Comic Books

The likenesses of heroes ranging from Spiderman to Hank Aaron will be available for purchase today at a baseball card show at the Landmark Inn in Maple Shade and a comic book convention at the Holiday Inn in Cherry Hill. The baseball card show is sponsored by East Coast Baseball Cards, a Cherry Hill-based company owned by 15-year-old Mark Lomas. About 50 dealers will be displaying and selling "millions" of baseball cards, including single cards and sets, Lomas said. The prices for single baseball cards can range from "a dime up to $30,000" (the most valuable being the 1908 Honus Wagner card)

Frank Gullo wanted to measure himself against the gurus of comic-book artistry. So the 18-year-old began penciling his own renditions of popular characters, including the Silver Surfer, Batman and one icon named Venom. His favorite: the Wolverine, half man, half wolf, with a dark sense of humor. "He keeps to himself, but is a berserker," Gullo said. "He goes wild. " For the former Upper Moreland High School student who recently moved to southern Italy with his parents, drawing had become an obsession.

John "Loop" Lupo gingerly picks up The Nine Rings of Wutang comic book from a shelf on the back wall of his store as if it is precious. Presenting it like an altar boy holding a communion plate, Lupo places it on a box of densely packed, wrapped comic books for a visitor to see. "When I was a kid, I'd just get in the bed and sleep on them [comics]," said the 47-year-old owner of Stormwatch Comics as he handled the $2.95 comic book. "But to take care of them, you can't just fold them back when you open them because you'll be breaking the spine.

Invincible. Amazing. Unstoppable. When I was a kid, such larger-than-life language sucked me into the world of comic books. They featured ordinary people for the most part, who through a set of bizarre circumstances acquired powers that made them superheroes. The Avenging Angel. The Diabolical Dr. Doom. And my all-time favorite, the Uncanny X-Men. The combination of great illustrations, over-the-top prose, and riveting story lines kept me spending my 25 cents each week for the next cliff-hanger.

New from Marvel Comics: Spider-Man meets the Incredible Raider. Spider-Man, you all know. Great climber, avenger of crime, star superhero. The Incredible Raider, with apologies to the Incredible Hulk, is Ronald O. Perelman, Philadelphian now in New York, chairman of Revlon Inc., feared predator on Wall Street. Perelman controls enough spare change to take over several billion-dollar companies tomorrow if he wanted to. So when he announced last month that he was buying Marvel Comics for a mere $82.5 million, it left people wondering whether maybe the savvy investor was on to something.

OK, so I'm no longer pubescent, but I read comic books. I began, I suppose, like any other normal person: reading the forbidden things in secret. Although over the years, comics have addressed "real life" issues, including, for example, rape, child abuse and substance addiction, with "real life" settings and relationships, there is something serendipitous still about the heroes handsome and heroic, the heroines handsome and heroic, and the abrasive, megalomaniac bad guys. Perhaps the most pervasive reason for reading comics is the most personal.

Henry Chmielefski is not your stereotypical, lunch money-squandering Batman addict - a 12-year-old boy in sneakers with fantasies of invincible biceps, triceps and pecs. Henry Chmielefski is a grown-up. A man who works for a living. A father. But there he was, hanging around last Saturday at a comic convention in the Woodhaven Howard Johnson's, in a room designed for wedding receptions, as tons of comic books were rolled in on dollies and set up behind clip-on spotlights that displayed rare editions.

Beginning this weekend with a two-day "quality auction" at the Slosberg Auction Gallery and culminating next weekend in a major art sale at Freeman's, the December auction calendar will offer a solid week of opportunities to bid on everything from works by students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to collectible comic books. The comic books will be offered at the first session of the Slosberg sale, beginning at 10 a.m. today at the gallery, 2501 E. Ontario St. The 500 lots include specimens from the so-called golden age of the 1940s and '50s, such as Weird Chills and Amazing Adventures, and some from the later "silver age," such as Hawkman and the Fantastic Four.

Comic Book Confidential compresses 55 years of comic-book history - from Batman to Big Baby, from the Flash to the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers - into a breezy, eye-grabbing 90 minutes of pop-culture commentary. Canadian filmmaker Ron Mann has said that he came to this project knowing next to nothing about the flimsy newsprint picture books, and that's probably just as well. Spawned in the '30s as a newsstand alternative to the Sunday funnies, comics developed into a form that now accommodates everything from sophomoric yuks and straight-arrow superheroics to gripping "graphic novels" about African apartheid and the Holocaust.

The Film at the Prince folks have come up with another winning program: comic books. Taking a cue from the recent box office successes of Spider-man, X-Men and The Flaming Carrot (OK, forget that last one - but check out Bob Burden's book featuring "the world's first surrealist superhero"), the Prince people have put together a late-summer series teeming with caped crusaders, Japanese anime, vintage noir, '60s camp, and other cool stuff adapted from and influenced by comics. The action begins tonight with Joseph Losey's 1966 study in pop-art cinema, Modesty Blaise.

