Shipping Comic Books - SAVE

Greetings heroes,
As many of you readers know, after getting back into comic books, I started selling them. It’s really about the most awesome experience a fan can have: making money while enjoying the hobby you are passionate about!
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Anyway, there are some great tools-of-the-trade that I highly recommend to people who sell comics. For that matter, if you simply trade comic books, this is the best practice for shipping.

Other Blogs and Resources for Comic Book Geekery!

I post mostly about the fun stuff I find on Marvel Unlimited and quite a bit of that is based on building clickable link lists for all of the issues and tie-ins for crossover events and comic book series where the MU interface (unfortunately) does not contain the issues in proper order.

There are a ton of resources I use to find the right reading order for the big crossover stories since the trade paperbacks rarely include the tie-ins and Marvel’s own site is almost useless as a search tool. I’ve introduced readers to some of my favorite sites, which I’ll list next, but below that, I want to tell you about other blogs and websites that you might not know about. By the way, it is probably important to know that some of these sites aren’t actively updated, but that is ok since many of us are interested in older issues anyway.

Here are the sites I’ve talked about so far:

• Comic Book Herald - Dave Buesing’s excellent site contains fantastic posts about all things comic book and geekery fun! His recent post about Arrested Development is just one example of his brilliance. I link to his reading order guide on every blog page because it is the best!
• Comic Vine - owned by CBS interactive, don’t hold that against the site, as it is a great resource for comic books of all publishers. Check out the results of this search for Phoenix Force!
• Phil the Comic Guy - a cool blog with a guy who has a real interesting approach to his reviews: he tells you what he thinks, straight up. He’s also great at putting together excellent read order guides, such as this one or A vs X.
• Uncanny Xmen Net - the site for X-Men fans. It’s full of great links, descriptions of issues and so much more.

I’ve been reading some other blogs and sites lately:

• Siskoid’s Blog of Geekery - I discovered Siskoid thanks to this great What If… summary - What If Professor X Had Become the Juggernaut?
• Comic Book Resources has a very active forum - it’s a great place to see fanboys (and girls) arguing who has the bigger power (grin) and debating which artist ruined the look of their favorite hotties in the books.
• deviantART.com - great site for artists and fans; however, view with caution as a great deal of the art tends to be adult in nature, although that may just be because I follow those artists LOL. Check out x-men lovers, any of the cosplayers like psyfrostcosplay, or my favorite JamieFayX’s gallery.

Addition courtesy of a friend on Google Plus -> http://www.comics.org <-

Here's one of my favorite pieces by JamieFayX, Hope - The Mutant Messiah

What blogs and forums do you like?

 

Until next time,

Excelsior!!!

Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited - The Phoenix Saga - Part I of ??

Jean Grey is one of my all-time-favorite comic book characters. She was Marvel Girl in the original X-Men and had powers of telekinesis that allowed her to move things with her mind, create invisible barriers with that mental force and similar fairly simple demonstrations of a super power.

Much later in the comic series, we learned that Professor X had put a psychic block on her powers and that she was really far more powerful with the ability to read minds, push thoughts into minds, fly with her telekinesis and so many other cool things. This made her a useful host for the cosmic entity of life and death known as the Phoenix.

These are the issues that cover key parts of the first story of the rise and fall of the Phoenix. Great material if you want to go back in a time machine and learn all about one of the most enduring characters and themes in the Marvel Universe.

We’re going to stroll along memory lane in this first section, introducing Jean Grey and covering the last three issues before she became Phoenix.

1. The X-Men #1 - before the title was renamed “Uncanny X-Men,” this title started it all. First published September 10, 1963, it was co-created by artist Jack Kirby and writer Stan Lee, incidentally the creators of many of Marvel’s most famous icons. In issue #1, we meet the original team, Professor X and archenemy Magneto. Note for this issue and other comic books, my favorite online comic book shop is based in Ft Worth, Texas and they do a great job of packing and shipping quickly along with pricing fairly. At the time of this writing there is an auction item of X-Men #1 with flaws as low as $101. Click here for the a search of X-Men comic books - issue 1. By the way - Jean’s story starts on page 8 of this classic issue. Never mind the primitive (by today’s standards) art work. Remember, this was before society found it acceptable to draw every comic book female like a super vixen. If you want to see how Jean developed, here’s a great piece of Jean with Emma Frost (big thanks to the fanpop.com clubs “Femme Fatales Fan Art” group where I first spotted it and of course, the amazing artist JamieFayX at deviantART).
2. The All-New, All-Different X-Men #98 - this is the beginning of transformation of Jean Grey into the Marvel Universe’s most-pivotal character. Just a few issues after the formation of the All-New, All-Different X-Men featuring Colossus, Nightcrawler, Storm, Thunderbird, Banshee, Sunfire and of course future break-out character Wolverine, this story brings us a return of the Sentinels. These mutant hunting robots are ready for action and all about ruining Christmas for the X-Men.
3. The All-New, All-Different X-Men #99 - the anti-mutant hysteria moves to space as the Sentinels go hard after the team.
4. X-Men #100 - the issue before Marvel Girl’s big change!

