The Retiring Type...

 One of the most perplexing questions that people ask me is "Are you retired?" My immediate reaction is to say "yes" because I retired from teaching (my only career where I my hours and duties were set by someone other than me) almost a quarter century ago. But then I realize that "retired," to many people," means "doing nothing," and in that sense I didn't retire when I left teaching. I continued to do Comic Shop News on a weekly basis until the end of 2022. So am I retired now, since we passed CSN on to the intrepid David Witting at that time? Maybe not, since I still have Dr. No's Comics & Games Superstore, and I work in the store five days a week, as well as doing a fair amount of work from home (orders, adjustments, record keeping, etc.), so there's only one day out of the week when I'm not doing something store-related. Even when we go on a trip (like our recent sojourn to Universal Studios), I take the MacBook Air with me and do frequent reorders. And I also write, both fiction and non-fiction. I don't get rich doing it, but I do get paid, so I guess that's working, too. But I'm aware that a lot of people interpret "retired" to mean "no longer doing something I don't want to do," so in that sense I've been retired all along. However, no one wants an answer that complicated, so when they ask, "Are you retired?" I usually just say "sort of." It's easier for all of us.

Let's Get Small!

Okay, if you're not involved in the world of comic book retailing, this may be a "deep in the woods" conversation that holds no interest to you. I hope you'll bear with me, though, as I discuss further ramifications of the whole distributor crisis that's been going on in 2025. I promise that my next blog post will be something less industry-focused, honest!

To make a long story very short, the largest distributor in comics, Diamond Comics Distribution, filed bankruptcy on January 13th. The new owners took over on May 15th, but they don't really seem interested in distributing anything, leaving a number of small and mid-sized publishers in the lurch. All of the mid-sized publishers have found new homes and are working to get the money they're owed, but the small guys are struggling to find distribution.

To fill the void, a comics writer and convention-runner named Phillip Russertt started a new distribution company, Philbo Distribution, a small operation that wants to distribute books from the small guys to comic shops. There's only one problem,.

For a retailer with a good understanding of his business, Philbo's model is totally unworkable. The company offers a super-short discount of 40% for orders of less than ten copies of a title, but almost all of the books that Philbo carries are the sort that hardly any store would possibly need ten copies of. Philbo wants prepayment at the time the order is placed, even though retailers have no firm idea of when the books will ship. No firm shipping date means that retailers can't count on aggregated shipping to cover the cost (what if only one publisher ships a book that week?). Philbo has no proven track record for reliability, packing quality, shipping efficiency, negotiated freight discounts, and so on.  That means that full shipping must be borne by the retailer with no volume discounts because Philbo has no volume (hopefully they'll use someone like Pirate Ship to at least get some discount off standard rates). 

Let's talk about the reality of the retail world. Retailers really need 50% discounts on comics to cover rents, utilities, taxes, employee wages, and other overhead items and still make a profit. The last survey I saw showed that most comic shops spend about 42% of their annual income on those overhead items. If that's the case, then it's more cost effective to toss a few dollars into the parking lot every month than it would be to order at this discount (because after paying shipping costs, the odds are you'll be looking at a 30% discount, realistically).

Now the old distributor, Diamond, offered 45% discounts on several of those small publishers and only a 40% on a few--but they also carried the big guys, so retailers could consolidate shipping across all the publishers into a lower per-book cost. Right now, Lunar and Penguin Random House have stepped into the void, taking over many of the mid-sized publishers (and in Lunar's case, some of the small publishers), almost all at a 50% discount. But the key here is lower aggregate shipping costs, payment on or after receipt of merchandise, and a proven track record of negotiated discounts on freight costs (or, in PRH's case, no freight cost at all).

When I first heard about Philbo, I wrote to Phillip about this. In his reply, he said that "creators pay print costs of $2.75-$3 per book [for a $5 book] and simply can't survive on offering 50% or more on orders of two or three books." First off, I don't think that's correct for most publishers; the only people I know who are paying that sort of cost are print-on-demand publishers.  But if that is true, then these small publishers they shouldn't be publishers at all--they're doing fanzines, not professional comics (how can they pay $3 a book to print a comic that they're wholesaling for $3 a copy, with Phillip keeping at least 10% of that $3 and the publishers also paying the ship the books to him? If these numbers are somehow accurate (an assertion I still question), that would mean they're losing money on every copy, so we're helping them financially by not ordering, right?

(I should add that for more than 35 years, Ward Batty and I published Comic Shop News, a weekly printed at the same facilities where comics are printed, and I know that none of the comics printed at these facilities cost even a significant fraction of $2.75/$3.00 per copy. So I do have decades of business experience in publishing on which my doubts are founded.)

