Year: 2013

After going for a few months without reading any comics, I decided to spend a bit of time, over the last couple of weekends, trying to put a dent into the big pile of unread books sitting on the floor of my bedroom. In particular, I decided to finally read a few “orphan” books that have been sitting in the pile for, oh, five years or so. I read the first (and only) issue of Daredevil/Bullseye: The Target last week. And I read the three comics that Grant Morrison wrote for the Worldstorm relaunch of the Wildstorm universe today.

I thought that Kevin Smith’s “The Target” got off to a good start, so I’m disappointed that it never got past that first issue. I don’t really have too much to say about it past that; I think it would have been a fun story.

The Morrison Worldstorm stuff was quite interesting, though I’m not sure if it would have really gone anywhere, long-term, or if it would have wound up being a disappointing mess. It would have been fun to see where it went, regardless, but maybe its collapse was inevitable. One interesting aspect of it is that, for an “event” that only resulted in one issue of Wildcats, and two of The Authority, there’s a good bit of writing about it available on the web. I found three pretty interesting articles, one at seqart.org, another one here, and one more here. And all three are from 2011. (The comics came out in 2006.) So there seems to be something about it that has engaged people, even five years after the books were published. I guess that’s the nature of pretty much any “grand plan” stuff cooked up by Grant Morrison.

Speaking of Grant Morrison, I’ve got a couple of other random mini-series written by him in my reading pile: Sebastian O and Vimanarama. I picked them both up at the same time, out of someone’s dollar box at a convention a while ago. And both series actually ran to completion, so it’ll be a nice change of pace to read stories that actually come to an end!

I just stumbled across this article by John Jackson Miller, talking about the end of Comics Buyer’s Guide. I had a subscription to TBG (as it was called at the time) back when I was in high school. I didn’t save those issues, as it came out every week, and was mostly ads, so there didn’t seem much point. But there was some good content in there, from people like Don & Maggie Thompson and Cat Yronwode. And some nice covers by folks like Terry Beatty.

I let my subscription lapse at some point, but I picked it up again and read CBG faithfully for quite a few years, before letting the subscription lapse again a few years back. Even though I hadn’t been reading it lately, it’s sad to see it go. I actually think I learned a lot about a number of subjects unrelated to comics from CBG, mostly from Don and Maggie’s writing. CBG was always very well-edited and well-written.

I see that Maggie is now writing for the Comic-Con blog. And other former contributors have also been blogging at various sites — John Jackson Miller has The ComiChron, Mark Evanier has News From Me, Tony Isabella has his Bloggy Thing. So I still get to read stuff from some of the best writers who appeared in CBG over the years. But I’ll miss the good old hard-copy version.