Sullivan's Sluggers

Just put my name down for this. Looks top. Big Stokoe fan. Thanks to John Bishop for the tip.



Snag a copy (or two) here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1940696606/sullivans-sluggers-baseball-horror-graphic-novel

Unexpected sound effect

Unexpected #166, July 1975

Fantasy Family

White Dwarf jumpers!

Hope he's their dad.

Scan from White Dwarf #72, December 1985

Me and a Moomintroll.

Proud moment.

I'm the one on the right.

Fudge Judge

JLA #15, November 1962

Ice cream van

Spotted in Primrose Hill, north London

Click it for closer inspection.

Note that he seems to be flying over Canary Wharf, not Metropolis.

Still working

"Hey, is this blog still working?"

someone asked.

I think about it often.

It's dormant until I have the time to do something with it again.

Still London. Still loving the comics. Just don't have as much time to read or write about them as I did.

Gosh!

I'm so out of touch that I had no idea about this: http://www.goshlondon.com/move/

I'll definitely be there on the 30th to bid farewell to the old shop (and meet Alan Moore).

The new place sounds like it'll be just grand.

Gene Colan and Night Force #12

Gene Colan. Others out there can write a good deal more articulate obituaries and summaries of the man's career. They have. Go read them.

He was obviously incredible. Grab yourself a Marvel Essential Tomb of Dracula - the fact that they are in black and white is good. The art is amazing.

I remember a couple of years ago when Colan did that Captain America special, Marvel offered the standard version and a black and white variant. I bought the variant, obviously. Given that he was an octogenarian with eye problems, some of it was predictably rough, but there are parts of that comic which were still incredible. Get a copy on ebay, it's worth a look.

Why Night Force #12? That cover. I picked it up from the newsagents back in the day - I must have been about 11 years old - because it was just one of the random haul of American comics which had turned up that particular month.

I had no other issues of Night Force, but the cover really unsettled me, so I bought it. It's the nutso second part to a story about The Beast from The Book of Revelations, rumbling through a 1920s funfair killing people. I always thought the cover was the view of someone stuck at the top of a ferris wheel. It stuck with me, and it was the first thing that came into my head when I heard Colan had died. Great artist. RIP.

Seen on ebay

Description: "Intact and no rips"

ON YOUR KNEES!

Creepy praying doll...

You click. Make Big.

Scan from the back of The Mighty Thor #267, January 1977

Magnificent Mart

MART!

Wasn't really in the mood for the stinkfest at the start of the day. I was knackered, it was pissing with rain outside and I've just got heavily into this online pinball game.

Still, I am nothing if not dedicated to tat, so off I trudged to meet Mr Bishop at the bus stop. There we boarded a 476 where we found this chap...

11.30am and unconscious. The smell of vodka hung about him. It was impossible to wake him up. We told the bus driver who stopped the bus and called an ambulance. This annoyed one lady who was more bothered about the fact that her bus journey had been affected than the welfare of this poor sod. Yay London! What a cuntwitch.

Anyways we made the mart. Given the weather we thought it would be empty and grim. Not so!

It was one of those marts where they open up the back room and fill it with British tat - and it was heaving. The busiest mart I've been to for some time. Not only that, it was LOADED with treasure.

First stall BOOM! I complete my run of Teen Titans for £2 and pick up the first few issues of Alien Legion for pennies. Mr Bishop scores a silver age Captain America for 50p. Further in more bargains to be found. Plus beauty.

Oh yes, real beauty...

Shrines to 60s tat!

Shrink wrapped 80s wank mags (under the counter, if you please)

Blurred British Annual stall - trust me it looked lovely

Batwomen

Original fucking Ezquerra 80s Strontium Dog pages - obviously the robber selling them wanted hundreds of pounds. But still they were lovely.

THAI HORROR FILM POSTERS!!!!

THAI HORROR FILM POSTER MAN!!!

He kindly agreed to hold my favourite poster on his amazing stall (Evil Dead II) up for me

What a nice man. What an incredible stall!

WHAT AN AMAZING FUCKING MART!

I bought heaps and heaps of good cheap rubbish. Even managed to score some reasonably cheap Heroclix off the notorious Heroclix robber.

All the dealers seemed to be doing pretty well. Absurdly high priced near mint silver age key issue man was there. I saw him sell five comics to one bloke for £1,100. "Shall I charge it to the usual account, sir?"

EC comics man held court. Krypton comics man smashed out his 25p boxes of filth. All was good.