As I continued to discuss this with Phillip, he told me that "...you wish to discourage small publishers the opportunity to get in the ring and potentially grow and feel that kills the market that's  why marvel and DC regurgitate garbage to stay safe [sic]... Only betting on sure things has worked so you play it safe." At this point, I saw little reason to explain that my store, Dr. No's Comics & Games SuperStore, is the most fully stocked comic shop in the metro area and one of the most fully stocked in the US, and that we have carried independent comics since the store got into comics back in the late 70s, when I was the guy in charge of ordering for the original owner. 

Christina Merkler, co-owner of Lunar Distribution, said on a podcast recently something to the effect that if a publisher can't sell 250 or 300 copies of a book (I forget which number she cited), then they're not really ready to enter the marketplace, and I agree with that. That's the number that Lunar is looking for, and I gather that a lot of the smallest publishers aren't hitting that number, even with 2000 comic shops as their potential market (and remember, a small publisher sells to retailers, not to readers because a small publisher has zero marketing budget to reach those readers), Small publishers have to make expansion of the buying audience their number one priority. That may require deeper discounts, losing money for a while (I know of hardly any small business that didn't take a loss initially), or most importantly of all, pricing your product so that you can offer industry-standard discounts. Does that mean you might have to charge $1 more cover price to give a 50% discount? Perhaps so--but it also means that you open a lot more retail avenues for your product. Offering a product at a lower cover price, and paying for that lower price by charging 20% more for your product at the wholesale level (I pay $2.50 for a $5 book at a 50% discount, but I pay $3 at a 40% discount, and $3 is 20% more than $2.50) is forcing the retailer to become a discounter... but most small businesses don't have the profit margin to survive as a discounter. 

There's also an added cost involved in adding new distributors. It takes time to calculate orders for each distributor, it takes time to handle payments, it costs more proportionately  to process a small order than it does to process a large order. Their is an economy of scale involved in dealing with fewer distributors for more product, and for a small business, economy is the key—we have to maximize return on every dollar spent if we want to survive.

I hope that small publishers can find a means to get into comic shops like mine. I said, when Diamond began having problems, that losing them would hurt the smallest publishers much more than anyone else. But they're going to need a better business model than this to achieve success. Maybe Phillip Russertt will prove me wrong, but from what I've seen from fellow retailers and other knowledgable industry veterans, it's not likely.

A Furry Mackerel-Colored Memory

 Last night, I wrapped up the first draft of an all-ages manuscript with the working title of Anna. It's not ready to publish yet—for one thing, the first draft of the first half of the book was done via voice transcription on an iPhone to set a simpler, more fundamental style and structure that was easier to evaluate if I heard it out loud, but the vagaries of voice transcription require a lot of correction—but I was proud to put the word FIN at the end of that last paragraph.

This wasn't an easy book to write, because the inspiration for it is the life of the most remarkable cat I've ever had the joy to share my life with.  I've owned cats since 1964, when almost-eleven-year-old me welcomed a black and white cat named Tyger (I know the color was wrong, thanks) into my family's home. She was with us for several years, even though she suffered injuries and lost an eye in a gory fight with another animal in 1966 and we weren't even sure she would recover. 

Since then, I owned (or cared for) four different cats between 1971 and 1973, then went cat-less until 1975, when Meade Frierson invited Susan and me to an event at his house and encouraged everyone to take a kitten home with them (I think the event was the front for a cat-distribution scheme, to be honest). Her name was Stormy, and she stayed with us until 1990, when she passed.

A week after Stormy's death, Susan and I welcomed two cats, a mackerel part-Persian named Asia and a blue-cream full-blooded Persian named Tisha, into our lives. Asia developed a fast-growing injection-site tumor and left us to soon; Tisha outlived her by two more years before succumbing to the accrued effects of old age.

Then came Anna. We stopped a pet store on a whim and saw this mackerel half-Siberian half-Ragdoll in a cage with four white Ragdolls, and I fell in love with her almost immediately. Previously, I had gotten kittens, not cats, but she was too irresistible to pass up. Anna was a joy from the day she entered our life, even though she was sickly and undersized at the time we got her.  She settled into our home and our lives right away, but seemed a bit lonely (after all, she had grown up with other cats). So three months after we got her, we brought Mischa into our house—a robust mackerel Siberian with black points and paws like snowshoes. 

Mischa passed at the age of eighteen, while Anna lived until just a week before her twentieth birthday. Anna was the only one of my cats to get to know and love Karen (Mischa died just a couple of months after Karen and I met), and it was quite touching to see her become so attached to Karen almost immediately. She followed Karen from one end of the house to the other, and settled in right next to her whenever Karen sat down. So Karen was just as devastated as I was when we realized that it was time to say goodbye to her.

We learned after Anna's passing that, while Karen was allergic to cats, they were a catalyst for a couple of dozen allergies that all went away just a couple of weeks after Anna's passing. So we decided that Anna would be our last cat—and that was a decision I had already reached before we learned of the allergies, because I realized that I am to obsessively devoted to my cats and I couldn't both own cats and travel or pursue other activities that I had put off for so many years.

