Crimebuster

Rat Queens has been a little off the radar recently because of the long delay between issues caused by Roc Upchurch's departure from the book. But with the series getting on a monthly schedule now, I expect the buzz to start building up again.

The market can decide that Avengers #71 is worth a million dollars - in fact, I highly encourage this - but it won't change reality.

Avengers #71 is a great, great book. But it's not the first Invaders. The first Invaders is Giant-Size Invaders #1 from 1975. The idea that the group of heroes in Avengers #71 were the Invaders was a retcon introduced in Invaders Annual #1 in 1977, two years after the Invaders debuted, and 8 years after Avengers #71. Avengers #71 is neither the team's first appearance in the real world (that would be GS Invaders #1), nor is it even their first appearance in continuity, as they had already been a team for 16 issues before this story took place. This is like saying that X-Men #201 is the first appearance of Cable, only even less accurate. It's a great comic and one of my favorite Avengers stories, so I certainly encourage everyone to get it. But it is not the first Invaders. I don't think it's even a prototype like Sub-Mariner #34 supposedly is. It's just Roy Thomas using any excuse he can to include Golden Age characters.

Calling Sub-Mariner #34 1st Pre Defenders is basically a lie. Just curious why you feel that way? It has been thought of that way for at least the last 30 years. It is listed in Overstreet that way under Sub-Mariner 34 & also noted as a pre-appearance under Marvel Feature #1. I understand everyone has their own opinion, but this one seems pretty obvious. It also says it on the CGC label. Can't pin this on the seller, though if you want to call CGC liars, that's fine.

No. But like Micronauts, they do own the rights to a lot of the characters they created for the title. I think they have the rights to the Spaceknights and the spaceknight concept. In the late 90's, for example, they put out a mini-series trying to revive the concept, except without Rom involved. It never really caught on.

There were a lot of spaceknights, Rom was just the greatest of them all. Many of the other spaceknights were female, including his girlfriend Brandy for a time. She was transformed into Starshine:

No.

Hybrid was legit terrifying. He also appeared in Rom Annual #3, where he tried his sick tricks on the New Mutants. Rom is amaaaaazing. Such a great series. And a great (mostly) self-contained story, with a beginning, middle and end. This is what I think of as a proto-event. It happened just before these sorts of things got branded and hyped as big events. If it had happened two years later, it would have gotten a "WRAITH WAR!" logo on the top of each issue and it would be a lot better known now than it is. There were multi-part crossovers into both Avengers and X-Men as part of this event, and the effect of X-Men was much more long term and dramatic. The first appearances of Forge were split between X-Men and Rom, and the gun Forge used to strip Storm's powers was based on Rom's Neutralizer. So all the stuff that followed - Life Death, the romance with Forge, the years of powerless Storm - flowed from the Rom crossover. Plus, the big finale of the wraith war guest starred the entire Marvel Universe... drawn by Steve Ditko! If you ever wanted to know what the Avengers, WCA, X-Men, Defenders, FF and Alpha Flight would look like drawn by Ditko, Rom #65-66 is where it's at. Steve Ditko Wolverine... yeah. Weird.

The first comic shop I visited was in Ayer, MA, just outside of Fort Devens, but I don't remember the name of the store. This was in 1985. I do remember wanting to buy the oldest back issues they had for my two favorite titles at the time, which ended up being Avengers #36 and Fantastic Four #61. On the way out, I checked their 25 cent bin as well, looking to find whatever they had that was really old, regardless of the title. The two comics I pulled out of the bin for a quarter each: Amazing Adventures #6 and Flash #137. My copies are long gone now, but I sure wish I could find stuff like that in quarter bins now. Not long after this I started visiting A-Ok Cards and Comics in Leominster, as well as Same Bat Channel and Great Expectations in Fitchburg.

I and all of my friends were Liefeld fans when his stuff first hit. Liefeld is like Vanilla Ice - nobody wants to admit they liked him, but millions of people were buying his stuff. By the time he moved to Image, though, he was already a punchline in my high school. We had 4 or 5 comic fans in my school, and the day Youngblood #1 came out, we went to the comic store and bought copies. And then spent the rest of our high school lives making fun of how terrible it was. That opening scene where the hero kills a guy by throwing a ballpoint pen into his throat was a running joke for the rest of the year. I'm pretty sure one of the other students drew pictures of "Ballpoint" in everyone's yearbooks that year instead of signing them. Good times. Edit: I had to dig out my yearbook. Probably of no interest to anyone but me, but it made me laugh: I also found this note from another student, giving me some good collecting advice for 1992: Anyway, none of this has anything to do with Hot Topic, so I'll stop derailing.

