Here's the cover of Dodge News volume 18, number 7 circa 1953...

It's one of those "kids reading comics in the 1950s" photos that are always neat to look at. You can spot Superman, Captain Marvel, Popeye, Donald Duck and others on the covers pretty readily. Rip Jagger went through and tracked down most of the covers several years ago if you don't want to hunt them all down yourself.

But the reason why I'm pulling this image out and calling attention to it is something that I haven't seen anyone comment on. Namely, the "PLEASE DO NOT HANDLE" sign hanging right over the boys' shoulders as they're sitting there reading the comics they're apparently not supposed to handle.

I suppose this is the type of rampant insubordinate behavior that parents were so upset about back then that led to the comic book burnings and the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency hearings and eventually the creation of the Comics Code.

You know, for as many great reprint collections are available these days, there's something to be said for seeing old comic strips in their original context. You ever look at an actual newspaper comics page from the mid-20th century? Here's The Calgary Herald from March 22, 1949...

You might notice that it doesn't look all that different from today's newspaper. Cramped page, crossword, horoscope... Heck, even Mary Worth and Dagwood are still around! The printing quality has improved a bit, but the jokes haven't.

I really try to sympathize with companies that aren't able to keep up with the times. After all, there are people -- real, hard working people -- who put these newspapers together, not to mention the various comic artists whose work you see every day. But if you haven't appreciably changed anything about your product in three quarters of a century, it's really hard for me to justify why you're still even around.

For the past few decades, Wednesday meant "new comics day" for fans. The day when the latest batch of comics would be made available on shelves at their favorite local comic shop. But with Diamond Distributors collapsing, that might no longer be a ritual fans can count on.

Let's back up a bit... how and why has Wednesday become New Comics Day in the first place? Older fans might well recall going to their local comic shops to buy new comics on Monday. Others might recall that their shop got new comics on Friday. While any given shop might have a regular day that they got new comics, that wasn't necessarily the same day as any other shop. The reason for this is because there were a variety of distribution channels. One thing I try to point out to fans every year is that August 8th is NOT the anniversary of Fantastic Four #1, and this is easily proved by the number of different copies where the retailer physically wrote the date they received them right on the cover, so they would know when they could return unsold copies back to the publisher. I've seen dates ranging from as early as July 30th to as late as August 21st. There was no single, national system in place for distributing comics -- they showed up when they showed up thanks to the collection of regional distribution and subdistribution channels that retailers went through.

Keep in mind, too, that in the mid-20th century, comics were still dismissed as emphemeral garbage. So if a distributor was loading up their delivery truck with Life and Time and whatever else, the comics were considered the absolute least important. Which meant that they might just get left in the warehouse an extra week or two if the truck happened to fill up. That's another reason why the received dates on those Famtastic Four #1s range over almost a full month. As hard as it might be to believe now, back then nobody -- well, no distributors or retailers at any rate -- cared too much whether they got the latest comics issues this week or next week or the week after that.

Now, this started changing in the 1970s. Comics fans were starting to get recognized as a significant (and profitable!) group of consumers, and the industry began trying to standardize and normalize business operations to run more efficiently. You can sometimes find 1970s comics with some random color sprayed across the top; this was actually part of that process of standardizing things, which I wrote about here. (In that same post, I also note how that eventually worked its way back to publishers and that's how/why comics from the 1980s often have a block of color printed at the top of every interior page.)

This standardization process led to comics being delivered in a more regular fashion. Phil Seuling was a big insitigator in this, helping to set up a comics-specific distribution channel that was independent of (and thus wasn't materially impacted by) magazine distribution. There were still regional differences -- and that led to some weird local scarcity issues sometimes; the debut issue of Howard the Duck is a bonkers story because of that -- but that's when you started to see individual shops getting a dedicated New Comics Day.

But the big change happened in 1997 with the collapse of Heroes World. That's a whole story unto itself, but the short version is that Marvel owned its own distributor briefly but that aspect of the business was run really poorly and it entirely collapsed inside a couple years. Marvel had to quickly pivot to Diamond -- who was able to leverage Marvel's now-tenuous position into an exclusive contract -- to gets its comics distributed. Any comic shop that wanted to sell Marvel comics had to go through Diamond. And, as a retailer, if you had to order from Diamond anyway, it was easier to just go ahead and get every other publisher's comics from them as well, whether or not they were exclusive. And that's the super-short, abridged version of how Diamond got to be an effective monopoly.

