Bookery Fantasy Finds!

Here’s a comix shopping recommendation from me to you, if you’re ever in the greater Dayton area. Bookery Fantasy, man. BF is a store specializing in all the things I love: comics, paperbacks, and magazines new and old as well as gaming supplies (which I don’t care about so much, but you might!).

The store is so massive, it’s TWO stores, across the street from one another. A weird, fun shopping experience for sure. One of my favorite things about BF is the massive “discount warehouse” set-up, which includes an entire basement full of single issue comic books for a buck apiece. I spent an hour and a half digging through their archives and I barely made a dent… but the above picture includes most of my spoils.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m slowly collecting runs of my favorite DC superhero comics from when I was growing up and I’ve gotten much closer with two of those collections with my trip to BF. Two more issues of Ron Marz’ run on Green Lantern (starring modern-era GL Kyle Rayner). I’m only two issues away from completing this run! I also picked up a couple of issues of Chuck Dixon’s work on Robin.

Blue Monday is a book I loved in high school. Written and drawn by Chynna Clugston Major, BM is a high school comedy drawn with distinct eastern influences. Clugston’s pages are jam-packed with jokes and details and I always dug how deeply she seemed to understand her characters. Everyone has a distinct personality and a Bleu joke wouldn’t work coming out of Clover, and so on. That seems like a crazy thing to laud a comic about, but a writer who can establish distinction between characters is a skill that is rarer than you think.

I also picked up the first two issues of Mutant Texas because the creative team of Paul Dini and J. Bone is a knockout.

Finally, some random “gets” – The Mighty #12 is the last issue I needed in this year-long superhero series published by DC Comics. It’s a surprisingly dark look at the Superman archetype and the last issues of the series were drawn by Chris Samnee. Flinch #8, also published by DC under their Vertigo imprint, features a horror story written by Greg Rucka that is, without question, one of the grossest things I’ve ever read in my life. It’s a weird kind of accomplishment.

Anyway, Bookery Fantasy. Definitely worth a trip!