Obscure Comics: Hanging with Booster Gold.
Whereas some comic fans are completist and rush out to buy their monthly titles when they come out. I’ve always taken a cheaper and more obscure path*, maybe it’s quantity over quality but I do love my bizarre comics**. The majority of my comic collection was bought for a price range of about 25p to 75p per comic (over a pound’s pushing it, although I recently bought Blue Beetle number one for £1.50). Rather playing exorbitant fees for the ‘cool’ comics of the late 1980s/early 1990s like X-Men (when the Jim Lees and Rob Liefelds of this world were stinking up the place) I was reading the likes of Marvel Comics Presents, DC Showcase, She Hulk, Wonder Man, Damage Control, Spider-Man 2099, Justice League International, Justice League Europe etc. Apart from cheering fro the underdog, I bought these comics because you could normally pick up 10-12 issue runs and story arcs of the lesser-known superheroes for the same amount of money as one issue of a brand new X-Force or something.
I have recently been repeating this madness (my life is one of constant returns) in Norwich comic emporium Abstract Sprocket. Where I have been picking up the likes of Manhunter, Justice League Task Force, Blue Beetle, The Heckler, Firestorm: The Nuclear Man, Captain Atom. Thanks to Wikipedia I can now fall further down the big geek hole and get enraged once again over things like the true identity of Monarch during the Armageddon 2001 Crossover. Thankfully I can go onto campus and rant to ‘Fabes’ (seen here with his Living Tribunal Series) about it as he is an aficionado on the highest order of things like The New Universe and Quasar (and alerted me to this series that has started to feature Miguel O’Hara aka Spider-Man 2099, I used to like him because he was half-Irish and once did a lino print of his logo for an art project and my art teacher worried that I was into something occult to my mam at a parent teacher meeting!)
*Don't I always.
**Christ! is this some sort of 'understatement post'
1 comment:
Bolster Gold looks like he is going to be getting the spot light for a bit with this 'one year forward' / 52 thing going on DC. Fire, that 'new Beetle' and Guy Gardner do too (have to say I quite like GLC Recharge dispite rushed ending). May make up for the rather high death toll the JLI have gone through recently.
Have you seen the cover of the first new Justice League? Pretty much every hero is on it bar the Martian Manhunter. For traditions sake alone he should be a member + I would be weary of any group that formed without him.
Normally I would be totally apathetic to the whole Infinite Crisis / one year later thing since the status quo is always soon returned in comics but I have to say I look forward to Batman returning to being an effective Dark Knight rather that Mr Ultra Paranoid who hates every hero and is suspicious of everyone and everything and yet still somehow allows multiple anti-superhero plans to go missing + fall into the hands of super villains or JLI members who become villains for no good reason (you think after loosing all his anti-JLA files to Ra's Al Ghul he would look up and see what his Brother Eye satelite was doing!).
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