BG11 Available Now, BBT2 on Monday!

Lucky Comics' Beetle Girl #11, discussed in the previous post, showed up on Drive Thru Comics earlier today. It was originally believed that it would be available only in early April so the early release was a pleasant (and extremely rare) surprise.

The 8-page format that Lucky uses has very much grown on me. More along the lines of the golden/silver age material, Lucky's books pack a lot on a page, unlike most of today's books which commit three pages to show two dudes shaking hands or ordering coffee. At $0.75, they're not too hard on your comics budget and it's a good deal on a per-page basis, if you feel the need to analyze it to that degree.

And since we're talking finances, I've never been one to collect variant or rare covers. Never saw the point of buying the same content multiple times for what amounts to a single different page no matter how attractive the rare cover might be.

But for smaller, inexpensive books...Why not? The following cover was shared with me earlier this week (and has since been added to the Lucky Comics page above).

I didn't know if it was done with some degree of confidentiality so I didn't include it here right away, but my understanding is that the book is coming out early next week and a smaller version appears on Lucky's website blog now. I doubt I'm spoiling some big reveal then.

I quite dig this Marcelo Salaza work but I also liked the first cover that was made public. It is my understanding that the book will be available with either one, so I'll get both. One goes in the read pile, the other goes up on my wall. "Problem" solved.

As to the Beetle Girl issue, Lucky might have landed their finest artist yet (I say this without having read their entire catalog, mind you). Geanes Holland seems like a very good fit for the book.

Also, I enjoyed having the Black Bat butt heads with The Shadow in regards to methodology in the first Masks volume from Dynamite Entertainment a couple of years back. Something similar happens here, yet the Black Bat is on the opposite of the argument, interestingly enough.

The Black Bat appears in at least one more future issue of Beetle Girl and to the best of my knowledge, Black Bat Tales is meant to be an ongoing series. So it seems that Lucky Comics has become our proverbial "Bat channel" for the moment.