Hurricane Irene

• Just a lot of rain, and a bit of wind filled today's grey day due to Hurricane Irene (downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it reached Massachusetts).
• TV was Friday's latest "Thundercats" and a lot of Bianca de la Garza talking about the weather.
• I also read the amazingly perfect for kids of all ages "Marineman" comic book series. I need to get the trade paperback for a few of the kids.
• Mac & Cheese and ground beef for a late lunch.
• ...And I just bought one ticket to see Ivy at the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton for Tuesday September 13th!

Contraction Part 2

In a similar vein to my last post, I have been mulling over the idea of limiting my monthly comic pulls to a much smaller number of titles. I have found that I tend to buy some books based on a loyalty to the character and/or wanting to see a 'little' book succeed, rather than take into account how much repeat enjoyment I may get from the book over the long haul. I think it would be best for my long term financial success (without sacrificing my lifelong hobby completely) if I were to keep my comics budget below the forty dollar mark going forward. So along these lines I have decided a few things:

• Once the Nick Fury - led Secret Warriors ends, I am washing my hands of Marvel Comics for the foreseeable future. The X-teams have been a mess for the last five years, and the Avengers titles have been as well. Unless Iceman gets some serious positive exposure in an X-book and/or the Avengers get back to basics (sans-Wolverine, Spider-Man, Luke Cage, et al), this once-proud company has seen the last of my dollars.

• I can't go all 'spazzboy' on the DC relaunch. I would like to get twelve of the new titles, but I think I am going to make myself keep it to eight: Legion of Super-Heroes, Legion Lost, Aquaman, The Savage Hawkman, DC Universe Presents, All-Star Western, Mister Terrific and Nightwing.

• Vertigo: I am going to continue with House of Mystery and The Unwritten, but alas, the 'going nowhere fast' iZombie is getting the axe.

Contraction

I've been collecting comics since I was ten years old. From time to time I sell off a small pile of them to either pay a bill, or trade some of them in for newer comics. I think now is a great time to "weed out the unfit", so to speak, and make their footprint in my living space a great deal smaller. I have around twenty longboxes (which hold several hundred comics each) and ten (or so) half-boxes, and a lot of them are full of issues I'll probably never read again.

I am compiling several lists: "Keepers", "Kids" (to be distributed between my ten nieces & nephews), and "Revenue" (the ones I no longer wish to keep, and will attempt to make some money off of them by selling them).

KEEPERS (in no particular order):

• Legion of Super-Heroes (original team and 'retroboot')
• Nightwing
• JLA
• JSA
• Starman (Jack Knight)
• Avengers
• West Coast Avengers
• New Mutants
• Conan
• Astro City
• What If?/Elseworlds (and other 'alternate universe' titles)
• Savage Dragon
• Green Lantern
• Hawkman
• Aquaman

I will amend this list from time to time, and share which titles wound up going to the kids.

Laketastic!

After working with Dad from 11:30 to 3:30 I went down to the lake for a few hours. Got down to the lot, unpacked all of my stuff, and popped open a Wachusett Green Monsta IPA (see my review here). Then I slathered on the
sunscreen and took a second beer with me out onto the lake. I paddled around and floated in the middle of the water, enjoying the sun (and to a lesser extent the beer), exercise, and white clouded blue skies for awhile, and then headed in for a bit, to read the tail end of "The King's Commission" and do some inking on my 'X-Men' drawing of "Colossus vs a Sentinel". After that I grabbed a third beer and headed back out onto the water for a second round of summer revels. However the beer spilled into the lake on my outward paddle, and so I enjoyed the sunny scenery and watched the other denizens of Wyman's Pond as they jet skied, motor boated, or party boated around the water.

As I lazed away my afternoon I aired out two old boxes of comics that Dad had stored in the basement and hallway. He had an old issue of 'Superboy and The Legion of Super-Heroes' that I hadn't read (#218, cover dated July 1976) and it was packed with characters and plot elements that are still relevant today (Absorbancy Boy, who grew up to be Earth Man on the team now, Infectious Lass and her futile second attempt at joining, and most importantly, new member Tyroc's final initiation test). What a great find! And the scent of old comics always brings me back to my childhood.

I could have spent the whole evening down there, but by 7 pm I was hungry for supper, so I packed up the car, satisfied with my combination of productivity and recreation, and headed home...

Superhero iPod Shuffle

Whoo-HOO! I won again. And once I've gotten paid once or twice, I should have a few bucks to supplement my ten dollar credit!

Let that be a lesson to any doubting folks: if you don't enter, you can't win. But if you do enter, you have a chance at obtaining some cool free stuff.

