Comic Reviews by Walt

Along with the closer-to-current-home shops that I’m able to get to pretty easily and "casually" I still maintain a pull list at the shop that’s been my "main" shop for nearly a decade now, prior to being laid off last summer.

I had a bigger haul there at Kenmore Komics & Games over the weekend, with the store’s 30th Anniversary Sale!

I’ve maintained Spawn as a pull for over a year now, close to a year and a half–and at this point figure it’ll remain at least until McFarlane and/or Image bump it up to $3.99. I’ll be ok with a bump to say, $3.50, but if they go straight for the 33% hike straight past $3.25, $3.50, and $3.75 straight to $3.99, I’ll surely balk at it!

However, as a "special occasion," I’m ok with the $4.99 for the Spawn 25th Anniversary Director’s Cut of #1–I’m entertained at the cover (an homage to Ultimate Spider-Man #1, incidentally from 2000 or so–barely 8 years into Spawn‘s existence, where USM is itself some 16 1/2 years in the past!

Then there’s The Sovereigns, which I was NOT going to go for–it’s like Dynamite has no idea what to do with these characters! There was a year-long (year and a half with delays?) run of several of the former Gold Key books, then there was some other mini-series last year "teaming them up," and now there’s this–which seems to be yet another take on the properties (as a shared universe at that). Still, with my ill-will toward Valiant (coming up on 2 years since I dropped their entire brand cold-turkey over their crap stunt with Legends of the Geomancer), I’ll support a crappily-run situation like these in protest…at least Dynamite just has the generic/general/standard CRAP with variant covers, and isn’t actively trying to screw over fans for CONTENT.

And I’d requested the standard cover for Flash #22…I still want to get a standard Batman #21 to "frame" along with this for my wall.

As part of the 20th anniversary sale, I hit the back-issue bins and found The Untold Legend of the Batman mini-series. I’m quite certain I have these issues in my collection already…but darned if I’d be able to locate them without digging through several dozen shortboxes and a few dozen longboxes…with the sale, I got all three issues for less than the cost of two contemporary Marvel comics. So three issues’ content that I want to read sooner than later cheaper than two issues that I’d have no interest in? Definitely a worthwhile price, and well within my notion that I’ll gladly (relatively) pay up to $4ish in general for back issues as that’s balanced against what I’m paying anyway for a new/contemporary comic.

I also finally remembered to check for the AvX: Consequences #5 issue, hoping I’m actually remembering the correct issue that I’m missing. I’d managed to get 4 of the 5 issues as single issues, but somehow either flat-out missed the fifth, or misplaced it and never came across it consciously when going through my boxes. So though I have the two hardcover Omnibus volumes, this gives me a complete set, I believe, of the core AvX 0-12 and Consequences 1-5.

I also snagged the Supergirl volume from a 50%-off bin, figuring for the savings, well worth getting for now, even though the first volume wasn’t there. Fortunately, it turned out I already had the first volume–it’s the Supergirl by Peter David volumes I never wound up acquiring…so this goes with the first volume and thus was all the more a great purchase!

Along with the purchases, got two free Castle volumes in hardcover–apparently with chain bookstore returns, the shop got quite a large volume of these for free as part of a blowout, so they were additional notes of "thanks" to customers for coming by.

Finally, as with the 25th anniversary half a decade ago, John had commemorative dice made, and told me to go ahead and take a couple sets. Along with a couple Gen Con D6s, the 25th anniversary one has been a favorite, and these’ll be going into the dice bag as well!

All in all, quite the haul for not a bad price, and some sweet bonuses. There’s also a Riverdale print that I’ll likely be adding to my wall o’ art.

Hard to believe that I’ve been around long enough to see comic shops celebrating 20+ year anniversaries; given timing, I’d just missed the 20th anniversary when I discovered Kenmore, but have been around for nearly 1/3 of the shop’s existence.

And closer to this house, Comic Heaven  recently celebrated an anniversary–I know I have been going there for nearly 24 years now! And even Comics & Friends at the Great Lakes Mall I believe has been around nearly a decade now–their Lake Effect Comic Con is coming up in a couple weeks for its eighth year!

Filed under: 2017 Non-Review Posts, 2017 Posts, NON-REVIEW CONTENT, The Weekly Haul | Tagged: Anniversary, comic shops, d6, dice, Kenmore, Kenmore Komics, New Comic Book Day, new comics, Sovereigns, Spawn, Untold Legend of the Batman, weekly haul |