Next week is Free Comic Book Day 2013, and once again, Blake and Erin are here to walk you through the books being offered. What are this year’s can’t-miss titles? What are books you’ve never heard of that may be worth your time? And what special treat has Blake cooked up for you guys? Contact us with comments, suggestions, or anything else at Showcase@CXPulp.com!
Music provided by Music Alley from Mevio.
2 in 1 Showcase Episode 288: Free Comic Book Day Preview 2013
Our pal Adam from the Graphic Panels Podcast has declared the week before Free Comic Book Day, beginning April 29, to be Comics Kick Ass Week — a time to celebrate what we love about comics, and we here at the Showcase are going to tell you how to help spread the word. Blake talks about what’s got him excited about comics this week and tells you how to do the same. In the picks this week, it’s Batman and Robin #19. Contact us with comments, suggestions, or anything else at Showcase@CXPulp.com!
Join the Comics Kick Ass Week event on Facebook!
Follow Comics Kick Ass Week on Tumblr!
Music provided by Music Alley from Mevio.
2 in 1 Shot #7: Comics Kick Ass Week
On the tenth anniversary of Free Comic Book Day, Blake and Kenny set up camp at BSI Comics in Metairie and chat with fans, pros, and fellow podcasters about everything! In this episode: a spoiler-free discussion of The Avengers, our thoughts on the DC Nation cartoon block including Green Lantern: The Animated Series and Young Justice, discussions of the free comics on sale, Kurt Amacker tells us about his new graphic novel Tad Caldwell and the Monster Kid, and we chat with the hosts of the Nola Nerd podcast and Adam from the Graphic Panels podcast. In the picks, Adam recommends Earth 2 #1 and Blake (surprising virtually no one) talks about the first issue of the new X-O Manowar. And the free stuff isn’t over — Blake is giving away free downloads of his superhero novel Other People’s Heroes! Just go to Smashwords.com, use the coupon code XG56X, and download the book in your preferred eReader format! (Coupon expires on May 20, 2012.) Contact us with comments, suggestions, or anything else at Showcase@CXPulp.com!
Music provided by Music Alley from Mevio.
Episode 265: Free Comic Book Day 2012
Saturday is Free Comic Book Day, friends, but what exactly does that mean? Today I remind you all to help make the event what it’s supposed to be…
With just five days left before Geek Christmas, it’s time to gear up for Free Comic Book Day! Blake and Erin go through this year’s list of offerings and talk about which books they’re anticipating, which ones may not be to their taste, and whether or not there’s any reptile as awesome as Doctor Dinosaur. (Answer: No.) In the picks, Erin is absorbed in Rhiannon Frater’s As the World Dies series, and Blake urges you to watch Young Justice on Cartoon Network. Contact us with comments, suggestions, or anything else at Showcase@CXPulp.com!
Music provided by Music Alley from Mevio.
Episode 264: Free Comic Book Day Preview
I gotta be honest with you guys — I’m not above feeling a little schadenfreude when I see a yellow journalist take it on the chin. Today I take a look at why certain styles of reporting not only aren’t worth it, but can be outright destructive.
Everything But Imaginary #430: Yellow Journalism With a Dash of Cyan and Magenta
But rolling back in time, let’s go to May 11, 2005. The week after Free Comic Book Day, I took the time to look into everything that worked on that happy occasion…
Everything But Imaginary #114: What Worked on Free Comic Book Day
When people get back to work or school after Christmas, they talk about their holiday. Their trip to Grandma’s house, the snowman they built with the kids, whether or not they got that Play-Box 65 with internet connectivity, a rumble pack and automatic transmission they really wanted. Well folks, the biggest holiday of the comic book fan, Free Comic Book Day, has come and gone, and I for one think it’s worth taking the time to determine its success.
Now I don’t mind telling you that my FCBD was almost derailed. As introverted as I can be, I’m also more or less a sociable person, and I hate doing stuff like this alone, so I tried to round up my buddies Chase and Mike, the two men on this planet I am most likely to have fun arguing about comic books with, and two guys I haven’t seen nearly often enough in the last few months. But alas, Chase was offshore and Mike was laying down a new floor in his home, using the indisputable logic that, no matter how great comic books are, you can’t walk on them. So finally, I called my buddy Jason, my oldest friend and often my first call when I need someone to hang out with. The reason I didn’t call him first this time was that, for one, he’s not into comics, and also his fiancé was having some sort of crisis regarding her gall bladder or something. (I am taking her word for it, as nobody on the North American continent actually knows what a gall bladder is for.) But Jason managed to get away and hit the shop with me.
