As promised last week, The Professor is continuing to get caught up on his email questions. Thankfully, none of the questions this week ask things like “Tell me everything you know about comics,” as all the writers demonstrate an ability to posit actual answerable questions. This first is from February 24th:
What can you tell me about the obscure Licensable Bear #4 comic? It would appear to be the first Obama appearance in a comic book. As such, why doesn’t it get more attention?
Well, Licensable Bear is one of those too-hip-for-the-room concepts; the whole joke is that he’s cute and, yes, licensable, which lends itself to satire about marketing, etc. Here’s a link to the Licensable Bear comic’s home page, and specifically to information about issue four, the one with Obama: http://licensablebeartm.com/?page_id=41 . As it states, the book does, in fact, have Obama in it, came out in July 2007, and had a print run of 1050 copies.
Currently, there are two copies up on ebay: one has a minimum bid of $49.99 and no takers; the other has no minimum bid, is currently at $4.50 with three bids, and has three days to go. The Professor’s guess is it’ll go for around $10, but maybe there’ll be more enthusiasm for it than that.
Why doesn’t it get more attention? Because who cares? The man isn’t Wolverine; his mere appearance for a few pages in a comic no one’s ever heard of just isn’t that big of a deal (now, if it had his origin…). The Spidey appearance is hot because it’s Spider-Man, and Obama as a kid liked the title, and Marvel’s marketing department worked overtime promoting the thing, and it worked. Licensable Bear? It’s not badly done — the writer, Nat Gertler, knows what he’s doing: he hits the beats of the concept right where he should; it’s just that it’s not that interesting a concept. Still, the Obama thing is an interesting twist for the creators and publisher — lightning in a bottle, really — and it’s no wonder they’re encouraging interest in the book. Is it a solid investment? You’re asking the Professor this? Nah — the Professor’s opinion is that you’d be just as well off buying stock in GM as a copy of that book right now. Note, however, that the Professor does not have a particularly stellar comics investment record — he remembers distinctly reading the ad to send away and buy the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 at cover price, back in the mid-’80s, and ignoring it, and he could have bought Cerebus original art for less than $50 a page — so listen to him at your peril.
Next, from February 27:
I have a curious question. In your professional opinion, would I be decreasing the value of a silver age comic by having it autographed for a cgc signature series? I ask because if not, I want Ironman #1 (1968) signed by Stan Lee and graded by cgc for a signature series, but I’d like to know if it will devalue the comic first. What’s your opinion?
This is actually the subject of a lot of debate among comics graders — autographing a comic, after all, is Writing On The Cover, which we’re all trained to think is a bad thing — and yet, is it’s a collectable autograph, then shouldn’t that add to the value of the book?
The Professor’s take on this is that it usually balances out — the autograph makes the book worth more to a fan of the autographer, and less to a fan who’s purely a comics collector and condition junkie. In the case of Iron Man #1 and Stan Lee, though, the Professor would advise against it, for the simple reason that Lee didn’t write the book — the scripter was Archie Goodwin — so even though he was the editor, there’s no particular reason for him to sign the book. The Professor is a firm believer that a signature on a book should be from one of the major creators of the book itself, so writer/penciller/inker, but nobody else. Now, if you could get Gene Colan to sign that book….
And finally, from March 1:
What or who was this Zur-En-Arrh Batman from last fall’s Batman R.I.P. by Grant Morrison? I’m told it’s based on an old Batman comic? Thanks.
Yep — Morrison has said in a number of interviews that he considers all Batman stories to be part of continuity — although many of them get finessed in as hallucinations or similar “unreal” events — and the tale of the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh (the story’s actually titled “Batman — the Superman of Planet X!”) comes from Batman #113 (1958), in which an inhabitant of that planet teleports Batman there, informing him that he’s been watching his career via interstellar viewing or some damn thing, and has modeled himself on Bruce Wayne’s costumed career. By the kind of coincidence endemic to 1950s Bat-comics, Batman on Zur-En-Arrh has superpowers, and… well, stuff happens. Morrison used that as a jumping-off point for his own tale of fail-safe personality implants, and the rest is (recent) history.
