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Had one of these in a collection we’re processing, and just felt like it needed to be shared (with apologies for stealing pal Dorian’s paperback book club idea).

…and enjoy the continuing mayhem from this weekend from afar. However, I did come across these classified ads in Comics Journal #64 (July 1981) that I wanted to share.

I wonder if this person actually did find that job:

“WANTED: A FULL-TIME JOB in a Cleveland, Ohio area comic book store. Have had previous bookstore experience. Am willing to move to Cleveland from Mansfield to get this job! This is not a dream, not a hoax, not an imaginary want ad!”

This next one has me thinking:

“ARTISTS-WRITERS WANTED!! for teenage super-hero work (heroes of my own and What-If? variations on others). If you like it when the villain vs. hero outcome isn’t predictable, this is for you!”

“Not predictable” – oh, so the villains win. Or maybe both the villain and the hero lose to a greater menace. Or they’re fighting in the street and get hit by a UPS truck, killing them both. Or they just sorta mutually decide that it’s a draw and go their separate ways. The outcome could be any of these things or something else entirely! UNPREDICTABLE!

This is a subscription ad for a comic collecting magazine:

“MONEY! OLD COMIC BOOKS are an investment as good as gold! Let us show you how and what to buy.”

“Invest heavily in Howard the Duck. Surely nothing will affect future sales on this hot comic!”

“NOW AVAILABLE: COMPLETE CHECKLIST of comics used in ‘Seduction of the Innocent.’ Also available, complete checklist of comics used in ‘Parade of Pleasure.’ Each list includes illustrations. Each list $1.00 which includes postage and printing costs.”

Saves you the trouble of pulling them out of the Overstreet guide, I guess (if it even listed them all at the time…I don’t know). But there were (and still are) people looking for these, so I guess the seller was hoping people would buy his lists and use ’em as checklists as they wander around the convention floor looking for that one comic where Dr. Wertham thought he saw a vagina in the shadowed muscles of some character’s arm or shoulder.

Er, anyway.

So I’m crawling back into my bunker. Let me know when the shooting stops, please.

Scans_Daily, the long-running LiveJournal community dedicated to providing scanned pages of comics new and old with varying levels of “fair use” (ranging from “well within” to “not even in the slightest”) was taken down the other day. Johanna has a sympathetic take on the situation, whereas Kevin gives ’em an extra kick in the rear out the door (URL may not be safe for work). EDIT: And Lisa drops in some solid commentary about the situation, which I’m sure will result in the sort of reasoned, rational response the internet is known for.

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I keep meaning to mention an odd coincidence involving once-former-now-current-again-employee Kid Chris. His home phone number is one digit off from the store’s phone number. And he once received a call that went a little something…like this:

(phone rings)

Kid Chris: “Hello?”

Guy on phone: “Is this Ralph’s Comic Corner?”

Kid Chris: “No, you have the wrong number…but I work at Ralph’s Comic Corner. Can I help you with something?”

Guy on phone: “…What?”

Then there’s the fact that Kid Chris’ address is similar enough to the address of one of our longtime regular customers that the customer’s Wizard subscription is often delivered to KC’s house. But that’s a story for another time. Er, except I just told the whole story. Never mind.

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Seriously, there are moments when I think “they didn’t really actually make a Watchmen movie, did they?” and then I realize we’re less than a week away from it opening and it just blows my mind, man.

Sure, it’s probably not any good, but just that it exists is enough to mess with me.

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Because internet pal Dave is awesome, he made this for me:

Nearly all the endings result in some horrible death, except for the one that ends with you becoming manager of a comic shop, which in some ways is even more terrifying.

THIS GREEN LANTERN’S WEAKNESS

IS YELLOW SNOW

from Green Lantern #154 (July 1982)
by Paul Kupperberg, Paris Cullins & Rodin Rodriguez

A suspect has been arrested for the murder of customer Sean.

• Well, I think this comment on my post about the effect of text pieces in Watchmen is bit of a gross mischaracterization. I’m not calling (or being just short of calling) anyone a “dumbass” by telling them to skip the text pieces. It was a matter of the story’s pacing being affected by supplementary material when presented in collected form, not comprehension of the actual text pieces themselves, that I was discussing. If you think the text pieces are adversely affecting the enjoyment of the narrative, particularly when you’ve got the whole thing under one cover just sitting in front of you waiting to be read…hell, just skip the back-ups, come back to them later. No big whoop.

  I’m not going to repeat my entire discussion (you can just reread the original post), but I just wanted to emphasize no one was calling anyone else stupid here. I was just making an observation based on customer feedback, not standing in judgment of lesser beings. I save that for those puny, misguided mortals who don’t like All Star Batman.

• Pal Dorian wants to know just why, exactly, you think Aquaman is lame…if in fact that’s what you think about him.

  Dor and I have talked discussed this once or twice at the shop, and I even brought it up here when talking about characters to revamp. Not that we’re talking about how lame Aquaman is, just that there’s nothing specifically wrong with the core concept. Anyway, don’t tell me about it, tell Dor.

• Happy ninth anniversary to Neilalien, the greatest comics blogger of them all, and the one that blazed the trail for all the rest of us who followed. Thanks, Neilalien, for all those years of great writing, solid linkblogging, and wonderfully obsessive Doctor Strange content. Here’s to many more years of your insight and wit!

