Meanwhile...

Hello readers. How are you? Good. Me? Oh, I'm fine, I suppose. I didn't actually get brutally murdered by Steve Wacker after saying his name three times in the bathroom mirror Wednesday. That was just a "joke." The real reason I didn't post anything yesterday, or anything of substance for a few days, was two-fold.

First, normally on Wednesday night I would write an installment of my increasingly less substantive "Comic shop comics" feature, although I only actually bought and read one comic book-comic in the comic shop Wednesday afternoon. It was Tiny Titans #49, and as it was the forty-ninth consecutive issue of a title by the exact same creative team, I didn't really have anything to say about it. It was pretty good? Not the best issue ever, but it was still definitely another issue of Tiny Titans.

I liked this panel: I did have Orc Stain on my pull-list, but my local shopkeep failed to order this week's seventh issue of it. Perhaps because it has been a million years since issue #6 came out, and he forgot the series still existed.

I don't know. I really like reading comic books, but there are soooo few of them I enjoy reading in that format any more, and fewer all the time (More on this below the asterisks).

And then yesterday I would have done my normal "Meanwhile..." link post, but I knew I was going to have a second piece to link to a Robot 6 today, so I figured that I'd just wait for today to post that post, so I'd only post one lazy "Meanwhile..." link post this week, instead of two back-to-back.

So let's get to those links now, shall we? Yesterday at Robot 6 I had the latest installment of "A Month of Wednesdays," featuring short reviews of graphic novels A.D.D., Batman: The Gates of Gotham (yes, again), Jinchalo and Too Much Coffee Man: Cutie Island.

Then, today, I had a review of Bongo Comics' Ralph Wiggum Comics #1, which is pretty much the Platonic ideal of what I'd like a comic book to be...right down to the paper stock.

And over at ComicsAlliance, I spent most of my week on Earth 2 tease watch (see the results here, here and here). Apparently the heroes of the new Earth 2 will have much, much better costume designs than those in the New 52iverse (with the exception of Earth 2 Batman's, the others all have simpler, sleekier more faithful-to-their-inspiration designs), and the characters will be much darker and more violent, which is kinda weird, given that the New 52iverse characters are all ready an awful lot darker and more violent than the DCU versions they replaced.

I was kinda hoping the new Earth 2 would be to the New 52iverse as the old Earth-2 was to the old Earth-1...in other words, Earth 2 would be the old, "real" DC Universe before the New 52boot. No dice, apparently, and it sounds awfully Kingdom Come-y so far. If I had to guess, I'd assume that it will be the older, wiser JSA characters who serve as the moral ballast trying to keep the renegade Trinity in check and from crossing too many lines, but I could just be projecting some of the previous incarnations of the group's raison d' etres onto the available info.

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Just out of curiosity, I went through the Diamond shipping list for books coming out this week, looking for books featuring characters and/or creators I was interested in and would therefore potentially want to buy...and then the reason or reasons I didn't. The $3.99/22 price point is the main one...that and deciding to trade-wait at some point, and then falling soooooo far behind that the idea of "catching up" seems like something that falls between "maybe some year" and "unlikely."

Here's what I would have liked to maybe buy, under different circumstances:

Batman Odyssey Vol 2 #5: Trade-waiting this zany-looking series, plus every issue is $3.99...$3.50's my personal ceiling for a 20-ish page comic

Infestation 2 Team Up One Shot #1: Trade-waiting...because each issue of Infestation is $3.99 a pop

Justice League #6: I love the Justice League with a passion that's almost unnatural, and I actually like the work of writer Geoff Johns and artist Jim Lee an awful lot, but it's a 20-ish page comic for $3.99...and the first three issues were shockingly bad, containing probably the worst writing I've ever read from Johns (and I've read almost all of his comics to date)

King Conan: Phoenix on the Sword #2: I'm trade-waiting Conan, and am so far behind at this point that the last one I read was from Kurt Busiek's run

Lord of the Jungle #2: $3.99 for a Tarzan comic seems awfully steep, considering how much free Tarzan entertainment there is at my local library

Shade #5: Trade-waiting

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Micro-Series: Donatello #1: Trade-waiting IDW's TMNT comics...due to the $3.99 price tag

Steed and Mrs Peel #2: $3.99? For reprint material?!

Twelve #10: I woulda bought this if it came out in a timely manner following the first half of the series, which I read regularly at the time...but I think that was some time in the late 1990s, wasn't it? I can't remember anything about it, and now the very idea of Twelve comics just irritates me

Usagi Yojimbo #144: I'm reading Usagi Yojimbo in trade, and am one million volumes behind on it

Walking Dead #94: Reading in trade...I left off on the volume where they found a prison and thought about maybe moving in there for safety. What was that? Volume 3? 4?