Comic Picks By The Glick

So I understand that the big reveal behind “Captain America 600” is that Steve Rogers is coming back as Captain America, with the actual resurrecting taking place in the “Captain America Reborn” mini-series. Marvel caught a lot of heat when they forced retailers to order the “Reborn” mini-series without revealing what it was soliciting, and based on this week’s revelation, they certainly deserve all of it. Their hype machine implied that something was going to be revealed on 6/15/09 that would garner “Cap 600” national media attention, with most people speculating that there would be some announcement as to who would be playing Cap in the upcoming movie. Yeah, there was some talk that it was just going to herald the return of Rogers as Cap, but most people thought to look on this optimistically. Something along the lines of “Come on, Marvel wouldn’t be that stupid.  There has to be more to this than bringing ANOTHER character back from the dead.”

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The usual bit of recent comics news analysis I put here evolved into its own post as I was writing it. You’ll see it up here tomorrow. In the meantime, it’s an all Dark Horse review-fest after the break!

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The bricks in question being “MW,” “Apollo’s Song,” and “Ode to Kirihito,” listed in ascending order of excellence.

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So Fanime was completely awesome. I went to lots of great panels (three of them involving Carl Horn), events (the masquerade was okay this year, and there was the “Restricted Rock Paper Scissors” game I participated in… and lost), and saw clips from movies that I now have to own (including “The Scorpio Incident” and John Woo’s epic “Red Cliff” ). The only real disappointment I took away from the con was in its selection of manga. While I picked up plenty of good stuff at the dealer’s room (and at the swap meet), the manga vendors there left something to be desired.

In short, it’s gotten to the point where I’d rather not buy manga unless I can get a decent discount on what I’m buying, and while the Comic Cellar (known to me from their perennial spot at Frank and Sons) had most of what I wanted, their only discount was “no tax.” The other vendor that was offering a base 20% off had the ten volumes of “Monster” that I’ve been wanting to pick up, but in order to qualify for greater discounts, you had to buy 14 volumes of stuff. I made it to twelve before I realized I’d have to start picking up stuff I had no interest in.

… I’m only now starting to realize how incredibly self-serving this sounds, so I’ll wrap it up now. The moral of this story (as is turning out to be the case quite often here): www.amazon.com FTW.

My thoughts on what I bought at the con, after the break.

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