But now that there was really only one comics distributor for the entire United States, all those regional differences dissipated. Comics got delivered to retailers on Diamond's schedule, and that turned out to be Wednesday. (To be fair, I seem to recall that Wednesdays were arbitrary as far as Diamond was concerned, and it was actually outside input from publishers that led them to Wednesday deliveries. I can't find specifics offhand, but I believe it happened to work well with either Marvel's or DC's production schedule and Diamond didn't really care, so they just rolled with it.)

And that's why we've all known Wednesdays as New Comics Day since the late 1990s.

But if New Comics Day was a thing specifically because of Diamond, what happens when Diamond is no longer a viable player? Well, with comics distribution news being an almost daily thing for the past six months now, there's clearly a lot in flux and we've had so many twists and turns that I don't think anyone can predict where this will all shake out. But if we do get back to a situation where we have multiple reliable distributors, we could see a return to New Comics Day being different for every shop depending on who they order from. Or perhaps a single shop will have multiple New Comics Days every week if they use multiple distributors. Or maybe the major distributors all happen to land on an agreement to all delivery books on the same day because every publisher was already set up for a Wednesday schedule. Or maybe we have different New Comics Days for each publisher. This can go in any number of different directions.

That doesn't necessarily mean the death of New Comics Day or that we'll be forcing fans to shift their Wednesday rituals to a different day of the week. But we're definitely looking at a "things will never again be the same" for comics fans in a way that no company-wide crossover story has ever been able to deliver.

The thing about comic book collectors is they collect comics. I mean, that sounds obvious on the face of it, but what that means is that they go out and obtain comics, and then keep them. Maybe they buy new comics every week at their local comic shop, or they only go to conventions to pick up back issues, or they just order trade paperbacks from Amazon, or they back a lot of Kickstarter projects. However they get them, the point is that there's an ongoing influx of comics being added to their collection. And with that comes storage.

When I was eleven, I had a subscription to The Fantastic Four and that was pretty much the extent of my collecting. I got one new comic each month, and very, very occasionally a handful of others if Mom had a little extra pocket change and I was being really whiney at the grocery store. Between the two, let's call it 20 comics a year. Storing 20 comics is not a big deal. You could drop those as a stack on the kitchen table and it wouldn't cause too much of an issue.

After five years of that, though, you've now got 100 comics. It's not impossible to find room for 100 comics, but that's probably enough that if you tried just dropping them on the kitchen table, you wouldn't be able to just slide them to side a bit to have lunch. They could still pretty easily fit in a short box, but you're now starting to consider their space and size, and how much room they take up.

But hey, we added five years to an 11-year-old. That's a sixteen-year-old now. One who can drive and works part-time at McDonald's. That single title subscription is now six titles. And instead of begging Mom for pocket change, McDonald's allows for discretionary income, meaning more purchasing power and more regular trips to the comic shop. So instead of 20 comics per year, we're looking at maybe 100 comics per year. Under the original premise, it would've taken fifteen years to fill a single long-box. Now, it's down to three years. Three years to figure out where you're going to put another long-box isn't a terrible endeavor, but it's certainly more thought-consuming in terms of storage logistics than a single long-box over a decade-plus.

Where I'm going with this is that the more comics you buy, the more storing them becomes a concern. Because not only do you have to consider where you're going to put all these new comics you just got, but that's in addition to the ones from before that you were already storing! If this keeps happening throughout your life -- you keep buying comics -- you eventually start run up against the financial constraints of storing them. You've bought as many bookshelves as you can fit in your home, the books on the shelves are all two or three deep, plus there's two or three more books lying horizontally across the tops of everything else too. You're now essentially running up against three options...

1. Create additional storage space in your home
2. Rent a storage unit at another location
3. Get rid of some of your collection

Me, personally, I have yet to intentionally do #3. I lost a long-box full of comics in a flood back when I was in college, and I've gotten rid of some duplicate books I wound up with, but I've never sat down and thought, "I should sell some of my comics to make more space." The first idea of "creating" mroe storage space I did once basically by selling one house and buying another; I didn't do it in order to get more storage space for my comics, but I did take advantage of that opportunity. I have tried renting storage space, as well, but that was a consciously temporary endeavor while I was moving.

What I don't know, though, is which of those three methods might be more common than the others. When folks run out of space for their comics, how do most people handle that? I see some people selling their comics online, often with a distinct "I need to make more space" type of message, but I have no sense of how common that is against other options.

