Microcollections 1: Superhero Ephemera

As I consider my collections, the ways I go about organizing them, adding to them, and appreciating them, I also realize that the large collections (primarily my comics, Bionicle, and Lovecraft) are accompanied by smaller collections, some intentional and some completely arbitrary. I thought it would be fun to have a few brief looks at some of the smaller collections in my collection of collections.

(*sigh*)

First up, superhero stuff.

 While clearing up our storage room the other day, I opened up a box I had labeled "Superhero Ephemera." Inside were these little treasures. I used to have some of them in the spaces between my comic boxes, but having rearranged those shelves to optimize space, the ephemera was relegated to a box. However, a few weeks back we visited the very strange and awesome Miracle of America Museum in Montana, a place where knick knacks and stuff were just spread over a warehouse-sized space to celebrate the innovation of the American nation. I have a few more thoughts about that, but I'll save it for another post. Inspired by this, I made a little bit of space to display some of my knick knacks, superhero style. The accumulation of this little collection is a random process. Many of the little figures, mostly fast-food toys, are things that came in bags of Bionicle that I get from thrift shops. There's toys that come from Kinder Egg-style candies, inserts from Wizard magazine, lantern rings that were given away during the "Blackest Night" event. The black Spider-Man toy in the bottom left corner has been the subject of one of my Horror from the Dollar Bin posts, a naughty little toy if ever I've seen one. There's a couple in there, the Wolverine at the front and the similar Captain America at the back, that are actually pens. And then there's the Fleischer Superman cartoons, on video cassette. There's a belt buckle, little tiny reproductions of comics, bracelets, zipper pulls, little figurines. The day after I took this picture, I got a Super Grover figure in a bag of Bionicle parts. He graces the shelf now too.

A fairly important part of my dissertation is going to be looking at exactly this sort of intrusion into the material realm of these kinds of fictional characters. Toys and knick knacks like these make up a sort of mythic background radiation. We see them at flea markets, garage sales, McDonald's, and pay them little attention. But they are important manifestations of fiction into reality, and I think that's something that's worth thinking about.

Flea Market Finds

This past weekend, I did something that I very rarely, if ever, do. I bought a box (a whole box!) of comics.
At a local flea market I found myself flipping through a single long box sitting below a vendor's table. I'd been disappointed with this trip to the Hillhurst-Sunnyside Community Centre, as this was the only box of cheap comics (and actually the only cheap comics, period) that I could find. There was one other vendor selling key Silver Age issues at guide prices, but no other "dollar bins." This particular one had quite a few issues of the latter bits of Avengers v.1, issues up in the 300s, which is the section of that series that I'm currently in the process of tracking down. So I'd decided to pick up a few, maybe $10 worth, when the lady behind the table said she'd do a good deal on the whole box. I considered for a few long moments, and then asked what kind of deal. She said $50 for the whole thing. Again, a few long moments passed, and then I agreed. I dashed to the ATM, got another $40 out, and left with a box of comics.

I've spent the last 4 days going through, databasing, bagging, boarding, removing duplicates. In the end, doubles included, there were 228 comics, which very roughly breaks down to 22 cents per issue. I think I did alright there.

Up above, there, you can see the collection laid out after I got home. The stacks of comics are all issues from the same, or similar, series. Thus, the Avengers pile is all Avengers. The Archie Comics pile is all Archie Comics (the only bit I haven't finished cataloging quite yet). I bought the collection primarily on the strength of the number of Avengers comics in it, though, of all the runs in the box, that was the one that produced the most duplicates. It was, in fact, the stuff that I initially dismissed as "filler" that turned out to be the gold amongst the dross (yep, I'm looking squarely at that enhanced cover Silver Sable #1 from the 90s).

Up in the top left corner there is a pile of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, both initial and deluxe editions. I love these encyclopedias, so it was a nice treat to get them. I'm also in the process of tracking down duplicate issues of each one so I can remove the covers and use them as posters. There were a few doubles in that pile, but mostly it was new stuff. The large pile of Archie comics is mostly mid to late 80s. Betty and Veronica's fashion sense was, in a word, atrocious in that era. I remember living through those fashions, both the first time and in the ill-advised 80s revival that seemed to take the world by storm a few years back.