But the week that Anna passed, I knew that I wanted to tell her story in an all-ages book. I can't say if it's a good one or not—I hope so—but I can say that writing it was an unforgettably moving experience for me. I'll keep you updated as to the progress of the rewrites, and perhaps you'll have a chance to read it on our own in the near future.

An Unheard-of Issue

Anyone who knows me is aware how much I love music. All my life, I have strived to acquire the best-quality recordings of my favorite artists. I listen for the slightest nuances of difference. I focus on each individual instrument or voice as much as I can. In the 1960s, when many of my friends had simple mono record players, I explored the two-channel wonder of stereo. Int he 1970s, quadraphonic music was an obsession for me, and I spent far more than I could afford to add a quad amplifier and turntable to my audio system. Int he 1980s, MTV introduced me to basic surround sound; a few years later, almost every stereo amplifier added a surround synthesizer to create the illusion of four-channel audio from two channel recordings. In the 1990s, I began to seek out five-channel audio on laserdisc and DVD. In the early 2000s, I immersed myself in DVD-Audio (which is decidedly different from the audio track on a DVD) and Super Audio CDs with surround mixes. More recently, I have added a lot of Atmos recordings to my collection of blu-ray audio. I am absolutely hooked on finding the perfect means of hearing every voice, every instrument, every echo, every resonance, every reverb...

So imagine my dismay when, after attending an outrageously over-amplified concert on May 16th, I discovered a day or two later that my hearing had been severely affected by the excessive volume.

I should have gone prepared with high-quality sound-reducing earplugs, of course--but it never occurred to me that a small performance in a local restaurant might be amplified to a volume that could overload a high school auditorium. I tried using wadded up bits of paper towel, which helped a little—but not enough, obviously.

The first sign I had that something was wrong was when we were watching the rerun of a Friends episode two days later. A couple of minutes into it, I thought that my Atmos surround system was malfunctioning. I was hearing distorted, tinny echoes of the characters' voices coming from behind me, it seemed. Sounds coming from my right were overloaded, boomy, and almost painful, even though the volume was relatively low. Karen assured me that everything sounded normal.

A few days later, I was startled when Karen put her hand on my right shoulder as I worked at the computer. She had spoken to me from my right side several times, but I had never heard her and had no ideas she was even there.

We sleep with a white noise generator/soiund machine that provides an ebb-and-flow wave sound throughout the night.  I turn over and over like a rotisserie chicken when I sleep, so I split time between my back, my right side, and my left side. As I lay there after waking up, I realized that if I was on my left side with my left ear fully pressed into the pillow, I couldn't hear the sound machine at all.

However, the hearing wasn't ˆ. The faintest bit of bass boomed into my right ear until it sounded like that annoying car you can't wait to get away from at a red light. Upper-register treble sounds were sharp and irritating, like some sort of siren. Voices were distorted, as if I was listening to them with water in my ears.

About four weeks after the incident, we joined a friend for karaoke, which Karen loves. Even with noise-limiting Eargasm ear plugs, the volume seemed excessively loud and horribly distorted. Even when the volume was more tolerable, I had trouble following conversations because I could not isolate voices from distorted background noise.

I hit a real low after that. Music means so much to me, and now I couldn't enjoy it. I felt as if a vital part of my life had been taken away. I became aware that the continual frustration was leaving me depressed and angry, and had to make a real effort to control it so that I wasn't making life miserable for Karen and other people I see on a regular basis (I know I wasn't wholly successful in that regard, but I wasn't even aware for a while what effect all this was having on me). I had trouble sleeping because I kept struggling to hear the sound machine, or the air conditioning, or the fan that I sleep with every night.

"Give it some time and it will go away," several people told me. It didn't. I finally went to see a doctor. I told him that the problem had improved, but it hadn't gone away. It had been at its best during the six days we were at Disney, where we were near sea level. The night we drove back to our home, which is 1074 feet above sea level, I had a lot more distortion and discomfort the first night, although it returned to its pre-vacation level by the second night.

He did a number of tests. He said that I haven't lost any hearing--tests verified that I could indeed hear even very faint sounds at all frequencies. The problem was the fidelity of that sound; I was hearing distortion like a blown-out speaker at some frequencies, and it didn't follow a normal pattern. At some frequencies, I heard more distortion in low-volume sounds than I did at higher volumes. At other frequencies, I heard low volumes very accurately but heard distortion at higher volumes. And at some frequencies, I heard no problems at any volumes.

The good news is that my hearing does seem to be improving now, more than nine weeks after the event that caused the problem. The doctor said that that gave him some hope that it might continue to improve and gradually return to normal. But he said that correcting the problem would be difficult because it didn't follow a typical pattern. Hearing aids, he said, aren't designed to correct narrow-frequency-range distortion at mutliple frequencies without impacting the frequencies that I hear normally.

It has continued to improve. I can now hear the sound machine, and some low levels of bass and upper-register treble are less intrusive than they were, but it isn't back to normal.

