Hola, Sneakers. Welcome to the Episode 460 of the podcast that introduced the concept of ghosting!
This week: haste waste; time travelling; it’s all about Vietnam; a Dahl’s house; let’s all read Kathleen Gros’ Jo; petty; a Top 10 Kids Books rundown; Terry Fox; burrower worms trilogy; bad gift getter; mean girls; the orange shirt; show interruption #1: let’s all check out Sarah Walsh’s YouTube channel; interruption #2: we’re not here to promote Table Top Tiddies; the problem with the comics industry; EC Comics; superhero boom and bust; the real Golden Age; the ideal market; “mature” readers; the cure for a problem that doesn’t exist; content farms; so long, comics shops; targeted audiences; the perils of fan fic; two-fisted teen romance; yukking it up; paging Dr. Superman; the most important thing; the ideal comic shop; intro to Asterix; Howard the Duck mania; comic strip page changes; jumbles; a lesson in sarcasm; the high cost of schooling; over-zealous; our listeners are smart; gnomes; the art teacher bullet; listener recommendation: The Goes Wrong Show; invasive wallabies; be proud; no Ed today; jerk mail; and, finally, a real coincidence.
Thanks for listening.
Question of the week: Comic fans, what makes a good comic book store? Not a comic book fan? What would convince you to visit a comic book store?
Sub-question of the week: Comic fans, what is your favourite non-superhero comic book character? (You can insert a comic strip character into your answer if that’s your bag.)
Here’s a sample of Sarah’s aka Earth Immigrant’s channel content – this week she trickily plays along with herself! (Hope you don’t mind us posting this, Sarah!)
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Hey now, you didn’t plug the podcast we were all on, talking about Sparks! I think we had a good discussion that listeners will get a lot out of.
https://pagesandpanels.squarespace.com/blog/2020/9/17/pages-and-panels-vol-2-36-ian-boothby-nina-matsumoto-david-dedrick-and-sparks
And I might have to take you up on the Halloween offer. Maybe I’ll pick a costume that involves a full face mask.
Oooops! We’ll plug it next week. Probably when I’m reading this letter out loud.
Well heck, you guys! I don’t mind at all. Thank you! I’m only about 2/3 through the episode at the moment (got rudely interrupted with actual work duties at work – it is a week of interruptions that aren’t) so I’ll check back in to answer the weekly questions when I get to them. ????
Hey dudes! I forgot to mention in regard to university in Australia, I did a 3 year BA and my total fees were around 9,000 bucks for the whole 3 years, for which I will never have to start paying it back (having left the country). If I WERE still in Australia, I think you start paying it back at around a dollar a day as soon as you start earning over 54 grand a year. (I never did – I’m an artist!)
I sat on the interview panel in my third year to help pick the first year students for after we left and there are only 60 spots in our advertising course of which we were to fill 45. The other 15 HAVE to be filled by international students who pay around 50-60,000 per year, otherwise our courses just wouldn’t run. So yeah, our meagre fees are heavily subsidised by international dupes, er… students.
For comic stores, we all have our lottery dreams, right? One of mine has always been to have a kind of comic space aimed primarily at kids. A library/store/studio space. A reading area, where kids can just chill out and read together, a store where parents can buy stuff if there’s something kids really like, rooms where artists can rent studio space with nice big windows if kids want to watch (with blinds if the artists don’t want to be watched). And rooms with SO much art materials where kids can come and create and share their own stuff, have workshops with artists… I would have LOVED something like that when I was a kid. Might have made it easier to find MY people. There was no comic shop in my small town growing up so there were no other kids who read comics in my school. My brother and I were a lonely island in a sea of boring. (We got our comics from a neighbouring town where our mum lived and our dad taking us on frequent trips to the big city to fuel our habit because we were relentless.)
For now, I enjoy stores that are arranged logically. Comics grouped together by genre. Then by publisher, or alphabetically. Or both. Sections where prolific authors have all their stuff in one spot. That kind of thing. I kind of organise everything at home that way though, so like most people, I guess I’m just responding to a mirror?
For non-superhero comic characters, I have to pick Peanuts and Donald Duck comics as my favourites because they were my biggest influences. In each one, my favourite characters were Charlie Brown because he was the loser and I could always relate to that in school because my one passion was drawing, to the detriment of EVERYTHING ELSE. And I always enjoyed the stories where Gladstone Gander showed up because while he was insufferable, his powers of luck were very VERY appealing.
What makes a good comic book store?: I’d consider myself a comic book fan, but I don’t have much experience with full-fledged comic book stores. Instead, I typically buy my comics either online, at Barnes & Noble, or at secondhand bookstores like Bookoff. Those satisfy my needs pretty well, but I’d certainly be open to shop at any comic book store that had a nice, relaxing atmosphere. I’m a real sucker for buying a drink that I can sip on while I browse, so a comic book store with a good café would be a definite plus.
Favorite non-superhero comic book character?: hard to pick just one, but to stay on the Alan Moore theme a bit, I recently reread The Ballad of Halo Jones, one of his earlier works that I don’t think gets enough attention. Halo Jones is an ordinary woman from a poor background struggling to survive in a far future society. The series got cancelled after only three of the planned nine volumes, but it still ends on a fairly satisfying note, and is well worth checking out.
Unsure if I’m late… I hope not. Don’t see Ed yet hahaha. Just wanted to say thanks for the kind words last week, and that you should not fret! My four years at university were much better than my high school years, and I found a great group of friends there. We have a lot of good clean fun together.
I don’t really have much of an answer for your comic book question. I’m definitely not a comic book fan, I’ve read many of the Tintin books for French class, but that’s about it. I’m just personally bad with keeping up with serial entertainment. Don’t really watch tv shows either. So i guess I would need to guarantee whatever comic i was picking up was a complete story. Also comic shops in general would have to feel more inviting to women. I really hope I’m wrong, but I get the impression that if you’re a women in comics/ who enjoys comics that you have to “prove yourself”. Love to hear Nina’s opinion on this.
