Comics Fight Their Way Into the Mainstream


By M.E. Russell
Illustrated by M.E. Russell and Chad Essley
The Wall Street Journal, March 4, 2004 (Leisure & Arts, page D10)




Portland, Ore. -- A scene in the movie "American Splendor" takes place inside the Cosmic Comics store in Baltimore. Joyce (protagonist Harvey Pekar's future wife) is having a mini-meltdown as vainly looks for the latest installment of Mr. Pekar's autobiographical comic of the movie's title. Her greasy, tremulous co-worker flees the store after one too many head-clutching outbursts, leaving Joyce alone in the shabby little shop where comics are papered over the windows.

It's vintage Hollywood, which routinely sees the comic-book culture in terms of two stereotypes: There's the bag-of-neuroses-brimming-with-spleen (Joyce and Harvey Pekar) or the bloated übergeek -- a pompous misfit with a mind for sci-fi and a body for whaling -- exemplified by the Comic-Book Guy in "The Simpsons."

A truer picture can be found in Portland, Ore., at Excalibur Books and Comics. Located in one of the city's blue-collar hipster neighborhoods, it is the Rick's Café Americain of comic-book retailing. Thanks to its proximity to three comics publishing houses (Dark Horse Comics, Oni Press, and Top Shelf), the store counts a disproportionate number of writers, artists and editors among its customers. But Excalibur also caters to kids and eccentrics, regular-guy readers and collectors.

Excalibur was founded in 1974 by Peter Fagnant, 50, a bespectacled, bearded, ponytailed Yoda figure who still runs it with Debbie, his 28-year-old daughter, and two other employees. Debbie grew up in the store and collects "Wonder Woman" and romance comics like "Heartthrobs" and "Young Brides" that date from the "Golden Age" of comics -- roughly 1938 to the mid-1950s.

In appearance, Excalibur is a far cry from the scruffy Cosmic Comics. It looks more like a library or a hospital, with clean white walls, bright light and its merchandise neatly organized according to type: new releases; rentable animation DVDs; new releases; all-ages comics like "Archie" and "Bone"; Japanese comics; "alternative" comics, which contain romance, crime and slice-of-life stories (including, yes, "American Splendor"); local work; "adult" comics; genuine rarities such as 1934's "Famous Funnies" #1, which Mr. Fagnant recently sold to a customer for $3,400; and much more.

Every Wednesday is "New Comics Day" at Excalibur, when fresh material comes in -- and the denizens of the comic culture come out. On a typical day, 70 or 80 customers will leaf through the new titles. This particular "New Comics Day" began as it always does, at 10 a.m. with a pallet containing 2,000-3,000 new issues and other merchandise -- total retail value about $6,000 to $9,000. What might surprise the uninitiated is how many of this week's comics have nothing to do with superheroes. Indeed, these days DC and Marvel find themselves sharing shelf space with big challengers like Dark Horse and Image — plus a host of smaller studios, upstarts and self-publishers ranging from genuinely talented independents to hopelessly deluded hacks. Fully a third are anthologies of daily newspaper strips ("The Norm," "Liberty Meadows," "Lil' Abner"), adaptations of TV shows ("Powerpuff Girls"), slice-of-life autobiography (Robert Crumb's "Dirty Laundry") and works showcasing New-York-cool art cartoonists ("Blab!").

The staff will spend the next hour sheathing over 2,000 comics in poly bags. This caters to collectors -- Excalibur's core customers -- and, equally important, it lengthens shelf life. Unlike other retailers, comic-shop proprietors can't return their unsold inventory. Nothing is on consignment. They must buy all their books outright, usually through wholesaler Diamond Comics Distributors, which controls the bulk of the comics-distribution market.

Excalibur opens at 11 a.m., and by lunchtime on this particular Wednesday, it's apparent from the assembled customers that comics appeal to a wider range of readers than popular prejudices would have us believe. There are women on the tragic side of hip -- Goth and depressed-looking, with artfully distressed "I don't care" looks that actually take work -- a few young men in their 20s, a guy in a business suit, people with tattoos.

