Still alive.
New post inbound, probably this Wednesday. Thanks for your patience, everybody!
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The updates will continue until morale improves.
So the surgery that was scheduled for Wednesday has been postponed, which is in fact good news. There are two procedures to treat the problem in my eye, one of which I had a preference for over the other. Now, I had a complication in the eye upon which the surgery was going to occur, and if I hadn’t responded well to the new medication, we would have had to rushed into the surgery and done the procedure I did not want. However, since the medicine is doing the trick, we can wait for that eye to calm down a bit and then do the procedure I do want.
Phew. Anyway, while that medication is helping one issue, it does have the side effect of making me lethargic and a little wobbly, which is not ideal. But it’s only for a bit, so I’ll be fine.
I’m still taking it easy on this site for the time being, but I’ll still do some short form yapping on Bluesky, such as Tuesday’s thread on my feelings about “professionally graded” comics written in celebration of my somehow acquiring 5,000 followers on that site.
Now, a surgery is still in my future, there’s no getting around that. I won’t know when for sure until probably my next appointment, but I suspect it’ll be within the the next couple of weeks. I’ll keep you posted. With posts. Here on my posting site.
Thanks for reading as always, and I’ll be back soon.
Still on a break.
…Especially since I’m on a new medication that’s really throwing me for a loop. Still don’t know if the surgery is happening this week for sure or not, but supposedly my early Monday morning appointment will finally nail down what we’re doing. Probably shouldn’t use the word “nail” in association with eye surgery.
Anyway, you should pick up the new Supergirl #1, coming out this week, and if you haven’t got your copy yet, Blood and Thunder #1, the sci-fi action book from last week, is a good one to check out.
I hope everyone is doing okay out there, and with any luck I’ll be back to proper blogging here soon. Thanks for reading, pals.
An update.
Hello everyone! I’m just popping in here for a moment to let you know that I’ll be doing Medical Stuff for the next week or so, which currently entails some early morning doctor visits and, with any luck, another eyeball surgery on Wednesday. I say “with any luck” because some complications have arisen that may delay the procedure…I’ll know tomorrow if things will still be on schedule.
As such, content may be slowed down a bit over the next few days, so I ask your patience as I deal with real world shenanigans. I promise you, I’d rather be writing about comics.
Thanks for reading, pals, and I’ll be back to normal operations (so to speak) and the Final ’90s Countdown very soon!
Yes, that’s a Firesign Theater reference.
Hiya pals…current plans are to resume the Final ’90s Countdown posts next week, given that the next entry required a little more research. I have that research in hand now, so the next entry in the series is imminent.
Plus, I had some other things to discuss this week, and a little news that may affect this site briefly, but I’ll get to that in a moment.
First off, check this out:
Yes, your eyes don’t deceive you, that is indeed an actual copy of Guts #2 from 1982. I had posted a pic of this on Bluesky that I found in an eBay listing, lamenting that I couldn’t buy it at the moment but I at least had this pic. Enter longtime online pal Katie, who purchased the item and sent it my way! That was a very generous and unexpected thing for her to do, and she has my most sincere thanks!
So who am Guts #2, anyway? It is a very small press comics publication primarily by Steve Lafler, with short bits by other creators. It’s entirely on newsprint, no slick covers, and it’s honestly the first one of these I’ve ever seen.
Now I have seen Guts #3, as I detailed my acquisition of same a couple of years back. That item turned out to be readily available via Last Gasp’s mail order warehouse, at least at the time, at a ridiculously low price. (And I just checked, and it appears to still be available.) Now all I need to find is #1, similarly all-newsprint, and I’ll finally have all the Guts I need.
Oh, right, you know about this, right?
That’s this Saturday, friends! I’ve written a boatload of material on the event in the past, and only occasionally got pushback from people who were wrong. Anyway, I’ll do what I always do, give away as many comics as I can, be a good host to our special guest for the day, and try to have a good time.
And finally, I want to let you folks know that, unfortunately, my eyeballs have to go under the knife once again. Due to complications arising from previous issues, my right eye requires surgery, which will be happening in short order. I don’t have a date for that yet, but obviously things will be disrupted here on the site briefly for the procedure itself and recovery time. Once I have more info, I’ll let you folks know.
Okay, that’s all the news that’s fit to blog, so I’ll chat with you again soon enough. Thanks for reading, pals.
One tough Gazookus wot hates all Palookas.
More of your questions, more of my answers!
ExistentialMan gets down to earth with
You’ve mentioned your comic reading backlog (and unfortunate eye challenges) several times over the years. I’m curious if you have a system for how you tackle your stacks of books. Do you just read them in the order you placed ’em in the longbox? Selectively choose back issues that relate to current titles? Toss a random dart at the stack? Please enlighten us.