We have, in one of the many collections we’re dealing with at the store at the moment, a copy of Broadway Magazine from 1910. The back is filled with a lot of great period ads like the one above, and of the sort I’m sure many of you would recognize as similar to ads used as back page illustrations in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen mini-series. In fact, this very issue of Broadway has the infamous “Marvel Syringe” ad, the inclusion of which in an issue of League resulted in that issue’s pulping and revising as so, I suppose, not to offend DC’s crosstown rivals. You can read more about that (and see the ad in question) here, if you scroll down a bit.

Anyway, that’s my loose connection to comics for this post, justifying it ever so slightly for inclusion on this site. But mostly I just wanted to present this ad because, man, they really make things sound terribly dire, don’t they? “Some men are eaten alive by tape-worms, others wander hopelessly for years, dying slow deaths from bowel disease.” WOW. If only I had some kind of Candy Cathartic to counter these horrible fates.

And let’s look at the testimonial by Mr. (ahem) Bowles: I’m going to say that the phrase “there came on the scene” a freakin’ 18-FOOT TAPEWORM, expelled after taking this wonder drug, gets the 1910 Award for Most Polite Euphemism. “There came on the scene,” like, you know, Mr. J. Frederick Tapeworm, of the Hampton Tapeworms, just happened to pop by the parlor for afternoon tea.

That this medicine is from the “Sterling Remedy Co.” isn’t lost on me, by the way. I better not have missed out on some enormous Candy Cathartic fortune.

DICK TRACY’S BREATHLESS MAHONEY KEYCHAIN
Seriously, this is just sad. Employee Aaron dug up a stash of these from one of the many poorly-lit underground storage tunnels that extend miles through the earth beneath our store, and now I’ve got something else to throw on the eBay.

A Breathless keychain. Sigh. Well, I guess it is technically a Madonna collectible, so who knows…maybe I can get something for these.

In answer to my question from the second anniversary…well, I guess we are celebrating the third anniversary. Only this time, I’ve got the name right…I keep swapping the positions of “Hulk” and “Wolverine” in the title.

Anyway, here we are, three years after the original release of issue #2 of this six issue mini-series. This time is a little different, as issue #3 (pictured to the right) is allegedly imminent, with a scheduled release date of March 4th. And Marvel has released “All New Printings” of #1 and #2 for those folks who missed it the first time around, or perhaps did read it before, but those memories of yesteryear…faded, near-forgotten recollections, like faded Polaroids…no longer hold any trace of those initial exciting installments.

Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating the whole “lost to the mists of time” thing a bit, but not much. Because, three years? What the hell, man? That’s just embarrassing. Hope the bragging rights of getting a guy from Lost to write a story about Hulk and Wolverine punching each other was worth the joke this series has become.

Of course, the series will still probably sell, so the answer is “sure, of course it was worth it.” Doesn’t change the fact that extreme lateness on high profile books is a pain in the ass, especially during the first year or so when people kept asking us for the next issue, and would give us the “somehow this is your fault” look when we told them about the delays.

But we’re allegedly that much closer to finally being done with this thing…unless we get more delays between later issues. If I’m still waiting for #6’s release in 2018, I’m going to be a tad steamed. At least Marvel appears to be attempting to finish this series, unlike this other stuntcast-writer series which was just full-on abandoned.

I don’t have any new complaints about this I didn’t cover during the last two anniversaries, so be sure to read those if you have a great need to experience more of my shouting into the wind. Let’s just hope Marvel’s learned a little something from this. Which I’m sure they have…until the next time this happens.

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On a somewhat related note, I have this one guy who keeps calling to ask if the fourth Planetary trade paperback is out yet. Someone has apple-pie-in-the-sky hopes. (First, the last issue has to come out. Then we get the hardcover collection. Then we get the softcover. Even if the last issue pops up in the next Previews, we wouldn’t see a trade until a year, year and half down the line, maybe. Assuming we survived the initial shock-induced heart attack caused by the solicitation.)

I hope someday I’ll be able to sell this person a fourth collection. It’s a good series, but sales on the trades stalled a bit when people discovered that the concluding chapters are not in print, and that we’ve long since blown through most of our back issue stock on those later singles. Fortunately the stories are mostly stand-alone-ish, so it’s not that much of a detriment, and we’re able to move some copies of the volumes. However, the set’s long-standing incompleteness still stands as a barrier for some potential customers, despite my salesmanship mojo, and that’s a shame.

So last night I saw, for the very first time, the animated version of Warlock from the ’90s X-Men cartoon:

image from this eBay auction

Warlock was from one of those too few periods in the last couple of decades or so where something interesting was being done with the X-Men franchise…in this particular case, giving New Mutants to Bill Sienkiewicz to draw:

Obviously there’s bit of a difference there between the comic book version and the cartoon version, but all things considered, they didn’t do too badly. In fact, animated Warlock didn’t look too dissimilar from the comic book representations by artists that weren’t Sienkiewicz. The cartoon version wasn’t without its charm…it was googly-eyed goofy enough to get across that sense of oddity that the character brought to the X-Universe. If anything, it was one brief bit of personality in a cartoon that, from the few installments I’ve seen, seems sorta generically bland.

Anyway, aside from all that, I wanted to run this panel from Sienkiewicz’s run as well:

…you know, just because.

images from New Mutants #21 (Nov. 1984) by Chris Claremont & Bill Sienkiewicz