Galaxy Newsbrief - August 13th, 2012

* You'll find me at the bottom of yesterday's Five for Friday at The Comics Reporter, who asks who are the great underappreciated North American cartoonists? My response might not shock anyone who's been reading me any length of time, although I've never talked about exactly why I feel the way I do, as I do in the post at TCR.

* Also at TCR, Tom Spurgeon rounds up links to all his site's Spider-Man coverage from Friday.



* Tom Spurgeon also wants to know about older comic shops. Above is a photo of the rack of new releases from the long-defunct Unicorn Comics in Saratoga Springs, New York. I believe the photo is from 1981, the year the store opened. Probably too late to fit into the era that Tom is asking about, although Unicorn Comics was definitely an early comics shop that had no clear model it was working from. The only other shop in the region at the time that I was aware of was FantaCo in Albany, and Unicorn did nothing like FantaCo did it. Unicorn used an actual cigar box as a cash register, for example. (Electric City Comics in Schenectady was probably around by this time, but I was unaware of it at the time.) I worked at Unicorn Comics for $15.00 a day in trade the summer of 1982. There was an issue of Penthouse in the bathroom that featured a photo-spread of a young woman with three breasts, who did the shoot supposedly to be able to afford the plastic surgery to reduce her to the standard number of breasts. Store owner Jack Mintzer later owned a sports memorabilia shop in Lake George, and these days works in the education field. Occasionally I would walk over to The Red Barn (a hamburger stand later replaced by Borders on Broadway in Saratoga Springs) and pick up Jack's lunch. I first bought Nexus and Cerebus at Unicorn Comics, and certainly bought the all-important Daredevil #181 there. I first learned about Unicorn Comics from my mother, who spotted an article in the paper about the store opening. The first things I learned about comics retailing, I learned from Jack Mintzer, and I remain profoundly grateful for those experiences.

* One time, somewhere in-between those two dates, the store bought a collection of Silver Age DC and Marvel comics like Broome/Infantino Flash, O'Neil/Adams GL/GA, and Thomas/Adams Avengers issues, all with the logos stripped off. These were comics that had gone unsold and had supposedly been destroyed after the logos were stripped and returned to the distributor for credit. I was browsing through them and picking the ones I wanted when a slightly older customer who was at the time a wannabe comics artist, tried to elbow me out of the way, realizing what a treasure trove that box held. We ended up in an actual fight, but in the end I got the comics.

* Frank Santoro, at the Comics Journal, writes a bit more about artist Klaus Janson.

* At The Beat, Todd Allen apparently is the last man on earth that thinks there's still any difference at all between DC and Vertigo.