Dear Mark Millar,

No, that doesn’t happen. Oh, sure, I’ve heard those sub-Dane Cook level comedians make those same sophomoric jokes: “Hnurr hnurr, I wish I was a lesbian, I’d just stare at myself all day, amiritefellas?”
It’s not funny. It’s really kind of offensively stupid. And the joke really doesn’t translate when being applied to gay men. Especially not when it appears in a comic aimed at 25-35 year old man-children who would probably shriek in terror at the thought of a nude gay man.
And yes, this is me being appalled at something in the worst comic since Skate Man. A fool’s errand at the best of times.

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Speaking of people who have apparently never met a real-life homosexual, I’m a little weary of people trying to make the Machine Gun Joe character in Death Race some sort of indicator of the progress of gay characters in mainstream films.
In the film, when the question of the character’s sexuality is introduced, it is quite clear from the context that it’s just a homophobic taunt. From one of the likable “good” characters, naturally, homophobic insults still being something that it’s okay for protagonists in mainstream films to say. Unlike smoking or racist insults.
Now, I’m aware that some of the film-makers have said that the character is meant to be gay, while others have not. In any case, there is nothing in the film itself to suggest the character is gay, save that insult. The character himself never declares himself to be gay. And the one vaguely “homoerotic” moment in the film is almost instantly deflected by the normalizing return of heterosexual values.
In a way, the film-makers have stumbled upon a neat trick; they get to take credit for a “ground-breaking” gay character in an action film without ever actually having to deal with a gay character.

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So, I keep thinking about Kevin’s posts about bad retailing decisions, mostly because I’m baffled that smart people keep missing Kevin’s point so badly. Either they think it’s a good thing for a retailer in a small margins business to actively discourage sales in the names of “integrity”–which is an argument that really phenomenally misses the point that comic shops being run like club houses instead of businesses is bad for the industry, or they keep bringing in this asinine restaurateur metaphor, as if a waiter suggesting the crab cakes because the clams with linguine are a bit off tonight is anything remotely like a retailer sending out a mass e-mailing to existing and potential customers insinuating that they’re idiots if they like a comic he doesn’t.
It all makes me reconsider that “smart” adjective.
But what I keep coming back to is that telling your customers your opinion of a book, and still selling it to them, are not mutually exclusive.

Amazing Spider-Man #2338; While many fans, myself included, were upset with what it took to bring the character to the new status-quo, the new creative teams on this title have met with critical and commercial success. A new storyline starts here for those curious about what’s been going on.
Astonishing X-People #2222; While the combination of Ellis and Bianchi are not to my taste, a new storyline starts here, tying in to the larger “Manifest Destiny” branding in the X-books. It’s a good jumping on point for those who enjoy Ellis’s super-hero work.

Hey, whoa, did you see that there? I gave as neutral a judgement as I could while still finding a way to tell interested customers to check the book out. And it was easy.
Of course, this doesn’t address the concerns of those bloggers who see nothing wrong with what the retailer in question did because he was bashing super-hero books in his newsletter. But I’m sure that if he had slapped a big NOT BUY on Kramer’s Ergot or Love and Rockets, the art-comix bloggers would have had my back.

From Star Spangled War Stories #93, a message to all my brothers and sisters still toiling away in the salt mines of comics retailing:

DC Comics circa 1960 has your back!

If I still worked in comics retail my response to this news would be: “What? DC publishing a Batgirl comic that I could actually sell to kids? Has the world gone mad?.”

Cue comic fans bitching about Character X not getting an “All Star” book before this in 3…2…

No, I’m not talking about the recent yaoi unpleasantness. I’m talking about Tokyopop’s recent announcement that some titles will move to online sales only.

Even though I (thankfully) no longer work in comic retail 24/7, I still keep my hand in and assist my former employer with the manga orders. I really try my best to maintain as diverse and full a stock of new titles as possible, and research new titles as they’re solicited as much as I can. But I don’t have an unlimited budget and manga is not the focus of the business, so cuts and exceptions have to be made. Occasionally I screw up. I never ordered any of the Project X books, for example, because I couldn’t imagine anyone possibly wanting to read a comic about the history of Cup Noodles. And then it became a hit with the discerning manga blogerati.

I’ve got a pretty good grasp, otherwise, about what does and does not sell to our customers. Manga novels don’t sell. Sports manga don’t sell. So-called “global manga” titles don’t sell. A few Korean titles will sell every once in awhile, but the “original English language” stuff is almost always dead on arrival. So I keep in mind the types of material customers won’t buy at the store when I set the order numbers.

