Beerbohm's Comics Reality

Lately, I've been reading some files I found buried in my archives from several years ago. It was a series of text pieces written by comics retailer Robert Beerbohm called "Comics Reality." They were all written in 1997 and '98 for the Comic Book Network Electronic Magazine. There have an interesting look at comics retailing, partially being a history lesson, but also addressing some issues that were JUST old enough to no longer be current.

I think I first came across the pieces around 2001/2002, so they were slightly dated at the time. Still in the "just old enough to not be current" ballpark. But I vaguely recall thinking at the time that I'd save them and read them later when I had a chance. Apparently the chance didn't show up for over a decade, as I've didn't pull these out to start reading them until relatively recently!

I'm only on the fifth installment out of twelve. But all that "not quite current" stuff is now at least 25 years past and Beerbohm's writing about it with then-little hindsight is quite interesting relative to having a few years to reflect on things. History as it was happening, if you will.

I bring this up for a few reasons. First, I think it's fascinating and I'd like to highlight Beerbohm's work/research. I knew he'd been working on a book about comics retailing for a while, but I found several references to it in "Comics Reality", meaning that "a while" has been nearly three decades. To be fair, I've heard he did have at least a partial draft that was over 800 pages long when he passed away last year. I know his daughter Katy had expressed interested in seeing it eventually published and I'd love to see that as well. While his writings could sometimes be a bit unstructured/disjointed -- Beerbohm even noted to me once that he needed a strong editor -- I don't doubt the information in his manuscript is invaluable. I realize that it's only been a year since he passed and Katy had plenty of her own challenges even before then, but I do want to keep the idea of this book alive and floating in the ether at the very least.

Second, what he has written for "Comics Reality" is incredibly enlightening, if a tad unpolished, and I'd like to encourage anyone who has the remotest interest in comic retailing to check out at least the first two installments. Sadly, the only place I can seem to find them online is through the Internet Archive. There's a very good explanations of why Jack Kirby's Fourth World books were canceled despite their popularity and how/why Howard the Duck commanded such erratic pricing when it was first published.

Beerbohm was one of the few people who seemed actively interested in the history of comics retailing. And being one of the first generation of them himself put him in a nearly unique position to document that period. Years ago, I'd toyed with the idea of writing that myself but only before know Beerbohm was already doing so. I've since come to realize, too, that it's very much the type of subject that I would be really bad at writing. (Well, not bad the writing per se, but I'm bad at doing the first-hand research that it would require.) How many of those early retailers are left at this point? Bud Plant just retired at age 73. Chuck Rozanski is still going strong, it seems, but he's 70 himself. They're only still with us mostly because they started selling comics when they were teens; any of those early retailers who was even slightly more adult back then would be in their 80s now.

That's why I'd love to see something comprehensive of the history of comics retailing. Let's capture what we can before it's all second-hand heresay.

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