Woo-hoo, We’re Number Whatever!

Last week I received a surprising email from Substack, host of this newsletter. The email led to a chart saying “Untold Stories with Adam Philips” was the #63 comics newsletter and rising. A day or two later I looked at the email again, and I was at #15! But by the time we got to the weekend, I couldn’t even find myself on that chart. Easy come, easy go, I guess.

What does it all mean? I have no idea. Actually, that’s not true. I can extrapolate a thing or two…for example, looking at that list tells me that comics content is spread out across multiple platforms. I know at least a couple of creators who post in other places. And of course we have to remember that for every high-profile writer who posts their thoughts, we have tons of others writing about comics from a fan or collector point of view, which is also great.

Anyway, I’ve been doing this for 14 months, give or take, and I’ll keep on going. Maybe not quite every week, but at least a couple of times a month.

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You Buy the Ticket, You Take the Ride

Just a few months ago, in February, things were looking great. I had a bunch of clients as we headed into this year’s annual ComicsPro meeting in Glendale, CA. I walked into that meeting working with or representing multiple small publishers, and I was on stage so often a ComicsPro board member commented on it.

Then things got kind of quiet. I still have a couple of active clients right now – but you never know where or when you might find a new opportunity. I am looking at five – count ’em, five – potential new clients at this moment, including a couple of publishers, a couple of individual creators, and one convention. Some of those could activate pretty quickly, others might take a few months. And while those develop at different rates, Comic-Con International: San Diego 2025 looms, with its opportunities for meetings and follow up conversations.

Oh, and the one panel I pitched to San Diego got approved, so that will be fun.

Oh, and I’m also working on some writing projects, which I hope I can talk about more soon.

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Avengers, Go Relax!

I finished my epic read-through of the Avengers a few days ago, from the very beginning up through a little past issue #200, as collected in the first 11 volumes of Marvel’s Avengers Epic Collections. It started out full of chaotic energy, got more serious and sensible in the middle, then touchy-feely in a very 1970s way, and ended up pretty awful.

How awful? So awful that Ms. Marvel wakes up to find herself pregnant, gives birth a few days later, the baby quickly grows up to be Immortus, who proclaims his love for her and whisks her away to his weirdo dimension. And that was in big issue #200. So much to celebrate! Yeesh.

But there’s a lot good stuff in there along the way, from the introduction of the Vision to some epic stories centering on Black Panther, from the weird slumlord / gangster role of Cornelius Van Lunt to the many identities of Henry Pym, from the Wasp’s ever-changing outfits to Hawkeye quitting and rejoining and quitting and rejoining, from an intergalactic war in which we only saw the repercussions to the origins of both alien races who declared that war – there was a lot going on in each and every issue.

I do love some of the weird dropped balls you find along the way. For example, in the Kang War, we see that Kang is somehow related to, among others, the Scarlet Centurion – but that never gets explained or even spelled out. And later, Moondragon takes Hellcat for “further training,” then returns a couple of years later with no Hellcat – and no one notices.

And I love so much of the art in this series, by Jack Kirby, Don Heck, John Buscema, Sal Buscema, Dave Cockrum, Bob Brown, George Pérez, John Byrne, and all the rest.

Oh well, Avengers…it’s been fun.