Well, I won't bore you with the details of my ENTIRE day, but I took a trip slightly out of my way to stop by Up, Up and Away Comics for their FCBD celebrations. The parking lot was packed, but I got the last open spot, as I was directed in by a TIE-bomber pilot and Spider-Man. I thanked them and stepped inside to find a pretty packed house. I tried to step through and off to the side a bit to get a lay of the place.

Fortunately, I had been there before and knew the basic set-up. But they had evidently cleared out a little area towards the back for Tony Moore, who was already signing and sketching away. One of the bookshelves which I think normally holds just Superman books had been populated with the Free Comic Book Day material. Mostly just the Gold Sponsor books by the time I got there, but a few Silver were left.

In their usual gaming area, they had set down 40-50 long boxes of discount comics. Fifty cents each, as many as you want. Fairly quick way to unload a lot of mostly dead inventory, more than likely. One of the employees was standing nearby with heavy bags and boxes for those people who were finding lots and lots of books. (And there were no shortage of them! I easily saw several people through there with a couple hundred comics each.) It should come as no surprise that there was little in there of enormous value. Lots of semi-recent Marvel and DC, a number of fair/poor range Charlton and Harvey, and a smattering of independents from the late 1980s. I picked up both issues of Hulked-Out Heroes (which I had just learned featured an appearance by the Thing as Blackbeard), The Return of Skyman by Steve Ditko, and a curious promotional book called The Adventures of Comicretailman and Mr. Assistant, the Electronic Super Clerk. (I'm going to have to post a full review of that one later. You won't believe it!)

The hardcovers, paperbacks and manga seemed pretty much how I remembered them. Some new books in stock of course. The back wall also had several new books, including a few small press books that I hadn't realized had even come out.

I was in the store about an hour, and it was hopping the whole time. Not so crowded that you couldn't move or had to trip over people, but a very healthy crowd. A fair number of young kids, too. I think I saw around a dozen that were short enough that you had to be standing right next to them to see them in the store.

I've been to FCBD events before where the owners/managers seemed to only go along with it grudgingly. I've been to one other where the owner embraced the celebration and really made folks feel welcome. There's a HUGE difference in how successful that makes the event, and (coincidentally or not) it also seems to track closely with the overall atmosphere of the store.

You're telling me that, in the headquarters of the Fantastic Four, in the building that houses perhaps the greatest collection of technological wizardry on the planet, with the nearly infinite resources of one of the world's premier super teams, the Human Torch's best option for alleviating boredom is playing Atari's obscenely repetitive Spider-Man game from 1982?!?

From The Fantastic Four: Island of Danger by David Anthony Kraft and Earl Norem. Circa 1984. As in, two years' of technological advances after the Spider-Man game came out.

Before Diamond became a virtual monopoly, there were several dedicated comic book distributors. Before any of them, however, comics were distributed by the same folks who also distributed magazines an paperback books. The comics were shipped in bundles to these middlemen, who sorted them and sent them off to local newsstands and such along with the latest copies of Time, People, Playboy as well as the latest Harry Harrison or Stephen King novels. Comics were a comparatively minor part of their business, and weren't well-regarded as money makers. Especially in light of the fact that these distributors could get their money refunded from the publishers.

Comics were, for these distributors, a burden as often as not. Rather than deal with them and actually send them on to comic book shops, they would sometimes just shred them, get their refund and not worry too much about them. The newsstand dealers didn't care since that was a small part of their business, and there were few enough dedicated comic shops that they didn't have much economic power.

What comic shop owners started doing, then, was driving down to the distributors and picking the comics up themselves. The distributors didn't care; they just didn't want to deal with them. So what happened was that one guy would drive over, buy up ALL the comics, and essentially hold a local monopoly on that week's issues. Sometimes, he'd pick up all the books and the distributor would still claim the refund from the publisher! It was a decidedly unfair and unbalanced system.

(Side note: because the distributors were claimed the books were shredded, the publishers took that to mean they were unsold. So even though books were sometimes selling like hotcakes at the retailer level, the publishers didn't hear about them. That's why Jack Kirby's Fourth World titles got canceled so early. Same with the Dennis O'Neil/Neal Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow.)

Suffice it to say the system was broken. That's when Phil Seuling stepped in and suggested something like the direct market system we have now.

(Obviously, that's the EXTREMELY condensed version of what happened.)

But here's the thing. The situation didn't change until it essentially became untenable. That's usually how humans work -- we collectively only tackle issues when our backs are up against the wall. That's why Marvel and DC are still publishing print comics almost exactly the same way they've been doing for decades; there's no real impetus for them to change.

