I'd never set foot in a comic book store until my late teens. But now that I'd been bitten by the comic bug, I started popping into the local comic shops to see what else they had. Most of what I found was pretty non-inspiring, but every now and then I would come across a title that I really found interesting. For much of the 80s and 90s, my comic collection grew very slowly. I picked up a few books here and there, but didn't really buy much.

And then Dark Horse started publishing Star Wars comics, beginning with Dark Empire. I'd seen the Marvel Star Wars comics from the seventies/early eighties and had been unimpressed. But these Dark Horse comics were worlds apart from Marvel's stuff. They had painted card stock covers (beautifully rendered by Dave Dorman, who does far too few covers these days). The interiors were less polished, but still beautifully done water colors, not the crudely inked stuff that so many big publishers churned out and continue to churn out to this day. And they followed this title with a bunch of other Star Wars titles, most of which expanded the Star Wars universe and didn't just rehash the same stuff we'd already seen in the movies.

I discovered many other Dark Horse titles (the previous post is about another one I love, Conan) that were interesting and always found myself more drawn to the independent section of the comic shop than to the Marvel/DC section. So that's a vast majority of what I picked up over the years. Even the big two managed to publish a few titles that piqued my interest (though most were later in the 90s and early....man, you'd think there would be a cool way to say 2000s by now). In the last few years, I've become much less selective, so a lot of books I wouldn't have looked at twice in the nascence of my comic-buying, are now collected in their entirety. But nearly all of them have some aspect that did or does appeal to me, so I don't feel cheated.

As I've indicated in posts from years past, I was for many years an enthusiastic attendee of the San Diego ComicCon. But I haven't been now for several years, due to the evolution of the Con to primarily a big media event (movies, TV, video games) and much less a place where you can meet the guy who writes/illustrates a favorite comic book. I've even found it increasingly difficult to fine retailers who stock any of the indie titles that I buy (when I have missed an issue or two in the series). Not to mention the crowds. Or the fact that you now have to buy your pass the day after the show ends to have any chance of getting a pass. In years past, I would wait in a moderately long line on the day I wanted to attend and get a one-day pass with ease. Those days are no more. So I stopped attending.

Also, over the past few years, with my increased appetite for so may different comics and my decreased time to devote to reading those comics, I accumulated a huge backlog of unread comics in my collection. I probably had over a thousand unread comics (that I wanted to read, but had never found the time) in my collection.

So I made a decision. I now had over 20 long boxes of comics, taking up space that I needed to store all the other stuff having a wife and kids leads you to acquire. And was continuing to buy comics that I might not ever even get around to reading. So I stopped. I spent many hours integrating the unread comics with the read comics (they had been stored in separate boxes so I would know which I hadn't read yet) and verifying the list I'd kept off the books in my collection was accurate. And I shopped it around to a couple of comic book retailers.

Big disappointment. Huge! I was offered a fraction of what I'd paid for the comics (cover value - not the few I'd picked up at premium prices). And told by several parties that this was reality. The titles I'd collected just aren't that marketable.

So I decided to just put up a CraigsList post with a small piece of the list and a link to a web page I created with the full list. I may stick a few of the books up on eBay if I don't get any real interest in the collection as a whole. Once I start putting books on eBay, it just makes it really hard to entertain offers for the collection in its entirety.

My expectations are low. But we'll see what happens.



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Just after I posted all those scans from The Bloody Crown of Conan, I received an email about a new Dark Horse Conan comics adaptation that's coming out this month, Conan and the People of the Black Circle.

Here's Dark Horse's teaser for The People of the Black Circle:

Assassins, dark magic, and a beautiful noblewoman mean trouble for the Cimmerian barbarian unlike he's ever seen in this full-tilt escapade through the mountains of Afghulistan!

* Conan like you've never seen him”fully painted by Olivetti!

