Depending on who you are and where you live, this comic either comes out today or next Wednesday.  I was lucky enough to have a copy sent to me by Fred Van Lente, so I’m not sure which area I live in.  Having never read a previous edition, I wasn’t sure what laid ahead for me.

 

You wont know either unless you click the link to read the rest of the review!

Here’s what you have to do if you are a true comic book fan.  Buy the following: Comics and Sequential Art by Will Eisner, Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud and right next to that should be your complete run of Comic Book Comics.  It is that good, and that valuable to the exploration of comics.

There are three stories in this issue which couldn’t be any more different and yet everything flows together while you’re reading.  The three stories are: the origin of graphic novels, Osamu Tezuka, and a history of the direct market.  While I was familiar with some of the information within, the vast majority of the comic is brand new mind blowing information.

“It Rhymes with Traffic Hovel” is an exploration of where the graphic novel came from.  While Will Eisner is given the credit, and Understanding Comics expanded the term to cover stories going back thousands of years, that’s still only scratching the surface.  How many of you out there have ever heard of Switzerland’s Rodolphe Topffer?  How many of you can even spell that name?  (I’m not even sure I did.)  He wrote and drew his work for his friends amusement and then it became so popular that it was published in a New York newspaper, making it arguably the first published comic (add strip or book to the end at your discretion).  From here to woodcuts to Classics Illustrated to “picture novels”.  Its an amazing history of the medium we now know and love as comics.  I wont go through every panel and fact in the book.  That’s why you should go buy the book and find out all this information for yourself.  But the book doesn’t end there.

Creator of Astro Boy, and the “God of Comics”, the Osamu Tezuka biography shows the potential for comics better than any of the dozens of big budget comic movies have done.  As someone who worked at Borders for years, I debated with co-workers on the rise of manga.  Why don’t the popular American movies and TV (Justice League, Heroes, Dark Knight, Marvel movies, etc.) lead to increased American comic book sales?  Wizard and Spider-Man sit on the rack and get bent then sent back unsold, while Shonen Jump sells out the first day.  Well, for all of you who had the same questions, read this issue and understand.  My parents will never read a comic, most of my co-workers wouldn’t even know how to look at one.  Yet, a world away its as common as listening to an iPod.

Finally, a look at the history of the direct market.  I started reading and collecting comics shortly after the black and white boom/bust.  However, I was hip deep in the speculator craze of the 90s.  There is no reason I should have bought 5 copies of WildCATs number one the day it came out (nor should I now have 10 copies, as I have bought out friends’ collections over the years).  The direct market is a great thing.  I love that I can go into a (good) comic book store and have a whole world in front of me, new and unfamiliar.  Need that missing issue of New Warriors or the Defenders?  Got it.  Need a brand new issue that just came out today?  Here’s Comic Book Comics #6, enjoy.  Turn a corner and discover a whole new series, or artist, or writer that you never heard of before from the past 70 years.  Two booms and busts and I’ll predict a third within 20 years, maybe even 10.  (When the vultures realize that comic sales are in the tens of thousands now, they will be marked up as “rare” and “valuable”.)

Highest recommendation that you should buy Comic Book Comics.  Immerse yourself in the world of comics.  From this issue alone, I want to buy the rest of the series so I can educate myself.  I want to find an Osamu biography, and read his series.  I just want more, and I want to spend good money on it.

If you dare say you love comics, and you don’t own this title, than you are a liar.