Some of you may have noticed that I had sort of an impromptu Low Content Mode on the site last week, aside from Thursday’s post when I just kinda went on and on. No particular reason for it, other than, you know, having some other things to occupy my precious, precious free time. Like doing a little interior house painting. Or shooting people getting shot repeatedly on Red Dead Redemption. Or actually reading the occasional comic book. Or getting my usual daily dosage of five hours of sleep.
Plus, it doesn’t hurt to ease off a bit to recharge the batteries. I have been doing this daily for nearly seven years, when, after working all day slinging funnybooks at customers, I come home and write about funnybooks on the internet for free (well, mostly free, he said, gesturing desperately at his Amazon links). Please don’t begrudge me doing some “easy” posts once in a while. (And I put “easy” in quotes, because sometimes the simple posts end up taking as much time to put together as the more content-ish posts.)
I’m overreacting…it’s not like anyone really complained or anything, and traffic on the site has been up, and it seems like a lot of you folks have enjoyed the last week’s worth of entries…so consider my behavior encouraged. But I sometimes do feel like I’m skimping a bit when I do a lot of scan-heavy posts in a row, so…well, there you go. I’m a victim of my own guilt.
By the way, remember how like every year I say “okay, I’m going to stop updating every day” and yet I still keep posting every day? There’s something wrong with me, man.
BOO HOO I DON’T WASTE TIME ON THE INTERNET PROPERLY. Okay, enough of that, let’s move on to this:
I’ve been trying to use the category/tagging function of this site a little more frequently, mostly because I’m tired of seeing all my posts read “filed under Uncategorized” and, okay, fine, to make things easier for the readers, too. I’ve been a bit silly with some of the tags…I don’t know that I’ll ever use “worm-suit” again, but I’m sure someday I’ll once again find use for the “tampons” tag. I think my favorite category is “freak-out”…be sure to click that and scroll down for an old favorite of mine (after the much more recent post).
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So Tom Spurgeon did one of his regular “Five for Friday” polls where he asked folks to list five favorite Fantagraphics publications that weren’t by Chris Ware, the Hernandez Brothers, Charles Schulz, Dan Clowes, and Peter Bagge. For once I managed to participate in the poll, and you can see my entries
about a third of the way through this list of results, somewhere.
I found myself wanting to list far more than the five allowed…I did mention in a note accompanying the list I emailed Tom that the only reason I didn’t list James Sturm’s The Cereal Killings was that he’d already used it in his example list. (And come to think of it…has The Cereal Killings ever been collected? I can’t recall that it has. (For those unfamiliar, it’s sorta like the Watchmen/League of Extraordinary Gentlemen of cereal mascots, only far more low key and melancholy than those comparisons may suggest. Also, it’s brilliant.)
One title I did mention was the sadly uncompleted Eye of Mongombo, but when I Googled it up just to make sure I had the spelling correct, I found the blog for Mongombo creator Doug Gray! Specifically, this post featuring newly (as of 2009) commissioned Mongombo art! Pretty cool. Gray also mentions trying to work on the book again, and I sincerely hope he does.
There were several Fantagraphics publications I wanted to mention, like their excellent Popeye collections, or their Zippy books, or any of their Kim Deitch releases, or the pure evil of Scott Russo’s Jizz, or the assorted J.R. Williams magazine one-shots — but I did list his series Crap. Yes, that’s right…Jizz and Crap. Ask for ’em by name! I also thought about mentioning Don Rosa’s Comics & Stories but wasn’t sure if that counted…but looking at that Comics.org entry which lists Fantagraphics as the publisher, yeah, I guess it would have.
And then I saw other people mentioning Amazing Heroes and Comics Journal in their lists, and I was thinking, damn, why didn’t I think of that?
Oh, man…and there’s Real Stuff, and Anything Goes, and Schizo, and….
Anyway, not sure what the point of all that was, other than “I like a lot of stuff from Fantagraphics and should talk about them more on the site.”
Didn’t see anyone mention Teaser and the Blacksmith, a comic that was…certainly something. Not even sure how to begin describing it, and given the Googling I just performed, if I did describe it I’d become the go-to source on this book and I’m not sure if I’m ready to shoulder that responsibility. (EDIT: Ah, here’s a brief article that notes the premise of the story.)
I was also genuinely surprised no one listed Wendy Whitebread, from Fantagraphics’ Eros division. C’mon, the thing went through multiple printings, and I know I sold a ton of them…some of you have this comic. Don’t deny it.
So anyway, I did this as a quickie gag for a couple of friends in email, and the files have been sitting on my desktop for a few days, so what the heck, here you go:
SUPERMOBILE
CLARK KENTMOBILE
Just grabbed the pic via the Googling, so hopefully I didn’t offend anyone with my repurposing his/her scan. It was for the purpose of creating a better world, my friend.