Meanwhile, Excalibur employee Shawn Brooks is holding forth on the genre. "A comic book is a bundle of contradictions," he says. "It's a book, but it's not; it's a magazine, but it's not; it's art, but it's not; it's reading, but it's not." He breaks the store's readership into different subsets: the obsessive collectors who thrive on the "puzzle-building" -- gathering complete sets of back issues -- and a growing group of people who genuinely enjoy reading the stories.

As we're talking, we're joined at the counter by Jefferson Smith, 30, a Portland lawyer and political activist. He's buying a fairly thick stack of comics that includes Superman, X-Men, Captain America, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man and Batman. He read them voraciously as a kid, but started picking them up again six months ago. "I always wanted to be a hero," he says. "I started [reading them] again when I was discouraged about what was happening in the country."

"Comics are escapist — that's obvious," Mr. Brooks continues. "But there's also, depending on what you read, a surprising amount of depth. That shocks and surprises a lot of people." He argues that comics are actually more immersive than movies, "because it's words and pictures together — it’s all-encompassing entertainment."

The comics subculture is growing, fed in part by the Internet allowing fans to find each other. In 1970, 300 people attended the first San Diego Comic-Con, held in a hotel basement; since then, according to promotional literature, it's grown into the nation's most important comics-industry convention — with 70,000 people attending last year.

The subculture's also growing because the production values have gotten better. Mr. Brooks makes a point I'll hear a lot over the course of the day: Thanks to a renewed interest in good writing, combined with better illustrators and digital pre-press technology, comics are enjoying an upswing in quality.

Later that afternoon, as customers hover at the new-comics rack, untaping the plastic bags to peek inside, Peter guides me back into his office. The walls are plastered floor to ceiling with the semi-forgotten history of pulp fiction -- a color Xerox the cover of "Amazing Fantasy" #15, the first Spider-Man appearance, for example. In mint condition, this comic would fetch five figures today. There are also a couple of dozen covers from "Dime Mystery Magazine" and various jungle-girl comics from the '40s and '50s, books with titles like "Sheena" and "All Top" and "Rulah" -- all of them depicting white girls in fur bikinis shown in varying degrees of peril.

On the shelf behind him is a copy of "Seduction of the Innocent," the 1953 book by Frederic Wertham that led to congressional hearings on the deleterious effects that comics were having on teenagers. According to a 1998 article by Kenneth A. Paulson of the Freedom Forum, "Wertham's 'findings' included his assessments that Batman and Robin represented a homosexual fantasy, Wonder Woman glorified bondage and crime comics led to juvenile delinquency."

Around 5:30 p.m., a half-dozen comic-book professionals converge on the store. Among them are Pete Woods, who works on Batman comics, and his wife and fellow pro, Rebecca. They share a studio space with artists who work on "Superman," "Superboy," "Wonder Woman," "Daredevil," "Fantastic Four," and other major titles. Both think American publishers need to do a better job courting a female readership. "I don't want to see a woman bound and gagged on the cover of a comic," Rebecca says. "I want to see some more empowering things." I mention that this week's issue of "Robin" features, well, just such an image on its cover and, inside, and one of the same woman being shot while tied to a chair. Rebecca moans.

They're soon joined by Brian Michael Bendis, a fireplug of a man who's arguably the most prolific and successful writer working in comics. Bendis currently writes "Ultimate Spider-Man" and "Ultimate Fantastic Four," among other titles. I mention one of the rueful jokes of the comics industry -- that because of its isolated distribution network, most of the people who come into comic-book stores draw comics themselves. The entire audience is in the room with the entire industry, like some bad coffeehouse poetry slam. "Oh, yeah," jokes Mr. Bendis. "Sales would double if DC and Marvel got rid of their comp lists." Everyone laughs.

"You know, it's like music," he continues. "It's impossible to figure out how to do it for a living, but if you get to, you are such a die-hard. I mean, all these guys here, this is their life --there's nothing else that we're gonna do. This is it. We were doing books and we weren't getting a dime for it for years. And if there was no comic-book industry, we'd be going to Kinko's, folding 'em in half and putting staples in them ourselves. I know this for a fact because we were."

M.E. Russell is a writer and cartoonist in Portland, Oregon.

© 2004, Wall Street Journal. Reprinted with permission.

Posted: Thu - March 4, 2004 at 12:14 PM        

|

©