October 27th, 2006 at 10:49 am PDT
1. I’ve been told by my e-mail host, Fastmail, that there’s a catastrophic disk outage that’s playing havoc on their site, and I’ll be unable to access the ray@raycornwall.com email for at least a day. So I’ll be slow to respond to emails this weekend.
2. I’ve changed some of the tags around on the sidebar.
3. I owe everyone articles on Luke Cage, a few Masterworks, and Iron Wok Jan. I should make some headway this weekend. The Iron Wok Jan reread came out of the last attempts to revive 35-30, which I’ve decided is just not feasible anymore. One thing I’ve definitely picked up on the second time around is the extent of Jan’s physical abuse at the hands of his grandfather; it changes the whole tone of the story. It’s still a fantastic story, but it’s a little disturbing.
4. Comics shopping goodness: If you shop at Buy.com until 10/31 and check out using Google Checkout, you’ll save $10 off a $30 order. The discount can be used repeatedly, so you could buy, say, $210 worth of books for $140 by doing 7 orders. The deal doesn’t work on pre-orders, and they seem to be slow on updating new books; I noticed Ode to Kirihito and the Ivan Brunetti anthology were not in their warehouses even though I saw the books on the shelves of Barnes & Noble last weekend. And if you’re meticulous about the condition of your books, I don’t recommend the service; they don’t pack books anywhere near as good as, say, Mailordercomics.com. But if you’re just looking for a few graphic novels to read, you can’t go wrong.
October 25th, 2006 at 3:18 pm PDT
Adams has lost his voice due to a bout with spasmodic dysphonia, a condition where the brain forgets how to speak in a normal voice. You can sing, shout, and speak in public, but normal talking is impossible. There are no documented cases of recovery.
Until now.
This is an amazing story. Rather than gloat about his recovery, Adams asked his readers to share their greatest moments. It’s a fantastic blog post, and it shouldn’t be missed.
(Thanks to Boing Boing for clueing me in to this.)
October 22nd, 2006 at 11:50 pm PDT
We blew up the blog real good, didn’t we? I’d like to thank Omer Kakarca for designing the theme. There is still some work to be done (the logo’s pretty hideous), but I like the new layout, and I hope you do too. Drop a comment if you see any bugs.
October 17th, 2006 at 12:54 pm PDT
From Warren Ellis’s Bad Signal, with his permission:
Okay. I just this second got the go-ahead from Nick Lowe to talk about
this. So here we go:
Sales on the singles are okay, if not great. Sales on the first collection
have apparently been terrific.
We were on such a roll with NEXTWAVE that I was actually into the
idea of doing a second year, which is highly unusual for me and
work-for-hire properties. So Marvel sat down and looked at the numbers,
as they wanted to do a second year too.
What they found was that, at our current sales levels, they could afford
for me to write it, but not for Stuart to draw it. Stuart, as a
Marvel-exclusive artist, commands a fee commensurate with his
astonishing talent. I’m WFH-exclusive too, but they just send me
whisky and loose women and I’m fine. So, basically, I could continue
to write NEXTWAVE, but we’d need to find another artist. This, to me,
was just wrong. I mean, Stuart would obviously be given a far better
job that had actual readers attached to it, but it still seemed a bit like
the numbers were conspiring to fire him for doing his job too well.
Everyone at Marvel pitched in to try and make it work, but the
numbers were just against us.
So NEXTWAVE #12 will be the final issue of the ongoing series.
(To clear up a common misconception: NEXTWAVE was always
pitched as an ongoing series. However, my original intent was to
do 12 and then pass it on to someone else. This got garbled,
somewhere down the chain of communication, and so the first
issue or two got solicited as "part xxx of 12".)
However. The numbers game changes when you posit things in
terms of limited series.
NEXTWAVE #12 will be the last issue of the ongoing series: but
there will be more NEXTWAVE to come, presented as a sequence
of limited series.
This was all worked out some months ago, so I had plenty of time
to work the final NEXTWAVE sequence into a conclusion of sorts.
#11 even features a twelve-page spread that you’ll have to buy six
copies of the comic to assemble into its full splendour. Everyone
wishes I’d thought of that eight or nine months ago.
That was the news. Return to your duties.
Call me a nut, but I think this series deserves the oversized HC treatment. I held off on the first hardcover collection hoping we’ll get the big book soon. I think I regret that decision.
October 16th, 2006 at 11:16 pm PDT
I could take that copout, you know. 30 in Hexidecimal would work out to 48 in base ten, and I’d have a few extra days, and I could pretend it all worked out.
But I’d be denying one truth that I don’t want to deny- 35/30 worked for me in the most important ways. Sure, I only wrote reviews for half the books, and I got sidetracked the last week and a half with the Essential Luke Cage and the webcomic Narbonic. But I wrote a lot more about comics than I ever have in my life, set up a website to do it, and established a level of self-discipline that every writer needs. And I learned a few weaknesses, and I’m happy about that, because I can’t get better as a writer without that awareness.
