Trying to Stay Afloat

I walked by the shop in my building the other day, and Mike, one of the owners, was inside. I knocked on the locked door, and Mike let me in. We chatted about the state of stores in this new normal of pandemic closures. It was...a sad talk.

He told me that he started grouping first issues of different companies into large bags and selling them at discounted prices. He said, "You may like this one," and handed me an indie set of first issues.

It was thick and cost only fifteen bucks, and seeing as how I want to keep them in business, and he already knows me and my tastes, I bought it right then.

This was the contents:

I haven't had the opportunity to read all of them, as I'd wanted to before I wrote this up. But hell, for now this could be some content.

I did peruse the first few pages of Aftershock's The Man who Fucked Up Time, and it looks very good.

Coronavirus Attacks Comic Industry

I mean...dang.

I'm looking forward to the new X-O, and Tyler Boss's new Dead Dog's Bite.

Anyway...

Bad Idea Soon to be Among Us

I've been watching since the February 6th announcement of the mechanics of the Bad Idea movement, if you want to call it that, with excitement and anticipation.

The former Valiant executives are starting their own new comic publishing company and are planning on distributing to originally just 20 stores, but it looks like the number is up to 50 for May's release or Matt Kindt's ENIAC.

There should be a history written about the February 2020 BI announcement's ups and downs, about the madness that overcame a portion of comic fans. I may even write up some of my own feelings, as I'm on the side of total excitement, even if I can't get any books. I'm all in.

"Bathroom Face"

This may be a little gross.

I used to "sell" old comics of mine in my classroom, but not for money, for fake, earned Sherbux. Upon hearing this, my mother would purchase Ebay lots of comics on the cheap and send them to me, to add to my market supply.

Anyway, I occasionally take them to my boy when I go pick him up from daycare, and recently I brought him a SHINY issue:

Is it hard for you to read the title? It was/is for me. Stygmata is the name, and Entity was the publisher. The cover is some kind of gold foil, and after thumbing through the first few pages, the saturated watercolors made me thing it should be okay for the car ride home for my son.

The title turns out to be more religious than I was thinking, and despite the hero/main character, Stygmata, his appearance had my three-and-a-half year convinced he was a badguy.

Since then, after noticing the, er, early-career work of the artists and the generic xenomorph actual badguy, my son and I joke that this dude has only one face: pooping face:

Over and over, pooping face.

New LCS in the Building

A new comic shop opened up in the building I live in:

Atomic Basement is the name, and they opened up on New Year's Day. I went by a few times, and brought my son in the next day. They were giving away some neat stuff on opening day:

The owner, Mike, is also in the comic-production and publishing business, and has written for comics for years. Recently, he and his people wrote, drew, and published a few different series, the following was gifted to me on opening day:

It's an interesting, screwball cowboys/interdimensional shifting-type story, even if the art borders on advanced-comix-style.

It's very exciting to live above a comic shop. My son already loves it---they give him stuff each time he goes.

You Keep Me Hanging On

Having purchased a graphic novel for a friend I got to reminiscing. The gift is a collected miniseries/first volume of one of Black Mask's offers.

I have only read four titles from Black Mask, but they have been among my very favorite sequential art productions ever, as well as some of the finest examples of the hidden masterpieces of the margins of the medium.

I was ignorant to the Black Mask company until I first learned of 4 Kids Walk Into A Bank:

The story is not usually something you see in comic form---four pre-teens planning to rob a bank in order to thwart their leader's father's possible relapse into a life of crime. The art and the coloring fit so well together that the muted palette dazzles somehow.

It was so good that you waited. And waited. And felt guilty that you got angry when you learned Matt Rosenberg's father had a heart attack and that had caused the delays.

Since Black Mask is pretty much one dude, Matt Pizzolo, the realities shift.

One of their next big projects publicity-wise was Calexit:

Great badguy, great map and flag background, and nice recognition of the real California. Also, the treatment of the day-to-day experience of both an occupying force and a resistance force is not forced or contrived.

It's no real SPOILER to say that Zora kills fascists, but one of my favorite memories of an experience reading a comic has to do with Zora killing fascists.

It never mattered that it took 10 months for the three issues to come out. 10? I must have been busy; it felt like 15 months.