I got there relatively early in the day and was quite gratified to see the size of the crowd. Parents, children, young couples, teenagers, all flocked to the shop, sifting through this year’s offerings. Because it was so crowded, the manager was limiting us to two items apiece, which made it rather difficult on me to choose, but in the end the only thing I missed that I really wanted was Mortal Coils. I would have liked to get Sean Wang’s Runners: Remastered as well, as I’m a big fan of the series, but I decided instead to leave that and talk it up to people who were trying to decide what to pick up.
FCBD has, in many respects, become something of a mini-convention. It’s the one day a year I know I’ll mingle with other comic fans outside of my usual circle, talk, gossip and exchange ideas. Saturday was one of the first times I’ve been able to have a conversation with anyone outside of a computer forum about Infinite Crisis without them looking at their watch and suddenly remembering a pressing engagement.
But it most gratifying, to me, to see all the kids that were there. Sifting through the comics, getting Betty and Veronica, Uncle Scrooge and Amelia Rules!, looking at the toys and cards, popping open boxes of HeroClix right there on the counter – now that was a great sight to see.
So I walked out of that shop satisfied – but as I said last week, Free Comic Book Day isn’t really about me. It’s about the people who don’t go into a shop every week as though it were a religious experience. It’s about getting the kids to read it, or the adults who only read casually. It’s about boosting the esteem and profile of the entire medium. Now as some of you may know, I’m kind of a message board tramp. I post all over the place. If you added my post-count on every board I’m on, I firmly believe that I could beat the Hulk in a fight. And not just comic book boards – these are boards for books, movies and anything else that interests me. So I went to several of these boards and asked chaps of my acquaintance, including new readers, casual readers and hard-core fanboys, to regale me with their thoughts on FCBD. Here’s what a few of them had to say.
The gent known as Avalonian said:
I took my kids, and I picked up the Betty and Veronica freebie for our youngest, and I bought the 6th part of the Marmalade Boy manga series because the older two saw it and wanted it.
For myself, I picked up the Flight Primer, Ronin Hood of the 47 Samurai, and the Star Wars comic — all free. And I bought Origin, the graphic-novel collection of the Wolverine origin story that came out a few years ago. I’ve been meaning to read it for a while, and I figured, why not?
Ronin Hood of the 47 Samurai was OK, and the Star Wars comic was… Star Wars. Never could get into the Star Wars comics much. Flight was really cool, though. Great art and oddball stories. I may have to check out the rest of the series.
Av also tells me he was interested in 1602 and Warren Ellis’s Orbiter, as well as the upcoming adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere and the Jeph Loeb/Tim Sale miniseries Catwoman: When in Rome. He also quite enjoyed Origin. Now this leads me to several conclusions:
1. Am I the only person in the universe who thought Origin was kind of bland and unimpressive?
2. You’ll notice that most of the stuff he got was off the beaten path. He steered right past Batman Strikes and Marvel Adventures. Now this in no way means that the superhero titles are unimportant or should be ignored, but hopefully it will remind those folks at the Big Two that there is a huge audience out there for non-superhero properties.
3. And yes. Flight was really cool.
HarleyQuinn19 informed me…
I grabbed an old (but still free) issue of The Adventures of Barry Ween and totally fell in love with the sick little kid! I so have to get those TPB’s!
Harley, it seems, hit a shop that still had some free copies left over from a few years ago, but hey, whatever works. Judd Winick’s Barry Ween comics helped put him on the map (not that a Pulitzer Prize nomination for Pedro and Me exactly held him back), and it further shows the diversity of the audience. On the flipside, Harley dismissed Heroic Publishing’s FCBD offering, Flare, because it “seemed like just another blonde bimbo in a skin tight outfit to me.” Honestly, I haven’t read Flare and it’s liable to have a lot going for it, but that goes to show you how negative first impressions can keep a potential audience at bay.
[2012 Note: “HarleyQuinn19” today is known better to readers of this column as “My girlfriend Erin.”]
Ubiquitousblink had the following observations:
I haven’t read all my free comics yet but I was impressed on what the indy companies provided. Marvel kind of dropped the ball IMHO. Their “kid” books are kind of wimpy and watered down. DC is superior in this aspect. I’ve always believed that DC has been able to provide a wide variety of genres for all ages and tastes. I could read all DC/Wildstorm/Vertigo books and not miss Marvel at all (except for Bendis’s Spidey).
