Labels: best in la, collector, comic book, comic book store, fox la, good day la, spider-man, website

Comic books meet Politics, or rather a politician who loves comic books. Our new president-elect Barack Obama is on the cover and inside next week's Amazing Spider-man. It's not the regular cover for the book, it's an incentive cover, we had to order a ton of the regular cover (about 20-25% more than our usual number) to QUALIFY to order those covers.

Labels: 583, barack obama, comic book, cover, president elect, presidential election, spider-man

If you come to our store, I am pretty sure you already know that all 3 of us (Joseph, Nick and myself) are pretty huge fans of Ed Brubaker. I know most of you know that I always say that the current run on Captain America is probably one of the best things published right now, or about how perfect Criminal is. This brings me to the topic of this post.

INCOGNITO is the latest effort by Ed and his long time collaborator Sean Phillips, who is known to most of you as the artist of Marvel Zombies. The team of Bru/Phillips has to this point already done two amazing books: Sleeper, and incredible look at a hero trapped in a criminal underground, with the world thinking that he turned (soon to be a movie), and Criminal, considered by many one of the top 2-3 finest books of our time and a perfect film-noir comic. Picking your favorite with those books is like choosing one of your children, I have never seen books that excelled so much at what they accomplished. And with the first issue of INCOGNITO, the team just gave us the beginning of their third Masterpiece.


The basic concept is brilliant. Imagine you are a Villain, an all powerful and morally corrupt individual who revels in his superiority over the "common guy". Consequences mean nothing to you, until one day something happens and you can no longer show your face to the people who are even more evil and "super" than you are. You make a deal with the government, take a pill that, if used regularly, removes your powers, and go into witness protection after putting your boss in jail. Now you are a common stiff, sorting paper work at a typical firm, with typical loser co-workers. You have become the type of "grunt" that you despised when you had your powers. How long can you last in this situation, until the urges and fond memories make you try to find a way to get back to your past glory?


Oh, and did I mention that we are making the first issue 100% RETURNABLE? Need I say more?

Labels: Captain America, comic book, Criminal, Daredevil, Ed Brubaker, noir, Sleeper

So if you are reading this, you are probably already a customer at our store. So the first thing I should do, is thank you for your patronage and wish you happy holidays, whichever ones you celebrate at this time. Hope everything gets better, or at least, not worse (in these times, that is already a lot to ask for).

Now, you may ask, why the 'bleep' does Collector's Paradise need a blog? Aren't there enough of these on every site, with opinions of every kind, from politics to Paris Hilton's new BFF? What is the reason, Edward, for you deciding you want to spend more of your already precious time on this "fun" endeavor? Well, the truth is, it's all about Google. Yep, Google made me do this.

As some of you know, we have recently spent an absurd (hindsight) amount of money on cable advertising that resulted in a SMOKIN' TV Ad and very little in feasible revenue.


How do you ask we know that it was a total waste of time? Well, we polled the crap out of anyone whose face we saw for the first time, and found out that a) people drive by and actually turn heads at our ugly yellow sign, and b) people use Google A WHOLE LOT! Cable TV ? Not so much. Almost everyone we asked who did not just see us while driving/walking/running by, said that they did a search on Google and somehow or other we showed up. Wow, all that business without any work on our part (besides creating a pretty neat looking website).

This got me thinking about how to improve those odds and find ourselves on more searches and more often. After doing some Googling myself, I found that Blogs are actually a great way to have the spiders that Google uses to find information like us. And here it is, our own slice of the Blogosphere (well, a crumb of it, not a slice, but who's counting).

So, I know this one has run a bit long and winded. I won't do that again (if I can help it). What I will do is try to update this often and be short and to the point. You will find my random musings about the hobby, about a comic book that made my Wednesday, about a frustration that a comic book company is making me tear out my 3 remaining hairs out, or just a look at what I took pictures of last night (yeah, I am a published photographer, did u know that? Look here)

With this I will end this first of many blogs, and if you are still reading, thank you for "going all the way". Please help me by commenting on my posts, and making me feel that someone actually pretends to care what I write about.

Happy Christmaka to you all!

Labels: collector, comic book, google, subscription, website