“No you can’t have that. The Canadian price is too high.”

(For the record, our store is in California. What the Canadian price has to do with anything is beyond me…)

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Kid Chris: “I need to find a hat shop, but not like a novelty one.”

Dorian: “I think any hat shop you’re likely to find, outside of maybe Milan or Paris, is likely to be mostly novelty hats. Hats haven’t really been in fashion for decades.”

Mike: “About the only thing that’s more of a niche market these days is comic shops.”

Dorian: “Yeah, but people aren’t surprised to hear that they still make hats or that there are stores that only sell hats.”

Kid Chris: “Hey, we should become maggia hit-men!”

Dorian: “The gay maggia?”

KC: “Northstar’s in that right? He is an evil gay zombie now, isn’t he?”

And now I’m racking my brains trying to figure out what other Marvel characters would be in the gay maggia (as opposed to the mafia, which we all know doesn’t actually exist, despite the fact that “mafia” is an Italian word…)

One of the conversations that actually did take place while I was away was some angst over the state of comics retailing. The problems under discussion seemed to be two-fold: there aren’t enough good stores, and there aren’t enough stores period. Not only is it hard for people seeking something other than front of Previews material to find stores that carry that sort of thing, it’s fairly difficult for many people to find comics at all.

Which led me, in my usual contrary way, to this thought: communities largely get the comics shops they deserve. That is, the kinds of comics fans in any given geographic location largely determine the kinds of comic shops, if any, that tend to pop up there. There’s a reason, for example, that when I go into any random comic shop in LA, I can find about four or five dozen statues of female super-heroes, but no Oni, AIT or Viz titles, much less the latest Ralf Konig book. Hell, half the time your lucky to be able to find the comics those statues are based on. If you can’t find anything other than the stereotypical, over-crowded, dirty, basement-dweller shops in your town, what is it about your community that only that type of shop has been able to survive.

So, while I would dearly love to be able to order as many copies of the latest Chris Ware, James Kolchaka or Bryan Lee O’Malley work as we do of Superman/Batman or the latest X-Men cross-over, the demand for those works in our area simply doesn’t justify such an expenditure. We’ve had to do a lot of hand-selling and encouraging of the customers who show an interest in works from non-premier publishers in order to build sales to the point we’re at now. Luckily, most customers we’ve hand-sold too tell all their friends, so we are able to build momentum for quality works, but it’s a slow process.

And while our shop may be far from perfect, I take comfort in knowing that anyone who criticizes the way we do things must never have seen our now out-of-business competitors. Because they don’t know how good they’ve got it with us.

As a result of some re-arranging of the manga shelves, I’ve decided to take the plunge and try to arrange the manga by genre. As you follow the shelves down from the top, they go something like this:

Over-size books: books that, because of their size or shape, will only fit on the top shelf.
“Mature” titles: these are actually the more, for lack of a better term, “male” orientated mature readers titles. The ones I wanted to make sure were out of kiddies hands.
Historical drama: this is where all the samurai and ninja comics go. I tried, at first, to keep them strictly historical, but I had to lett a few of the more fantasy-based titles creep in there for space reasons.
“Shonen”: not strictly speaking comics for young boys, but the more male-orientated action and adventure comics.
Shojo: this category was fairly easy to put together and is more or less accurately described.
Josei/Yaoi/Shonen-ai: the more “mature” titles aimed at a female readership. Normally I’d have wanted to keep them on a higher shelf, but they’ll almost certainly sell better if I keep them close to related titles. Desire for example will probably sell better if it’s only a shelf away from another romance comic than it will if it’s on the same shelf as something like Battle Royale. As much as it might amuse me to put it on the same shelf as Battle Royale to see people’s head’s explode when they stumble upon a gay romance comic while they’re looking for their school-girls getting killed manga.

And, as I’ve mentioned before, the actual kid-orientated titles are already on our kid’s comics rack, and have been for some time now.