Anyway, in other news:
- Regarding that panel I posted yesterday…I felt a little funny picking out a panel by freakin’ Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, for a bit of good-natured mockery. I mean, it seems almost sacrilegious, doesn’t it? Anyway, that panel was from a strip called “Federal Men,” which ran for quite a while in the various iterations of early Adventure Comics. You can read descriptions of some of the stories here. A reprint collection of these stories would be interesting, but I’m not holding my breath.
By the way, speaking of sacrilege: here’s reader Todd with his slight reworking of the panel:
- Tom Spurgeon has some commentary from one of his readers about comic pricing and buying habits. In particular, there is some discussion about the likelihood of someone spending more than $20 a week on comics in the late 1980s. As someone who entered the high-finance world of funnybook retailing in the late ’80s, I thought I’d supply a brief bit of anecdotal…well, perhaps not “evidence,” but it may be of interest.
Starting about the mid-’80s, and off and on through the late ’80s, our shop had a box of overstock and/or deadstock comics by the register with a sign on it that read “FREE COMIC WITH $20 PURCHASE.” And, it is my memory that the $20 level was originally picked because 1) it wasn’t a price level that was normally breached terribly often by the majority of customers, but 2) it was close enough to what a significant portion of customers were spending that the hope was that they’d plop another comic or two on the pile to hit $20 and qualify for their free comic.
Now…and please consider, I’m working off decades-old memories here…I believe that we had some, but not a lot, of customers slapping on additional comics to get to twenty bucks, but that eventually we had enough people already buying twenty dollars’ worth of stuff without going back and grabbing an extra book or two that they got their free comic anyway. And, eventually still, sometime around the big Batman movie-fueled boom, we did away with it completely. (I suppose we could have just raised the price level to, say, $30 or $40 for the free book, but at the time rivers of cash were flowing through the direct market and thus, perhaps the need to encourage additional sales in that fashion was no longer as strong.)
Later, we briefly did a “spend $50, get a free poster” thing along these same lines, which I’m pretty sure was in the post-market crash years of the mid ’90s. And that tells me that, even though the high-livin’ days of the boom were long gone, the customer base that remained was spending far more on average than they had pre-boom, so that $50 now seemed like the just-above-average typical sales level that seemed achievable.
My memory was that was more about clearing out old poster stock than hoping people would hit $50, which, like what happened with the $20 level, is something people gradually started doing anyway.
Wish I remembered more details about these things. Should’ve kept better notes.
- Speaking of our retail past: Chris Sims recently concocted this Comics Alliance article about comic book bumper stickers, and in the comments section to it, someone mentioned our old “U.S. OUT OF LATVERIA” stickers that we had at the shop. [NOTE FOR MY DAD, WHO READS MY BLOG: Latveria is the fictional country that the Fantastic Four’s arch-nemesis, Dr. Doom, hails from.] Now, I tried to respond to said comment with a link to a post on my site featuring said sticker, but alas, the CA comment machine does not like linkity-links, so instead I’ll post that link here.
And before you ask: no, I don’t have any more. Sorry, kids.
- More Comico history: the transition to color printing, including some early and neat-looking coloring guides for a page from the original Mage series.
- Pal Dorian does terrible things to an old DC subscription pitch. TERRIBLE THINGS.
- Employee Aaron’s fiancée Kempo whips out her 2010 San Diego Comic-Con report, with lots of photos of the two of them eating meals.
- I’d noted something on my Twitter the other day, and thought I’d repeat it here: you know what I’d like to see Christopher Nolan name the third Batman movie? The Caped Crusader. That’d be pretty awesome, right? Yeah, I knew you’d agree.
image from Famous Funnies #209 (December 1953)
Apparently there are still “ladies’ divisions” for racers (hot-rocket or otherwise) in the 25th century. EQUALITY…OF THE FUTURE!
…says the guy posting this because he thinks “Ram-Jet” Rosie is cute.
YES, I KNOW IT’S WEIRD you guys can have your Witchblades and your Kitty Prydes just let me have this DON’T LOOK AT ME
So anyway, I was looking through a copy of Batman #259 (Nov-Dec 1974) when I saw a special feature wherein readers submitted their own new costume ideas for Robin.
This one, frankly, isn’t too different from the standard model:
…but seems to be given just that little bit of extra…somethin’-somethin’ to push Robin over into “exotic dancer” territory. Perhaps this redesign should be kept in mind if the Batman burlesque stage show ever comes to pass.
Now this costume (by a noted fandom figure and author) is pure awesome:
Not so much for the costume, which is pretty much just giving Robin some limb coverage, but for this fantastic power ‘stache:
I am certain it is within Grant Morrison’s power to somehow squeeze this version of Robin into the forthcoming
Batman, Inc. series. WE KNOW YOU CAN DO IT, GRANT.
