end of an era

It’s official.

I’ve gone through the entire Marvel Previews catalog for February and didn’t earmark a single page. There is nothing in here that I plan on ordering, beyond the series we’re already subscribed to.

I’m not sure how to feel about this.

—-

In other news, I was stopped like four separate times today to be asked questions about comics. This makes me very happy.

fragment from my resumé for O-Week Coordinator

MLLL Signator, Reed College, Spring 2005-present
If the legends are true and I instantly forget everything I ever learned in a Reed class the moment I receive my diploma, I will still be eternally grateful for my Reed experience for one reason: the opportunity to signate the MLLL (comic book reading room).

That room has reawakened a passion for comics that had been hibernating since my childhood, it has taught me deep truths about art and literature and life, and it has caused me to discover a passion for administration deeper than I could have imagined. Signating the MLLL, for me, means nothing more and nothing less than helping other people find happiness – serving as midwife for the life-changing experiences of my fellow Reedies.

I work extremely hard for the MLLL (calculating expenditures, managing inventory, monitoring new releases, alphabetizing bookshelves, scrubbing floors, etc.), but because of me, other students are discovering stories make them laugh and cry and think. It’s my way of giving back to the community – by making it possible for other people to receive what I’ve received.

how i’m spending your money

STUMPTOWN COMIX FEST 2005
October 1, 2005

BOUGHT FROM POWELL’S, THE NIGHT BEFORE:
Cromartie High School #1 by Eiji Nonaka (ADV)
FLCL #1 by Hajime Ueda & Gainax (Tokyopop)
Love & Rockets vol. 5-6 by Los Bros. Hernandez (Fantagraphics)
The Masterplan by Scott Mills (Top Shelf)
Phoenix #1: Dawn by Osamu Tezuka (Viz)
Soulwind #2 by Scott Morse (Oni)
Trenches by Scott Mills (Top Shelf)
X-Day #2 by Setona Mizushiro (Tokyopop)

BOUGHT FROM COSMIC MONKEY COMICS:
100% by Paul Pope (Vertigo)
Alec: How to Be an Artist by Eddie Campbell (Eddie Campbell Comics)
American Elf by James Kochalka (Top Shelf)
Ghost World by Dan Clowes (Fantagraphics)
King: A Comics Biography of MLK Jr by Ho Che Anderson (Fantagraphics)
Love & Rockets vol. 7: The Death of Speedy by Jaime Hernandez (Fantagraphics)
Love & Rockets series II #1-12, 14 by Los Bros. Hernandez (Fantagraphics)
Mother, Come Home by Paul Hornschemeier (Dark Horse)
Nil: A Land Beyond Belief by James Turner (SLG)
Optic Nerve #4 by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly)
Pounded by Brian Wood & Steve Rolston (Oni)
Scooter Girl by Chynna Clugston (Oni)
Tales Designed to Thrizzle #1 by Michael Kupperman (Fantagraphics)

BOUGHT FROM SPARKPLUG COMICS:
Air by Thien Pham (E-Z Cheese Comics / Sparkplug Comics)
Christina and Charles by Austin English (Sparkplug Comics)
FLEEP by Jason Shiga (Sparkplug Comics)
Tales to Demolish #1-2 by Eric Haven (Sparkplug Comics)
Watching Days Become Years #1-2 by Jeff LaVine (Sparkplug Comics)

BOUGHT FROM EZRA DANIELS
The Changers, book 1-2 (plus CD) by Ezra Claytan Daniels (Dream Chocolate)
Disposable Boy #2 by Ezra Claytan Daniels (Dream Chocolate)

BOUGHT FROM MICHEL GAGNÉ
Zed #1-4 hardcover, #5-6 by Michel Gagné (Gagné International Press)

SIGNED BY THE CREATOR
Carnet de Voyage by Craig Thompson (Top Shelf)
Same Difference & Other Stories by Derek Kirk Kim (Top Shelf)
Spiral Bound by Aaron Renier (Top Shelf)
+the Daniels and Gagné books mentioned above.
-NOT our copy of Daisy Kutter by Kazu Kibuishi, because I’m an idiot and forgot to bring it.
-NOT our copies of Flight vol. 1&2, because someone else is an idiot and stole them.

why every college needs a comic book reading room

last night was a magical moment in the MLLL.