I’ve never felt out of place in a comic book store or been made to feel unwanted there. Workers have always been friendly and accommodating.
Also, I just wanted to say the 6 year old has let me start reading “The Abandoned” to him (the book about the boy who turns into a cat) instead of the next Five Nights At Freddy’s book (written for 12 year olds, mind you) and he’s enjoying it. After the first two chapters I asked him what he thought and he said he wants to rip the book up into a million little pieces because it has people in it who throw cats so… he cares.
I suppose I qualify greatly having worked in a comic store as well as shopped at almost all of them in my area. My store, as you know, was Lone Star Comics, based in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. Buddy Saunders, the owner, kept as many as eight stores going at one time which doesn’t sound easy…especially during the 80’s. Lone Star in the beginning was a Sci-Fi and Fantasy book store with comics, old and new. Buddy was smart and was always looking to sell the things you couldn’t find anywhere else, first edition hardbacks, collector comics, D&D supplies, Japanese imported models (like Battle of the Planets), ROBOTECH toys and Anime. When I was working there we had a huge customer base of readers who could only find an entire series of books that you couldn’t find an any of the bigger chains and if our store didn’t have it, we’d order it. I think Buddy’s attention to this kind of service made Lone Star a successful store and I was proud to be part of it. We would keep the Diamond Distribution catalog out for customers so they could see previews of what was coming out in months to come, so we’d then order extra if those customers wanted something. The same customers kept coming back week after week, so I think we were doing something right.
Ian was spot on about how to conduct oneself when working in a comic store, be the professional and never try to hard sell the customer, they usually know what they want. Nine times out of ten the customer just needs to know you’re there as an authority of what you’re selling. Buddy used to visit us once or twice a week from the flagship store and during those times expected us to hard sell customers and educate them. This came off as kind of patronizing sometimes but Buddy still wanted us to perform this way. One day a guy came into the store and asked where we had our Tarzan comics. He was mostly after either the Kubert art or the Buscema art so we showed him where they were in the back issues. When the guy came up to buy the comics, Buddy said, “Let me show you how this works.” So Buddy starts in with the guy about Tarzan in a very patronizing way, “Do you know who wrote Tarzan? Have you ever heard of Edgar Rice Burroughs?” Stuff like that. So Buddy take s the guy back into the store to show him that we also had an entire selection of Tarzan novels by Burroughs. A few minutes later, the guy just put the Tarzan comics back on our counter and said he might come back and get them another time and then ran out of the store. Buddy ran this guy off with his hard sell tactics but we couldn’t tell him that the guy had ran out. Buddy was a great guy for building the Lone Star business but a little heavy handed at selling what he had built.
I did work there during some interesting times in comics. I feel like comics really grew up in a short period of time, all within my almost four years at the store. During that period I witnessed the development of so many comics influences that are discussed to this day, The Dark Knight Returns and Daredevil, both by Frank Miller. WATCHMEN and Swamp Thing by Alan Moore, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, John Byrne’s Man of Steel, Marvel’s Secret Wars and DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths. All this happened during my time and it was wonderful.
There were also the less than wonderful events too. The court battle for Marvel’s “Work for Hire” vs Jack Kirby started while I was at Lone Star which made Marvel look like industry bullies at the time. I remember making signs to build awareness about all this and many of the comic creators were on board in defense of Kirby as well. There was also Buddy’s rant in the “Comics Journal” magazine about censorship and how violent the industry had become which led to a so much damage control for Lone Star. Buddy had basically shot himself in both feet and the industry pushed back at him. I still remember Buddy and Chris Claremont debating the issue on The Today Show. Buddy used to discuss with us that the best era of comics had passed and that the stories had become so violent and grim, a turn he didn’t like. Comics should be like a DC “Imaginary Story” (DC’s precursor to Marvel’s “What If?”) from 1965 that was fun for all ages or Little Lulu, another one of Buddy’s favorites. Speaking out against the progressive writing of the time and selling it made Buddy an industry hypocrite that finally faded away after my time there.
When all that happened though, we had to rearrange the store so that children couldn’t get their hands on the latest copy of Miracleman that showed a vaginal birth of the hero’s daughter, all that stuff had to be put up high and broke up the flow of the store. It was not as bad as you’d think because we knew the readers of those comics were there for those comics and could find them, the process just threw my manager’s OCD way out of whack by segregating the comics because of Buddy’s values.
I knew this would get long, I rant about Lone Star Comics even when I’m not asked about it…
I’d be crazy if I didn’t choose Cerebus for this particular character, I invested a lot of time and money in Sim’s groundbreaking comic at the time. I was drawn in by a good friend who was a Cerebus reader before me, he pointed out that there were Marx Brothers references with Lord Julius for Groucho and Duke Leonardi for Chico during the “High Society” story arc…I was immediately hooked. I remember going on a Cerebus buying frenzy, going from store to store and buying what I could afford in back issues. I then had the opportunity to visit with Sim and Gerhardt at several Comic Cons back in the 80’s and 90’s, the kind Cons where you could sit and watch these guys draw all day. If you were in the right place at the right time, one of them would sketch you something for a drink! Sadly, I didn’t keep up with the entire run of Cerebus, something I’d like to complete one day. I hear that Sim took the series into a more personal preachy direction but I’ll have to decide if that’s for me on my own.
Jesus, what an epic…I have more to say about comics but I’ll cap it off here for this week.
Thanks guys, I was enthralled by Episode 460, I like discussions about funny books…
My marker version of Cerebus on Bristol board from 1986:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BVdzlGFFDzr/