Well, it wasn't really a game, per se, but I thought it might be cool to post all the originals that yesterday's covers were swiped from. I might point out, too, that a handful of these are NOT from other comics!

The interesting thing about covers is that they're designed to attract attention. Publishers want readers to see a cover so interesting and/or intriguing that they pick it up and buy the issue. Not surprisingly, then, a lot of the iconic images from comic books come from the covers. Often, a lot more time goes into a book's cover than any, theoretically more complex, interior page.

From time to time, artists try to recreate imagry from previous covers. Sometimes this is a sales gimmick designed to suggest that this issue is just as good as the one the original cover was from, and sometimes it's just an artist trying to pay his/her respect to the original artist. And sometimes, it's more of a parody. Whether any given image is a tribute or just a rip-off is often subjective, although if an artist signs the work "after" the original creators, that's a good indicator that it was meant as a tribute.

So I've gone through my collection again and pulled out some cover tributes. Once again, I've only included one image per title. (Otherwise I'd have a crudload of Fantastic Four covers since I happen to know those books a lot better!) See how many of these images you can trace back to the originals...

So I picked up The Pirates of Coney Island #1 this week. It was a book that I was originally going to pick up for the pirate thing. But then I saw that it was really more of a modern tale rather than the "classic" pirate tale that I generally enjoy. But I saw it the shop this week and picked it up anyway...

The first thing I noticed was the color palette. Each page was given an overall hue that helped to convey the mood of the scene. Well done there, and I didn't feel it was over the top or anything.

Next, there was something of a European vibe to things. Not terribly overt like if you were reading Judge Dredd or Blueberry but still there nonetheless. Almost an undercurrent, really. (I later learned that artist Vasilis Lolos is actually from Greece.)

As for the story itself, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself intrigued. We've got a kid who goes up against a small gang of punks, a stranger who helps him, and the pet shop owner who's also a victim of the gang activities. Plus, this odd sidebar where a restaurant owner is hiding a load of extra cash and is killed shortly afterwards. We haven't actually seen the supposed pirates yet, and there's been only the barest indications that this couldn't be just anywhere on the planet.

The issue is almost more of a prologue to the actual story. Or it least it seemed that way to me. Writer Rick Spears seemed comfortable to take his time with the story and tell it the way he wants to tell it, which runs contrary to how a lot of mainstream books are written these days. I give him a lot of credit for that.

I suppose I don't have a really firm opinion of the book just yet, but I'm interested enough to come back for issue two. We'll see who these pirates are, and then I'll see if I'm willing to add this to my pull list.

Intriguing opening, to say the least, though...

Well, here I was just thinking that absolutely NO ONE was reading this humble, little blog. I was getting no comments on it whatsoever. Well, it turns out there was a glitch in the system (yes, that's the technical phrase) and I wasn't getting notified that any responses were coming in.

Hopefully, we've got that corrected now, though, so please feel free to comment away on whatever strikes your fancy.

Check it out: I just saw that Mark Evanier swang by last month and verified that he doesn't hate me.

And we do have a status update on the Bill Mantlo Tribute!

Cripes! Now I feel bad for letting those important (in terms of this blog) responses hide in the cracks for so long! Hopefully, though, we won't have that happening any more! Respond away!

There were two indie books I was looking for this week at my local shop: the Girl Genius volume 5 trade paperback and Dr. Id #1. Both of which are being published basically by the authors themselves, and I wasn't entirely surprised that my local comic shop guy didn't have either.

What surprised me, though, was that evidently Girl Genius wasn't even out yet! He said he had four other people already specifically request it a while back. It should be showing up any day now, and he ordered one extra copy that he'll set aside for me. Which is great, but I only knew about it because it's been up for sale on the author's web site for at least a couple of weeks now. Obviously, that was a kind of pre-order situation, but it doesn't say that on the site. Given that it's a small press deal, it didn't wholly surprise that I hadn't heard about it earlier.

Dr. Id he hadn't even heard of. Not surprising, honestly, since it's the authors' first comic and they've only got one issue of the one title slated for publication so far. In fact, the only reason I knew about it myself was because I was tooling around on the Internet looking for information about the author for wholly different reasons! ComicList.com noted that the book did come out this week, but obviously that doesn't mean any given comic retailer ordered copies three months ago. I'm going to check another shop on my way home later today to see if they picked it up.

