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 quick word about Get Back

I’ve never been a massive Beatles fan. Sure, I like a load of their stuff but I’m at best a casual fan, but as a lover of music the new documentary Get Back looked interesting however at around seven hours I thought I’d take months to wade through it. Instead I’ve swallowed it up in eager gulps as the entire thing is not just extraordinary in terms of the restoration done by Peter Jackson’s team but it changes how history will see the end of the Beatles, not to mention it’s got some astonishing archive of London at the end of the 60’s when the buildings were still blackened with a century’s worth of industrial grime.

It is going to be for the candid footage which changes things that this is going to be remembered. The film Let It Be made it seem like the back were falling to pieces and struggling to make new music but that film can now be binned as ok, there are tense moments, especially when George walks out the band tired of playing second fiddle to Paul and John while trying to struggle with a clear case of Imposter Syndrome, constantly telling the others they should get Eric Clapton to replace him.This results at one point John telling him that they don’t need Eric Clapton but they need George Harrison. It’s wee things like this which make it all just change how history has seen things.

Of course a large part of the fun are watching the band come up with songs, though by far the most interesting one is the creation of Get Back which comes out of nowhere when Paul is playing around, diverts into an anti-racist song that attacks Enoch Powell (this bit is jaw dropping as imagine how that could have changed things?) before eventually settling on what we all know now.

Rather than some chore this is a fascinating joy.The closest we’ll get to The Beatles doing reality TV as it were. You’ll see George leave, then come back, Yoko being perfectly nice while inventing a Goth look a decade early, John and Yoko turning up smacked up, Ringo’s astonishing wardrobe and simply endless cups of tea being drunk. You don’t need to be a Beatles fan to enjoy this so make some time to watch this simply remarkable documentary.

Giving Steve Ditko credit.

The family of Steve Ditko is pressing Disney to terminate the rights for Doctor Strange and Spider Man, both characters who are worth billions to Disney/Marvel. In return Marvel/Disney are fighting to ensure things stay with them, so the logical outcome will be it ends up like the Jack Kirby case where they came to an agreement with the family which is why Kirby now gets a very promenent credit on the Marvel film and TV series. Disney also have the original writers of Predator doing the same but at a more advanced phase.

Of course Ditko’s heirs should be recompensed, and Ditko’s credit should be made more important, and of course Disney will fight to keep every last penny they can. What shouldn’t be depressing in all of this are fans leaping to the defence of Disney/Marvel, both companies which have refused creators payment and credit for nearly a century and partially got away with it because fans put ‘product’ ahead of people or art. Even the thought the Ditko estate might deny ‘fans’ their fix has sent people into a feral rage.

Spider-Man will continue at Marvel, hopefully with the Ditko family a bit better off and Steve Ditko gets a better credit for his co-creation, and as for Doctor Strange, well, that one was pure Ditko so hopefully that gets more publicity than it does now. In the meantime ‘fans’ will shill for billion dollar industries who see them purely as breathing cash machines…

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.

20 years of 9/11

It is astonishing to me that 20 years have passed since 9/11, which means there are people now becoming adults who have known nothing but the 911 era and can’t remember the relative decade of peace (unless you lived somewhere like The Balkans) tyhat had taken place just before it. At the time it was very, very clear the world was going to change, yet few would have predicted the Taliban winning the war 20 years later while even more barbaric fundamentalists have emerged since then, both in the Middle East and America, while the lives of ordinary women, gays and lesbians come under threat worldwide by very different types of fundamentalism.

And all of this and more came out of that glorious autumn morning 20 years ago.

I always remember new things about it. Only this week I was telling a mate about how all the news websites went down through the sheer weight of people trying to get onto them (and this was in the days of dial-up so there were nowhere near the numbers of internet users there are today) so you had to go onto message boards to find out what information you could. For example, the Fortean Times site ended up being a great resource as news sites were crashing, but by late afternoon UK time news sites were coming back online, in a somewhat basic form. Sadly much of that digital record is lost so the best reord of how the world reacted that day is lost.

But we’re now two decades into whatever this is and there’s no signs of whatever this is ending as we have no leaders on any side capable of bringing it to an end which is why part of me sees myself worrying about this carnage probably til I die, and those born in the era of 9/11 will never know any better. .