Tonight, shortly after dark, I went for a two-mile walk to get in my five miles for the day (I had an appointment this morning, so didn't get to do my first walk). On the way home, as I neared my driveway, I heard the hoot of an owl, followed by the plaintive cry of a coyote. For the first time in a while, I felt like I could hear the sounds normally--and I could tell that one came from the woods to my left, behind my house, while the other came from the uphill woods to my right and somewhat in front of me, in the woods behind a neighbor's house. I welcomed the call of both the owl and the coyote, because they told me that I was hearing those frequencies, at least, in undistorted and equally balanced stereo.

I listened to the tree frogs, or crickets, or whatever it is that makes those midsummer night chirping sounds (my parents never could agree on which it was). I could hear them all around me, and if I turned to face the other way, I heard the sound equally well from the opposing ears as I faced the other direction.

I came in and listened to some music (Eric Tingstad and Nancy Rumbel... always a good choice when I need to unwind a bit), and I heard the stereo more than I have in a while. There is still some distortion, but I really believe it's not as bad as it was even a week ago.

Will it get back to normal? I have no idea... only a hope. But when depression or frustration attempts to ambush me again, I'll try to remember how bad it was, and how it has gotten better, and I'll try to fight off that ambush. 

There's still a lot of music I want to hear, after all.

Repaying a Debt

There are some people who will always have a home on the shelves at Dr. No's Comics & Games SuperStore. These are creators who play such an integral role in transformingcomics into an art form that I feel like our store is a better place just because they're on the shelves here. 

Jack Kirby—the man whose creative vision and artistry made the Marvel Age possible. Steve Ditko—without him, there's be no Spider-Man as we know him. Carmine Infantino—the artistic stylist who brought the Flash, Adam Strange, and the New Look Batman to life on the printed page. Joe Kubert—no one conveyed the gritty reality of war better than he. Carl Barks—the best of all the Duck artists, he's the man who gave us Uncle Scrooge. Gil Kane—a master cartoonist who could create drama on the page at Marvel, DC, Tower, and in his own projects like Blackmark and His Name Is... Savage. And the list goes on... Wally Wood... Curt Swan... Barry Windsor-Smith... Bob Bolling... Wayne Boring... Russ Heath... Frank Frazetta... Murphy Anderson... Neal Adams... Al Williamson...Bernie Wrightson... Alex Toth... Jim Steranko... Don Rosa... Michael Wm Kaluta... Jerry Ordway... John Buscema... Gene Colan...Gardmer Fox... Roy Thomas... Dennis O'Neil... John Broome... Charles Schulz... Vaugn Bode... 

Undoubtedly, a comic shop is a business that has to make a profit. For that reason, we spend a lot of time analyzing demand, sales velocity, trend projections, etc. In general, if a book takes more than six months turn a copy, my managers and I discuss it before we reorder another copy. If a book takes more than a year, our default position is "don't reorder."  With thousands of collected editions in stock, we have to consider space as well; we try to carry as much as possible, but you can't devote shelf space to a one-every-year sales item if you need to space for a one-every-month sales item. 

But these creators—well, without them, there wouldn't be a Dr. No's Comics & Games SuperStore. I got into comics through the work of Swan, Boring, and Bolling (who illustrated two of the first four comics that my parents bought for me). My imagination flourished through
the work of Kirby, Ditko, Barks, Kubert, Heath, Kane, and Anderson. I saw comics go in an all-new direction thanks to the artistic innovations of Windsor-Smith, Steranko, Wrightson, and Adams.  I discovered the fiction Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard thanks to the stunning work of Frazetta. And because of them, I fell in love with comics and SF and fantasy, and that love led me to the world of fanzines, then into the realm of comics retailing.

So these people are just some of the creators who get an All-Access Pass to Dr. No's. They're the ones who'll be on our shelves as long as there is a Dr. No's. I owe them a debt I can never repay—but I can take one small step in that direction by keeping their memory alive, by introducing new readers to their incredible body of work, and by allowing old readers to re-experience the creativity that got so many of us hooked to begin with. It makes us a better comic shop—and in fact, I'm not sure if we could call ourselves a full-line comic shop if we didn't include the works of these masterful creators.

It doesn't matter how tight those bookshelves are—when it come to these guys, if it's in print, we'll make it fit.

More Than a Boys' Club

 

My first personal contact with anyone at Marvel Comics was with Flo Steinberg. My parents had reached out to Marvel on my behalf in 1964 in hopes of locating some early Marvel issues that I had been unable to find to fill in a hole in my collection (a hole caused by a childhood friend who helped himself to a few books from my stack of Marvels one evening when he spent the night at my house). 

