"Post No. 533"

As promised for today, here's a special little "Pop Quiz" for all of you comic book "authorities" out there.

Above pictured are two comics published by different independent companies in the early 1990's.

The book on the left is from 1993 by Caliber: The Realm #4.

The book on the right is from 1994 by Millenium: H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu #3.

What relevance do these two comics, published 14-15 years ago, hold for the collector today?

(First one to answer correctly gets my admiration and a E'sJ's "No Prize", and if you don't want to just make a wild guess and redicule yourself yourself in print in front of your fellow readers you can always email me your answer to: dpuck@scrtc.com, where, if you're wrong, I'LL redicule you myself! *heh!*)

And getting right along to other stuff...

I couldn't figure out why I couldn't find a listing for that Power Records Batman I got yesterday in The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, until a friend told me to look under the Promotional Comics section. Now...correct me here if I'm wrong. I mean, maybe I'm not quite sure of the terminology, but I just don't consider that book as a promotional comic. It's something one bought off a rack and paid full cover price for, and neither a freebie comic, OR one that you had to send in a coupon to obtain. In fact, the only way I could see that being a "promotional" is if the comic came free WITH the enclosed 45 R.P.M. record? Personally I think that Overstreet simply didn't know "where" to put those Power Comic Books & Record Sets and took the easy-way-out by listing it as such. But I'm sure that for every title Power Records produced, there was a comic book title of some sorts to match it and correctly it should have been under that particular title. Geez, in Batman alone there's probably over 100 different additions to the regular series!

Finally read a few issues of Marvel's The Ultimate Fantastic Four all of which were written by either Warren Ellis or Brian Michael Bendis ...so you know that I liked them! A bit too late for me to get into that boat unless I break down and buy issues collected in TPBs (which actually I do have the first two volumes of Spider-man and the first X-men as such). It amazed me that Bendis and Bagley did a whoppin' 110 issues together on the Ul.SP-Man! Geez! What a run!

In that last lot of modern stuff there's a couple of issues of the 2004 Marvel She-Hulk series as well, which I've yet to read but must admit that I admire the covers. Cover artwork has become much more attractive on comic books in the past 10 years or so, don't you think? Or maybe it's just because they finally moved away from the work of so many artists that seemed to have an Image house style, which is something that bored me a lot.

And, finally...

There's a clue to the above "Pop Quiz" hidden here, in this post.