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.