Some kid I didn’t know was reading V for Vendetta. Vera read Promethea and was moved to tears. Devin read WE3, Fell #1, and Desolation Jones #1-2 and gasped on every other page.
Meanwhile, I was working through Mike Allred’s The Golden Plates #2, which made the whole experience very surreal.

on the comics signatorship

For those of you who don’t know (namely those of you who’ve never spent even ten minutes in conversation with me), I run the comic book reading room at my school. Recent conversation with one of our more dedicated readers () yielded some of my thoughts on the matter:

apologies to Eliah for cutting out a lot of his comments:
On a new resource for the room
(15:24:07) me: http://www.slingsandarrowspublishing.com/
(15:24:19) me: i think this will be a great asset
(15:24:36) eliah: it looks pretty cool
(15:24:36) me: it’s recieved great reviews across the board
(15:25:11) eliah: surprisingly inexpensive as well
(15:25:36) me: yeah
(15:25:48) me: check out the sample
(15:26:33) eliah: that looks awesome
(15:26:37) me: big entries for hulk, hellblazer and heavy metal
(15:26:57) me: a decent review of a 4-issue Peter David miniseries for Chaos! Comics
(15:27:58) me: a summary of the howard the duck debacle
(15:28:03) eliah: heh
(15:28:16) me: for something like hellblazer, i really need an article just like this
(15:28:24) me: who did what when, what was good, etc
(15:28:32) eliah: yeah, and i agree with it pretty well
(15:28:35) me: ’cause i’m not going to read 200 issues of hellblazer
(15:29:55) me: (Giant-Size Man-Thing is still the best title of a comic ever)

what my job (as i see it) entails
(15:31:53) me: grr. the database needs updating badly. maintaining that stuff was work enough; now that I have to make purchasing decisions as well it’s quite a task
(15:33:34) me: i almost want to divide the signatorship into a “creative director” and “operations director”
(15:33:44) me: but i still want to do both, and think I’m good at both
(15:33:56) me: and i’m not sure i could tolerate someone else doing it
(15:34:01) me: :/
(15:34:24) eliah: is there a lot of administrative-type work?
(15:35:03) me: i haven’t even had to deal with the paperwork-and-Senate stuff much yet
(15:35:12) me: thanks for reminding me. more headaches
(15:35:39) eliah: ha. sorry.
(15:35:52) me: i was thinking of the mailing lists and inventory management
(15:36:23) me: although the emails should be written by the person who’s making the purchasing decisions
(15:36:39) me: “here’s why i bought this comic”
(15:37:53) me: and controlling our purchasing is really a hefty task. not only am i trying to monitor upcoming releases (trying to predict what will be good out of hundreds of short ads three months in advance)
(15:38:09) me: and checking out online reviews to see recent stuff we missed
(15:39:54) me: but also trying to cover huge gaps in our coverage of essential reading – why buy another shitty Batman issue when we don’t even have anything by Seth?
(15:41:00) me: all the while trying to come up with a coherent coverage philosophy as an institution
(15:41:12) eliah: eh? coverage philosophy?
(15:41:45) me: what sorts of things should a comic reading room (for [Reed] college students) have?
(15:42:24) me: not to mention that getting people to realize, read, and appreciate what we already have could be a full-time job
(15:42:47) eliah: hey, just reading it can be a full time job.
(15:43:09) me: and if I buy things too quickly because I’m racing to cover shameful gaps in our coverage, it floods and nobody reads any of it
(15:43:37) me: I bought two hefty trades of Alan Moore’s Supreme run just at the end of the year
(15:44:08) me: in September they’ll have to go on the shelf (cause there’s a huge stack of new stuff from summer) and i’m afraid they’ll disappear there
(15:44:38) me: not to mention that I also like to read the damn things myself
(15:44:48) me: not only personally but in my role as signator
(15:45:16) me: maybe i can stay at Reed after I graduate and just… signate

