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New Comics Day

This year, I shook myself off eBay a bit. Just a teeny-weeny bit, mind you. Part of it was because of dumb luck – I am a member of this community called , and some LJ user put up a post sometime in the middle of the year that a friend of his was selling off a couple of comics. Out of curiousity, more than anything else, I clicked on the link to his LJ, where he had listed the comics and the prices down, and discovered that the guy was selling the complete Liberty Meadows for 15$. Bargain time! I shot off an email, and got a reply pretty soon, with a price breakdown. But goddarnit, someone beat me to Liberty Meadows. But Brady, the seller managed to coerce me with a fresh list of comics. Nice combination of trade paperbacks and single issues for enticing prices. And he even promised discounts.

So I got cracking. Tried ordering a small bunch at first, and got them very soon through some colleagues in the States. And then me and Brady began to break down the payments into time-based amounts. At the end of it, I was about 800 dollars lighter, and a back-breakingly heavy bunch of comics wound their way to 2fargon‘s place. Including complete runs of Hellboy, Cerebus, Tom Strong, Conan ( The Dark Horse series), a near-complete Warren Ellis bibliography.

A month or so later, Brady came back with a new list. He was liquidating his entire comicbook collection – with the exception of two series, Starman and Usagi Yojimbo, both of which I was looking for desperately, and was giving me first crack at it. The stuff that he was selling included quite a bit of Warren Ellis again, all his indie work, complete runs of Ex Machina, Essential Spiderman, Bendis’s Daredevil run, quite a bit of which I already had, Hellblazer – and loads of other great swag.

I bought out his entire collection.

The explanation I offered myself was that I could very easily sell off my existing duplicate copies. Also, with a complete haul, it makes it easier for us to come up with a consolidated amount. Plus, he was offering free international shipping. After the first two months of the payment, he sent off the first package. The package was supposed to take two months to arrive, and I eagerly waited for those two months to pass. By the time it was October 19th, I was practically salivating with glee. I made it a point to cheerily greet the postman every morning when he landed at the office. All the office guards knew I was expecting a package, and the moment it arrived, they were to call me, regardless of how busy I was.

It didn’t arrive. No problem, my stoic self told my foaming-at-the-mouth-and-at-the-brink-of-tears persona, give it three months, and then we’ll see. After all, trackable packages don’t get lost, they do get misplaced sometimes.

By the time November 19th came around, I was on my way to completely losing it. More so because November 19th was a Sunday, so I had to wait until Monday before I knew whether the parcel was here or not. Nope. No go. Went to the Post office on Tuesday , to verify if the package was there. Nope. No go. Went to the customs office on Wednesday, with The Flatmate, and then the post office at the airport to ask around. Extremely polite bunch of people, but they had no clue of how to track a USPS number. Came back and wrote off a mail to Brady to start tracking the package at his end. It would take 60 days to find out its whereabouts.

And today, it arrived. Flatmate is away in Bangalore, so had a gala time hauling 25-odd kilos up three flights of stairs. Spent a happy half an hour ogling at the contents.

  • Boneyard TPB vol 1-3
  • Tales from the Bog
  • Badlands TPB
  • – Steven Grant and Vince Giarrano’s epic crime novel, that dealt with JFK’s death. Excellent book, highly recommended by Ellis in his From the desk of…. series.

  • Streetwise TPB
  • – A collection of autobiographical short pieces by Jack Kirby, Evan Dorkin, Sergio Aragones, Barry Windsor-Smith, Roy Thomas and John Severin, among others. This is a book I have been trying to get my hands on for quite sometime.

  • Hotel Harbor View TPB
  • Benkei in New York TPB
  • – Both of these are manga by Jiro Taniguchi, of whose work I had but read reviews about.

  • Astronauts in Trouble: Live From The Moon TPB
  • Astronauts in Trouble: Space 1959 TPB
  • Astronauts in Trouble: One Shot, One Beer TPB
  • Larry Young wrote this series, and when he could not get it published, he created his own comicbook company to distribute it – called AiT/PlanetLar. So now you know what AiT stands for. Artwork by Matt Smith and Charlie Adlard.

  • The Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot – Frank Miller, Geof Darrow
  • I had this already, in individual comic form, but the art is good enough to own this twice over. So there!

  • Xenozoic Tales TPB Vol 1, 2
  • If you have not seen Mark Schultz’s breathtaking artwork, know this – This comicbook is a labour of love. ( Aren’t they all?) Schultz draws women, dinosaurs, and cadillacs, and the world would be a better place if women, dinosaurs and cadillacs looked like Mark Schultz’s art.

  • Sleeper: Out in the Cold TPB
  • Sleeper: All False Moves TPB
  • I have written about the series before. I bought individual issues of the second volume from Brady, and since he was letting go of the trades of the first volume really cheap, I bought these off him. Amazing series by Ed Brubaker!

