The long lost days of the comic book exchange

I’ve spoken about the world of buying comics in those days before the direct market but I’ve only touched upon the glorious world of the comic book exchange which is outlined from an American viewpoint in this lovely piece here.

An exchange is exactly as it sounds. You’d take your comics there and exchange them for more comics. As a child in the 70s there were two I went to, one on Maryhill Road and the other tucked away near the entrance of Partick Subway station. Both were inhabited mainly by older men thumbing through the magazines I was never allowed to go near as a child but I was allowed to go through the boxes of comics on the floor which were a mixed bag to say the least. Made up of British and American comics, as well as new and older comics from the 1960s and earlier so I’m talking comics like this.

I remember picking up Silver Age comics in abundance for a few pence each, or if they had a stamp on them from that particular shop, you could exchange them for other comics. This is why you’ll find comics from that era with stamps of bookshops on them so you can pick up Silver and Bronze Age books which were once in shops ranging from Paisley to Poplar. True, the 5p (or whatever price) on them is nowhere near what these books are worth now but for years this was one of the main ways people could buy, and collect comics in the years before the direct market came together in the 1970s.

The direct market and gentrification were two of the main things which wiped out so many exchanges during the 80s as after all, why spend all that time raking through unsorted boxes of comics on the chance of getting a bargain when there was a speciality shop where you could get new and old comics at the same time? Sure, some collectors did that but hunting down comics is a tiresome job. Then there were the areas where these shops were being modernised, which often meant gentrified so these places were either knocked down or replaced by something appealing to an entirely different market. In the 21st Century the likes of eBay not to mention most people think any comic is worth a fortune (reality is most comics aren’t) the idea that one could walk into a strangely smelling shop and pick up anything for 10p or less is insane but for a few decades there we could do that and it was wonderful…

Visit To A Comic Book Exchange: St. Louis, 1946

A word of praise for George Perez

By now the comics world is aware that George Perez has a terminal diagnosis of cancer with six months to live. This is appalling news as not only is Perez one of these figures in comics everyone loves, but he played a major part of me falling for superhero comics as a kid partly thanks to glorious wonderful stuff like this.

Or this.

Or this gem

Or any of the dozens of comics he did which did at a time when if you picked up a comic with Perez or John Byrne art you’d be guaranteed a bloody good time. Perez’s art had everything from great figurework, to storytelling (something many artists today can learn from) but it was overall exciting and dynamic.

Had a project which featured dozens of characters? Get Perez.

Six months is not long at all but I hope the next few months are filled with joy for him as fans pour out their appreciation for one of the true greats.

There’s unlikely ever to be another George Perez so let’s appreciate him now and let him soak up how much people love his work and him in these final months.

Do MCU fans like the comics their favourite films are baed on?

We’re a few weeks away from The Eternals coming out. Now The Eternals was not one of Jack Kirby’s greatest creations but it was a great attempt to forge a science fiction epic which was typical late era Kirby in that it was big, bold, colourful and directly influenced by the Chariots of the Gods stuff which was a huge thing in the mid 70’s. It has improved incredibly well over the years as one of Kirby’s works.

But the first clips paint this huge world of Kirby’s shit grey, or brown and what colour there is has been muted as The Eternals become a low rent Justice League fighting ultra generic CGI monsters.

It just looks dreary compared to the source material yet for a generation the source material is ‘too loud’, ‘blocky’, and worse as if they’d rather have blandness over celebrating the source material. and it isn’t as if Marvel haven’t completely embraced Kirby like they did with Thor: Ragnarok, which as we know was a massive financial and critical success for a studio becoming increasingly obsessed with the larger plot over individual stories.

Now it could be because these people grew up on sparsely drawn manga, or they’re not used to the multiple languages of comics, or even if they’re away that Kirby created or co-created 90% of the characters they obsess over but to see so many dismiss Kirby’s work is depressing as without that work they’d have nothing to obsess over unless Kevin Fiege had decided to create a multi-billon dollar Rawhide Kid film.

But Superman shouldn’t be gay!!!

The headlines are full of gay at the minute as Superman is gay!!

