My Free Comics!

I just got back from Manhattan, where I stopped off at Jim Hanley's Universe over on 33rd St. In my opinion Hanley runs the best comic shop in the city, but then again I haven't been to all of them so your opinion may very well differ.

Anyway, Hanley's was giving you the choice of four 'free comics' or three comics and some small Batman figurine. I went for the four comics, since I'm not a big one on action figures, to be honest. I have a few but don't go out of my way to collect them.

Some shops will lay out all the comics on a table and you can pick from what you want, with a limit to only four (frankly what are they going to do with the rest? they had boxes of the things behind the desk!) I went with some things I thought might be a bit different. I skipped the Marvel and DC books, as well as the Gladstone & Archie titles. It's not that I might not have enjoyed them, but I was more interested in checking out some books I'd heard of on line.

The four I have are: BUZZBOY from Sky Dog; RUNNERS #1: REMASTERED from Serve Man Press; RONIN HOOD AND THE 47 SAMURAI from Beckett Comics {How could I possibly resist that title?}; and BONE SHARPS, COWBOYS AND THUNDER LIZARDS from General Tektronics Labs (Jim Ottavianni and the fine folks who brought us TWO-FISTED SCIENCE)

I'll have reviews of all of these at some point, along with comments on the comics for which I actually paid. Among those are the lead in for DC's INFINITE CRISIS, FLAMING CARROT, THE ESCAPIST and a couple of others.

Hanley was also giving out copies of HOUSE OF M Sketchbook promoting Marvel's big cross-over event and the latest issue of CSN (Comic Shop News) which promotes "Free Comics Days" on the cover.

It's been a few years since I regularly picked up any mainstream Marvel titles, so I know I'm not the audience for this. Then again the same can be said for INFINITE CRISIS, even though I am much more familiar with the DCU since I was buying a half dozen of so regular titles from DC up to about a year ago. I probably would have passed on IC, but Tony Isabella reviewed this and I just had to see for myself.

Hope that you made it to your local shop or can get to one this week. Many places will probably be giving away the Free Comics titles while they have some in stock. That is the point isn't it?