A longtime showbiz journalist and fan's thoughts on comic books, movies and other cool stuff.

Tag: comics shops

Comic-Shop Memories: AAA Best Comics, 1988-1989, Phoenix, Ariz., Part 1

Completing my freshman year at University of Arizona, I returned to Scottsdale for the summer. I think I took a short visit back to Edmonton, and then returned to Scottsdale and secured a summer job in the engineering department at the Hilton Scottsdale Resort & Villas, located at 6333 N. Scottsdale Road. I remember getting my first check and heading to the comics shops, the closest of which that I knew to be a good one was AAA Best Comics, located at 9204 N. Seventh St. in Phoenix.

This was the shop to which Fog Hollow transferred its subscription accounts when it closed the year before. I don’t remember much about my single visit to the store the year before, but I do remember pulling up to AAA Best on a sunny morning in June 1988 and walking in to find an older woman sitting by the door and announcing to her son, the owner, that he had a customer. The man was Ken Strack, and he was a terrific comic shop owner who earned a lot of my business for the next five or six years.

Excalibur #1 (Oct. 1988). Art by Alan Davis and Paul Neary.

On that day, Ken was busy sorting and the new issues were just laid out on a table in near the front entrance. The store occupied a long and narrow space at the end of a strip mall structure. I distinctly recall Excalibur #1 was just out and I scooped it up ASAP to flip through the lovely artwork by Alan Davis and Paul Neary. The other book I recall grabbing, either on that visit or one shortly thereafter, was Marvel Comics Presents #1, with that cool Walt Simonson wrap-around cover.

Marvel Comics Presents #1 (Early Sept. 1988). Cover art by Walt Simonson (and friends).

This also was the summer when Marvel experimented with twice-monthly publication of its top titles, which included X-Men and The Amazing Spider-Man. The latter was, of course, drawn by Todd McFarlane and was taking off like a rocket.

I still visited other stores, most notably All About Books & Comics, during this time. But AAA Best was my favorite. Ken was quick to spark a discussion and recommend new books based on what he knew you liked. I looked forward to visiting the shop as much to talk with him about comics as to buy my weekly stash. I once was checking out with a large stack and as he rang them up, I said it should keep me busy for a week or so. His reply was something along the lines of “No way! You gotta grab a bowl of cereal and stay up all night reading them!”

I kept my subscriptions with AAA Best even when I went back to school in Tucson that fall for my sophomore year. I had a new place to live in a different part of town, but I also had a car and a girlfriend I met in traffic school that summer. She was starting as a freshman at U of A, but I was so insecure about my comics habit that I didn’t tell her about it until we’d been dating a few months already. I need not have worried. She thought it was kind of cool and even read some of the books — she liked McFarlane’s Amazing Spider-Man — when I’d acquire a new stack of stuff.

I had braces at this time, and at least once a month would come up to Scottsdale to have the orthodontist adjust them. He had office hours on Saturday morning, so after my appointment, I’d head over to AAA Best. One day in January 1989, Ken was on the phone when I walked into the store. He was having an animated conversation with someone about flying in for an event, weekend accommodations, etc. At the end, he pulled out a copy of The Amazing Spider-Man, #315, which was the most-recent issue at the time, to look up the circulation figures in the statement of ownership in the back, and said he’d be happy to pop a few copies in the mail. That was when I realized he was talking to the one and only Todd McFarlane. When Ken hung up, he looked at me and said, “You are sworn to secrecy!” He then told me that McFarlane was coming for a store signing that spring and that subscribers like myself would get a special poster signed by Todd, whether they could make the event or not. This was quite exciting news, to be sure, but it was easy to keep to myself since I knew almost no one who would have known who McFarlane was.

The front page of the Life & Leisure section from The Arizona Republic newspaper on March 23, 1989, featured this interview with Todd McFarlane.
He says at the end that he ultimately wants to do a gag strip like Garfield.