I’m going to still review the two Masterworks and Alan Moore’s Lost Girls, and a few of the other books may get a longer review as time goes by. And I’ll do a summary of the other books soon. The summary will come sooner than the rest. And I want to finish everything soon; just because I’m past 30 days doesn’t mean I want this program hanging over my head 30 days from now. Call it 35/60, if you wish.
October 16th, 2006 at 1:22 pm PDT
eBay announced last week that it’s clamping down on pre-order sales on Playstations 3s and Nintendo Wii consoles. Last year, when the Xbox 360 came out, numerous eBay buyers were hurt when they tried to buy consoles through such auctions, only to suffer when sellers couldn’t deliver the product.
This is a responsible move on eBay’s part. No video game reseller can guarantee you a Wii or PS3 at this time. You can pre-order a console from a retailer, but because supply issues are never resolved at a console launch, the retailer can’t guarantee it will be allocated the number of pre-orders it took. And most of the pre-order sales on eBay are actually individuals who made a pre-order at a retailer anyway, so they can’t guarantee the sale. It’s too disruptive a business for eBay, and they outlaw such business with this policy.
"The seller must guarantee that the item will be available for shipping within 30 days from the date of purchase (i.e., the day the listing ends or the date the item is purchased from a store front listing)."
However, since this policy is uniform across the eBay site, I suspect a lot of comics retailers are about to run into trouble with this policy.
There are a number of listings each month on eBay for pre-sales of comics merchandise. Here’s one as an example. This is for Marve Masterworks Avengers volume 6. Marvel is listing the shipping date as December 13, 2006. The auction expires October 19, well before the 30 days that eBay mandates for such auctions. Technically, this auction is not in compliance with eBay’s policy on pre-sale transactions.
But there’s a big difference between this listing and a listing for a console that hasn’t shipped. The retailer is utilizing the Direct Market to secure the Avengers book. He’ll place an order, and Marvel will fulfill it through Diamond Distribution. In fact, Marvel will create as many books as needed to fulfill the needs of Diamond’s retailer customers. Unless the retailer makes an error with his Diamond order or Marvel unexpectedly allocates the Masterwork (and I don’t think they’ve ever allocated such an item), the retailer will easily fulfill this order when the book comes out. And this retailer has done this transaction many times in the past; he’s got a 99.0% positive feedback rating on nearly fourteen thousand transactions. (I’m not endorsing the retailer at all; I’m just rattling off his eBay numbers. I picked this transaction solely because it’s the first one I found.)
Clearly, this sort of transaction shouldn’t be treated in the same way a console pre-order is. But the polciy doesn’t distinguish between the two; it treats both the same, and I suspect at some point comics retailers are going to be punished for the sins of the video game industry.
October 11th, 2006 at 2:34 pm PDT
This post tries to wrap up all the loose ends in Civil War to explain the behaviours of Tony Stark and Reed Richards. Nice piece.
I haven’t forgotten 35/30, but it’s been ambushed by, of all things, Essential Luke Cage 1 and what might be the funniest Doctor Doom story EVER. More tonight.
October 7th, 2006 at 9:07 pm PDT
So back when I started 35/30, I vowed to write something on all the books in the pile, read or not. With about a week to go, the pile’s huge, and I’m going to take a stab at the unread pile.
Truthfully, this is a tough month. There’s a lot of books on the unread pile. Part of that is because a lot of the books are part of series I’m a little behind on, but this is still a lot of books. I’ve been sidetracked because I’m reading the full Captain America Masterworks series, and they’re three dense volumes. But I still never thought I’d have this high of a number of unread books at the end of the month.
On the other hand, I’m going to end up with a double-digit amount of full reviews, with The Great Catsby, Lost Girls, Absolute Kingdom Come, Jokes and the Unconscious, and the two Masterworks books to go. I’ll take that for a first month of blogging. I hope you will too.
So here we go:
Concrete Vol 6 Stranger Armor TP
This is a small digest reprint of Paul Chadwick’s Concrete origin story. I prefer the oversized format for Chadwick’s art, like we saw in the short stories collections in the 90s, but the digests do have a nice bonus. The "big" stories such as Strange Armor are presented along with short stories printed around the same time, so you get to see the big picture. This is a fantastic series, and it’s highly recommended.
Daredevil Vol 1 HC (New Printing)
"New Printing" stands for "the first edition has a significant production error and missed an issue". The first edition had a page that was missing word balloons and didn’t print issue 12 (a fill-in with art by Rob Haynes). The book fixes the error and reprints Daredevil v2 1-14. This book established the Marvel Knights imprint, featured a nice story by movie guy Kevin Smith, and had some fantastic art by Joe Quesada. It would have been a nicer book if Marvel had offered an exchange program for those of us stuck with the first volume, but I still appreciate the new edition.
