Aw, man, I haven't blogged all the comics from the last comicon.

Last Saturday's Lilac City Comicon was a bit of a rough one for me, since it started with me locking myself out of my house! I haven't done that in years: I had a knife in my pocket, not my keys. But, I was able to pop a screen off, move some convenient cinder blocks from the Direct TV dish that's been in the front yard forever, and clamber through a window. It wasn't graceful, but it was alarmingly easy...

Unfortunately, I did get mildly soaked while going through the high grass by the side of my house; then soaked again while in line, then soaked again while in line again to get back in after I had to take a load of comics out to my car! I was wearing an old pair of shoes, since I changed after soaking the first pair at home; but between them and the floor of the convention center my legs were destroyed by the time I ran through my limit. (Same thing happens if I stay in Costco too long!) 

After all that, it was a pretty good pile of comics. I didn't take pictures like last year, since that was kind of a pain to do, but because I started sorting a bit right away. There were a few purchases that I was pretty sure were going to be duplicates; but sometimes it's worth just having a book in-hand; and I've been vaguely considering maybe opening up my own shop after I retire from my current job. That may or may not ever get close to happening, but it is an excuse to buy stuff: I'm just building up inventory, right? For a store that would be entirely my taste: I'd love it, sure, but I tend to doubt that would translate into folding-money sales. (I do have a back-up plan to that, involving t-shirt sales, that I don't want to go into since I actually think it could be a good idea! Most good comic shops do have more than one revenue stream, like cards and such.) 

The last several weeks, I swear I've picked up a big stack of comics every weekend. There was a ton from EntertainMart, a vein of Conans from Merlyn's, a load of Astro City from Monkey Biz, a batch of recent-ish books from my main store, the Comic Book Shop. My pull list is at the CBS, but they know I go where the cheap books are. I did feel a twinge of embarrassment when I asked Monkey Biz for a comicon ticket, but they were sold out, so they called the Comic Book Shop to see if they had any: that's very thoughtful, but it was like my side girl calling my main squeeze...

So, no shortage of stuff to read and blog. The main challenge is spacing them out: this is Random Happenstance, right; not "I just found 40 issues of the Shadow, that's two months sorted." Or Conan, or Jonah Hex, or 2000 AD stuff. I'm also not doing a whole week on (Marvel's) Solo either, although I'm good and stocked up on today's book, which had more variants than issues, and nobody had bothered to upload the cover for this issue! Ugh, I have to do everything around here. From 2017, Solo #5, written by Geoffrey Thorne and Gerry Duggan, art by Paco Diaz.

I hadn't read his 1994 limited, but this one goes a ways attempting to add a little depth to the "one man war on terror." While he had lost someone that set him off on his crusade, Solo also did merc work to pay the bills, and had an ex he was still in touch with, and a baby daughter with her. Dum Dum Dugan pulls Solo's name out of the Red File--washouts from S.H.I.E.L.D, and imminently disposable--and tasks him with pulling out an agent that had infiltrated the Zoo Crew. The Zoo Crew wasn't a crappy morning show, but gunrunners moving alien weapons: the agent hadn't moved, or taken out the crew, since he had a line on where the weapons were coming from, but dies before Solo uses image inducers to pull a Yojimbo to set the Crew against itself. (Or a Fistful of Dollars, or as the book mentions, Last Man Standing.)

Based on a text the gang's leader received, Solo sets S.H.I.E.L.D. on Egghead; but the texter may have meant a figurative Egghead rather than a literal one. Disguised as the Zoo Crew's leader, Solo has to explain to three angry, armored suppliers why the rest of the Crew was apparently dead? Labor dispute? Solo spins that as a positive: keep the circle close, less mouths to feed, more opportunity for them, right? And his pitch finds ears: the lead supplier teleports him to his base, abandoned space station Geocore. The supplier had been head scientist until budget cuts shut it down, but his codes were left active, so he went back up and kept it going. He also reached out to make friends in space, and did! Yondu, and the Ravagers.

Yondu had been helping the supplier "build a nest egg," to get off earth before it was inevitably conquered by somebody; but also can see through Solo's image inducer: his eyes were better than "you monkeys." But Solo had left a line open to S.H.I.E.L.D, who were hitting the suppliers' other locations. Yondu had actually been planning on taking over earth himself: stir up trouble, destabilize everything, then move on in. Repeatedly threatening to eat his face, he chases Solo around the station, while Solo realizes S.H.I.E.L.D. is going to blow it up, with him on it or not! Dum Dum is not unsympathetic, but "we all gotta find our own way in this life." Still, Solo might not be out yet...

Somehow, from different boxes, I've ended up with three copies of #5, which, honestly? Could be a fair chunk of the print run! I have another fifth issue of another limited series of another of Deadpool's Mercs of Money that I'm surprised I have any of: you could probably pull the first three issues of it or Solo easily from any quarter bin in the country; but orders were probably dialed back after that.