Next to the Archies is the pile of comics I was most surprised by. It's an almost complete run of Marvel Two-In-One, Marvel's solo title for The Thing, from #80 to #100. I had little to no interest in this run, written predominantly by Tom DeFalco, who I immediately associate with the deplorable Clone Saga. But, as my impetus for the 40 Years of Comics Project had it, I shouldn't automatically assume that a comic is bad having not read it. I did read a few of these issues (once I'm done with Age of Ultron, I'm going to devote a few weeks to the stuff in this collection), and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. In particular, issue #86, and the story "Time Runs Like Sand," now ranks as one of my favourite comics ever. I'll re-read it and blog it next week some time.

There was also some late-era Fantastic Four v.1 in the box, which, again, I had little interest in, until I realized that it encompasses the majority of Walt Simonson's run on the title that I have been meaning to read for quite a few years now. So I'll chalk that up as a win too.

Before I talk about the other piles, I'll note that there were, as you can see, a number of individual issues of various comics. The ones I've read (Guardians of the Galaxy, Silver Sable) were pretty unremarkable, which is probably why whoever bought these in the first place didn't get any more.

I've already noted the Avengers comics as being the most important, at least from a collecting viewpoint, in the lot. Most of the pile of Superboy were duplicates, and in truly terrible shape. That version of the character was never one I had that much interest in, though the "Zero Hour" tie-in issue does feature the old, pre-Crisis Superboy, so that should be interesting. One thing I will note about the Avengers comics is that they included full runs of both Walt Simonson and John Byrne's tenures as writers on the title, both quite short, but probably pretty good.

The last little bit is that pile of Marvel Age comics, a good 30 of them in sequential order. This might seem a low point to end the assessment of the collection on, until one realizes that, by and large, these are comics that have never been reprinted. That is, of course, because the series functioned as a news magazine, and only included the occasional sequential strip (Fred Hembeck's center pages notwithstanding). What they do contain, however, is a chronological recounting of the events of each year of Marvel Comics narratives in the "Marvel Age" feature at the end of each issue. The earliest one I have starts in 1973, more than a decade after the "Age" begins. The articles are fantastic for the fact that rather than recounting publication history, they actually tell the fictional histories of the characters. I envision this as a scanning-and-sharing/cataloging project for the future. There's also occasional exclusive comics (like the Kirby/Stern piece that graces Marvel Age Annual #2, or the Shadowline summary from Annual #4) and the aforementioned Hembeck work, which I'm assuming has been reprinted somewhere, but maybe hasn't. Add to this the occasional article about the workings of the company, faux Daily Bugles, and such, and it's actually a pretty great find. Not one that I ever would have gone out of my way for, but pretty great nonetheless.

And that's it. As I said, I don't buy collections like this very often, due to both space and financial constraints, but I felt like treating myself on the weekend, and it turned out to be more of a treat than I'd expected. Look for some examples of what was in the collection over the next couple of weeks of the 40 Years project. 

A Review of the Latest BIONICLE Graphic Novel

From my comics blog:

BIONICLE: The Gathering of the Toa

Collection: Religious Ephemera Part 2

 My first piece in today's post is something my son brought home for me from school, given to him by a friend for a laugh. I have a fair bit of respect for much of the ephemera that grows up around religions. I don't always necessarily agree with the tenets they proscribe, but I admire the dedication to one's faith that drives people to offer this kind of secondary writing. If more fundamentally religious people dedicated themselves to the pen, and not the sword, we'd have a far more interesting world.

That said, I think I fail (or pass, depending on your point of view) this test.

It's a well-recognized fact that many religious organizations find new converts amongst the lost and directionless of the university campus. I do truly believe that these groups, the ones that have a table in the student center, or who advertise on the bulletin boards, have altruistic origins, even if their practice is not quite the same as their praxis. I find numerous pieces of this ephemera tacked up to the boards I walk by on my way to and fro in the school. These three pamphlets were packaged together, and I've got a couple of other bundles too. Though of slightly higher quality than something like Bill Ashmore's exegesis from the previous post, they're still products of an independent press seeking to offer elucidation of Christian principles. What I think would be interesting about these sorts of works would be to compare their conclusions to the more rigorous and accepted interpretive texts.

My final piece for today is a bit of a joke, though one with some teeth. In my first year of the PhD program, I was given a research position (more a "catalogue this office" position, really) that involved going through a large collection of amateur science fiction fanzines from the mid-70s and "bibliographizing" them. A substantial portion of collection was a publication called Minneapa, and within one of the issues was this send-up of dogmatic religion. My own thinking on religion accords something like this just as much veracity as any other piece of ephemera, and it's kind of amusing in its own right. As you can see, it's credited to Al Kuhfeld, who was a regular contributor to the zine. Hopefully he doesn't mind my reproducing it here.

That's it for this installment. See you next time.

