Comics: Remembering the Defenders, pt. 2

I think my favorite Defenders are (in no particular order): Hellcat, Nighthawk, Valkyrie and Gargoyle. I'm not sure why, but it seemed like Patsy and Kyle (that's Hellcat and Nighthawk) really seemed to want to be there. Neither of them were really doing much else at the time and hanging out with other superheroes just seemed to be a natural activity for them. Kind of the way firefighters hang out -- even if they're from different stations might gravitate toward each other because they have a shared language and background.

Nighthawk was, for a time, the glue that held the team together. He had the money and provided the resources that the team needed to hang out, including a place for Valkyrie to keep her flying horse, Aragorn. The Richmond Riding Academy even served as their hang-out for a while, giving them one of the more unusual bases of the various Marvel super teams (mansions and sky-scrapers were the usual fare for the extremely urbane heroes of NYC.

Collectorz.com Update I pulled my Defenders comics out of their longbox for this article so that I could do a quick review of what I had and was very pleased at how quickly I was able to enter the comics into the Comic Collector database. I have a run of 109 issues, from Defenders #44 - 152. I also have 18 of the previous issues, including small runs here and there with a lot of covers missing on those very early issues. I also have Defenders #1 & #2. I picked those up a few years back when a comic book store went out of business. I don't remember what I paid for them, but I do know it was well under the price stickers on the two books, $45 and $13, respectively. I'd be surprised if I pad more than $15 for the pair of them. So, all in all, I have 127 of the Defenders comics and I was able to enter them into the system in about 10 minutes. Most of that time was spent double checking issue numbers and be very precise on which issues were missing (as I told you before in a previous post, I'm a notorious double and triple bagger -- I will put multiple comics in a single bag, so sometimes I had to open the bag to be sure of what's in it). Doing the math, that means I've 83% of this series. Not bad. Now that I know what issues I'm missing, maybe I can hit a sale and fill them in.

My first letter printed in a comic book was probably Defenders #79, Jan 1980. Not a great letter, but it was my first. I was pretty inspired to write because the change in writing which brought in a controversial change that brought back the Foolkiller as a character. I was very pleased with myself and I took it to school to show some buddies; the school newspaper even did a short story on it. It was pretty cool. Of course, the comic got beat up by being handled by other people, so I had to go out and buy another copy. This may have been the first time I've bought multiple copies of a comic that my letter appeared in, but it wasn't the last. All in all, I believe I've had letters appear in seven different comics.

Remind me to tell you about them sometime!

This issue was written by Ed Hannigan and I really enjoyed what he did with the series (ignore my rantings in the letter -- his work grew on me). I particularly enjoyed his Tunnelworld stories. This was a magic dimension on the inside of a giant... well, cigar-shaped hollow rock. It was long, tapered at the ends, and the entire world existed inside it, sort of like a ring world or Dyson Sphere, but shaped like a tunnel. I was really into all things Tolkien at that time, so this was a neat treat. It had mystic creatures like the Sputs (kind of a cross between dwarfs and halflings). I'm going to go back and reread those issues because I really enjoyed the mixture of superheroes in such a strongly defined fantasy setting.

The Not-Quiet-Sorceress Supreme
Doctor Strange wasn't always available to work with the Defenders, so oftentimes his girlfriend/disciple Clea would fill in and provide the mystic power the team needed. In that she wasn't nearly as powerful as Stephen, she wasn't there to be the deus ex machina that the Sorcerer Supreme could be. I recall that she traveled to Tunnelworld with Nighthawk, Valkyrie and Hellcat (and possibly some other heroes -- it has been a few decades since I last read this stuff).

Click here to read a cool
article about Tunnelworld.

Two things I remember from this storyline (if not exactly the issue listed above), and those would be that because the world was in a tunnel (it's a magical dimension, so you can quit worrying about applying your Mythbuster skills to its ecology) so that it was possible to fly straight up and, eventually, hit a zero gravity point gravity on all sides of you equalized and you could float in the middle of the world.

I also remember the words to Clea's translation spell that she cast so that they and the Sputs could understand each other. I have no idea why this bit of poetry stuck in my mind, but I did whip it out once or twice in a game of Dungeons & Dragons and impressed the GM!

Here's how I remember it:

Big folk, small folk and folk in between
All have a way to tell what they've seen.
By the powers that beckon
By the powers that reach
Let each folk here understand 
the other one's speech!

When I pull these issues to reread them, I'll check the actual text against my memory and we'll see how close I am.

More on the Defenders next week.

Comics Movie: The Avengers are coming!

I'm about to enter a state of Nerdvana. The Avengers movie is coming out on Friday and I must admit that I'm SUPER hyped about it. It's been a while since I've been this excited about a superhero movie. The last must-see movies for me were The Hunger Games, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, pt. 2, and even Twilight: Breaking Dawn pt. 1. Okay, sue me for liking movies based on good kid lit. Okay, maybe Twilight isn't all that "good," but it did make me want to see what happens next, which is frankly a lesson "mature" fiction would do well to learn.

