Popeye-ing the question.

§ September 23rd, 2024 § Filed under question time § 40 Comments


Unfortunately, your pal Mike is a little under the weather, so I’m going to do something I haven’t done in a couple of years: I’m asking YOU for your questions!

That’s right, plug in your questions (or even topic suggestions) into the comments section on this here post and I will get to them within a hopefully reasonable amount of time. Just a couple o’rules:

1. ONE QUESTION PER PERSON, PLEASE. I only have so much life left to live, and need to attend to as many of you as possible.

2. KEEP ‘EM COMICS INDUSTRY RELATED. I mean, if you ask me a rules question about beholders in your D&D campaign, or my best stock tips, I can give it a shot, but keep in mind a) my D&D knowledge peters out sometime around the late 1980s, and b) I don’t have money for things like “stocks” or “bonds” or even “medicine” so take my answers with a grain of salt.

So there you go…throw them my way and I’ll get to them as I’m able. Thanks pals, and hopefully I’ll be up and running again as normal by Wednesday.

40 Responses to “Popeye-ing the question.”

  • Sean Mageean says:

    I wonder if Stan Lee was a fan of All-Star Comics during the 1940s–as a newspaper article from “The Daily Bugle” appears in All-Star Comics no. 30. Perhaps Earth-2’s iteration of J. Jonah Jameson was a cub reporter at The Daily Bugle at that time–and maybe he had it in for The Tarantula…

    https://images.app.goo.gl/yCaaS4C3K9PuxyBp7

  • Paul Engelberg says:

    How have Ahoy Comics done in your shop?

  • Mike Loughlin says:

    Which current comics have your customers interested and excited?

  • Joe Cabrera says:

    In general, do you enjoy today’s comics as much as those of yesteryear? If not, why? Is it nostalgia coloring your opinion, stories getting worse, unappealing plot directions, etc.?

  • will richards says:

    In your opinion, which are the most criminally un-reprinted runs of both Marvel and DC comics?

  • Dave Carter says:

    Who is your favorite comic book Doctor? (either MD or PhD…)

  • JohnJ says:

    How in the world do you decide how many variant covers to order of some books, especially with DC’s extra dollar for variant cardstock covers?
    The multiple covers bit started when I still was ordering comics in the 90s and it drove me nuts. It’s got to be ten times worse today with damn near every book having multiple covers.
    How about the blank covers for sketches? Do you have customers that ask for those?

  • Paul Di Filippo says:

    How would you reboot the Harvey Comics Universe to make it appeal to the youth of today?

  • Who would be on your “Mount Rushmore” of comic book creators?

  • googum says:

    Hey, was ACTION COMICS WEEKLY direct sales only? I didn’t think it was newsstand, but just checking; figured you’d know!

  • Derek Moreland says:

    How are the ENERGON UNIVERSE (Transformers, G.I. Joe minis, Void Rivals) selling for you? Corollary question: is Transformers doing better now than the MtMtE/RiD days at IDW?

  • ExistentialMan says:

    Mike, apologies if you addressed this before. You’ve mentioned your comic reading backlog (and unfortunate eye challenges) several times over the years. I’m curious if you have a system for how you tackle your stacks of books. Do you just read them in the order you placed ’em in the longbox? Selectively choose back issues that relate to current titles? Toss a random dart at the stack? Please enlighten us.

  • Adam Farrar says:

    I’ve never read any of the original Popeye comics. But I’m missing out, yeah? My library has the six volumes from Fantagraphics. Should I try to find the pre-Popeye Thimble Theater strips to read first?

  • Nate A says:

    Is the era of the superstar penciller over? Will there be another Byrne or Lee (proportionate to the current baseline sales) or did something happen in the market to make that impossible?

  • Matthew says:

    You’ve had your own store for ten years (good job! congrats!), what’s the biggest mistake you’ve made (comics related or not)?

  • Tom W says:

    Do your comics retailer abilities, honed over many years, mean your comics are in mint even after you’ve read them?

  • Andrew Davison says:

    Where is Groot currently?

  • Thelonious_Nick says:

    “I’ve never read any of the original Popeye comics. But I’m missing out, yeah? My library has the six volumes from Fantagraphics. Should I try to find the pre-Popeye Thimble Theater strips to read first?”

    I can answer this one! Yes, start with the over-sized Fantagraphics Volume 1 and work your way through, this is absolutely one of the best things ever published.

    Don’t bother with pre-Popeye Thimble Theatre, although as I recall, you get a couple months of pre-Popeye strips in that Vol. 1 anyway, as you start off with the story of Castor Oyl trying to catch the whiffle hen that leads to the first Popeye appearance.

    The Sunday strips in the back half of the book are wonderful, with the full-page Popeye strips (bonus strip Sappo included!). When I look at them, or also the full-page reproductions in the Prince Valiant hardcovers, it makes me weep to see what the Sunday comics have been reduced to now.