The signing itself was March 25, 1989 — a Saturday. There was an article with and interview with McFarlane on the front of the Life & Leisure section of The Arizona Republic newspaper on March 23, 1989, promoting the signing and, when I arrived fairly early on there was already a long line of folks ready to meet Todd. It took a long time, and I’m glad this was March instead of July. Todd at one point agreed to take a short break to review the portfolios of artists looking for feedback. But eventually, I got to the front of the line. Todd was sitting at a table in the back of the shop, with a stack of original Spider-Man art that was for sale, as well as copies of most of his books for sale at then-relevant prices. I regret not buying any of that art, but at the time $75 or $100 a page was out of my price range. I remember the guy in front of me bought a copy of The Incredible Hulk #340 for $10, and Todd teased him by saying he could buy 10 Spider-Mans instead for the same price.

My signed copy of The Amazing Spider-Man #300 (May 1988), which I’ve kept in a mylar sleeve for more than three decades now. It is not now, nor will it ever be, for sale.

I got my copy of The Amazing Spider-Man #300 signed — I’d never been to a signing before and hadn’t thought to bring more than the one comic for him to sign! He also signed the poster the store had printed up. That poster now hangs, framed, quite visibly near the dining table in my house.

My signed poster from Todd McFarlane’s 1989 appearance at AAA Best Comics. I have number 52 out of 2000 because my subscription box number at the shop was 52.

That summer, I worked again in Phoenix at American Express — this time tracking down, repairing and cleaning credit-card authorization. Not very exciting — and sometimes quite disgusting — but it did put me in position to visit All About Books & Comics and then swing by AAA Best on the way home. I remember buying a copy of Marvel Graphic Novel #5: X-Men — God Loves, Man Kills that summer at AAA Best, and being completely blown away by it.

And for those who don’t remember or weren’t there yet, 1989 was a huge summer for movies, starting with the release in May of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and followed by Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, License to Kill, Ghostbusters II and, of course, Tim Burton’s Batman. The rest of the summer was pretty good too, with Lethal Weapon 2 and James Cameron’s The Abyss. It was all very exciting at the time, even though most of those movies haven’t held up especially well. (One thing to remember is there was a writer’s strike in Hollywood in 1988 that limited rewrites on a lot of those movies, including most notably Batman and Star Trek V. The TV networks were so starved for cash, they started re-shooting old Mission: Impossible scripts as a new series, and Star Trek: The Next Generation used a few scripts that were originally written 10 years prior for the never-made Star Trek: Phase II series that eventually became Star Trek: The Motion Picture.)

The runaway success of Batman showed a comic-book property could result in a good movie and make a ton money at both the box office as well as with sales of T-shirts, toys, books and comics. The teaser trailer Warner Bros. released in early 1989 got everyone very excited and Batman comics started selling in big numbers, picking up lots of new readers. New comics at the time were still only 75 cents or $1, so they were cheap enough for kids excited by the movie to buy and read.

The movie came out at a good time for DC Comics, which had been doing right by Batman for a few years with things like The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One, Batman: Year Two, Batman: Ten Nights of the Beast and Batman: A Death in the Family. DC’s investment in quality was really paying off for them.

Leading into the movie was DC’s celebration of Batman’s 50th anniversary with a really terrific story in Detective Comics #598-600 that was written by the new movie’s scripter, Sam Hamm, and drawn by Denys Cowan and Dick Giordano. (That writer’s strike idled Hamm, who I recall reading was quite pleased he was being paid to write comics when there were no movie or TV work to be had.) Issues #598 and 600 were 80-page giants, featuring lots of tributes in the back to Batman from top artists and writers in comics and beyond. I remember how impressive it was that the likes of Ray Bradbury and Stephen King, along with the unexpected tribute from Stan Lee, had classed up those books.

There also was a booming business in selling trade paperbacks of The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One. And Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s Batman: The Killing Joke was also in the mix, proving endlessly popular that summer with a spot-on $3.50 cover price because it was the closest of any of them to the movie’s plot.

And the public interest was extremely intense. Demand was so high for Batman T-shirts that there was a worldwide shortage of black cotton. (I read this in Variety years later in an article interviewing the then-head of Warner Bros. Consumer Products, but I don’t have the specific citation.) Every newspaper, TV station and radio outlet was doing something Batman related, from interviewing fans to “morning zoo” DJs joking about what kind of sound-effect would appear on screen when Bruce Wayne and Vicki Vale got intimate.

