Today is a *true* unboxing, as I unpack the contents of my October comics order from the states! Still no spiders in the mysteriously ratty mail bag (whew), but a few books I was hotly anticipating, two new Epics, and a pair of odd Marvel trades.
Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.
Episode 32 features DC Super Hero Girls, Vol. 4: Past Times At Super Hero High (Amazon), Shutter, Vol. 05: So Far Beyond (Amazon), Spider-Man: The Daily Bugle (Amazon), Bloodstone & The Legion Of Monsters (Amazon), Thor Epic Collection, Vol. 3 – The Wrath Of Odin (Amazon / Thor Guide), Doctor Strange Epic Collection, Vol. 13 – Afterlife (Amazon / Doctor Strange Guide), and Shang-Chi, Master Of Kung Fu Omnibus Vol. 4 (Amazon / Shang-Chi Guide)
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Alternately, you can keep reading for the full transcript. Please keep in mind that this season of videos is shot off the cuff with no chance to review the books ahead of time, so I might occasionally fudge some facts (usually addressed in the video by subtitles).
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Crushing Comics! I’m your host Peter and this is the show where I fall in love
with my comic book collection all over again …
… but I have a special treat today, because an order of books from the states has arrived here in New Zealand. So, we’re
gonna crack this open and see what new books are joining the collection.
I ordered this order on October 3rd from InStockTrades and it winged its way here. Let me tell you, man, one of the
things that I’m learning about living outside of America in general – but especially living all the way around the world from America – the amount of consumer choice in America is just amazing.
Like, the amount of things you can choose from and how quickly you can get them shipped, how cheap they are …
just incredible! There might be points in America where you’re like, “Oh I can’t get this one imported book or a certain kind of food or something,” but let me tell you: it’s totally different anywhere else.
I’m paying, like, a third of how much I’m paying for these books just to get them here. Crazy!
So let’s see what’s in the box! I have no recollection at this point of what’s in here or why I ordered it. Oh, this is fun, okay. All right.
The first thing here is the fourth volume of DC Super Hero Girls. We love these so much in our house. I was really hesitant to get into books that were kiddy-fied heroes because sometimes they can be written very unintelligently, and it’s like a lot of kind of like gross-out humor and just silliness. I tried to sample Tiny Titans or Teen Titans or one of those
in the book was just… I don’t even think it was the right maturity level for my four-year-old. I think it was, like, for a one and a half year old.
Especially, because the DC Super Hero Girls … I was afraid that it was ghettoizing the female characters to kind of be like useless princesses and so I was very hesitant to pick it up. But we bought them in California en route to New Zealand. I was like, “Well, at worst, could be something to read on the plane.” My daughter already loves Wonder Woman because we’ve actually been reading the Perez Wonder Woman.
She loves DC Super Hero Girls. Loves them. It’s written with just enough maturity that to her feels like big kids in school, but it’s written at a level that she can read by herself after I’ve read it to her once or twice.
The fourth one, Past Times at Superhero High, it stars the primary cast of the heroes, which is: Wonder Woman, Batgirl, and Supergirl, and then the kind of one that’s in the middle is Katana (who I know has been a hero for a while now, but she’s aloof here, much as she’s aloof in the comics), and then Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn are of like the bad girls.
They’re not villains, though. It’s kind of like their represented as bad girls in that they don’t always make good choices, or their choices don’t always turn out okay. Like, Poison Ivy’s plants are always getting away from her.
So we’ll be reading them very very soon.
Let’s see what’s next. Oh, this is a series that I love! And it does it end? Awww!
Shutter, by Joe Keating an Leila De Luca. This is one of my number one image recommendations. If you love Saga and you were like, “Wow, I’ve never read anything else like this in my life before! What else could satisfy me?” buy this book.
It’s in five trade paperbacks. Hopefully if we keep buying them and getting more people to buy them, eventually we get it in one complete hardcover edition.
It’s so hard to explain. It’s like the daughter of a world-renowned adventurer and archaeologist (again, in that kind of Indiana Jones mold, which I know I’ve mentioned on some recent episodes) has now forged her own life, but she’s world famous for being an adventurer with her father and now the mystic parts of the world are coming after her for something that she’s not sure if she really understands.
I’ve only read the first three collections and I’m just obsessed with it, so I decided I wanted to hold off for the fourth and fifth one to get here before I read the rest of the series.
Fantastic. I could not more highly recommend it. One of my favorites.
[Tossing a piece of paper] An invoice!
I’m a sucker for these weird collections. This is Peter Parker or, not Peter Parker, Spider-Man: Daily Bugle. It collects these weird miniseries. Daily Bugle #1-3 and Deadlines#1-4.
I probably have them in floppies in all honesty, but I love all these weird ball sideline Spider-Man series. And, you know, it’s hard to think of how they could be comprehensively collected, because they all splinter in a lot of different directions. They’ve happened at different times. It’s not like the venom 90s series, where they kind of just can like blow through them in big chunks. So, anytime there’s a little collection of more than one of the series, I’m usually in.
Some of the fun noticing is black and white, which is pretty cool. I don’t really know too much else about this, so I’m really excited to read it, quite honestly.
