Greatest eh?

I can't resist...

Vital comics that everyone should read at some point:
1. Watchmen (Alan Moore) - it will change the way you look at comics and life. - I also recommend V for Vendetta, his Swamp Thing run and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen...
2. both Dark Knight series (primarilly the first) by Frank Miller), Frank Miller Collected Daredevil work & Wolverine mini series...
3. Sandman - Neil Gaiman
4. The Spirit - Will Eisner - long running comic, but the best!
5. MAUS - Art Speigleman (sic) - amazing!!!
6. Carl Barks Disney work (Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck).
7. Mage & Grendel runs - Matt Wagner
8. The Dark Phoenix X-men run - Claremont/Burne
9. Waiting for Nexus TPB - Baron/Rude
10. I like the collected old strips like: Tarzan (Hogarth), Flash Gordan, Lil' Abner (Frazetta years), Dick Tracy...
11. Animal Man
12. Steranko - Nick Fury
13. TBPs - Original Star Wars, Any Marvel Title - Stan Lee is brilliant and Kirby & Ditko are marvelous.
- many, many more... Just what I could come up with now.

You mentioned that you thought Dark Horse was sliding. I think you may want to look again. They are becoming very concerned with art and writing.
The following titles are really exceptional:
- Conan
- The Moth
- The Escapist

Good to know there are so many enthusiasts out there. Hard to keep the collections current unless you make a mint...

Classic photos Chris! I would say that while you may resent your mom for tossing that shirt, it was probably so faded and dilapitated that you would have to imagine the X-Wing being on it. I think your mom for once made a pretty good call. At least she didn't throw out all your baseball cards while you were away fighting in WW2 like my wife's uncle.

I am slowly going through my grandparents house. They passed away 10+ years ago. My uncle had lived there until recently. He let the place go to say the least. So every Wednesday I go down and wade through the garbage bags and giant spider webs to salvage what I can. That is where I found this photo. I hope to find others. There is no electricity and so I try to do it during the day. When the light was waning last Wednesday, I was mindlessly pulling stuff from a box and saw the biggest freaking spider skitter to the shadows in the box. Can you say FREAKED OUT!!! I went for my flashlight to get a better look and the batteries decided to die right then. I grabbed the nearest implement I could and just beat the crap out of that thing and the box. I'm still not sure I actually got it due to the dark and the fact that I just packed it up and called a day rather hastilly... But I found this gem.

I have found some other cool stuff, but nothing beyond tattered old comics and books and photos. Anyway, hope to share more with you if I can find them...

Don't get me wrong. I liked Marvel a lot in the 70's and 80's. The current status is what I'm sick about.

I can relate to you in that I was raised on comics. Classics Illustrated was always there at my grandmothers. Also Sad Sack, Mad Magazine, House of Horrors and the Classic Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge before anyone knew he was the artist drawing it. I also remember days when I'd be home sick. My father would come home at lunch with a fistfull of comics and among them would be Spiderman, Superman, Green Lantern, Incredible Hulk... That got me going to look and buy them at stores and read them into worthlessness. My old Conans and Strange Tales and Xmen are classic and worth tons in good shape. Mine are worth my memories and that's fine for me. I didn't know and had I knoown, I probably wouldn't have cared. I never bought a comic I didn't read. I just read them a little more carefully these days.

But having a father come home after he pops by the local convenience store and brings you some great comics to read is no longer. They aren't there. The sick kids are getting what? DragonballZ? It's just stupid if you ask me that they do not make them more accessible. It is art and literature and needs to be out there!

Brian has come through again and delivered quickly and in good order. I have said it a lot. Brian is a great person to trade with.

I think the amount of times I have traded with him speak for themselves. Thanks again Brian. Look forward to doing it again someday!

I have a few things I'd like to rant about if people will entertain my thoughts...

1. Who is buying/reading/collecting comics besides me? What titles do you like right now? I would like to recommend a few titles I find to be extremely well written and drawn (outside of the Dark Horse SW comics, which vary). They are te following: The Losers (Wildstorm), Black Hole (Indy), Conan (DH), Batman: City of Light (DC/The Pander Brothers!), The Escapist (DH), The Moth (DH), Plastic Man (DC)... Notice please the lack of Marvel (other than 1602, I have no interest in Marvel).

2. The Slow Death and Immense Decay of Comics as we have come to know them...
Brief History: Comics come into being in book form from collected dailies. Sequencial art and storytelling becomes a lucrative business with unlimited possibilities. Heroes are born, heroes go to war while America is at war and they are popular and distributed everywhere. Comics have a tough time tring to recover from the end of the war. Horror and True Crime comics are the focus and they are eventually censored. Then we see ridiculous monster comics and then back to super heroes. The writing becomes very good and Stan Lee humanizes the hero. Comics become popular and are widely distributed. The 1980s. comics boom and start selling millions of copies per issues having to do several printings to sate the demand. They are at convenience stores, super markets, retail, drug stores. They are out there!!! They are advertising by being a fixture. Specialty shops are for the serious collector, but remain fairly covert.

Then Marvel has a great idea. Let's focus on the collector and forget the kids. Marvel decides that all they need is several thousand people to buy 3-10 copies of 'collectible' issues and they will do just fine. These select people invest as planned, but soon realize that there isn't a market for their 'collectibles' because anyone else interested has them or is trying to get rid of them. They stop buying comics. Marvel prints the few million or so comics expecting to have the continued effect and no one buys them. The market is flooded and there is no more demand. This makes Marvel  focus exclusively on specialty shops that order and pay up front and the distribution is taken from the public eye. Marvel goes bankrupt and almost kills the industry because the other companies followed Marvels lead. Indies fold, go under and suffer. Comic books are on life support.