I was late to the game on Batman comics, but Ken set me up with trade paperbacks and enough recent issues of Detective Comics and Batman to keep me happy. This was my first regular pathway into DC Comics, which were really strong in those first few years after the reset of Crisis on Infinite Earths. I discovered the Justice League comics by Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis, and loved that affectionate and funny take on superheroes. I tried stuff like Emerald Dawn, which relaunched Green Lantern, but it didn’t take with me.

Marvel was, of course, still going strong with all the Spider-Man, X-Men, The Punisher, Silver Surfer and Avengers titles. I also really dug Marvel Comics Presents, an anthology that exposed me to a lot of characters I hadn’t read before, including Black Panther in an excellent 25-part serial by Don McGregor and Gene Colan.

When I went back to Tucson that August for school, I again had a new place to live, in a new part of town. I also had broken up with my girlfriend and was now intent on majoring in journalism. I don’t know why I stopped getting my new comics from AAA Best, but it was a temporary situation, to be sure.

More to come …

Comic-Shop Memories: All About Books & Comics (Part I), 1986-87, Phoenix, Ariz.

I don’t know how quickly I was able to discover All About Books & Comics after moving to Arizona, but it was pretty quick, likely within a month or so after arrival.

The shop was farther from home, about 16 miles from home or a half-hour each way in the car, at 535 E. Camelback Road. Like most comics shops, it was in an unremarkable building, albeit one that had bright letters and even characters at times painted on its street-facing windows.

It would be an understatement to say I was impressed when I first walked into the store. Not only was the space large, but it was crammed to the gills with new and back issue comics — more than I’d ever seen in any other shop. And, I quickly learned, there was lots more in the back. If you couldn’t find what you were looking for, just ask, and they’d come back shortly with the book you needed in fantastic shape. I have a stone-cold mint copy of X-Men #147 I acquired from the “back room,” and an equally nice copy of X-Men #142.

What impressed me most at first was the back issue selection, which was deep. I checked out the X-Men selection and — just in the box — they had just about every issue back to #143, the end of the John Byrne run. The issues before that were prominently displayed along the walls in mylar sleeves for “exorbitant” prices that ranged from $10 to $30 for most except the earliest issues of the “new” X-Men run. Every other title was stocked just as deeply, if not more so, since those early new X-Men issues were the hottest thing going at the time and there were no reprints. So to read them, you had to get the originals. Classic X-Men had just started and it was going to be a while before it got to the Dark Phoenix issues.

A later printing of the first X-Men trade paperback, with a great cover by Bill Sienkiewicz.

I say that with one exception, that applies directly to this visit. While checking out a rack in the corner, I came across the first X-Men trade paperback, published in 1984, collecting issues #129-137, for the cover price of $7.95. I had to have this book, but couldn’t afford it at the time. Luckily, Christmas was coming up, and I told my parents this is what I wanted. So my dad drove me down to the store again, we bought it — I was sure it would be gone by that point — and it went home to be wrapped awaiting Christmas morning. I remember reading it that Christmas Day of 1986 and absolutely loving it. I’ll have to do a whole post on that book another time.

The following May, I graduated high school and was due to attend the University of Arizona in Tucson starting in the fall. My dad was working for a personnel company that had a temp business that served American Express, which had extensive operations in the Phoenix area. So he got me a summer temp job at one of their call centers, answering a national informational toll-free number for the Amex business card. The hotline was advertised in USA Today and other high-profile places, so my job was to answer these calls, answer basic questions about the card, take down the caller’s information and pass it on so that an application would be sent to them, or — if they were a larger company — a sales rep could contact them. It was boring and easy. Most of the calls came from the East Coast, so the afternoons slowed to a crawl and I’d read sci-fi books I borrowed from the library at my desk until I was done at 4:30. The perks included being able to look up cardholder addresses in the computer — few comics folks seemed to have Amex cards, but I never stopped putting their names in the system — and a fantastic deli in the complex called The Duck and Decanter, which is still there and makes the most incredible sandwiches. And it was located at 16th Street and Camelback road, just nine blocks down the street from All About Books & Comics!

So 4:30 would hit and, about twice a week, I’d make All About my first stop. I had this summer job and sufficient financial aid to pay for university, so I felt free to spend a little money on comics. I was in full-on X-Men fandom mode at the time, and so these trips were used primarily to raid those deep back issue bins. I’d grab four or maybe five issues per visit, adding in a few other back issues to series I still had holes in — The New Mutants and Alpha Flight in particular. When I started frequenting All About, my X-Men collection ran back from the current issue (around issue #220) back to about #174, with a couple of older issues in there. By the end of the summer, I’d filled it in all the way back to #141, plus annuals. I’d also brought up to date my run of The New Mutants.

