CSotD: Stop the wagon, I want to get on
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Let's start with an extremely sensible rule
If Alex Raymond places a woman in your path, do not question her motives. Or his. Just stop the wagon.
Sure, she might try to kill you. But why focus on the negative?
Too-Smart-For-The-Room Juxtapositions of the Day
(Bizarro)
(Lio)
I want to see the Bizarro done as a performance piece in an airport. I have heard a probably-apocryphal story of someone giving the name "Spartacus" at a Starbucks so that, when his coffee was ready and his name called, he stood up and said, "I am Spartacus" only to have other people also stand up and declare, "No, I am Spartacus!"
In a room full of people who spend five bucks for a cup of coffee, it's entirely possible. But I'd like to see a video of people walking past this driver, just to see how many chuckle.
(The fact that a cup of coffee will also cost you five bucks at the airport is probably not relevant.)
And Lio is equally going to sail over a lot of heads, but it made me laugh. I've mentioned before that we had a rule in our seminar senior year that nobody was permitted to use the term "evocative."
We didn't have the same rule about "epiphany," but let's just say that, in general, certain statements that got knowing nods from a tableful of sophomores were more likely to provoke snickers a few years later.
By our final year of seminar, it was pretty risky to use the term "epiphany" in any sentence that didn't also include words like "magi" and "frankincense."
However, I would very much have liked to have a painting similar to the one in Loose Parts in my apartment senior year. Dave Blazek has come up with a strikingly evocative conceit.
Whatever the hell that means.
Actually, I'd be pretty happy to still have any of the posters that adorned my walls in college. I had, for example, a Day-Glo orange poster with a huge black fly on it, which, being a college student, I put on the ceiling, and a line drawing of a man making passionate love to a tree, which was on a lot of my friends' walls as well but which I've never seen since.
I also had a collection of posters from the Mai-Juin riots in Paris, including this one, which were wonderful artwork but as ephemeral as … well, it was an ephemeral time.
None of it was supposed to last. That was the point.
Which brings us to this
Tom Spurgeon linked to a very nice story about a used bookstore in Arizona that includes used comics as something of a specialty. I'm linking to his posting rather than the story with the usual hat tip for the lead, because I agree with everything he says and think you should read it, but you should click through to the story as well.
The gist of it is that this store sells used comics, not as collectors' items but as used comics, and anything more than two years old is a buck.
I like this in general because, as I've noted before, I think the comic book industry hurt itself and all comic fans by trying to maintain the same people as its clientele, catering to an ever-shrinking audience of Peter Pans rather than letting inexpensive, simple Superman comics remain the provence of 10-year-olds and creating new, more complex, more costly titles for older, more sophisticated, more well-funded readers.
And while I guess that, in major cities, there are comic book stores that are not like the one in the Simpsons, I promise you that snobby nerds are very much the rule out here in the sticks, and not only is the selection of comics woefully limited to what they specifically like, but they are more invested in selling games and action figures than in paying attention to what else is being written and produced.
In the case of our area's sole comic book store, they lay out the free comics on Free Comic Book Day, though they don't really want to be disturbed while they're having discussions with the regulars. Then, if you like one of the free comics and go back to buy the next issue, well, they didn't order any.
And I'm specifically interested in the topic because, decades ago in a much larger market, I tried in vain to persuade one of my sons that, no, GI Joe comics were not going to be worth a lot of money years later.
No, not even if you put them in plastic bags.
For instance, the 1985 issue pictured here is available in Very Good/Fine condition. You will note that it has a cover price of 75 cents. You can now buy it for 49 cents. I'm sure that, if it were in better condition, it would be worth twice that.
I wasn't able to convince the little fellow that valuable ephemera is valuable because, yes, everybody's mother threw theirs away when they went to college. Or because everybody used the Mickey Mantle rookie card to make their bike sound like a motorcycle.
If everyone had squirreled them away in mint condition, they'd be worth squat.
However, something in the universe loves little boys.
That once-avid collector of GI Joe went to the 1998 MLB All-Star Game in Denver with his grandfather, where they were giving away Beanie Babies, and collectors were offering three-figure sums for them.
By then, he was older and wiser and knew which side of a bubble to be on, and so, in a strange display of cosmic justice, he recouped his costs and maybe even came away with a little profit.
I would add that he also picked a damn good time to stop the wagon, but that's a story for another day.
She was, however, carrying a sword. Really.
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