For those of you new to the site, what EM is referring to is the fact I’ve had some vision issues in relation to actual physical problems with my eyeballs, discussed enough here that the topic has its own category.
Now, the eyeball situation has mostly stabilized, though I’m still getting treatments (i.e. the dreaded injections) in the left eye about once every couple of months…a vast improvement over getting shots in both eyes every month like I had been at the beginning. And I haven’t had a vision-obscuring bleeding incident in my eyes for quite some time now. So, you know, good news all around.
My vision is diminished from what it was, requiring glasses now. And though I no longer need the regular treatment on my right eye, the vision in that eye is impaired. I can see out of it, but not at the…resolution, I guess, as I can with my left eye, which is mostly at normal when using said glasses.
Anyway, as mentioned by EM, my reading had been slowed down a bit, after about an 18-month period at the beginning of all this when I read virtually nothing. When I did start reading again, it was slow going as I adjusted to my new vision status quo, and between bouts of eye-bleeds that would prevent me from reading again.
One result is that I gave up entirely on reading comics for a while, even during those periods when I could do so. I watched a lot of TV instead, which, thanks to a big ol’ flatscreen, was much easier for me to see than small print on paper pages. I was still picking up the comics I wanted to read, but setting them aside for a later date.
And that later date has been the last couple of years or so, as I’ve been making a stronger attempt at catching up on the backlog. I’ve adjusted to my vision, I’ve got a reading lamp that helps quite a bit, so I’ve been making some progress.
When I started to try catching up, my priority was the stuff I was reading on a serialized monthly basis. Gathering together all the Superman stuff, the Hulk stuff, so on and so forth, and reading through them a series at the time. Then, as new books come out, I read those as I get ’em and I stay caught up on those series.
Then there are the one-shots and the miscellaneous minis that have come out over the years, that got backlogged and I get to those as I find the time. There are probably still some of those DC/Hanna Barbera specials I haven’t read yet. But I’m getting through them as I can.
The real roadblocks are the magazines and the graphic novels/trades. I don’t get every issue of Back Issue, but about one out of every three issues or so there’s one stuffed with articles I want to read (“special DC Comics 1980s mini-series issue!” — DAMMIT) and I’ll pull it aside and I think I’m years behind on those and really need to stop picking them up. But then this month they had an issue about DC’s horror comics and DAMMIT.
Graphic novels, 100 to 200 or more pages a throw there, take a lot longer for me to plow through, but lately I’ve been trying to put more effort into reading them. For example, not long ago I finally read Matt Wagner’s newly expanded Grendel: Devil by the Deed, about a year after its release.
Now it’s not like I’m just talking home piles and piles of books every week. I have made an active effort to keep my personal pulls to a minimum, as I try to find a balance amongst 1) what new stuff I really want to read, 2) what I have time to read, and 3) how much backlog I still need to whittle down.
This isn’t even counting all the regular prose books I need to catch up on. I just read Opposable Thumbs, a book about the history of film critics Gene Siskel, Roger Ebert, and their partnership, and it took me like a year to get to that.
Adam Farrar gets up close and personal with
“I’ve never read any of the original Popeye comics. But I’m missing out, yeah? My library has the six volumes from Fantagraphics. Should I try to find the pre-Popeye Thimble Theater strips to read first?”
Adam, Adam, Adam…how dare you come here, into my very own website, without having read any Popeye. Friend, run, do not walk, to that library and get those volumes into your hands. If it’s closed when you show up, break in. Do not delay feeding Popeye into your peepers any longer than you already have.
You do not need to read the earlier Thimble Theater strips. The first of those Fantagraphics volumes contain several non-Popeye TT strips, kicking off that storyline and eventually leading to Popeye’s introduction. That should give you enough of the taste as to what those early strips were like.
Should you ever decide to continue beyond those Fantagraphics reprints once you’ve caught Popeye fever, maybe you can try some Thimble Theater (available in very large and expensive, but nice, hardcovers). Or you can look at a bunch of the facsimile editions IDW published of 1940s-50s Popeye comics by Segar’s successor Bud Sagendorf, which can be found in single issue or collected form. there were also a couple volumes reprinting Bobbly London’s run on the strip from the late ’80s/early ’90s.
There’s a current Popeye comic, Eye Lie Popeye, done in a nigh-anime style that’s a little off-model from the original strips, maybe, but still a lot of fun.
But read those Segar comics! And always remember what Popeye says about cartoonists:
Yes, it’s my eye again.
