Progressive Ruin presents…the End of Civilization.

filed under Categories End of Civilization 13 Comments

All rise…this month’s End of Civilization is now in session! The honorable Spike Merling is presiding. …Do you solemnly swear on this copy of Hero Illustrated #2 from 1993 and its attendant Aliens Vs. Predator ashcan included in the sealed polybag to read along in your copy of the September 2020 Diamond Previews and DC Current #4?

Well, too bad, because you’re getting this End of Civilization anyway:

p. 38 – Darkness 25th Anniversary Commemorative Edition:


Celebrating 25 years of people bringing their copies back to the shop and asking “is it worth anything yet?”
 
 
p. 59 – Ice Cream Man #21:


Wait, hold on, how do they expect to sell piles of copies to speculators without a Dr. Seuss parody cover? C’MON, MARKETING
 
 
p. 72 – Stranger Things Dungeons & Dragons Crossover #1:


Oh yeah, sure, if you want to do the obvious thing. I think we all know the Stranger Things crossover we’re really waiting for.
 
 
p. 103 – Locke & Key Sandman Hell & Gone #1:


Finally, the dark, gritty horror version of Flint Marko we’ve been waiting for.
 
 
p. 123 – Goosebumps Secrets of the Swamp #3:


Is there some kind of…thing…in there? Is that the secret, that this is a surreptitious DC/IDW crossover to go along with that Locke & Key/Sandman one? HAVE I CRACKED THE CODE
 
 
p. 202 – Marvel Value Stamps A Visual History HC:


I just know these are going to show up in collections a decade or two down the line with some of the stamps clipped out.

[NOTE: yes, this solicitation was apparently cancelled, almost certainly due to time-traveling demand from an alternate future version of myself dealing with the very problem I just described]
 
 
p. 230 – Tremendous Trump Trade War TPB:


Collects together all those prevoius Trump parody comics so you can remember those things we were making fun of before they got repeatedly supplanted by new things Trump did.

Kudos on the great name for the book, however.
 
 
p. 231 – Punchline #11:


How pissed do you think these guys are at DC right now?
 
 
p. 248 – Everything Will Be Okay TP:


The new graphic novel from Matt Wilson! I bet his coloring will be great!
 
 
p. 250 – Batman 100 Greatest Moments HC:

Ooh, it better include this:

Or this classic scene:

Or this groundbreaking team-up:

Or this defining moment:

Or even this scene from Batman: Damned:


 
 
p. 309 – Batman and the Missing Punch Line Young Adult SC:

“Missing?” You can’t swing a dead Catwoman in this month’s orders without hitting a Punchline. You’re not even trying, Batman.
 
 
p. 310 – Little Big Book of Pussy HC:


Hey, great, I love cats!
 
 
p. 320 – Alien Official Cookbook HC:


Finally, an excuse to dust off and put out the ol’ John Hurt Lazy Susan.
 
 
p. M98 – Dragon Ball Super Monopoly:


Do not pass GO, do not go OVER 9000

Is that how that works? I have no idea. All I know is that this Dragon Ball Monopoly is nowhere near as strong as Superman Monopoly.
 
 
DC Connect p. 7 – Punchline #1:


How pissed do you think these guys are at Antarctic right now?
 
 
DC Connect p. 18 – Dark Night Death Metal Infinite Hour Exxxtreme! #1:


Look, there are people who find this title to be absolultely delightful, and there are people who are wrong. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.
 
 
Marvel Previews p. 68 – Fantastic Four Antithesis #4:


Boy, after reading that first issue, it’s more like “Anti-TEETH-is, amirite?

Yeah yeah, “but wouldn’t that mean he wouldn’t have teeth?” Shut up, it’s still funny.

Post-poned.

filed under Categories eyeball, obituary 2 Comments

Sorry pals…was going to have an End of Civilization post ready for today, but I had a small eyeball issue and decided the less time in front of the computer monitor, the better. Hopefully I’ll have it up later in the week. Thanks for understanding.

In the meantime, I hope you join me in mourning the passing of Chadwick Boseman. My condolences to his family, friends, and fans.

Yes, that one paragraph is a single sentence, I apologize.

filed under Categories dc comics 10 Comments

Roel asks

“Hi Mike! If I wanted to understand current DC continuity, what is my best resource? Is there a website that would help clarify where things stand, and maybe point out key issues that can get me up to speed? Thanks for any suggestions!”

Hi Roel! Boy, that’s a doozy of a question, particularly when it comes to DC Comics and its shared superhero universe. Ever since Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC continuity has been a patchwork mélange of refits, restarts and reboots, a constant schizophrenic scramble forwards yet backwards trying to put everything back in the original packaging while also simultaneously declaring their product “new!” and “improved!”

