Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by retailer Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in
Last week I raved over a couple of local comic book store and it occurred to me I’ve never given a shop a negative review here. Now this isn’t out of either misguided boosterism or fear I’d offend some of my fellow retailers (this I do all the time without even meaning to), it’s because it’s been quite a while since I’ve been inside a really bad one. Oh, I’ve seen more than my share that were unfathomably awful but this was way back at the dawn of the direct sales market, which is starting to be a really long time ago.
I really don’t think this reflects good luck on my part (not given the state of my luck); it seems more likely, in spite of the still in place stereotype of the comic book shop as an Ugly Boy Store, that what’s considered to be just barely minimum acceptable when it comes to what constitutes a "good" comic shop has risen considerably over the last couple of decades.
There I was, talking about Indian comics a couple of weeks ago and the next thing you know Virgin Comics is “reorganizing,” presumed not at all well. The cost cutting and downsizing are well and good but it’s probably too late which is a shame since I admired the eclectic nature of Virgin’s line and its high production values. I know it’s Monday morning quarterbacking at its worst, but if Virgin had actually expected to generate revenue from comic shops they probably should have started with Dan Dare and worked their way up to more esoteric titles.
I’ve been reading the main Secret Invasion series and studiously avoiding all the spin-offs, but finding myself with a great swatch of dead time I finally sat down and read a big pile of them all at once and came to a couple of realizations. First, most of them were just awful, perfect evidence for someone who argues that one of the unintended consequences of a company focusing the bulk of its time and energy on a single “event” is that the quality of their rank and file titles drops precipitously.
And wow, Marvel superheroes are actually killing Skrulls. I mean, I know having already played the
Of course we’re supposed to want our heroes to kill them; they are, finally, what I’ve been asking for all along, a fantasy stand-in for Al-Qaeda, religious fanatics bent on destroying everything that makes us who were are because being them is so much better. At last there are make-believe terrorists our heroes can punch in the face (and then some) without it seeming inappropriate or in bad taste. So I’m guessing the audience these comics are intended for is cooing “cool!” every time they see a Skrull reduced to a fine green mist.
And of course I have to tip my hat to Mr. Bendis for finding a way to make the Skrulls into a genuine threat, but it is worth noting that he had to add just one thing to change them from being a bunch of annoying shape changers into a genuine threat: religion.
And finally, there are so many bloggers, blogging so often, that it’s increasingly hard for me to find something to write about that hasn’t already been written about a lot better by someone else, but here’s something that seems to have slipped the blogosphere’s collection attention. In Batman Confidential #18, the second part of a five-part series by Fabian Nicieza and Kevin Maguire, the Barbara Gordon Batgirl is chasing Catwoman across
I’m not really complaining about it; it gives Kevin Maguire a chance to show us lots of his patented facial contortions. Plus it’s a remarkably light hearted story for a DC Universe where they’ve just…well, I won’t “spoil” for some of you but Sean McKeever should be really, really ashamed of himself for what he just did to Wonderdog in this week’s Teen Titans #62. But it doesn’t alter the fact someone in the editorial department thought it was coolio to green light a story in a Batman comic where there’s page after page of naked people rubbing up against each other.
