It Came From Ebay

Sometimes I am totally eBay's bitch. Mostly this is due to the fact that I have a hard time passing up a perceived "bargain", so, in an effort to get some value out of the books that I buy for $3.00 at 11:30 on a Friday night, I'm going to try to review them in an irregular series on this here blog.

Also, due to a regime change at my place of work, I'm going to be stuck in meetings, getting told how to do my job for the next two days. Imagine my joy. This will most likely delay my comic buying for the week.

Superman: The Daily Planet
Cost: $3.00
Value: OK

One of the many, many books released to tie into last summer's movie, this book features various stories spotlighting the Daily Planet and its staff through the years. Overall, the older stuff is the best, because it's patently insane. One story, which I'm sure Jake has already covered, has Lois Lane taking time off from her normal obsession with tricking Superman into marrying her, for her side-line obsession of proving that Clark Kent is trying to trick her into marrying him. No wonder so many kids of the 40' & 50's became drug addled beat poets and hippies. If these books shaped your view of what adult life would be, you'd need drugs to have it live up to it.

The later 70's and early 80's books featured our reporters kicking the Planet to the curb in favor of a TV station. I don't know why they bothered with these stories at all. I mean, the Planet's a newspaper, not the crap-ass TV station they worked for. Maybe they just wanted to show off some of the primo threads of that era.

Mainly, this book illustrated for me that someone needs to do a book actually about the Planet and its employees. Much like how Gotham Central was about the cops in Gotham City, I think there could be a really good series about the issues facing journalists in a world that seems to be in mortal peril on a weekly basis. It's been tried a few times. Marvel had the Pulse which was OK for a few issues before it became an exposition outlet for whatever major "event" Bendis was writing at the time. There was also that issue of Astro City (not sure which one, but it's in the first collection) which featured a reporter who had a vital story to tell, but no sources. Hell, if they could get back the creative team from GC (Brubaker, Rucka & Lark) this would be an excellent book. No one would buy it, but I'd be happy.