Collection: Religious Ephemera Part 1

I make no secret of my fascination with the paratexts that grow up around religions, both factual and fictional (a distinction that I think needs troubling). I've just finished reading a piece by Lovecraft scholar Robert M. Price about the various canonical, apocryphal, and pseudepigraphical pieces of sacred writing in the volumes of the Cthulhu Mythos, and it got me thinking of where such independently published, or small press published, texts fit into these distinctions.

I discovered these lovely little cards in various books that came into my used book shop in 2001. A large proportion of my initial donations for the store came from a priest who was retiring from very active service and wanted to downsize his library, and I get the suspicion that these were bookmarks he'd used. The top one is the oldest piece in this collection, dating from 1903, with the subsequent two from a decade later. I think these are beautiful little bits of religious art, and I keep my eyes open for more. Two of them have the name "Agnes" written across the top, perhaps indicating that, regardless of the subject matter of collectible cards, those who possess them are adamant about their ownership!

A couple of years ago I was riding the train to school, and I caught sight of this little pamphlet sitting on a seat next to someone across from me. Immediately I realized I was looking at one of the great oddities of the comic book world, a Chick Tract. These evangelical little comics are famed for being both deeply disturbing and, unintentionally, hilariously bad. While I was growing up in the 80s, the "Dark Dungeons" issue, a paranoid denunciation of Dungeons & Dragons, was a well-known and well-mocked example of these pieces. Just before I got off the train, I actually ventured to ask the young man sitting next to it if it belonged to him, to which he replied in the negative. And so I acquired my first Chick Tract in a very cool way, as if it had been left, either as addition to my collection, or warning against my sins. (I haven't scanned the whole thing, just bits that I thought were interesting.)

 I'll just offer one more piece today, otherwise this post will run long. Where the Golden Text cards were in books, and the Chick Tract was on the train, I found this next piece sitting in an icy puddle while walking down Kensington Street in Calgary. I brought it home, dried it out, and gave it a read, and it immediately found a place in my heart. I don't want to imply that it converted me or anything, only that these sorts of independent writings, printed at home and posted or distributed with the fervent desire to spread helpful truth, are amongst the most earnest and valuable religious writings in some ways. Many creeds will propose that the truest way to salvation is to have a personal relationship with whatever deity presides over one's faith. Writing such as this are testaments to that personal relationship.

I'm afraid I can't comment on the strength of Ashmore's exegesis here, but that he was driven to produce such exegesis speaks volumes (and, should he ever see this, I hope he doesn't mind me posting it, and takes my thoughts on it in the spirit they're intended, as praise). This is the work of someone figuring for himself how to fit himself into the typological narrative of the Bible and the dogma that has grown up about it. There is something genuine about it, something lacking in much of the more polished and produced religious exegesis that is popularly available.

Going back to Price's look at the texts of the Lovecraft Mythos' fictional religion, he leaves out these kinds of works, though perhaps in the case of the first two examples, it's because the fictional religion is meant to be a secret. Ashmore's work on the Bible comes closer to the exegetic texts Price describes in another article on the various sorts of books that populate the Lovecraftian Mythos, a working out of meaning and connotation, and one's place within it.

As the title notes, this is part 1 of this collection. I'll come back with more in the near future.

The 40 Years of Comics Project: Weird Metadata Post #3 (Crosspost from "Giant Box of Comics")

Apparently my database software can make graphs. This is endlessly amusing for me, and I'm going to share them with you.

Not all of my comics have all of the same data entered in the database. Some stories don't have titles, for instance. Or the writer and artist may not have been recorded in the comic. But most have Cover Years. It makes sense that 2001 and 2002 are the most represented, as that's when I had my store. But 1987 comes in after that, my X-Men, Avengers, Animal Man, didn't have to pay for my own food days.

Ha. Animal Man is the only character who makes enough appearances through the database to merit mention. What this actually says is that I was far more caring about keeping track of my Animal Man appearances than any other character in the collection. This'll be an interesting graph to run once all of the comics are properly indexed.

No surprise which genre wins out in my collection. That Adventure comes in second is interesting. I wouldn't necessarily characterize a lot of what I've got as Adventure, though I suppose that term can be applied quite widely.

As with the genre list, no surprises for the top place for writers. I suppose that Chris Claremont is the third-highest representation has something to do with the aforementioned 1987 collection. It would be interesting to find a year, and read only comics from that year for a year.

One last one for today. For publishers, the top two aren't much of a surprise. Actually, none of the top ones really are, simply for the fact that they can handle the kind of volume that produces far more representation than the smaller publishers.

