On Tuesdays when the shop gets their new comics in to process so that they’re ready for the shelf on Wednesday, we divvy up things up in several stacks. This usually leaves us with a stack for all the big five publishers, Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, IDW and Image, as well as a stack for Dynamite to keep the small publisher stack from getting too tall. A few weeks ago a friend of mine and I noticed that Dark Horse had a vastly smaller stack compared to all of the others. This got me thinking about how Dark Horse stays in business when we seem to get only a few titles a week. Looking at comichron.com,... Read More

I normally like to balance out my criticisms with things I love about comics, but it’s still early in the year. So, there isn’t a lot for me to praise this year while the comic industry keeps doing things that frustrate me to no end. That being said, with the recent announcement of a new Defenders comic I decided it was an opportune time for me to talk about the thing that’s at the top of my list of ‘Things Guaranteed to Angry Up My Blood’, namely when comic companies change the contents of their comics to fit movies and TV shows. Ten years ago I read Doctor Strange: The Oath from Brian... Read More

If you clicked on today’s article hoping to hear about Vampirella, Baron Blood, Morbius or Andrew Bennett then I’ve afraid I’m going to disappoint you. No, today’s article is about how the comic book industry is trying to bleed us dry of every penny they can get. First I want to talk about an indy publisher called Big City Comics. They publish two titles: Tesla and Hyde: Scary Fails and Killing Mars. Killing Mars is the book that appealed to me a few months ago when I first saw it in Previews. It’s about a criminal with a bounty on his head, who hires a team of female mercenaries to protect... Read More

Given that the holiday season is upon us I want to talk about what we as fans can do to give back to our favorite hobby. I have three suggestions that will help your local comic shop serve you better and help them stay in business. First and most important: the Previews catalog is your best friend. The biggest challenge your shop owner has is trying to find out how many issues of any given comic they need to order. If they order too few issues then people who come in asking for a copy they’ve sold out of could go to another store or Diamond Comics Distributors, North America’s only comic distributor,... Read More

The recent release of Peter Panzerfaust #24 and Bitch Planet #9 has got me thinking about the one sure fire thing, guaranteed to make me drop a comic from my pull list: lateness. I never dropped Peter Panzerfaust. I really like the book; which is the story of Peter Pan with the setting changed to World War Two, but it did make me drop Kurtis J. Wiebe. Wiebe is the writer of Peter Panzerfaust, Rat Queens and Pisces from Image and Bounty from Dark Horse. I name these four comics specifically because they represent the timeline of my resentment to this writer. Panzerfaust come out in 2012 and I ordered... Read More

I don’t like dumping on the comic book industry every article. It would sometimes make this easier if I did, but the good things the industry does should be pointed out alongside the bad. That being said we as comic book fans need to look at the things we do for good and ill. There was news reported recently that Chelsea Cain, writer of the Mockingbird comic from Marvel, quit Twitter over harassment from Internet trolls. As an aside, it took me a minute to settle on Internet trolls to describe the people harassing Cain. I had some other choice descriptors, but I do try and keep these family friendly,... Read More

In a previous article I talked about NPR’s coverage of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau being on the cover of Civil War Two: Choosing Sides #5 and how it seemed more like a Marvel PR stunt then official international news. This led me to wonder why comic books are so terrible at selling themselves. I can remember the first time I saw a television commercial for a comic book. It was about five years ago while watching Doctor Who reruns on BBC America. There was a commercial promoting Fables, a DC/Vertigo comic about how the Grimm Fairy Tales characters are adjusting to life in the 21st Century.... Read More

NPR had an interesting piece I was listening to recently. Listening to NPR has been a recent change in my morning routine since most of the morning radio programming in the Q-C is either bad music or worse comedy. The piece they had was about the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, appearing in a Marvel comic. I found the article very frustrating because they referred to the comic several times, but they never once actually used the title of the book. I found the transcript of it on their webpage and the closest they come is referencing Civil War Two, the crossover event the comic they were... Read More

EDITOR’S NOTE: Local comic book fan Ryan Franks will be writing about comics and comics culture for QuadCities.com as our new columnist. We hope you enjoy his treks into the comics world! My earliest memory of comic books comes from when I was about three. My parents and I were at some kind of family gathering and a very boring one at that. I had with me Transformers Comic Magazine #4, a digest sized comic collecting Transformers #7 and 8 from the original 1984 run of Marvel comics. Given that I was three I wasn’t able to actually read the book as printed. What I would do is look at the drawings... Read More