I'm not sure why people like to mock fans so much. I think it's a lot cooler to actually care about something than to sit on the sidelines and make fun of other people for caring. Don't get me wrong, I have a hard time understanding why someone would like X-Force either. But I respect kaholo's passion for it. There's nothing wrong with being a fanboy. Fanboy respect!

The first issue of a 12-issue series highlighting Groo's supporting cast just came out a couple weeks ago. It's called Groo: Friends and Foes:

Writing or art it was still a *spoon*ty Allred that created it. Just happened to be the female that time... Edit... Sorry, chip on the shoulder after a hell of a day... I think Peter Milligan did the writing on that series. I haven't read much of his other stuff, but I did try the first issue of Enigma, which is highly acclaimed in some circles, and found it to be pretty much incomprehensible.

In my youth I was addicted to all things Schwarzenegger related and didn't understand much about the mechanic's of firing a minigun with one arm. To me I didn't really care for Liefeld's proportional standards because I thought only bad *spoon*es had giant muscles and guns bigger than there friends. To this day I could care less how the heck someone draw's feet as its not exactly any part of what I pay attention to and still believe those who pay so much attention to them have this huge foot fetish... But honestly I loved the amount of detail put into pages. Then when Capullo took ahold of X-Force it reenforced why I loved the series and Tony Daniel was no different. I loved the idea of black ops without the idea of fighting Cobra just to detain them so they could be set free a week later. X-Force was my series I guess as many others have one. Vol 3 was awesome and I have no idea what the hell is going on with this current series but in my youth I was a diehard fan. So for someone to take Spider-Man kill him off and replace him with some goofy looking *spoon*tards I absolutely hated it. Fair enough. I had a similar reaction to Avengers Disassembled, which has been a blessing in disguise, as it finally freed me of the burden of having to care about the Marvel Universe at all. But I think Allred is excellent. I read his X-Force/X-Statix and loved the art. The writing, on the other hand, eventually got tired out. Satire has a short shelf life before it starts getting stale and overdone. I'd blame that for the eventual demise of the book before I'd point the finger at Allred.

It's rare for one thread to have so many people with such bad taste. Taste is subjective, if course, so I respect that you guys don't care for Allred. But I think you're nuts. His stuff is great. Even his art wouldn't be enough for me to pay money to read about Silver Surfer, though. Allred drawing X-Force killed your love of comics for 10 years?! I mean, I'd understand if you were talking about Bendis or Mark Millar or something, but Allred? On X-Force of all things?

Will this conversation change anything? Well, if it helps CGC realize the information on their label is incorrect, and they decide to list Annual #14 as Gambit's first appearance, then it could.

I wasn't disgusted by the artwork, I thought it fit the book, I enjoyed the first issue and have put this on my pull list. No problem with the art for me.

The Cat #1 is a really good comic. #2-4... not so much. It goes downhill really fast. But that first issue had a lot of promise. I prefer The Cat to Tigra, personally.

I'm probably the only person who didn't realize there was a Cover B to the Braga Special, but I was at my LCS today and was quite surprised to see one. All of the promotional material I saw only showed Tess Fowler's regular cover. Her cover does not say Cover A on it as far as I can see. I also didn't see any discussion of a variant cover here, or on the Rat Queens Facebook page. Of course, I'm sure retailers and people who buy Previews were aware of the second cover. It was also mentioned in the Image solicit for the issue (though not, I think, actually pictured), and Bleeding Cool did a blurb about it as well. But it was news to me. I assume that the second cover wasn't given more hype because it was done by Roc Upchurch, and given the controversy surrounding his exit from the title, they probably didn't want to make a big deal about him having this new (and last?) Rat Queens item. I'm wondering if Cover B might have been under ordered as a result of this? Given that it's a continuation of the character portrait series Roc did for the variant covers for #2-5, this might be in some demand by fans trying to complete that set - if, unlike me, they even know it exists. Roc's Cover B for the Braga Special #1:

Dug this out of a literal bin of comics, a big blue storage bin that had a pile of comics dumped in it. Most everything in the bin was wrecked, but somehow, this survived just fine. It was part of a 3 for $5 purchase:

It was a merchandising tie-in.

The worst part about U.S. 1 is the fact that the logo uses the interstate color scheme instead of the U.S. highway color scheme. The logo should really be black and white.

The first great Doctor Strange cover in my opinion is Doctor Strange #169. High grade, glossy copies of this just absolutely pop. I used to have a 9.0ish copy with eyeball melting colors, it was great. One issue I think a lot of people completely forget about is Fantastic Four #27, which is the first "full" Dr. Strange cover - depending on what people mean by that - and only his second cover appearance ever:

That's just what a great character Hulk is. His biggest, most key moments ever are when he randomly changes color.

It's not really a first appearance of anything, though, is it? I'm not sure what Bleeding Cool means by the "new" Purple Man. It's the same guy as before. Same name. Same powers. Same everything, really. So... so what, exactly?