While the letter that Mom wrote was addressed to Stan Lee, it was Flo Steinberg who wrote back. Stan had asked her to send a stack of several issues from that list that Marvel still had in their office files--but he also asked Flo to send me a list of the books that Marvel had for sale. Apparently Marvel had heard from others who wanted back issues, and Flo had inherited that job. She sent a list of alpha-numerically ordered comics, with a simple price structure: 25¢ for a regular comic, 50¢ for an annual (which was about double the cover price, but that included postage). Flo's letter was cordial and kind. I had seen references to "Fabulous Flo" in various Marvel comics before, but this experience showed me how she earned her nickname. For several years (until the advent of mail-order back issue dealers  like Howard Rogofsky and Robert Bell, who ran ads in Marvel Comics) Flo became an invaluable source for Marvel issues that I had missed. (It was easy to miss books back then, in the days before comic shops, because most groceries and drugstores didn't care which comics they got, so long as they had comics to fill the racks. So you could never be certain that the store who got last month's Fantastic Four would get this month's Fantastic Four...)

For me, Flo was as vital a part of Marvel Comics as Stan, Jack, Steve, Don, and Dick were—and maybe even more, because none of them sent me manila envelopes with back issues in them!

When I saw the first mention of Margaret Stohl's Super Visible: The Story of the Women of Marvel Comics, I initially thought that it focused on female characters (the image of Sue Storm, Invisible Girl, not he dust jacket misled me). Once I saw that it actually focused on the women who helped make Marvel through their work as office managers, business directors, editors, writers, artists, and more. I was intrigued: first, I wanted to see if it talked about Flo at all (it does—and it's heartbreaking to learn that she left Marvel because they wouldn't give see fit to give her a $5 a week raise). Then I wanted to see what it said about other women who have worked at Marvel over the years, many of whom I interacted with professionally as a retailer and as writer of Comic Shop News. 

Marie Severin, Jo Duffy, Anne Nocenti, Bobbie Chase, Trina Robbins, Paty Cockrum, Louise Simonson, Jean Thomas, Virginia Romita, Christie Scheele, June Brigman, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Janice Chiang, Amanda Conner, G. Willow Wilson, Irene Vartanoff... they're all in here. But most importantly to me, Carol Kalish is here. Carol passed away many years ago, far too young, but her acumen with both comics and business made her invaluable to Marvel's prominence
. Carol was my barometer: any book that didn't mention her contributions to Marvel couldn't pass muster. Thankfully, Super Visible acknowledges what Carol did for Marvel and for the comics industry as a whole.

The book focuses on many other creators with whom I haven't been lucky enough to interact professionally, including some about whom I actually knew very little. It's informative, but most importantly, it gives many of these women a voice to tell their own stories in oral history form, and their stories are fascinating. Many of them could be subject of an entire book on their own—and maybe that will happen down the line. But right now, Super Visible is the best way to learn about the women who made Marvel far more than a boys' club.

A Life in Four Colors Part Sixty

Our lives changed in so very many ways once we moved to Marietta.

You wouldn't think a move would make so much difference, but it did. Cedartown (and even Rome, eighteen miles away) was relatively sedate and stable; the wheels of change turned very slowly there, and we were young enough that many of the places that had been a part of our childhood lives still existed.

But Marietta in 1977 was a nexus for people in their twenties and thirties trying to build a new life for them in ever-growing metro Atlanta. When we moved into our apartment on Franklin Road in Marietta, many of our neighbors were nearly the same age as us (in contrast to our lives in Cedartown, where the neighbors around us were at least a quarter-century older than us, and some of them had children older than us). There was an energy to apartment life in Savannah Oaks that we had never experienced in Cedartown. 

In 1977, Marietta had a few 24 hour restaurants, a couple of 24 hour grocery stores, 24 hour drug stores--it seemed like a place that never stopped to rest. There was a vitality that the young emigrés brought with them, and it fed into our awareness that this was very different from anything either of us had experienced before. We had seen glimpses of it during our weekend visits to our friend Larry Mason, who lived across town in the Buford Highway corridor, but we never imagined that within a few years, we'd be right in the middle of it all. This may sound fairly insignificant now, but to someone coming into this world after living in a  town where pretty much everything closed at 9pm, it was a Wizard of Oz moment.

(Those of you who remember life before COVID have seen the world shrink in a mirror image of this. All those 24 hour stores started closing when COVID scared off some of their customer base, and few of them have returned to the pre-COVID boom era. I remember walking to Kroger or Walgreens at 2 in the morning to enjoy the night air as I made an impulse purchase, or driving th Walmart or Kmart at 3 or 4 am. Alas, the entire 24-hour economy seems to be one casualty of COVID that will not recover...)

With Susan's new job came more money--but with our move came more expenses. Even so, after paying $490 a month in rent for our two-bedroom townhouse apartment (a steep increase from the $75 a month we paid for a two-bedroom rental house in Cedartown), we still had unprecedented levels of disposable income. We also had health insurance, which we never had when each of us was in school; we had a retirement fund, which we had never even thought about in our early twenties; and we had comforts like central air conditioning, new appliances, and two and a half bathrooms.  While this is the sort of thing that a lot of people consider basic today, it was a significant step up from the simpler life we had lived in the first six years of our marriage. 

