On comics

Hey again everybody (all... zero of you probably).

One of the big things I wanna do on this blog is talk about comics. I want to offer my opinions on various titles, books, authors, illustrators, etc. I'd like to review them occasionally and talk about what's going on with them. But first a little about comics and I.

As a kid I read comics a lot, mostly collections of funny pages strips like Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, and Foxtrot. I'd find my way to reading through Star Wars and X-Men comics on and off as I grew up, but I've always read comics in some capacity. But a few years ago, my sophomore year of college I believe, I really dug into them. I had stopped reading comics for a while, and just read books about the various Marvel and DC heroes such as the DK collection of guidebooks so I'd know about the increasing amount of comic-to-film adaptations I was interested in. But on a whim I decided to get back into X-Men. I knew about some of the big events at Marvel such as the Civil War and House of M but I didn't know what they were. So I managed to dig back into X-Men by reading the second volume of "New X-Men" by Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost. Reading through that got me to read through House of M, and reading that got me branch out to other X-titles, as well as going back to read through Grant Morrison's run on "New X-Men", the re-naming of the core X-Men title that was launched in the 90's.

And from there, well, I read a fuckton of other comics. I made my way to DC comics and read though Geoff John's run on Green Lantern (having just finished this past month with his final issue of, what, ten years?). Likewise, I found my way to other DC comics like Batman, the Flash, etc, etc. Now I have a decent collection of comic trade paperbacks.

As you can see, I've got three almost-full shelves taken up with just my Marvel and DC stuff. Top shelf is DC (52, Animal Man, Batman, Doom Patrol, Green Lantern, Seven Soldiers, among others), middle shelf is assorted Marvel (Annihilation, Captain America, Daredevil, Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Spider-Man, etc), and the bottom shelf is JUST X-Men related material, in (mostly) chronological order instead of alphabetically.

 

This shelf is dedicated to comics of other publishers like Dark Horse, Image, and whathaveyou. I've got stuff like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Maus, Penny Arcade, Scott Pilgrim, Sin City, Star Wars, and The Walking Dead. Along side that are two cardboard boxes of single comics I have been buying for a few years. That is just my physical collection. I've also got about 18 gigs of comics on my computer, some of which I haven't even read through yet.

So I've crammed a lot of comics into these past few years. I hope to post my thoughts on various comics in the future, and I'm going to kick myself to really keep this going and maybe make something of it. Like many comic readers, I've had my share of thoughts for my own comics, but I haven't done much with them besides what's in my head, since my writing and drawing skills lack on account of my spending five years on a college major in the natural sciences. Hrm.

But in the future expect a lot of comic discussion. For example, next week Wednesday the new comic issues hit the stands. One of the handful I'll be picking up is the first issue of DC Comics' "Larfleeze", a major character spinning out of Geoff Johns' "Green Lantern" run, and I'll be talking about it a little either that day or the next, along with the rest of my haul that day (All New X-Men #13, Uncanny X-Men #7, and Wolverine and the X-Men #32 (my gosh, that is a lot of X-titles)). I hope to do this sort of thing every week by picking my favorite issue of the week and talking about it.

But that's not all this blog will have. It won't all be about comics, but also video games, news, whatever the heck I feel like posting, reasons why I say "heck" and "gosh" when in this same post I use the word "fuckton", as well as other junk.

I guess stay tuned for more things???

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I am Iron Man