dynamite
Food or Comics? | This week’s comics on a budget
Baltimore: The Plague Ships
If it’s Tuesday, it’s time for Food or Comics? Every week we talk about what comics we’d buy if we only had $15 to spend, if we only had $30 to spend and if we had extra money to spend on what we’re calling a “Splurge” item.
So join Brigid Alverson, Chris Mautner and me as we run down what we’d buy this week, and check out Diamond’s release list to play along in our comments section.
Brigid Alverson
If I had $15…
I’d start with the first issue of Baltimore: The Plague Ships ($3.50), because it’s written by Mike Mignola and it has Europe flooded with vampires. Looks like fun. And then, because I can’t get enough Mignola, I’ll take issue 2 of Hellboy: The Storm ($2.99).
Dark Horse is launching its updated Magnus: Robot Fighter series, written by Jim Shooter, this week. Issue #1 looks pretty sweet, and it’s 56 pages for $3.50 (including the original Magnus story from 1963), so I’ll give that a try.
- August 3, 2010 @ 08:19 PM by JK Parkin
Food or Comics? | This week’s comics on a budget
Batman & Robin #13
With the cost of comics seemingly always on the rise, we’ve revamped our old Can’t Wait for Wednesday columns around cover price. Hence, welcome to our second Food or Comics? column, as we look at comics that’ll be in shops tomorrow.
Every week we’ll tell you what comics we’d buy if we had $15 to spend, if we had $30 to spend and if we had some “mad money” (like a gift card) to blow on what we’re calling a “Splurge” item. This week Chris Mautner and Brigid Alverson join Kevin Melrose and myself in our trip to the hypothetical comic shop, following our trip to the imaginary ATM machine.
You can play along as well in our comments section; check out Diamond’s shipping list for tomorrow to see what will be in shops.
Chris Mautner
If I had $15, I’d buy …
Batman & Robin #13 ($2.99)
Starstruck #11 ($3.99)
Godland #32 ($3.99)
Boys #44 ($3.99)
These are just about all the comics I’m currently reading in floppy form, minus a title or two. In fact, I’m relatively certain my LCS will be holding copies of these for me when I stop by this weekend. Three involve superheroes. One is a knotty sci-fi saga. One will almost certainly involve someone’s blood being sprayed across a room. That, or a bathroom joke.
- July 7, 2010 @ 04:00 PM by JK Parkin
The Middle Ground #5: Sitting Up Straight On The Back Of The Bus
I’m pretty sure that the first licensed comic I actually bought would’ve been a Star Wars comic. I don’t really remember ever buying any of them, but I remember always having them around (For some reason, I specifically remember them always being around when I was sick, although I do remember eagerly running home from the newsagent with the first issue of Return Of The Jedi, hoping to find out what happened in the new movie before it came out, and being somewhere between excited and upset to realize that the movie adaptation only filled the first third of the issue, with a random SW story and The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones filling up the rest). The first one I remember actively collecting was the Marvel UK version of Transformers, although I didn’t think of that as a licensed comic; my head didn’t work that way, yet, so it was just a comic that was connected to those toys that I thought were awesome in some mysterious way.
So why is there some kind of stigma against licensed comics these days?
- May 18, 2010 @ 02:30 PM by Graeme McMillan
Thin wallets, fat bookshelves | A roundup of publishing news
- A hardcover collection of the first chapter of Karl Kerschl’s Eisner-nominated webcomic The Abominable Charles Christopher is now available for pre-order. “Wrapped in an embossed, faux suede cover, this 144-page tome collects all of the comics from the first two years of the series, along with many additional illustrations and a gorgeous 40″ gatefold at the end of the book, featuring a dramatic pencil rendering of the key players, all in one scene,” the description reads.
- Artist Mike Hawthorne shows off some nice pages from an as-yet-unrevealed Vertigo title.
- Avatar Comics is launching a new imprint called Boundless Comics. The first comic they’ll publish is Lady Death, penned by her creator Brian Pulido and co-writer Mike Wolfer. They also plan to publish a series of trades that’ll collect older Lady Death material.
- Image Comics will publish a new miniseries by Ben McCool (Choker) and Nikki Cook (DMZ) called Memoir.
- Pat Lee will return to comics with Widow Warriors, a new book that’ll be published by Dynamite.
