Sunday, July 29, 2018

THE UNBOXING - JULY 2018

I'm getting this one in just under the wire for the month, but there's a reason: I picked something up at Comic-Con that I wanted to include for our July Unboxing. First, however, a quick Digital Unboxing: You'll recall that just last month, I grabbed digital versions of a bunch of Dark Horse's USAGI YOJIMBO SAGA books, with plans to get the remaining, earlier Usagi stuff from Fantagraphics whenever they had a sale. Well, that time came sooner than expected, with a linewide Comixology/Amazon sale of the publisher's wares just this month. As such, I picked up USAGI YOJIMBO BOOK 1: THE RONIN, USAGI YOJIMBO BOOK 2: SAMURAI, USAGI YOJIMBO BOOK 3: THE WANDERER'S ROAD, USAGI YOJIMBO BOOK 4: THE DRAGON BELLOW CONSPIRACY, USAGI YOJIMBO BOOK 5: LONE GOAT AND KID, USAGI YOJIMBO BOOK 6: CIRCLES, and USAGI YOJIMBO BOOK 7: GEN' STORY, making me (as far as I know) the proud owner of all collected Usagi stories to date.


I also took advantage of a Viz sale to grab DRAGON BALL SUPER vol. 1, vol. 2, and vol. 3, adapting the ongoing TV series into a manga format (which is totally the opposite of the original DRAGON BALL/DRAGON BALL Z, which was a manga adapted to television.

And now the biggy: from IDW (in cooperation with Marvel), the John Byrne's X-Men Artifact Edition. There have been a few of IDW's "Artist Edition" books which have intrigued me; specifically the John Romita Spider-Man books and the Walter Simonson Thor book, but I've always balked a bit at the price and considered them non-essential items. This, however, is the first in the series which really piqued my interest, and which I considered a must-have.


So since I had wanted the book anyway, when I saw IDW offering an SDCC exclusive version with an alternate cover, signed and hand-numbered by Byrne himself, I jumped to pre-order, and picked it up the first day of the show. I've only skimmed it so far, but it's really nice -- and it's huge! This is the first Artist Edition book I've seen in person, and even though I know how big comic book art pages are, it's still larger than I expected. I can't wait to really sit down and peruse this thing.

But for now, that's it. Will there be an Unboxing in August? Last year that started a three-month stretch of nothing. This time, I guess we'll find out together.
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2 comments:

  1. angmc43@hotmail.comJuly 29, 2018 at 1:28 PM

    So, are we expecting a volume-to-volume review of the 42-volume DRAGON BALL (both DB and DBZ) Manga series sometime in the future?

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    1. MattJuly 30, 2018 at 11:07 AM

      That does sound like a fun idea, though I must confess that I don't own the entirety of DRAGON BALL in manga format! When I was in college, I read Viz's monthly comic book adaptations, but they both ended mid-storyline and I never picked up the collected edition volumes that replaced them.

      Every time there's a Viz sale on Comixology, I consider picking up the series, but it's way too many books to buy all at once, and doing it piecemeal always feels like a bad idea for some reason (even though sales occur so regularly that it probably wouldn't take too long to gather everything).

      I might look at the SUPER manga eventually, though. I do a manga series every year around January/February, after all. Next year will be GUNSMITH CATS BURST, to continue where I left off with the original GUNSMITH CATS this past February. By early 2020, there should be another couple SUPER volumes out, so that could be a good time to read the books. (Though it feels so far off right now, it'll be here before I know it!)

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