Hi pals! My usual variant cover-age post for Monday is postponed due to more eyeball issues. As these things go, it only seems to be a minor bleeding problem in my left eye, the one with the stronger vision. Unfortunately, it happened just a couple of days before my next appointment where the preventative treatment would have stopped that from happening, but What Can You Do™?
Now, like I said, it’s only very minor…in fact, even as I type this, it’s barely noticeable, with only a minor haze in my vision, but it’s enough to keep me from reading fine print. However, sitting in front of my computer doing a long-form post that requires Research and lots of Looking at Stuff is probably not a good idea at the moment. I should recover quickly and I’ll be up and running again later in the week, with a new variant cover post for next Monday. In fact, a comment left on the last post gave me an idea for next time!
My doctor says that, after all the laser treatments and surgeries I’ve had, and with the continuing injections, the recurrence of bleeding in both my eyes should “burn itself out,” to quote him, but it might take two or three more years. Hopefully in the future we’ll have more luck getting ahead of these incidents rather than chasing after them. (By the way, I never closed my GoFundMe to help me deal with the costs of these treatments, so if you have a spare buck or three to throw my way, I certainly won’t say no! Or, if you want to give me a buck a month at my Patreon, you can do that instead. Or too! Or you can even buy comics from me at my store, I guess that’s also an option.)
Thanks for reading, pals, and I’ll be back Wednesday.
Hiya gang!
My eye has mostly recovered, and I should be back to my normal schedule next week. Thank you for the well-wishes and your patience…both were greatly appreciated.
I’ll see you Monday.
Site’s on hold for just a bit.
Had another eyeball incident over the weekend…not a huge one this time, but enough to blur out the vision in my good eye. So, if you showed up today waiting for the next installment in my variant cover-age, I apologize…it’ll be up next week. I’ll try to be back to updating here by the end of the week. Thanks for reading, pals, and we’ll talk soon.
Basically I just say I’m behind on my reading but here’s a couple of things I do like reading.
One thing I haven’t heard at the shop in a while is “wow, what a great job, you get to read comics all day!” Which is good, because that did get a little tiring to hear, and to explain (when I bothered to do so) that the one thing I really don’t have time for at the shop is reading comics. Particularly now, that I’ve opened my own shop, where the only hand on deck is me and spending the time to read a comic means less time pricing old comics or whathaveyou.
Does that mean I’ve never read comics in the shop? No, of course not…it’s just not something I’m normally inclined to do. The one time I can remember doing so at the new store was an issue of Doomsday Clock, I think. And, at the old store, back when DC and Marvel used to send out preview packs of full issues coming the following week, I’d make time to read Preacher whenever it showed up. However, beyond occasionally flipping through an issue to check for damage while grading or maybe briefly browse through one to find something for Instagram, and yes sometimes just to admire a page or two of art…I tend to leave the actual reading at home.
The big problem, of course, has been my eyeballs. At first, I just thought my vision was getting blurrier due to my encroaching decrepitude, causing my reading to slow down considerably (even with the assistance of progressively stronger dollar store reading glasses. And then once the actual problem was determined (“Oh hey the interiors of your eyeballs are bleeding.” “Wait, what”) and problems began to accelerate, clouding my vision or blacking it out entirely…well, “reading” became an activity that was off the table.
End result: huge backlog of reading. For nearly three years my reading habits have been impaired by my ongoing eyeball issues. For the first year, it was just “no reading,” as my eyes switched off being cloudy or dark or too blurry and so on. Then once my eyes stabilized a bit (with only occasional bouts of hampered vision)…I found I had fallen out of the habit of reading comics. Sure, I read one or two here and there (at least once using a giant glass lens as a magnifying glass) but mostly I just watched television.
Television, as it turned out, was a lot easier to enjoy with my sometimes not-clear vision, particularly with my TV’s large screen and the somewhat close proximity in which I sat. The bright colors tended to cut through whatever was in the way, and while things were still sorta blurry, at least I could make sense of what was happening. Ended up rewatching all of Babylon 5 during this period…it was all bright and colorful and those early CGI effects were crisp and clear and easy for me to see. (I do remember early on watching A Quiet Place on Amazon Prime, with one eye blacked out entirely, and the other essentially with rivulets of blood obscuring its vision…it was like looking through prison window bars.)
It wasn’t until relatively recently that I started making an effort at trying to keep up on the comics I like to read, to try to cut down some of the backlog. And I’ve made some headway…I’m still caught up on Immortal Hulk and the Superman books, for example. But it’s still slowish going, even with somewhat stable eyesight and real glasses. My vision isn’t what it was (my left eye being the strongest one, and my right eye, where all the problems began, being partially impaired and not able to easily read anything below a certain size), coupled with the fact that the backlog is…a little imposing, is still kind of putting me off a bit.