Except it isn’t Superman, it’s his son. DC here are having their cake and eating it, and yes, it is a massive publicity stunt because superhero comics love a publicity stunt, and yes, DC can stuff him back in the closet just as quickly as they pulled him out of it. But it’s a sort of positive in that more gay, BI and lesbian representation is in superhero comics but not just to get a sales boost or tens of thousands of headlines across the world. Making gay from the off rather than in Jon’s case, aged up rapidly (last time I read a comic with him in it a couple of years ago he was barely out of nappies) to late teens/early 20’s to fit this storyline in.

So overall, a good thing but could still do better.

Come to Glasgow this weekend to buy lots of lovely comics from me

This weekend Glasgow has it’s first comics event for over two years!

The location for this is nice and central at the RSS Centre/Renfield Centre, 260 Bath Street. Glasgow, G2 4JP, and it’s also spitting distance from where I live so no ridiculously early rise for me. This is the first chance to give customers a good chance at my back issues (oo err) as the marts I’ve been doing in shopping centres are a much scaled down operation.

So come spend money and help make some room so I can get more comics to sell you lovely people!

Here’s some tasters…

And literally thousands more…

The horror of the second speculator era of comics

First of all here’s a nice video giving a basic rundown of the first big speculator era back in the 90s.

It was a glorious time for a while. Comics published a day or two ago would be hitting 50 quid and higher by the weekend. Massive amounts of money was spent by speculators and dealers, while publishers pumped out masses and masses of shite, much of it being utterly unreadable.Market went BOOM and overnight dealers and companies were dropping like flies.

Fast forward to 2021 and the market now is bloated with variant covers not to mention speculators pushing the prices of comics to the level where they’re unaffordable to most people. At least in the 90’s a ‘key book; would be expensive but you didn’t have to have a Swiss bank account to look at one. Added to the horror of slabbing comics it means vitally important, major comics will never, ever be read which destroys the purpose of what a comic is. It is to be read, and if you want, collected so you can read it again.

A mix of the Covid pandemic, a lack of conventions/marts and Youtube channels like Comictom101 are pushing this agenda at the expense of the medium. Speculation doesn’t help grow the medium or improve the quality of mainstream comics, or stop creators writing purely for their Netflix deal. It just creates a bubble and that bubble is unsustainable for collectors which is going to be dismal for the industry overall. But yet the bubble grows.

What worries me is the POP when the bubble bursts.The industry as a whole for your mainstream Marvel/DC title is not anywhere near as secure as the 90s, nor are there the same quality of creators, especially now Substack has signed consistantly selling Big Two creators leaving Marvel and DC with not an awful lot. So we shall see, but I dread the worst in a few years time once superhero fatigue kicks in.

The strange politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe

I’m watching What If.. which is enormous fun as it takes the non-canon joy of the original 1970s run of comics and translates it to a new, younger audience. It’s the most fun Marvel have had since they went Emo in the few years around Endgame, and it is nice to see Marvel fully embrace the comics instead of keeping up with the idea they can ‘ground them in reality’ which is bollocks.

What If… is the latest example of the MCU’s exceptionally odd internal politics. For example, at the start of Falcon and Winter Soldier, Sam is working for the American armed forces rescuing soldiers who were doing something dubious in the Middle East but the rest of the series never comes back to that, so we never really deal with the fact that Sam has serious power in this world but yet his family is broke. Unless capitalism collapsed we’re to take this at face value?

Then there’s the Avengers who are essentially a fascist organisation, though they do good we see unchecked power. Now this is a subject Marvel did try to deal with but quickly dropped like a hot potato once it started getting complicated, as is making the likes of Loki a hero even though in the continuity of the TV series he’s got the blood of thousands of New Yorkers on his hands. This is the problem when you take kids power fantasies and throw them into the ‘real world’. You have to then deal with the massive contradictions of having these characters in our world mixed in with the politics of Disney which means everyone also has weird sexless relationships in worlds where even no matter what happens, there’s careful product placement.

What I’m basically saying the Marvel Cinematic Universe may be entertaining, but there’s some strange, sometimes dangerous takes on politics of all kinds and that’s mainly down to not embracing the silliness of the source material or having a studio owner willing to investigate the logical outcomes of this world.

The theft of Jack Kirby

Most comics fans with even a passing interest in the medium and its history will be aware of how badly the industry has suffered from people stealing original art from publishers and selling it to collectors. The most famous case being that of Jack Kirby who throughout his career must have seen hundreds of pages ‘vanish’ only to have them reappear on the secondary market. There’s an excellent blog here detailing the issue, and it is one which a number of people really, really, really fucking hate talking about for all the reasons in the world popping in your head right now.