There were a few times I had to bend the classifications a little, just for the sake of putting a title somewhere where I know it’ll sell. Chobits and Maison Ikkoku for example, are not shojo comics, but they sell almost exclusively to our female customers, so they feel like a better fit for the shojo section. Likewise almost every horror-themed manga title I came across on our shelves felt like a shojo title, whether that was the author’s intent or not.

It’s also worth noting that in many cases, when I couldn’t decide what category a particular title best fit in, the decided factor was the size of the female character’s breasts. The bigger they were, the more likely the title was to end up in the “shonen” section.

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A few trade paperbacks that DC hasn’t released yet, and I don’t understand why not:

Justice League of America #s 166, 167, and 168: This is the story in which the Secret Society of Super-Villains do a mind-swap with the JLA and learn their secret identities. Considering just how many comics DC has published within the last year which reference this story in some way, it’s really very puzzling that DC hasn’t released it in some format.

Wonder Woman in the [Decade]: They’ve got these books for Batman and Superman, and Wonder Woman has a long enough publishing history that it’s possible to put these out. Granted, a lot of those sixty years worth of Wonder Woman comics are absolutely terrible, but they’re really no worse, on the whole, than the Batman or Superman comics that DC has reprinted. Plus, Wonder Woman is one of those few comic characters that non-comics fans will actively seek out merchandise for.

Amethyst: a young girl travels to another dimension, is transformed into a teenager, can do magic, discovers that she’s the prophesied savior of the kingdom, and has a bunch of cute boys competing for her attention. Put it into a manga-sized trade (including manga-size page count), and I think DC may have that cross-over book they seem to want so badly.

Sugar and Spike: I’m not actually particularly interested, but everyone else seems to be. I think even DC has acknowledged in the past that this is one of their most-requested titles for reprints. So why hasn’t it been?

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Another category of books missing: gay manga. No, not yaoi. I mean actual manga by and for gay people. The recent yuri titles are a nice start, and I don’t honestly expect any US publisher to be brave enough to try to publish Gengorah Tagame’s work, but still…it would be nice to read some gay themed manga that aren’t about willowy under-age boys for once.

Marvel’s big SDCC announcement so far: the return of Captain Universe.

DC’s big SDCC announcement so far: the return of the Spirit.

So the biggest news as yet out of the closest thing the comics industry has to a trade show is: the return of two old properties, neither being handled by their original creator.

Yesterday’s grumpy face wasn’t entirely motivated by the stupid, lousy slow computer at work. It was also prompted by the third kid in three days trying to buy Sin City comics. And I do mean “kid.” We’re talking the under-10 set in each case.
That just boggles my mind. We go from a week of hyper-sensitive parents complaining about the content of Archie and Donald Duck to parents so lax in their monitoring of their children’s entertainment choices that I have to explain to them that the comics feature extensive nudity, lewd sexual situations and extreme violence. I mean, surely these parents didn’t take their kids to see the movie?

Oh, and anecdotally, if you want to make sure that you move all your copies of the latest issue of The Comics Journal in a day, be sure to shelve it with your new manga releases.

And to make up for making you all look at my mug yesterday, here’s a picture of John Tristram:

Suitably decompressed now to talk about the things I missed photo-blogging.

As Mike mentioned, first customers of the day were the very nice Chris Brown and his wife Kelly Brown. Which was a nice way to start what turned out to be a very busy and hectic day. Wednesdays are always a bad day for people to try and buy back-issues…we’re simply too busy and have too little space to do it properly, yet we had tons of people, either folks we rarely see or had never seen before, coming in with very specific shopping lists. I’m guessing they were folks headed to SDCC.

Speaking of SDCC, say hi to Ian and Sean while you’re down there. And on Friday try to hunt down Kid Chris. And, I don’t know, make fun of his ankle tatoos or something.

