Profit and Loss in the Comics Biz

Talk with today’s crime novelists, and you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that they were comic-book fans in their youth. I already knew this to be true of Robert Crais (The Watchman), and discovered recently, when interviewing Tom Cain, the pseudonymous author of The Accident Man (due out in July), that he too devoured comics as a boy. For some years now, I’ve been trading comics with Crimespree Magazine’s Jon Jordan, who blogs about comics in his “spare time.” My own affection for the genre was well rewarded in the early 1980s, when I had the chance to share a beer with Frank Miller, the artist-writer who would go on to create Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Daredevil: Born Again, and Sin City.

In association with the recent opening of Spider-Man 3 in movie houses worldwide, The New York Times last week published a piece heralding “Free Comic Book Day.” It explained, among other things, that Gotham has a remarkable number of comic-book outlets:

There is no better day to visit your neighborhood comic store than tomorrow: Free Comic Book Day, the annual industry promotion in which participating retailers nationwide will give away titles ranging from “Little Archie” and “The Amazing Spider-Man” to “The Lone Ranger” and “Transformers,” a spectrum as wide as the stores that sell them.

And there is no better city in which to make that visit than New York. While it may be better known as a financial, cultural and culinary capital, it shouldn’t be any surprise that the home of DC Comics and Marvel Entertainment also boasts the best comic book stores.

“It’s a wonderland for anyone who loves the medium,” said Brian K. Vaughan, a popular writer of comics for both DC and Marvel who works from West Hollywood but is an ex-Brooklynite. “The worst comic book store in New York City is better than the best comic store in at least 40 other states.”

From the more than 40 comic shops in New York City, here are five--one in each borough--that are especially worth checking out. They were arrived at through a combination of polling industry contacts, scouring online postings by fans and distilling the lessons of my own 25-year comic book habit. Try them tomorrow for Free Comic Book Day; on a Wednesday, when new comics arrive; or any other day of the week.

Reporter George Gene Gustines goes on from there to relate the background and offerings of his chosen five stores.

On a much sadder note, I should mention--rather belatedly--that Marshall Rogers, one of the great artists of the comic-book world, died in late March of this year. Rogers is best remembered for a brilliant Batman series in Detective Comics during the ’70s, on which he worked with writer Steve Englehart. Together with Neal Adams and the aforementioned Miller, Rogers is deemed to have been one of the artists who most adeptly handled the torch passed down by the late Batman creator, Bob Kane. I loved Rogers and Englehart’s two-part Batman story featuring Jack Napier (aka The Joker), “The Sign of the Joker,” especially its terrifying conclusion in Detective Comics #475, “The Laughing Fish.” In my opinion, these were definitive Batman yarns.

One aspect of Rogers’ career that is often forgotten is that he worked on what was allegedly the first detective graphic novel (inspired by Will Eisner’s A Contract with God). That work, written by Don McGregor and published in 1980, was Detectives Inc.: A Remembrance of Threatening Green. As I recall, it was a hard-boiled private eye story, without nary a superhero in Spandex to be seen.

In its obituary of Rogers, The New York Times recalled:

Marshall Rogers, a comic-book artist who made his name illustrating Batman at a significant period in 1977 and ’78, was found dead by a family member on Saturday at his home in Fremont, Calif. He was 57.

The cause has not been determined, said his sister, Suzanne R. Schmachtenberger, of Fort Collins, Colo.

Mr. Rogers’s work with the writer Steve Englehart on just six issues of Detective Comics was important in redefining Batman, returning him to his pulp roots as an urban vigilante and helping shake off the camp elements popularized by the Adam West television series a decade earlier. These “Dark Detective” stories, as they came to be known, laid the blueprint and set the tone for decades of future Batman stories.

“You could draw a comic for 30 years and not have the kind of impact that we did,” Mr. Englehart said.

The full Times obit can be found here.