But even that continuity eventually felt generally smoothed out and consistent compared to the kicking-over-of-the-table “New 52” initiative, a publishing strategy that to all appearances was a last-second decision, so deleterious to DC’s universe that if it had been much planned ahead of release, one could be forgiven for thinking they were deliberately trying to reinvent and outdo the confusion that followed Crisis on Infinite Earths.

In fact, it was such a mess that DC was compelled to follow up with the linewide “Rebirth,” with more restarts and…maybe not so much “reboots,” but rejiggerings of characters and concepts across the board. Compared to the New 52, Rebirth felt like a little more thought was put into it, a little more care was taken to keep the things that worked, and to try to fix the things that didn’t work. Most notable, perhaps, was getting rid of the mostly* objectionable New 52 version of Superman and replacing him with the preferred post-Crisis/pre-New 52 one (to no small measure of irony to those of us who remember the negative reaction to that Superman’s introduction in the ’80s).

The ultimate overarching statement of “Rebirth” was “oh yeah, the New 52? That was actually Watchmen‘s fault” as explained in Doomsday Clock. When you write off a publishing initiative in-universe as the result of an attack by a “bad guy,” that certainly sends a message.

Now, my friend Roel, I know none of this really answers your question. All I’m trying to do is explain why your question is hard to answer. The best response I think to getting a handle on the current version of the DC Universe is maybe getting your hands on a copy of DC Universe Rebirth, the 80-page one-shot that kicked off what’s going on now. DC’s usually pretty good about publishing occasional one-shots that give you an idea where everyone’s at just prior to whatever event is about to happen (Countdown to Infinite Crisis was another). Now these one-shots are set-ups, of course, establishing mysteries and situations to be dealt with over the next year or four of DC Comics, but they do provide an overview of its universe as it stands At That Moment.

In DC Universe Rebirth‘s case, its eventual resolution in Doomsday Clock ended up not really resulting in anything of any impact on the mainline universe. The ballyhooed “return of the Legion of Super-Heroes” it was supposed to bring about already happened before the series concluded, for example. So, basically, you could read just this and not miss a whole lot.

If you wanted to jump into the DCU as it stands now, however, just jump in with whatever character you like, and eventually you’ll get an idea of whatever the prevailing continuity is, particularly in relation to whatever title you’re reading. Now, Justice League could be the most wide-ranging of the titles, as it should give you whatever the current accepted DC Universe versions of the primary superhero characters. You may or may not get specifics of each character from their own titles…like, maybe they’ll mention that Superman’s identity is now public, for example.

I mean, aside from that…perhaps your best bet is to not worry about continuity, and just enjoy the books you enjoy. Let continuity sort itself out. And chances are, with DC’s recent cuts and reorganizations, we could very well be heading to another “fixing” of DC’s publishing line. Maybe not an explicit reboot, but I’ve put my dime down on a reworking everything into a shape that’s a little more media-adaptation friendly, more accessible and less tied to the minutia of a shared universe.

Okay, you’d asked for websites that could set you straight. Well, frankly, I’d advise you to avoid all comic book content online as that way lies madness…surely reading my site has taught you that! But you can probably find some pretty good resources just by Googling “dc comics reading order” and you’ll get some folks who’ve already done the hard work of figuring out what to read and where.

And naturally there’s always Wikipedia. Not always perfect, but given the obsessive nature of the sort of comic fans who’d spend time editing Wikipedia articles, chances are they’d do a reasonable job explaining whatever recent histories of characters you’d need. FULL DISCLOSURE: this is coming from the fella who once edited the “Abby Arcane” Wiki page to correct the first appearance notation.

There are also specialized Wikis for purt’near everything. This DC Fandom Wiki would likely come in useful.

I’m sure there are more, and that friendly readers of this site will drop their suggestions in the comments. I hope this helps, Roel!
 
 

* Yes, the character did have some good moments, but never felt like he quite “gelled,” never really felt like Superman.

“Three things cannot long be hidden: the Joker, the Joker, and the Joker.”

filed under Categories batman, swamp thing 14 Comments

[SPOILERS for Batman: Three Jokers ahead]


So Monday afternoon, I did something I almost never do at the shop…I read a comic book.

I’ve heard plenty of times over the years “wow, it must be great to work in a comic book store and just read comics all day,” and I think in the 32-years-next-month I’ve been doing this, I’ve maybe read…a half-dozen comics while on the clock? I mean, my lunch breaks don’t count, I would assume, but even then I wasn’t reading comics…I’d maybe poke through Wizard or screw around on the internet.

But this time, after I’d broken down the DC Comics shipment, and did all the comic saver pulls, instead of doing anything useful like pricing that stack of Deadpools I obtained from that defunct store stock, I decided to just straight up read that Batman: Three Jokers comic that’s all the rage at the moment.