Fan Mail

I have been rereading a run of old "Fantastic Four" comics lately, the 'Heroes Reborn' relaunch from the late 90's, and Chris Claremont was the writer for a large span of issues (#'s 5 - 32). He spent most of the run dragging in all of his less-than-spectacular minor characters from his "X-Men" and "Excalibur" tenures, practically relegating the team to bystander status in their own book. Not to mention corrupting the book with a 'been there, done that' alternate future family member (the super-annoying Valeria Von Doom), a move which had previously caused me to drop the X-books he's written where he spent more time on the incredibly lame Rachael Summers (Cyclops & Jean Grey's potential future daughter), Cable (Cyclops and Madelyn Pryor's son all grown up in the future, and decades older than his parents) and Bishop (a mutant cop from several generations in the future, where all the X-Men are dead) rather than focusing on present-day (at the time) worthy mainstays (and my personal favorites) like Colossus, Nightcrawler and Iceman.

Anyway, I was reading the letters page in "Fantastic Four" #23, cover date November 1999, and there was a particularly well-written missive that I agreed with whole-heartedly. Imagine my surprise and exclamation when I realized it was a letter I'd sent in and gotten published! Check out my long letter of praise and constructive criticism, and laugh with (or at) me...

Gift Card Bonanza 2

Yesterday I went to That's Entertainment to use the $40 gift certificate my parents got me for Christmas. I had a list of offbeat titles I wanted to try, but after searching the shelves for awhile, I didn't find any of them. I think the store has been cleaned out over the last week, because I know some of them were there on my last visit. And while they did have a copy of "Flight" #5, I want to read that anthology series in order, and I certainly don't want to pay full price when I can get that $27 book for $14 on Amazon.

So I used the certificate to get the bulk of my monthly pull list."Conan the Cimmerian" from Dark Horse and "DV8: Gods and Monsters" both ended with the issues I picked up. I am sad to see Conan go, but DV8 ended rather flat. We will see how the miniseries stands up to a run-through read of all 8 issues. The 3 issues of  Marvel's "Secret Warriors" were good (as usual), but the 3 issues of "Secret Avengers" were not. I am nearly done with Marvel, and have been slowly slipping away for the last half-decade as they have spread out and thinned out their Avengers and X-Men franchises beyond my caring. "SW" and "New Mutants" are the only ones I care about at this point.

I also got the latest issues (#19-20) of "Unwritten" from Vertigo. The story moved along nicely, with a few surprises mixed in. The "Moby Dick" angle is pretty cool too, and I look forward to seeing how the tale unfolds. DC's "Legion of Superheroes" #8 showed the new leader election results (Mon-El, which is lame, I wanted Phantom Girl to win) and more progress in the Durlan assassins plot. Any new Legion story by Paul Levitz is a welcome thing, and this month there was a lot going on. And finally, "Zatanna" #8 breezed by, but it's a good book, and I've always loved her ever since her early days with the JLA back in the 70's and 80's.

Overall, I am grateful for the gift, but underwhelmed by what I brought home. I am all about a great story with decent art, and most of the comics this time around failed. I've been more particular with my comics dollars over the last couple of years, and that trend is going to be ramped up going forward. There is too much uninspired filler out there lately...

The IN Box

Today when the mailman came, in addition to the latest issues of "Playboy" and "Wired", I received the autographed copy of the French version of the graphic novelization of Richard Stark's "The Hunter" that I won from Darwyn Cooke's artist's blog. In addition to the personalization, Mr. Cooke included a little sketch of Parker! It's the same great story that I already own in hardcover, but it is oversized, and relettered in the French language. Very cool. I immediately went online to thank the owner of the Canadian comic shop (Strange Adventures Comix & Curiosities) who held the autograph signing and subsequent contest.

Yesterday

Yesterday (Monday) was a good day. I spent the morning reading the latest issue of "Surfer Magazine" and drawing (surfers, go figure) while I finished watching "Raiders of the Lost Ark". I did my usual fruitless job search online as I played games, read on Wikipedia for awhile and entered a few random contests. It was ESPN sports television ("ATH" & "PTI") while I read the latest "Rolling Stone" beginning at 5 pm. I worked out from 7 - 9 pm, and then took a quick shower, before stretching my last $60 at Hannaford (I had coupons for $5 off $50, and free cat litter - score!). I watched the Ravens/Texans game (I beat my brother Kevin in the first consolation round in our fantasy football league - thanks Andre Johnson!) and the beginning of "Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom" (the worst of the franchise by far - Kate Capshaw, you cannot act!), and then fell asleep around 1 am while reading old issues of "Terminal City".