The Big BooK this week is, of course, Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but the few pages I did look over struck me as Frank Miller doing his best to out-do, well, Frank Miller. It’s pulpy and over-wrought and the people who praised Hush and hated Dark Knight Strikes Again are absolutely going to loathe this book. Look for lots of scathingly negative reviews from people who didn’t get the joke. My suspicion: the book won’t be very good, but it will be fun in an unapologetically trashy way.

Evil Observation of the Day, via Mikey Sterling: Is that the cover to Angel or Blood of the Demon?

Most Seriously Wrong Comic of the Day: Zombie King by Frank Cho. This was the book that had everyone who flipped through it asking “what the hell is wrong with Frank Cho?” If necrophiliac bestiality is your thing, you might enjoy this comic.

Most Frustrating Customer Moment of the Day: “Do you have any back-issues?”
Sure, we have plenty, what are you looking for?
“Do you have any independent comics as back issues?”
Sure, lots. Which ones are you looking for?
“Do you have any Pied Piper comics?”
I’m not familiar with that title, do you know who published it?
“I think it was just Pied Piper.”
So…is that the name of the comic or the name of the publisher?
“Oh. I think it might be the publisher, I guess.”
Okay…well, I don’t actually have a section for back-issues from a company called Pied Piper, which means that if I do have any of their comics, they’ll just be put away by their title. Was there a particular title you were looking for?
“Yeah, there was one title I was looking for. It was called Ex-Mutants.”
…Uhm, yeah, we have that.
(See, because a sane person would have just asked me if we had any Ex-Mutants comics…not approached the problem from the back-angle, so to speak.)

Guessing game! Who said: “Having sex with men? Is that some kind of gay innuendo?”

Even when our customers are being a tad eccentric they can be amusing. This was given to me in gratitude for helping to find Legion of Super-Heroes back issues.

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“So, because it was kind of a sketchy neighborhood, and we weren’t sure what it was going to be like inside, I decided to do the gentlemanly thing and go first.”
“And then what happened on your date?”
“Well, we triggered a trap that made the floor drop out from under us and we were attacked by goblins.”

Two of my co-workers discussing a “date” one of them went on. (No, it wasn’t Mike. Or Kid Chris. Mike has a real-life flesh-and-blood girl-friend, and Kid Chris is, to put it bluntly, a tad over-sexed.)

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Signs I’m not dealing with a future Nobel Prize winner: “Excuse me, could you please leave your skateboard under the table by the front door?”
“What’s a table?”

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And that’s when Dorian started beating his head against the wall: Can I help you find anything sir?
“Yes, my nine year old son is sick, and I’d like to buy him some Marvel comics.”
Okay, what characters does he like.
“Oh, he doesn’t like super-heroes. But I liked Thor when I was a kid.”
…Well, there hasn’t actually been a Thor comic in a while, but I have the more recent issues over here.
“No, I don’t want the recent ones. I want comics for a little kid. The recent ones have too much sex and violence. Besides, I don’t want comics anyway. I want the books. Ones that have the older Thor stories from when I was a kid, that weren’t dirty.”
(I get this complaint quite frequently from people who have never actually looked inside the comics they’re complaining about. But then, I get the “too much sex” complaint about reprints of Ditko Spider-Man, so I’m used to over-sensitive parents.)
Well, in that case, I’ve got several books collecting Thor comics on this shelf here. The older ones will be in these two lines here, the ones that say “Masterworks” or “Essentials.”
“How much are these hardcover ones?”
Those are $50 each.
“What! It’s legal to charge that much? You guys are rip-offs!”
Well, the Essentials are much cheaper. Those are about $15 for about 500 pages of comics.
“What! These are in black-and-white! You guys are rip-offs! I want color copies of all the old Thor stories, from back when it wasn’t dirty, in a book that costs less than $10.”
There really isn’t anything like that available.
“How dare you not magically materialize the exact thing I’m looking for, despite the fact that what I’m looking for doesn’t exist!” (Okay, he didn’t actually say that last line, but that was the gist of his statement.)

