Comics I Regret Selling
|
Being an adult is weird. The older I get, the more I just feel like a bigger kid. I mean sure, I'm paying bills and making big decisions. But I'm also reading comic books, and I still look to the left and right before sneaking a chocolate chip cookie out of the pantry. Perhaps the biggest gap between my perceived and actual maturity levels comes in parenting. Today, I'm headed to a parent teacher conference. There will almost certainly be a moment where the teacher will tell me something very serious about my child, and I'll have to try REALLY hard not to just laugh at the stupidity of the moment. Do you find these types of moments in adulting to be as especially hard as I do? The other times adulting is hard are when I'm forced to let go of a comic in order to bolster my finances. It doesn't happen often, but I almost always regret it. Here's a list of my Top 5 biggest selling regrets. On The Podcast This week, I got to help shine a spotlight on the upcoming Resurgence of the Valiant Universe comic event. I interviewed Fred Van Lente and AJ Ampadu, two writers who have been instrumental in the most recent run of Valiant books that started in late 2023. Longtime Valiant fans will be happy to hear how much these new comics honor the history that has come before, and still use the continuity from the 2012 relaunch. More Reviews On The Way The last few months have felt like a big shift in the perceived legitimacy of Comics Are Dope. I'm working on articulating my thoughts better for next week's newsletter. But to put it simply, publishers seem to be picking up the proverbial phone when I call! Because of this, I have quite a few books I'll be reviewing in the upcoming weeks. A graphic adaptation of the James Lowen classic Lies My Teacher Told Me, Patrick Horvath's breakout Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees, the amazing Jimi Hendrix: Purple Haze OGN and a few upcoming Marvel trades as usual. I'm sort of struggling to determine the best avenue for these. Some will warrant standalone videos. Others could be given a loose theme and combined into list videos. Some I might only talk about in a blog post or social media spotlight. If you have a review format preference, please drop me a line and give some guidance. I'm all ears. Eyes. Whatever. I don't have a clever thought to end this e-mail with, so I guess I'll just sign off. Read Something Dope Today, BJ KICKS |
Comics Are Dope
Celebrating everything Dope about comics. Curated by BJ KICKS.
When you do something for a long time, you tend to get good at it. Especially if you focus on making small improvements each time, your 50th attempt at something should look WAY better than your first. But if you’re not careful, you can fall into complacency along the way. So your 300th attempt looks a lot like your 75th. “Done is better than perfect” becomes the mantra, especially when finances are involved. It’s really easy to use the law of diminishing returns to justify laziness. Trust...
I remember the first time I heard "Livin' on a Prayer." I was couch surfing the summer before my senior year of college with two close friends -- one of whom was a theater major (is it theater or theatre? anyways...) Before the fall semester started, my friend decided to invite all her theater homies over for a kickback to start the school year. That was my first 'white' party. As a black kid in the suburbs, you don't really see white people in their natural habitat. You get to play outside,...
This week, we crossed the 20,000 subscriber mark on the Comics Are Dope YouTube channel. As I said on Threads, I don't think I've met 20 thousand people over my lifetime. The idea of that many people clicking the subscribe button after seeing me talk about fictional heroes in capes and tights is crazy to me. While I think every YouTuber (including me) dreams at least a tiny bit about having one of those 100,000 subscriber plaques; every subscriber on this journey feels like a gift I couldn't...