In amongst the man throng, I caught up with LLC chum Tam, and then went for post mart drinks with Mr Bishop, Dex and special guest star Bruce - who had come all the way from Hitchin just to load up on 25p issues of Captain America. What a man!

The now traditional window seat was a fine place to compare our water-damaged, creased and torn treasures and to watch the dealers loading their boxes back into their vans. One of them dropped a box in a puddle, picked it up, wiped off a now wet copy of Valiant and shoved it back in the van.

Truly, the best mart for years. Huzzah!

Ace reporter

I should probably explain.

I haven't been updating properly because I've got a new job as a reporter on a local newspaper. It's punishing and consumes all my time, leaving me exhausted - in my pants, on the carpet - every night.

Don't get me wrong, I love it. But basically, it's killing me and I just haven't had the energy to blog recently.

Oh, and my scanner's blown up again.

Anyway, I suppose I'm sort of still here. I do love doing this blog. But until I get used to this new life...fergedaboudit.

PS I am planning to do the mart next weekend and I WILL write a report. Promise.

Nostalgia bytes

Via the Twittering of Charlie Brooker comes this quite splendid link to ancient Spectrum game cover art.

What a sensational collection that is. It really deserves a nice coffee table book.

My ebay disgrace

So, I make a bit of money freelancing and it immediately goes on this...

Seal's getting cracked as soon as it arrives.

I now own Giant-Size #1!

Yeeeeeeeeeeees!

It's a sickness.

May Day! May Day!

Happy May Day, comrades! There's a mart today. Lovely day for it, too. Sadly I will not be in attendance. This pains me but I've got another appointment at 2pm, so any visit I did make would be ridiculously short. Part of me wants to go just to stick my head round the door and take in the bouquet - you know the one, the whiff of acid spewing old comic bags mingled with the sweat of King Stinker and his chums? Mmmmmmm. Breathe it in! I will not let myself be that sad, though. Next one! Yes. Next one!

Not that I need any more tat anyway. I've got humongous amounts of yellowing rubbish to plough my way through as it is. Even though I dropped my weekly comic habit months ago, I'm still faced with piles of unread comics. I have a feeling that I'll never read everything I own.

On a different subject, I went to see Thor the other day. I was meant to be doing the shopping, but there was Thor, looking all lovely and shiny on his poster, so off I went. Enjoyed it quite a bit actually. Saw it in 3D, which was quite odd. Never been to a 3D film before. Those glasses really bring down the brightness, don't they? The stuff with the frost giants looked really dark through my specs. Great special effects though, and lovely costumes. Loved the Destroyer and the Rainbow Bridge. I'm also a fan of black Heimdall - yes. Don't fuck with Stringer! Thought Volstagg was more like Gimli than Volstagg, but that's just a minor gripe really. Overall it was a highly enjoyable romp. I'm ashamed to say that the obligatory Stan Lee cameo made me laugh out loud. I'm too easy. Nice Odin from Hopkins - still think Brian Blessed would've been a braver/funnier choice. Natalie Portman was fairly fit. Loki's helmet was spectacular. And is just me, or does anyone else get an immense feeling of nerdish superiority watching people leave the cinema before the post credits extra scene? "Ha! You're leaving! Don't you know there's a secret bit at the end? You clearly AREN'T a proper comic fan type. Your loss, well adjusted normal people! Your loss!"

Seeing things

This is quite cool - a page from Denny O'Neill and Dick Giordano's 1989 retelling of Batman's origin, "The Man Who Falls."

It's a decent story which was published exclusively in the trade, "Secret Origins" alongside a bunch of reprints. Apparently it was used as a reference by David Goyer and Christopher Nolan for Batman Begins.

Anyway, that's not why I scanned in the page. I wanted to draw your attention to this panel...

That's Thomas Wayne rescuing young Bruce from a cave full of bats. It could be accidental, but I think Thomas looks like Joker here.

Purple coat. Green hair. No?

Scans from The Man Who Falls, by Denny O'Neill and Dick Giordano, colours by Tom McCraw. 1989

Cracking Cap page

I bought a skipload of bronze age Captain America at Kapow. It's largely great. Just finished issue 227 which sports this terrific cover...

Mein Gott!

Amazing!

The plot here is that the Red Skull has taken over the SHIELD helicarrier, turned all the operatives on board into Red Skulls and taken Nick Fury hostage. He straps Fury up to some solar powered death ray which will incinerate Fury once the sun hits its mirror. Top stuff.

Anyway, Cap fights his way to Fury just as he's about to get roasted, at which point the Skull starts his inevitable head fuck speech about Bucky. That moment gives us this quite splendid page...