Now personally, there are several Marvel books I would miss if I walked away from the publisher altogether – Young Avengers, New X-Men and Fantastic Four topping the list. But I get what UB is saying here. I’m hearing from a lot of readers that DC is taking the edge in terms of quality. They’ve also got a wider assortment of books geared at kids – Marvel’s offerings are almost entirely kiddie versions of their preexisting characters. DC has some of that, but also opens their ranks up to stuff like Looney Tunes, Powerpuff Girls and Cartoon Network Block Party. In fact, stuff like the Cartoon Network comics seem to be some of the only anthology comics that sell very much these days at all.
Comixtreme’s CXPulp‘s own Walt Kneeland made a lot of intriguing comments in his own LiveJournal, but the one that I found most interesting was…
Should have picked up Runners #1. Offhand, other than Uncle Scrooge and Ronin Hood, that was the one I’ve heard the most about/remembered the most….but maybe I’ll find a copy later if stuff gets dumped into a quarter bin or otherwise becomes available somewhere. I know last year I missed a couple FCBD issues, but wound up getting those at Origins and Gen Con.
Oh, Walt, but you should have gotten Runners. The good news is, a trade paperback of the first miniseries will be coming out in a few short months.
On the other hand, I was quite gratified to see how many older readers were compelled to sample Uncle Scrooge. I am an unabashed fan of Walt Disney comic books, particularly the works of Carl Barks, Don Rosa, William Van Horn and Pat and Shelly Block. This year’s FCBD offering was Barks’s first-ever full-length Uncle Scrooge story, “Only a Poor Old Man” from Uncle Scrooge #1, and it is considered by many to be one of the best. If you got it and read it, by all means, let me know what you thought.
And finally, I thought it would be good to get the perspective of, not just a reader, but a retailer. So I asked my good buddy SSJGOKU555, who happens to be majority owner of his local shop, to tell me how FCBD went for him.
Free Comic Book Day is one of the best days of the year for me. One I’m a comic geek and I love getting free comics. Two, all of the people who normally don’t buy comics stop in to pick a freebie and maybe one or two titles to check them out. And finally, I run a comic shop and I like making money.
FCBD is one of the most brilliant things ever devised. It brings in new customers, brings in old readers, brings kids into comics. My shop opens at noon daily and FCBD we had a line waiting for the store to open. All the normal customers, but what I was happy to see was a lot of new faces and a lot of kids maybe 8-9 with their mother or father. From what I saw, the mothers were reluctant to buy any comics due to the fear of violence and sex while the fathers typically knew there was an entire kids rack and headed right for that. Of course this wasn’t always true though. After I showed them the kids rack, the parents took the free comic and saw familiar faces such as Scrooge McDuck, Archie, Sonic the Hedgehog, the animated version of Superman, etc. These are people that normally don’t come in and did because of FCBD. This is what needs to happen more. The comic industry needs more new, young readers to pick up a book here and there. And parents should encourage it, if for nothing else a young child can go read a comic with a cartoon character in it that they know and they can pick up a few reading skills and learn to enjoy reading.
My customers seemed to be in very good spirits, getting free stuff usually does that to a person. We had music going, games, prizes, etc. Customers got into it, had fun, won TPBs, action figures for the kids, etc. Sales were were great due to the free stuff. We gave away so much free stuff we ran out of the free comics and wound up giving out second printings of Green Lantern: Rebirth #1. It’ll remain to be seen whether or not the new customers come back, but for getting new readers into a comic shop, FCBD definitely succeeded. I can’t wait for the next one.
So there you have it folks, straight from the horse’s collective mouths. In short, is Free Comic Book Day working? Yeah, I think it is. The progress is slow and it’s an uphill battle, but I think it is bringing in new people and re-exciting old readers, and those are the two most important things that could possibly happen in the world of comic books right now.
So let’s start getting ready for next year.
FAVORITE OF THE WEEK: May 4, 2005
It wasn’t even a contest, folks. Not Superman, not New X-Men… not even Villains United could have wrested my “Favorite of the Week” award from The Complete Peanuts: 1955-1956. The third volume in a 25-book series, this is a concerted effort to reprint every Peanuts comic strip the legendary Charles M. Schulz ever did, in their original order, as restored as technology and archival records will allow. This volume contains such notable events as Linus’s first words, Snoopy’s first impressions and the first time Lucy pulled that darn football away from good ol’ Charlie Brown. To a Peanuts lover like me, reading these books is nirvana.