This was the sort of life that we had envisioned experiencing at some point--but we never imagined that we would be propelled into this life so quickly.

I know that it will surprised no one to learn that with more money came more books, more comics, more fanzines, more music... more of everything that had been a part of our lives ever since the time we met in 1968. Our entertainment budget grew almost ten-fold over the first few months. Where I used to have to make decisions about one or two albums a month, I could now buy the music I wanted as soon as it was released. I had Steve Leaf at the Book Nook hold one of every comic book for me every week so that I could pick up the entire stack every weekend. I started ordering more books from Donald M. Grant and Arkham House and a number of small specialty publishers. 

For fans, the things we collect have a tendency to expand exponentially while the space we have for them expands mathematically. So even though we had a much larger space than we had ever lived in before, we were rapidly filling up our library (the second bedroom). I had to move some of my comics into one of the storage buildings at my parents' house in Rome because I was buying so many books there wasn't room for them. But that wasn't a worry—we were intoxicated by the opportunities that came with life in Marietta.

Just a few months after we moved, I ventured into what seemed like the outer territories of Cobb County to check out a new store I had heard about, a place with used records, used books, some James Bond collectibles, and some back issue comics. I was intrigued by the store's name.

Dr. No's.

The owner, Artie Decker, had come out of the music industry where he worked on the promotional side of things. He had access to lots of promo albums from the label for whom he worked, and he had friends who worked for other labels who could supply him with surplus promo copies to stock his used record shelves. He had bought out the inventory of a used bookstore in metro Atlanta to fill his used bookshelves, and a friend had sold him about ten boxes of comics to start his inventory. Artie knew a lot about music, a bit about books... but nothing about comics. He did know, however, that it was a market that was growing rapidly for Alex Nunan at Book Nook on the other side of town, and he wanted to be Marietta's Book Nook.

Our fanzine Future Retrospective had been sufficiently well received that we were on the comp list for a lot of SF and fantasy publishers--and a lot of the books we got were reissues or paperbacks releases of hardcover titles that we already had. I began taking those books to Artie to trade in, because SF was like gold in the used book market in the 1970s: it was the ultimate printed commodity, and he would offer universal trade credit for anything he carried in order to get SF (most stores only let you trade genre for genre in books, and never for comics or records). 

As I read the comics I bought at Book Nook, I discovered that some titles didn't appeal to me, so I would take them to Artie to trade them in for books from his boxes. This piqued his curiosity even more, since I had comics he had never even heard of. "I want to get into new comics," he said, "but I don't know anything about them." I assured him that I did, and that for a modest payment in new comics credit, I could help him to order properly on a few titles to test out the four-color waters.

Artie was enthusiastic about that arrangement. As a result, within a few months of my move to Marietta, I began my first limited foray into actual comics retailing, albeit in a behind-the-scenes capacity.

I had no idea just how much this was going to change my life over the next few years...

"I Swear It's Not Too Late..."

Soon after Susan died in 2019, I began a still-ongoing process of evaluating my life to determine what I possessed and what possessed me, so to speak. There were many things that I had kept for years without even looking at. Susan's death helped me to realize that in many cases, the joy is in the memory. But sometimes the burdens of owning Too Many Things inspire changes. This is one of the reasons I sold my comics collection a couple of months ago. I still love comics, but I have collected editions of the things I truly love, and don't have to have the physical comics any longer (and this was the fourth time I've sold my collection in my lifetime, so it wasn't an unprecedented decision).

In the past few years, I have re-homed Susan's antique cross-stitch collection, as well as her cross-stitch flosses and linens; our voluminous 25,000 book mystery collection; over a dozen items of furniture (some no longer needed, some that reflected tastes that have now changed); over 500 laserdiscs; an enormous amount of clothing; multiple sets of dishes and small appliances; and a huge assortment of holiday decor items that I had not used in years. Along the way, I found a box that I had packed up in 1986, when I moved from my Kennesaw home to my first Marietta home; it had not been unboxed in the almost 40 years since. I looked through the items once, smiled a the memories as I said goodbye, and donated what would be useful before I discarded the rest.

Recently, I referenced the whole "Swedish death cleaning" concept, and a friend who is a part of the Dr. No's team laughed and said, "I started to say something about that but thought it might be taken the wrong way." I assured her it wasn't. While that's not the inspiration for my cleaning (my primary goal is to implement a five-year plan that would enable me to sell the overflow house after I have sufficiently downsized), it reflects a similar attitude. When Mom died, when Dad died, and when Susan died, I spent a lot of time going through the accumulations of three lifetimes and I became aware how many of those things had not brought joy into Mom's or Dad's or Susan's lives for many years prior to their deaths. It took me many months to go through all of those things and deal with them, and in some cases I had no real idea what to do with them (JM Early was a lifesaver when it came to re-homing cross-stitch and quilting materials).

