Comic Books

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jean Giraud, 73, a French comic-book artist whose dark, intricately drawn fantasy worlds profoundly influenced graphic novels worldwide and U.S. science fiction films like Alien , Tron , and Avatar , died last Saturday at his home outside Paris. Mr. Giraud was seen in the comic-book world as a kind of artist-avatar of the unbounded interior human landscape. Mr. Giraud's pen name, Moebius, referred to the disorienting, curved plane known as the Mobius strip. In France, where the line between popular and serious art often blurs, he was a source of national pride.

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.

DALLAS - The bulk of a man's childhood comic-book collection, including many of the most prized issues ever published, sold at auction Wednesday for about $3.5 million. A copy of Detective Comics No. 27, which sold for 10 cents in 1939 and features the debut of Batman, got the top bid at the New York City auction. It sold for about $523,000 with a buyer's premium, said Lon Allen, managing director of comics for Heritage Auctions, the Dallas-based auction house overseeing the sale.

* THE WALKING DEAD. 9 p.m. Sunday, AMC. * COMIC BOOK MEN. 10 p.m. Sunday, AMC. IN THE AGE of the DVR, caring about audience flow is supposed to be, well, so 2007. We record what we want, we watch when we can. AMC must not have gotten the memo, because starting Sunday it's following the return of "The Walking Dead" with the premiere of Kevin Smith's "Comic Book Men. " It might look like a match made in geek heaven, but it's more than the pairing of a show based on a comic book series with one about the people who buy, sell and obsess about comics.

Create your own superhero on Saturday as the African American Museum in Philadelphia concludes its four-part series, "Outlined in Black: Creating Superheroes - A Comic Book Workshop for Youth and Young Adults. " The workshop, taught by acclaimed illustrator and artist Eric Battle, is inspired by the life of enslaved African American Robert Smalls who became a Civil War hero and a five-term U.S. Congressman from South Carolina. Families also can learn about the significance of black superheroes and the meaning of heroism.

His skin is a preposterous shade of yellow more appropriate to a Kool-Aid flavor. His bald oval head is crowned with a topknot tied with a red bow; he has squinty eyes and buck teeth that extend over his lips and the most garish yellow-on-green outfit you'd ever find in a circus supply store. Meet Chop-Chop, a comic book character who made his debut in 1941 in the first issue of the long-running superhero comic series, Blackhawk . Ugly, almost inhuman, the rotund guy would make for a great villain.

This week's DVD releases are topped by films about people who fight injustice and evil. Captain America: The First Avenger, Grade C-minus: Chris Evans - the guy who put the heat in the Human Torch in the Fantastic Four movies - steps into the boots of the latest comic-book-inspired film champion. He plays Steve Rogers, a 90-pound weakling who, through the magic of science, becomes the hunky Captain America. The film isn't a major disaster, but it generally could use some work.

We all know how the story goes: book becomes bestseller, bestseller becomes Hollywood blockbuster. It's expected that our favorite reads will one day leap off the page and onto the silver screen. But today, popular volumes are finding a second life on the shelf, visually reimagined as comic books. A seemingly limitless number of classics are available in kid-friendly comic versions, from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to A Tale of Two Cities. The Diary of Anne Frank, Fahrenheit 451, and even The Book of Genesis have all been transformed into comics.

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.