Author Archives: Phil

About Phil

With 40 years of experience in comic reading, collecting and reviewing, English Professor Phil Mateer has an encyclopedic mind for comics. Feel free to ask Phil about storylines, characters, artists or for that matter, any comic book trivia. He will post your questions and answers on the AABC blog. His knowledge is unparalleled! He is also our warehouse manager, so if you are looking for that hard to find comic book, ask Phil!

It Came From the Back Room #19

Posted on April 1, 2011 by Phil

Standard recap: I’m slowly going through AABC’s one-million-plus back-issue room, restocking the boxes on the sales floor and pulling stuff to sell as discount/overstock/special items. I’m going through the alphabet backwards (don’t ask), and at my speed, this amounts to a two-year project. This week, we have the last of “J”: Jonah Hex DC’s grizzled, cynical Westerner has been a cult favorite for decades. His profile’s higher than ever right now (ironically, because of a supremely crappy movie), but it’s the book we’re examining today, and thankfully it’s got a number of high points. There are five stages to Jonah’s … Continue reading →

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Phil’s Reviews: Stuff I Bought #192

Posted on March 20, 2011 by Phil

Bad Dog #4 — Writer: Joe Kelly;  Art: Lucia Diego This hasn’t been out for awhile, but Kelly’s tale of a werewolf bounty hunter cursed by past sins and existential angst (but, in the best hard-boiled detective tradition, still determined to do the right thing) is worth waiting for. This issue, Lou and his partner, the cheerfully scatological, sexually deviant but religiously fanatic midget Wendell, get their Hunter S. Thompson on and travel to Las Vegas for fun and debauchery, although of course complications ensue. Diego’s art is always fun to look at, especially on the two leads (Lou’s massive … Continue reading →

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It Came From the Back Room #18

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Phil

Standard recap: I’m slowly going through AABC’s one-million-plus back-issue room, restocking the boxes on the sales floor and pulling stuff to sell as discount/overstock/special items. I’m going through the alphabet backwards (don’t ask), and at my speed, this amounts to a two-year project. This week is brought to you by DC, who have the longest-running of all the “J” titles: Justice League of America In our last regular installment (before we broke to discuss Dwayne McDuffie), we had just finished up Justice League Volume II (the ’80s Giffen/DeMatteis bwah-ha-ha run), and were about to start the next incarnation.That would be the … Continue reading →

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Phil’s Reviews: Stuff I Bought #191

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Phil

Uncle Scrooge #401 — Writer/Artist: Don Rosa: “The Universal Solvent.” Rosa originally wrote this 24-page story in 1995, for (I think) one of the European Disney books; it appeared here in the US in 1997 in Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories #s 604-606. Gyro Gearloose invents the titular solvent (to demonstrate it to a skeptical Scrooge, he pours it through a stack of “the most impervious substances known to mankind,” starting with lead, and going through iron to “titanium steel,” “impervium,” and, at the bottom, “Disney contract”), and Scrooge spills a bottle on the ground, setting off a wild, science-fueled adventure … Continue reading →

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It Came From the Back Room #17

Posted on March 4, 2011 by Phil

Dwayne McDuffie died last week, on February 21. He was a co-founder of Milestone Comics, and animation producer of Static Shock, Justice League Unlimited and Ben 10: Ultimate Alien, but in addition he was an admirable writer of comic books. This week, instead of the usual back-room letter-J stuff, I pulled some of his best work for the cover-price racks. Damage Control McDuffie was working as an assistant editor at Marvel in the late ’80s when he came up with this concept: a comic focusing on the guys who clean up after superhero fights, repairing all the damage, sweeping up the … Continue reading →

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