Somehow I missed Ka-Pow! Comics Fight Their Way Into the Mainstream when it was first published a few weeks ago:
A scene in the movie ‘American Splendor’ takes place inside the Cosmic Comics store in Baltimore. Joyce (protagonist Harvey Pekar’s future wife) is having a mini-meltdown as she vainly looks for the latest installment of Mr. Pekar’s work — the autobiographical comic of the movie’s title. Her greasy, tremulous co-worker flees the store after one too many head-clutching outbursts, leaving Joyce alone in the shabby little shop where comics are arranged in disorganized piles and papered over the windows.It’s vintage Hollywood, which routinely sees the comic-book culture in terms of two stereotypes: the bag-of-neuroses-brimming-with-spleen (Joyce and Harvey Pekar) or the bloated ubergeek — a pompous misfit with a mind for sci-fi and a body for whaling — exemplified by the Comic-Book Guy in “The Simpsons.”
A truer picture can be found in Portland, Ore., at Excalibur Books and Comics. Located in one of the city’s blue-collar hipster neighborhoods, it is the Rick’s Cafe Americain of comic-book retailing. Thanks to its proximity to three comics publishing houses (Dark Horse Comics, Oni Press and Top Shelf), the store counts a disproportionate number of writers, artists and editors among its customers. But Excalibur also caters to kids and eccentrics, regular-guy readers and collectors.
Excalibur was founded in 1974 by Peter Fagnant, 50, a bespectacled, bearded, ponytailed Yoda figure who still runs it with Debbie, his 28-year-old daughter, and two other employees.
I’m not sure the article has convinced me that the stereotypes are wrong. The store is run by a bespectacled, bearded, ponytailed Yoda figure.
While I wouldn’t say that comics have gone mainstream, they aren’t all superhero comics these days:
Every Wednesday is “New Comics Day” at Excalibur, when fresh material comes in — and the denizens of the comics culture come out. On a typical day, 70 or 80 customers will leaf through the new titles. This particular “New Comics Day” began as it always does, at 10 a.m. with the delivery of a pallet containing 2,000 to 3,000 new issues and other merchandise — total retail value about $6,000 to $9,000. What might surprise the uninitiated is how many of the week’s new comics have nothing to do with superheroes. Indeed, these days DC and Marvel find themselves sharing shelf space with big challengers like Dark Horse and Image — plus a host of smaller studios, upstarts and self-publishers ranging from genuinely talented independents to hopelessly deluded hacks. Fully a third are anthologies of daily newspaper strips (“The Norm,” “Liberty Meadows,” “Li’l Abner”), adaptations of TV shows (“Powerpuff Girls”), slice-of-life autobiography (Robert Crumb’s “Dirty Laundry”) and works showcasing New-York-cool art cartoonists (“Blab!”).
I hadn’t thought about this aspect of the business:
The staff will spend the next hour sheathing over 2,000 comics in poly bags. This caters to collectors — Excalibur’s core customers — and, equally important, it lengthens shelf life. Unlike other retailers, comic-shop proprietors can’t return their unsold inventory. Nothing is on consignment. They must buy all their books outright, usually through wholesaler Diamond Comics Distributors, which controls the bulk of the comics-distribution market.
The fact that nothing is on consignment practically creates a collectors’ market; store owners don’t want to buy more issues of any one comic than they can sell, but any they can’t sell become collectible back issues.
Some “fascinating” comic-store-employee philosophy:
Meanwhile, Excalibur employee Shawn Brooks is holding forth on the genre. “A comic book is a bundle of contradictions,” he says. “It’s a book, but it’s not; it’s a magazine, but it’s not; it’s art, but it’s not; it’s reading, but it’s not.”
A part of me wants to read Seduction of the Innocent, just to see how bad it really is:
On the shelf behind him is a copy of “Seduction of the Innocent,” the 1953 book by Frederic Wertham that led to congressional hearings on the deleterious effects that comics were having on teenagers. According to a 1998 article by Kenneth A. Paulson of the Freedom Forum, “Wertham’s ‘findings’ included his assessments that Batman and Robin represented a homosexual fantasy, Wonder Woman glorified bondage and crime comics led to juvenile delinquency.”
Amusingly, the second of those three findings is basically true.