But that doesn't mean that YOU have to wait for it. Don't let things get to the point where you HAVE to change. Try to take a look at your options now and make them better, if you can. For some ideas in the webcomics arena, check out this discussion going on over at The System.

• The Cincinnati Art Museum is currently running an exhibit called The Way We Are Now: Selections from the 21c Collection. I gather the pieces range all over the map artistically, but the centerpiece seems to be one called "Fat Bat." CityBeat has more details.
• Matt Kuhns examines the cover art for the upcoming Red Skull: Incarnate series, comparing them with actual Nazi imagery that they're supposed to be alluding to.
• Can't justify the extra bucks for a toy Mjolnir to wield when you see the Thor movie later this week? Now you can make your own out of paper!
• C.J. Renner and Jim Clark have been teaching a Creating Comic Books class in Hopkins, MN the past several weeks. It's been going so well, they'll be doing another one in the fall.
• Wired has an interesting piece on the Pentagon formally starting a program that allows veterans to create comics and graphic novels as a form of therapy to deal with what they may have witnessed in combat. This kind of 'art therapy' has known to be useful for years, so it's good to see encouragement in all its forms. What strikes me as interesting, though, is this line about how "the black-and-white comic is precisely the kind of thing Darpa apparently has in mind — and also exactly the sort of thing that could embarrass the military if the comics leaked into general circulation." Leaked would imply that the soliders are only allowed to create this material if they vow never to publish it.
• And don't forget that Free Comic Book Day is this weekend!

I was doing some reading at lunch today and came across the quotes below. They were originally written by Robert Klein, but I only found them referenced in Robert Beerbohm's "Comics Reality" #7...

According to your figures during the 1948-1953 span, when yearly circulation was edging up to one billion issues, the U.S. population was about 160 million. That means the yearly per-capita purchase of comics then was about 6 comics for every man, woman and child in the U.S.

We know that every man, woman and child didn't buy comics, so it means that those who did, bought a lot more than the per-capita average. When you consider the pass-along readership was estimated at 5 readers for every copy sold, there's a very interesting conclusion to be drawn. During this era, comics were a mainstream entertainment medium for children and some older people...

With the huge circulation figures of the sort we see for the post-war/pre-code era, comics were definitely mainstream. When I was growing up, I struggled to figure out what motivated people to stir up the Comics Code fuss. Why were parents, Congressmen, etc. dedicating so much energy to cleaning up the contemporary comics? After all, I though, comics simply aren't that important. It took a while for me to realize there was a very different situation in that era -- comics really were that important back then. Television hadn't yet taken root and the comic book was a staple of a kid's entertainment, and that comics really must have been everywhere.

To put that in perspective, if the same amount of comics were sold today, relative to the current population, that would be about 1,867,708,734 comics per year. Nearly two trillion. Compare that against what John Jackson Miller calculated to be about 69,200,000 in 2010. If you're not that great at math, the number of comics sold in 2010 was a little less than 4% of what was sold in 1950 on a per-capita basis. Instead of 6 comics per person per year, we're closer to less than a quarter of a comic per person per year. Keep in mind, too, that comic books in 1950 were about twice as long as they are now.

Now, that doesn't take into account graphic novels and bound collections. It doesn't take into account anything outside the Diamond distribution system (print-on-demand, digital, etc.). The Diamond reporting isn't terribly accurate, since we don't have actual numbers to work from. And, to one of the points Klein alluded to, we now have a wealth more options for our entertainment dollars.

But even with those caveats, it's still pretty sobering.

Like, I suspect, many of you, I was online last night when news of Osama bin Laden's death started flying across my screen. Rumors floating around on Twitter first, followed by confirmation on CNN and eventually the President Barack Obama's formal announcement. Also like many of you, my Tweet stream then got filled with short recaps, quips about Obama's success relative to G.W. Bush and general shouts of jubilation and/or patriotism. The same thing happened on Facebook.

Look at that Savage Dragon cover at the right. It's from a couple years ago, and is clearly meant to evoke the imagery from the first issue of Captain America Comics #1 where Cap makes his publication debut by whacking Adolf Hitler on the jaw. A full year before the U.S. entered World War II.The analogy is apt in that bin Laden has been viewed by Americans in much the same way that Hitler was. The idea of Hitler (and bin Laden) is a more powerful image than the actual individual. That both Hitler and bin Laden had so little control within U.S. media and propaganda circles meant that they weren't portrayed as simple bad guys but as evil incarnate. The ultimate comic book villain with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Which isn't to say that I support anything they did. I'm just saying that our media hype machine was so forceful that there was nothing either of them did that wasn't portrayed as absolute evil. There's scarcely an attempt to even understand what their thinking was; they did what they did because they were evil. Two-dimensional villains who committed abominable acts for their own sake. Who or what they actually were is irrelevant; they were the living embodiment of everything bad in the universe as far as we're concerned.

