Comics This Week

Today I picked up:

- Stan Lee Meets the Amazing Spider-Man -- a new series with Stan Lee as a character meeting some of his fave characters in stories. This one has a story written by Stan, another written by Joss Whedon, a Fred Hembeck page, and a Spidey reprint from 1970 by Stan and John Romita. Silly fun.

- The Eternals #4 of 6.

- Ultimate Spider-Man #100 -- Haven't read this series in a few years but had to buy the big one.

- Ramayan 3392 AD #1, another book from Virgin Comics, this one sort of retelling a great Indian creation myth.

- X-Men First Class #1, which I passed on last week but read some very positive reviews, so we'll see.

- Best of all: Essential Thor Vol 3 -- hoo hah! Reprinting some of my favorite comics, Thor #137-166 by Lee and Kirby.

Then tonight, the Margaret Mitchell House a block away hosted yet another cartoon-related guest speaker: Robert Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker (to which I, ahem, subscribe--and not just for the cartoons). He gave a slide show of lots of great cartoons, showing how they're made, what works and doesn't, etc. Fascinating. I also picked up there (and had him autograph) the new trade paper edition of The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker, which instead of 2 CDs now has a DVD with more than 70,000 cartoons (all ever published, to date, almost), which is a couple thousand more than the hardcover that came out a couple of years ago. Fun stuff.