I always recall the final moments of Citizen Kane, when the workers are destroying the accumulations of Charles Foster Kane's personal life (largely the items he had boxed up to save after his mother's death). To him, those items had meaning; to everyone else, they were junk. I didn't want my junk to be a burden on those who survive me--and I didn't want my junk to be a burden on me.

I am lucky that my memory remains sharp and vivid at 72. I carry the wonderful memories of every item that has brought me joy in my life, even though I haven't seen some of them in almost six decades (I still smile when I think about my Man from UNCLE gun and shoulder-holster set). I can get rid of some of those items and still have those memories. And if I someday get to the point that my memory isn't so sharp and vivid--well, having the items probably wouldn't do me much good at that point anyway.

This is not a somber, melancholy, or depressing process. It is a celebration of the myriads of things that have helped to make my life so wonderful, and a recognition that life is always an ongoing process of change. Life is not and should not be a museum of one's past. It should always be a process of finding joy and contentment in life's present, and an eagerness to experience life's future.

"Strange to Be Seventy..."

 Seventy years old.

 

It surprises me, to be honest. Mom didn’t make it to seventy. Neither did Susan, nor my cousins Frank and Karen, nor so many other friends and family members. 

 

I wasn’t given much chance of making it to seventy after my heart attack. They gave me a 30% chance of surviving the surgery, and not a much better chance of surviving until the surgery. 

 

But here I am.

 

Life has given me far more goodness than I ever imagined it could. I wake up without aches and pains. I walk five miles or more every day, and enjoy it even more now than I did when I began this habit more than twenty-three years ago. I eat the foods I enjoy, and enjoy the foods I eat. I listen to music every day, and still get the same thrill from it that I did when I first began buying records more than sixty years ago. I have never, not even one day, had to work a job I didn’t enjoy. I have dear and loving friends who value our friendship as much as I do, so they adjust their schedules to make sure we get to share a couple of meals together every week.

 

And I share my life with a beautiful, talented, amazing woman who has the courage to do things I could never bring myself to do, and I get to wake up next to her every day and lay my head on the pillow next to her every night. We share walks, we share meals, we share laughter, we share tears, we share stories of our lives before we met one another, and every week I learn new things about her that make me love her even more. Before I met her, I didn’t think I could ever find love again. She proved me wrong.

 

My immediate family may be gone now—Mom and Dad died too many years ago, while Alzheimer’s has taken my dear sister Kimberly from me memory by memory over the past several years—but I have threefamilies now. There is my family by blood—Aunt Jean and Uncle Red, my niece Jessica and my cousin Cathy, as well as my aunts Donna and Martha, both of whom are closer to cousins than aunts since only a small handful of years separate us. There is my family by choice—Charles, Darrell, James, Eddie, Ralph, Buck, Izzy, and Shelley, all of whom make each week of my life better. And now there is my family by marriage—Karen’s family, who have accepted and welcomed this quirky, introverted newcomer into their lives. 

 

I’ve lost so many that I’ve loved in the past seventy years. Five cats have been lifelong companions to me, and I was there when each of them left this world; I’d like to think I learned  from each of them how to love more and care more for the cat who followed. 

 

But the deaths of Mom, of Dad, and of Susan—a part of me died with each one of them. But I learned from that. I learned the value of loving while you have the opportunity, and making sure that the people you love know how much they mean to you. A single moment could be all that stands between love and loss. 

 

Death makes some people afraid to love again, or it fills them with regret that they loved at all, since every love has to end with sorrow for the person left behind. But I remember there are no great moments that I remember from any time in my life that don’t involve someone I loved, someone who loved me… That’s what love is. It’s every wonderful moment of your life, shaped into a multi-faceted gem of a memory—the treasure no one can take away from you. Death isn’t a reason to be afraid of love—it’s the reason you should love. It’s the best thing life can give you.

 

My obsession with numbers and statistics is no secret, so it may surprise a lot of people that I don’t place significance on the “landmark” birthdays. Twenty-one, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, sixty-five, and now seventy—they’re not turning points in my life. I’m only a day older than I was yesterday. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel old. I hope I don’t. I’m still filled with ambitions and plans and dreams, and many of them are the same ambitions and plans I had when I was a kid, a teenager, or a young adult. I still feel a rush of enthusiasm with new technology; I still feel a flood of emotions from new music; I still get lost in new books; I still rediscover my sense of wonder in new comics; I still want to tell more stories; I still hope to draw more; I still lose myself in playing my guitar, even though I’m little better now than I was when I took it up more than a half-century ago.

 

And there are new things, too. Dancing, which I never imagined I’d be able to do, absolutely enthralls me. I value the moments I get to share with my neighbors, many of whom have become so important to me. I want to make more trips with Karen, even though I have spent most of my life sticking close to home. I hear Karen playing the piano and I want to do that, even though I’ve never done so. I pluck at a mandolin, because I love its sound. I play drums now, even though I have no skill at it yet. 

 

Life is a process of scrutinizing the things that fill your days and deciding which ones to keep, which ones to discard, and which ones to add. I’m lucky. I keep finding things in all three catagories. 

