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 talks about the lessons of the skip week, one of the new characters Disney got from Marvel, the comics about its flagship character, and the Spider-Man strip:

I apologize for last week's absence; I really try to keep this a weekly column but do confess there are weeks when I rediscover just how hard stringing together eight hundred words is, but you should never mistake its nonappearance for a lack of interest on my part.

Since the subject is 'skip week,' while it was nice of Marvel to provide direct retail stores with copies of Origins of Siege for the Diamond skip week, but the gesture was kind of undercut by the fact it was also available online at Marvel.com.  I've always been a big proponent of publishers producing original online comics, especially material that could provide added value to the print titles (like what Marvel is doing with their current online Spider-Man stories).  But since the whole idea was to provide us with something that would bring customers into our shops it really should have remained a comic book shop exclusive--for that week at least.

I liked the free Marvel calendar more; it wasn't exactly earth shattering but was just the kind of promotional item publishers should be providing us with on a regular basis--for free.  I know some retailers have complained about the price we had to pay for the Color Coordinated Power Ring Collection; personally, I think they proved to be worth the price.  But let's face it; it is an expense that Time-Warner could have easily absorbed, especially now that the Green Lantern movie seems to finally be inching towards production.

So I hope in the future we'll be seeing more custom key chains, pens, wrist bands, etc. offered to us, but next year what I'd really like to see is a more substantial item being offered as a holiday gift.  Like, say, those custom reusable fabric bags just about every other business has been offering its customers for years now; it would be perfect for our file customers.  After all, what better way to encourage them to buy more comics than by giving them a bigger bag to put them in.

As I've written before when Disney bought Marvel they got 5,000 new characters only a fraction of which are superheroes, so since it's so profoundly none of my business I've taken it upon myself to introduce Disney to some of their new properties.  This week it's Marvin Mouse.  Like Dippy Duck (see my 10/29/2009 column, "Confessions of a Comic Book Guy--Introducing Dippy Duck") it's a funny animal one-shot actually signed by Stan Lee and his artist, one you'd never expect to see doing funny animals.  In this case it's Bill Everett; the man who created Sub-Mariner here helps Stan create perhaps the single most unattractive funny animal in the history of comics.

Maybe it's just because they were so easy to write but Stan relied heavily on the stock dumb character; like Dippy Duck and My Girl Pearl (a dumb teenage girl comic from the same period) Marvin features a protagonist literally too stupid to live.  Now I know that the dumb guy is a staple of the funny animal genre, understandable seeing as how so many of them depend on rube/conman situations (go read an issue of DC's Dodo and the Frog--I think you'll be pleasantly surprised).  And here thanks to pure chance Marvin always gets the best of would-be sharpie Honest John but the bulk of the 'stories' are just really bad dumb jokes told in comic strip fashion.  The only thing unique about Marvin is, in a complete reversal of funny animal tradition, he wore pants but no shirt.  The first and only issue also contains a Dippy Duck two pager by Lee and Joe Maneely which is actually an improvement over the rest of the contents.

And just from the promotional art I can't wait to see the next European Mickey Mouse serial set to run in Walt Disney's Comics & Stories: Mickey Mouse and the World to Come.  I like my Mickey in high adventure mode and am willing to bet this obvious homage to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow will provide me plenty of it.

In case you missed it, X-Men villain Sabretooth made his first appearance in the syndicated Amazing Spider-Man comic strip this week.  I'm guessing that Larry Lieber was doing his best to replicate the movie version of the character but he way overshoots and ends up with something that looks a lot more like a young Ozzy Osbourne in full werewolf mode.  When they first meet Spider-Man asks him something that hasn't come up in over twenty-five years of comics (no doubt for the benefit of its core readership of retirees who have no idea who he or the X-Men are); does he spell his name with a 'er' or 're'?

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.