crossover burnout
(15:53:02) eliah: hey, did you catch House of M?
(15:53:19) eliah: I’ve just read the first so far
(15:53:24) eliah: and I kind of like it
(15:53:33) eliah: but i’m worried it’ll just be another big stupid crossover
(15:53:37) me: i don’t know what to think
(15:54:21) eliah: ‘course, i also don’t know some of the back-story
(15:55:10) me: DC Prelude to Countdown to Infinite Crisis on Infinite Crossover really burned me out, i think
(15:55:17) eliah: heh
(15:55:23) me: and i’ve been unfairly dismissive of House of M as just the Marvel equivalent

DC Comics declines to innovate
(15:55:36) eliah: I’ve still not managed to get into any DC titles
(15:55:53) eliah: I grabbed Green Lantern, but it didn’t really get me
(15:56:58) me: i’m so skeptical of mainstream comics these days
(15:57:19) me: green lantern was a big hoopla because Hal Jordan’s back
(15:58:00) me: I was never terribly attached to him in the first place, but he was gone
(15:58:11) me: with a rather cool corruption story, even if he didn’t make much sense as a villain
(15:58:20) me: but then he was the Spectre, and that was cool
(15:58:45) me: but i feel like this is just DC declaring all the GL stories of the past ten years invalid
(15:59:02) me: not exactly “progressive”
(15:59:02) eliah: They seem to mess with their back story a lot
(15:59:46) me: messing with continuity is one thing. i’m more concerned with the fact that this represents a conscious rejection of the possibility that they might tell new stories
(15:59:59) me: “we’re going to go back to the way it was in the good old days.”

Archivism, and originality, in an ephemeral artform
(16:00:50) me: I dunno. it’s a tough thing to argue, because unoriginality is more excusable in comics than, say, novels
(16:01:07) eliah: Why?
(16:01:35) me: Mark Twain’s works are still around and easily accessible – much more so than most contemporary debut novels
(16:03:00) me: whereas comics start becoming harder to find, the moment they hit the shelves
(16:03:06) me: they’re printed once and gone
(16:03:17) eliah: true. there is that inherent ephemerality…
(16:03:25) eliah: excepting collected editions
(16:03:59) me: until we [i.e. the comics industry]have a robust archival program – and we’re much further on that than we used to be, but there’s a long way to go – new readers have no way to get to old classic stories
(16:04:02) me: not to mention:
(16:04:34) me: 1) lack of coverage – new readers can’t know about the old classics if no one tells them
(16:06:00) me: 2) the comics business has changed tremendously in the last 70 years. production values have grown so drastically that people used to contemporary comics may be unable to accept decades-old coloring
(16:06:56) me: and some writing doesn’t age well either

a depressingly-accurate analogy?
(16:08:08) me: can you imagine if every CD went out of print a month after its release?
(16:08:53) me: you’d be limited to “new releases” every week, plus whatever stuff the label decided to put together in a “compilation”
(16:09:03) eliah: yeah, that would suck

past vs. present
(16:09:19) eliah: and it is hard to look at 15-yr-old books after a bunch of modern stuff
(16:09:26) eliah: but that just makes the present more exciting…
(16:10:08) eliah: a rather unique medium
(16:11:01) me: but the important thing about the past is that we can evaluate it! we have a critical context for it; we can eliminate the crappy stuff and concentrate on the best!
(16:11:26) me: i have no idea whether House of M is going to be good
(16:12:21) me: I know that Joe Sacco’s Palestine is a landmark of investigative journalism in comics form, well-reviewed in all camps
(16:12:52) me: or that Carl Barks’ Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge influenced a generation of cartoonists
(16:12:59) me: you get the idea
(16:13:49) me: when I’m (painfully) aware of the great stuff of the past that we don’t have access to, it makes me reluctant to gamble on new stuff
(16:13:50) eliah: yeah
(16:14:03) me: so that’s a tough balancing act

cry for help/input?
(16:14:51) me: I’m gonna try to keep leaving Diamond Previews in the MLLL every month so other people can look through them