FAVORITE OF THE YEAR: Free Comic Book Day 2005
And now for a special bonus! While I wasn’t able to get every Free Comic Book Day comic this year, I managed to get a few and read a few others, and my favorite hands-down has to be Jetpack Press’s Johnny Raygun Freebie. This comic is a great lighthearted sci-fi superhero title about a teenage secret agent in a world full of mad scientists, monsters and superpowered kids. I’ve never read a Johnny Raygun comic before, but the story of his sister trying to join the esteemed Nuclear Kids left me grinning from ear to ear. I’m going to make an effort to find the first several issues of Johnny’s quarterly title, and I’m almost certainly going to add this one to my pull-list. Invincible fans take note – this is the kind of thing I bet you’d really dig.
Blake M. Petit is the author of the superhero comedy novel, Other People’s Heroes, the suspense novel The Beginner and the Christmas-themed eBook A Long November. He’s also the co-host, with whoever the hell is available that week, of the 2 in 1 Showcase Podcast. E-mail him at BlakeMPetit@gmail.com and visit him on the web at Evertime Realms. Read past columns at the Everything But Imaginary Archive Page.
It’s Free Comic Book Day 2011, and the boys are back at BSI Comics! Blake, Kenny and Mike chat with our old friends Vernon Smith, Kurt Amaker of Immortal 60 and Monty and the Mongoose of Flying Zombies fame. PLUS: Your old buddy Chase is back with his inimitable brand of freewheeling movie and pop culture commentary. In the picks, Chase gives a shout out to Captain America: The Captain, Blake was into Avengers Academy #13 and Kenny dug DC Comics Presents: Son of Superman #1. Contact us with comments, suggestions, or anything else at Showcase@CXPulp.com!
Music provided by Music Alley from Mevio.
Episode 220: Free Comic Book Day 2011
If you haven’t gone yet, get out there to your local comic shop and grab some free stuff. You can find said shop using the comic shop locator at www.FreeComicBookDay.com!
And if you’re in the New Orleans area, come on by to BSI Comics and greet the 2 in 1 Showcase crew as we record!
And tomorrow, pop on over to CXPulp.com and download the podcast, for cryin’ out loud!
Okay, guys. The weekend is here, and there’s a ton of great stuff to be done. Thor is finally in movie theaters, all over the country fairs and festivals are starting up, and I’m told that there are things called “baseball” and “fresh air” going on all over the place. Awesome sauce.
But there are two things you really ought to do this weekend, and they’re really simple, and they’ll cost you a combined total of 99 cents if you do ’em both. First of all, as I mentioned on Wednesday (and a few weeks ago, and every year before that on this weekend), Saturday is FREE COMIC BOOK DAY. You go to any participating comic book store and there’ll be special edition books there. Stuff for the parents, plenty of stuff for the kids, and a lot of fun to be had by all.
If you don’t know where the nearest participating comic shop is, just go on to www.FreeComicBookDay.com and punch your ZIP code into the comic shop locator. Bring your friends, bring your family, and try to buy a little something too (because those free shops do cost the shop owners money).
Sunday is Mother’s Day. Which is wonderful and joyous and we should all do very nice things for our moms. But if you’ve got yourself an Amazon Kindle or any device with a Kindle app on it (such devices include iPads, iPhone, iTouches, Android phones, Blackberries, PCs or Macs) you can get Scott Sigler’s new collection of short stories, Blood is Red, for a mere 99 cents. Sigler is one of the best purveyors of sci-fi, thriller, and horror fiction in the New Media realm that I’ve gotten so engrossed in, and there’s no doubt this collection of eight stories is something I’m really looking forward to.
Now the book is actually available for purchase now, but if you’re reading this when I post it on May 6, don’t buy it yet! That’s because Sigler is trying to make May 8 what he calls One Bad Motha’s Day. Hit Amazon on Sunday at noon Eastern, 9 a.m. Pacific and buy the book then. The way Amazon ranking works, the more sales happen in a given period of time will help boost the book’s rankings in the Kindle store, which gets the book more exposure, which (hopefully) translates into more sales. Help a brother out, and get Blood is Red on May 8.
(And don’t forget, while you’re there, that you can get my book, Other People’s Heroes, as well. Just $2.99. And frankly, I’m not as picky about when you buy it.)