Please do me a favor, and in the comments, let me know if/when you found yourself running out of space to store your collection, and how you tackled it. One of the three options here, or maybe a combination? Or maybe something else entirely that I haven't thought of! I'm genuinely curious what might be more/less common.

In 1998, a new restaurant opened in New York City called Mars 2112. It was a theme restaurant of the type that were popular in the late 1990s, with this particular theme being, to no surprise, an immersive Mars visit. Supposedly, the owners had studied prior theme restaurants to see where they failed and tried to incoporate as many learnings as possible.

Patrons would enter via the "Cyberstreet" waiting area which featured space themed arcade games. When enough tables were ready, groups of two or three dozen would be "boarded" on a shuttle that took them on a simulated four-minute ride from Earth to Mars and, upon disembarking, they'd be seated in the "Crystal Crater" which was set to look like a hollowed out crater on Mars specifically for the purposes of dining. The waiters and bartenders were all clad in shiny uniforms that looked like they drew inspiration from The Jetsons and Lost in Space, while a few actors would roam the dining room floor in alien costumes to meet and greet the customers. The menu consisted of space-themed meals and drinks which, supposedly, were much better than your average for a theme restaurant.

A second location was opened outside Chicago two years later, and the owners were trying to raise funding for additional spots in Philadelphia, Washington DC, and Minneapolis when 9/11 effectively slammed the brakes on all US tourism, which the restaurant depended on. The Chicago location was quickly closed and the company filed for bankruptcy in 2002. The New York location remained opened but made a number of cutbacks. They continued to struggle, filing for bankruptcy again in 2007, and eventually shuttered entirely in 2012.

Now you may be asking, "What does any of this have to do with comics, Sean? Did they produce some kind of comic to promote the restaurant?"

No, they did not. However, Dumbing of Age creator David Willis worked at the second location as a shuttle pilot that ferried patrons from Earth to Mars. Willis recently noted that he was one of the few people who liked doing that job "because 90% of it was sitting on a chair alone in the dark." Given the limited time that location was open, it completely overlaps with the production of Willis' It's Walky! comic and he said he did a lot of thumbnail sketches for that strip while the simulator was running. Although he didn't say expressly, it seems likely the Mars 2112 gig influenced the space theme of It's Walky!

And as it happens, there is in fact footage online of Willis in his role as a shuttle operator! This isn't professional-grade camerawork by any stretch, but Willis is plainly visible as people enter and exit the shuttle, and he very clearly introduces himself with his real name. Enjoy!

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Skip the AI Cheat Code
https://ift.tt/FZ9wszg

Kleefeld on Comics: John Byrne's Unused FF
https://ift.tt/BUsketf

Kleefeld on Comics: Studying Problems
https://ift.tt/3Eeogbn

Kleefeld on Comics: Dr. Werthless Review
https://ift.tt/pn0BMgC

Kleefeld on Comics: Funeral for a Country
https://ift.tt/CwtW1qK

Shortly after election day last year, I wrote a somewhat rambling post about my cynicsm going into a second Trump administration. After Congress yesterday voted to kill millions of Americans -- and make no mistake, that is precisely what they did; Rep. Derrick Van Orden celebrated online that "17 million people lost health care" and "18 million kids lost school meals" -- and cede much of their own power to a single man, I don't find anything worth celebrating for "Independence Day" this year. Hell, I can barely string together some coherent thoughts.

I'm not going to write anything new and just copy a portion of what I wrote back in November. It's sadly even more relevant now...

Back in the mid-90s, I enjoyed playing a game called Jump Raven. You basically had to fly around this pseudo-future, climate-change-impacted New York and pick up DNA capsules of nearly extinct animals, so that various gangs like neo-nazis (who, of course, were shooting at you) wouldn't get a hold of them and create mutant monsters. The actual game play was a little repetitive, but they used an interesting (custom) software engine and there was a good story around the game. One of the game features was that you could choose what type of music you listened to while you were flying around. All original songs, most of them quite good for a small-ish company's video game. But what stuck out to me back then was that one of the the songs had a spoken word refrain over an electronica type beat. The line was "The average lifespan of nations is 200 years."

