Spiderman 3

Well, Spiderman 3 is just around the corner and I'm looking forward to it. I've been really happy with the Spiderman films, as comic movies go. With a little luck and some massaging of the work schedule, I'll get to see it when it hits theaters on Friday. Today, though, I decided to dig into the bowels of my archives and bust out some Spiderman goodness from the last film.

I warn you now that this is about the dorkiest thing you're apt to see today, and if you don't think you can take it, turn back now.

I have a friend named Matt who is a very talented artist (euphemism for "unemployed"). Matt also happens to be very twisted, and where these two traits intersect there is ALWAYS something good to come out of it. One of Matt's more entertaining hobbies is whipping up the most ridiculous costumes he can cobble together and going to movie premieres. This is usually reserved for Star Wars films, and I've observed, but not participated. KFC Bucket Boba Fett with two-liter soda bottles taped together is nigh-legendary, as are the stormtroopers wearing armor composed entirely of paper plates. Darth Vader with an office calculator Velcroed to his chest, though, would be my personal favorite.

But once... ONCE... the costuming was too hilarious and the opportunity too good to pass up... and that was for Spiderman 2. There was a standing plan for a group of us to see the midnight showing; we gathered in preparation at my house, and the moment I opened the front door and Matt was already in costume, I knew he was finally going to get me to join in the silliness. I couldn't stop laughing the entire time-- and now you shall all see a tiny little chapter of my shame, because I swore I'd do daily updates for a week, and I didn't have time to work on anything else I've wanted to put up here.

Who I am is not important. Just know that I'm in there and that we got a rousing ovation when we walked into the theater.

Quick Hit

I don't have a Sunday update today, so I'm just going to say if you live in Minneapolis or Chicago and can get to a place that stocks indie small press books, check out Uptown Girl by Bob Lipski. It's funny, sincere, has a really good heart behind it, and the ladies like it too (it's the only comic my wife reads). Bob is also one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet, and a damn good looking cat, if I do say.

Come to think of it, you can do mail order and even subscribe by mail via the site, so never mind the "if you live near" stuff... go get it!

Mart Nodell

There was a period of time when a circuit of comic conventions would run up and down California, and EVERYONE who was active in the industry ended up at these things. Of course, San Diego was always the main show of the year, but in the San Francisco Bay Are where I grew up, there were also a few shows a year where you were absolutely certain loads of industry people would be in attendance. Whether or not this is still the case I cannot say, but I can't imagine that it's quite the same as it used to be - with the possible exception of the San Diego Con (which is nothing like it used to be AT ALL).

About fifteen years ago I was at a show in the San Francisco area, and there behind a table was Martin Nodell, creator of the original Green Lantern back in 1940. At that time I was going through a major Green Lantern phase, getting everything I could to build out an eventual run of GL from Showcase 22 on. Naturally, I became very aware and very interested in the Alan Scott GL character as well, but this was at a time when almost nothing was happening with the Golden Age DC heroes, and they were certainly nowhere near the prominence they're at now.

At this point, for those who aren't familiar with Martin Nodell as a personality beyond comics creator, you need to know that he and his wife, Carrie, were practically inseparable. If Mart Nodell was at a show, his wife was there too. And she was his BIGGEST fan. She took a lot of interest in what he did and knew his work quite well- just about anyone who's been involved in conventions will tell you that the two of them were two of a kind and a joy to behold.

I talked with the Nodells for a little while and asked if I might be able to get a Green Lantern sketch. He replied "Well, I don't really do that." It was perfectly understandable - he wasn't a hot artist in the spotlight or anything, he was there to meet fans and enjoy his time later in life, not produce anything on request. We talked a bit more and I showed him something I had brought with me, hearing that he would be in attendance at the show. A Green Lantern action figure.

