I Made 'Comic Shop News'!

Comic Shop News is a free weekly newsletter offered at most comic book stores, highlighting news about current or forthcoming comics offered. As a bonus, each new installment reprints a week's worth of installments of the ongoing Amazing Spider-Man newspaper comic strip, written by Stan Lee, drawn by his brother Larry, with Alex Saviuk drawing on weekends. It's the only place that still features Spidey married to Mary Jane Watson...for now, anyway.

Around late-December/early-January of every year, CSN presents The Red "K" Awards, named after Superman's rarely seen foil, red kryptonite, the awards offer a recap of the best and worst, the highs and lows, the cheers and jeers of things that happened in comics within the last year. And best of all, CSN concludes their Red "K" Awards by turning it over to the readers and letting us write-in our own Red K's, the best of which are printed and featured in a forthcoming issue of CSN.

And so...MY Red K got printed in Comic Shop News last week!!

"The Cooke-d Books Award"

I checked the email I had sent to mention the other write-in suggestions I came up with :

The "Finders Fee" Award
For Batman '66: The Lost Episode.

- I thought the price for this special issue was too high, considering that the bulk of it (the introduction of Two-Face, based on an unproduced script by Harlen Ellison, adapted for the comic book by Len Wein and Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez) was about the same length as an average issue of Batman '66..and I can still recall the days when a "prestige format" one-shot was around $5.95/$6.99, not $9.99.

The "Spider-Sense Fatigue" Award
For Marvel Comics' Spider-Man: Spiderverse crossover.

- For what is essentially a romp, I found this Spider-Man "event" to be kind of leaden..not bad, but perhaps symbolic of Marvel's boredom with Spider-Man/Peter Parker...once upon a time, Marvel Comics had one character named Spider-Man, Peter Parker with no other "Spider-..." counterpart to speak of, and that was all they needed for the first 10-15 years or so...or maybe this is a reflection of their frustration with the unanimous negative reaction to most of the Spider-Man comics published since "One More Day"?...

One out of Three. Not bad. I'll try again next time.