The Genuine Imitation Jonesing Bogart Library
by Art Bowshier
I have been a comic book fan since I was little. I had been having trouble learning to read...
Dad had brought home stacks of comics given to him by other truck drivers on the road. In no time I was reading well. I may be a bit dyslexic as I read things wrong sometimes and may have to reread the sentence or paragraph a time or two. Comic Books taught me a lot with words and pictures. I would have those expensive comics today were in not for my mother starting the coal furnace with them in the mornings. It was the early sixties--what did anyone know then. I still mom and always will!
As I got older, I would visit Smitty's Drugstore for comic books. I would get a fountain Cherry Coke and a comic book. Or Go to the 5 and Dime to get a Gold Key Tarzan. Or go down to Haymers little green store and buy a value pack of stripped off covers of comics in a cellophane wrapper. These had giants and comics that didn't sell. Boy were those the days.
I got older and the artwork got better. Kirby went to DC and I couldn't get enough.
Prices jumped around as page counts did too. For a while everything was giant sized. I got to see many older stories and Simonson and Goodwin's Manhunter in Detective Comics. What they did in eight pages amazed me so much. I became a fan of the Justice Society of America. Werewolf by Night and Ghost Rider and Tomb of Dracula stretched the comics code at that time as did the drug related issues of Spiderman and Green Lantern/Green Arrow. There was Howard the Duck and E-man. There were the superhero parodies of NOT BRAND ECCH!! and The Inferior Five and Dial H for Hero (sort of). Charlton's The Phantom by Don Newton even caught my eye. It was a great time to be a kid and a reader of comic books.
I got older and moved to a bigger town. Crisis occurred and the million crossover curse of the events that followed. The artwork became grittier. Every third book was either Batman or Punisher. Direct sales came with comic shops. Then newsstand comics disappeared and no comic shop close by. Thus comics left my life. I' find a book here and there and send to Passaic Comics and get 100 mixed or indie books for $20.00 ppd. Then there were other sellers, and, I came across and then eBay. I have the habit of giving out comics for Halloween.
(I even created my own comic without really knowing how to do it. It's available at Indy Planet digital for a mere 99 cents. It is creative to say the least. When a friend self published his own books, I decided I could also. Calendar Komix Anthology #1 exists! My second endeavor--DREAMCATCHER- THE MAN THAT WALKS BETWEEN WORLDS -- should appear in the spring of 2012. It is a supernatural western. I've never read Jonah Hex, so anything similar is just coincidental. I had seen the movie after I wrote the story, though....)
My comics tended to come from yard sales and flea markets from then on. They tended to be older and more collectable. Classics Illustrated, Off Brand and Oddball type comics. I'd go to cons now and then. My collection tends to be older than I am especially in the Dell section. I love painted covers. I have Mason-Dixon versions of Tarzan. A Mason-Dixon version is where the black natives are either left colorless or yellow in the books. Many stores would not sell a book where blacks were portrayed on a level to a white man. Those were sad days back then.
Then a comics shop opened nearby--Main Street Comics and Games owned by Scott Riley and I found out about Superfly Comics in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Two good shops to shop at. I haven't gotten many comics since they re-entered my world. (The stories are too stretched out for my old school tastes. The art styles have too much to look at and I tend to lose track of the stories.) Money may have a bit to do with it. I wish I could buy but, they sell out, at least the ones I wanted to look at...as I don't get out to comic shops every week and am not ready to have a pull file, yet
Bill Gladman turned me on to Comic Related and I met a gang of people a 4C (Champion City Comic Con) in Springfield. Bill even gave me the concept for Dreamcatcher, I did character studies and gave them names and back-story. I penciled four pages and gave them to Bill to show the inker who did not like my work so. I was out and Bill couldn't in good conscience use my ideas --so I asked if I could go on with the story I had already started. Bill said he would love to see a different version and was amazed that I worked in almost a Marvel style with what he had told me of his story and it blew his mind just a little. I have since changed it a ton. I learned a bit about self publishing from Bill and others and the internet.
I have come to a conclusion that comic companies should have come to when Diamond distributing became the monopolistic monster it is now. Deciding if a book can be distributed or not, whether or not CBS's (comic book shops) get credit or not for ruined books or books that never came at all. This one entity is the say all and end all for an industry it is intent on killing.
If you complain you can have your flow of comics stopped and business gone out of business in weeks. Back in the days of newsstand comics they sold hundreds of thousands of books a month.
Some of those were what one book sold. Can it go back to the newstands? ARCHIE digests are still everywhere and are great impulse buys for kids.
I think newsstand comics are still possible. Almost every newspaper has four color presses now.
Sunday comics sections are on a whiter shade of newsprint than the paper itself. And most print up a TV Guidey-like section that is the size of a comic book. (Way back in WWII the paper supplies were allotted. if you didn't use you allotment then your allotment would get smaller. Gilberton, the company behind Classics Illustrated used newspapers to print their books and to keep smaller newspaper allotments the same. Will Eisner and Quality Comics had what was called the SPIRIT Section, a tabloid size comic that played to a more adult audience. It had a Splash Cover and sixteen pages. in full color with three stories! This was a weekly Sunday newspaper insert.) With the advent of Kickstarter and Indie Go-Go crowd-funding sites one could test market a return to newsstand distribution regionally... It would take a willing distributor and a collective of artists, writer, editors and more to get it done. But, it is plausible and doable. The current standard in paper and color quality and print quality would be lessened. Necessarily so I would try four different comics for the test market. An all ages book, a tryout book A superhero book, and a teen age type book. All would contain short stories--eight pages of less--one and done. A Kickstarter/ Indie Go-Go funder would pay for the 5,000+ copies needed to tryout the idea regionally. Size and price would tend to go with whichever demographic being aimed at
Happy trails, people--just my rambling thoughts here. See you next time--maybe with a review.
blog comments powered by Disqus