  • Chris says:

    How much do you need to keep track of storylines for ordering purposes? Is it mostly character appearances and event tie-ins, or does it go deeper than that?

  • Adam Farrar says:

    Thanks Nick!

  • Patrick Gaffney says:

    Have your started your Cerebus read through yet? I have almost made it thought the first collection and it truly amazes me how the art progresses over that first year or two.

  • Thom H. says:

    I’m always curious why people have the jobs they have, so: what drew you to comics, both as a hobby and as a profession?

  • Smicha1 says:

    You get to curate a big chonky omnibus from the post-TMNT black-and-white indy boom. Roughly 1,000 pages. What’s going in it? (Choices do not have to be animal-related.)

  • Davey boy says:

    John Wagner, Alan grant, pat mills, any thoughts on the 2000ad trinity when they dipped their toes in marvel and DC in the 80s/90s?

  • Daniel T says:

    I feel like I’ve asked this before, but I’m very close to your age so obviously I’m basically decrepit.

    Stan Lee supposedly said something like “Every comic is/could be someone’s first comic.”

    How true do you think this ever was and is today?

    This strikes me as something he would have said in the late 60s or 70s and would have been more applicable when the medium had more of a mass market and you could come across comics “in the wild.”

    But with the rise of the direct market in the 80s and 90s and the explosion of titles, I think it became almost impossible for any given issue to be someone’s first.

    And today I’d argue the vast majority of comics issues aren’t someone’s first. Is anyone’s first comic going to be Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose 132, The Holy Roller 8 or Absolute Powers: Origins 3?

  • Allan Hoffman says:

    If you could give advice to your past self when you were planning your store what would it be?

  • Andrew Davison says:

    Have you found that the natural impulses of a collector versus those of a successful purveyor of comics have led to an irreversible psychotic break? A comic shop Jekyll and Hyde situation, if you like?

  • Michael Grabowski says:

    “Yoo-sa-gi” or “oo-sa-gi”? I had heard of Usagi Yojimbo for ever but only started reading it five years ago and completed (and started over) just this summer. If this was in your 80’s or 90’s extensive survey/poll, I’ll go back and look but if not, can you offer some commentary on it as both a series that you perhaps have enjoyed or as a comics property that you have seen customers enjoy? And if you already dealt with most of that elsewhere around here, can you just answer the first question, please?

  • Michael Grabowski says:

    @Adam Farrar, @Thelonius_Nick, There’s an issue of The Comics Journal around #275 where they reprinted the pre-Popeye Whiffle Hen sequence that immediately precedes Popeye’s introduction and leads into Volume 1 of that edition of FBI’s Popeye collections. That’s a lot of fun. Also, there’s a huge Sunday Press book of Thimble Theater Sundays from the two years or so before Popeye showed up, featuring a very long sequence of Castor Oyl stranded in the desert. It’s entertaining, but also confirms that we’re not really missing out much due to the dearth of readily readable non-Popeye Thimble Theater strips.

  • Wayne Allen Sallee says:

    Mike. What are the odds tthat this was the original concept for THE THREE JOKERS?

  • MisterJayEm says:

    Q: What’s something (the biggest thing?) about the comics business that comic book buyers/fans don’t understand?

    Make me smarter about my ignorance, Mike!

    — MrJM

  • Rob S. says:

    I’ll piggyback onto Daniel T’s question by asking another. Assuming the “every comic is someone’s first comic” maxim is true — do readers want the same thing in their first comic today than they did 40 years ago? Does clarity of action & characters in an ongoing storyline matter to new readers now? Did it, in actuality, matter then? Or was/is the dazzling incomprehensibilty of it part of the attraction?

  • Oliver says:

    Japanese pronounce ‘usagi’ as “oo-sah-gee” but it seems Westerners have an easier time making the first syllable “yoo”.

  • King of the Moon says:

    Is anyone under college age interested in the new Ultimate titles?

  • Michael Grabowski says:

    Thanks, @Oliver! I’ll work on saying that correctly at my LCS and with my daughter who reads it, too. “Ask for it by name!” (But not with the Power Rangers, please.)

  • John says:

    The Eternal Query: Who would win in a fight – Dennis Dunphy, or Bibbo Bibbowski?

  • LouReedRichards says:

    Sorry I’m late to the party on this.

    Is there a property that you once wanted to see adapted into another media that you now hope is never touched, so it remains in its “purest” form?

    Zelazny’s Amber Chronicles as an example. LOVE the books, but the comics from the early 90’s (IMHO) were truly terrible.

  • Bob Stec says:

    What is Swamp Thing’s middle name?

  • Sean Mageean says:

    @Bob Stec

    I’ll take a guess that Swamp Thing’s middle name is “Heap” …

  • Michael Grabowski says:

    Regarding the pre-Popeye Thimble Theater, look what FBI just announced for this month: https://fantagraphics.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e7bf7e04ba74544c5173d3076&id=4b1732dbd2&e=71a8b9b4d6

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