I came to the horrible realization yesterday that I was buying all but two of the books published by DC this week, not counting the reprint of Omac Project #2. I’ll leave you all to guess which ones I passed by.

I was also flipping through several titles and came across what is possibly the most pointless retcon ever in the pages of Green Lantern #2…the green parts of Hal’s costume give off heat? The hell?

I also went into shameless commercial shill mode and made sure that most of the copies of Previews that we had out for sale had the Corpse Bride cover facing out.

Several people asked about the Nat Turner comic by Kyle Baker. It was supposed to be released this week, but I suspect this is another one of those situations where West Coast stores got the distribution shaft. I think the same thing happened to us with the second issue of Action Philosophers, which again, several people have been asking for and has yet to show its face. At least I know why the new Magnus, Robot Fighter book is late, it’s been resolicited in the latest Previews.

Speaking of Nat…go get Licensable Bear #2 by Nat Gertler.

High Impact Comics and Diamond have managed to annoy me greatly. We usually put up the featured merchandise poster Diamond sends to comics retailers each month along with Previews, because it’s a cheap way to draw people’s attention to the higher priced items they may want to buy. This month’s poster features the “woman spilling liquid and ice over her breasts” variant cover for Anime Crazy Manga. Because I already have a hard time convincing parents that not all manga are dirty sex comics…

There were, in fact, lots of interesting things in Previews outside of the Big Four listings. Treehouse of Horror #11 is solicited, featuring a story by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson, antother story by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan, and a third illustrated by John Severin, Angelo Torres, Mark Schultz and Al Williamson. That’s two comics by the creators of the best horror comics of the 70s and a collaboration of several EC artists.

It’s also apparently spooky manga month, with Del Rey soliciting Ghost Hunt and Sugar Sugar Rune, as well as a new volume of Wallflower, Viz releasing Death Note and Monster and Tokyopop dropping the Keith Giffen written I Luv Halloween. Digital Manga Publishing also drops more yaoi than you can shake a stick at, with second volumes of Antique Bakery and Yellow, as well as Alone in My King’s Harem.

There’s also a novelization of Yellowbeard by Graham Chapman in the books section…and speaking of the books section, a few months ago, Heart of America by Warren Ellis was solicited, and I don’t remember seeing much discussion of that. Or any at all, really. Am I the only one who looks at the books section?

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F. Paul Wilson to adapt his novel The Keep for comics. This is interesting news, as I don’t think a novelist has ever written a comics adaptation of thier own work before, but I’m not terribly excited about this particular project. You see, I’ve read the novel, and I didn’t like it very much. It has a brilliant, high-concept story. I mean, how can you really go wrong with Nazis vs. vampires, right? But it dissolves into a tedious and cliche-filled battle between Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, and that’s the kind of thing that annoys me in horror novels. Vague concepts just aren’t that scary. Absolutes just aren’t that scary. Give me something creepily plausible and ambiguous and I’ll be with you.

I’m not terribly fond of the Spider-Man character, but I was willing to give the new Peter David and Mark Wieringo title a shot. With those creators, and with a title like Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man (which is an utterly brilliant title), I was expecting a lighter in tone look at Spider-Man, something which has been sorely lacking from the titles of late. It also looked like it might be a Spider-Man title that I could actually start selling to kids. But then they go and announce that the first three issues are part of a cross-over series, and what’s more, David won’t even be writing all three of those issues. So, there goes my interest in the title. And if it’s crossing over with Spider-Man and Amazing Spider-Man, there goes my hopes that it’ll be a book I can sell to kids without having hyper-sensitive parents getting annoyed at me.

“Dorian, you must clearly be in the wrong on all things, because you only ever talk about the bad customers you have.”

