Tag Archives: acquisitions

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Mmmmm…bueno!

Excellente!

I bought a page from this eBay seller two months ago. A page from The Moth, this wild indie comic created by Steve Rude and Gary Martin, with Martin, Rude’s primary inker on Nexus, providing the dialogues as well on this series.

When I was about to pay the seller, I noticed the address he had added on his invoice, in case I wanted to send him a money order. As it turned out, it was Gary Martin himself, selling his page. Mailed him and talked about how cool his work was, and asked him if he had other pages for sale. Turns out he had, and agreed to sell them to me at cheap ( and I mean REALLY cheap prices). We agreed on a time-payment scheme and I ended up buying 5 pages off him. A month later, the payment was complete, and Gary sent the pages off, promising to inform me whenever he put up his Nexus pages for sale. The pages from the older series are all gone, but there is a new storyline coming out in Summer 2007, and I get first crack at them, yay!

And today I got the pages in the mail, and I found that Gary has also sent a volume of his book on comic book inking free with the package. Inside is inscribed “To my #1 fan in India, thanks for all the support”, followed by his signature. How cool is that? I just can’t stop grinning!!

I have uploaded all but one of pages to my comicartfans gallery, and you can check them out right here.

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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.

The Loot, with annotations

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New books

Best Book Stall has another sale going on right now, at YMCA Secunderabad, and I happened to drop in about 5 days into the sale. Much astounded at the clearance sale section which occupied one side of the huge hall – you could select any 5 books for hundred rupees, ten books for one hundred and fifty. A cursory search yielded gems like hardcover editions of Robert Silverberg’s Valentine Pontifex AND Lord Valentine’s Castle. Volume 3 of Brian Lumley’s Necroscope, assorted parts of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, two Patricia Highsmith novels, Tim Dorsey’s Cadillac Beach, which I am looking forward to reading – I hugely enjoyed Hammerhead Ranch Motel. El Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate, Gregory McDonald’s Son Of Fletch, and I hate to say that I haven’t gotten around to reading any of the Fletch novels yet. John Berendt’s Midnight in The Garden of Good and Evil which, to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t have picked up had it not been for the price. And interestingly, found this out-of-print book called Mrs Coverlet’s Magicians by Mary Nash. I don’t really remember where I had heard of this book – probably while amazon-surfing some day….

The rest of the sale yielded some great finds too. Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish, which I read immediately, and which, like I expected, has very little in common with Tim Burton’s movie except for the broad theme in general, and the ending. John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, which I also finished immediately. An illustrated 1946 hardcover of Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass, (John Tenniel’s drawings, of course!) I had resisted buying this for quite a long time. An illustrated unabridged version of The Three Musketeers, and the only children’s book William Faulkner ever wrote, called The Wishing Tree. The Encyclopaedia of the Occult, which seemed much comprehensive when I browsed it on the spot, and a book on the early Warner Brothers’ directors. Yukio Mishima’s Sound of Waves, a love story set in Japan, which I had been hearing good things about ( seems it has been adapted to film some five times). Two Shel Silverstein hardcovers – When The Sidewalk Ends and A Light In The Attic. An interesting children’s book called The Philadelphia Chickens – this came with a free CD that had songs sung by folks like Kevin Kline, Meryl Streep and Laura Linney.

Also picked up quite a few random books on music criticism. Had to go there again later, because I ran out of cash.

Spent the long weekend peacefully completing four volumes of Buddha. Can’t wait to get my paws on the remaining four – and I now understand that the term “Godfather of Manga” is one not easily bestowed on a person. Do yourselves a favour and try reading Buddha if you can. Scans are not available online, as far as I know. The storytelling alternates between cartoony goofiness and gut-wrenching realism between pages, and goddamnit, why is so less Tezuka available on eBay?

Which reminds me, I won a lot of 18 comics that included a signed first edition of Craig Thompson’s Goodbye Chunky Rice, a signed copy of Slow News Day by Andi Watson, and Matt Madden’s One Faraway Beach, also signed. Loads of other stuff too, and all for 22.5$, woo hoo!