Deadbeats #78 and Soulsearchers #78
Both books are from Claypool, which will stop publishing comics in 2007. Sales are so low that Diamond is refusing to distribute them anymore, despite Claypool’s claim that they’re happy with sales. It’s a shame; we’re going to lose Peter David’s Soulsearchers because of the shutdown, although there’s been talk of moving the comics to the web. Claypool’s been mocked on the blogosphere for their lackluster marketing efforts; the names of the authors didn’t appear on the covers until this year. In fact, I ordered Deadbeats by accident; I only wanted Soulsearchers, and made an error on my online order form (my bad!).
I’d love to see Claypool consider reinvigorating the line on the web through the sort of promotion Slave Labor’s doing with online comics (89 cent downloads in PDF or CBR format); right now, there are only trades reprinting the first twelve issues, which can be discouraging for new readers. Here’s a thought; with David’s exclusive agreement at Marvel, why not see if Essential black-and-white budget trades could be put out through Icon?
Essential Luke Cage, Power Man Vol 2 TP
From the splash page of Power Man 28 (this is a scan from the comic, not the black-and-white Essential):
"Sir Nose has stolen the Bop Gun from Starchild! How will Starchild lead us all to Funkentelechny? Bring on the Mothership Connection! Ain’t nothin’ but a party, y’all! Flashlight!"
There’s a heck of a lot of talent in this book, actually: Chris Claremont, John Byrne, George Tuska, Sal Buscema (always a friend here at Why I Love Comics), Steve Englehart, Mike Zeck, Marv Wolfman, Don McGregor, and more. I’m looking forward to sitting down with this volume and doing a deeper read.
Finder TP Vol 8 Five Crazy Women
Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder saga continues. And I’m so far behind in reading this great, dense series that I’m stealing a quote from McNeil herself:
"Everybody’s asking about the other ‘lost issue’ now that BEWARE OF DOG has found a home in the FIVE CRAZY WOMEN tpb. Would anyone believe that FIVE CRAZY WOMEN grew out of a need to have a place to collect BEWARE OF DOG? I did those two single issues to Give New Readers Great Jumping-On Points. I hope it worked, because I can’t do short stories to save my ass, and for years those two issues have been loose ends defying all attempts at tidy tying-up. I could do a few more single-issue stories, I’d think. Then I could just collect all of the ‘Jaeger B-Sides.’ Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. Har. Me trying to write a short story is like a twelve-stepper saying he’s only going to have one Cosmopolitan."
If you really need a jump-on place, why not hop over to lightspeedpress.com and read the webcomic? You can get the first 69 pages (as of this writing) for free.
Halo & Sprocket Vol 1: Welcome To Humanity TP
I bought this book solely because of Johanna Draper Carlson’s review. It’s one of her ten favorite comics. That’s good enough for me.
Hellblazer: Stations Of The Cross TP
I’m a Hellblazer fan going back to the days of Garth Ennis. I find that I like each author’s run after they’re all done. Mike Carey’s run still has another trade or two to go.
I’ll pick up on the pile tomorrow. Tonight, my wife CL and I are going out for fondue!
Fondue: gooey cheese.
Throw in some great dippers and
That’s a darn good time!
(See? Haiku. I sneak it in.)
October 4th, 2006 at 6:52 pm PDT
Since the relaunch of the Marvel Masterworks program in 2003, Marvel has priced the books at $49.95 for books with the new silver bookjacket design and $54.95 for books with the original marble design. Starting in January, the price will be $54.95 for either edition, but the bindings will be sewn, rather than glued. I own all but one of the non-Golden Age Masterworks, and I think this is great news.
Glued bindings have been a major complaint of those who chat on the Marvel Masterworks board. Glued bindings tend to be tighter than sewn bindings, so the books end up suffering from "gutter loss" (in other words, you can’t really see the art along the inner edges of the pages). The problem’s much more noticeable in the new Omnibus formats; the Alias book and the Eternals reprint had serious problems with gutter loss. Here’s hoping that Marvel puts sewn bindings in the upcoming Miller Daredevil and Ditko Spider-Man books.
Credit for this news goes to the always incredible Gormuu at MarvelMasterworks.com.
October 4th, 2006 at 5:00 pm PDT
Go here. The interview was in support of Neil’s new project, Fragile Things, a collection of short stories.
He’s not kidding about the lines at his signings, either; I’ve waited 5 hours to get an autograph from him before. And he was as charming at midnight as he was during the 7 pm reading. He’s definitely the real deal. (He signed the hardcover graphic novel of Stardust and a piece of original art from A Game of You that I bought at a ACS auction.)
I’m mystified about the idea that the Death movie would only be a $30 million movie; I always thought it would do incredible box office. But what do I know? The site’s Why I Love Comics, not Why I Love Estimating Box Office Receipts.
Boy, that’s a pretty cover, isn’t it?