By that time, Black Mask was responsible for two of the most important comic properties of the times for me. One day I saw Gravetrancers up at the register, and the dude behind the register nodded, "Yeah man, that's, liked, fucked up...it's awesome." Are you kidding me? SOLD:

This is all true: there's a drug produced by certain compounds found in a dead body, and the fresher the dead, the stronger the drug.This drug is also highly addictive, because, of course it is. The story writes itself. It's got everything: syringes full of psychedelic corpse drugs directly to the eyeball; a dude being thwarted from having sex with his mom by someone other than his mom; and Shovel, a boy of 40 who wears a shawl over his face because he has no lower jaw. It's now cannon in the badass-underground-horror-drug-masterpiece genre.

The next title, Young Terrorist, was actually released before the 4 Kids... series, but I picked up the collected series a few months ago, having been thumbing through for too long.

It poses as a "daughter-of-an-American-oligarch-rebels-and-joins-a-terrorist-cell" story while turning out to be closer to superhero comics at the end. That marriage is the real star and story.

These are just four of their titles. I haven't even gotten to Black yet, where black people are gaining superpowers, and they're the only people on earth who are:

Or Kim&Kim, where two chicks are interdimensional cowboy bounty hunters, one's queer and one's trans:

What about Space Riders:

While I was writing this I remembered seeing in one of the sale bins Ballistic, the collection of the four issue series, and buying it on the spot:

Butch is an air-conditioning unit repairman in an dystopian future independent floating city-island of technology mixed with DNA. He aspires to be a criminal, and has a living gun as a sidekick, a gun that spends equal time between being attached to his right hand, and chilling on couch getting loaded.

The pencil work is Darick Robertson, and who doesn't love Transmet? And at $2.99, what risk was there?

But I still haven't finished it.

Black Mask is responsible for some of the great artifacts of era in a medium, and that's pretty cool.

They've earned my continued attention.

Before the Big Two: Part 1

I named this blog "Beyond the Big Two" as a way to signal that I'd like to mention lots of comics that are outside of the DC/Marvel umbrellas. I had/have a whole series of ideas that I wanted to write about concerning the different eras of comics, and I'm not really sure how I wanted to do that.

Today, the Big Two are, as mentioned, Marvel and DC. But, back in the Golden Age of comics, the Big Two, if anyone cared to call it that, were probably National and Fawcett, or, and this is likely more accurate, it was a Big Three, with MLJ added in.

At that time, Timely and Quality and Fox did okay, with one of Fox's main characters outshining everyone until Fawcett's big reveal.

Today only three of these six companies remains in operation: Timely Comics took the name of their most popular line and became Marvel Comics; National Comic Publishing took the initials of their most popular line and became DC Comics; and MLJ, reeling from having their second most popular character ripped off and being overshadowed by the new character, went in another direction, leaned into the popularity of their beloved character and changed their name to reflect that, and became Archie Comics.

DC Comics bought the rights to Quality, Fox, and Fawcett over the years, and characters that had been independent and popular, and rivals, even surpassing the sales of giants like Superman and Batman, have been absorbed into the DC Universe.

Two I wanted to briefly point out got their starts as outside the umbrella of what today are considered established companies, but, at the time in 1939 and 1940, everything was just starting out. This first character was wildly popular for a time, and predates all Golden Age heroes except Superman (1938) and Batman (March 1939):

Blue Beetle had a radio show and a park day and popular costume. 1939 was a good year for comic heroes, as we get, in this particular order: Batman, Blue Beetle (Fox), Human Torch and Namor (Timely/Marvel), Captain Marvel/Shazam (Fawcett), and the Shield, the forerunner to Captain America (MLJ).

In 1940, before Captain America debuted, before Archie and the Spirit showed up, Quality released a character who could absorb sunlight to various ends:

The Ray, as a character, is still around the DCU, as is a new iteration of Blue Beetle, as well as a whole cast of characters purchased from their early rivals.

While I like the history of BB and the Ray, neither were remotely as popular as the heights attained by Captain Marvel and Archie and Superman and Batman. Blue Beetle may have been trending that direction, but Captain Marvel ended that.

It takes 80 years to fully appreciate how wild the origins of an entire artform's medium and commercial market were.

Shazam and Archie deserve their own posts...