Comics Shop

ESSENTIAL COMICS VALUES ALL IN COLOR! COMICS SHOP is the reliable reference for collectors, dealers, and everyone passionate about comic books! THIS FULL-COLOR, INDISPENSABLE GUIDE FEATURES: • Alphabetical organization by comic book title • More than 3,000 color photos • Hundreds of introductory essays • Analysis of multi-million dollar comics' sales • How covers and splash pages have evolved • An exclusive photo to grading guide to help you determine your comics' conditions accurately • Current values for more than 150,000 comics From the authoritative staff at Comics Buyer's Guide, the world's longest running magazine about comics, Comics Shop is the only guide on the market to give you extensive coverage of more than 150,000 comics from the Golden Age of the 1930s to current releases and all in color! In addition to the thousands of comic books from such publishers as Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, and Image, this collector-friendly reference includes listings for comic books from independent publishers, underground publishers, and more!

Award-winning business journalist Dan Gearino leads a tour through the world of comic shops, telling the story of the direct market from its 1970s origins to today. Includes profiles of forty notable shops in the U.S. and Canada, and a close look at The Laughing Ogre in Columbus.

At the Mountains of Madness is a story, which details the events of a disastrous expedition to the Antarctic continent in September 1930 and what was found there by a group of explorers led by the narrator, Dr. William Dyer of Miskatonic University. Throughout the story, Dyer details a series of previously untold events in the hope of deterring another group of explorers who wish to return to the continent. The title is derived from a line in "The Hashish Man," a short story by fantasy writer Edward Plunkett, Lord Dunsany: "And we came at last to those ivory hills that are named the Mountains of Madness..." Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. He is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors in his genre. Some of Lovecraft's work was inspired by his own nightmares. His interest started from his childhood days when his grandfather would tell him Gothic horror stories.

The modern comic book shop was born in the early 1970s. Its rise was due in large part to Phil Seuling, the entrepreneur whose direct market model allowed shops to get comics straight from the publishers. Stores could then better customize their offerings and independent publishers could access national distribution. Shops opened up a space for quirky ideas to gain an audience and helped transform small-press series, from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Bone, into media giants. Comic Shop is the first book to trace the history of these cultural icons. Dan Gearino brings us from their origins to the present-day, when the rise of digital platforms and a changing retail landscape have the industry at a crossroads. When the book was first published in 2017, Gearino had spent a year with stores around the country, following how they navigated the business. For this updated and expanded paperback edition, he covers the wild retail landscape of 2017 and 2018, a time that was brutal for stores and rich for comics as an art form. Along the way he interviews pioneers of comics retailing and other important players, including many women; top creators; and those who continue to push the business in new directions. A revised guide to dozens of the most interesting shops around the United States and Canada is a bonus for fans.

Comic Agilé depicts the magical, depressing, funny and potentially educational moments that occur when agility meets reality. Through the form of short comic strips, Comic Agilé brings to a head the challenges, misunderstandings and ill-intentioned behavior that makes it so difficult to put the agile mindset into practice. Besides its tragicomic storytelling, the agile comic describes how to avoid, manage or improve the illustrated situations, so the readers are left with a burning desire to go back to their context and improve their agile practices. For the sake of humanity.

Since Kate Beaton appeared on the comics scene in 2007 her cartoons have become fan favourites and gathered an enormous following, appearing in the New Yorker, Harper and the LA Times, to name but a few. Her website, Hark! A Vagrant, receives an average of 1.2 million hits a month, 500 thousand of them unique. Why? Because she's not just making silly jokes. She's making jokes about everything we learned in school, and more. Praised for their expression, intelligence and comic timing, her cartoons are best known for their wonderfully light touch on historical and literary topics. The jokes are a knowing look at history through a very modern perspective, written for every reader, and are a crusade against anyone with the idea that history is boring. It's pretty hard to argue with that when you're laughing your head off at a comic about Thucydides. They also cover whatever's on her mind that week - be it the perils of city living or the pop-cultural infiltration of Sex and the City, featuring an array of characters, from a mischievous pony, to reinvented superheroes, to a surly teen duo who could be the anti-Hardy-Boys. Perceptive, sharp and wonderfully irreverent, Hark! A Vagrant is as informative as it is hilarious, and a comic collection to treasure.

A comprehensive introduction to the comic arts From the introduction by Paul Levitz "If ever there was a medium characterized by its unexamined self-expression, it's comics. For decades after the medium's birth, it was free of organized critical analysis, its creators generally disinclined to self-analysis or formal documentation. The average reader didn't know who created the comics, how or why . . . and except for a uniquely destructive period during America's witch-hunting of the 1950s, didn't seem to care. As the medium has matured, however, and the creativity of comics began to touch the mainstream of popular culture in many ways, curiosity followed, leading to journalism and eventually, scholarship, and so here we are." The Power of Comics is the first introductory textbook for comic art studies courses. Lending a broader understanding of the medium and its communication potential, it provides students with a coherent and comprehensive explanation of comic books and graphic novels, including coverage of their history and their communication techniques, research into their meanings and effects and an overview of industry practices and fan culture. Co-authors randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith draw on their own years of experience teaching comics studies courses and the scholarly literature across several disciplines to create a text with the following features: Discussion questions for each chapter Activities to engage readers Recommended reading suggestions Over 150 illustrations Bibliography Glossary The Power of Comics deals exclusively with comic books and graphic novels. One reason for this focus is that no one text can hope to do justice to both strips and books; there is simply too much to cover. Preference is given to comic books because in their longer form, the graphic novel, they have the greatest potential for depth and complexity of expression. As comic strips shrink in size and become more inane in content, comic books are becoming a serious art form.

A history of the comic book, in which a noted cartoonist demonstrates the aesthetics and power of the medium