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Friday, September 10, 2004
Friday miscellany
--Yesterday was apparently "Japanese gay romance comics day" as three titles of that genre shipped. Golden Cain, Only the Ring Finger Knows and Kizuna. Kizuna is the only one I've ever heard anything about, so it's the only one I've picked up. And at $16, rather than the increasingly usual $8-$12 for manga titles, I'm reluctant to pick up any of the other titles unless I know more about them. I usually try to make a point of getting as many gay-themed comics as I can, but I'd like to know a little bit more about these shrink-wrapped titles I've never heard of than the vague descriptions on the back. Especially since a lot of the yaoi stuff I've seen kind of creeps me out a little. When they describe it as "boy-boy love", there's a strong emphasis on the boy part.
--I was asked by one of my co-workers if we should increase the orders on Astonishing X-Men, as #4 sold in far greater numbers than #3. I had to admit that what we saw with #4 was probably a one-time spike in sales due to the return of a much-beloved (apparently) character. Which, of course, Marvel didn't really give retailers too much advance notice on. Had we known, say, three months before the issue was due out, rather than three weeks before, that Marvel was planning on hyping that issue and putting out a variant cover and bringing that particular character back, we probably would have ordered more initially. Or, in other words, I didn't see a lot of people who hadn't been reading Astonishing rush to pick it up, and I didn't note any increased demand for back-issues of the first three issues, but I did note lots and lots of people buying multiple copies of issue #4.
--We're open later on Thursdays than we are the rest of the week, for a list of reasons that are very long and frankly sort of dull. So when new comics day is moved to Thursday, that means that now not only do I need to be at work about two hours earlier than I usually am, I have to stay an hour later as well, making it about a 10 hour day. Ten hours of looking at comic books is enough to test the sanity of any man, hence the rather dull post today. I was going to talk about comic book movie adaptations today, but I didn't have time to scan in any of the images I wanted to use to illustrate my points. And the one image I did find time to scan, because I was already scanning a bunch of copies of Electric Soup (those Frank Quitely film parodies really weren't very good), Viz (I looked and looked and nothing even closely resembled humor, except maybe "Sherlock Homo") and Toxic (I think I want an "Accident Man" collection), I forgot to send to myself so that I could upload it to the web. So, yeah, I've kind of forgotten the point of this entry...what was I talking about again?
--Oh, that In the Shadows of No Towers book...yeah, it looks pretty, but my brief examination of it leads me to believe that the mixed-to-negative reviews are probably the most accurate assessments of it's quality. And frankly, I'm getting a little bit tired of the art-comix crowd thinking that the way to convey to the masses that their books are "important" is to print them in ludicrously over-sized formats, ala Quimby the Mouse and Jimbo in Purgatory and this latest Speigelman work. Just because a book is large enough to be used as a surfboard, that doesn't make it good.