- April 16, 2010 @ 07:00 AM by JK Parkin
DC Comics takes seven spots in November’s Top 10
Blackest Night #5
It turns out that DC Comics’ domination of the Diamond Top 10 in October may have been more than simply an anomaly made possible by a competitor’s schedule drift: The just-released list for November shows the publisher taking seven of the 10 slots, one better than the previous month.
As chart-watcher John Jackson Miller points out, only the appearance at No. 3 of Marvel’s Captain America Reborn #4 prevented DC from repeating its once-in-four-decades claim to the six best-selling comics.
Marvel continued to lead in unit share and dollar share.
DC’s November achievement was again aided by Blackest Night, whose fifth issue was the top-selling comic to the direct market. Four of the company’s six other Top 10 titles were tied to the crossover; only Batman and Robin #6 (at No. 4) and The Flash: Rebirth #5 (at No. 9) were unrelated to the miniseries.
The 10 best-selling comics were evenly split between $3.99 and $2.99.
Perhaps almost as interesting is the list of Top 10 graphic novels, which is led by the first collection of Image Comics’ surprise hit Chew, followed by the fifth volume of Dynamite’s The Boys.
- December 3, 2009 @ 11:40 AM by Kevin Melrose
Send Us Your Shelf Porn!
Welcome once again to Send Us Your Shelf Porn. Our guest this week is Marc Mason, newly established PR guru for NBM and proprieter of the Comics Waiting Room Web site.
Remember, you too can be a featured Shelf Porn guest. All you need do is take some photos of your burgeoning comics collection and send them to me at cmautnerATcomcastDOTnet. Feel free to include as much or as little info about yourself and your collection as you like.
And now here’s Marc …
- September 16, 2009 @ 02:00 PM by Chris Mautner
What are you reading?
Sequence from 'EmiTown'
Welcome to What Are You Reading, where we talk about all the wonderful comics and other stuff we’re currently engaged with and hopefully point you toward some quality material. Our guest this week is Jamie S. Rich, author of the new graphic novel You Have Killed Me and, of course, our guest-blogger for the week.
A bad case of pinkeye kept me from doing to do much reading this week, but thankfully the rest of the Robot 6 team seems to have made up for my lapse. See what they’ve been reading by clicking on the link below …
- August 2, 2009 @ 11:45 AM by Chris Mautner
Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs: What Looks Good for June
Johnny Hiro
First of all, I need to apologize for my no-column-having self last week. My computer died suddenly on Tuesday and I just wasn’t able to get anything going for the next day. It’s still dead (and will be for a couple of weeks, most likely), but I’m able to borrow a PC for this week’s column and here we are.
As usual, our monthly look through the Previews catalog for awesome is heavily focused on graphic novels, collections, and first issues.
AdHouse
Johnny Hiro, Volume 1 – I’ve been aching a loooong time for this one. Giant lizards, lobster-quests, and opera-going ronin are hard to wait for.
- April 8, 2009 @ 02:03 PM by Michael May
2009 Joe Shuster Award nominees announced
The nominees for the 2009 Joe Shuster Awards, which honor Canadian comics creators, were announced today. The five-year-old awards program is named after Joe Shuster, co-creator of Superman. The list of nominees this year includes Darwyn Cooke, J. Torres, Karl Kerschl, Dave Sim, Kathryn & Stuart Immonen, Faith Erin Hicks and Seth, among many others.
Check out the full list of nominees in the press release after the jump.
- April 2, 2009 @ 01:10 PM by JK Parkin
Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs: Dynamite’s Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes #1
Sherlock Holmes #1
Written by Leah Moore and John Reppion; Illustrated by Aaron Campbell
Dynamite; $3.50
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been really curious to see what Dynamite does with a Sherlock Holmes series. I described myself as being “skeptically curious” about it and said that “I love Holmes when Doyle writes him, but other writers often portray him as either superhuman or a total ass. It’s rare that someone is able to match Doyle’s ability to balance both aspects of Holmes, but hopefully Leah Moore and John Reppion are up to it.”
When Dynamite offered to send me a PDF of the first issue, I couldn’t resist taking a peek. It’s not the format I’d prefer to read the story in (especially since the PDF was uncolored and I imagine that Campbell’s art will look fantastic in color), but curiosity beat the crap out of delayed gratification and so now I’ve read it.
- March 25, 2009 @ 11:36 AM by Michael May