Hey, Folks!
It looks like I have finally achieved a Thursday where I am both feeling well and I actually have something to say. Also, the spirit is moving me and I actually have the urge to get it out all out on “paper”. Honestly, too often I sit down to write something up for the EDitorial and realize that everything I have to say is stuff I will be saying when people come into the store and I don’t want to sound like a broken record. I’ll also admit to wondering if anyone is really reading the stuff I put out every week. Of course, then I don’t get anything put out and I will get comments from customers letting me know that they missed my little missive for the week or technology will have a breakdown and I can’t record the show (like Tuesday) and many folks definitely do miss my rambling videos. I guess I just want everyone to know that I do hear you and I will work harder to get something out that is actually entertaining AND informative…😊
So, I don’t know about anyone else, but I am currently enjoying the hell out of DC’s “Dawn of DC” promotion! If you’ve read comics long enough then you know that all of the Big Companies tend to go through periods of “good” and “bad” comics. The cyclical nature of comics will often see various marquee characters going through myriad changes and permutations with everything eventually getting reset, restarted, and rebooted and we are off the to races again. D.C. Comics has entered into another period with a new starting point with a bunch of their major characters and I have to admit that I am quite taken with a couple of the new directions.
I have, of course, been extolling the greatness of Chip Zdarsky’s run on Batman as well as the miniseries which is rapidly approaching it’s big finale, Batman & Joker The Deadly Duo by Marc Silverstri and company. Both books take a major swing away from what has been The Batman Playbook for the last several years with the endless amount of dramatic psychobabble. Zdarsky and Silverstri, with both of their current projects, instead give us good, solid Batman stories with Batman being portrayed as a sympathetic protagonist in a cracking good super hero story. I want to see Batman working with the police, solving mysteries, helping people, and stopping crime. What I don’t want to see is constant navel gazing, blaming himself for every damn thing that goes wrong with Gotham, the seemingly endless pontificating over his dead parents, and showing us over and over again how depressing Batman’s existence is and how he isn’t allowed even one moment of lightness or cheer. Remember when Batman used to have a sense of humor? And, by the way, I still can’t quite understand how many readers complained about Batman’s amazing fall from the Justice League satellite to the ground without killing himself. If it were in a movie it would have elicited cheers and in comics we get complaints that it “isn’t very realistic”…c’mon, Folks, it was COOL!
I’ve been a Superman fan ever since I jumped into John Byrne’s Man of Steel miniseries back in the 80’s, although he 80’s and 90’s era Superman books have always been my favorite. I will freely admit that once we hit the NEW 52 era that I very quickly lost interest in the Superman character. I’ve never completely stopped paying attention to the books, but I haven’t been a regular reader of all of the Superman Stuff until recently with the Dawn of DC stuff. Superman, written by Joshua Williamson and drawn by Jamal Campbell, has changed everything for me. This “new” direction on the character is not new at all…it’s a refreshing and much loved decision to go back to the 80’s style of Superman with the attendant cast and bad guys. I will admit that there’s nothing in the material that is going to make you fall in love with the character if you aren’t already, but I submit that the art and storyline is classic super hero material and would be of interest to anyone who loves a good old-fashioned comic book story.
Adventures of Superman, featuring Jon Kent, is just as good and for essentially the same reasons. Fresh and fun and featuring a well paced and action packed super hero story. The fact that it is centered around the multiverse and features a supporting cast of different D.C. mainstays from alternate universes is a big plus for me as well. I loved all of that pre-Crisis multiverse madness when I first started reading D.C. Comics and I am glad to see current editorial really leaning into it. Writer Tom Taylor and artist Clayton Henry are bringing their A game to this title and it shows!
A new title that just shipped in this week is the Unstoppable Doom Patrol #1 by writer Dennis Culver and artist Chris Burnham. I have loved the Doom Patrol since the classic Grant Morrison run of the late 80’s and the characters have rarely been as well served since then despite everyone from John Byrne to Keith Giffen giving the title a try. Culver and Burnham have done a wonderful job of combining all of the different flavors of Doom Patrol into a great start of the new title. There is a good balance between melodrama and super hero action and it feels like an X-Men title. Loved it and is well worth a try…so much so that I am taking a copy home for my husband to give a try…
I have decided to make some changes/updates to the subscription form this week and try to clarify how it works because of an influx of new customers using the service. Please understand that I try to put EVERYTHING available from my three distributors every week. That includes titles that I have ordered “for the rack” as well as a lot of material that we don’t carry on the rack at all. Whenever you make your choices and hit the SEND button either myself or Brian will process your order and make a pull list of the items that we have in stock or put an order for titles that we don’t carry. Because of shipping costs and the vagaries of comic distribution we generally put one order in a week on Sunday for material that comes out the following week. So basically if you order something we don’t normally carry or if we are technically “sold out” of then we have order the item(s) and then wait for the reorder to get here. Generally that means that we have it before the end of the week, but rarely before Wednesday when people start coming in for their books. If you order something that we need to order after 3:30-4pm on Sunday then chances are the order will not be placed until the following Sunday and will take an extra week to get here.
I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get more information out there in front of you when you are using the subscription form. The problem is that the best thing about Google forms is how simple they are to construct and to use. Simple for us…simple for you…it really is a great system. But I was still running into problems when it comes to either items I haven’t ordered enough copies of or items which we simply don’t carry. Sometimes it takes longer for the special order items to get here or else the distributor/publisher will sell out of the item immediately or there is a variant cover that suddenly everyone in the world wants and there is a question as to whether I can get more copies or not. Brian and I do try to catch these things as they occur and make adjustments, but the system is not a perfect one. So, in order to experiment with a new way to deal with the issue, I am starting a new system to signal some additional information to you. From now on if you see an single “*” next to an item it denotes items that are not carried on the rack. If you order this item then it may take anywhere from a couple of days to longer to get into the store, depending on the distributor. If you see a double “**” next to an item this denotes something that is normally carried on the rack but we have sold out of all of the copies from our initial order and you may have a wait while we order in more copies. I’m going to try this new system for the next week or two and see how it works with adjustments and possibly more classifications to come!
Well, I’ll admit that I had more this week, including a rundown of the upcoming Free Comic Book Day event, but I see that it is already 3pm and I am WAAAAAAAY behind on everything that needs to get done before I leave the store today so I will instead bid you all a fond adieu. Please have a great weekend and I hope to see you in the store this week!
Eddie