But a great way to keep orders down on certain titles, or entire lines, is to pull stupid, un-friendly to comics retailer moves. I’ve been very impressed with Go Comi’s line of books, particularly their production values. But I won’t order any of their titles that have been Borders exclusives. Why should I? Anyone who wants them has already had four or five months to buy them at Borders. We haven’t carried anything from Net Comics either, because, as I said earlier, Korean comics tend to be a tough sell with our customers and they solicited something like twelve first volumes their first month in existence. That was simply too much at once on unknown properties from a new publisher. I may start ordering some of their material, now that I’ve had a chance to see it for myself elsewhere, but I have no regrets for not letting them flood our shelves early on.

And now I have to decide what to do, if anything, about Tokyopop. I’m extraordinarily upset about this latest move of theirs. They’ve always been a bit of a nuisance to deal with, from an ordering and budgeting angle. They put out too much at once, their section in Previews is a mess, and now doesn’t even include descriptions for anything more than one or two volumes old, and their production values are somewhat lacking in comparison to almost all their still in business competitors.

My first impulse, honestly, is to simply stop ordering any Tokyopop titles outside of what we need to fill pull-lists. Why should I take a chance on ordering a new series from Tokyopop if, two or three volumes later, they might decide that it isn’t selling what they think it should be and make it an online exclusive item? Why should I attempt to build an audience for a title in the store if Tokyopop could decide that they’d rather cut out the middle-man and sell the title direct themselves? And what do I tell customers already buying a title when Tokyopop decides to take it exclusive?

I’ll probably have to talk with the rest of the people who work at and operate the store before I come to a final conclusion, but I have a hard time imagining that anyone is going to have an opinion about what to do that’s far different from my first impulse. Tokyopop really did a lot to usher in the current manga marketplace in the U.S., but their actions since then have been frustrating and baffling and have burnt out a lot of people’s goodwill towards the company.

I ventured into the alterna-hip-indie record store in Ventura yesterday. I was looking for a Candy Butchers album. I couldn’t find one. No, not even under “Mike Viola” or in the used section. So, I went and found the one employee with natural hair color and no facial piercings, thinking that this would be the person most likely to be able to assist me without commenting on my taste in music in the process (a particular problem with many of the employees at this store).

“Excuse me, do you have any Candy Butchers albums?”

Uh…did you look under “C”.

“Yes. In ‘Rock’ and ‘Used.’ But I’ve learned from past experience that things in this store tend to be shelved according to the musical standards of whoever happened to be working put-away that day, else how do you explain why The Damned keep ending up in your ‘Goth/Industrial’ section while Pink is in ‘Punk’ and No Doubt is in ‘Reggae’.”

Let me check the computer…We have about a dozen different Canned Heat albums, is that what you’re looking for?

“No, I don’t really care for hippie blues bands, and besides, I came in looking for Candy Butchers.”

Dude, I don’t think they really exist. If they did, we’d have their albums. We’re the local alterna-hipster indie music store, after all.

“Let’s see…the last bands or performers an employee here told me didn’t exist were Queen Adreena (you kept trying to sell me Queen), Scissor Sisters (Michelle Shocked), Hidden Cameras (Mott the Hoople), Mountain Goats (Madonna), Polyphonic Spree (Pet Shop Boys) and Stephen Lynch (Sleater Kinney). And yet, in each case, I was able to purchase those albums either on-line or from a chain store. Oh, and by the way, is it really necessary to play Salt-N-Pepa so loudly in the store we’ve had to have this entire conversation while shouting?”

We’re playing Salt-N-Pepa because it’s part of the drinking song mix we play here!

“Salt-N-Pepa’s ‘Push It’ is a drinking song?”

Dude, it’s ironic!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I buy music online.

As I still do for the comic shop I used to work at, as no one currently employed there knows about manga, it suddenly struck me: “I used to think there weren’t enough gay comics coming out. Now it’s almost as if the manga shelves are drowning in yaoi…

“Still outnumbered by panty-flashing fan service books, though.”

(Or, I Work For A Living, I Can’t Get To A Comics Shop On Wednesday!)

I discovered today that, in my absence, the manga section has actually managed to expand a little. Which is a promising sign. It was at the expense, of course, of my great experiment with racking manga by genre. Without a full-time person aware enough of manga in the store to keep it going, it was becoming too hard to determine what should go where. Also, I gather that the “but that’s not shojo” factor was a problem as well, where people refused to accept that certain titles really and truly belong in certain genres. This was always a problem with racking certain manga titles in the kids graphic novels section. Apparently Dragon Ball Z fans really don’t like being told that it’s a kids book.

Though I did pick up School Zone by Kanako Inuki. I was flipping through it, slightly put off by the cutesy-goth horror manga aesthetic that almost every Japanese horror comic seems to use, when it struck me that the book was completely bat-shit insane.
“Bat-shit insane” is pretty much a selling point on manga for me.

