Shipping This Week! - 05.05.04

Oh, yeah - another 5 months, 3 weeks, 2 days, 14 hours, and 6 minutes until I get sick of INFINITE CRISIS!

For me: Seven Soldiers, Y, Great Lakes Avengers. Sea of Red is vampire pirates, right? Is it as good as I'd like it to be? The store was sold out of it last week.

OMG

MAR051675D FELT TRUE TALES OF UNDERGROUND HIP HOP ONE SHOT (MR) $2.95

Does this mean that Slug will be the next Craig Thompson?

Yeah, Sea of Red was pretty good - it was essentially an origin issue, showing how the guy on the cover got in the sticky wicket he finds himself in. Much pirate love (& ghosts, too).

Speaking of great books from Image - ROBERT KIRKMAN! Both The Walking Dead and Invicible are fantastic!

Hoo boy. Slow week for my first visit to the NEW COMIC SHOP (owned by the same guy who owns my old comic shop) FIVE BLOCKS FROM MY HOUSE!
The kid who works there in the afternoon is gonna get soooo sick of me.
"So, you think Green Lantern could beat Grey Hulk?"
"Um, I don't really read DC."
"Well, he could. Well, Hal Jordan could. He's Green Lantern again, you know. You probably didn't even know he wasn't. His replacement was, umm, ineffectual."
"Okay."
"So you think Green Arrow could beat Grey Hulk?"
"What does Green Arrow do?"
"He beats Grey Hulk, that's what he does."
"Oh. You wanna buy something?"
"Naaaaaa, I bought my comics yesterday."

What's Invincible all about?

Image needs to get some damn editors. Walking Dead has more misspellings/usage errors/incomprehensible sentences than any other mainstream comic ever.

And don't get me wrong, I like the book, but how can I enjoy a good man-having-to-kill-his-zombified-best-friend moment when I'm sitting there going, "It's EFFECT, not AFFECT, you stupid bastard!!"

Really? I didn't notice any typos or such things. & I think that all editorial issues are the responsibility of the book's creators, not Image - they're just the publisher. (Blame the letterer!)

Invincible is about a kid that has superpowers (superstrength, flying around, etc.), and he finds out his dad is a superhero, and he flies around doing superhero stuff while trying to get through high school and yadda yadda yadda BUT it's a well-executed take on this played-out thing, and there was a BIG TWIST a few issues ago that SHOOK THE FOUNDATIONS of the kid & stuff. A $.50 issue was released recently (last month, I think) - it serves as a nice recap of what preceded it. Great art, too.

There have been some awful ones, Dave. I try my best to forget them but maybe I'll post some examples. It seems much worse that a typo in a novel because some letterer (DAMN YOU LETTERER) actually took the time to do it by hand.

On the plus side, the preview cover of the ninja woman with her defanged zombie slaves looks SWEET.

CONCRETE HUMAN DILEMMA #5 (OF 6) (MR)

BATMAN DARK DETECTIVE #1 (OF 6)
DETECTIVE COMICS #806
INTIMATES #7
LEX LUTHOR MAN OF STEEL #3 (OF 5)
SEVEN SOLDIERS SHINING KNIGHT #2 (OF 4)
SUPERMAN #216
VILLAINS UNITED #1 (OF 6)
Y THE LAST MAN #33 (MR)

SEA OF RED #2 (MR)

DAREDEVIL REDEMPTION #4 (OF 6)
GLA #2 (OF 4)
SHANNA THE SHE DEVIL #4 (OF 7)
ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR #18

Nothing for me this week.

Was there really a demand for an X-Men: Eve of Destruction trade paperback? That boggles my mind. The final third of the Claremont run is mostly out of print, but THAT they reprint?

The original Claremont run, I mean. Amazingly, they never bothered to make trades out of the Romita Jr., Silvestri, and Jim Lee runs. Weird.

I'd love to know the actual sales numbers on the majority of stuff Marvel TPBs for the sake of TPBing.

Also on the WTF reprint tip - there's some $4 reprint special offering fans some crap Wolverine stories AND reprints of coveted appearances by TUK THE CAVE BOY.

[xpost]

I'd imagine Jim Lee's run was TPB'd in one of those Visionary books (unless they just covered the issues of post-Claremont X-Men he was involved w/).

Yeah, I'm almost certain that the Visionary book is just the first year of X-Men minus the Claremont story. Omega Red, etc.

Pretty light week for me, with only JLE, Shining Knight, Villians United, Y and GLA. My pulls were all screwed up for while as my store changed distribtors, so I've been getting stuff all out of sync. This is my third issue of Y in a month -- it's like Christmas!

Just Villians United for me - I'll look at it in the shop first to check that it isn't rubbish though...

Seven Soldiers 2:
More than a bit waffly, not helped by the artist getting much worse at rendering action or even matching the text in the panels than last time, (and she (?) was pretty bad then).

If a guy kicks out the door of a car, it is his feet that are pointing out the door, not his head! If a car hits his head while it is hanging out of a car, this will affect his position too! Also the car that hits him cannot drive through two other cars that have hit each other!

Plus, if a dude is in several panels talking about how deformed a part of his body is, and how weird that must look to other people, do not make sure to bury that body part in deep shadow in every panel! And then do not draw it being completely normal and unblemished later on in the book!

The bit with Clark Kent wearing an open trenchcoat over his Superman costume may be a deliberate reference that things are slightly different in this world, might be a bit of chicken fat gone wrong in the colouring, or might be a fuck-up because Bianchi can't read English properly. Who knows? At least this will be over first and I can wallow in the rest of the 7 Soldiers joyfully.

Just got Shining Knight 2 and the other Seven Soldiers catching up I have to do. Don't feel a real urge to catch up on Detective Comics. Also, how is the Batman: Dark Knight Detective? Picked it up and looked at it, but eventually put it back in favor of saving money for food.

Can someone help me out a bit with what happened between Hush and the current Batman story arc? That's what I missed. What was War Games all about, eh? And is GLA good? It seemed pretty popular, and looked.. intriguing. But having not read the first one, I didn't want to confuse myself.

War Games is what happened between Hush and now.
I've only read the War Drums Prelude and Vol. 1 of the WG trades.

Tim Drake's dad found out that he's Robin and made him quit.
In WD, Spoiler who is sort of Robin's g/f steps in a become Robin for a few issues, before getting fired for not following Batman's order to the word.
In War Games, there's this big meeting between all the Gotham crime bosses that nobody's sure who called (it's revealed by the end of the first trade, but just in case you care to read that, I won't spoil it for you, since it has a bit of dramatic currency). Sure enough the meeting turns into a gunfight and a bunch of bosses are dead, which leads to all out war between the gangs.
Batman calls in all his friends and Tim Drake gets to be Robin again.

Spoiler gets killed, and Tim Drake's dad gets killed (in Identity Crisis).
Batman pisses off the Gotham PD and by the end of War Games, he's back to unwanted vigilante status. He ships Robin and Batgirl off to Bludhaven, and Nightwing (in his own book) quits the superhero biz to rehash his growth from R to N. In the Batman title, however, Nightwing's in Gotham hanging out with daddy.

Thanks a bunch.

Under what circumstances would heroin be shipped from the United States to Australia or Japan or anywhere at all west across the Pacific!? None! None at all!

...unless the US heroin industry started receiving government subsidies so it could compete in global markets, like with rice or whatever

As much as I hate to say it, Batman: Dark Detective is pretty lame. I knew it would be, but it's still sad that it really is.