The Ottawa Comic Book Guy

Good day, and welcome to our Man of Steel comparison as promised last time. Firstly though, long time readers of this space will remember my reaction to the announcement of the Buffy reboot. I am pleased that they have backed off of the idea of replacing Buffy and that they are going to have a new slayer telling stories in Buffyverse. It makes me think that this was the plan all along, and that they had announced it differently so that they could get some publicity out of it all (nothing generates more publicity these days then manufactured outrage) considering the environment the network was in when the news was revealed. Now on to the show.\ When we left off last time, John Byrne had come over from Marvel to DC to create the Man of Steel. Marv Wolfman, the writer of Crisis on Infinite Earths , and an old colleague of Byrne's from their joint time on the Uncanny X-Men , convinced Byrne to do it based on conversations they had before Byrne made the switch where Superman woul...

I have had no time due to work and children to begin any articles yet, but I don't want to go too long without entries so..the good , the bad and the ugly of comics right now. (I can tell by the reaction on Boris' face, he's excited.) The last month and a half (from late April to about mid-June) has too many blockbuster movies for most geek budgets...I mean Avengers, Deadpool 2, Solo and another Jurassic Park movie all so close together? Come on, how much money do these people think we have? (Although, even in a role where she keeps her clothes on all the time, still awesome to see Emilia Clarke.) Judging by how under-expectations the box office take for Solo was, can we expect that movies may actually start going down in box office take? Speaking about money, after Amazing Spider-Man 800 and it's 57 cover variants, we are going to get yet another Amazing Spider-Man #1. And of course, after Action 1000, and a new Man of Steel , we are going to get yet anothe...

I picked up the following book last week as an impulse purchase (I don't know what attracted me to the cover.) What surprised me is that it is listed as Cover D. For a 15th issue in a series that, when reading the issue, didn't seem to have any large necessary impact on a killer story line (I found it better than average, but...) That's when I realized, although I am aware of just about a few issues really having a variant cover over the last couple of years (maybe five...ten), but the amount of variants  is almost becoming unwieldy. Back in the beginning days of comics, variants only happened by accident, either by a manufacturers defect (for example, double-stapled covers, missing inner pages, etc..), or a printer's error (number changes on issue, price changes.) There are very few examples of variants until just after the Second World War. At that point, Canada created true variants by limiting US cultural product importation (due to wartime import restrictions...