Okay, that's it for now, but that's a fun little toy. I'll see if I can generate some other interesting visualizations another time.

Constructing a Collection - Don't Knock the Quarter Bin

(The second installment, written very close to exactly 5 years later. Next break won't be quite so long. Promise.)

Five years ago, I started what I'd hoped would be a series of articles about constructing a comic collection. Five years later, all I have is that introduction, but I still think it's a pretty interesting thing to talk about. I do love talking and thinking about collecting (as this currently-fallow blog attests), so I'm resurrecting the series. We'll start with a consideration of the quarter bin.

(I'm going to pepper this post with actual scans of things I've found in dollar bins, just to give a sense of the scope and quality of comics available in such places.)

 Probably the first question/comment would likely be "What the heck is a quarter bin?" It's a testament to the time in which I was beginning to think about these articles that I would think of the bargain bins of many comic stores as "Quarter Bins." Sadly, the days of quarter comics, except at the occasional garage sale, are over. It' much more likely you'll see a "Dollar Bin" nowadays. But if we consider that some comics hit upwards of five dollars per issue, a dollar is pretty good.

Secondly, let's expand our definition of a Quarter/Dollar bin, which will actually place the notion of a 25 cent comic back on the table. Dollar Bins don't have to be located in comic stores. A flea market might have comics kicking about on a table for anything from a quarter to a dollar. I've found packages of comics for $10, which turned out to mean 50 cents per comic. The Quarter/Dollar bin is a collecting metaphor. Really, we can consider it as any place where one can procure comics for less than they are likely to be new or as collectibles in a comic store.

As far as I've ascertained, there are four categories of comics, one of which I've not yet been fortunate enough to procure. Every so often one will hear a story, be it online or from an acquaintance, about someone who is pouring through a stack of old comics at a flea market or garage sale, and comes across something ridiculous like Action Comics #1. It may not be in pristine condition, but, really, who cares?! Imagine finding that comic, regardless of condition, and getting it for a dollar. Or less. I live in hope that one of these days something similar will happen to me, so I have that kind of story. But not yet. This is not to say, however, that the other categories of comics one can find are not every bit as fun and exciting. It's just in different ways.

The above comic is The Adventures of Mighty Mouse #132, published by Pines Comics in, according to the GCD, 1956-ish. My old copy of the Overstreet lists this issue at $65 Near Mint, and $5 Good. I got this one for 50 cents. The staples are still good, the center page is still there. It's missing a cover, but, really, the cover is simply there to, well, cover things. For readers, at least, it's what's inside that's important. My point for this comic, and similar ones in my collection, is that I likely wouldn't have paid even $5 for a copy of it. I like the mid-eighties Mighty Mouse from Marvel, but the character's not a particular favourite. This comic, however, coming in a stack of similarly aged and conditioned comics, was a wonderful find. It's utterly, utterly strange, and revealed to me that the attributes I admire in the aforementioned Marvel version of Mighty Mouse are not unique to that era of the comic. And if I'd turned my nose up at cheap, coverless comics, I'd never have discovered it. The Quarter/Dollar bin can be a treasure trove of strangeness. Weird independent comics that never got much play on the shelves, battered up copies of old comics from the fifties (a decade that really was another planet). In my delving into these troves, I'll often pick out the strangest covers I can find (I know, I know, judging books etc.). Often they'll be bad. But occasionally, they'll be good.

Comics like this one are often shunned by collectors. They're in bad condition, they don't give the full presentation of what the original material artefact was. I prefer to see these comics as being well-loved. The rounded corners, the slight oil stain at the edge of each page, the dulled almost to brown pages and equally dulled colours. They've been around, seen a lot of wear. They've been read. And really, for a narrative in any medium, to have been told and retold, or to tell and retell, I suppose, is really the highest praise it can receive.