And you know…I thought it was fine. Geoff Johns in his particular wheelhouse here, just doing a plain ol’ Batman story despite the weight it’s carrying from the hype and the marketing. Like a good percentage of Johns’s work, it is directly building on a foundation laid by Alan Moore decades prior. However, unlike Doomsday Clock, where the reach for Watchmen exceeded the grasp, here he’s fiddling around with The Killing Joke, a comic that critical history, and Moore himself, have decided is one of the writer’s lesser works. As such Johns here feels a little less out of his depth, addressing not only the consequences of The Killing Joke but the decidedly dumb-but-impactful “Death in the Family.”

In fact, I think that’s one of the clever bits of Three Jokers, in how it entwines both of these events together, and forces the two characters directly affected by these events (Batgirl and the second Robin Jason Todd, now “The Red Hood”) to confront their respective histories with the title character(s) of this story. In fact, Johns somehow managed to make Todd’s past experience even more excruciating and terrifying…and I should clarify, I mean this as a compliment, as I found this probably the most effective scene in the issue.

As to the overall plot…I won’t delve too deeply into spoilers, if at all, but I’m glad this seems to be more of a Batman-milieu rather than a “DC Multiverse” thing. Given the origins of this whole “three Jokers” business to begin with, involving the Justice League and the New Gods and Batman using Metron’s Mobius Chair to find out “wait, how many Jokers?” — well, in the, what, four years since that info dropped I’d been expecting some kind of parallel universe explanation. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here. I mean, who knows, there are two more issues to go, maybe Pariah will show up.

Well, one thing about the conceit of Three Jokers is that it provides an alternate explanation for the many versions of Joker we’ve seen over the years to the one Grant Morrison has been trying to sell us since his Arkham Asylum graphic novel in 1989 (as occasional partner-in-crime Ken Lowery reminded me). The specific example I’d mentioned was the more recent Batman #663 from 2007. In essence, the Joker reinvents himself, undergoes a shift in personality, which is something we witness directly in that Batman comic. It seemed like a perfectly good way to explain the multitudes of Joker’s personalities we’ve had over the decades, and fit very well with the character.

Johns’s premise is not so elegant, presenting instead the idea that there are literally three people running around as the Joker, each with their own style and tone. As I saw someone point out on the Twitters, you’d think this would make Batman look bad, being unable to tell that was what was going on. I don’t want to use the term “idiot plot,” but maybe we can just suppose that Batman had some kind of brainfart and overlooked the fact that the Joker maybe had a slightly different jawline than he remembered, or that his eyes were spaced differently. Or maybe Batman attributed the differences to the affects had by the beatings he’d give him. Who knows.

I should note that the art is great…Jason Fabok really puts in a good show here, especially with the various portraits of the Joker he’s prepared for the many variant covers (as well as a few of the Batfamily). Given the content of the story, the deliberate biting of the panel layouts of The Killing Joke is actually quite fitting. If a Killing Joke sequel has to be made (SPOILER: it probably doesnt) then you can do worse than tying the new work to it visually. Anyway, it’s definitely a gorgeous looking package.

A couple of continuity points, or lack thereof as the case may be:

A line of dialogue notes the Joker’s first appearance “decades ago,” which means at minimum two, if we’re being literal. I presume this is Johns’s way of saying that the five-year-timeline of the New 52 is good ‘n’ gone after the events of Doomsday Clock.

However, when I mentioned that on the Twitters, it was pointed out to me that Three Jokers isn’t mainline DC continuity, so maybe that “decades” comment doesn’t apply to any other DC Universe title outside the series. Given that nobody really has any clue what constitutes continuity or not at DC anymore, I don’t suppose it matters that much. If I recall correctly, even The Killing Joke wasn’t necessarily intended to be in the regular DC continuity…which of course changed once Batgirl debuted as the wheelchair-wielding Oracle in Suicide Squad.

It does seem weird, though, that a mystery set up in that most in-continuity of DC Comics, Justice League, would get answered in an out-of-continuity series. Would that mean the mystery remains unsolved in-universe? Well, I think DC’s “Rebirth” was since then, anyway, so maybe they made that event Never Not Was. Or we could just not worry about continuity and enjoy the story as is…like some kind of crazy person.

Oh, and is there a Swamp Thing connection? Your bet your tubers there is! Say so long and farewell to the late Dr. Roger Huntoon, who first appeared during Rick Veitch’s Swamp Thing run, killed off panel in Three Jokers #1. Here he is in Swamp Thing #79 (1988), bothering Lois Lane:


Alas, we hardly knew ye, Dr. Huntoon. We’ll see you again, in the next reboot.