 

So I’m seventy now, as of about two and a half hours ago. And I’m okay with that. 

"Too Wonderful for Anybody to Realize..."

 Life can be stranger, more unpredictable, and more wonderful than we can ever imagine.

It's been the better part of two years since I last posted here. So many things have changed since then, and as a result my life is better in ways I could not have imagined.

Karen and I got married; in fact, we celebrated our first anniversary on October 30th of this year. It has been everything that a marriage should be--two people in love with one another, sharing our commonalities and celebrating our differences. We haven't known each other for our entire lives, so we take joy in discovering more about each other's lives. Little things will come up in conversation that will lead to fascinating stories that fit into the puzzle of our lives. Each of us wants to know more about one another's life prior to our meeting, and the people who were important to us in those years. When Susan died in 2019, I envisioned a life of solitude; I had no idea I would find Karen, a kind, wonderful, caring woman who would help me to discover (and rediscover) so many of life's joys. 

Karen and learned that we both love dancing. She is very good, and I am very persistent. And through our interest in dance, we met our new friends Tatyana Heath and James Riley, the owners and instructors of Ballroom Dancetime. Getting to know them has been a wonderful experience as well, and I appreciate them more with each passing week.

I have gotten to know Karen's family--her four children and her six grandchildren, and her sister Nancy and Nancy's sons--and through them, I get to re-experience the love of my own family. I never had children and never thought it mattered, but I find it intriguing that several months after Karen and I became serious with one another I actually had dreams about Lulu, Donny, and Emma, the children that Karen and I might have had. Having lost my own family  a while back (both parents died, and my beloved sister still lives, but she is so devastated by Alzheimer's that I feel like I have lost all that made Kim such a wonderful person), it is touching to witness the love between Karen and her family.

We made a lot of changes to the house--adding a covered porch, replacing wallpaper with paint in colors that made the rooms warm and engaging, adding new furniture that reflected our styles and tastes, streamlining and rearranging for more eye appeal and flow, and getting rid of furnishings that had remained for years simply due to inertia. My mother used to redecorate and repaint the family house every decade or so, and now I see why--the changes help you to appreciate your home in all new ways.

Karen retired in the summer of 2022, and that has given her time to pursue interests ion music, acting, and writing. It makes me very happy to see her finding the time to be creative; I have been lucky enough to have that sort of time for many years now (although I'll have even more in 2023 (but more about that in a couple of paragraphs), and now we both have that freedom. It also means that we both are free to travel--something I haven't really done at all in the 21st Century, due to the chronic health issues that Susan suffered until her death. (Susan couldn't travel with me, and I had no interest in traveling without her.) Now Karen and I can enjoy time away from home and appreciate it even more when we return!

Our Wednesday dinner group has grown to a Wednesday-dinner-and-Friday-lunch group, and both gatherings are always festive and fascinating. Charles Rutledge, James Tuck, Darrell Grizzle, Eddie Coulter, and Ralph Groff are regulars for at least one of those meals every week, and we have a number of occasional lunchtime companions who join us as their schedules allow. Having such good friends as these is remarkable. I talk to so many people I know who lament the absence of good friends from their lives and I feel even more lucky to have so many.

After 35 and a half years of weekly deadlines, I have stepped away from Comic Shop News as of mid-December. I never dislike doing CSN, but in recent months I wasn't enjoying it the way I once did, and there were other issues that made preparing a weekly publication more challenging than it had been. So my business partner Ward Batty and I put CSN up for sale and found buyers who have a game plan to keep the publication going. It's fascinating to see something you co-created continue after your own involvement comes to an end, and I'm eager to see where they take it--but I'm also happy to have time to write what I want when I want.

Alas, there were some sorrows. We lost my beloved cat Mischa in the summer of 2021 at the age of 18, and eleven months after that her sister Anna passed just a week before her twentieth birthday. Losing a feline companion is always heartbreaking, but it's also one of those things that you realize you will have to endure from the very moment you let a cat into your heart. I found some solace in the facts that I gave the two cats the best lives they could possibly have had, they lived longer than any cats I ever owned, and they were happy and loved until the very end. For now, I will refrain from replacing them; this is the first time in 45 years I have not had a pet, and I'm not sure I could ever find two cats who could fit my personality as well as Anna and Mischa did, so I'm not going to try (at least not for now).

But as 2022 comes to an end, I am appreciate of all the joys that have come into my life since the last time I wrote for this blog. I promise that I'll be here more frequently from here on (it's up to you to decide if that's good news or a threat). Those of you who had followed my "Life in Four Colors" entries will see more about my life as that series continues, and I'll even use the blog as a place to talk about comics, now that I no longer have a weekly Comic Shop News deadline. But most of all, not much'a nothin' will be a place where I can once again discuss my life and the things that make it better--just as it was when I first launched not much'a nothin' as a fanzine back in 1968!