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Underground > Comic Books >

Shop of Wonders

miss wonderstarr

20:35 / 08.04.06

I read on another board about a (possibly mythical, possibly real) Detroit record store that closed down one day in the late 1960s and re-opened in 2006. Its stock was immaculate, perfectly preserved.

While I could coolly appreciate the marvel this inspired in the musos who discussed it, I didn't really connect until I thought: what if it was a comics shop.

What if a comics shop closed down one month, like June 1939, or November 1956, and was sealed for decades, absolutely watertight and fireproof, or else miraculously spared any damage over the intervening years.

And then you heard it was going to open. And you got in line at dawn, with a few other dedicated fans who'd heard the rumours, waiting for the shutters to go up again. What would you want to find there, as you wandered among the museum racks of absolutely mint titles?

20:50 / 08.04.06

Aside from noting that there weren't any comic shops in 1939 or 1956, I have to ask isn't this just the same as the prospect that faces you going into any new comic store or second hand book shop for the first time? The infinite promise of the back issue bins where you picked up a copy of Miracleman 15 for next to nothing?

miss wonderstarr

22:25 / 08.04.06

We-e-ell... this would have full mint-preserved stock, in racks by company and title, not a lucky dip in bargain bins, and you can load the dice by saying what year you'd like it to have first shut down in. You would have a whole range of comics from that month on display and the previous few months clearly available. It wouldn't be hit and miss searching, it would be a time capsule of that historical moment.

If the idea isn't entirely killed for you by the impossibility of a specialist comic shop from the Silver Age, that is.

23:02 / 08.04.06

Technically speaking the concept of time travel is scientifically impossible.

Check.....mate

miss wonderstarr

08:20 / 09.04.06

OK let my thread die if you dislike it

09:35 / 09.04.06

I don't want this thread to die, I don't hate it, but I don't really approach different comics published on the same date as being a capsule of any kind of historical moment.

That probably sounds nonsensical, and isn't totally accurate - because comics, like all media, have a lot to say about the time they were produced. But I don't think it is how most readers interact with their comics. Even moments that have been described in historical terms, such as the Golden Age and Silver Age aren't tied to dates as much as specific issues, and stories.

You can look at all the comics published in a particular month, but nobody reads comics that way. Even regular comics creators, who get comp boxes from their publishers each month, don't read their comics that way. The home in on specifc titles they collect and read and focus in on storylines they found particularly memorable.

10:26 / 09.04.06

I guess a lot of this also rests on the importance on places on the 'original' art object. While I can see the appeal that people have for the comics of their own youth, and for comics of historical significance, I tend to be more worried about being able to read the stories and see the art. I've read facsimile reprints of Fantastic Four issue one and i've read the same story in a big reprint collection and don't think I'd gain much for the experience of reading a copy from the original print run outside of a greater understanding of paper quality and printing quality of 1960s comics.

Yeah, I'd love to see a comics library like the one postulated in Hicksville of all the comics ever made, I am a natural hoarder and definitely think comics deserve to be recorded and collected the same as any other publication, but I'm relatively content to read reprints, as I am pretty content to do for most other media...

miss wonderstarr

10:42 / 09.04.06

I've read facsimile reprints of Fantastic Four issue one and i've read the same story in a big reprint collection and don't think I'd gain much for the experience of reading a copy from the original print run outside of a greater understanding of paper quality and printing quality of 1960s comics.

I differ from you there. I really like looking at the original comics and seeing all the ads and lettercols, feeling the paper and thinking that this object has been around for decades - that the first kid who read it was escaping into this comic while Hitler was still a very real menace, and that now the same kid's probably got grandchildren.

In the "best of" DC reprints, you only get the main story, not the back-up strips, the war bond promotions, the Royal Crown cola comics... or, years later, the Sea Monkeys, the X-Ray Specs, the Insult that Made a Man out of Mac, the Hostess Twinkies, all that good stuff Flex Mentallo was riffing off.

I'd really like to walk into a Silver Age time capsule and see, for instance some "Batman and the Negative Space Alien from Gamma-Wave Sea on the Far Side of the Moon! (In This Issue: A Special Guest Star Dies!)" comic alongside all the other crazy shit from the same month, part of a kind of... Zeitgeist, rather than it being reprinted out of context in a collection, between the urban gothic Golden Age stuff and the Denny O'Neil hardboilers of the 70s.

