New Comic Collection on Sale Starting Saturday, February 17
We just purchased another great new collection of comic book back issues! This collection includes CGC graded and non-graded issues.The collection includes hundreds of back issues. Comics include Spiderman, X-Men, Transformers, Daredevil, Dragon Ball Z, Avengers, Captain America, The Hulk, and more. This collection will only be available in store. Visit early and buy before they are all gone!L.A. Mood Comics and Games100 Kellogg Lane, Suite 5London ON N5W0B4, Canada
The Next Big Marvel Fad Is Here
By Dan BrownI’m not one to say comics were better when I was a boy – they weren’t better, they were just different.That said, I do miss the desperate attempts by the editors at Marvel Comics to cash in on the latest trend, whether it be kung fu or black power or disco music.I miss the slapdash efforts to tap into the collective consciousness from the folks at the House of Ideas whenever the Next Big Thing came along in the 1970s and early 1980s.You don’t see that much in today’s comics.What I’m talking about are the weird, wonderful books like Marvel Premiere No. 50, which came out in 1979 and featured shock rocker Alice Cooper.That’s right: Along with Captain America, Spider-Man and the rest, the then-edgy Alice Cooper was once a Marvel protagonist.You can imagine the wishful thinking: Cooper was selling a pile of albums and had generated a lot of buzz with his at-the-time outrageous stage shows, so the brain trust running the firm likely figured gangbuster sales would follow if they slapped Alice’s name on a comic. That may also be why comics and characters prompted by popular trends were mostly half-ass affairs.The creative team had to get them onto stands quickly, since by the time retailers reported sales figures back, the newest mania could be over.Nor was Cooper the first musician to appear in the pages of a Marvel adventure: Gene Simmons and the guys from KISS likewise showed up in the magazine-size publication Marvel Super Special No. 1, which landed in 1977.But the ultimate example of cashing in on a musical craze had to be Dazzler, the mutant who had the powers of . . . a disco ball. She first appeared in 1980’s Uncanny X-Men No. 130. You won’t be surprised to learn the mutant superhero team discovered her in a chic New York nightclub a la Studio 54. Having her debut in the pages of one of the brand’s most popular titles didn’t hurt, and the character went on to have a comic of her own for five years, thus outliving the music genre that spawned her.If it was hot, Marvel tried to jump on it. When martial-arts films featuring Bruce Lee drew audiences to movie theatres, the company responded with heroes Shang-Chi and Iron Fist, who chopped with their hands and kicked with their feet. Giving a new character the unsubtle name Power Man, as well as promoting Black Panther to headline his own series, were part of Marvel’s play for black readers. With real-life daredevil Evel Knevel generating headlines in the 1970s, the storied company answered with a stuntman of their own, the Human Fly. Shogun Warriors was aimed at fans of giant Japanese robots.When the Marvel team couldn’t secure the rights to The Lord of the Rings, they created their own fantasy world in Warriors of the Shadow Realm. Heck, Spider-Man even joined forces with the original cast of Saturday Night Live in Marvel Team-Up No. 74 in 1978. And it got sillier. In 1982, the latest to become a Marvel superhero was . . . the Pope. John Paul II made his comic debut in a biographical issue called The life of Pope John Paul II. “The entire story!” the cover blared. “From his childhood in Poland to the assassination attempt!” I’m sure kids everywhere were thrilled.Of course, if you do enough of these fad-based comics, eventually one will catch fire. And that’s just what happened in the mid-1970s when Marvel got the rights to a virtually unknown sci-fi property called Star Wars.It was arguably the smartest move in Marvel history, because the title became a massive seller. There were millions upon millions of us hungering for Star Wars content, of which there was little apart from Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye novel and Brian Daley’s Han Solo trilogy. Smarter people than me have argued how, without the Star Wars licence, the company might not have survived into the 1980s.I guess you could say there is one fad that Marvel editors have been trying to milk for the last 20 years, which is the popularity of the movies and TV shows based on Marvel characters. They’ve taken a hero like Samuel L. Jackon’s Nick Fury from the movies and projected him into their comics, erasing the original cigar-chomping Second World War stalwart.But apart from driving up the price of back issues, I’m not sure big-screen adaptations have done much for the sales of the comics themselves, which is both odd and sad.Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
R2-D2 and C-3PO Never Did This
By Dan BrownA bunch of robots walk into a bar, but they aren’t the strangest thing about the place.That’s the premise of Robot Comics No. 0, which Bob Burden – famed in comic circles for creating Flaming Carrot and the Mysterymen – published in 1987 as a one-off “cultural oddity,” to use the eccentric creator’s own words.The book describes one crazy night down at the Blind Pig, a bar where a mummy plays banjo in the corner, two guys with axes for heads scuffle, scuba divers float through the air, beans spill out of the pay-phone receiver, and a man walks by, carrying a tombstone in anticipation of his own imminent demise.Welcome to Bob Burden’s imagination. If you’ve ever had a frantic bout of drinking at a dive that didn’t make sense to you in the morning, yet was still a lot of fun, you’ll be able to relate. The whole thing plays like an extended scene out of a Flaming Carrot comic, and indeed, Carrot supporting players like Uncle Billy and the Artless Dodger are part of the watering hole’s crowd.Those readers with long memories and unconventional tastes know Flaming Carrot (and his sometime allies, the Mysterymen) as the blue-collar hero whose mask is, well, a flaming carrot. His secret origin: After reading 5,000 comics in one sitting, the poor wretch suffers brain damage, becoming Palookaville’s B-list protector in the process.So if you’ve read any of the Carrot’s irregularly published exploits, you will grok what Robot Comics No. 0 is all about.As with all of Burden’s work, this slender volume is a riot of invention. This bar could only have come from his fertile, twisted mind, and I was lucky enough to find a copy in the bargain bin at L.A. Mood just before the summer.The surreal comic makes for engrossing reading on a muggy August afternoon.By way of introduction, Burden says he composed the tale decades prior to its publication as an exercise in what he calls “electra-fiction.” The artist/writer says the panels “exploded on the pages with no bounds of reason or any attempt to conform to known standards. It is, in essence, experimental literature guised as a leaking barrelful of rip-snorting, foot-stomping belly laffs.”I call it the cartoon equivalent of jazz. Or a nonsensical salad stocked with one random ingredient after the other.There is no plot, no A to B story, just a profile of an unforgettable night in a drinking establishment whose existence defies logic.If you’re a fan or student of tavern-derived literature, you could also classify it as Burden’s answer to the classic New Yorker piece by Joseph Mitchell, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon.Indeed, the evening’s events are narrated by a nameless reporter who figures, “As a journalist and an artist, I ought to record it all for posterity.”What does he observe? Harry Lime, from the Third Man, appears in one panel in all his Wellesian glory. The house band’s cover of Neil Diamond’s Cracklin’ Rosie upsets a patron. One of the bar’s many denizens refers to two of the Three Stooges. And then the female (?) robot leaves in the company of a Maytag repairman. Of course, several bodies are buried at the local drive-in theatre following the night’s mayhem.If all of that sounds like your kind of madness, it’s worth hunting down this little-known Bob Burden creation.No wonder his motto is “The wild shall wild remain!”Dan Brown has covered pop culture for 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
