Keys keys keys!
The ninth Wednesday of the year is upon us and that means new comic books, but even more importantly key issues that we need to keep an eye out for to pick up at cover price. To see a full list of all the Key issues make sure you check out keycollectorcomics.com. Now if I had to narrow it down to only 5 key books, these would be those books.
Starting off this top 5 list of keys, I could think of no better way to start other than with my personal favorite, Detective Comics. This week issue 1020 is released with an outstanding artist doing the B card stock cover, Lee Bermejo. Since Peter Tomasi jumped on to this run of Detective, it's been a great ride and now having this incredible artist doing the B covers and a few more issues to come, seems like a no brainer book to pick up. I do understand that there are people who do not consider “cover art” to be a “key issue” but in my frame of mind I look at it from a different perspective. Dealing with a book like Detective Comics that is not slowing down or ending, a book that has seen every “age” of comics from golden to modern, there is a market of collectors that focus on putting together full runs of this series, including variants. Along with a set of collectors that only focus on certain cover artists, so would that not be considered a key? It's also almost as if a comic book being a ”Key Issue” is in the eye of the beholder. I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Punching her way into the second slot, we have Year of the Villain Hell Arisen issue #3. If you can recall from last week we had Punchline’s first cameo appearance in Batman 89 but now its her full-on first appearance. If you subscribed to Key Collector you would have received the push notification Monday morning showing the panels in which she appears. Now, if you missed out on this, hate to break it to you but this is going to be a little tough to find at your LCS this Wednesday. Even if for some reason you are the first one in the door and the shop just happens to have this book, I’m pretty sure it's going to be marked well above cover price, leaving you with the rapid fire question: will you pay 20$ or more for this issue? The choice is yours my friend, choose wisely.
Go ninja go ninja go! Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Jennika issue #1 drops this week. If you don‘t recognize that name, fear not, for there has been a recent addition to the TMNT family. Back in July of 2019, in issue 95 of the IDW TMNT run, we saw the transformation of Jennika, mutating into a Ninja Turtle. Pretty cool right? I personally thought we would have seen Venus from the TV show back in the 90’s but that's irrelevant here. This issue is going to be Jennika‘s first solo run and it's only 3 issues, but that's a good thing. Three issues are easily collectable and should also be a good insight into the character. Now the second question is: with all the different covers, what's the best one? In my opinion, it’s a Tyler Kirkham Store exclusive. Price is a little steep at 49$ for the virgin and regular covers but the homage to Spiderman is hard to go wrong. You can check out that cover over at https://acomicspot.com/
Now, my second to last key is more or less a shot into the dark. I personally am not too familiar with Falcon and Winter Soldier but this is a new Marvel book and it does contain a key. That key being a 1st appearance of The Natural who is a “gifted” killer. Not too sure what that means but I’m all in on a cool new assassin character. What do you think?
Last but not least, not at all actually. Ant Man issue #2 is pushing first appearances out the wazoo. This issue is supposed to contain 3 first full appearances and one possible cameo appearance!
It could possibly be the sleeper pick of the week. I say that because this week everyone is having tunnel vision over Year of the Villain for that first full punchline but here we have Ant Man introducing multiple new characters, and that's pretty cool.
-Perry Comics
Perry here, I host a comic book YouYube channel known as Perry Comics and also a little Instagram over at @perry_comics. When I don't have my nose in a book or eyes glued to editing you'll catch me in the community supporting all the other incredible creators. You can catch me multiple times a week “Lurkin” where I do multiple hours live streaming to highlight every single person that uploaded comic book related content that day.