Click it to see it nice and large. My issue is a bit yellow, but I think you can still appreciate some great storytelling here. Tip-top job by Sal Buscema. Love how the panels flow vertically as well as horizontally. Brilliant way to show a lot of stuff happening at the same time while maintaining the sense of drama and urgency. Tick-tock-tick-tock - Know what I mean? And what about this panel...

That's eye-popping, face-stretching, spit-flecked horror for you there, folks!

Magic.

Scans from Captain America #227, November 1978. Written by Roger McKenzie. Drawn by Sal Buscema.

PS - It's not really Nick Fury! He'd never scream in the face of death. It's a SHIELD 'life model decoy' (obviously!) which the Skull used to trap Cap into making a rescue attempt. Ah, this issue is so gloriously ridiculous.

The Fink Brothers

Brief Kapow thoughts

There's not much left to say about Kapow. I'm very late to the after show party and you've probably read all you need to about the convention already. Still, here are a few thoughts...

The general vibe I get from those who attended was good. It wasn't perfect, but then I only say that because it wasn't quite what I wanted. Selfish git, eh? I would have liked to see less movie fluff and more comics. I'd have ditched all the video game nonsense and replaced it with 25p boxes of tat, and I wouldn't have let some of the shite awful indy creators past the front door. No offence to indy creators, I love a good independent comic me, but there weren't many good independent comics on show. Far too much floorspace was taken up by sixth form standard bilge -IMO. What about those jokers at the end of artist alley selling dog rough sketches of aliens for a fiver?! If you bought one of those you want incinerating. So yeah, fuck them off next year and either get some decent indy creators OR replace them with more purveyors of old tat.

I bought a fair amount of old comics BUT, I have to say, in the main there were not many bargains to be had on the vintage stalls. Same old problem, I'm afraid - the sellers seem to be in denial over ebay. NEWSFLASH: thumbing through your Overstreet guide, deciding you have a NM copy and then slapping an extra few quid on top of the guide price isn't good enough any more. If you want to sell your water damaged copy of Giant Size X-Men #1 then you're going to have to quote a sensible price! I'm sure the stalls peddling the high price silver age tat sold some of those comics on their wall, but only to mugs. I am not paying you £270 for a comic that I can get for half as much on ebay! You have to adjust or you WILL die! Sorry. I don't want to see you die, I am just telling you the truth.

Right, moans out the way - the good...

The people. I had such a nice time meeting comic chums. Really. I even announced this after a couple of beers, at which point Little Ad said I was just sucking dick! Well, Little Ad - not so sir! The people (including Little Ad) were the undoubted highlight of the weekend for me. From Dexter and John, who schlepped the floors with me, to Dave who tore up the cosplay and provided plenty of laughs in the pub. It was spiffing to spend so much time with like minded folk. I got to meet Pete Kirkham, have a chat with Mike Leader, a bit of a yarn with Mr Salmond. Marvellous. It really was very pleasant. Then there were the brief but - for me anyway -enjoyable chats with creators. Shaky Kane - what a lovely fellah. He spent ten minutes apologising for the fact that the free sketch he was doing for me was shit. It wasn't shit and even if it was, it was fucking free! Chris Weston - politely breaking off from some proper work to pose for a snap and chatting happily about The Twelve with me (nearly finished, apparently). A 10am chat with Leinil Yu in a kebab shop. Nerdgasmic stuff. And what about the cosplayers? I saw a lot of this bunch in action because I spent a good proportion of the con following Dave around. Didn't talk to them, but enjoyed watching them doing their thing and got a little bit of an insight into the politics at work within their community. Some good soap opera there, for sure. Lesbian cosplay grooming FTW! Plus - Domino, PHWOAR!

Venue. Great place. Lovely and bright. Big high ceiling with natural light. Rooms for the panels (I only went to two) were spacious and air conditioned. Plus Upper Street is great for restaurants and pubs AND it's really handy for my house, which is obviously the most important factor.

Anyway, yes. Next year - bring it on! More cosplayers. More tat. Less video game and film shit. Reasonable prices. There's a chance HMV might go bust, so at least we won't have their wank stall. Tell that strange lot with the electric guitars and their rip off of Detroit Metal City to piss off, too. Or not. Whatever. I'll be back. The fact that it wasn't perfect doesn't matter. It's a comic convention! That's what I care about. It's in London. Tickets were fairly priced and those involved clearly put a lot of work into organising it.

Overall I give it a 7.5 out of 10. Really enjoyable weekend.