There was a few conventions in the 90’s in London where dealers from the US would have piles of art from the likes of Kirby, plus Neal Adams, Gil Kane, Steranko, and loads more for not insane prices compared with what any of those pages would go for today. The feeling at the time was many of these pages were stolen, or passed on from the original theif as after all, this was a goldmine of comics history being sold for a bargain. Just what you’d do if you want to shift hot goods quickly.

As mentioned before, this is barely spoken about because it involves picking a scab and what might come from it isn’t good. We know some artists,writers, editors (I’m not naming names, but the likes of Howard Chaykin have often over the years) and all and sundry would help themselves (struggling with rent? Grab a few pages, sell them to collectors and you’re back on track) so when Kirby had his art returned to him by Marvel, hundreds of pages ere missing. Other artists have seen pages for sale that they were told was lost while every now and then you’ll hear rumours of a black market of art thought lost but being traded by rich collectors. There’s a serious business now in collecting original art, and as everything is a one of a kind, there’s the fact it’ll never be replaced so next time you see a load of art on sale wonder where exactly that art came from and also ask if the artist/s are getting a penny from it?

Cancelling Frank Miller

If you ask people one of those who changed how comics are seen as a medium since the 1980s then Frank Miller is going to be high on the list of names given as his Daredevil work for Marvel, then Dark Knight and Batman Year One for DC being given as examples. Dark Knight is one of the best selling mainstream comics of all time. Also people may mention Sin City or 300, but Miller from 1980 through to the late 90s produced a body of work few creators since have matched let alone got near.

Since the late 90s his work has been, well, sketchy. After watching his hometown being attacked on 911 he appears to have went off the rails a tad, but if you’ve had to live by breathing air containing soot, smoke and atomised human then perhaps the horror of that day might have got to you. All of that does not excuse Holy Terror, a thinly vieled Batman booked where he tortures and kills a lot of stereotypical Muslim terrorists in a work that is toxic, angry, awful and unforgiveable all at once.

It’s a work which really shouldn’t exist. Miller in more recent years seems not exactly proud of it, even apologetic for it, which to be honest he should be because it is every bit as terrible as it sounds.

Anyhow, Miller has turned his hand to helping make average comics for DC these days but his part in making comics what they are today is untouched, so as a guest at a comic convention you’d expect Miller to be not just a huge draw but to go down well? Not in the case of Thought Bubble, who’d invited Miller over as guest, who announced today that he was no longer coming due to complaints from other creators who felt ‘unsafe’ had he been present. The full story is here at Bleeding Cool.

The idea that Miller being in the same area is essentially making the area ‘unsafe’ would hold water if after Holy Terror he’d carried on producing the same sort of work, which he didn’t. If anything it provides an opportunity to discuss the book with Miller in a way that hasn’t been done publicly. Instead a boycott is threatened, the organisers back off some people feel worthy, and nobody learns anything. There’s no sign that people change or contain a complex set of thoughts and feelings, good and bad. Instead it’s do right or do one, and if you don’t like it the hive will come after you.

Life is about living with different types of people of a variety of different opinions and thoughts. Sure, fuck full on actual racists but I don’t beleive Miller is one, and it would have been fascinating to see someone who has fought hard for free speech and against censorship in comics to discuss this with people in a con setting.

So instead we get this. Thought Bubble were in a no win situation, neither was Miller, but the organisers of the boycott feel like they’ve won a victory but it’s a sad time for the UK comics scene when a creator as important as Miller to the mediums history is ‘cancelled’ like this. The only shining light is that if one sets themselves up as morally pure then they’d better be careful not to drop these standards or do something others might find offensive or they’ll be the purity guard after them. This sort of rightous authoritarianism always leads to a bad place.

And next year Thought Bubble should book Howard Chaykin just to fuck all the right people off.

Come to sunny Paisley this weekend and buy comics!

The comics marts are coming thick and fast now, with this time the sunlight land of Paisley welcoming us all to the town for a comic (and toys, etc)at the Paisley Centre. Lots and lots of wonderful comics will be getting sold, so get yourselves down and give me your money!