MEGA holiday sale!!

Everything must go!! Actually, fortunately, everything DOESN'T have to go, but I thought I'd have my biggest sale ever to give thanks to those who patronage my store. So starting today, November 28th, until the end of December, I'm having a 25% off sale on all graphic novels, trade paperbacks, hardcovers, and manga! This sale is my way of giving something back to all the discriminating readers who frequent my store, especially with all of the entertainment choices available. Another thing to keep in mind, is that I don't have crazy lines (like the big box stores or malls) at Alternate Reality Comics so shopping here is hopefully less stressful in that respect also.
Lots of great comic and manga volumes are looking for great homes, so hopefully this sale will make it easier for those of you that gift sequential art and or you'll be better able to treat yourself to that book you've had your eye on. Thanks again to everyone who choses my store for their comic book fix and especially you, that's right you - my audience of this blog, which makes my doing Ich Liebe Comics all the more gratifying.

La Muse

La Muse is a new graphic novel (well new in print form, it's been serialized online previously) written by Adi Tantimedh and drawn by Hugo Petrus (220 pages for $19.95). La Muse is Susan La Muse, an alien who's taken human form and has nth level super powers which she uses to correct the ills of our planet.









In La Muse, Adi Tantimedh fully explores what a person who has basically limitless powers could do to change the world. This graphic novel and its central character has a very liberal political activist slant, but La Muse isn't preachy, instead it's a very smart, highly entertaining graphic novel that really expands on what Alan Moore did with Miracleman years ago. Anyone who's ever read a superhero comic will appreciate how well thought out La Muse is. Alan Moore calls La Muse "wonderful" and he wouldn't lie to you, would he!?

my new sign, finally

So I finally got around to changing my store sign on the pylon sign tower that is in my strip mall center. I wished I had taken a picture of my old sign just to show what a dramatic improvement my new one is.
My old sign had white letters on a red background with a lettering font that I thought was cool and distinctive, but actually was hard to read.

The lettering font that I used for my new sign (and for almost everything I do that involves signs for the store) is a font called ccgthingamjig that I bought from ComicCraft (a company that sells licensed fonts) and is of course the same lettering for the classic Fantastic Four comic from Marvel. I originally chose black letters on a yellow background because I thought it would make an interesting inverse contrast to the sign next to mine on the pylon (The Stakeout, a bar a couple of doors next to my store), but I've always liked yellow and think it really pops out.
As you can see from these photos of my new sign, there's still a few empty spaces on this pylon sign (and there are a couple for businesses like Relic that don't exist) so if you can think of a cool, exciting business that isn't already represented in the immediate UNLV area, I'd love to have some new neighbors!

Keith Knight signing Nov. 28th!

This Friday, November 28th, from 4-6pm, everyone's favorite alternative cartoonist, Keith Knight, will be signing at my shop and sharing funny stories about the feedback he gets from his cartoons.

Keith Knight is mostly known to discriminating comic book lovers from The K Chronicles, his weekly alternative comic strip, that has been collected into five small trade paperbacks, which in turn has been collected into a single, massive volume by Dark Horse this past year.
In addition to becoming a papa this past year, Keith's other baby is the daily, The Knight Life, a nationally-syndicated comic strip that the Las Vegas Review Journal has been kind enough to run in their paper for our entertainment.
The two comic strips I've posted here are from Keith Knight's The Knight Life.

And as if The K Chronicles and The Knight Life wasn't enough, Knight also does a single panel comic called (Th)ink.

Hopefully those of you reading this will have recovered from eating a lot of tofurkey this Thursday to make it out to your favorite comic book store (which I hope is Alternate Reality Comics!) the day after (Friday, 4-6pm, Nov. 28th) and share some laughs with Keith Knight!

Pixie & Moto & Alucard

After three and a half months, it looks like our new kitties, Pixie and Moto (Moto's the grey one), have come to accept that we aren't just fattening them up to eventually eat them, and they've now joined Alacard (our black cat) in bossing us around.

Moto, doing her best to blend into our bed.











Pixie, with her kryptonite eyes, trying to make us give her more wet food (cats have really small brains so she doesn't realize that kryptonite eyes can't make a person do something).

Alucard, chilling in the garage, which is his version of going outside.

I thought it would take longer for the two new cats, Pixie and Moto, to adjust to us and their new surroundings, but now they roam everywhere and all three cats even get along as well as cats can.

Brave & The Bold & Watchmen

Tonight on Cartoon Network at 8pm the first episode of Batman: Brave and the Bold airs so set your dvr, tvo, or whatever recording device you use. If the animation looks like the screen capture I have accompanying this entry, than it looks to be good. I've liked all of the Batman animated series except for the last one titled The Batman, as I really disliked the design of the characters and I thought they cut way too many corners with that series' animation (not that I could even watch a whole episode of that series). Tonight's episode features Batman and the new Blue Beetle (who's an Hispanic teen-ager), with next week's episode featuring Batman and Green Arrow, and the week after will have Batman with Aquaman (so I'm guessing that Plastic Man as featured in the picture above will appear later, unless and episode features two other characters besides Batman).

For the second Watchmen trailer, click here: http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/You'll have to scroll down a bit. The music in the first part of this trailer is by the amazing Phillip Glass and the music in the latter half is by Muse.

Bottomless Belly Button

Another great graphic novel - I feel like a broken record this week, but this is a good thing, an actual embarrassment of riches for lovers of the sequential art medium. Today's book submitted for your consideration is Bottomless Belly Button, written and drawn by Dash Shaw and published by Fantagraphics Books. Bottomless Belly Button is over 700 pages for just $29.99 and while at first when you pick up this book, you think "wow, 700 pages!", but it actually reads fairly quickly, while being incredibly substantial at the same time.
Bottomless Belly Button is about the Loony family, who have come together upon the announcement that their parents are getting divorced after forty years of marriage. There's no forced drama within ala Lifetime television productions, rather Shaw has characters that react / process this new development in their family dynamic in the varied ways that people go through. The story construction of Bottomless Belly Button is similar to Alex Robinson's graphic novel Tricked or the movie Crash, without being derivative or too clever. The art evokes that of Jeffrey Brown (Clumsy, Sulk) and has a kind of slacker, leisurely pace that perfectly complements the rhythm of the story and characters.