Ultimately, will anything going on in this series stick to the character? Joker seems awfully resistant to any long-term alterations to him or his premise. I think the whole “Red Hood” thing that was retroactively added to his history back in the ’40s, and the shooting of Barbara Gordon and the crowbarring of Jason Todd have both stuck (hence this series). Everything else just seems to slough off…any attempts at giving him a Real Name don’t last (“Jack Napier” seems to have lasted the longest, having returned after a long hiatus in the out-of-continuity “White Knight” series). Three Jokers seems to be foreshadowing a revelation regarding the Joker’s name, but I’m sure that’ll eventually go the same way. (Maybe some Jokers will be named, and others won’t…we’ve got plenty of them to work with here.)

To wrap up this already overly-long post, I think Batman: Three Jokers is fine. Beautiful art, a serviceable script, and a weird game-changing premise that may or may not survive the end of the series. But boy, those covers are nice.

“I remember when comics were only 8 cents!” “What are you, some kind of weirdo, get outta here.”

filed under Categories retailing 20 Comments

Some responses to my last post, the one about one’s childhood comics collections being thrown out seemingly transitioning to being kept around:

will richards bids the following

“Perhaps eBay has put paid to the ‘chucking out’ ritual?”

That probably doesn’t hurt, the idea that anything can be monetized probably encourages people to hold onto things with the idea “I can probably sell this” even if they never get around to it. It can be a lot of effort to list a bunch of individual issues on eBay, especially if you don’t really know much grading or even the comics themselves (which frankly doesn’t seem to stop a lot of people, judging by several auctions I’ve seen over the years).

And not just eBay, of course…I’m sure folks unload their piles of funnybooks on Craigslist or through similar means. I can imagine, though, so many similar piles of ’90s comics being trading around that they’re either going for next to nothing or just straight up free, he said without researching this in the slightest. I do know that I’ve acquired plenty a collection either for a song or completely gratis from people who didn’t want to bother with eBaying or Craigslisting.

• • •

John Lancaster puts his dime down on

“Back in my olde shop days, the one I tired of was the older gentleman wandering in and then declaring ‘I remember when these where all a nickel!’ and ‘I had the very first Superman but my mom made me give it to the paper drive for the War.’ Generally I got this at least once or twice a year.”

I used to get similar comments at my previous place of employment, but not so much at my own store. We’ve very clearly aged out of that era, though most of the folks I encounter who remember 10-cent comics now are remembering them from the ’50s and early ’60s, not so much the ’40s.

Oddly enough, I didn’t get a lot of “Mom threw away my Superman #1″ (almost never Action #1, probably because they didn’t know/remember that Supes first appeared there). What I did hear a lot was “I have a Superman #1, would you buy it?” We always said “sure, bring it in,” and of course we’d never see that person again. I mean, it wasn’t impossible, but not very probable. Best case scenario is that they did have an old Superman comic, just not #1. Or probably that treasury-sized reprint from the 1970s. Or just something else entirely…had many a promised “Golden Age collection” turn out to be ’80s Spider-Man, so there you go.

And the whole “nickel” thing…yeah, probably just remembering incorrectly, but I also considered the possibility that they were buying them for a nickel apiece second-hand. I’ve seen enough old comics with a “5¢” written on the cover in grease pencil to think that’s maybe what they’re remembering. Or of course they bought a copy of that comic pictured above!

I do get the occasional “I remember when they were a quarter” or “fifty cents,” but not as often as the “10 cents/a nickel” I used to get. But if I’m in this business long enough, I’m eventually going to hear “I remember when comics were only $2.99” and all I’m asking is that you bury me not on the lone prairie after that happens.

• • •

Sir A1! gets saucy with

“When it comes to dumping comic book stock, it looks like the local Friends of the Library used book place has been on the receiving end of that for quite some time (at least in those pre-pandemic days). The funny thing is that although a chunk of the stock is 80/90s, there’s been an uptick in material from the recent past of five to ten years which always struck me as odd. Don’t know if they were from shuttered stores or just stores that just flat out dumped their overstock of ‘March On Ultimatum.'”

A long time ago, back in your pal Mike’s pre-comics retail days, I recall going into a thrift store in town and finding in their magazine bins multiple copies of various comics. The only specific issue I remember for sure was Fantastic Four #229 from 1981, and there were at least a couple dozen of that comic there. I’m sure I probably wondered how this store got these, but didn’t pursue the matter. They all looked new enough to my then-untrained-but-still-working-properly eyes. I wonder now if these were somebody’s investment copies that were dumped for unknown reasons (I mean, aside from “these are a lousy investment”) or extra store stock that said store didn’t feel like storing. Now, the only store in the general area at the time was my future place of employment, and I’m about 99% positive Ralph wouldn’t have dumped out any comics like this, no matter how many he had, so…who knows?

That’s a lot of typing to say I don’t know the deal at Sir A1!’s local library, beyond folks ridding themselves of collections and “investment,” particularly in the wake of that trend of downsizing possessions due to that Netflix show or book or whatever it was.

