing movement to boycott an Obama speech to schoolchildren that will undoubtedly urge controversial positions like studying hard and brushing teeth.

But instead I will ask this. Isn't this the same group of pundits and reactionaries who spent the last eight years telling me that disagreeing with George W. Bush on any point of policy made me a deeply unpatriotic traitor to America because he was the President and we all had to support the President in a time of war?

Bartender, a round of mirrors for the house. Hypocrisy, thy name is the increasingly deranged right-wing punditocracy. Seriously, there used to be serious, thoughtful people in the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Where did they go? And who left the nutcases in charge?

Finally, our survey of the Sunday paper returns to the topic of my sports-and-comics morning habit. After first deciding that they didn't want to bother with delivering my morning paper more than three times a week, the Detroit Free Press has now decided to cut another six comics (including my good buddy, Spider-Man!) from the tattered online remnants of my morning comic page yet again. You told us what features you wanted, and we listened.

I'm pretty sure that I didn't tell them to lop another half-dozen comics out of their already shrunken lineup. Stranger yet, they are now officially recommending that I go to other online sources to feed my morning habit. From the article: "If we discontinued your favorite comic, there are many free Web sites that run comic strips. "

So, my morning paper is no longer delivered in the mornings and is no longer paper. And now it recommends that I just go straight to better online sources for what they used to provide. Then they wonder why their circulation is plummeting.

Um, okay. GoComics.com, you've got yourself another "My Comics Page" registrant.

Speaking of GoComics.com, I started there a few months agp after Gil Thorpe got cut from the lineup. There are a few comics aggregators out there. They just happened to be the one that carried Gil Thorpe. But my list over on GoComics is now starting to look like a better bet than the Free Press's comics page. Here's what I'm reading over there:

Bloom County
Calvin and Hobbes
Pickles
The Quigmans
Gil Thorp
The Fusco Brothers
Tank McNamara
Candorville
Garfield Minus Garfield
Liberty Meadows
C'est la Vie
The Norm
Too Much Coffee Man
The Argyle Sweater

Beward, Free Press. That list is starting to crowd you out for reading goodness.

Spidey and the Mouse

Alas for Spidey, there are no good web-swingin' skyscrapers in either Anaheim or Orlando.

I saw a post on Arsen's LaMarotte blog (Where Even Spider-Man Fails) that got me thinking about this acquisition and what it means for the future of comic books. After poking around a few news stories, I came across a quote in a Newsarama.com story on this acquisition (What Marvel/Disney Merger Means to Comic Book Shops) that I thought got to the heart of the deal:

"Comics are a small part of Marvel. This deal is for the riches in licensing and spin-offs to other media, notably video games and movies," (said Joe Field, owner of Flying Colors Comics in Concord, Calif., and president of the ComicsPRO retailing organization.)

In truth, I can't help but feel that the story of Marvel is a fascinating case-study in corporate killing of the goose that laid the golden egg, and vast profits despite the mismanagement.

Back in the 90s Marvel nearly single-handedly destroyed the established comic-book distribution network whose reach had greatly benefited the entire comics industry. (It's a long story involving the desire to jack up profits by creating a distribution monopoly.) As a result, greatly reduced distribution reach and sales numbers have forced them to jack up the price of individual comic books, so that the comic-book business could maintain its profit margins. So they have since instituted a series of price hikes.

Until the early 1990s an average book would have cost 75 cents to a buck in today's money. Now it retails for $3.99 to a much smaller general audience. This price jump has naturally led to ever-declining sales numbers for individual titles, especially in sales to kids, i.e. "future customers." DC has generally joined in with the price-hiking, since their distribution outreach was just as wrecked, and since their comic-book business is also under a large corporation and subject to the same pressures. And the lack of a widespread distribution system has made it a practical impossibility for the smaller publishers (Dark Horse, Dynamite, Top Cow, Image, etc.) to bust out of the comic-book-shop ghetto.

Here's a recipe for an industry death-spiral if ever there was one. The only thing equally dumb that I can think of is Major League Baseball's decision to schedule the World Series so that nearly all of their championship games end after midnight Eastern Time.

"Holy eating-your-seed-corn, Batman!"

But at the same time that Marvel has been merrily looting their core comic-book business, the media spinoffs (film, video games, toys, licensing and endorsement deals, etc.) from those comic-book characters have proven to be enormously profitable. The troublesome part for both Marvel and DC, however, is that almost all of their popular "properties" (Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, X-Men, Iron Man, Hulk, etc. for Marvel, and Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash, etc. for DC) were created 40 to 75 years ago.