Tiaira Rodgers has a sweet sparrow of a voice but knows how to make herself heard in print. "I feel like some adults think, 'Oh . . . they're just kids, they don't know anything,' but that's not true," she wrote. "I'm a Philadelphian, I know what goes on here. I understand that if one person suffers, we all can suffer. If one person succeeds we all can succeed. " Mighty Writers, a grand name, is a rec center for the mind. The passage is from her "Letter to Philadelphia," a testament of hope.

We're selling the house our parents bought for $8,500 in 1956. My five siblings and I moved out many years ago, but we've always been able to come back - from college or the military - for a celebration or crisis to the modest house in North Adams, Mass. So it's hard to imagine that soon, no one named Riordan will be living there. Perhaps you have, or had, such a house yourself: the backdrop for those first-day-of-school photos, the setting for the family's favorite stories. Like the one about our youngest brother breaking his collarbone on Mother's Day two years in a row. Or our mother somehow getting between two of her sons as they had a fistfight - over a doughnut.

Joe Kubert, the influential comic book artist and writer whose rugged, hyper-masculine artwork included Tarzan, the flying super-hero Hawkman, the World War II infantryman Sgt. Rock, and graphic novels about the Bosnian war and the Holocaust, died Aug. 12 at a hospital in Morristown, N.J. A spokesman at Mr. Kubert's comic trade school, the Dover, N.J.-based Kubert School, said the cause was multiple myeloma. Mr. Kubert, whose career spanned more than seven decades, started in comic books during the industry's infancy as a boy prodigy.

Shakespearean classics as comic books? Dante reduced to some sleazy strip out of the Sunday funnies? The Great Books - all those texts teachers told us to revere as holy, inviolate - increasingly are showing up on the graphic-novel shelves. For some, it's a potential nightmare: Homer's Iliad sitting next to Homer Simpson; Shakespeare's Tempest next to Peanuts . Yet artists and teachers alike are embracing recent graphic novelizations of a dozen great books, from the Bard of Avon's greatest tragedies to novels and short stories by Franz Kafka.

Local comic-book publisher Zenescope is on a roll and the latest proof is that Lionsgate TV is going down "‘Alice in Wonderland's" rabbit hole.   The studio that brought you "Mad Men" has emerged the winner for TV rights to Zenescope's "Wonderland" graphic novels, the company's editor in chief, Ralph Tedesco, told People Paper Comics Guy Jerome Maida. "I recently went to Los Angeles to pitch the property for TV, which was the first time we really focused on pitching for television," Tedesco said.

ST. MARIA Goretti High School is a home for orphaned vampire girls. An abandoned Fishtown factory is a space station infiltrated by werewolves. A Jefferson frat house is the home of murderous, demon-possessed sorority sisters. At least in the minds of Tony Trov and Johnny Zito, two South Philly-born-and-bred comics writers who transform Philadelphia into their own fantastic, dark playground. In a panel from their comic La Morte Sisters, about a version of Goretti (now Ss. John Neumann and Maria Goretti High School)

The 11th annual East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention celebrates the African American experience in comic books Friday and Saturday. The convention will offer an awards ceremony, film screenings, youth workshops, a parade, a comic-book marketplace, and other events at the African American Museum in Philadelphia and the Enterprise Center in West Philadelphia. Convention activities begin at 6:30 p.m. Friday at the museum, with a free reception and ceremonies for the Pioneer and Glyph comic awards.

THEIR FACES ARE distorted, coiled into extreme expressions, their eyes slanted shut - these are some of the stereotypical drawings found in American comic books featuring Asian characters. The Asian Arts Initiative is taking a closer look at depictions of Asians and Asian-Americans in the exhibit, "Marvels and Monsters: Unmasking Asians in U.S. Comics, 1942-1986," brought to Philadelphia by New York University's Fales Library and Special Collections. The exhibit draws from the extensive collection of William F. Wu, a science-fiction author and cultural studies scholar.

ADELE -MANIA CONTINUES. The British singer's "21" has spent 21 weeks atop Billboard's top-200 albums chart, and its 21st week is the best yet in terms of sales. Nielsen SoundScan reports that "21" sold 730,000 copies the week after Adele's Grammy sweep on Feb. 12. It's the longest stint for a woman at the top of Billboard's album chart, ironically displacing Whitney Houston's "The Bodyguard. " "21" has now sold 7.3 million copies.   Actors in fight scene The AFTRA merger has hit a SAG. According to the Los Angeles Times , " Mary Tyler Moore Show" costars Ed Asner and Valerie Harper are teaming up in an attempt to take down the proposed merger of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.