About Formats. The Telephone Book Collection

Christmas is coming up and you may be looking for presents for the comic fans of your acquaintance or maybe you might want to take this opportunity to try some comics. If so, that’s what this blog is for: comic recommendations for the new reader. Of course, graphic novels are quite an expensive medium, probably more than most of us will want to spend on anything less than the closest of relatives. So today we at New readers…start here turn the spotlight on a format that emphasises quantity and economy: the telephone book collection.

About... Grey Spines. A Consumer Warning

By and large we’re a positive bunch at New Readers… Start Here but today, for one post only, I will be dwelling on the negative and tell you about something you should not buy:

Marvel collections with a grey spine.

The reason this warning has not come before is because I was not convinced it was a general problem but rather that I was just unlucky. The books with grey spines represent an inferior British binding of Marvel graphic novels, quite simply the glue connecting the pages to the spine is not strong enough. About a hundred pages of my copy of Planet Hulk fell straight out of the book when I was about halfway through. Once, as they say, is an incident.