  • Last Day in Vietnam – Will Eisner
  • It’s by Will Eisner. ‘Nuff Said.

  • Batman: Haunted Night TPB
  • Batman: The Long Halloween HC
  • Both by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale. I have the second in front of me as I write this. Finished reading it during lunch. What a series! And I have never lusted after Poison Ivy as I do after seeing Tim Sale’s rendition of the lady. *sigh*

  • Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters TPB
  • Mike Grell on one of the classics of the eighties. I remember going apeshit over ads of this series that appeared in DC Comics in 1987, or was it 1988?

  • Dark Days TPB
  • 30 Days of Night: Return to Barrow TPB
  • Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith’s masterpiece of Vampire fiction. The first 30 Days of Nightseries was being optioned for a movie by Sam Raimi, last I heard.

  • The Essential Spiderman Vol 1-6
  • Black-and-white reprints of the earliest Spiderman issues by Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, all the way upto the John Romita days. Each paperback is a humongous 600-odd pages. Yum!

  • Squadron Supreme TPB
  • The classic series by Mark Gruenwald that preceded the deconstructionist superheroes of the eighties and nineties. Supreme Power is a recent revamp of this series. Slightly dated in terms of design, but the concepts hold up really well.

  • Concrete Vol1 Depths TPB
  • Paul Chadwick’s masterpiece was collected into a variety of editions. Recently reissued by Dark Horse comics as a smaller-sized Trade paperback, this volume has the first five stories.

  • The ‘Nam Vol 1-3
  • Michael Golden and Doug Murray’s limited series about the Vietnam war, widely praised as one of the most accurate descriptions of the war. Murray was himself a Vietnam vet, and if I remember correctly, the storyline was done in real time, one year in the series meant that one year had actually passed in the timeline of the story.

  • Desperadoes: A Moments Sunlight TPB
  • Desperadoes: Epidemic one shot
  • Desperadoes: Banners of Gold TPB
  • Desperadoes: Quiet of the Grave issues 1-5 complete
  • Kane Vol 1-4 TPB
  • Jack Staff: Everything Used To Be Black And White TPB
  • I saw Paul Grist’s work in St Swithin’s Day by Grant Morrison. The guy’s artwork is amazing!!

  • Jinx: Buried Treasure issue 1
  • Jinx: Pop Culture Hoo Hah

  • Fire TPB (Brian Michael Bendis)
  • Couple of Bendis’s early, pre-Marvel works.

  • Whiteout TPB – Greg Rucka
  • Whiteout: Melt issues 1-4
  • Queen and Country issues 1-4, 13-29
  • Greg Rucka’s stuff. Really, really cool.

  • Orbiter Hardcover
  • – By Warren Ellis and Colleen Doran. It’s meant to be a space fable, that Ellis dedicated to the Columbia shuttle disaster.

  • Sgt. Rock: Between Hell and a Hard Place Hardcover
  • – Joe Kubert and Brian Azzarello

  • Batgirl: Year 1
  • I love the character of Barbara Gordon, and this was one series that really gave a very good backstory to her character.

  • Batman and the Monster Men issues 1-6
  • Heh. Matt Wagner on a Batman trip. This story details an early Batman adventure starring Dr Hugo Strange, Boss Maroni and Bruce Wayne’s first girlfriend – Julie Madison.

  • Solo issues 1-11
  • I had bought one of the Solo issues, the one by Sergio Aragones – which was autographed by The Man himself. Lucky enough to buy out the entire series from Brady. Solo is DC’s artist-friendly project – 48 pages, no ads, and an artist gets a complete issue to himself!

  • The Losers issues 13-16, 18-32
  • This is one cool series by Andy Diggle and Jock, about a bunch of special agents out to get their revenge against the higher-ups who tried to eliminate them.

  • Nextwave 1-6 issues
  • Nextwave is Love. And Mark Millar licks goats.

  • Hawaiian Dick Vol. 2 (complete) issues 1-4
  • Conan the book of Thoth (complete) issues 1-4
  • Desolation Jones 1-6 (Warren Ellis)
  • Oh bah. Am too tired to write stuff about these. Look ’em up.

I am now off to read Xenozoic Tales. Muhuahahahahaha.

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10 thoughts on “New Comics Day

  1. Could I be excused if the words “The Flatmate” caught my attention more than anythings else? :P

    If I can’t be excused, let me bargain my way. I NOW have an address, my dear. :P

    I tried calling you two days back. I guess you were sleeping. If you see my office numbers in your incoming calls list, that would be be.

    • Erm, I was talking about this flatmate. :-)

      Ok, so please to send address post-haste!

      I was indeed sleeping, been sleeping off early the past couple of days. Waking up early too. The habits, they are a-changing! :-)

  2. Anonymous says:

    Cerebus

    Started Cerebus a while back, interesting to see the way Dave Sim develops the comic, and the way the titular character himself evolves.

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