1. The All-New, All-Different X-Men #101 - this is it. Enter: The Phoenix! Jean Grey saves everybody in this exciting issue where she debuts as The Phoenix in that sexy green costume.
2. The All-New, All-Different X-Men #108 - there are plenty of great stories in between 101 and 108, but 108 brings back the Shi'ar Empire introduced in issue #97 and we discover the limitless powers of The Phoenix.

A word about the titles used for the comic books in the links: Marvel calls the titles by the last name they had before the numbering restarted or ended. I’m using the titles found on the cover of the books, although it could be said that these All-New… issues are simply titled “X-Men.” Check out the collected editions of books at Amazon.

There’s so much more in the Phoenix Saga. Many trade paperbacks, many issues to come, but this gets you to where Marvel Girl first becomes the Phoenix and should leave you a real taste for what’s to come.

Until next time,

Excelsior!!!

What SUCKS about Marvel Comics Unlimited

Dear readers,

There are some drawbacks to the MDCU platform at this point. It reminds me quite a bit of HBOGO and Amazon Prime videos when they came online. First, you can’t “subscribe” to a comic book series. You can add individual comics to your “library” and you can even have up to six comic books offline if you are using an iOS device, but this is not something that is really helpful.

Surely there needs to be a better way to organize comic books in libraries for users of the service. Marvel doesn’t want to discourage people from buying paper comics (or digital ones) monthly, so they delay digitizing of new issues. That makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is how sometimes a single issue will be missing from a long line of old issues. I noticed some in Uncanny X-Men that were missing, so you lose parts of story arcs. That sucks.

Another big drawback is one of the reasons for this blog: searching for comic books sucks. The web-based interface is better than the iOS app, but it’s still a real bitch to use.

As you can see, searching for “uncanny x-men 266” gives you a lot of results. Luckily for this particular search, the first one is the correct link. If you click it, you’ll get the following screen.

With many other searches, the results aren’t quite as useful. When searching for age of apocalypse, you get this:

As you can see, it’s not exactly easy to find the comic book issues you want to read. The only way to improve the search is to click the Comics option under the By Category heading on the left.

Although you will still have trade paperbacks and other content (like variant cover editions) that are not available on the online service.

Marvel - please consider adding a U symbol to the listings as shown below where the link contains any MDCU content.

Until next time,

Excelsior!!!

Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited - The Reading List Blog!

Dear readers,

Marvel Comics Unlimited is really a cool feature for people into comic books, whether you were a fan in the 80s as a kid (like me) or a more recent fan, this service allows you to read comic books from the silver age on through to recent books from as recently as 2012.

There are some gaps in issues, sometimes the sequence is out of order (especially on mini series) so you’ll click next and see two issues out and think the next issue is missing, only to discover that clicking next again gets you that missing issue.

The service is available on iOS and looks great on the iPad and iPad mini -- but you might be surprised to learn that the iPhone is great thanks to the “smart panels” feature of the app. This link will open iTunes to the Marvel Unlimited app that is designed for both iPhone and iPad.

Android fans need not worry, Marvel loves you too and they offer access via your web browser too, with an app coming to Google play soon. I love the browsing experience on Chrome and use Chrome on my 27” iMac for most of my reading.

There are some downsides to the service, and I’ll cover those in another blog post, but first, let me explain the purpose of this blog. There are tons of great reading lists that help you navigate the complex order required to follow along on major crossover events in the Marvel Universe, like House of M, for example. This blog will feature posts that list the individual issues for crossovers, notable major stories in the Marvel canon like the Death of The Phoenix, the first appearance of Gambit and more, all with hyperlinks to the Marvel Unlimited browser-based version of the comic book.




Speaking of Gambit, nerd friends, did you see this? AND yes, I know the actual first appearance of Gambit was a cameo in X-Men Annual #14, which unfortunately is not on the new digital service yet.
So, welcome to my blog, your comments and suggestions for issues and events to highlight are welcome!

Excelsior!!!