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Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Various and Sundry
Comic Book Galaxy is giving away copies of Street Angel, so this may be a good chance to check out what all the buzz is about.
Meanwhile, Polite Dissent is giving away three copies of the very entertaining Nikolai Dante: The Romanov Dynasty collection.
In the "throwing good money after bad" category, McFarlane toys has acquired the rights to make toys based on The Simpsons. I guess McFarlane wasn't paying attention to the horrible death by over-kill the line experienced at Playmates. I think the last thing toy retailers and comic shops are interested in right now are more Simpsons toys to serve as peg-warmers.
The titles for this year's Free Comic Book Day (on May 7th) have been announced. I'll probably be doing a rundown on what's worth picking up and what's worth leaving behind again. Right now, the only "Gold Sponsor" books that look promising are Bongo's Gimme! Gimme! Giveaway!, Image's Flight sampler and Gemstone's Uncle $crooge reprint. Again, I wish DC would put out a Vertigo sampler, or perhaps something to promote the Humanoids, 2000AD, Wildstorm and CMX as well as an all-ages book. I'm more interested personally in the "Silver Sponsor" offerings, especially Comics Festival!. The only one there I really don't like the idea of is Wizard's offering. The last thing in the world that people new to comics need to be shown is Wizard and it's amateurish frat-boy humor. I'm glad Tokyopop is doing a sampler, last year's was a big hit with our customers, though more manga samplers, from Viz or Del Rey would be welcome as well. And I still think an offering from AiT/Planet Lar would be a good idea.
Okay, I was willing to give the film a chance, up until I saw this. It looks really, really dull, and the little line at the end, "You know that looked cool" is a rather shameless attempt to deflect criticism, and one doomed to failure.
(But hey, I guess they had to put it on-line for people to dissect, since by playing it in front of the Elektra movie they've pretty much guaranteed that no one will see the trailer in theaters...)
In retail-related topics, the fourth printing of Green Lantern: Rebirth #1 seems to be the wall in terms of demand for this title in our area. After ordering a good number of printings one through three and selling out rapidly, the fourth printing is just sort of...sitting there.
In contrast, we still can't keep Identity Crisis in stock, and have now sold out of the seventh issue as well. And contrary to popular opinion, it is not just selling to hard-core DC fans. Casual readers and new readers are picking it up as well. In fact, the buying pattern seems to have been the same as for Avengers Disassembled, in that lots of people who don't normally buy the title picked it up to check it out, and people who had left comics came back to see what the big deal was.
And make of it what you will, but we don't seem to be having any trouble moving the Elektra Movie Adaptation or Elektra trades, which suggests to me that the target audience for the film must have enjoyed it, even if nobody else did.
I went in to work today to so some moving of shelves and rearrangement of stock, including our huge wall of manga. Our stock of manga has outgrown our ability to display it all, so I've had to pull lots of the older books, the "flipped" books, the books from defunct publishers, and the odd books where we've got one copy of one of the middle volumes off the shelves in order to make room for the newer titles and the titles that are still selling. So, if anyone is looking for hard-to-get manga, I may know where you can get some.
Speaking of manga, tangentially, if you come into the store and ask me where we keep the "how to draw" books, and you end up purchasing soft-core photos of barely legal Japanese girls, don't be surprised when I look askance at you while you tell me you're "an artist."
Lastly, finally got a chance to play some City of Heroes after my temporary absence from the net...and in addition to realizing that the new tendency for bosses and giant monsters to target defenders is no fun at all if you're playing a defender (a conclusion I came to after getting killed by the Winter Lord for the tenth time because my team-mate hit him and he decided to aggro on me instead...), I finally put my finger on why I can't take the Council/5th Column seriously. They're the Lucille Ball of the villain world. See, all the other villain groups are undone by the actions of the heroes. But the Council are undone by their own schemes as often as not. So when we were investigating a new storyline in which the Council attempt to place remote control devices into Devoured Earth creatures in an attempt to control them, I was not the least bit surprised to get to the final mission in the first chapter and discover that the Council were getting whupped good by the Devoured Earth already, before Rum Red and his team-mates even started beating up the bad guys.
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