paper crack | a pointless comic book blog

I had such high hopes I'd get rolling on the visual revamps of all my blogs, especially finally making papercrack a weekly reality but none of that has come to pass yet.

I wish I had 20 more hours in the week.

Finally! If feels like it has been ages since the first issue came out.

But man oh man, if there is one book that is practically 100% inaccessible to the uninitiated it is this series!

While I love the original LSH and can appreciate continuity heavy stories, even I have to admit that Geoff Johns' pulling a Roy Thomas here and meshing more of the DCU up into continuity porn is a bit too much.

The book is way pretty though and as always, Perez makes you feel like the money you paid is 110% worth it!

What exactly is the history of the characters of the DCU anymore?

There!

I said it!

The elephant in the room that nobody really seems to want to address.

After Infinite Crisis, I have absophrockinglutely no idea what is and what is not canon and quite frankly, it does effect my ability to enjoy a given story.

It would have almost been easier to have suffered a 100% reboot of the DCU after Infinite Crisis if there at least had been some kind of overriding editorial vision but like so much of collaborative fiction, that really didn't happen.

Now I'm not saying that the Post-Crisis On Infinite Earths DCU had a cohesive vision.

No. That took a bit to build up after 1986 but it did seem to gel relatively well by 1990 or so.

Hell... even the Legion, with all the post-Crisis rebooting, still made more sense to me than much of what has come after Infinite Crisis.

Now I will admit that my pre-2002 habit of buying a ton of weekly books has stopped for some time now. The value of spending $3.00+ on 3-4 minutes worth of read each issue really couldn't be justified at all anymore.

And after Infinite Crisis, both Giga and I really curtailed pretty much everything we bought on a monthly basis to about 3-4 books max.

Because of that, I have had to live vicariously through so many comics bloggers' reviews to even begin to have an idea of what the DC Universe is even like anymore.

But honestly, I don't think it would have mattered if I had bought every post-Infinite Crisis DC comic or not.

There just doesn't seem to be any attempt at a cohesive whole any more regardless of what books one follows.

My rambling train of thought now moves forward and maybe, if you've started to read Paper Crack, you can either point me in the right direction of some blogger that can answer my questions or some source of meaningful data.

Superman #680
Written by James Robinson ; Art by Renato Guedes and José Wilson Magalháes; Cover by Alex Ross

So this is part 4 of James Robinson's recent take over of the Superman title.

I had purchased #677 when he came on but there was no usual "gotta keep reading it" vibe for me that I usually get from Robinson so I never picked up the next issue.

Let's face it... dragging out Superman fighting Kirby's Atlas character pretty much smells of the good-old modern "let's pad it all to fit a trade paperback" story-telling mentality.

And I'm sure as hell not interested in wasting cash on the individual issues of most of these padded storylines anymore.

Anyway... from the moment this cover came out I knew I was going to buy the book.

Krypto sans silly Silver Age human-thinking thought balloons = a very hard Nala.

Even as a kid I wanted Krypto, who rarely appeared in the 70s even, to be a real dog that just happened to have Superman-level powers.

And it only took me 30 years and three continiuity reboots to get it!

Suffice to say, Superman's getting this this shit beat out of him by Atlas and Krypto comes into whip the bite this hell out of Atlas. And he does a remarkable job of this.

So I see that you are saying... "Nala? What's the point of this utterly pointless waste of this Apache directory filler called Paper Crack now that you've sold off your 15,000+ comics and you always seem to hate comics anyway?"

Well...

While I have a love-hate relationship with comics that exceeds my love-hate relationship with Plastic Crack, there's still some strange lame vane part of me that wants to write and discussion frigg'n comic books.

Yes. I barely buy anything any more.

And no, my opinion is absolutely not important either.

But let's face it... I'm a f'n geek and if there's one thing geeks like to do is pointlessly waste valuable personal free time discussing the useless minute details of utterly worthless shit.

And so... Paper Crack™ is resurrected to not annoy the few readers/contributors I have over at Plastic Crack by my mixing comic shit in with my Transformers shit.

So there.

I've wasted another $10 on registering a domain (though I should have done that ages ago) and because I am the World's Most Beloved Polish-American™, you now can read my comic book rantings almost 99% free of my gay Transformer rantings.

A new pointless comic book collective blog has been reborn.

Invites have gone out to potential authors.

Maybe.

We can be as cool as About Heroes one day.

So the past few days have consisted of me trying to sort my old Marvel Comics to get rid of the shit.

I'm not evening going to try and deal with the DC stuff at the moment since it is taking me so long just go get the Marvel shit in order.

And quite frankly, I haven't been seriously interested in Marvel books since the 80s.

I realized as I was going through the comics that I remember the actual stories of the 80s books but I apparently bought various Marvel books in the late 90s that I can't tell you a single damn thing about.

Uncanny X-Men from the issue #94 to the early #200s I remember every single story. Apparently I bought a lot of stuff later than that and I can't guarantee I read any of it.

Marvel all kind of collapsed for me once Uncanny X-Men split into multiple pointless books and when The New Mutants became the godsawful X-Force.

And once John Byrne left Fantastic Four in the 80s, I can't really say what happened after that for those characters either.

**warning** picture heavy

Well I'm finally working on the comics in the basement.

Yay!

Must... get... rid... of... 90%... of... them...

Well the back bedroom remodeling is almost done!

And that means I can start sorting through all the comics soon!

I so need to get that done and get these out of my life.

So with the recent holiday, crack day got pushed to Thursday. Since I'm on vacation I decided to join Giga and Sutekh on their paper crack adventures.

We arrived at Discount Paperback, the local crack dealer who supplies Giga's weekly fix of four-color addiction.

DP is pretty much you typical comic shop/geek toy shop/porn shop/miscellaneous paperback shop.

The 50% off bins (above) were rummaged through for goodies. I was going to get a Sandman Mystery Theatre trade and a Judas Contract trade but ended up putting them back since I have no need for more paper here in the House of Love at all.

DP has quite a selection of graphic novels and trade paperbacks. My eventual goal is to only by trades of content I want to own. It takes up less space than the individual issues and of course can sit easily on a shelf where the issues kind of fall all over the place. However, I wish Marvel and DC would trade shit that probably will never be done such as ROM and All-Star Squadron and such.

DP also has a ton of non-transforming-flavored plastic crack running the gamut from superhero shit to mango to a ton of crap that I thankfully don't know about. (It is a point of pride for me that I know so little about a ton of modern current geekage!)

Last night, while at The Family T's house, we discovered Mister T. reads Ramayan 3392AD, an totally kickass beautifully illustrated comic by Deepak Chopra of all people. This book is sweet and I may end up getting it when it is collected... or at least borrowing Mister T.'s copies.

I finally got my hands on a copy of Volume 1 of The Absolute Sandman collection. Damn this is purty.

Of course, I own the originals and the trades already and I can't justify buying yet another version of the same thing but man it is nice. Someday. Maybe. I suppose a lot depends on how much I can make off the comics collection and crap when it goes.

In the end, Giga got 52, the new JLA, and some books I don't read. He got a Weaponer of Qward too.