And there was also the package I received from mikester, containing multiple copies of Solo, each signed by Sergio Aragones, and a trade paperback of Fanboy, that has a sketch by Aragones inside. Why multiple copies of Solo? Because there are rabid Aragones fans in Delhi, Bombay and Kolkata, and it just didn’t seem fair for me to have a copy and them not having it. Now, now, is my halo showing?

What is Solo, you ask? Oh, well, you don’t, but let me tell you anyways. It’s a series published bimonthly by DC comics, with 48 pages and no adds, and correspondingly has a higher price point of 4.99$ per issue. What really sets Solo apart is that every issue is done by one artist, who is given free reign to do whatsoever s/he wants with DC characters. I believe the series has been cancelled after twelve issues, but each of the artists who have contributed so far are legends in their own right – Paul Pope, Tim Sale, Howard Chaykin, Mike Allred, Ted Kristiansen, Richard Corben, and on issue 11, Sergio Aragones. Coincidence department: I bought the first 10 issues issues of Solo from a comicbook fan at a dollar each just two days before Mike mentioned that Mr Aragones was signing at his bookshop.

I had to play a game this weekend – one of these insane urges to trounce virtual meat that crop up from time to time – so I began Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. Excellent gameplay, which was kind of expected when I found out that the game was produced by Tigon games, a company founded by Vin Diesel himself ( I remember asking a question about this company in some quiz or the other when it was launched). Currently midway through the game, and enthused enough about gaming to install Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend, the latest TR game. Graphics are superb, but the camera angles are killing me. Is it time to pick up a controller?

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A Father Knows His Child’s Heart, as Only a Child Can Know His Father’s

I just finished reading 28 volumes of Lone Wolf and Cub. Rereading, rather – I had completed reading the scanned versions sometime last year (well, alright, also the 45 issues that First Comics had reprinted in the eighties, and which I had bought earlier. ). But that was not sustained reading, I was reading the early volumes at the rate at which the kind brainz was downloading them off Emule ( One volume every four days, downloaded to his server, from where I would have to download it to my computer at home, on a painfully erratic 64 kbps connection) And then I discovered bit-torrent, and found the first 23 volumes in a single gigatorrent. Got them, read them all, and stalked zcultfm patiently until volumes 24-28 were uploaded by some samaritan.

I bought the complete lot off eBay last December, from a guy in London at a ridiculously low buy-it-now price, and he waived shipping charges for the lot if I could arrange a personal pickup. My sister came to the rescue, but the books were stuck with her until last week. Oh, the agony. The irony being that bookstores in India began stocking Lone Wolf and Cub volumes since February. Yes, I could have bought them all here, but they would have cost me a lot more, and not all of them were…ahem….first prints.

I finished the first 13 volumes in a single sitting at Delhi airport, taking occasional tomato soup-and-coffee breaks to soothe the hyper-charged mind. Could not really continue with the rest when I got back to Hyderabad, but managed to get to volume 20 by yesterday. Could not control myself any longer, and finished the last 8 volumes today. And now there is this melancholy feeling that refuses to go away – you understand the feeling, right, the thought of “darn, why did it have to end?” and “What do I do next?” and the general hangover of the journey itself, nearly 9000 pages with Ogami Itto and Daigoro on the road to Meifumado.

I could rave about the series and Koike and Kojima’s storytelling prowess, but I am just. Too. Blown. Away right now.

Which reminds me, I also finished eight out of ten volumes of Samurai Executioner, also by the same creators – ironically, the fate of Yamada Asaemon, the titular character of Samurai Executioner is revealed in one of the early volumes of Lone Wolf and Cub. If you find volumes eight and nine of the series, do let me know. Those are the ones I do not have right now – Blossom bookstore in Bangalore stocks Samurai Executioner only until volume 7, while the shop I went to in Delhi had volume 10, but no volume 8 and 9. Darn.

What am I going to read next? Easy. Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha, four volumes of which I bought in Delhi, and which I have been dying to read ever since Andrew Arnold raved about them on Time.com. This will be my first Tezuka, and from what I have seen so far, is going to be quite a different read from both Lone Wolf and Samurai Executioner. Now if only I find the next four volumes without much of a fuss….

Quick trivia: Goseki Kojima and Osamu Tezuka were born on the same day – November 3, 1928. What Enishi!

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