The financial growth of these companies is now driven by the extension of these characters into new markets, not through the creation of new characters. And, in fact, it's going to be well nigh unto impossible to create new characters with the same sort of popularity because their core character-creation business -- comic books -- no longer has the sort of reach that can create character popularity (i.e. "brand recognition") on the cheap.

To me, the really interesting thing is that comic-book creation itself is one of the cheapest forms of media creation. For a company worth $4 billion, an investment of 1% of that total -- $40 million, which is certainly less than the advertising budget of the Spider-Man 3 movie -- could finance the creation of an entirely new generation of comic-book characters with real potential outreach. Sure, the majority of them would disappear into obscurity, as have the vast majority of all comic-book characters. But somewhere out there is the next Spider-Man or Wolverine.

For Marvel this would be equivalent of a research and development arm, but instead they put the vast majority of their resources into re-hashing the same characters that Stan Lee dreamed up in the 1960s because that's where the proven profits lie. How many companies require their core R&D department to turn a fat quarterly profit? Especially when that R&D department is essentially a publishing business that has historically only produced small profit margins?

As for whether the sale of Marvel to Disney is good or bad for the long-term future of comic books, I'm kind of agnostic. Exchanging one set of corporate overseers for a different set seems to me to be a lateral move at best, and this deal is really more about movie, multimedia, and licensing than it is about comic books.

My guess is that comic books are quickly headed the way of pulp adventure magazines. The narrative adventure heroes of the future are being created right now on the web by individuals in web comics and blogs. Like the comic-book heroes of the past, most of them will only find obscurity. But somewhere out there is the next great fictional hero to inspire future generations of kids.

And who knows? The most recent "great new hero" to emerge was Harry Potter, who came from dead-tree books of all things. Maybe the real lesson is that characters and storytelling are what really matters, not distribution networks, corporate managment, and licensing deals.

The Knights of the Dinner Table

Okay, so I promised a writeup of my epic re-read of my entire collection of Knights of the Dinner Table magazine. (The collected comics from vols. 1-86 in softcover compilations, plus my collected run of Vols. 130-151 of the magazine, since I started picking up the strip at my local comic shop.) The strip was created by Jolly Blackburn and is still drawn and mostly written by him, with some additional writing from a fairly small team of contributors.

Here's the important thing that I want you to take away from this entry. After re-reading nearly 20 years worth of these comics in order, I'm convinced that this semi-obscure niche comic is humor of the highest order, on a par with my some of my other all-time favorites, names like Mark Twain, Douglas Adams, Monty Python, and Terry Pratchett. No kidding. It's that good.

Instead of the truly epic writeup I had considered, you're going to get a midsize, slightly rambling, and entirely unproofread entry from a tired blogger. But that's okay. Truth be told, you'll have more fun reading KODT than reading my blog entry about reading KODT. I'll provide some handy links to a few good, quick KODT web-comics below. Also, there's a pretty good Introduction to KODT on the site of its publisher, Kenzer & Co., as well as a good Wikipedia entry on KODT. So if you want to read the full background and more about the cast of characters, I see no need to recreate them here.

The first thing a new reader notices about KODT is that it is possibly the geekiest thing ever created: a comic book about playing Dungeons & Dragons. But it is also laugh-out-loud funny, driven by characters and context, and endlessly addictive. Worry not, you really don't need to know much at all about D&D to appreciate the comic. The comic isn't about Dungeons & Dragons; it's about characters playing Dungeons & Dragons and therein lies a world of difference.

Like many fine inventions, Knights of the Dinner Table started as an accident. KODT creator Jolly Blackburn published a small role-playing-games fanzine called Shadis while he was in the military, and he had planned to run a comic page in the back of the magazine. When no comics came to him, he drew a little two-character comic of his own. The strip struck a chord with his readers, was eventually picked up by Dragon magazine for a while, and finally led to a standalone KODT magazine that launched in 1996 and has now run more than 150 issues: a truly remarkable accomplishment in a shrinking comic and magazine market. In that time the cast has grown from a core of four or five regulars to include dozens and dozens of characters ... and character is at the heart of KODT's appeal.

The cast of characters began with a single group of gamers in the comics early years. It soon expanded to include other gaming groups, the local gaming shop, and eventually the publishing company that creates the role-playing games that obsess them. The Knights and their fellow gaming groups venture into a wide variety role-playing genres -- westerns, spy thrillers, superheroes, space wars -- often to hilarious effect. But most of their time is spent with their first love, Hackmaster, which is their version of Dungeons & Dragons.

Here are three pages from a very early story called "Lair of the Gazebo." You'll have to click on the individual images to make them large enough to read.

(I'll post these three panels for ease of access, but will just link through to the KODT Web Comics site for most of the citations. Unlike my larcenous beagle-haiku business model, my point here is not to swipe their content, but to get you interested enough to buy somebody else's content.)

