Tuesday, September 2, 2008

COMICS MY WAY: MY HISTORY


When I was a small little monkey, raised in a small cage in a small town, I needed the escape of comics just to try to stay sane. My parents, afraid of the violence and probably juvenile delinquent influences found in these silly books, refused to allow me to have any comics with superheroes in them. So I was left with Saturday Morning (see my post about Space Ghost below), the small box of mostly superhero comics my grandparents kept stashed at their house, and the Adam West Batman show. After taking a spanking for smuggling in a Batman 80 pager (and, I HAVE to wonder what kind of beating would I have gotten if I had brought home a CURRENT version of Batman I shudder), I eventually started getting every other kind of comic into the house to read and escape with as well as learn to draw my own as much as possible.


I came to love comics as an art form and saw it’s potential very early on, though probably on some subconscious level, I understood most of the language of comics, the storytelling, the flow, the very ART of it all. Like I said above I was restricted from any kind of superheroes in the house, so in my hard core quest to soak up comics in any form I literally absorbed ANYTHING on comics I could find at the local library, the collections of any of my friends, as well as anything I could get away reading at my local drugstore. Frankly, by the time my parents rescinded their no superhero policy I knew as much about each and every one of the costumed vigilantes before even owning a single issue of their adventures.


During this time I did convince my parent to allow me to buy Strange Adventures featuring Adam Strange, able to pass him off as an ordinary Joe in a space suit that kinda looked like a superhero outfit, as well as most everything that Gold Key printed. In fact the deciding factor that superheroes weren’t all that bad for me came as a result of a Twilight Zone comics digest that had a few morality plays featuring folks selling their souls to the devil. My mom decided that she’s rather have me reading morality plays about guys wearing brightly colored spandex as opposed to morality plays that featured demons. Luckily she never read an issue of Ghost Rider or Son of Satan that I bought. Eerie and Creepy, along with Conan and the Marvel Magazines would come in a little later.


A few years after being allowed to have superheroes I bargained a deal with my local drugstore to stop by after school and straighten out all of their comics shelves in return for a dollar’s worth of comics. A deal that went awry when I tried to barter for the first issue of Planet Of The Apes magazine, which was a buck twenty five. When the comic collection got to be too big I would bargain away issues for others, or give away grocery bags full to allow folks to sell at rummage sales.

In High School there came the above-mentioned magazines, which lead to my discovering underground comics. Then, when I was allowed a car and able to drive back and forth from work, I discovered a local bookstore that was in early on the direct distribution system. They got comics 3 weeks ahead of the newsstand, which was awesome to me and just encouraged me to read even more. Then, with them getting comics from Big Rapids distributors (which I believe eventually became Glenwood Distributors) they also started carrying more esoteric comics like Cerebus (where I was in on the ground floor with that title) as well as First Kingdom and the Tandra books.


The first Graphic Novels weren’t too far behind as Eclipse’s Sabre as well as others emerged. I started taking a liking to oddball formats, looking to read comics that came from anywhere, any country, as long as I could read them, and most any size shape of form (like the pocketbook collections, or anything bound into a book, or even some of the lighter sci-fi and pulp works like Doc Savage and Weird Heroes).

After high school, I was lucky enough to take the backroom of the arcade I was working in and, again with the help of Big Rapids Distributors, start my own little comic shop, the first one ever in my county. There I sold the first Fantasy Quarterly ElfQuest, as well as more issues of Cerebus, I took in collections and sold some and got ripped off on others. I remember fondly the Byrne Claremont X-men during this period. The shop was pretty successful to start with, but after a short time it became aggravating and frustrating to me as I was reading and selling product that I KNEW I could do better. Eventually, after the owner of the arcade messing with our books and (realizing that we were turning in a good profit) trying to enforce a high rent on us, we shut the store down, but not until after planting the bug in a number of other comic collectors to follow suit and start their own shops.


Then I got married the first time and life got into the way. I started working for a living at the very bookstore that I had made my primary stopping point only a few years before, and started something of a family, still with the bug to draw and see some of my own comic stories in print. After attending a few conventions and drawing up a few ideas, I traveled halfway across the state to visit a comic convention in the mall where there would be a professional guest to show my work to. The guest never showed, but there was another dealer there that was printing a little localized comic, so I showed my stuff to him. He asked me point blank why I hadn’t been printed yet, and to send him a story and her would print it.

That little 8 page story took four months for me to do and re-do and when I finally saw it out in print, well that was it as far as I was concerned, that’s what I wanted to do from then on, much to the chagrin of my then wife. I was divorced not long after that.


My need for work spun me into commercial art and being the art department for one of the bigger screen printers in the county, but I was still getting as much as possible printed, or self printed whenever or wherever I could. I produced comics during both the black and white boom and bust, I’ve knocked on the door at one time or another of most all of the major (and some of the minor) comic companies over the last 2 and a half decades. I’ve gotten SO close to a decent amount of respect and a good deal from the big two and missed out by a hair’s breath on more than one occasion. I’ve bluntly pissed off quite a few editors, almost twice as many as have gotten my admiration and respect, and burned enough bridges to keep anyone from driving across town. I’ve started and stopped no less than four self-publishing companies, and I’ve seen comics from almost EVERY possible angle and researched them through almost every possible era.


If you doubt my ability to understand comics then I welcome you to buy my 3 part miniseries, entitled oddly enough, Spank The Monkey On The Comic Market, where I’ve pointed out my views on comics’ past, present, and future. I have to tell you I know a LOT about comics, mostly because I LOVE comics!

My reasons for spewing all this to you is that through this blog I plan on staking my claim as a comic book art form critique. I’ve shown you a little bit of my REAL credentials here, just in case you stumble across a future posting here of “Comics My Way” and you think I’m full of shit, I wholeheartedly submit to you that I am not. So I hope when future installments of Comics My Way headers pop up here that you not only read them, but you let me know what you think about them and contribute to whatever discussion(s) you can about this art form. Feel free to send anyone here to my blog that you can. Feel free to use me as reference, as I will use references whenever I can, but most of these "Comics My Way" posts will be about how I would change things in comics and why.

When it comes to comics, there’s a lot to talk about, there’s a LOT of things horribly, horribly wrong and I plan on not just bitchin’ and moaning about the screwed up shit, but offer solutions on what I would do to fix it, and what HAS to be done to fix it, and how I would do comics MY WAY. Plus I might even tell you when comics are going right- but don't hold your breath waiting for it.

Stay Tuned, and WAKE UP!

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