It’s that time again, my friends! Three days from now is the first Saturday in March, and that means it’s gonna be Free Comic Book Day time again! As I do every year, this week’s EBI column is all about FCBD and how you can try to make it work.
Everything But Imaginary #397: Free Comic Book Day Turns 10
But for our classic column, this week we’re gonna slip back to May 5, 2005 — to the Wednesday before another FCBD…
As people who read this column or Ronée’s with the slavish devotion we deserve will know, we’re both quite involved in our local community theatre. Just this past weekend, we finished a run on the comedy The Butler Did it Again and we lucked out – we worked with a lot of good people and made some good friends on this set.
One of the people we worked with, Earl, has a son who wants to make his own comic books. Earl tells us that the kid spends all of his time writing and drawing, and asked Ronée to take a look at some of his stuff and see if she could give him any pointers. When I heard that, I got out a piece of paper. On it I wrote “Comics and Sequential Art by Will Eisner and Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.” I said, “These are the two best books you can give anyone who’s really interested in making comics books.” Then I thought a moment. And then I wrote down www.freecomicbookday.com. “That’s a way to get some free stuff,” I said.
It’s really become quite the event. Once a year, like Santa Clauses in Punisher t-shirts, the comic book shop owners of America throw open their doors and call out to the masses, “Come in! Get free stuff! See what we’ve got to offer!”
Free Comic Book Day 4 will be held this Saturday, May 7, at a comic store (hopefully), near you. But as great as it is for fans like us, the kind who zip off to the shop weekly, faithfully, hoping for the newest adventures of Superman or the X-Men, if we’re the only people to go, then Free Comic Book Day will be a failure.
The whole point of Free Comic Book Day, the whole purpose, is to pull in new fans, new readers, to get people to try something they haven’t before. If we’re the only ones there, FCBD will simply be preaching to the converted. But that’s where we run into the problem. How do we get them there?
In the past, FCBD has been tied to the release dates of comic-related movies: Spider-Man in 2002, X2: X-Men United in 2003 and Spider-Man 2 in 2004. This year there were two obvious choices they could have linked the event with – Batman Begins or Fantastic Four. But instead, they decided to make it an event of its own, to try to stabilize it, and to try to give the event its own identity not dependent upon the films. I can’t blame them for doing it this way. Comic book movies are hot properties right now, but movies are cyclical. When the inevitable summer comes that there’s no huge comic move, FCBD should still have a presence, and it’s best to try to establish that presence right now.
But without a movie to link it to, how do you get the word out about FCBD? What comic books really need, I think, are sort of a central advertising council. You’ve all seen the ads paid for by an entire industry instead of a single company: “Got Milk?”, “The Incredible Edible Egg” and “Beef: It’s What’s For Dinner,” are all products of that sort of advertising strategy. Comic books need something like that, one central organization that can let people know about all the different, varied worlds that comics have to offer, and tell people where to find them. Such an organization can’t be created overnight, however, and the chances of one being established and set in place by Saturday, let’s face it, are pretty slim.
So this leaves us with that old standby, press releases. Speaking as someone in the journalism field (so far out in the field, in fact, that I often suspect the game ended and they forgot to call me in to the dugout), I can tell you that these are a hit or miss proposition. Typically, a press release for an event such as this will only get printed if the editor of the paper in question has no other way to fill up space. And even then, it will get chopped up, rewritten and twisted around quite often. It’s not the most reliable way to get any information out there, and the most anyone can really hope for is that they manage to print the correct web site address.
Nope – the best chance any of us has of getting the news out? Good old fashioned word of mouth. That’s what I did with my buddy Earl last weekend. I don’t know if he’ll actually make it to a shop with his kid, but I intend to pester him a little about it just in case.
Yes, the point of FCBD is to bring in new fans – but we can’t forget that we’re doing that for our own benefit. The number of regular comic book readers in this country has decreased dramatically over the past few decades. It’s painful to even contemplate. So even we, as much as we love comics, cannot sustain the industry forever. People die, people decide they’re too grown up for comics, people drop the hobby for financial reasons. New readers have to be brought in, or eventually there simply won’t be enough of us left to keep the industry afloat.
So if you love comic books, the best thing you can do is to help other people love them too. And one of the best ways to get anybody to try anything is to give them some free samples.
Parents? Take your kids! Kids? Take your parents! There’s so much to choose from this year! Sure you’ve got Spider-Man, Batman and Star Wars, the old standbys, but look at some of the other offerings: Uncle Scrooge. Betty and Veronica. The Simpsons. G.I. Joe.