Further up the page is the Steve Gerber-penned Cybernary #1. A good portion of Gerber's output in the nineties was with Image, and much of it suffered from the fact that he had to cleave to the shared universe within which he wrote, a universe of gravity-defying breasts and psychotic superheroes. It is no secret to anyone who's read this blog for a while that I'm a huge fan of Gerber's work. But he's not one of those writers, like Gaiman or Moore, who is voraciously, and more importantly popularly, collected and read by the general comics reading public. Gerber's writing demonstrates another of the categories of dollar bin finds. I've found many, many of his old works in such places, the one-offs he did for Creatures on the Loose for Marvel, his 4 issues of Captain America from the late seventies. They're not well-regarded comics, likely because they were fill-in issues for the regular writer/artist team, but they do have something about them that's intrinsically Gerberian (a notion I'm exploring over at Sequart). If you've a propensity for the work of someone like Doug Moench, or would love to read the old adventures of Morbius, the Living Vampire, the dollar bin is a good bet. That said, I've definitely found obscure works by the likes of Moore and Gaiman in dollar bins. The popularity of a writer/artist/title is no guarantee of high cost for all of the associated works. If you're clamouring to read all of Neil Gaiman's comics output, have a look in your local dollar bin for Elric #0 from Topps, beautifully illustrated by P. Craig Russell. Or Moore's old Time Twisters from 2000 A.D. in Quality's Time Twisters series. The dollar bin is a wonderful place to find oddities that fit your collection that, in some cases, you never even knew existed.

"Those three types of comics are all well and good, Tom" I hear you say, "but what about new stuff?" Well, you're in luck, but only in a few places. The coverless old stuff, the quirky collection stuff, they're staples of the dollar bin. The rare find is just that, rare. The fourth category I've discovered isn't ubiquitous, and often only happens in comic stores that are quite small. My local store in Calgary (Phoenix Comics N.W.) has very limited space, and no back issue boxes, so when comics get too old and don't sell, they're relegated to the dollar bin. To the right is issue #3 of Dark Engine, publication date October 2014. So the comic's just slightly more than 8 months old. I found the first three issues of this series in Phoenix's dollar bin, and picked them up because, well, a dollar! And it turns out to be a really great and intriguing series, which, again, I very likely would not have picked up for the cover price. That said, I'm going to keep reading the series, and pay full price for subsequent issues. This particular use of the dollar bin is quite wonderful, I think. I get to try a new comic for a substantial discount, and the store stands a chance of creating a new reader who will then pay full price for the rest of the series. Phoenix Comics has been remarkable for this sort of find for me. A number of the series I am currently reading I initially found in that dollar bin, and I'm so grateful for the opportunity to try new series without too much of an "am I wasting my money?" feeling.

(I probably shouldn't have mentioned where I got those new issues. All you Calgarian readers are going to go and scoop up all the good stuff now!)

I'll never stop shopping in the dollar bin. At the moment it's a nice way to grab a pile of comics and stay within a graduate student budget, but even when I start making actual money (that does happen, right?), I keep going to the dollar bin. For me, it is the place where the real wonder and fun of collecting comics is crystalised. There is the thrill of finding something cool and unique, of discovering the new or re-discovering the old. The smell of old newsprint wafts from them, the dust of years accumulates on your fingers as you search, your heart leaps when you think you've found something great. Were I ever to counsel someone on starting to build their own comics collection, I would say this: Take $50, go to a comic shop that has a substantial dollar bin, and get 50 comics. Base your purchase on how the comic looks, the characters on the cover, the genre it seems to be. You'll find great things and terrible things. And it will be one of the best $50 you spend in your life.

Constructing a Collection - Introduction

(I originally posted this to my comics blog five years ago. Even at that early point in my education, I knew there was something interesting about collecting and collections. The next installment of this was written in the last few weeks. I think this intro still stands up, so I've left it as is.)

I've not been writing editorially on this blog for a while now, so I thought it was time to get back to it. Almost 10 years ago, I opened up a used book and comic store. It survived from October of 2001 to August of 2002, not quite a year, and was one of the best things I've ever done. I won't pretend that it was perfect. Running a business never is as far as I can tell. But for 11 months I had a comic store. Fantastic.

Anyway, 10 years later, I'm in the process of cataloguing what remains of the inventory of my store. The comics are all I have left from it, having donated or sold just about everything else. And when it came time to decide what to do with them, I just could not part with them. So, a while back, I started going through them, sorting out all the duplicates, cross-referencing with my personal collection, and entering the remaining comics into my database. I'm currently on the letter M, so halfway through, and I realized that it's a pretty great collection. As I go through it, I come across little gems that I had no idea were in there, occasional autographed comics (including a Neil Gaiman autograph, which is really cool!), some rather valuable ones. And some that are worth just about nothing, but are fantastic comics anyway.

It occurred to me that I was pretty lucky, as a comic book fan, to have access to this kind of collection. And as I've been going through it, various things about the accumulation of such a collection have been presenting themselves. Because although the vast majority of the collection came from my store, it's also partially come from 25 years of collecting comics. And you learn one or two things in that time. Over the next couple of months I'll be writing short pieces on these one or two things, both as a chronicle of my own collection, and as my suggestions for creating a collection.