I was really interested at the time in the issues from Dave Cockrum’s second run as artist, which I was reading for the first time. They were very different in tone and style than the stuff that hooked me on X-Men: issues Claremont produced with artists Paul Smith, John Romita Jr., John Byrne and Art Adams. But the more I read the Cockrum stuff, the more I really came to love it fully and completely, faults and all.

I also started trying out more comics, still mainly Marvel. Favorites included: Avengers by Roger Stern, John Buscema and Tom Palmer; West Coast Avengers by Steve Englehart and Al Milgrom; and Silver Surfer by Englehart and Marshall Rogers. All About was well stocked, and you could pick up at cover price, new off the racks, the last six or so issues of these titles plus any recent annuals. And new comics cost 75 cents at the time, so it was not terribly expensive to try out six or so issues of a new series.

I recall flipping through a copy of an issue of Batman: Year One and not buying it — which was, again, really dumb. I did later acquire those originals for a very reasonable price.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I had been getting my subs through Fog Hollow Comics until it closed, and then those subs were transferred to a shop called AAA Best Comics. On Fridays, I would often hit All About and then drive up to Fog Hollow for my subs and then home. It took an hour in the car in Phoenix summer heat — without air conditioning. But this was my thing and I was all in. I almost always went for a swim as soon as I got home to refresh my sweaty self and remember for a moment what it was like to be cool.

The day before I was scheduled to drive down to university with my parents and move into my first apartment with a roommate I had yet to meet, I wanted to get my new comics from All About. It was new comics day, but in those days that was far less of a weekly event than now. The books came in and sat in piles on the counter throughout the afternoon as the staff worked to verify quantities before they could be put on sale. So I waited. For quite a while. I looked through back issue bins. I checked out the small section next to the comics where All About stocked used paperbacks and discount comics. Finally, the new books were freed and I picked up my comics, including X-Men #224, and began the long drive home in the late-afternoon heat.

Cover to X-Men #224 (Dec. 1987). Cover art by Marc Silvestri and Bob Wiacek.

If you’ve ever been to Phoenix in the summer, you know it gets really damn hot. And when the monsoons come, it gets worse because the humidity goes up from nothing to something. This was a monsoon day. I could see the thunderheads building up in the mountains, and was driving toward them as our house was near the foothills of the McDowell mountains. I had sweat through my clothes several times over in my AC-less VW Beetle. And then I got a flat on Hayden Road, just north of Via de Ventura. I pulled off onto a side street and, having no working spare, found a nearby pay phone to call for help. Which took a very long time to come because it was rush hour and our other car was otherwise occupied. So I found some kind of shop to sit in, with my comics, and read them until I got some help and could get home, wash off the day with a dip in the pool and try to prepare for the next day’s events. But I had my comics. That made me happy. And since I had an apartment, I did take with me my collection — about three long boxes at this point.

On to Tucson, and another town of new comics shops.

Breaking a 26-year weekly comics buying habit

It’s now been six weeks — or maybe eight; I don’t remember — since I last walked into a comics shop and bought a stack of new comics. And it may be a long time, if not ever, before I do so again. If it sticks, it would mark the end of a 26-year habit that has brought me tremendous joy but whose time may have finally passed on.

I could trot out a bunch of reasons for this change that have nothing to do with the comics themselves — namely, that there’s precious little time for me to read comics and the money spent on them is better used elsewhere with a 10-month-old in the house.

But the real reason is that comics — by which I mean mostly mainstream, superhero comics — have over time gotten so, well, small, that I have finally lost interest.

But let’s back up for a second.