Bearing in mind that this was many years ago, nothing in the way of superhero toys was out there to the extent that we see things in the market today. Even with Mego toys in the 70s and Super Powers in the 80s, a character like Alan Scott being committed to plastic was unimaginable. It was just a generic body with hair made from modeling putty, some paint, and a cannibalized Super Powers Red Tornado cape (boy, this really makes me want to see if I can find it- I'm sure I kept it somewhere), but they probably hadn't ever seen more than a handful of anything like that. I remember that Carrie was especially tickled at the figure. Her delight, I am fairly certain, is why Mart Nodell gave me a sketch he drew up on the spot.



To this day, stories like this are what make me love comics, particularly from a historical standpoint. These men who were simply looking to pay the rent in an industry that was looked down on as the hind end of print media became heroes in their own right, creating cultural icons that will outlast us all. Being able not only to have real interaction with these people, but to come away with such a positive experience, is both a privilege and an honor that we can't take for granted, because so few are left.

Martin Nodell passed away on my birthday in 2006. It was, and likely will be, the saddest one I have.

- INTERLUDE -

I was checking the toymania.com boards today, and someone called "Brainiac" was asking a question about Spider-Man action figures. What follows is the EXACT exchange as it appeared... note the names the posts are signed as.

Are there gonna be 6-inch Spider-Man 3 figures? - Brainiac 16:37:36 4/27/2007 (3)

What do you care? Jerk. - The citizens of the bottled city of Kandor 16:41:14 4/27/2007 (2)

Hey, it's that insulting mouth of yours that got you bottled in the first place. - Brainiac 16:58:20 4/27/2007 (1)

I just really needed that today. That was priceless. whoever you guys are, you made a big nerd chuckle.

A Minor Deviation...

I know I said I'd be talking about Ion and the way DC wants to brick on their readership, but something struck me tonight that I wanted to get off my chest (and no, DC didn't put it there), so I'm straying from the plan.

I just picked up a book called Tales to Astonish by Ronin Ro, and while I'm still not that deep into it, it's a really interesting read. The book focuses on Jack Kirby's career in comics with a heavy emphasis on his relationship with Stan Lee over the years. It's a little jarring in that the book, at least early on, jumps from point to point a little too quick, and a lot of the "facts" are obviously based on recollection and anecdotes, but it's very interesting nonetheless.

The thing that struck me as I was reading it and wanting to go out and find more books on the early history of the medium is that we are at a time in history where, one by one, the people who pioneered this little corner of entertainment are dying off. I had the amazing fortune to meet Jack Kirby not long before he passed away, and he was a very warm, genuine man who really enjoyed talking to people who enjoyed him. We actually spent quite a bit of time in conversation, most probably because it had nothing to do with comics! My Grandfather was born in Brooklyn, also a Jewish tailor's son, not long after Kirby was born in Manhattan. They served in the army around the same time and both worked on not working (Kirby would climb into a plane's undercarriage and bang on the metal in order to sound busy).

We only stopped talking when his wife reminded him he had somewhere to be, and while it was probably just a conversation for him, I will likely never forget the privilege I had that day. Even now I remember being choked up in the waiting room of the dentist's office when I was thumbing through a weekly magazine and saw that Jack Kirby had passed away. This wasn't an artist who drew funnybooks, and not even a man who helped to create entire noodles in the kugel of American culture, this was someone who I had met and shared some time with, someone who came before me and had so much to offer, someone who reminded me of my own history.

I'm really struck with a sense of sadness at the thought that the men behind so many of our cultural icons, moreso now than ever before, are leaving us for the hereafter. Next time I'll talk a bit about someone else who's no longer with us and the amazing experience a geeky kid had thanks to his kindness. I think this will end up being a three or four parter, so for the one person who's reading, if you were waiting for me to hate on Ion, sorry about that.

Comics Cost Money! -part two-

So last time we got ourselves up to the point in time where the comic book market began its brief boom and prices started exploding upward. In case you're coming in cold or need a point of reference, here's the original chart that compares the cover price of a comic, by year, to it's adjusted value in 2006 dollars:



So what the heck happened around 1989-1990 that forced comic book prices up so high so quick, such that they're now more expensive than they've ever been with no evidence of relief in sight? Why is the cost now so much higher than anything that's been historically necessary? Has readership fallen so far that the margins have to be larger to support the industry? Are the margins actually larger at these price points, or is it just incredibly expensive to produce funnybooks now compared to every other time in their history? Let's first look at the most basic way that the market started to change: speculation.

