After writing this column for the past twenty months, I have decided to end this column. I want to thank you, my wonderful readers, for spending time at this column. It has been a tremendous pleasure and honour to share my thoughts and ideas in this column. It was definitely a learning experience to put my thoughts out there and to receive…
Category:
Why Comics Rule
This year has been another banner year for the comic book industry. The yearly comic collecting cycle seems to culminate in the comic convention circuit during the summer and the release of the new Overstreet Price Guide at around the same time. And the current Overstreet Guide has shown another string of strong price jumps among the key Silver Age…
Summertime is a time for me to catch up on reading some of the comic books that I didn’t have time to read. For my recent reading, to pass those lazy days of summer, I decided to read a story arc from the Uncanny X-Men (volume 3) #s 26-31. This story arc was rendered by the creative team of Brian…
The Avengers are in the spotlight right now, mainly because of the movie, “Avengers: Age of Ultron” which is currently screening in theatres. I loved the story and character development in this second Avengers instalment so I’m going to write about the early Avengers comics in this article. I’m going to reflect on how the Silver Age Avengers characters and…
Fan Expo Vancouver took place on the first weekend of this month (April 3-5) and it was another big event. This year’s Fan Expo appears to have attendance that was bigger than previous years. The celebrities included Jennifer Morrison; Carrie Fisher; Chad Coleman (Tyreese from the Walking Dead) and his fellow Walking Dead cast members Scott Wilson and Sarah Wayne…
It’s almost Easter-time, so I thought it would be interesting to explore issues of life and death in the comic book world. The “comic book death” of a major character mirrors the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who is celebrated in the annual Easter tradition. The regular rite of “killing off” a major superhero to drum up sales has…
It has been two years since Marvel “killed off” Spider-Man by causing a “brain switch” that put Doctor Octopus’ mind inside the body of Peter Parker. Naturally, this created a lot of havoc in the life of Peter Parker, the Amazing Spider-Man, including plenty of unheroic behaviour, conflicts with the Avengers, and an “on-again, off-again” romance with Mary Jane Watson.…
Happy New Year, everyone. It is now 2015 and it will be another fun and exciting year in the comic book industry. Last year was a busy year for movie announcements. Marvel made a slew of movie announcements including new movies for Captain Marvel, the Black Panther, the Inhumans, and two movies for the final Avengers instalment (Avengers: Infinity War).…
This month saw the release of Guardians of the Galaxy #21, a much-anticipated story set in the home planet of the Venom symbiote. This story inspired me to think back on the first appearance of Venom’s home planet, which appears to have been The Amazing Spider-Man Super Special #1 (1995). This comic is dirt cheap as its guide value is $4…
The tv screen is getting crowded with comic-related tv shows this season. Agents of Shield, Arrow, and the Walking Dead are already well-established shows, and The Flash just debuted this month on the CW network. I’m going to look at another DC-related series that premiered last month on Fox–Gotham. As I am reviewing the first few episodes of this series,…
If we only look at the Wolverine example, we would assume that the value of a character’s first full appearance always trumps the value of the first brief appearance. It would stand to reason that a comic book reader gets more of the character in the first full appearance issue and this would increase more buying demand (and value) for the first full appearance issue. However, as I sifted through and compared first brief appearance and first full appearance values in this year’s guide, I found that this wasn’t always the case. Here are examples of comics showing both cases: examples where the first brief appearance issue is more valuable, and examples where the first full appearance issue is the more valuable of the two.
Many readers of this website have already seen the new Guardians of the Galaxy (GOTG) movie. According to box office returns, GOTG is the highest grossing movie this year, which is really impressive because GOTG pulled in more viewers than the other big superhero movies such as Captain America: the Winter Soldier and X-Men: Days of Future Past. GOTG also…
It has been a while since I’ve followed the Astonishing X-Men comic book series. I hadn’t really followed this series since the great early issues by Joss Whedon and John Cassaday, so I decided to read up on Astonishing X-Men issues # 44 to 47, which was the “Exalted” storyline done by the creative team of Greg Pak, Mike McKone, and Rachelle Rosenberg.
A few weeks ago, I attended a local comic convention here in Vancouver and I heard about the new company Comic Book Certification Service (CBCS). This company was started by Steve Borock, the former president of CGC so he definitely has some clout in the industry. According to the website Bleedingcool.com, they’ve also started taking submissions at comic book conventions.…
When I was a kid, I was fascinated by geography and exotic locations throughout the world. This interest translated into the comic book world as I was fixated by the ways that Marvel and DC depicted the locations for their superheroes. I always liked the fact that Marvel’s characters did their work in real world cities. Spider-Man always found a…
I first heard about the new comic book series Afterlife with Archie at Fan Expo Vancouver, which took place last month. I never followed Archie comics very much but I was intrigued by the concept of a zombie apocalypse occurring in Archie’s world. I am also aware that this whole concept is gimmicky because it has already been done by Marvel and it has been done countless of times in other media. However, I did read some good press about Afterlife with Archie, so this convinced me to pick up the issues from my local comic book store.
Fan Expo Vancouver rolled into town on April 18 to 20. This was the third edition of Fan Expo in Vancouver and it was another big success. This year’s Expo was expanded to three days instead of two, and it was a little unusual to fall on the Easter holiday weekend. Like the upcoming 2014 Fan Expo in Toronto, this year’s Fan Expo Vancouver was scheduled on a holiday long weekend, and this may have prevented some folks from attending. On the bright side, the organizers seemed to have solved the long line-ups problem from last year, as this year’s wait lines didn’t seem as long as the ones from last year.
Joss Whedon had just announced that Ultron would appear as the main villain in the Avengers movie sequel. Like some frantic stock trader with insider information, I swung into action. I desperately phoned a few comic dealers in an effort to snag some copies of Avengers # 55 (the first full appearance of Ultron) for cheap. It took about a day to hear a back from them about the comics, and when they did call me back, the ink had already dried on the new price tags that they had slapped on the polybags. I think one dealer wanted $300 for a very fine copy of #55 so I passed on it.
For me, this forty percent figure exaggerates the actual percentage of women comic book readers. My own experiences from attending Comic Cons and comic book stores in Vancouver would put the figure more at about twenty percent of comic book readers being women. The comic book industry is still largely dominated by men.
