Shopping List

Another heavy week, another scan of my grubby shopping list. You'll note that I've added an exciting new star rating to the single issues. This is to show you how much I'm looking forward to reading each comic - See, always thinking outside the box!

Ahem...

 

I've also added a handy list of stuff I won't be buying this week. Obviously there's a lot of stuff I won't be buying, but this is the notable stuff I won't be buying. Here's why...

Back Issue + Alter Ego: I've done a lot of money on these expensive mags over the last couple of years. Occasionally I've enjoyed them, but more often than not (and this is especially true of Back Issue) I find myself wondering why I've shelled out my hard earned to read a series of articles where the author usually does little more than recount the plot of his favourite run of comics. If I want the "In issue 9 of Amethyst Princess of Gem World, Amethyst fought the Troll Women of Labiya. In issue 10 of Amethyst Princess of Gem World, Amethyst destroyed the wicked wizard of Kok-Suk" sort of article, I can go to Wikipedia. 

To be fair, there are some good interviews and rare pieces of art interspersed with the bilge, and the fact that this issue features interviews with Alan Davis and Jim Shooter means that I might buy Back Issue after all. Alter Ego is a definite no though.

Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers #1: I'm not buying this because I don't need to. It's not that I don't think I'd enjoy it, because I most likely would, it's just that I have to take a stand against these silly mini-series which seem to be clogging up my life at the moment and this seems a good place to start.

The Ultimates Vol 3 TP: Issue one of Loeb and Madureira's Ultimates run was so fucking bad that I vowed never to look at another issue. Now this is out, and I'm sort of tempted to buy it just to see how bad it is as a whole. But no, I've reread why I hated issue #1 so much and that's enough to jolt me back to my senses.

Secret Wars II Omnibus: Ridiculous! Secret Wars II was so terrible that Secret Invasion looks like The Watchmen in comparison. For the life of me I can't understand why this is getting the Omnibus treatment, let alone fathom who in the world is going to pay the £75 RRP! I fully expect this to be the first Omnibus to end up in the 50p boxes at Orbital.

Hey whut is it?

We already know that Neal Adams drew the definitive Batman. But how many of us are aware that he also drew the definitive crack baby (and MR T)...


On second thoughts, perhaps that crack baby's a bit too chubby to be definitive.



Reprinted in Back Issue #26

I belong to the Merry Marvel Thieving Society

I've been reading Manga.

There, I said it, sorry.

Naoki Urasawa's Monster to be more precise. Why? Well, I was in Gosh! getting my weekly fix and itching to spend more of my hard earned comic cash. Eschewing those pretty Showcases and Essentials, my mind strayed to an old episode of Around Comics in which someone or other (hope you're appreciating the specifics here) recommended Monster. Before you know it I'm shambling my way down to the Manga lined basement and grabbing some honest to goodness manga. Blimey.

I had no idea that Monster was a sprawling epic that runs to 18 volumes. Sadly after reading volume #1 I'm going to have to lay out more wedge on the remaining books. It's not that it's a particularly amazing piece of comics brilliance or anything, (I kept hearing Miriam Margolyes and Andrew Sachs in my head as I read the rather clunky English translation), but it is a page turner. A bit like an airport novel, very readable trash.

The plot centres around a young Japanese brain surgeon working in a German hospital who saves the life of a boy who turns out to be a psychopath. There's plenty of suspense, a nice (if somewhat hard to believe) look at hospital politics and some interesting characters.

The pictures are also very pretty. There's only one Japanese character in the story and it's interesting to see European characters drawn in the Manga style. Apparently Westerners all have huge noses.

Anyway - well worth a look if you fancy a fun, easy read on the bus to work.

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Finally got round to reading a bit of Back Issue #24. As always, there's a fair bit of filler to plough through, but buried in amongst some of the less interesting stuff there's a nice interview with Gene Colan about his run on Dr. Strange. It turns out that Colan based his Strange on a bunch of old photos he had of Mikhail Baryshnikov. There's one in the eye for all those folk out there who knock the likes of Greg Land for ripping off his art from magazines.