As for must-see Superhero Movies, the last one I got excited about was Captain America. And I'm pleased to say that one paid off -- I loved it. I have high hopes for this movie, too. Watching the movie trailers on TV has found me pausing them to answer questions from my wife about who the heroes are. There's a decent chance she'll go see the movie with me the second time I go (I'm going Friday afternoon and she can't take off work, so we'll go together next week).

And it also got me thinking about my favorite Avengers comics and stories.

Avengers: Essential and Otherwise
I have no idea what my earliest Avengers comic might be; I have not yet cataloged those comics. I have entered 7 into the system, and the earliest of those is Avengers #51 from April 1968. I also have #55 and #56. These are all that I've entered so far... I'm pretty sure I've got another 3-5 years worth waiting to be entered into the database.

For me, these are the "classic" Avengers, back when the whole Marvel continuity seemed fresh and exciting (also, I should mention that I read these several years after they were published -- I was less than five years old when these issues came out).  I really didn't get into the Avengers until the latter part of the 1970s and then the 1980s.

These issues featured the Avengers at their bickering best: arguing with each other while saving the world from aliens, monsters, and more super-villains than you can shake a stick at (not that I think that would be an effective strategy, unless of course the stick was Daredevil's billy club). This material came out in the dark days before the Internet or massive omnibus reprints like the super-cool Marvel "Essential" series. In those dark days you had to find comics at used book stores (if you were lucky), or have a friend who had them (I didn't) or just ignore what you were missing and just move on as the story continued.

Fortunately, those days are gone and most of this classic material has been reprinted in b&w phone book sized collections of about 500 pages. I have Essential Avengers 1 and 2, which is to say I've got about 1,000 pages of reprinted material from the classic early era of the Avengers. I will probably hunt down vol. 2 so I can fill in the gaps from the early days where the team first came together to fight Loki and to where Hank Pym donned the rather snappy costume of Yellowjacket (that dude to the right).

I think the storyline I remember most is the Wundagore Mountain in which the Scarlet Witch searched for the identity of her parents. That storyline blew my mind because it tied into so many cool things that I really didn't know very much about at that time:

• Wundagore Mountain and its ties to the Darkhold
• The High Evolutionary (all I knew of him was that he was somehow involved in the origin of Jessica Drew, the Spider-Woman)
• The Whizzer was Wanda and Pietro's father (I knew him from his appearances in the Liberty Legion) ?
• The evil Cthon (which I later equated to Cthulhu -- how cool is that?)

All in all, the "Yesterday Quest" was incredible reading back in July 1979. For me, this whole era (which some people hate because the line-up was changed by government command to only seven members, including the Falcon, who just had no business in the team back then). I liked it. It was exciting and really showed how the series was tied into the very foundations of the Marvel universe.

Of course, all good things come to an end. Eventually I moved on from the Avengers, although I did pick up an issue to read every now and then. Frankly, I'm glad I wasn't there for "Avengers: Disassembled" or the later "House of M" stuff. To me, those "mega-events" really did more harm than good. They made the comics too twisted and confusing to follow for all but the most die-hard uber-fanboy. And that just ain't me. I prefer my comics a little simper, like they were in the 70s and 80s. Of course, that's just the bitter mumblings of an old guy who thinks comics were better when he was a kid.  

How predictable of me.

But you know what? Just as youth has its prerogatives, so does age: We each get to gripe about how the other just doesn't understand. Of course, we also get to enjoy the new stuff, like the super-coll AVENGERS MOVIE coming out on Friday! Way back in my comic reading days of 1979, there is no way I could have imagined a live-action movie based on Earth's Mightiest Heroes, and no way I could have imagined that film making technology could actually bring the comic page to life. 

And that is TOTALLY COOL.

See ya here for Netflix Friday and a visit from the Avengers!

Comics Software Review: Choosing Collectorz.com, pt. 5

One of the joys of cataloging my comics is finding things I had forgotten -- or that I didn't even know I had. There is a difference, you know. The former happens when you open a box of comics (in this case marked, "OLD" on the front) and finding those extra copies of Karate Kid that you had wondered why they weren't with the rest of the series in the "K" box.

The latter is when you find something that you're not 100% you've ever seen before, such as Dagar The Invincible #14. This was an interesting little title that I had probably picked up as part of a collection. Looking through it now, I don't think I've ever read this story before, which is actually pretty good. Writer Don Glut and artist Jesse Santos did a capable job with this sword and sorcery tale. It reminds me of something that would have been put out by DC Comics during their DC Explosion years. Thanks to Collectorz.com, I can now look that up in my Barbarians box (that is to say, I have stored the location under the "Personal" fields listed in the software).