Still, the mint issues I'd actually like to find are just what you suggested: the Miracleman issues I read when they first came out on loan from some older cousin, and which I've never seen since. They remain like some kind of half-remembered dream for me, snatches of ideas and phrases:

- the tiger looks at me, and smiles
- actually, we prefer the words 'black person'
- Big Ben rising into the air and smashing down
- civilians strung on the Post Office tower
- a head with sapphire teeth, which turns out to be just a head
- the plea for help, "Miracleman! Miracleman!" trapping the kid between his two bodies in death

Maybe I should just let those images and words stay that way, instead of being disappointed by reading the real thing again.

11:11 / 09.04.06

I guess the facsimilie edition, like the one I have of Fantastic Four issue one is a cross between a regular reprint and the actualy thing because it does have all the old adverts in, but printed on much glossier paper, which in turn makes the colours even more vibrant and garish than they would have seemed in '63... but yeah - still a different experience from holding the actual disposable art object in your hands.

As for the Miracleman stuff, that is a bit of a special case for me since i have a combination of comics and collections. I have some of the original issues of Warrior with Marvelman. I have all of the first 16 issues of Miracleman apart from issue 3. I have Miracleman: book one which reprints the first three issues of Miracleman, but without some of the reprints of the '50s miracleman that appeared in issues one of the eclipse run, and without the editorial by Dez Skinn on the character's origin. I also have trade collections of Miracleman Book 4 and the Apocrypha, and assorted odd issues from 17-22 which contain one ongoing storyline that is a prelude to the silver age and a variety of editorial and letters columns. I also have issues 23 and 24, the only two parts of the silver age that saw publication...

So yeah, while I have much of Miracleman in various formats they all work in a slightly different fashion and contain slightly different material (and a few mistakes). And, of course I am still missing a few things like the rest of the silver age prelude. But somehow the 3 or so pages in the 3 or so outstanding issues between 17 and 22 don't seem worth the cost of tracking down, despite their fantastic Dave McKean covers...

This collection of almost replicated material came about largely bby accident as I attempted to assemble a collection that covered the all of the published stories, But I'm sort of glad I managed to do it this way...

So, yeah I guess between 'reprint' and 'original' there are plenty of shifting sands, but that's kind of half the fun I guess.

miss wonderstarr

11:28 / 09.04.06

Also, thinking about it, I've enjoyed the times when I've bought a job lot of fairly crappy, forgettable, run-of-the-mill titles from, say, the mid 80s at a market, and just immersed myself in the overall mood and aesthetic of that specific period. Like, Paul Kupperberg's DOOM PATROL was awful, but it was fun to get into the swing of pre-Vertigo superhero jaunts, just like it's fun to play Super Mario and Double Dragon on an emulator, or dig out your old mix tapes from 1981.

I'd like to walk into a store that was sealed in 1990 and check out the early Vertigo stuff - Hellblazer, Doom Patrol, Animal Man, Shade, Sandman were all on peak then I think - and see what else was around at the time. See what mindless mainstream stuff for immature readers was next to Hellblazer on the shelf, and browse to see what lightweight, fun superheroism I missed while I was getting into the gothic, artsy, genderbending titles.

13:29 / 09.04.06

About the only way I could have fun with this is if the comics store closed in, say... 2025?

19:52 / 09.04.06

What if the stores shut one year in the future, and then you could, like, find out what the heroes of, say, the DC universe are up to, like, one year later, but not know what had happened in that...oh, er, right.

I'd love to go back to the moment that I bought my first comic - my memories hazy about this, because I used to buy a lot of UK reprints, and also because there were several second hand book shops in the area that sold old silver age comics for cheap that me and my mates would raid every saturday, but I'd probably say that it was around the early eighties. I have great memories of the comics that I was reading back then - the Swamp Things (the one that I really remember is the one where the small town is flooded and all the weird vampire fish people are attacking him, and the story ended with John Constantine timing ST's regeneration) and the X-Men (the Hellfire Club story line I think, with Wolverine alone in the sewers) and the Justic League (was probably Detroit League around this time, but can't remember for sure). But yeah, if any year, it'd be the first one that I got really into American comics, and would love to see what was happening around that time, remind myself why I was drawn into those wonderful new worlds.