For those of you old enough to have lived through and remember the Cold War, the United States' biggest enemy was the Soviet Union. Why? They were Communists and our government told us that they were bad and trying to take over our country. Not that there was an actual plot or anything, but they were sold to us as a dangerous boogyman that we needed to be fearful of. It was an image that was so engrained in our collective psyche that our pop culture of the time is littered with references to the Soviets being bad guys. Just within comics' sphere, we've got everything from Superman IV to American Flagg! to all the Soviet Super-Soldiers appearances throughout Marvel's entire comics line.

Most Americans have never been to the U.S.S.R. or Russia. Most haven't even met someone from there. Collectively, we relied on the government and our culture at large to tell us who were our enemies. That gave us something to fight against. Nazis were an easy go-to villain in the 1940s because everyone hated them, and Russians made for a decent go-to villain during the Cold War for the same reason. The hatred was a little less intense, of course, since they weren't, you know, slaughtering whole cities full of people, but "Better Dead than Red!" was a common-enough battle cry that you could pretty easily rally Americans behind.

Such is the role bin Laden has played in recent years. He's been America's Bad Guy^TM despite no one having actually seen him for the better part of a decade. He's a man so inherently evil that he even didn't deserve a trial (much less a fair one) in the same way Saddam Hussein did. He's a man so inherently evil that the government didn't even bother to TRY to claim that he took his own life rather than potentially get captured by Americans. He's a man so inherently evil that the only place he could hide would be a remote cave in the mountains.

Again, I don't condone anything bin Laden said or did. I don't know what effects his death will have on al-Qaida. But I do know that this isn't a comic book villain we're talking about. Which, on the plus side, means he won't be advocating America's destruction any longer but, on the down side, means that there will almost certainly be consequences of some sort. The "Mission Accomplished" banner was premature in 2003, and I think it's be premature in 2011.

Just something to think about if/when you find yourself in a crowd of people chanting, "USA! USA! USA!"

OK, here's a page from the original origin sequence of the Fantastic Four...

It's been reprinted and redrawn often enough that most of you are probably pretty familiar with it. Can I get you to focus on one panel for a moment, though?

The team is clearly sneaking past a guard and taking the rocket against policy. It says so right in that very panel. Four civilians, one of whom was a minor, sneaked past an armed military guard. The guard is clearly oblivious. They lift off in the rocket, right under the nose of this guard. The guy has one job, a relatively important job given that this new rocket is an experimental prototype for the military, and he blows it. Big time.

So what happens to him? Aside from that one panel, we never see him again. Sure, the FF were picked up by the military again after they crashed, but the guard still screwed up. That might not warrant a court martial, but it's most definitely going to put a black spot on your record.

At some point, I wrote up an outline of a story where he was found of no overt wrong-doing but was so demoralized that he started messing up everywhere. He eventually got drummed out of the service and took a job as a security officer for an insignificant warehouse in the private sector. He screwed up there, too, and got fired. His fiancée eventually left him. His confidence was shot and he was in this downward spiral of self-destruction.

Then, while he was on the bus to yet another job interview he was certain he'd mess up, the vehicle is slammed sideways into a building. The villain (I forget who I had as the villain -- Trapster? Wizard, maybe?) groggily climbs out of the hole he just made in the bus and readies for another attack. The Human Torch flies into view; the two adversaries exchange some quips and get back to fighting. This guard, though, is on the sidelines watching. He's wracked with emotion -- there's one of the guys who destroyed his career and yet...

The villain eventually gets the upper-hand and has Johnny down. (I think this was via a ripped-out-of-the-pavement fire hydrant.) Then, just as the villain looks down on the Torch and is about to conduct the final blow, a brick cracks him right between the eyes, knocking him unconscious. The former guard looks at his own hands, stunned. Eventually, he regains his composure and helps the Torch, who asks what happened.

The scene cuts to Mr. Fantastic welcoming the guard on as a new security chief at the Baxter Building in front of the rest of their headquarters' staff. The guard thanks Reed and says something uplifting about second chances and positive outlooks and living up to your potential. As everyone disperses, Johnny asks if the guard wants to grab something to eat after work to which he declines, citing that he's got a date with his former (and future!) fiancée.

End.

So somebody write that up and make that into a comic for me, will you? I'm freely giving that idea out to anyone who wants to take it. It's just a half-decent (I think) idea that I'll never really be able to do anything with. But it seems like it'd make kind of a nice fill-in issue at some point, right? Maybe a back-up in an oversized issue? Just a thought.