The "bad" part of cataloging comics is that it can take a lot of time. Tonight, for example, I manually entered 25 comics (mostly old Marvel Western comics from the 1970s that I inherited from my little sister, Lori). These are a lot of cool Kid Colt, Rawhide Kid, Ringo Kid and other classic titles that she bought in the mid 1970s when we were living in El Paso, Texas. At the time I preferred superhero comics, so although I read these, I didn't really "dig" them, to use the lingo of that time.

Click to see full-size image.

Now, of course, I really like them a lot and I'm very happy to have them in my collection. I also think it's cool to see her handwriting from waaaaay back when. Hmmm. I'm thinking she would have been in third or fourth grade at the time (this is from 1974, so she would have been about 8 years old at the time). Someone else do the math -- I'm just not sure what grade she was in. But whatever grade it was, she wrote her name in most of her comics, which probably meant she took them to school with her.

But I digress.

It took me about 30 minutes to enter 25 comics. Part of that time was spent tracking down an errant cover to a Lone Ranger comic. The other part was updating some of the cover price info on the Kid Colt comics. But still, even if that's one minute a comic (an average created from me having to fix things and submit corrections -- most of the titles were entered in less than 10 seconds), that could definitely add up over the course of entering another 7,500 comics (which is about how many I have left to go).

One way to theoretically speed things up would be to use a barcode scanner. Barcodes were added to comic book covers in the late 1970s. If memory serves me right, this happened in 1976. But I could be wrong, and a 2-minute google search didn't yield the results I wanted. Before then, comics were not cluttered up by the UPC barcode (like the cover to the might Marvel Western comic that my sister signed above).

Collectorz.com realizes that barcodes can be a useful way to enter titles, so they have a cool app called CLZ Barry to help you zap your books and have them show up instantly in the Comic Collector software.

At least that's the theory.

Using CLZ Barry
I don't like this software very much. As much as I love the rest of Comic Collector, I think this add-on feels buggy. It just doesn't feel finished. I'm actually a fan of minimalist software, but this crosses the line from minimalist to just flat-out incomplete.  I'll explain.

The software comes in two parts:

1. An app for your smart phone (I have a Droid Razr, but I also used it on a Motorola Droid)
2. An application for your computer

Here's the screenshot of the desktop application:

That's it, folks. There's nothing else. Just a connection screen. There's not even a link to the help file: You have to go to your Start Menu to find that. To me, that's just not how you make professional-grade software. I don't dig it, folks.

The smartphone app is worse. There's no documentation at all, and this is really important because the icons are very important, and I have to go back to the Website to look up what they mean. These should be documented right in the software and the smartphone.  By the way, here's what they mean:

Click on pic to read at full size

Using CLZ Barry

Once you have the software running on your PC or Mac (in my PC it is visible in the system tray next to the clock) and on your smart phone, it's time to get scanning. For this test, I chose the aforementioned issues of Karate Kid. I thought these would be a good test because they are DC comics, fairly mainstream, but also a little bit old. I thought this might be a good test of both the software and the database.

I activated the software on both PC and phone and then followed the instructions by opening the Comic Collector software and putting the cursor in a text field on the "Add Comics Automatically" pane with the "Search by Barcode Tab."

Click on pic to read at full size

When you hold the camera phone over the barcode it vibrates to let you know that it had taken the picture. Meanwhile, back on your desktop, the barcode numbers appear in the search box and... yield no results. Not one of the Karate Kid comics were in the database. Neither were three other DC comics and a Marvel that I grabbed. I scanned Action Comics #460 and got results... wrong ones. It offered several choices as being possible, but they were all wrong.

I then tested it with a handful of Archie comics that came out in the past year, and all of them were in the database (including a Jughead Double Digest). This gives me meager hope that this software will be useful for quickly entering comics that were released in this century. But, of course, since 90% of my collection is from before 2000, this could prove to be small comfort.

So, even though the software works in the physical context, the truth is that the database doesn't have the barcode info for the really old comics. Plus, entering single comics with this scanner is just so darned tedious. It's much faster to just enter them manually by selecting a series and then clicking on the issues you have.

But all that aside, I just hate using the smartphone app. I think the most annoying feature is that it scans for you the second that you put it over a barcode. I would much rather hit a button to click the photo myself. This would make it more intuitive and easier to use. At least for me, that is. But I think the real problem is that it just doesn't take into account the fact that different people enjoy using software in different ways. Having the option to be manual or automatic would be a great boon. As would having the meaning of the icons explained in the software itself. 

In short, even though the software works, it feels half-baked and not quite ready for prime time.

See you for Wednesday as I wrap up my review for Comic Collector with a final look at scanning multiple comics at once and my final thoughts on this great program.