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| Sons of Anarchy #1 |
* Lots of TV shows (of the prestigious variety!) have been making the jump into comics, with Boom! putting out a very cool
Sons of Anarchy series and Marvel taking
Dexter on a tangent with a series by the character's creator
Jeff Lindsay and a second coming soon. That's in addition to
The X-Files: Season 10 series that's more like the sort of thing you expect to see in comics.
Sons of Anarchy is a show I've only tangentially watched, but I enjoyed the comic quite a bit.
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| Dexter #5 |
Marvel's
Dexter series was quite good and a lot better than the last few seasons of the Showtime series. I read the first
Dexter book a few years back after Showtime dropped a copy in the gift bag from a
Dexter TV show party at Comic-Con and really enjoyed it. Turns out there's a long-running series of books that take Lindsay's original idea in a different direction. Lindsay is enjoying doing comics (at least he said so
on his Reddit blog). It's always interesting to see creators from other fields tackle comics, and I think comics could benefit from more novelists jumping into the fray to counter the overdone screenwriting influences and the decompressed storytelling it inspires.
As for The X-Files: Season 10, I still think writer Joe Harris is doing a good job and it's cool that creator Chris Carter is pitching in, too. I don't think this show will ever quite re-capture the same zeitgeist it did in the 1990s, but it is nice to revisit the characters and ideas in comic book form, which has a bit more kind to the series than the big-screen sequel of a few years back.
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| Grendel #1 |
* I visit my old stomping grounds in Arizona once or twice a year, and finally managed to make time for a visit to
All About Books and Comics. I used to frequent the store during summers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and always enjoyed the depth of the back issue selection in particular. I'm happy to report that hasn't changed a bit, and a good portion of the store was devoted to selling inexpensive packs of classic comics runs from the past 30 years or so. I snagged a batch of
Captain Canuck originals and the first 10 issues of Comico's
Grendel series, as well a lengthy run of the original
Power Pack run — all for a great price. I briefly chatted with owner Alan Giroux about the old days and how much we both like shops that stock lots and lots of back issues. I am grateful that Los Angeles has so many great comics shops, but one that stocks back issues like All About is at this point just another item on my want list.
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| Shade: The Changing Man #1 |
* Also in Arizona, I found some boxes of old
Star Trek and
V paperbacks from the late 1980s and early 1990s, along with a few relics from the speculator age of comics: three sets of
X-Force #1, three sets of
X-Men #1 and polybagged black cover and green cover copies of
Spider-Man #1. I also found a poster from Atomic Comics' 1993 Mega-Jam, signed by a ton of creators, including the late Steve Gerber. I don't remember where it came from, as I didn't attend the event, but it's totally extreme, dude. And just to show I don't have completely horrible taste, this box also included most of Steve Ditko's 1970s DC Comics series
Shade: The Changing Man. That was some funky, weird, cool stuff.