If one million copies of Zippy-Doo #1 were sold at $1.50 an issue in 1992, do one million people own it? Not a chance. If one million copies of a 1940's Superman comic were sold, chances are that one million little Timmys bought them. Granted, comics speculation started in the '70s to a degree and continued through the 1980s, but prior to the massive boom that was kicked off by the Batman movie, there were not ridiculous amounts of multiple covers or hordes of people speculating en masse on any number of things (or just about everything, as was the case for a couple of years). The tough part about proving what was really going on is that the speculation and investment market makes sales and circulation numbers almost meaningless- if a significant portion of the buying audience is getting multiple copies of things, or if they're just along for the ride, we can't tell what the real size of a the core comic collecting audience was at the time. What we do know, though, is that by the end of the boom, that core audience was a fraction of what it once was. Did the smaller number of people buying comics drive the price up, or did the price increases drive people away?

Here's what I think happened; initial numbers looked good in the glut, but it was thanks to die hard fans that would stick around through most anything and/or speculators with disposable income buying up all the books, and multiple copies at that. Little Timmy, the bread and butter of the last several decades, was boxed out. If pressed to identify a specific breaking point, I'd say the magic number was the one dollar cover price. After this, a comic just wasn't something you could throw some change at. Anecdotally, this corresponds to the time when you could expect to see fewer and fewer comics outside of the rapidly expanding specialty market (which contracted just as rapidly when the glut ended), probably because the casual, impulse-buy demand just wasn't there anymore at the higher price point.

If we assume that decreased demand (lower print runs) pushes cover price upward (higher per-unit cost of production), a rather pesky vicious cycle comes into play. Little Timmy isn't buying all the comics anymore, so the books get geared towards older audiences. Lose more readers. Circulation drops; price ticks up again. Increase appeal with fancier paper and sophisticated printing/coloring - ironically, things that little Timmy wouldn't have cared about or likely even noticed 20 plus years ago - and it costs more to produce and drives the price up. Lose more readers. Circulation drops; price ticks up again. Rinse and repeat.

At this point, it seems that comics are relying on a very loyal core audience of older collectors with a fair bit of disposable income to keep things going. It will be interesting to see how long this can be expected to last given the rate at which prices are going up and readership isn't. The current sense of dissatisfaction with the last few years' product among the "core audience" of collectors is not a good sign. Say, that sounds like a segue if ever there was one...

I mentioned last time that I've abandoned Marvel altogether, and it's been that way for the last several years. Next time, we'll look at Ion- one of the many ways in which DC's been practically hand-delivering requests for me to do the same with them of late.

Comics Cost Money! -part one-

A little while ago I was looking at my expenses and marveling at how much money goes towards my comic book habit (although, really, it's not nearly as much as the ultra hardcore folks in the hobby). Even though I don't really get any more stuff than I ever remember getting, and almost certainly buy a lot less that I did in the peak times of my obsession, before I'd given up on Marvel entirely, it still seems to be a tighter squeeze and a spendier hobby than it ever was. I know the prices have been going up pretty quick lately, but "ever" is a long time. Was it harder for little Timmy to buy this month's Action Comics, or did it cost more for Timmy's granddad in 1940?

I thought it would be an interesting exercise to look at the real price of comics historically by mapping out two lines- one the general cover price most standard sized Marvel and DC books were for a given year, the other the real value of that amount of money in today's dollars. To obtain the second set of data points, I used the value calculators at measuringworth.com to obtain historical values set against a control year of 2006 (the most recent year available). Once completed, the graph told a very interesting story about how much we have been spending on the notion of wearing underwear outside our clothes. I chose 1937 to 2007 because A) it's a nice clean run of 70 years, and B) Detective Comics #1 is probably the best starting point for the experiment anyway.