They slowly creep back but stay limited to the specialty shops. Advertising by putting them in every retail store is gone. People don't buy comics unless they hunt them down in specialty shops. Graphic novels become the focus and the monthly books cut corners, artists and writers are hired for their speed and ability for meeting deadlines. The quality drops. Comics go from selling up to 2 million per issue in the 1980s and 1990s to considering good sales on a book being 15,000.

The movies come out and out and out and nothing is done to publicize the comic book industry. Comics are kept in a private world. 250+ million are viewing these movies and no one is buying comics because they can't get them. They are not there...

Rumors ripple through the industry that Marvel wants to focus solely on graphic novels and continue to focus on large corp. bookstore chains buying up front. The idea to stop printing monthly 22-24 page books is considered and could possibly come to be from Marvel.

DC stays true to form and doesn't want to shake things up. They are as concerned with quality as they are with profit. They sign the industtries best creators to contracts and recruit a house of legends by 2004.  Dark Horse also stays with the comic as an art form concept nad continues to put out quality books. Image is about the art and not the writing. But the art is worth the cover price.

Comics are hanging by a thin thread.

3. I love comics as a creator and a reader and a collector. I hope something is done to promote the industry better and to make comics more accessible to the average Joe.

I saw a kid (15 or 16) in a Borders bookstore reading a comic the other day. He had a mohawk going and looked fairly nerdy (who am I to judge). He was reading a graphic novel (more underground or independent).
I asked him why he was reading that comic and he said he liked the writing. I asked him if he collected or knew of a few titles and he said no. He was just starting to get into it. I asked if he knew where a local specialty shop was and he said... No.

My point is... The fan is out there, but the comics are not. This is going to be the demise if it is not amended. This art form must live on! I do not know if there is really anything we can do as fans. Just thought I'd air that out because it depresses me and makes me quite angry.

Hope the message is clear here. I tend to ramble when I'm all worked up.

Thank you for the heads up Billy Boy.

It's always good to have others watching your back. I must admit I am not familiar with Vectis or their services, but I am more aware and appreciate your inquiry and the measures you have taken to attempt to make the collecting and auction world a trustful and reliable place.

Rorworr (also my namesake on other forums and formally here) is not in any movies. He is a character from the RPG Invasion of Theed game. Hasbro decided to make an exclusive figure to help sales I guess. So, I guess we would call him a modern EU figure.

He comes on a green POTJ minicard and is packed in the RPG box with dice, character sheets and info, the game rules and guides and an adventure (Invasion of Theed). I have a source that has 3 or 4 collecting dust on the shelves if ever anyone wants me to pick this up for them. I have already bought 3 games ($14 or $15) to get to the figure. He is just a Wookiee and I can't resist.

I was in a Southern Boulder (CO) Rock Power Trio from about 1992 - 1998. I played drums and shared singing duties and wrote a lot of lyrics. I say 'Southern Boulder Rock' because the guitarist/singer and bassist were natives of South Boulder. So they gave it that flavor (I'm being serious, and humorous). I was from North Boulder (maybe 5 - 8 miles away from South Boulder. Not the distance that made it different, it was all about attitude.

We called ourselves 'Table Mesa' because that was the largest suberb of S. Boulder. It also represented an attitude. We'd see some guy walking and say, "Damn, that guy is so Table Mesa!" It basically means "bedroom genuis". Someone that is brilliant but self defeating and doesn't make the jump from his infinite badroom realm into reality. The BG comes up with amazing ideas and creative projects, but never shares them. Why not? Well, they are tired of being picked on and criticized by parents, teachers and peers, so they fear a negative response and just shoot it down anyway before other get the chance. They also fear success. A catch 22. So they create this huge and impressive body of genuis work and it stays in the bedroom. I was a bedroom genuis that made it out and so were my 2 compadres in Table Mesa. Our message was "Come out of the bedroom and check out some guys that dared to. We are embarrassing, but we have the courage and the integrity to keep grinding it out.

We were actually okay. We weren't easilly accessible. We challenged the audience to listen and understand what we were all about. No party here, just 3 guys making some different music. Rock, metal, old school country (Haggard, George Jones...) music in one sound and grating vocals with good lyrics. We were our own biggest fans.

We actually produced and printed 2 cassettes during our existence. The debut was: Table Mesa: Verde. We recorded it in a basement studio in 5 hours. I think we had 9 or 10 songs and they were raw but decent. I actually can't believe how good we were in some parts. We were just different. I played the drums with my aggression and anger more than talent. The guitarist played a Gibson Les Paul through a giant Mesa Boogie Tube amp. It sounded like pure peeling out in gravel. Niel Young comes to mind. The bassist was probably the most talented musician, but very eccentric and shy. Played his bass so well though.

2nd release was more for fun than exposure or as a demo to get gigs. It was called: "Table Mesa: Get Your Weird Sticks". Much more diverse quality of production and sound, but memorable and worth getting on tape.

I am proud of it and think if I could do it now, I'd take it a little more seriously and take some drum theory and practice a lot more. It was a blast and at some point a saving grace for me. We had fun. We played a lot of clubs in Boulder and Denver and even were slated to open for Sublime at the Fox Theatre. They didn't make the gig... We came across badly because the sound guy turned the 'suck' knob up a little too high (Far Side that is eerily familiar).

We toured and made no money, backed up a sewer system, our biggest crowd was 10 in a small lounge in Vegas. Went in a 69 VW bus through Arizona New Mexico, Utah and Vegas and showed up at these clubs and they did zero to publicize. It was purely and simply fun and something that gave us ample time to practice in front of small groups. One huge club in Arizona shut us down on Halloween night because it was costing more for them to have us onstage than they were making at the door (which was 0).

Anyway, that's my band stuff. Long and tired, but a really good time for me.