* A new miniseries set a decade after the Conan ongoing!

link     

All this Conan stuff put me in the mood for reading some Conan comics, so I went to the longboxes of recent unread books (I'm up to three or four longboxes of comics that I haven't gotten to yet) and grabbed the recent issues of King Conan. I hadn't realized that the current King Conan books were actually adapting another story from The Bloody Crown of Conan, The Hour of the Dragon. Having recently read the actual Robert E Howard prose, I went back to the first issue and re-read the series (up to the fifth issue). Issue six, the final in the series, comes out soon. As always, there were a few people, places and scenes I had imagined differently in my own head. And a lot of the slow moving parts of the story are skipped altogether. But the comic adaptation is about as close as one would expect a comic (or movie) to be to the original. If you're not a comic book fan, but you are a Robert E Howard fan, the Dark Horse adaptations are definitely worth a look. This one especially.

Here are the covers for each of the issues of the comic adaptation (the actual cover scans as well as uncluttered preview versions of a couple of them).

And unlike most comic books that lure you in with gorgeous painted covers and then let you down with abysmal interior art, this book really delivers. Here are a few of my favorite pages from the first 5 issues.

I expect more great things with the adaptation of The People of the Black Circle, but the teaser pages and cover have me wondering already if the artist/writer were familiar with Robert E Howard's Hyborian geography. This story takes place in Howard's version of India and the middle east. And while the turbans and the dot on the princess's forehead seem appropriate, the princess's features aren't very Indian, and the weird Darth Maul-looking guys on the cover were nowhere in the story I read.

Judge for yourself.

I am digging that last teaser page, though. Olivetti captures the essence of Conan there.

And on a completely unrelated note, I'm still really digging the Protopage "start" page I've set up. I've abandoned everything but Protopage for my bookmarks, RSS feeds, etc., so I hope they don't disappear in the night. I haven't been able to find anything about their business model, so I'm not sure how they're paying the bills with freeloaders like me using their stuff.



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It also includes a brief history of Robert E Howard's life up to the point that things take a distinct turn for the worst (he ended his own life at only 30 years of age - after creating an impressive number of diverse characters and fictional worlds), drafts of the stories in the book, an untitled incomplete story, and - what made it most striking for me - illustrations throughout by Gary Gianni.

I thought the illustrations were so interesting that I went online to find them because surely, I thought, someone must have posted them at some point in the many years this collection has been in print.

Negatory, good buddy. There were a few here and there in their low resolution glory, but no compendious collection.

So I scanned about 80% of them myself (you can definitely tell these were scanned from a bound book due to how blurry one side or the other of just about every image is). And now they are available on the interwebs - right here. So you've got that going for you. Which is nice.

I thought about re-sizing the images to make them fit in the browser more cleanly, but then I decided that defeated the purpose of sharing them. So they're all pretty huge.

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Nothing, of course. Other than it's about to become a thing of the past. Just like Conan.

I really like iGoogle. I set it as my home page on the browsers of all the PCs I use at work and home. I hit my iGoogle home page about 100 times a day (probably more) and have a whole bunch of RSS feeds coming into it. When it was announced (many moons ago) that iGoogle was getting the axe later this year (November 1, 2013) I started looking for a replacement with dismal results. The closest I could find was MyYahoo. But MyYahoo is extremely limited in its customizability and just kinda...clunky. So I set it up with my favorite news feeds, and dreaded the day iGoogle went away (popping in two or three times in the months since). I even made an attempt to create my own RSS feed reader. But I quickly decided that I didn't have the time to create something I would actually be happy with.

And then I received another reminder pop-up when I opened iGoogle this morning. My forgotten dread returned...I had to do something or risk losing all the news feeds I'd setup in iGoogle and hadn't copied to MyYahoo, so I searched again, expecting to find nothing new. But I came across a review and comparison of a few other non-Yahoo services that were similar enough to iGoogle to warrant a mention. One of these was Protopage.com. It sounded pretty similar to iGoogle, so I went to the site, poked around and then signed up. After playing with it for an hour or so, I had all my RSS feeds setup (in multiple tabs - I really like that feature) including Google news.

I no longer dread the demise of iGoogle. Good riddance...until Protopage decides to start charging for its services or close its own doors, that is. And then the mad dash to find a replacement will begin anew.



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