The Long Road

06/29/2003 Archived Entry: "Sex, Money, and Videotapes"

Saw HULK for the second time. Compared to the first viewing the desert fight was just as cool, the ending was a little less surreal, Jennifer Connelly was as beautiful (though she started to look like Amy Jo Johnson (the original Pink Power Ranger, accept no substitutes!)), and the Hulk was just as realistic.

Speaking of HULK, Marvel Comics recently published Marvel Encyclopedia: The Incredible Hulk. The book, oddly, deals with The Hulk as a cultural icon. It looks, in detail, at the new Hulk movie, the old Lou Ferrigno TV series, animated series, and Hulk memorabilia while giving a very cursory look at the actual Hulk comic book. The comic book section deals mostly with the current writer’s stories and shines a pretty negative light on past writers, including Peter David’s illustrious 11 year run as the writer of the comic.

Meanwhile, Universal’s site for the Hulk Movie has a pretty thorough rundown of all the events of the Hulk’s life in the comic book series. I find it interesting that Marvel’s “encyclopedia” is almost self-deprecating towards its own comics while the more “mainstream” Universal site embraces the comic book origins of the character.

Speaking of comics (see how well this whole entry is flowing?), I was putting away the pseudo-random piles (I’m one of those “organized-messes” kind of people) of comics on my closet floor today and came across two things. First, as I put away my recently acquired Black Widow mini-series I saw that I already owned it. So I’ve bought and read that story twice now without noticing. I must be getting old; this has never happened before. Second, I got curious as to the price of some of the comics I was looking at. I haven’t cared about comic book value since I started working at Bay Used Books (a book store that also sold comics) because I realized the futility of such things. Anyways, I had been buying Amazing Spider-Man for a friend ever since J. Michael Straczynski (the friend is a big fan of Straczynski, creator of the excellent Babylon 5) started writing it. I was aware that his run was pretty popular and that the books were worth SOMETHING. So I looked up the “value” of Amazing Spider-Man 32-36 (which were just lying randomly in my closet) on the Internet and found them to be worth 110$ U.S. collectively. WHOA. The first two Straczynski issues of Amazing Spider-Man that I did hand to him are now, together, worth 60$ U.S.

A few questions then: do I just hand the guy the rest of the comics at cover price like I was supposed to months ago or do I just keep them and pretend like I never bought them? And is he reading this?

Replies: 5 comments

It's always fun looking through old comics and finding ones you forgot you had!

Posted by Romer @ 06/29/2003 02:01 PM EST

It is...except when you realize you own two copies of the same thing!

Posted by Rayne @ 06/29/2003 11:17 PM EST

there was a huge lack of sex in that "Sex, Money, and Videotapes" post!

Posted by Étienne @ 07/02/2003 12:11 PM EST

Ya, I figured if the title was just "comics", people would just skip it entirely anyways. =)

Posted by Rayne @ 07/02/2003 04:46 PM EST

back in my comic buying days, before in moved to renfrew, before 90% of the people i know now knew me, ... um... was i going somewhere with this?

i had a friend then, and i still see him occaisionally. he really like the punisher comics. i think the fascination was that they #^*@ed out the words like @&%$, ^%$#, #&*^%, and @$%. heh heh. i now find it funny that they did that.

also, my friend and i got our comics at this store in town which sold previous comics. like, not only the most recent ones, but older ones too. in plastics bags. i bought a couple $7 comics, cause i knew my friend would want them. ah, the petty nature of children :)

Posted by shawnathan @ 07/03/2003 03:04 PM EST