For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been visiting family in Albuquerque, New Mexico (I’ll be tossing my adventures up on Strangematter eventually) and I snapped a photo of a nice villain-inspired bar sign. Not a bad version of the Joker, really. They’ve also have him painted on the side of the building, as well.

Albuquerque is an odd place, comics-wise: in the New Jersey area, for example, several comics book stores have gone out of business in the past 10 years or so. However, Albuquerque has not only retained most of the comic stores I recall visiting while in college, it’s gathered more. I was astounded when passing by comic stores that had opened in the last few years.

Revisiting New Mexico, though, also reminded me of all sorts of comics that used the state as a backdrop for stories and invariably would get it totally wrong. In fact, there’s a whole character with a back story involving the Navajo reservation (which stretches across New Mexico and Arizona) that just gets so much wrong, it’s funny: Roy Harper/Speedy/Arsenal. Devin Grayson tried to inject a little more reality into his back story, though, in her Arsenal mini-series to varying degrees of success. I should try digging that one up at some point. Hey, maybe Suspension of Disbelief could do an expose on that in between articles complaining about how artists draw archers (just kidding! I love that site and so should you!).

Since I was on vacation, I have a backlog of comics to read and review. One of my best friends also got me interested in some new comics (as well as reminding me of comics I used to read and still should be) so I’ll be tracking down and reviewing some of those, as well.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 17th, 2005 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Random Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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