Ah! Bloodstone and The Legion of Monsters. This collects Legion of Monsters #1-4 from 2011 (which is a book
that I already have collected and have already read), but it picks up a couple of other stories that have not been collected previously. Astonishing Tales: Boom Boom and Elsa (which is probably a digital first book) and some material from Rampaging Hulk that adds some background to Elsa Bloodstone, who I forget … she’s the father or the sister? Or, her father was the previous Bloodstone that we knew. Ulysses Bloodstone.
This was a little bit of a double dip for me, but my rationale was that this main monster series … I think, I want to
say, maybe, it’s an oversized hardcover? I could be wrong. This is a fun thing to fill out the shelf and generally I am in for any kind of female protagonist book, just because I love to support them and I know I’ll eventually enjoy [it].
Plus some of this black-and-white cart from … I guess these are the Rampaging Hulk backups? This art is righteous! Man, it was really good, check this out. Who is this artist? John Buscema, but in black and white.
(I guess that’s my theme this week, is black-and-white art.)
This is fantastic, so I’m excited for that. I love these off-the-beaten-path things, you know? Like, these are things that I never had the chance to read before and it just makes me pretty excited.
I have a hole in there brick in here! Let’s see.
Oh-ho-ho! Speaking of off the beaten path things I never had the chance to read before, were gonna add one to the oversized shelf today, too!
In this brick we’ve got a new Thor Epic collection. Vol. 3, which is Thor #131-153. It’s kind of on the heavier side for an Epic Collection. I’m waiting to accumulate a whole run and just sit down and read [a lot of] Thor.
You know… funny, I always really liked Thor in concept in the 90s when I was collecting, and I had a fair amount of Thor my collection, but didn’t really read it a lot. I don’t know if I was like waiting to get a run or if I just couldn’t decide to commit the time to it?
I’m not sure what my deal was, but I’ve actually now spent the time to read him in modern-day and I really enjoy Thor. I think he has a well-developed rogues’ gallery and supporting cast, where he can do that Asgardian stuff, he can do cosmic stuff, he sometimes has some conflict on earth. Jason Aaron is writing him spectacularly now.
So Thor is kind of like one of the heroes that I first expanded my [modern] collection [to include] – after I really had my X-Men stuff down. I think I went X-Men and then Fantastic Four and then Thor. Previously there wasn’t a ton of Thor collected and so it’s really cool now to see it get such coverage. I mean, they are really zooming through the series. I have [counting] one two three four five six seven Thor Epics already, this is is eight, and I think there’s only gonna be a total of… we’re almost halfway.
Speaking of Epics, here’s another one. Something I never in my life thought would get collected. This is Doctor Strange Epic Collection 13. This is probably the last Doctor Strange Epic Collection. I mean, I guess they could probably go forward from this, but the next chronological Doctor Strange material is Flight of Bones, which they’ve already collected into a non-Epic Collection, and this is the very end of his 1990(ish?) series.
It collects #76-90, which has some… I want to say Warren Ellis on writing? [checking] Yeah, in addition to Kurt Busiek and some other folks that you might not know. This is something that I banked the floppies, actually, because I was like, “There’s no way Marvel’s ever ever ever going to put this in a collection!” Yet, here it is.
That’s the beauty of the Epic Collections. They are indiscriminate about the material that they’re gathering. It’s coming from somewhere and they’re gonna cover it whether it’s the top seller or not, because the whole point is the Epics are going to collect everything.
It makes me really excited, because now I guess they can sell my floppies (although the floppy market in New Zealand may be non-existent, I don’t know yet).
And, finally, this [showing book[ finishes out the Master of Kung Fu omnibuses! It’s volume 4 of Shang-Chi, collecting #102-125 plus (as everybody hoped that it would) it keeps going from there to collect Shang-Chi back-ups in Marvel Comics Presents from 1988 #1-8 and a one-shot called Master of Kung Fu: Bleeding Black. That’s really exciting!
It covers all of the Doug Moench stuff that ends the series and pretty much takes this character all the way through… gosh, almost the whole nineties? He did not guest appear a lot. You could check that out in my Shang-Chi guide.
So now I’ve got them all, and I finally have… that other one got shelved? Oh, there it is. Now I’ve got them all! We can go right to a ceremonial shoving for this, and once I unpack my other ones I can finally do my read. That is really
exciting.
That’s my InStockTrades order of the second or third of October. So, took… ah, not quite two months to get here. It seems like five or six weeks as a standard. They go on a ship. That’s not too surprising. But, so happy to unwrap these books.
Probably the one that I’m the most excited to read from [this batch] is probably Shutter. I’m probably gonna take the whole pile of Shutter trades upstairs and just read through the entire series, because that is really exciting stuff.
Thanks so much for tuning in to this very rare unboxing interview. Interview? I’m interviewing the books, the camera is interviewing me. It would be fun, actually, if you interviewed me and asked me questions. That’s something to think of for the future.
Thanks so much for tuning in, and tune in next time for more unwrapping of the mysterious packages still left on my shelf here at Crushing Comics.