Knights of the Dinner Table, "Lair of the Gazebo", page 1, page 2, page 3.

This early story provides a pretty good example of the space in which KODT's humor works: the gap between the world of the characters that we see on the page and the imaginary worlds that they explore through role-playing games. The humor comes from the contradictions and conflicts that ensue. There's also a real sense of cameraderie and fun that carries the story cheerfully through its detour into a back-alley of absurdity.

As the comic has continued through the years the characters and stories have grown consideribly in depth and complexity, but I think the heart of what makes this comic work can be found right here.

You might also have noticed that the drawing style of this early story is ... well, um, shall we say "simple?" Though the artistry has improved a bit over the years, this basic style hasn't changed much at all. In truth, the comic often reads much more like a script with the world balloons serving merely to show which character is speaking. Let's face it, as fantasy comic artists go we have Frank Frazetta and John Buscema holding down one end of the scale and Jolly Blackburn holding down the far other end of that scale. (Sorry, Jolly.)

What's really interesting to me is that this has turned out to be a real strength of the comic, another fortuitous unplanned accident. The real action usually takes place in the imaginations of the characters as they play. But by keeping the visual aspects of the comic firmly in the real world, that gap between the real world and the game world is emphasized. And as I said above, that gap is what fuels this comic. I've read a lot of other fantasy and role-playing-based comics that featured artists with far more technical skill. But none of them have ever come close to capturing fantasy's sense of sheer unleashed imagination in the way that KODT does. Even the fiercest of dragons drawn by the best of artists can't compete with the dragons of our own imaginations.

(I digress a bit, but this is a storytelling truth once exploited effectively by filmmakers with limited special-effects budgets and technology, and the ability to show nearly anything onscreen has proven to be a weakness in the age of films filled with relatively inexpensive computer-generated special effects. Two of the most notable horror/monster flicks of the last ten years -- "Blair Witch Project" and "Cloverfield" -- generated their thrills by bucking this trend and relying on the fear of the unseen. It's a good lesson for storytellers of all genres and mediums.)

A few standard role-playing props do appear occasionally: dungeon blueprints, miniature figures, and hex-grid boards. But I don't recall so much as a thought bubble with a monster or a character. Those things can only be seen in the imaginations of the characters and the imaginations of the readers.

I came across an editorial comment in one of my various readings that indicated that Jolly Blackburn looked pretty seriously for a replacement artist in the comic magazine's early days. Remember, his goal was to publish a games magazine, not to create a comic, much less become a commercial artist. Fortunately, he was eventually talked out of it. This was a good decision for the long-term development of the strip because in really forced an emphasis on the sort of things that don't take much artistic skill, but are vital for the success of any long storytelling effort: character development, pacing, plotting, etc. Jolly has become a much more effective artist over the years, but the stripped-down style remains, and it's all to the good.

Here are a few more good stories that have been posted as web comics:

"Brian's Challenge" page 1, page 2, page 3. The Untouchable Trio Plus One take on Ol' Rotgut the Swack Iron Dragon.

"Baiting the Hook" page 1, page 2, page 3. The Untouchable Trio Plus One settle down in the homey village of Fyron.

"I Heard the News Today ... " page 1, page 2, page 3. A very nice strip run a few weeks after the death of Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax.

"Movie Night" page 1, page 2. Bob & Sheila at home.

And finally, since the intersection of the Internet with the Halls of Commerce has been a bit of a theme here lately, this strikes me as a good single-panel to close on, "Anything for a Customer."

So check it out and let me know what you think. There are about a dozen or so pages posted above. If you like them, there are another 3,500 or so out there, waiting to be enjoyed.

"Comics", not politics.

I've been futzing around with my new DirecTV video-on-demand service, and I downloaded a copy of the new "Wolverine and the X-Men" cartoon. The villain in this particular cartoon was an American governement agency that imprisoned a bunch of people without trial, and then tortured them for information.

Boy, am I going to be glad to have that sort of thing returned to the realm of comic books, cartoons, and science-fiction films.

(Note the label. "Comics", not politics.)

I love you Spider-Man....

I was looking up episodes of the new The Spectacular Spider-Man cartoon on YouTube (okay, I'm letting my geek flag fly here) and I came across this comment about one of the episodes that just cracked me up:

bphoebe4 (1 day ago)
i love you spiderman i have a whole collection of you and my room my name is myzel and im 5 yrs old

I haven't seen a youngster that excited about something since ... well, since my four-year-old niece Atlee was unwrapping presents on Christmas morning. I guess it gives me hope that Atlee may be able to maintain that enthusiasm level when she hits the sage old age of five.