Anyway, seeing lots of ’80s/’90s books certainly doesn’t surprise me. The recent ones…surprise me a little bit, but I can see a shop unloading dead weight if they’re in a pinch for space (especially now-dead stuff like non-Miles Morales Ultimates-line comics). I’ve not quite reached that point yet, but there is a Goodwill donation center located about a block away from my shop, so there’s always the possibility.

• • •

Thom H hangs around the store all day and tells me

“My father tells the story of buying a comic book every week with his dime allowance. When comics jumped in price to $.12, he could only buy one every other week.”

To steal a story from my aforementioned former boss Ralph, he had, as a kid, walked into the local store with his shiny new dime to buy a comic book, only to discover the prices had all raised to 12¢. It turned out there was an empty lot next to that store, so Ralph rooted around over there until he scrounged up enough cans and bottles to turn in and make up the difference.

Hard to see something similar happening today…”what, this issue of Amazing Spider-Man is inexplicably $4.99 instead of the usual $3.99…better monetize my YouTube unboxing videos.”

“Finally, when I worked in a comic shop, there was a guy who came in occasionally to try to get employees involved in a ‘who would win in a fight: Superman or the Hulk?’ conversation. I was told to be nice to him but not let him get in the way of my work. He would talk to you all day if you let him — sweet guy.”

I’m sure I’ve had my fair share of conversations like that, but nothing’s really coming to mind at the moment. Probably just because it was just One of Those Things you dealt with being in the job you were.

It does seem like most comic book related conversations, especially of late, revolve around the actual publishing business. Like, “again with the reboot/relaunches,” “how many covers,” “they’re still publishing Spawn,” stuff like that. Not a whole lot about the actual content of the comics, beyond “that was cool” or “so what happens next?” I do have the occasional query into how DC’s continuity works (“Not well”) and occasionally I’ll have someone try to drag me into a “which is better, Marvel or DC” debate (my expert maneuver out of that one: “oh, I like them both pretty well”). It’s all fine, and I enjoy talking to customers about comics, but I can do without the “I just spent $100 on this one comic at [another store] from people who never spend more than a couple bucks at a time with me. C’MON, YOU’RE KILLING ME

“Anyway, I didn’t even realize that stories like these were falling by the wayside until it was pointed out here. Comics culture really has changed in the past few decades.”

It’s a bit sad, a little End-of-An-Era-ish, especially for those of us who’ve been in comics retail for too long. But that just means there are room for more, newer stories! Like “I had the first appearance of Harley Quinn, but my Roomba ate it.”

For that matter, no one’s asked me if Thor or the Hulk was stronger for a while, either.

filed under Categories collecting, retailing 8 Comments

I want to thank you folks for replying to my queries regarding Comics in the Time of COVID. Again, I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this information, if anything, beyond having an archive of what’s happening right now in our hobby/industry that I can hopefully look back upon once we are theoretically past all of this.

I will say that it’s somewhat bemusing to me that I have readers of this site who don’t actively read comics. I mean, I knew this already, but this reminded me again. Hey, I welcome all readers, except jerks. The guy writing this blog is a jerk, and one’s plenty ’round these parts.

Anyway, if you have any more notes about COVID-related comics stuff, please feel free to drop them into the comments for Wednesday’s post. I promise if I publish a book with these, I’ll sell you copies for a most generous 5% discount.

Meanwhile, at the shop…I had a customer make a passing comment whilst perusing the stacks that made me realize something. And of course, no thought goes untweeted, so what I posted on the Twitterers was

the realization that I’ve been in this business long enough to go from hearing “my mom threw all mine out!” to “will you please take this case of TEAM YOUNGBLOOD #1”

I used to hear from people walking into the shop…well, into the previous place of employment, the repeated stories of “I had lots of comics but my [mother/father/guardian/cult leader] threw them out” and variations thereof. It’s an even that usually happened after the individual in question had moved out of the house, gone to college, entered the military, what have you. Or, of course, it occasionally happened when they were children, with parents tiring of the clutter and clearing out the strata of junk out of their kids’s rooms.

But I haven’t heard anyone tell me that in a while. Quite a while. Like I sorta refer to, it’s more likely I’ll be approached by someone trying to unload an accumulation of comics from their childhood or teen years that were never thrown away, but rather stored in a closet or garage for years on end. Time comes around to clean house for whatever reason, and suddenly they have these boxes of comics they have to do something with.

Keeping in mind that I’ve been in comics retail…well, as of September, 32 years, I’ve obviously seen a generational shift in how different groups of folks dealt with comics from their respective youths. A random, let’s say, 40 year old walking into my (well, Ralph’s) store back in 1988 and telling me about his mom throwing out his comics…assuming he was buying comics at around 10 years old, just to keep it simple, that would be around 1958. That wasn’t exactly a peak time for society thinking comics were worth saving, so chances would be pretty good they’d be discarded once said child no longer showed interest in maintaining his collection.