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I've been thieving. Terrible I know, but I was thumbing through the display copy of The Marvel Vault in Borders and was unable to resist the temptation to pocket this...
Gahh, it's only a sticker for Christ's sake. No-one's going to miss it and they'll only bin the display copy in a few months anyway. I might go back tomorrow and pinch The Thing Christmas Card.

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Not that I'm obsessed with Nazis or anything, but when I saw the magnificently titled I Killed Adolf Hitler in Gosh, it was obvious that I'd be slipping it into my nerd sack.

Travelling back in time to kill Hitler is a well worn subject in comics, (see Midnighter and Strontium Dog for famous examples), but it's never been done like this...

Top stuff. Highly recommended.

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That man Dave F has been filling my inbox again. Here's his latest offering...

"Blimey! You thought you’d never see the day when Big D posted something that wasn’t Hulk related. Well I just love this panel and had to share it with the world

When your 12 year old friend ‘Sticks’ goes ‘a missing, I think it’s a fairly safe bet that its gonna have something to do with the wild eyed hillbilly who wears dungarees and makes scarecrows in his spare time… Whadda you think true believers?

And while I'm here please let me treat you to another of my all time fave comic covers from the 70s…. Ooooh now I know Absorbing Man has never been 100 ft tall in any of his incarnations, but I was under 10 years old when I first saw this….

Aaah what magic nostalgia!

Anyone ever read this?

I've never been too bothered what Baker gets up to in his spare time,(unless its screwdrivering Cybermen) and when he shunned his Whovian heritage in the late 80s I boycotted him… Fuckin cunt!

DAVE SMASH!!!!!!!

But he endeared himself to me again when I had a chance meeting with him on Cecil Court. Took me a while to track this bloody book down though, and…. I rather liked it. Baker is a funny man and it shines through in his autobiography. Although not smeared with it, there is a healthy sprinkling of Who related history in there for the discerning fan. I mean come on! He has portrayed himself as the Doctor on the cover and history cant be erased can it Tom? Even a Time Lord knows that…. Or can it? You know I can’t fuckin remember actually. Answers on a postcard please!"

Thanks Dave.

Sickening...

...yes sickening! Sometimes I appall myself. How can a man of 35, with a young family to support possibly consider it right and proper to spend £43.73 on comics?

Seriously, I'm not Paul Gambaccini or Jonathan Ross, I can't justify spending extortionate amounts of dosh on comics every week. Heaven knows I'm rapidly running out of space to store the bloody things. And yet, when I go into Forbidden Planet and see DC Showcase: Wonder Woman volume 1 on "special offer" for a mere £8.99, well let's face it I'm going to buy it. After all, that's a bra-busting 527 pages of black and white Amazonian action, and what red blooded dork can say no to that kind of offer? Not me pal.

Similarly when I see volume 7 of The Walking Dead, I have to buy it. I can't possibly wait on Amazon to deliver me this one, it's going to get read tomorrow and that's that. Walking Dead = best horror comic nay best comic out there. Thankyou Mr spotty goth cashier here's my £8.50.

While we're at it have another £2.99 for 2000AD Extreme, because there is absolutely no fucking way I'm missing out on a magazine that collects the entire run of Mean Team, a future sport spectacular whose roster of characters includes a psychic panther drawn by none other than the mighty Belardinelli. Honestly it's awesome and I would have melted into a pool of man fat had I not come home with this in my grubby little nerd sack.

I probably didn't need to bother with Back Issue #24 or Alter Ego #72 after all they set me back £9.25 for the pair. Really, £9.25 for two magazines? Yes, really, £9.25 to read some fanboy pour his heart out about Amethyst Princess of Gemworld and Captain Carrot. Christ buying that shit officially makes me ill.

No matter, I will make myself better with a fine pile of floppies! Top of the stack and first on the read list is obviously Green Lantern Corps #16 or to give it it's proper title The Sinestro Corps War part 7. It's the best multi-part extravaganza I've read in years, or at least the one which features the most aliens beating shit out of each other in space. I love it, and as soon as I'm finished here I'm going to sit down and read the latest episode.