I also picked up The Battle for Bludhaven. People seem to be having mixed reactions to it. Given the general tenor of Palmiotti’s and Gray’s other collaborations, and the fact that the first issue prominently features the Force of July and the Atomic Knights (and the return of the Monolith), I’d say that the mix of played-for-straight and tongue-in-cheek material is deliberate.

And I grabbed a copy of Superior Showcase, the art-comic that tricks people who get snitty about not reading super-hero comics into reading super-hero comics.

And I got this, because one can never have too many “Bugs Bunny in drag” objects in your collection.

And a small stack of Lois Lane comics were purchased. I also said mean things about a particular Vertigo comic with good art and a dreadful writer to Mike, and he countered by describing one of the books in a certain company’s cross-over mania as an example of their attempts to get women to read super-hero comics.

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Recent side-bar maintenance

DudeTube, comics and naughty YouTube videos.

Here Now, comics and pictures of men in various states of undress. It’s like the perfect blog for me.

Blockade Boy is excellent, and I really should have drawn attention to my link to it before now.

The New Adventures of Queen Victoria, because clip-art funnies about historical figures are your best entertainment value.

I’ve effectively been appointed “ISBN-13 Compliance Officer” at work. This means it’s my job to keep track of which of our vendors are starting to switch over to the ISBN-13 system and which haven’t. “What is an ISBN-13″ you may be asking. Well, basically, it’s a unique code number that’s supposed to be visible on every book and book-type object sold in the world. It’s a bit like a UPC code, only more specific. It’s changing over because, basically, the existing ISBN-10 system has just about run out of numbers.
So, I’ve had to learn more about the ISBN system than I really want to know.
But what I keep coming back to is an utter conviction that the comic book industry, as a whole, is going to drop the ball on this. See, come January 1, 2007, book-stores will be very unhappy about having to deal with mis-labeled product. And any product that only has an ISBN-10 is going to be considered mis-labeled. I’ve been keeping an eye on new trades, and so far only Viz is using an ISBN-13 on their products. Marvel’s not. DC’s not. Tokyopop’s not. Oni’s not. (I haven’t checked any recent Image or Dark Horse trades, or the trades of any other smaller publishers. But I’d be surprised if they’re using ISBN-13s).
Now, given the growing importance of book-store sales for the comics market, the seeming reluctance of comics publishers to get on the ball about this is curious. DC and Tokyopop have good book-store programs, and a strong presence in chain book-stores, so they should definitely be on the ball about this. Dark Horse is in a similar situation, with their licensed titles and the success of films based on comics published by Dark Horse. I’m not the least bit surprised Marvel hasn’t rolled out any books with ISBN-13s, as Marvel frequently seems to work against their own best interests, moreso than about any other major publisher.
Granted, I’d be more than happy to be proven wrong about this, and discover that every comic book publisher in the country is on this situation and has concrete plans to move over to an ISBN-13 system by the end of the year. But given the general short-sightedness of most comic publishers, I expect some serious problems to develop.

(I suspect this may be my dullest post ever…)

It’s not well-known, but I’m the only member of the Ventura-area comics blogging community that doesn’t mind having his picture taken. So, in the spirit of furthering the public good, I thought I’d share with you some pictures I took in the local comic shop with a small, hidden camera. The guys didn’t know I was taking their picture, so you must forgive me if these candid shots don’t show them as you usually picture them.

Mike is always eager to show a customer around the store, until he’s completely satisfied they know what they came in for.

Inside, Corey and his brother Chad were cruising the New Arrivals section looking for something interesting.

Aaron is always eager to service the customers with a smile.

Nathan usually ends up taking his bike to work.

I don’t see him there very often anymore, but Tom happened to be there, looking like he just got off work.

Ian was outside, waiting to get picked up.

Even Kid Chris managed to come by, looking awkward in his fraternity shirt.

To revisit an earlier post of mine, the exact line in the V for Vendetta novelization is “I fell in love with you Evey.”

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The downside of kids digging manga in book-stores: Gee, I really would have liked to have browsed your manga section, seen what was new, see anything I might like to spend some of my money on…
But, of course, it’s kind of hard to browse when you can’t even reach the shelves because there are so many kids sprawled out on the floor, incapable of moving aside after you say a polite “excuse me.” And if you do manage to reach the shelves, the books are so badly out of order because the kids don’t work there and don’t have to clean up so what do they care, that you can’t possibly find anything.
(And I’m one of those pro-manga, pro-kids-reading-comics guys, and this annoyed me.)

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Once upon a time Mike insisted that I post some scans from a Harvey magazine about the forthcoming Baby Huey live-action film. He’ll be pleased to know thatit is now available on DVD.

(This may actually be old news, but screw it.)

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Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go let the last of the alcohol leave my system while I watch my brand-spanking new Bill Hicks DVD.