I began buying and reading comics because I loved the cool stories they told. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, there was nowhere near enough sci-fi, fantasy and superhero material around to satisfy my appetite for it. I had loved animated superhero cartoons as a kid, graduating to stuff like Star Trek, Space: 1999 and, of course, Star Wars, which arrived when I was the perfect age — 7 going on 8 — to love it completely. And I wanted more. By the time I was a teenager, the sci-fi and superhero content boom inspired largely by the success of Star Wars had begun to fade out. There was almost no sci-fi on TV, and the few attempts that were made in the genre like V or the imported Max Headroom were short-lived or terrible or both. Star Wars was, apparently, done after about 1986, with the Marvel comic canceled and no other new content to come for about the next five years. Star Trek was still around with a new movie every other year, but that just wasn’t enough; The Next Generation was still a couple years way. I liked science-fiction novels like the Dune series and Childhood’s End, but comics’ visual nature and the shared universes they offered were much more interesting. 

And I ate it up, which was easy to do because comics were cheap. Taking $20 into the comics shop meant you could walk out with 10 new issues and maybe eight recent back issues. The collecting aspect was part of the fun — every new store might have the issues you’re looking for at the price you can afford — as was the simple pleasure of looking at art. Classic comic book art is a wonderful thing to look at and admire, and the old-style work that was done with traditional pencils and ink had a lot of personality. An easy way to start an argument at the comics shop was to ask people who was the better artist: John Byrne or George Perez. It was the same with writers — you could after a while tell who wrote what without looking at the credits. And there was plenty of new material to explore, beyond just Marvel or DC. When you got bored with The Amazing Spider-Man or Justice League, there was American Flagg! or Watchmen or Jon Sable: Freelance or The Adventures of Luther Arkwright or Concrete or Love and Rockets to move on to.

All of which made comics seem like an evolving and innovative art form that was vastly underappreciated by larger culture. In a word, comics were big — they were immersive, delivered old fashioned action thrills and were often much smarter than anything on TV or playing at the local cineplex. Comics felt like they were ahead of the curve — that everyone would find this stuff as great and fascinating as we readers did if only they gave it a chance. I think fans’ desire to see their favorite comics on the big screen came from a real need to prove that comics were worthy of attention, that they were ahead of the curve.

Comics kind of got that wish with the speculator boom. The 1990s really were the best of times and the worst of times. There were a lot of astonishingly bad comics that sold zillions of copies, but also some of the very best comics ever came along during that decade. Even the increasingly cynicism of Marvel and DC was masked by the fact that there still was some spark in their characters and in their books — something that excited readers whether they were kids who got turned on to the medium by the X-Men cartoon series or longtime collectors.

The industry of comics has, like every other aspect of showbiz and publishing, had to struggle with the changing landscape of making it work in the 21st century. If you had told me 20 years ago how easy it was to publish, promote and distribute comics in the digital age, I would have expected the doors of creativity to swing wide open and deliver a new Golden Age of super cool stuff. But instead, we have come to an industry that’s dominated by monopolies or near-monopolies. Its increasingly corporate nature has slowly but surely wrung the innovation and fun out of mainstream comics almost entirely. Even more sad is the creative decay, the decline in quality of comics and their near-universal slavish devotion to imitating other media or less-interesting elements of comics’ own past. I swear, I hope to never again read another superhero comic that uses first-person narration in captions. It was different when Claremont did it back in that 1982 Wolverine series, but it’s been run into the ground so much since then that by now it’s gone all the way through the planet and is halfway to Mars.

Marvel and DC were always conservative, always very corporate on the business end of things. But the last successful new character (i.e., one proven capable of headlining a solo series and not being derived from another character) created at either company that I can recall in the last 20 or so years is Deadpool. The only breakout characters — ones known to some degree in the greater population — from the entire industry are indie creations like Hellboy, Bone and Spawn.

The Big Two are not alone. The overall trend in entertainment has increasingly been over the past 20 years in general and the past 10 in particular toward exploiting established properties over any kind of investment in the new. It’s telling to look at such companies as Warner Bros. Animation and Hasbro Studios and seeing them admit they have no interest in creating new properties because it’s much easier and more reliable from a business standpoint to continually exploit and re-exploit the library.

The same must be true at DC and Marvel, though they avoid saying it. Given both companies’ history with creators from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster to Jack Kirby, no experienced comics creator with a great idea is going to give it to either company under traditional work for hire terms. And even if there is some kind of co-ownership agreement worked out where the creator gets a share or say in the use of their creation, it’s never going to be worth a corporation’s time or money to deal with the restrictions such a relationship would impose on them when they have so many other properties they own outright and can do with whatever they choose whenever they choose to do so.