So... Is comic collecting really more spendy now than in the history of EVER?

In a word, yes.



The chart (a larger version can be found here) shows us that comics have always been cheaper than they are now, though the prices have fluctuated rather widely. The initial drop in prices is pretty obvious: prior to World War Two providing economic stimulation that shook the world out of the Great Depression, ten cents was a hell of a lot of money. In 1939, as the world was being pulled into the conflict, a ten-cent comic book was equal to about $1.45 in 2006 dollars. By the end of the war, that was $1.03 and steadily dropping. While the rate of decrease continued uninterrupted until the 12-cent increase in 1962 brought the adjusted price of comics from 67 to 80 cents, there was never as rapid a decline in the expense (not the price) of comics as we'd see coming out of the depression. This may account for some of the scarcity of early Golden Age books; many sources cite wartime paper drives, the passage of time, and simply throwing the books out, but at a time when ten cents would buy you a meal, a comic book just wasn't that cheap.

So if we throw out the Great Depression and WWII as anomalies, we're left with a fairly gradual climb in which comics never really got expensive until the 60 and 75 cent days of the early-mid 1980s. This was at a time when comics were still quite plentiful outside of specialty stores; the industry depended on spinner racks in pharmacies, grocery stores, and bookshops to attract casual readers like little Timmy. The data suggests publishers were aware of this, because after the jump to 75 cents in 1983-84, comics held steady for quite some time and actually became more affordable.

Enter Tim Burton.

In 1989, the first Batman film caused a comics glut that resulted in a few years of rampant speculation, overprinting, and price increases (beginning with the 33% increase in price to one dollar in that same year). Many people have argued that this dealt the industry as it had been for several years prior a killing blow, and the data supports this. At no time prior to the early 90's glut was there ever so steep a climb in both the nominal and real cost of comics. I would hazard a guess that this initial increase of a dollar was done to cover costs, since books had held out at 75 cents for a while, but it was timed to happen when the publishers would be least likely to suffer for it (as demand would be up even at a higher price because of the Batman movie and the overall interest in comics).

So now it's 1989, comics cost a WHOLE DOLLAR in the currency of the time, and things are about to get even costlier. Next time I'll cover what I think happened between then and now, because unlike the pre-batboom years, we really can't prove squat.

Be gentle with me....

So anyway, here I am with a blog. I've written lots of stuff lots of places, but never regularly maintained a blog, because I could never think of any one thing to focus on on a daily or near-daily basis. In all probablity, this will ring in the death of this experiment. However- shocking though it may be to learn that someone on the Internet claims this to be one of their defining traits- I am apparently a huge dork. Rather than keeping things confined to any one realm of nerdity, I reckon I'll have much more success keeping this up if I manage to jump around to all the things that make me such a massive nerd (which means I can probably never talk about my wife, because being married will disqualify me in some circles).

I'll open with a story.

A couple weeks ago, I was having a conversation with my Grandfather about miscellany when the olden times came up. I've always been fascinated with my Granddad, as his upbringing in depression-era Brooklyn is like an entire other world to me, lost to time and history. The conversation shifted to his life as a soda jerk at the family soda shoppe; somehow it came up that they carried comic magazines there as well, to get kids through the door. "Oh, I had Action Comics when I was there," he says matter-of-factly. "You remmeber that specific one?" I ask...

"Oh yeah. It didn't sell well."

"How do you remember that?"

"Well, it was the first Superman, and he didn't catch on until a few months later- then a lot of them started showing up- Captain Marvel...."

"And it didn't sell."

"No, no one knew what it was- so we had to rip the covers off and send them to the publisher to prove that they were unsold- we got books on a consignment..."

"So you tore the cover in half and returned the book?"

"No, we sent the cover back - the book we threw out!"

"So you yourself ripped the cover off a bunch of Action Comics #1 and threw them out..."

"I wanted my dime back!!!"

Next time, we'll see how much that dime really was, and how much a comic book really costs now. I'm sure all one of you can't wait.