[NOTE: seriously, some of the links for those comics are Not Safe for Work. You’ve been warned…quit your job before clicking.]
Your pal Mike’s been burning the candle at both ends lately, so I’m going to try to keep it (relatively) short for today’s entry by finishing up some old business. Keef asked this of me a while back:
“The more I get into weirdo undergrounds and ‘adult’ comix, the more I want to know about their history and perspective. When I worked at a shop around the turn of the century, we didn’t really have any Undergrounds– or if we did, I was entirely unaware of them. It took a while for me to get into Undergrounds. I suspect that a lot of that was just because it wasn’t covered in the mainstream comics media that I followed when I got into the scene– Wizard didn’t do any cover stories about the bizarre pointillist nastiness of Jim Osborne, for example– but also because it just wasn’t around. I enjoy this stuff now because there are so many weird niche rabbitholes to climb down.
“At my relatively-small college town shop, we stocked Eros stuff, but I thought of it as the ‘dirty old man’ section, and so I didn’t pay much attention to it– except for a few exceptions, mostly by people I knew. It’s only in the past few years that I’ve gotten into the Eros stuff, mostly for entertainment value (the Tom Sutton stuff) but also because some of it is genuinely good.
“Historically, has there been a shift in the way that you sell undergrounds / adult stuff? Do you avoid blogging about it because this is a ‘family friendly’ blog?”
Well, it’s a fair cop, I don’t talk about any of this stuff nearly as much as I should, given the amount of it there is, and the impact much of it has had on the medium as a whole. I do have an “undergrounds” category (which I don’t think tags every discussion of the topic on here), so I haven’t dodged things entirely, but there is certainly more to say.
In terms of “how do I sell the stuff,” I actually wrote a post about this in 2014, which, to be fair, I didn’t expect anyone to immediately remember. In fact, I had to Google it up myself to recall when exactly I discussed this. Interestingly, this was in August of that year, a mere month before I announced to the world that I was opening my own store. So, in that post, where I was talking about how we dealt with adult comics at my previous place of employment, I was almost certainly thinking to myself about how I was going to handle them at my new shop. I’m a little…bemused at that.
At my “new” (now nearly 12 years old) store, I handle adult and underground comics somewhat differently, mostly because there aren’t quite the numbers of overtly “explicit” comics that there used to be. By which I mean, we’re no longer getting comics with titles like Pee Soup, accompanied by covers that make no bones about what’s going on inside. (That link is mightily Not Safe for Work, by the way.) Instead, we’re getting comics with the very adult content like Money Shot, a sci-fi adventure book with plenty of Tab A going into Slot B (and variations thereof) inside, but the covers (aside from the naughty bagged variants we were talking about a few days ago) are mostly innocuous, or at least not any more salacious than what you’d find on your typical issue of Vampirella. These would just get racked in with the general population on the shelves, maybe wrapped in a clear plastic comics bag to discourage casual nosiness by a young’un, if I thought maybe there’s a chance of improper exposure.
Anything that would be deemed too explicit, and perhaps too much — y’know — on the covers may be bagged and put up in a specific portion of the top new comics shelf, sort of like what we did at the old store. There hasn’t been a lot along those lines (Tarot Witch of the Black Rose would fit into this category, for example), but that’s what I’d do. Or there are cases where the actual title is a bit much, like Cat Shit One. That would get snuggled into the upper section as well, perhaps overlapped by the magazine next to it so I don’t have something called “CAT SHIT ONE” obviously blaring from my top shelf.
Now “undergrounds” as a category for any new comics is more an honorary designation than anything else, and not “Warning: This Comic Is Aggressively Countercultural or Whatever,” necessitating separation from the regular stock to avoid upsetting the squares. They’re just “independent comics,” now, and even when Robert Crumb, Mr. Undergrounds his own darn self, puts out a new pamphlet, it’s just up there on the new comics rack between Superman #32 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder #3. And it sold there just fine, thank you.
Older undergrounds have their own box behind the counter, as does older naughty stuff like Eros Comix, since I don’t necessarily want those out on the floor where Grandma can unknowingly pull one out and say “how about this one, Little Billy?” But really, that’s no big deal…I have a box full of Classics Illustrated behind the counter, too, because I don’t necessarily want these, in some cases, nearly 80-year-old comics being man-or-Grandma-handled without direct supervision. (In fact, a lot of my back issue stock is behind the counter, because I literally don’t have the floor space for everything to be within the customer’s reach.)
As to the actual quality of undergrounds and adult comics…well, that’s perhaps a subject for a more comprehensive post. Undergrounds probably don’t need the defending here so much as the more explicitly XXX-rated books that proliferated on shelves or behind the “18+” beaded curtains a few decades back. Yes, some were, like, “just go buy a copy of Hustler, why do you need a comic that’s tracing stuff from copies of Hustler,” but many were unique artistic expressions, too. Gilbert Hernandez’s Birdland, the inaugural title from Fantagraphics’ Eros line, is one that gets mentioned a lot. There’s the outrageousness of Don Simpson’s…excuse me, “Anton Drek’s” Wendy Whitebread Undercover Slut. There’s the relative cutesiness of Debbie Does Dallas (at least the early issues that were drawn by a former customer of mine!). There’s Ho Che Anderson’s early work I Want to Be Your Dog (about BDSM in the Black community), there’s Bill Willingham’s fantasy work Ironwood, there’s the just plain weirdness of Spank…I mean, there’s a lot of notable stuff happening under that “adult comics” label. And that’s not even talking about a lot of the European and Japanese material being rereleased under these imprints.
Anyway, it’s a rich mine to dig into, clearly. I’m not sure I want to spin off into a separate “Progressive Ruin…After Dark” site, so discussion of some of these may require some circumspection. I try to keep things mostly general audience friendly here…I mean, I’m assuming my readership is largely adult anyway, but I’m not putting up high-quality scans of anything unnecessarily Turgid or Sopping. I’m just not that kind of webpage. But reasoned discussion of adults-only material is not, and hasn’t been, out of the question. When I find I have something to say on the topic, I’ll be happy to write it up here. I just hope I won’t be forced to card any of you before doing so.