Now, jumping to the far-flung future of 2020, with our flying cars and absolutely no virulent disease spreading unchecked through our populace, a 40 year old who bought comics as a 10 year old would have been picking them up around 1990. 1990 was a boom time for comics and awareness of the industry, and especially awareness of the collectibility of comics. This made parents a little less likely, I think, to dump Junior’s collection once he went off to his cooking academy. And as a result the comics saved during this time ended up either 1) being common as dirt, or 2) generally not kept in very good condition, despite being bagged and boarded, sometimes in those “high end” sleeves marketed at the time.

Now this isn’t a binary thing…people in the ’50s and ’60s saved comics (otherwise we wouldn’t still have copies around now!) and people in the ’90s tossed comics out. But I think the point I’m trying to get across, and as seems supported by anecdotal evidence, is that the likelihood of someone’s childhood comic collection having been thrown out has decreased over time. I mean, no duh, why’d I bother typing 600+ words about it, but it was, as I said in the tweet, a realization that literally just occurred to me. A thing I used to hear all the time, that I took as a cliché of comics retail, had just dropped out of my awareness so completely. Or I’m just old and forget things more easily, there’s that explanation too.

There’s an additional phenomenon of seeing more defunct comic store stock being schlepped around now than I used to see back in the late ’80s/early ’90s (case in point). Plenty of folks jumped on the comics bandwagon post-Batman ’89, and jumped right off again (or were pushed) when the market collapsed, leaving boxes upon boxes of inventory in garages or storage units that only within the last decade or so seem to be making the rounds. That stuff I talked about on Monday from a recent shutdown was an outlier. More likely I’d have someone come in who buys abandoned storage units trying to unload the pallets of former back issue bins for some shuttered shop he’s found himself possessing, and it’s clear from a quick peek that said store dated from the 1990s.

Now look, I just need one of these guys to find a storage unit that used to belong to someone who owned a newsstand in 1944. I know they’re out there, dang it.

Questions for you, in regards to COVID-19.

filed under Categories reader participation 34 Comments

I’m just kind of curious how the COVID-19 crisis has affected your comic book habits. Particularly in the U.S., where our handling of the pandemic has been…less than exemplary.

Look, I know COVID has impacted far more important things than just our beloved funnybooks, but this here website has a specific subject and I’m sticking to it. Basically, I want to know:

1) HAS COVID AFFECTED HOW YOU BUY YOUR COMICS

Do you do curbside pickup? Do you have them shipped to you? Do you have to go somewhere else to get comics because your regular shop ended up going out of business? Does your store maintain the proper health protocols? You know, that sort of thing.

2) HAVE YOU ALTERED YOUR READING AT ALL

Do you get more or fewer comics? Have you stopped buying comics altogether, or close to, because of financial concerns? Are you actually reading (as opposed to simply obtaining) more or fewer comics? Do you find yourself catching up or rereading anything because you suddenly found yourself with more time on your hands?

…If the answer to any of this is “yeah, I got COVID so that kinda screwed up everything,” I apologize. I’m not trying to make light of the situation we find ourselves in. Mostly, I’m just doing a very informal survey of how the comics, both the artform and the retail end, look to the people who would come through our doors and peruse the racks.

If you choose to participate, thank you. Not sure what I’m going to do with any answers I may receive, but I imagine some of you have a few points of interest to make.

Being given the business.

filed under Categories retailing 9 Comments

So here’s a thing I’ve occasionally thought about, and was reminded of in a more direct fashion on Sunday. There was a store, a comics and collectible shop, that opened up in a nearby town a couple of years back, and, unfortunately, shut down not long after.

I’m honestly not sure how long the shop was actually open, and apparently it had been in operation for several months before I even knew it existed. Usually my customers are quick to mention other shops…I mean, not in a gossipy way or anything, more like “hey I picked this up over at [wherever]” or like that. Sometimes they’ll ask me if I’m on good terms with the other shops in the surrounding environs, and thankfully I’m able to say “yes!” I’ve known many of these folks for, in some cases, decades, and while they are technically competitors, they are still my friends, or at least I’m on a friendly basis with them if they’re not lucky enough to have known me for 30+ years.

Anyway, so not hearing right away about a new shop cropping up in the area was a bit surprising. Especially (and here’s the kicker) it wasn’t too far from my house. A new comic shop, spitting distance from where I hang my metaphorical hat, and I didn’t know about it until months later. Okay, granted, I’m not exactly Mr. Quick on the Uptake or anything, and I wasn’t actively searching for other shops at the time…I’ve got my own shop, that’s enough to occupy my brain without overly worrying about what other shops are doing.