Look at some of the really out-there stuff: Flight, Ronin Hood of the 47 Samurai, Mortal Coils, Flare, Johnny Raygun, Runners, Amelia Rules! Come on, if you can’t find something at FCBD that’s to your liking, you simply aren’t trying.
I’m doing my best to spread the word. I’ve talked about it at nearly every message board on the net that will let me in. I’ve written an entire edition of my regular newspaper column about it and I’ve e-mailed that same column to everyone I know.
Now I’m asking you guys to do your part.
Yes, go to FCBD. Have a blast. Get some free stuff. But don’t go alone. Grab a friend who doesn’t read comics. If you have a friend with kids, make sure they bring the kids with them. Bring nieces, nephews or cousins. Guys, tell your girlfriends or wives that you want to take them out to a nice lunch and a movie, but ask them to come to the shop with you on the way. Girls, pull the same trick on your guys.
E-mail your friends. Send them the URL of the FCBD website. Send them the link to that column I just posted, if you think it’ll persuade them. Send your comic-reading friends the link to this column and encourage them to do the same things I’m talking about.
And here’s the biggest thing, probably the most important thing: when you get these newcomers into a comic shop, make it a place they’ll want to come back to.
Take them to the best, friendliest comic shop in your area. You know the shops where dust covers the back issues and kids playing Yu-Gi-Oh! are cursing like longshoreman. Some of you even may know of shops where the owner is requiring a minimum purchase for a FCBD book. Don’t go there. In fact, if possible, never go there again – save your money for store owners that deserve it. Go to clean, bright shops that welcome people. If your shop is having a sale on FCBD, so much the better.
Answer their questions. Make friendly suggestions. If they like movies like The Last Samurai, recommend the Ronin Hood comic book. If they liked the Sin City movie, casually guide them towards the trade paperbacks. (They aren’t free, of course, but if you can persuade them to invest a little money, so much the better.) Don’t laugh at somebody just because he doesn’t know the difference between Captain Marvel and Shazam!, and don’t roll your eyes when you hear someone say, “I thought Superman was dead!”
Don’t just jab your fingers at your favorite comic books and say, “Man, you’ve got to read Teen Titans, it’s the best!” Figure out what they would like. Someone who may pick up an issue of Uncanny X-Men and then never read a comic book again may fall completely in love with Strangers in Paradise, Fables, She-Hulk or Fade From Grace.
Make them enjoy the shop. Make them glad to be there. And make them want to come back.
Because if they don’t, then the entire exercise was pointless.
I love comic books, friends. Like a great many of us here, I dream about one day working in comic books, writing my own stories, seeing my characters and ideas sitting on the rack. So call me selfish. Because when the day comes for those comics to see the light, I want there to still be people out there to read them.
That’s your job. Your goal. Your quest.
Now go out there and make it happen.
FAVORITE OF THE WEEK: April 27, 2005
Maybe it’s because Bill Willingham is among my favorite writers or maybe DC is just on a roll, but Day of Vengeance #1 grabbed me and pulled me right in last week. After the events of Identity Crisis, Jean Loring has gone a little coo-coo, and apparently she’s taking the Spectre with her. With the hostless spirit of vengeance on a tear and many of DC’s top-level mystical heroes out for the count, it’s up to the b-listers like Ragman, Enchantress and (be still my heart) Detective Chimp to find a way to take him down. Unlike the other three miniseries that spun out of DC Countdown, this book will rest squarely on the shoulders of characters that many fans know nothing about. Heck, even I was only vaguely aware of Ragman, but Willingham gives us everything we need to understand who our heroes are and how big the threat is. I’m in awe these days. It’s been a long time since I could say it, but if you’re a fan of huge, epic adventure stories, right now the DC Universe is the place to be.
Blake M. Petit is the author of the superhero comedy novel, Other People’s Heroes, the suspense novel The Beginner and the Christmas-themed eBook A Long November. He’s also the co-host, with whoever the hell is available that week, of the 2 in 1 Showcase Podcast and the weekly audio fiction podcast Blake M. Petit’s Evercast. E-mail him at BlakeMPetit@gmail.com and visit him on the web at Evertime Realms. Read past columns at the Everything But Imaginary Archive Page, and check out his new experiment in serial fiction at Tales of the Curtain.
Evertime Realms 
People are saying…