Ranting Out A Review: Bedlam

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The Price:

I don’t normally buy the floppies anymore but decided to give this debut issue a look. The $3.50 cover price might give you a moment of pause, but that price is a steal considering that you get 48 pages of story and Marvel and DC routinely charge $3.99 for 20 something pages. Not to mention that all 48 pages are story with zero ads!

 

The Format:

I don’t consider myself any sort of expert in paper quality, but this seemed like better quality than your standard DC or Marvel release as well. But after consulting with myself, I seem to be of the opinion that most of the Image books I read could also make that claim. The exterior and interior pages are of the slick finish variety with the cover being just a bit thicker than the pages. Bonus points for no ink smudges on the book or my fingers when I was finished reading.

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Ranting Out A Review: Deadpool Kills The Marvel Universe

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The Price:

As usual I used store credit at my local comic shop (and former employer) to purchase this book so the cover price of $14.99 wasn’t a big issue for me. However, considering that the cover price on the original issues was $2.99, this collection of a 4 issue mini-series is actually more expensive than the single issues. So much for waiting for the trade to save a few bucks…

 

The Format:

This is just the standard Marvel series trade release. There are no frills and only a few pages of covers, layouts and scripts to pass for special features. And did I mention that it is actually more expensive than the single issues?

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Ranting Out a Review: Batman: Earth One

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The Story:  Batman: Earth One, written by Geoff Johns, is exactly what you expect. It retells Batman’s origin story in a way to keep it familiar while changing up things just enough to seem a little different. It not in anyway a bad comic, but better stories have been told of this period of Batman’s career.

The Price:  I used store credit (and my discount) at my local comic shop to purchase this book so the cover price of $22.99 was agreeable for me. In fact looking at my recent purchases on my Bat-related book shelf I notice that it is a few bucks less for a few pages less than all of them.

The Format:  I like the hardcover trade format. I like it more when they are over-sized like DC Comics has done with some of Grant Morrison’s recent Bat-books, but even at standard size I enjoy them more than a normal trade paper back (TPB). My complaint about Batman: Earth One’s format is that it does not read like a “graphic novel” as I thought it should, but instead it reads like the first TPB of a new Batman series. This might just be my individual expectations not being met more than anything else.

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Interview with Cliff Chiang

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Just like the ads say, MySpace really is a place for friends. To keep in touch with old ones, make new ones and to then bug some of them for interviews. This of course brings us to our new friend and incredibly talented artist Cliff Chiang, who was nice enough to take time out of his busy schedule for this interview.

 

 

Brian - Do you remember what your introduction to comics was and when you decided that you wanted to work in the industry?

Cliff - I knew about comics, but didn’t really follow them until my older brother started buying them. Mostly Marvel stuff: X-Men, Fantastic Four, etc. We were really into it for a few years but stopped reading when it got harder to track down issues after things went to the direct market system. I got back into comics in college, after reading Sandman and Hellblazer, and that’s when I realized that maybe comics could be a career for me.

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