The same issue has plagued pretty much all of entertainment, except maybe for TV, where the demand for content is high enough that new ideas can still get a shot. But look at the big studios’ biggest releases, the ones they pour tons of money into in the hopes that the payoff will be flush enough to keep everything going. They’re all mined from other sources — adapted or recycled from elsewhere. Even book publishing has gotten in on the act with silly ideas like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I find it fascinating that so many properties are tied up now that public domain titles have become popular fodder, like the upcoming John Carter movie and competing feature projects based on Snow White and Frank L. Baum’s Oz books.

The problem with this approach is that universes that do not grow are by definition stagnating. Adding new characters, new stories, new series is essential to maintaining healthy long-term interest, and that simply does not happen anymore at either publisher. When you think back to the most interesting eras for either publisher, it was when they were doing new things. When Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and others were creating the Marvel Universe, each new series was a major event. Each new storyline promised the potential of a new character as cool as Silver Surfer or Darkseid. It’s true for other publishers, like Valiant Comics, which for me evoked similar excitement during its earliest days when Jim Shooter was writing everything and sometimes even drawing the books. It was a cohesive universe that was growing organically and it was exciting to watch — until Shooter was forced out and a more conventional, short-term vision rather quickly began to unravel what had been done to that point.

On the indie side of comics, there are some bright spots. I still think some of the most exciting books of the 1980s and 1990s to discover were unique indie books, like Bone, Strangers in Paradise, Cerebus, From Hell and Stray Bullets. Dark Horse remains what it was back then — a unique mix of decent licensed comics and some really cool, high-quality creator owned comics like Concrete, Hellboy, Sin City and John Byrne’s Next Men. Dark Horse has always taken chances, and I continue to appreciate that, even though a lot of the newer original content they’ve come up with leaves me a bit cold. Image still publishes some of the coolest comics these days and are welcome as one of the few places left that is open to creator-owned comics.

The biggest problem with most indie comics — and with creators new to the comics field — is they seem to consider comics like a first draft of a movie proposal more than a medium of its own. When I was on staff at Variety, I got tons of horrible comics published by wannabe filmmakers who thought that, since comics were hot, all it took to get their script bought and made was to turn it into a comic first. There also were established filmmakers who sought to forestall studio intervention on the creative front by establishing their stories as comics that studios could not change without risking a Comic-Con backlash. In short, with a few exceptions, I haven’t found too many indie books that deliver the kinds of thrills and alternative takes on adventure stories, superheroes, whatever that rivals the best indie work of the past. Add to that the inability of most of today’s creators to get a book out on a regular schedule, with consistent writing and artwork, and even the most promising series can arrive stillborn (I’m looking at you, Nate Simpson’s Nonplayer).

So it is that the comics business has dwindled to a de facto single distributor in Diamond, a near duopoly on the publisher’s end with Marvel and DC splitting more than three-quarters of direct market sales between them, and a stagnant creative field that seems happier treading water and imitating sub-par movies or TV shows than coming up with anything really new. And the constant reboots and alternate universes, from Ultimates to All-Star to the New 52 just became wearying. Why can’t we move past origin stories anymore?

And it finally got to me.

After more than a quarter century, I found reading the last big stack of Marvel and DC books I brought home at tremendous expense to be the last thing I wanted to do. Trying to read the last few of them was incredibly difficult — the art was detailed but unclear, the scripting was clever but not informative, and the stories inched along at so slow a pace, with so little happening on any given page or in any given issue, that nothing registered as being remotely interesting. Six weeks later, or however long it’s been, I not only do not miss my weekly comics shop visit but I feel somewhat relieved. I no longer have to keep track of what I have and don’t have, what the big crossover of the moment is, or how much it’s going to cost and whether I can still afford it.

None of which means I stopped reading comics or have no more interest in comics. I’ve been focusing on artwork of late, and have found myself interested in the recent bounty of classic comic strip reprints. I’m well into the first volume of IDW’s The Complete Terry and the Pirates, by Milton Caniff, and digging the hell out of it. I also have a bunch of vintage graphic novels I plan to catch up on, including digging into the rest of Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing and an Al Williamson Flash Gordon volume I picked up a while back but never got around to reading. I also want to dig into the Williamson and Archie Goodwin strip Secret Agent X-9, and I  still have a few holes in my run of 1960s X-Men comics to fill.

