I only had one book on my list this week. I was going to head into town on Wednesday, but a few days before that I noticed something on a bus ride to Franklin Mills: a new comic book store. Within walking distance from my house! What this does is give me an option if I can't (or don't want to) go downtown for some reason. So I decided to check out the new store on Saturday, which was 2011 Free Comic Book Day. That's the day when many publishers put out special free issues (sometimes reprints, sometimes not). There was nothing quite as exciting as last year's "zero issue" that kicked off the War of the Supermen. But I did take two free books, the maximum allowed by the store. I hope the store, which has been open for ten months, does well enough to stay open. When I went on Saturday it was really quiet. While I was there a woman came in with a couple of kids, picked up two free books and then left. That was pretty much it.
Superboy 7: This was my one issue actually purchased, and skips ahead to when the Reign of Doomsday (which intervened last issue) is resolved (which will occur in the next few issues of Action Comics) and Superboy is back in Smallville. Alas, he wakes up to a nighmarish situation which, he is told, is his doing. The twist on this story (another of those time-skipping tales with "then" and "now" labels making it a little too confusing) was that it involves a variation of a plant that was a key plot in a classic Superman tale from the 1980s called "For the Man Who Has Everything."
As for the Free Comic Book Day issues, one was a reprint of a Green Lantern issue that tells (or re-tells, since this particular story was originally published in 2008) how Hal Jordan got his ring to begin with. Obviously it's promoting the movie. It also includes a preview of "Flashpoint," DC's latest huge mega-event (starting this week), in which time has been altered somehow (this happens so much!), leading to all kinds of changes in characters in the DC universe. Only Barry Allen, a.k.a. the Flash, remembers how the world used to be and has to find a way to fix things. I'm curious but not extremely excited about this. I plan to buy the main miniseries itself but probably not most of the tie-in books planned -- the ad on the last page lists one in May and a whopping 21 in June.
The other free book I nabbed was a special issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, which seems to be a new tale that's a prelude to a big storyline that's about to start. It was entertaining enough, and there was a little recap of what's been going on in Peter Parker's life recently. For example, it seems he no longer has his spider-sense. Whether it's permanent or not I have no idea, but I hate the thought of a world in which the sentence "My spider-sense is tingling!" no longer has any meaning.
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