Er, no, it’s just that the good, reasonable, polite and sane customers don’t make for very interesting stories. “You’ll never believe this: a customer came in to the store with a well-organized list of back issues he was looking for, and was very understanding of the fact that we were busy and so let us take our time helping him. In between fetching boxes of back issues we had a pleasant conversation about Golden and Silver Age comics that we wouldn’t mind seeing reprinted, because we both felt that DC’s and Marvel’s emphasis on only reprinting the popular material from those periods is allowing higher quality material to languish. For example, anything by Lou Fine is better than Golden Age Green Lantern, but good luck convincing DC of that.”

So in the efforts of balance, here’s my Worst Non-Comics Related Customer and my Worst Rude Clerk stories.

Worst Non-Comics Related Customer: I used to work in a shoe-store, right out of high school. There is quite probably no more soul-deadening retail posistion to have other than shoe store clerk (expect, possibly, liquor store clerk). At this particular store we had a price-matching policy. If another store had a current, advertised sale for the same kind of shoe we carried that was lower than our regular or sale price, we would match the price. Pretty simple stuff. Except for one fellow who came in with a flyer for another store. “I want this shoe” he told me. I looked at the circular. It was advertising a very fancy pair of sneakers for about $10. And I’m looking at the circular, and I realize that a) this isn’t our store’s circular, b) that’s not a brand of shoe we carry and c) this particular circular is about five years old. And I politely tell the customer that, while we do match our competitor’s prices, that’s only on items we have in stock and for current advertised sales, not ones from five years ago. And in any case, we don’t carry that brand of shoe, though I can show him several similar styles of shoe if he’d like.
Which, of course, is when he starts screaming about how I’m trying to rip him off and that he’s going to call the Better Business Bureau because we refuse to abide by our advertised sales prices. Literally screaming at the top of his lungs, making a scene in the entire store. Which is not a good sign for me, because this particular store had an over-broad “The Customer Is Always Right” policy which states that if the customer is unhappy, for any reason whatsoever, it is explicitly the fault of the clerk. By the store’s definition, in other words, there was no such thing as an unreasonable customer request.
So yeah, that was a fun day at work. I never did get that guy calmed down and he left, still screaming. In hindsight, I’m just glad he never threw anything at me. It wasn’t until I started working in comics retail that I needed to develop an ability to anticipate when customers would throw things at you because you refuse to meet their unreasonable demands.

Worst Rude Clerk: I was in the LA area, shopping around, looking for bookstores while I was on break from school. Specifically, I was looking for bookstores with either new or used editions of “pulp” detective novels from the post-war period, or books of commentary and reviews of the same. All in purpose of my senior thesis, “Representations of Masculinity in the Pulp Detective Story.” And so I had a pretty good nest-egg of several hundred dollars built up to use to buy material for this project, since I was having little to no luck finding these sorts of things through libraries. And I eventually wandered into a neighborhood in Santa Monica which had several used and new bookstores. My first stop was an upscale store which advertised that they carried lots of first editions. It had a monstrously ugly steel and glass facade, and when I went in they had fancy leather couches in their “reading” area, plush carpets, air conditioning, and classical music playing. The clerks were quite a bit older than me, very smartly dressed, and I felt immediately out of place in my schlubby poor college student outfit. Both clerks immediately gave me the evil eye, and when I asked them were they kept their older mystery novels I was given a vague “in that direction” wave by one of them. Looking around the store, I didn’t find an actual mystery section, but I did notice that they had a special section set aside for leather-bound first editions which was organized by the color and size of the books. Which meant that this wasn’t a book store for people who actually read books. After about ten minutes of trying to find something I could use, one of the clerks came up to me and said “We have a very exclusive clientele here. Perhaps you’d like to shop some place else?”
So I left, and a block or two later, find a somewhat run-down, plaster-facaded bookstore which was over-flowing with books. They had techno music playing and the gal behind the counter had colored hair and piercings. I asked for the mystery section and she took me to it, asked me specifically what I was looking for, and when told went into the back room and got out more of the exact kinds of books I was looking for. She even gave me a good discount on everything I bought that day because it was for school.
On my way back to my car I went back to that first store. There were still no customers in the store. I showed the clerk my receipt for several hundred dollars worth of books and asked him how much business he’d done since they threw me out. I didn’t get an answer. Not that I really waited for one, to be honest.

