BOUGHT: Shazam! Vol. 1: Meet the Captain! (DC Comics) When it comes to an attempt to salvage DC's Captain Marvel character after nearly twenty years of often ill-conceived reboots and changes in direction, is there any creative team more deserving of trust than writer Mark Waid and artist Dan Mora, who have been responsible for what is pretty much the ideal Big Two super-comic in the form of Batman/Superman: World's Finest...?  A few names may come to mind, but not many, especially if the book is going to be an ongoing affair, and one embedded in the broader DC Universe shared setti ..read more

  Oh, you thought that I had already written as much about Nancy comics as any comics blogger possibly could in the last few months? Well, I found another Nancy book, this one on one of the bookshelves in my ancestral home, where it has stood since publisher Drawn & Quarterly sent it to me as a review copy way back in 2009. I thought it might be worth re-visiting the book, a collection of writer/artist John Stanley's work on the character culled from the comic strip's comic book spin-offs, having just recently read so much of Ernie Bushmiller's original Nancy, not to mention Paul Kar ..read more

 BOUGHT:  The Best of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy (Henry Holt/Comicana) This 1988 book has long been out of print, but when its editor and writer Brian Walker noted during his curator's talk on the first night of Nancy Fest at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum (see the previous post) that he had found a few extra boxes of it in his garage and that they would be on sale the following day during the book sale portion of the event, I knew I had to try and get one (And, indeed, it bumped Nancy & Sluggo's Guide to Life, below, off my shopping list). The book, perhaps the begi ..read more

On Saturday morning, May 25, Denis Kitchen called to order the first official public meeting of the mysterious and once-secret Ernie Bushmiller Society. After a panel discussion with a few other society members, the underground artist and founder of both Kitchen Sink Press and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund—who, by the way, published some Nancy collections between 1989 and 1991—turned to the auditorium full of people who had gathered to watch it and asked them for "testimonials." This was one of the first events of Nancy Fest, a two-day celebration of cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller and his gr ..read more

 BOUGHT:  Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, The Man Who Created Nancy (Harry N. Abrams) This month's comics purchase was made in preparation for the upcoming Nancy Fest at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum in my old home of Columbus. Cartoonist Bill Griffith, best known for his Zippy the Pinhead strip, will be giving a presentation on his 2023 book, and I wanted to be ready for it by having read it. Unfortunately, my local library didn't have access to it, so I had to resort to buying my own copy, something you may have noticed I've increasingly tried avoiding ..read more

 BOUGHT:  Thorn: The Complete Proto-Bone College Strips 1982-1986 and Other Early Drawings (Cartoon Books) My sole comic book purchase for the month of March came not from a comics specialty shop or from an online bookseller like Amazon or Barnes and Noble, but rather from a Kickstarter campaign: The complete collection of Jeff Smith's mid-eighties comic strip from Ohio State University's student paper The Lantern, a strip that would eventually evolve into the comic book series Bone, the impact of which on the direction of the comics industry—or should that be "graphic novel industr ..read more

 BOUGHT:  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Reborn Vol. 8—Damage Done (IDW Publishing) This volume opens with a somewhat incongruous done-in-one chapter, by guest writer Michael Walsh and artists Vlad Legostaev, Santtos and Walsh. In it, the four brother turtles are hanging out alone in their lair together when they receive an unexpected visitor from the future, a middle-aged mutant ninja turtle who is apparently one of them. He's there specifically to warn Donatello not to do something he's thinking about doing, something that will visit great ruin on them in the future and, indee ..read more

 BOUGHT:  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Usagi Yojimbo: WhereWhen (IDW Publishing) In 2018, Dark Horse Books published Usagi Yojimbo/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Complete Collection, which included every single one of the comic book crossovers of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's TMNT and Stan Sakai's samurai rabbit, from the 1987 Sakai-drawn six-page short "Turtle Soup and Rabbit Stew" to the 2017 Sakai-created "Namazu or the Big Fish Story," a 40-page IDW-published one-shot. The title of that book, as vital and rewarding as the book itself may be, is no longer accurate, as IDW j ..read more

It wasn't something I was expecting to see in a comic book, least of all in the pages of Mayor Good Boy Turns Bad, the third installment of Dave Scheidt and Miranda Harmon's Mayor Good Boy series, about a talking dog mayor of a small town.  Early in the book, Robert Ableman, the father of the book's heroes Abby and Aaron Ableman, is shown going through his record collection. When Aaron interrupts him, Robert clutches the album he's holding to his chest defensively and holds it there for several panels. As you can see above, it's a Cub album, specifically their second album, 1995's Come O ..read more

BOUGHT: Batman: Dark Knight Detective Vol. 8 (DC Comics) This latest collection of post-Crisis, pre-"Knightfall" issues of Detective Comics opens with a mistake: The volume includes 1991's Detective Comics Annual #4, the Armageddon 2001 tie-in, just as the previous volume in the series did. In seems to be a mistake of addition though, as it doesn't look like it replaced anything. The next ten issues of the series from 1992 are all included, as is the 1992 Annual #5, the Eclipso: The Darkness Within tie-in.  This turns out to be the sole contribution of writers Alan Grant and Jo ..read more