Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This week Bennett looks at Marvel's Timely line, Nigerian comics, and the Vote Loki campaign.

First, DC announces that all of their upcoming "Rebirth" comics will have their SRP rolled back to $2.99.  Almost immediately afterwards Marvel counters with a similar price reduction (see "Marvel Announces New Timely Comics Imprint") for their upcoming reprint imprint for their All-New, All-Different comics.  I know that publishers like DC, Marvel, Image Comics and Dark Horse Comics have offered a selection of their top titles priced at only a dollar.  You probably have a few of them in your store.  But as both a reader and retailer, it's hard not agree with the headline of a piece on the Kotaku website which called the move "A Shockingly Good Idea."

There's nothing wrong with publishers doing multiple printings of first (and sometimes second) issues of "hot" comics.  It's nice for collectors, as well as being a nice revenue stream for us retailers.  But for actually selling a customer on a new series it's hard to beat being able to actually hand them an inexpensive collection of, say, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur.

On the other hand, I can definitely see the downside of having 16 different new titles coming out all at once.  That seems like an awful lot of comics, especially when you consider they'll be arriving at roughly the same time as DC's "Rebirth" line.  And it's also kind of hard to see that timing as being a coincidence.

I knew that Marvel was planning to do something with their old Timely Comics imprint.  Although the publisher didn't do much to promote it, 2015 was the 75th anniversary year and during it they made trademark applications under the categories of education, entertainment and online services.  Hopefully in the future they’ll be using for something other than a "promotional imprint:" Powerhouse Pepper and Silly Seal & Ziggy Pig, not to mention Terry Vance, Schoolboy Sleuth.

It's too late for February's Black History Month, or Black Comics Month for that matter, but the other day quite by accident I came across still further evidence that there's a global superhero/comic book renaissance going on.  On the Africanews website I came across a piece titled "Comics grace Nigeria's growing showbiz industry."  Now, I knew that there was a Nigerian movie industry, aka "Nollywood," thanks in large part to the great documentary currently running on Netflix called JImmy Goes To Nollywood.  But Nigerian superhero comics?  About this I knew nothing.

The piece focuses on Jide Martins, who quit his law practice to found the company Comic Republic where he's worked with a group of young artists to create a team of African superheroes.  These include a Superman analog named Guardian Prime who wears a green and white suit that mirrors the colors of the Nigerian flag.  The 30 plus-page comics, which are in full color and in English, are available free for digital download and readership has grown from 100 per issue to over 28,000.  You can check them out for yourself at the Comic Republic website.

And finally, appropriately enough, yesterday, a.k.a. "Super Tuesday," Marvel announced that in June they would release a new series titled Vote Loki in which the God of Mischief will be running for the U.S. Presidency.  While these sorts of things aren’t exactly common they're not unheard of; Howard the Duck once ran for the office and Lex Luthor actually won (though happily I don't think that "counts" anymore).  It's the sort of not-to-be-taken-seriously stunt that can get the publisher some short-term media attention, the kind of thing I'm usually happy to ignore.  But, after a couple of, shall we say, complicated years where he worked out some of his personal issues by first becoming a woman and then a tween, it's a little sad seeing him backslide into such cheap villainy.  Especially while wearing a truncated version of his old cuckold horns helmet.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.