Plus, I’ve gotten into the habit of just watching TV instead, which is easier.
I’m working on it, though. I’m probably making it sound like I just have giant piles of comics teetering over me at home that I gingerly remove a single copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s Snifter of Blood from the top to peruse. I don’t actually pull aside a whole lot of comics for myself, but week after week after week of not reading them means to the “to-do” pile adds up faster than you’d expect.
THUS, THE CULLING BEGAN. I started going through the stuff I did pull for myself and deciding just what I can pass up for now. The big loser here, unfortunately, was Marvel’s many Star Wars titles. Not to say I didn’t enjoy them…I did, they were a lot of fun, but it’s just too much and with Marvel’s crazy publishing schedules, it just stacks up too quickly.
I am keeping one title around, however, even though I’m desperately behind on this title as well, is Doctor Aphra (which you may have been tipped off to by the inset pic here). I think of the new Star Wars series Marvel’s been cranking out, this is the one I’ve enjoyed the most. I believe I wrote on Twitter about the appeal of the character as filling the “morally ambiguous” role that Han Solo can no longer occupy after his turn in the original movie trilogy. It’s an exploration of this universe via a fresh yet cynical perspective, told with humor and the right amount of pathos. While there is some sort of redemption arc to her story, it’s a meandering one which means we get to see her be a space asshole, which is quite entertaining.
As I said, I’m way behind, so some of my above comments may no longer apply. The last issue I read was #26, which could mean I’m two years behind or six months behind, given Marvel’s aforementioned publishing schedules. But I’ve got ’em all stacked up here and ready to read, and all her previous appearances (in her own title and elsewhere) set aside for future reference. And all other Star Wars funnybooks…back to the shop with ’em. Hate to see you go, but what else can I do, really.
I plan on cutting other titles out of the backlog as well, though I haven’t quite decided what’s next. There are things I’ll always read, stuff I’ve followed for decades: any Hulk series, for example, or the main Superman books, or any Groo or Love and Rockets and related. But there’s the other stuff, the series maybe I just started, or comics I’ve been putting off reading for so long it’s pretty clear I’m not that interested in them. Or books I dipped back into reading, like Batman or Flash, decided “yeah, read enough of those” and stopped. Again, no critique implied of the books…they’re perfectly fine, I just don’t have time for everything anymore.
That said, I did pick up this book last week:
…continuing the complete reprinting of the Legion of Super-Heroes that began in the Legion Archives hardcovers and living on in these differently formatted, cheaper to produce hardcovers which picked up where the Archives left off.
This volume brings us up to Legion of Super-Heroes #271, plus the Secrets of the Legion of Super-Heroes mini-series. That means we’re in the very early ’80s, and just about to the point where I started picking LSH off the stands. I was bit of a late starter, sort of, to the Legion, but I was instantly a fan and kept reading the book ’til about the New 52 era, which was just one reboot too many for the comic that had pretty much become known for its incessant reboots and the hope the New, Improved Legion would get traction this time.
Anyway, I like these books, and I suspect I’ll likely continue picking them up even as they start to overlap with the Legion comics I do have. You know, just to get the Great Darkness Saga on paper that isn’t terrible. I may stop once they hit that initial “direct sales only” series, which already exists on nice paper!
Did want to note that Paul Levitz, one time DC president/publisher and writer of the Legion, provides the introduction. He says that the contents within may feel a little…disjointed, due to various creative team pressures and deadline issues and stuff, but honestly when has a Legion story not felt somewhat like some of the pipes are rattling a bit? But Levitz does make some space to say some nice stuff about longtime DC editor/writer E. Nelson Bridwell, a fella that, from some things I’ve heard, may not have been afforded much respect from other folks in the field. Well, Mr. Bridwell’s writing, whether for a comic story or his explanatory editorial pages, were eagerly enjoyed by a young me, so he’s got my respect for certain.
Also wanted to note the artists in this volume…Joe Staton (always great), Jimmy Janes and Jim Sherman (both wonderful draftsmen…Sherman’s got a great splash with Light Lass that’s a knockout), and, of course, Steve Ditko. I’ve read that Ditko story before (hence the link to the previous post) and it’s pretty well out there.
You know, for someone who’s been having a hard time reading, I sure wrote a lot for other people to read. There’s some form of base irony there somewhere. But thank you for putting up with my typing, and we’ll chat again shortly.