Always Coming, Never Here

B.P.R.D. - Still good.

Hellboy - Also still good.

Astro City - Actually got an issue of this, finally! I'm really hoping they just wrap up this arc... it would be nice if there were some kind of reboot of Astro City at this point, but that may be so pomo that it eats its own head.

Planetary - LAST ISSUE IN OCTOBER FINALLY I CAN'T BELIEVE IT HAS BEEN TEN YEARS FOR 27 ISSUES

Batman and Robin - New take on old characters by Grant Morrison. Grant and Frank Quitely did amazing work with All-Star Superman, and this new Batman stuff (with Dick Grayson as bats and Batman's son as Robin) is really really awesome. The feel is exactly what Batman should feel like, but it's a new story with new character development; I love it.

Top 10 Season Two - Haven't seen this lately, must be running late again... maybe it's time to put Top Ten to bed.

Red Mass For Mars - Watchmen-like uberfuture where humanity is doomed. I think this book is about done, it never really grabbed me so now I'm just getting it to be complete with it.

Walking Dead - Still reading this zombie soap opera, it keeps pulling me back in.

Anna Mercury - Alternate worlds and a boob-laden secret agentess. New story arc, looks promising.

Viking - This is a very moody, art-centric, historical fiction piece about Vikings. I like it, but we'll see how long it lasts.

Buck Rogers - Indy take on the classic character. Could be good; we'll see what happens.

Doktor Sleepless - Bio/Hacker superhero wants to end the world. Still wearing thin.

Gravel - Warren Ellis, John Constantine with a badass military twist. This series not only excels for Warren, it's setting up its next whole story arc with this great weirdo all magician super-team. A very very cool idea, Magic X-Men. I hope it takes off - I also think it would be great if Avatar did an omnibus collection of all the Gravel stories they've ever put out (as the character starred in a number of mini-series before getting his own regular series).

Ignition City - Where pulp space heroes go to die. Still good, thanks be to Warren.

Irredeemable - Superman-level hero runs amok. This is some good stuff - deconstructing the idea of an alien super-being living in human society, much further than anyone's ever dared to go with the idea before.

No Hero - Take a drug, become a superhero via a horrific biological transformation; just read the penultimate issue, and it should all resolve nicely in the last book. I'm reminded of Black Summer, which I did like, but it also felt a little shallow like No Hero does. Both story ideas could have been expanded more, but Warren is the million armed writer of the Apocalypse, he doesn't really have enough time to write every damn thing in the universe.

Incognito - Supervillain in witness protection regains powers and becomes a "hero". From Ed Brubaker, still loving this book, hope it goes for a while or continues exploring the continuity in other series.

I got inspired towards the end of the day at Dr. Sketchy's. Behold:

It's a FACT:

Electricity is inherently filthy, and ferries wailing, evil spirits into your home that hate all life.

Currently finishing up the sorting, cataloguing, and archiving of six or so months of comics. Earlier in the year I finally got around to actually performing an inventory of my collection; I'm about to break 3,700 comics. I estimate I'll have over 4,000 comic books by next Spring, though that rate may change depending on extra stuff I might be getting (I currently get about 30 titles a month). I gots a big Excel spreadsheet with all the issues, titles, and which boxes I've put them in (up to 14 long boxes now, plus the two I keep ongoing collections in). Every once in a while I go through the Overstreet guide and add some prices to the collections of issues, but it really takes a long time to go through the book and calculate prices (there are 570 rows in the spreadsheet, and you have to price each of the issues and so on).

If I had to put a rough value on the collection? I dunno... maybe around $17,000 book value? That's probably a conservative number. Real value is whatever I could actually sell them all for; probably like $5,000 if I could get TE to buy them all, if they were feeling generous. Undoubtedly the overall investment in the books is somewhere in the middle, but at the moment I don't want to contemplate how much I've spent buying comics over the last 15 years.

I would never sell these books though. These books are probably my most cherished possessions, and I really hope to pass them on to later generations somewhere down the line. My original Sandman collection, my Invisibles, my JLA and Incredible Hulk runs... fifty plus years from now I want someone to read the books that I read and have the same feelings of wonder and excitement I did when I read the works of Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis, Alan Moore, Peter David, Kurt Busiek... not to mention all the amazing artists... Sam Keith, Barry Windsor-Smith, Frank Quitely, Alex Ross, P. Craig Russell... I could go on and on. Comics are a wonderful, wonderful thing.

In other christ-I-wish-that-hadn't-happened news, my freaking smartphone died. Don't bother trying to call me, I won't get it. Some sort of stupid crash involving the wireless modem, and neither a soft or hard reset was able to sort the problem out, it boots up with a Fatal Error and freezes. Any data that was on there is so wiped - I had hotsynced like a good Mikey, but if the damn phone won't work, what's the point? And just when I was getting to become totally dependent on the damn thing too... grrrr FUCK!