Back around 1972 I was dating a young lady, whom would eventually become my first wife. Unlike any other girl I’d ever known Betsy read and collected comic books. I’d been reading comics since around the age of six or seven, but had never really been aware of a ‘fandom’ of any sort. Maybe if I had grown up in a larger, metropolitan area it would have been different. Anyway, one day Betsy brought me a copy of a rather new publication called “The Buyer’s Guide for Comics Fandom”. It was on newsprint and filled with pages of ads & articles about comic books. To say that this was a revelation is an understatement.

It didn’t take me long to purchase my own subscription and even begin ordering some of the other ‘fanzines’ advertised in those teeny-tiny ads. (How zines came to change my life is a whole other story.) I had a subscription to TBG (later to be renamed “The Comic Buyer’s Guide” and going from monthly to weekly publication) on and off for about twenty years. The paper went through changes in editors, publishers and countless columnists over the past thirty years, but would still have been recognizable to those early readers. Then earlier this year Krause Publications, the current publisher, decided to radically change CBG. It’s now a monthly magazine, of close to three hundred pages. The new look features glossy pages, some color and is about the same size as your typical issue of COSMOPOLITAN.

Merlin Haas, a fellow member of the comics apa CAPA-ALPHA and its current Central Mailer, was kind enough to send me an extra copy of the September issue (#1596).

This cover features SPIDER-MAN 2, but also has some nice articles on the history of CATWOMAN on the screen, the decrease in words in comics (fewer balloons, captions and larger panels all contribute) and a nice overview of manga & anime in the U.S. by another fellow Capa-Alphan, Fred Patten. Along with these are reviews by Tony Isabella and others, a price guide (with additional mini-reviews and information on some titles), plus informative articles on trading cards, models and gaming. In addition Peter David, Craig Shutt, Heidi MacDonald and Allen Smith have articles, carrying over from the weekly publication.

Overall, I was really thrilled to see the changes, but even happier to see so many of the things I enjoyed about the old CBG continued and in some cases expanded. I think it’s time that I start subscribing again.