This is apropos of nothing, but it occurs to me that in the forth-coming Charlie and the Chocolate Factory film that Johnny Depp’s Wily Wonka is based, in terms of appearance, voice and mannerisms, on Michael Jackson.
Just putting that thought out there.

Also, is it wrong of me that I’m looking forward to the CAPalert analysis of the film more than the film itself?

There was surprisingly very little of note amongst this week’s books, unless of course you’re thoroughly invested into the Bendis-verse version of the Marvel U. I flipped through the second issue of House of M and was startled to discover that…nope, nothing actually happens in this issue either. Where the first issue was people standing around trying to decide what to do with the Scarlet Witch, this issue was brief snippets of the lives of the X-Men and Avengers in a world where (almost) none of them are actually super-heroes anymore. It’s slightly more interesting than the first issue, but it still strikes me as a rather dull way to lead off your big summer cross-over. And those pastel-colored covers still don’t impress me.

I’ve also noted that shipping two books with variant covers in the same week was probably a bad idea. Already the more casual buyer has shied away from the Marvel variants, leaving them to the speculators to purchase. And even they have limited budgets. As Marvel continues to roll out more and more variants, I expect to wind up with more expensive shelf-warmers.

And just to kick Marvel a little bit more, it’s not a good sign that my first thought, upon looking at the $100 Fantastic Four Omnibus (with variant cover, naturally) was: “I wonder what kind of printing error this will have which will render it unsellable?”

The only comic I did make time to give a thorough reading to was Shojo Beat. This is one of those magazines that almost goes out of its way to drive home the point that I am not in the target audience. Ads and articles on cosmetics and fashion, interviews with athletes, instructions on how to bake a cake: none of this interests me in the slightest. The first installment of Ai Yazawa’s Nana was somewhat frustrating, featuring yet another door-mat of a manga heroine. She’s neurotic and boy-crazy and defines herself by her ability to find a man. Luckily, she’s not the sole focus of the strip, or I’d write it off now. Absolute Boyfriend I have a strong pre-disposition towards anything Yuu Watase puts out. It’s another fairly standard set-up with the neurotic heroine, but it also has a very strong mix of Watase’s goofier sense of humor. The set-up also owes a lot to CLAMP’s Chobits with the heroine coming into possession of a robotic boyfriend. Given Watase’s track record I expect this series to be worthwhile.

I was also looking forward to Kaori Yuki’s Godchild, being a fan of her Angel Sanctuary series. And while it’s very pretty, the premiere story was a rather trite murder mystery without any actual mystery. And I would have sworn that there was supposed to be a prequel series released in book-form, mentioned in some of the original ad material for the Shojo Beat line, but there’s nothing mentioned here. It’s the sort of thing that might help to add a little context to the events here, as details about the main character are implied so as to suggest there the reader should already be familiar with the character. Taeko Watanbe’s Kaze Hikaru did nothing for me at all. In fact, it was a chore to read, and quickly became very difficult to distinguish between the many nearly identical looking characters.

Marimo Ragawa’s Baby and Me was mildly enjoyable, though it would probably benefit from a more consistent tone. It’s a series that has potential, and the baby is certainly cute, but even I can experience angst over-load, and if it goes in that direction I’ll rapidly lose interest. Surprisingly Mitsuba Takanashi’s Crimson Hero was excellent. It has lovely art and an assertive, self-determined heroine. Rather than being a standard, and thus dull to me, sports manga, it sets itself up as a sort of “reverse-harem” manga, with the heroine forced to live in a house full of boys in order to reach her goal of playing volleyball for a prestigious school. I’m very impressed with this initial story and eager to see more of it.