At the time, I didn't know if that was an accurate figure or not. But I always thought it casually sounded about right. A lot of short-lived countries of 50-100 years and a few outliers that skew the average upwards. Sounds like there's never been a lot of actual research on it, but what there is puts the figure between 150 and 250. Given that the United States passed it's 200-year mark about two decades before that game came out, it did get me thinking about the country's time was indeed limited. I didn't know by how much, certainly, but with each passing year, I felt we were pushing our luck.

The thing was, though, I couldn't see HOW the country might collapse. I couldn't find anything really comparable. The USSR seemed to be about the closest, but really only in terms of size and power. The political structure and geographic issues were wildly different. Despite thinking about that off and on for decades, it wasn't until 2017 that I started to figure out how a collapse might happen. My guess is that individual states start seceding in "protest" of federal regulation. I could see both progressive states peeling off from a GOP-led capital or regressive states peeling off from a democratic one; who leaves first would depend on who's in power when they finally push brinkmanship too far.

One thing I did make a point of trying to learn from studying the Soviet Union's collapse was what happened to regular people. The collapse is almost always discussed in terms of the politics of it all, but rarely in terms of what happened to Joe Average who was just trying to earn a living. Spoiler: Joe Average doesn't do well. The poverty rate in the region skyrocketed from 1.5% in 1991 to 49% in 1993. Life expectancy dropped from 64 to 57. Alcohol-related deaths rose 60% and deaths from diseases went up 100%. Thousands upon thousands died as direct result of USSR's collapse. By 2004, 20% were still in poverty and by 2011, 53% could still only afford basic necessities (which technically isn't poverty, but not by much).

I've heard it said that the Soviet Union seemed strong and didn't look like it was going to collapse, until it did. And it threw many people into financial turmoil almost overnight. I think a decade from now, people will say the US didn't look like it was going to collapse, until it did. And the people who will fare best in a US collapse are the ones who have already been thinking about how to deal with it. The people who were answering the question "what can I do?" from a tactical perspective.

It was when I started understanding how and why a collapse might occur that I started publicly suggesting that the United States was unlikely to survive as a country past 2030. Now, this was back in 2017, shortly after Donald Trump first took office, so I recognized even at the time that some cynicsim on my part might be at play. But I have circled back to this notion repeatedly, and I have yet to see anything to suggest to me that my 2030 "deadline" needed to be adjusted. I still don't. Trump's time in the White House before did much more damage to the country than I think most people recognize, and even if Joe Biden did everything possible to fix things (which, to be clear, he didn't) it would've still taken decades to repair the damage Trump did.

I am absolutely NOT cheerleading the collapse of the United States here. However it happens and whoever is in the White House at that moment, it will result in thousands upon thousands of deaths. Those who aren't killed outright will suffer massive hardships, many of which will lead to early graves.

I don't have anything to comfort anyone. Yes, you should do what you can. Yes, you should try to avoid collapsing into a ball of despair. But the reality is that things will get worse for everyone reading this. You will see some of your favorite businesses go under. You will see many people you know and love lose their livlihoods. You will see people you know and love have their very existence declared illegal. You will see people you know and love die. There's more than a fair chance you yourself will be one of those people who lose their livlihood, are declared illegal, and/or die. There is no way I can make any of those realities any more comforting.

When Trump was in the White House before, I regularly said that the best way to think of him is to recall the most two-dimensional, evil-for-the-sake-of-evil villains from the chinsiest Saturday morning cartoon you ever saw. This is not Lex Luthor taking power, this is Boris Badenov. We were lucky then that he is a fucking idiot and didn't have a plan. But in seeing that, the Heritage Foundation stepped in this time and explictly outlined a step-by-step process that even an idiot like Trump can follow. People died because of Trump before, but that was as often out of incompetence as malice. That ratio has swung very much more in favor of malice since then.

Other people will have much more practical advice about resisting. Building communities. Establishing (relatively) safe havens. The practical ideas I have are largely specific to me and my situation, and circle around my and my wife's physical safety. The only broader advice I can offer is to mentally/emotionally prepare for the worst, but frankly I'm not sure how to do that. But I can't offer "it'll be okay" or "it'll get better" platitudes with any degree of sincerity because I flatly don't think it will. Not any time soon.

If you are here reading this, I suspect you and I are in some measure of alignment with regard to good and bad, right and wrong, facts and opinions. So I do wish you well. I hope you're able to survive and thrive in every way possible. But luck favors the prepared as Edna Mode said, so do what you can now. Build your communities, stockpile your supplies, plan your escape route, do what you need to do.

Be safe out there.