After that I'll move on to the second of the one shot tie-ins to the series: Tales of the Sinestro Corps: Cyborg Superman. Obviously I realise that the mere sight of me reading a comic with the words Cyborg Superman on the cover is likely to make my girlfriend realise she is living with a deeply unattractive social misfit, but that's a risk I'll just have to take.

Perhaps she will look more fondly on me for reading Action Comics #856: Escape from Bizarro World part two. After all there's nothing childish about reading a comic co-written by the man who directed the Superman films and drawn by adult favourite Eric Powell. Very grown up.

As is Midnighter #12, a comic which features a gay super-hero. Oh yes, nothing frivolous about spending £2 on that, especially when you read it in conjunction with Detective Comics #837.

Mercifully this issue of 'tec sees the return of Paul Dini to writing duties. I can't remember the name of the guy who wrote the last two issues, but after the drivel on offer in #835, I've yet to be able to face #836 and might just leave it to go yellow and unread in the corner.

That's a fate that definitely won't befall either Lobster Johnson #2 or Modok's 11 #4, two titles which pack as much fun as is humanly possible into comic form. I'll be bagging those little beauties up and adding them to the hundreds of other expensive funnybooks which are slowly taking over all the much needed space in our flat.

Huzzah for comics!

The Weekly Shop #12

Over the course of the last week I went to a wedding, helped my dad move house, had a couple of nice meals out with the missus and saw The Manic Street Preachers in concert. All of which took up a lot of time, involved drinking large amounts and left me behind on my reading. That means that I'm writing about last week's comics just a day or two before this week's haul starts clogging up my house. Not ideal, but I don't want to skip last week because ALL the books I bought were top drawer.

If I had to pick a favourite I'd probably go for Captain America #26. I don't read all of Marvel's titles, but I'm guessing that very few are catching the bleak post civil war vibe as well as this one. The Marvel Universe is a dark place at the moment and let's face it, mainstream comics don't come much darker than the one in which the title character is dead.

Ironically all the signs suggest that this book is just going to get even stronger now that Steve Rogers is on the slab. Why? Because Ed Brubaker writes the supporting cast so well. Sharon Carter, Bucky and The Falcon have taken centre stage and the dynamic between them and their varied reactions to Cap's death make for a cracking comic.

The Red Skull is of course my all-time favourite Marvel super-villain so it's been a treat to see him stalking the pages of Cap again, but his psychopathic daughter Sin, the hulking Doctor Faustus and the magnificently weird Arnim Zola are a fine supporting cast. All mad as a box of frogs. You get the sense that Brubaker is having a lot of fun writing them.

He's doing a top notch job on Criminal as well. Issue #6 marks the start of a new story "Lawless" which promises to be as gritty as the first arc "Coward". Those five issues come out as a collected trade this week. Definitely worth picking up if you missed the floppies, although personally I'd recommend tracking down the back issues because the superb text pieces which were included in those original issues won't be reprinted in the trade. For me those discussions of noir and neo-noir films are an essential part of what makes this book one of the best on the shelves.

There isn't a text piece in Issue #6, but there is an excellent letters page which is well worth reading for a nice reader review of "The Death of a Chinese Bookie" a film which I'll definitely be looking up. I like a good letters page, the best I ever read was in the back of Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. On occasion it was better than the comic itself.

So anyway, Brubaker gets the number 1 and 2 slots in my best of the week. But on any other week I'd have put both Irredeemable Ant-Man#8 or New Universal #6 right up there. Both brilliant books, both doing something different and, for my money anyway, both succeeding because of the fresh approach they take to the super hero genre. A+ to both books, but A++ to Criminal and A+++ to Cap.

And while I'm handing out marks I give Back Issue #22 a B+. I really like the idea of this magazine and love the fact that as slick and glossy as it looks it still maintains the raw feel of a fanzine. My only real gripe with it is the themed format which each issue takes. I'm not saying that I don't want to read about the history of team-ups in bronze age comics, it's just that I think Back Issue could be even better if it didn't limit each issue to articles on a single theme.

It's still a fascinating read though. Hard to go wrong with an issue which features an article titled "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out: Robin's journey through the counterculture and into self-awareness"

I nabbed yesterday's panel of Cap spying on the Falcon from Back Issue by the way.