My point, though, is that we've got two books here that I have a distinct interest in already, and I had to do a fair amount of virtual and real legwork to just try to figure out how to get a hold of them. Neither book would've hit my radar at all if I weren't actively looking for something by their respective authors. So how, may I ask, do they expect to generate enough sales to break even?

Phil Foglio is probably not terribly worried about it. He's been around long enough and developed something of a following in his own right. With his Girl Genius series in particular, he's figured out a business model that seems to work for him and, as long as his readership doesn't bottom out entirely, he'll probably be fine financially.

I'm not sure that Adam McGovern has the same luxury with his Dr. Id though. He's not a complete unknown, as he's a regular contributor to The Jack Kirby Collector, but I think the audience of that magazine is maybe in the thousands. And it's not necessarily an audience who would, with any guarantee, go out and buy his comic just because of his name. Nothing against Adam, by any means here, but I don't think he's done enough shilling to really promote the book. I think I've seen one interview on Newsarama, but again, I only ran across it because I was looking for info about him.

And that, I think, is the biggest problem indie creators have today. They can have all the great ideas in the world, and do a brilliant job executing them, but if they can't get their message above the din of DC, Marvel, and Dark Horse noise, they're effectively dead in the water. An indie comic creator needs to be more than a creator, they need to be a salesman and a marketing guru as well.

One final note... I do want to help both Adam and Phil out, even though I don't know either of them personally. Next time you swing by your local shop, go ahead and buy Adam's and/or Phil's book. If your local shop doesn't have either, ask them about it and see if they can't order it for you.

My dad was a pretty progressive guy. He was born too late to have been a beatnik and he missed becoming a hippie by just a year or two. But I think he aspired to some of the intellectual, free-thinking ideals that the groups espoused. Consequently, while I was growing up, he made a distinct point of exposing me to a wide variety of experiences. We lived in a small, white-bred, Mayberry-ish town, but he still made a point of taking me in to work ocassionally -- a downtown Cleveland public school. He made a point of taking us different shows that came through the area; I remember seeing everyone from Doug Henning to John Sebastian to Mummenschanz.

One day, Dad came home from work with some comic books for me. Both my folks actually encouraged my reading comics because... well, it was reading. But he found these comics, as I recall, in a pile of books that one of the CPS libraries was getting rid of. Knowing that I liked comics and recognizing these comics' educational value, he picked one of each issue and brought them home for me.

The comics were about 15-20 years old at the time, but they were looking at historical events, so they weren't nearly as dated as some of the free Radio Shack comics about electronics I had. The series was called Golden Legacy and each issue told the story of notable black acievments throughout history. I remember thinking they were crudely drawn compared to the slicker look of the DC books I'd been reading, but the stories themselves were still interesting and compelling.

I remember two stories in particular. Issue five was a biography of Matthew Henson, who was on the first successful expidition to the North Pole and the first black man to reach the literal top of the world. Issues seven and eight were a two-part biography of Frederick Douglas, the famous abolitionist. I think the Henson biography stood out because of the similarities to classic adventure stories, with a small group of intrepid explorers battling the wilderness for the sake of going where no man had gone before. The Douglas biography, I know, struck me because I had recently seen his name in my social studies textbook at school. What was more striking was that the textbook's entire coverage of Douglas' efforts, and indeed his whole life, was summed up in maybe a paragraph.

"Hey, I thought we were supposed to learn a bunch of stuff at school. There's a LOT more in this comic about this guy than there is in my textbook!"

I don't know that I really have a point with this, but I find it interesting just how much knowledge I have that comes from comics. That, despite the cultural whitewashing that was so prevelant at least throughout my grade school career, I still managed to learn about important events that "the establishment" didn't really want me to acknowledge.

Yesterday, I have to say that I had a lot of fun going through my comic collection and pulling out the monkey covers, so today I'm going to do something similar.

Next to monkeys, what do all kids love? Dinosaurs! You're always in for a good comic if it's got a dinosaur on the cover. Of course, the downside is that, to come up with a semi-credible story, you've either got to involve time travel or pull a Jurassic Park. You don't have to explain why an ape exists in the modern world! Consequently, we tend not to see as many dinosaur covers as monkey ones. Interestingly, too, dragons and other abnormally large lizards don't really have the same draw that actual dinosaurs do.

But, hey, enough with the chit-chat, let's see what dino-covers we can pull out of Sean's collection...