Geordie Protect & Survive

If kids today think they can’t cope with potential armageddon, then cast your mind back to the time when armageddon could have been any minute of any day anytime from the late 50s through to the early 90s thanks to the very real threat of nuclear war. There was even a time when people not just thought they’d win such a was but also that people would survive it by stocking up on Fray Bentos pies, cat litter and remembering to wrap your nan in black bags and throw her out on the street for the council to pick up. How we got through the 80’s especially is a mystery still, but we did only to face another type of armageddon further down the line.

So people thought we’d survive and this resulted in utterly bizarre bits of fiction being peddled by governments like this bizarre, surreal bullshit in the video below. Check it Out was a kids programme, and taking a break from it’s usual stuff it decided to show us how to survive the end of life as we know it in the most children’s TV way possible.

Enjoy?

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?

Nirvana live in Newcastle 1991

I saw Nirvana around half a dozen or so times with each time being an experience for one reason or another but the one time I missed out was seeing them play in Newcastle, partly because it was in the legendary Mayfair, a nightclub of many rooms with dark corners where young people of the age did glorious things with drugs and other people’s body parts.

I was a tad annoyed as one can imagine so thanks again to YouTube and the person who had the foresight to go to one of Newcastle’s finest clubs on one of its best night with a camcorder so this night can be preserved for folk like me.

The world of Super 8 home films

Today if you want to see a film all you need to do is turn your TV on, go to any streaming site and pretty much anything you want is there. If it isn’t then there’s plenty of ways to find it. IT never used to be like this of course. Once we all had to get up off our arses to go to the video shop like a Blockbuster, or if we really liked a film you can buy it on VHS, then DVD and now Blu-Ray. Now imagine a time when you couldn’t just watch your favourite film but instead had to do with a Super 8 version of the film which was heavily edited down to normally around half an hour, if you were lucky. These versions of films did not mess around as they had to effectively act as highlights while staying true to the full version.

Here’s Alien as an example.

The chestburster happens around seven minutes into its 17 minute running time, leaving 10 minutes to cram everything else in. As for Star Wars, you dare not blink or you’ll miss something.

Same goes for The Empire Strikes Back.

Go to YouTube and there’s hundreds of them there in a handy playlist, and be warned some of these condensed films are literally less than highlights. Jaws for example runs just over ten minutes!

Yet there’s a charm to all these films. For years they were the only ways to see a film unless it was rereleased or it happened to pop up on TV, which for new films at the time would be years. An actual print of the full film would be out of the price range of most people, assuming they had the equipment and space to show them in. Super 8 versions could be shown on your wall.

These films are now massively collectable odddites from a pre-digital age where you had to improvise to see a film you liked, and these highlight reels were great pre-video solutions to a demand. I had a few of them but sadly sold them some years ago because they were gathering dust, but these clunky gems of memorbillia are things I wish I’d kept. Especially considering the current value of many of them…

Rock City in Nottingham is 40 years old

In the early 90’s I spent just over a year living in Nottingham, not because it was handier for work (which it was as it allowed me to live near where I could work) but because the nightclub/venue Rock City was there.

Rock City formed a large part of my formative youth when I moved from Glasgow to Leicester, and although dirty, sleazy alternative clubs were a thing in Glasgow nothing came close to Rock City. My first time there was for ‘alternative night’ which was a Saturday then. Walking up the wee hill to the venue I saw some poor lad being thrown face first out the club by the quite fearsome door staff who helped ensure there was very little trouble in the place.

Back in the late 80’s, and much of the 90’s I’d go up there for a gig, a night out or one of the legendary all-nighters. An all day session would involve starting in Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, then some chips, and then to the Salutation, before making our way to Rock City where by this point everyone is happily drunk and then the insanity really begins. The next day would see you wake up in a mess on someone’s floor/couch/bed or by some miracle you made it back home!

One of my best times there was when Nirvana played in 1991 just as they became huge. I’d bumped into the band coming out of Selectadisc (a now closed legendary record shop) while I was dropping some comics off at a shop in town. A blurted hello, and a smile back from the band made my day as did their gig that evening in what was a dangerously overcrowded venue.

You can get a jist of the night in the video below.

But moving away from the East Midlands meant visits were less, plus old age, and now disablity means clubbing is a chore, but the memories of the nights there will keep me going for ages, assuming I can remember most of them…