One thing I noticed, once I knew that shop existed, was that my business didn’t seem to have any drop in sales during the period. If anything, my sales were continuing their general upward climb. Thus, having a new shop in a nearby town didn’t cut into my business in a noticeable way, but even that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Just could very well be we had clienteles that didn’t overlap, with that store was pulling customers from their local area who weren’t making the trip out to my funnybook emporium. …Which is also another explanation why I wasn’t hearing about them.

But, you know, whatever…plenty of shops in the tricounty area, we all seem to be hanging in there, so what’s one more storefront? More power to them. I did try to Google them up and learn more about their shop and steal any good ideas at least remain a little competitive if the situation called for it.

But I couldn’t find them online. Searched the store name, searched the address…couldn’t find a website, or a Facebook page, or a Twitter account. Not even an Ello account or a Mastadon instance or even a Myspace. The one thing I found, the one thing, was someone’s personal Instagram account, not associated with the shop far as I can tell, that had a couple of photos from the store’s opening day. And that is…really something, particularly in the Years of Our Lord Circa 2016 or So, when everyone’s searching for everything on their phones.

I don’t know…maybe they fixed that later, but I never checked again, and anyway one I day I happened to drive by their storefront and they were gone, which I also hadn’t heard about either. I don’t know if no (or too little of an) online presence was a factor…I mean, it could have been any reason the store was shuttered, but it still struck me as unusual to not have really anything up and running once the store was a going concern. At minimum, a basic webpage with a specific domain name relating to your store, showing your address, your hours, and your email address.

I realize I had an advantage with my own online visibility. By the time I opened my shop, I’d been blogging on this site for about 11 years. I have a reasonably-sized readership, and some amount of goodwill I haven’t yet squandered by, well, you know. When I opened my shop, it got some measure of attention. Tom Spurgeon put it on the Comic Reporter site, Scott McCloud tweeted about it, and plenty of other folks hither and yon got the word out.

And I had online venues ready to go. A store website, a store Instagram, a store Twitter, and a store Facebook, and of course the eBay store. I don’t even exploit those resources as much or as often as I should, but they still provide a solid online presence for me. And, like, Instagram has helped sell so many things, I can’t even believe it. There are folks who’ll call me the moment I throw something of interest up there.

And on top of all that, there is of course the very page you’re reading now, and my personal Twitter account. Both feed business to me…I do a lot of wheeling and dealing in my Twitter DMs, for example.

This is a lot of typing to tell you “having your business at least minimally online is good, actually,” a conclusion which can’t be a surprise to anyone reading this. And I’m honestly not trying to pick on this other former shop, which would be, well, quite rude of me. I was just reminded about that store’s brief lifespan, with not even a ghostly internet memory left behind, save perhaps for the ones buried long back in someone’s picture feed.

Honestly, I did wonder about the taller Dollar Books for a long time.

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Wayne sallies forth with this query:

“…What are *your* memories of it as you heard from others (or read up on) over the years?”

I was born in 1969 (as the ever-changing tagline on my website might suggest) and while I did read various comics throughout the 1970s, I didn’t really start being a “comic collector” in earnest ’til 1980-1, aside from my short-lived attempt at getting each new Star Wars off the shelf. I was, what, 9 when the original DC Implosion happened in 1978, and since I was only picking up the occasional comic book here and there at the time (or badgering my parents into buying them for me) I wasn’t aware of it at all.

But how I became aware of it later…I’m not sure, honestly. It’s just one of those bits of background noise accumulated over the years as I read more comics and bought more back issues (usually from second-hand bookstores, then from actual comic shops). I don’t think I ever wondered “huh, there sure seemed to be a lot of comics that got canned around the same time” or anything.

If I had to hazard a guess, I would bet my first awareness of the DC Implosion came from spotting the Cancelled Comic Cavalcade entry in the Overstreet price guide. I remember getting my hands on one of the guides pretty early on and just poring through the thing, looking at all the different titles and the tiny black and white cover images that adorned each page. That must be where I first learned of a mass cancellation of books at DC, seeing that there were limited run collections of the unpublished comics.

I’m also going to presume that my love of fanzines and prozines (stuff like The Comic Reader and The Comics Journal) helped flesh out my knowledge of the event, particularly once I started picked up back numbers of those that came out as the Implosion was occurring. What was nice about the Comic Book Implosion book that I noted at the beginning of Wednesday’s post was that it pieced together excerpts from articles and interviews from the time, including material that I already had in my own collection of ‘zines, and gave me more of a narrative, and an understanding, of what happened and how. I actually learned quite a bit from the book (including the whys and wherefores of DC’s Dollar Book line — to entice newsstands into carrying a more profitable form of comic — as well as letting me know that some of the Dollar Books being physically taller was a deliberate strategy).