There’s a lot today’s comics could learn from guys like Caniff and how well he used the weekly and daily formats. In many ways, the classic comic strip could foretell the way forward for comics, as all media have been moving toward shorter, more intense bursts of content. As we’ve gone from newspapers to magazines to web home pages to blogs to Facebook and now to the 140-character limit of Twitter, short and sweet chunks of story seems like the natural way for comics to go. A comic book series used to deliver 12 stories a year; and even when there was a multipart story, each part was still complete enough in itself to be interesting. Now, with four-, five- and six-part stories the norm, you get only maybe three complete stories a year. I think is part of the reason the established comics franchises are split into so many books — you need four or five series at that storytelling pace to keep up. I would love for decompression to be declared officially over and for comics to go back to being, well, comics.

If they do that, I might at some point come back. That could happen next week, next month, next year or never. But until then, I’ll be taking my comics interest into a past that’s largely new to me and promises to be a lot more fun.

Comics slowdown emerges in stores, new Diamond policies

So the general economic troubles have started to have a concrete impact on the comic book business. Take, for example, this article from today’s Los Angeles Times, which says more fans are reading trade paperbacks through their local libraries rather than buying them, and notes the overall downturn in the direct market:

But even after a year stuffed with blockbuster films based on comic books, growth in all sectors is stalling.

There are no statistics available for comic books sold to customers. But the number sold to merchants is dropping. For February through November of 2008, the amount of top comic books sold to shops was lower than the same period in 2007, according to online research group Comics Chronicles.

Sales figures in broader comics categories, including magazines and trade paperbacks, nonetheless increased in the January-through-November period, though just 0.5% more than a year earlier, said John Jackson Miller, a Comics Chronicles researcher.

The article also discusses the impact of piracy and mentions the recent postponement of Wizard World Los Angeles. On a good note, it seems as though the Third Planet store in Torrance has been given a bit of reprieve:

Dreary sales forced Third Planet Games & Comics in Torrance to shut its doors in early January.

But in true superhero fashion, a longtime customer saved the day by buying the business.

The store will reopen with a smaller staff and stricter standards for ordering, manager Scott Grunewald said.

“Hopefully we have a happy ending,” he said. “Because now, we’re starting from scratch.”

On top of this comes the news of policy changes at Diamond Comics Distributors that raise the performance bar for new products — and will certainly put the squeeze on, especially, small publishers. The Beat has all the particulars, including on-the-record comments from Joe Nozemack at Oni Press. Here’s the gist, from The Beat:

In a change that will have a far greater impact, according to numerous reports, Diamond is raising its benchmark for products it will carry from $1500 to $2500. Jones has the clearest explanation of this change, (although he later amends perhaps the most key point of all) but the short version is that unless orders to Diamond on a product are consistently greater than $2500 at wholesale, Diamond will no longer carry the product.

The obvious result is that a lot of publishers in the back part of the Previews catalog will likely be dropped, limiting their ability to publish at all. This may not seem like a huge loss at first, but as pointed out on a number of sites, things that have become classics like Bone or even 30 Days of Night might never have been published with the new standards in place.

Being the optimistic guy I am, I wonder if this doesn’t perhaps open up an opportunity for secondary distributors like Haven (formerly Cold Cut) to add more titles and specialize in the sort of indie titles that are being dropped. Sure, lots of stores won’t add a second distributor to their workload and expenses in tough times, but low-fi indie work has a long tradition in the direct market that may now have a bit of a fire lit under it by the Diamond actions.

Third Planet RIP

I’m a bit late to this, but my former comic shop, Third Planet in Torrance, has closed down. This article (which is on the Contra Costa Times site, but was originally done for the Daily Breeze), has all the details. Apparently, even the fixtures are for sale if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

I shopped at Third Planet when I first came to California in 1996. I was living in Redondo Beach and working at the Breeze and Third Planet was not only the closest comic shop, but the best at the time in that part of Los Angeles. I last visited the store around 2000, after it had moved from its first location near the Del Amo mall to PCH and as I was moving north and east into the belly of the beast that is Los Angeles. It will be missed …

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