Okay, enough commercials for Two Morrows books, let’s get back to what’s going on at DC now, about which I don’t really know anything more. I did post on Twitter just some thoughts about what could happen, based on what little I read in some of the more reliable articles on the matter. I was going to summarize, but it’s late, I’m all headache-y from lasers in the eyeball this morning, and so I’m just gonna cut ‘n’ paste here:

Comics prediction re: the Warners/DC reorg – we’re going to see Jon Kent and Damian Wayne go away, as well as the Lois/Clark marriage. I can imagine the line as a whole reverting to almost Silver/Bronze-y type comics.

I mean, just modern *enough* to appeal to today’s readers, but simplified continuity, no more reality-bending Crisis type events/reboots, definitely no Dr. Manhattan’s naughty bits sharing a panel with Mary Marvel.

Just sort of a gut feeling based on what I’ve been seeing around. No idea what’s actually going to happen, but I think my assumptions could come to pass.

Meanwhile, on the DC Universe streaming service message board, it’s a pretty fair mix of “THE END IS NEAR” and “surely they won’t take THIS away from us!”

Anyway, I know it’s WAY too early to say, but the general belief is that the focus will be on exploiting DC’s properties in licensing and media, with comics more as an afterthought. I mean, that’s not much different from before…

…but it sorta sounds like they’ll want the comics to be more “marketing/licensing” friendly, so streamlining the continuity (if continuity even remains a concern) and matching public perception of the characters feels like the simplest path to that goal.

Again, just talkin’ out my butt.

I’d be sort of okay with a more accessible DC Comics, but I wish we could have reached that state without the human cost. However, the idea that any new, challenging material may be resisted (i.e. MISTER MIRACLE) is kinda rough.

I don’t know if there had been any new news about what’s happening at DC, as I’ve been otherwise occupied (LASERS IN THE EYE an’ all) but given what little has been said, I don’t think any of this is out of the question. Other folks responded on Twitter noting that there may be a reemphasis of focus on Young Adult and all-ages titles for bookstores, while others lamented the end of seeing any new challenging work from DC ever again (my thought: maybe curtailed for now, but maybe will creep slowly back in). Some suggested, both there and on this site, possible licensing of characters to other publishers (like Marvel’s deal with the Marvel Action line at IDW). It’s possible, but maybe we’ll see more backlist material get reprinted by other publishers, letting them take the financial risk? I don’t know. Nobody knows.

Anyway, I’m sure we’ll be returning to this topic again and again for the foreseeable future, so I’m going to end it here tonight and we’ll talk again on Monday. Thanks for reading, pals.

The DC Implosion Mark II.

filed under Categories dc comics 10 Comments

So I just recently finished reading the above book detailing the history of the “DC Implosion,” in which DC Comics in the 1970s is hit with immense cutbacks by its parent company resulting in lost jobs and a linewide culling of books in the midst of a planned publishing expansion.

Well, it happened again, with layoffs across Warner Bros. also hitting DC…not that DC was in the middle of a big publishing push, and no idea what’s going to happen to any of the comics they are publishing, but I expect it’s not good news. But plenty of people lost their jobs both at DC and the DC Universe streaming service, and of course my condolences and best wishes to those folks so affected.

I saw a lot of doomsaying online about how this was the end of DC Comics, which seems…premature. Okay, it’s probably the beginning of the end of the streaming service, which seemed doomed from the get-go, and its new shows all are migrating to HBO Max anyway. (Here’s hoping they find a way to keep the digital library of comics going.) DC’s inhouse collectibles division DC Direct is done as well. But DC Comics itself…it’s been through tough times before, and I feel like if this was the end, it would have just been shuttered completely instead of cut down and a new person being installed to oversee things.

According to that last link, there are publishing plans in place for DC going forward, though it looks like the Black Label line may be on its way out. Which is a shame, given that it’s been quite successful at least for me, but apparently, according to said article, DC’s new general manager ain’t a fan of the more “grown-up” comics so don’t expect a new Vertigo to arise from the company anytime soon. There’s a lot of other speculation in that article regarding what will happen (larger push to digital? licensing characters to other publishers?), but we’re all going to have to wait and see.

I’m not sure how I feel about any of this yet. I mean, aside from my sympathies for everyone losing their jobs, of course, especially right now in this COVID-19 impacted society we have here in the U.S. As a retailer I have some uncertainty, naturally, given I don’t know what this means for titles currently being released, or for DC’s graphic novel backlist. I’m hopeful that there will be a leaner, stronger DC Comics that emerges from this reorganization, though the human cost to get there is admittedly terrible. I just have to hope it all works out in the end, but I have to prepare for what will surely be some rough times ahead for the industry. Not that I haven’t been riding out those rough times since the ’90s comics bust, right?