Welcome to my inaugural blog post. Quick introduction. I am a history professor teaching in the South. My sub-specialties are Cultural Studies and Comics Studies. These blog entries will be to explore some of the issues coming up around comics, comics in the media, and the overpowering joy of identifying as a "fanboy" while working in and around education and the academy. You don’t have to have been a lifelong reader of comics here, only interested in how comics and comic books enter into our lives in unique and critical ways. I look forward to any responses to thoughts shared here and welcome conversation around a variety of comics topics. Most of all, thanks for reading.
I’ll make this first blog entry brief, as I really don’t have a lot of followers on the site yet and just want to throw up an few words to get any readers who might come across my stuff acquainted with my virtual and textual visage in our little online community. So let’s do this. Here it is:
SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SHOP!!!
I am a proponent of buying local. Although, the public conversation about buying local is usually about food, usually by some smarmy, self-inflated pedant who likes himself much more than anyone else does. Of course you only eat locally. You live in Southern California. I would eat local that much, too, if I could get fresh avocados eleven months out of the year.
Small businesses make up only a small part of the conversation around the “buy local” campaign. For my money, there isn’t a small business more worth supporting than you local comic book shop. I am not a shop owner myself, so I’m not trumpeting my own store here or anything. But the reality is that we as consumers have myriad options for getting our weekly or monthly fix on the books we love. Some of that has come with exciting new creator-owned web-series and the major publishers putting books up online or creating web-specific arcs for popular characters. For the most part, though, our monthly reads come in comic magazine form and need to be purchased somewhere.
That’s where your shop comes in. Or that’s where it used to come in. Lately, I have heard several diatribes coming through the fanboy pipes of readers suggesting that others turn to online companies that distribute comics through the mail, mostly because the service can get books to your door more efficiently and a little cheaper. I suppose these sites are useful if you live in an area without a specialty shop. But many of you might live closer to one than you think and not even know (check out comicshoplocator.com if you are not sure). There are other advantages to “buying local” though that do not have as much to do with saving time and a few cents per book. The standard marching call is that small business creates jobs for (fill in the blank with patriotic cheer for blue-collar middle-America). That, of course, applies to the comic shop, too. The owner of your shop is a small business owner who has invested time and money into providing a service for you and other readers and whose ability to feed herself or himself relies on the revenue that business produces. While that is true, the public discourse celebrating small businesses is stale and uninspired, what is presented as a “small business” or “local farm” is usually distorted through clever marketing rather than the reality of its size and practice, and what comes out the other end is a bastardized version of Jefferson’s hope that the US would be a union entirely of small, yeoman farmers. Not to say that you shouldn’t shop at local small businesses. I think you should, but it is not the reason I’m preaching the local shop in this entry.
A local shop gives a space for community. As social actors, we navigate intersecting and layered communities daily, from work to home to school to the market and wherever. Your local shop gives that wonderful third space where people who perform a shared identity get to connect and explore the hazy contours of that very identity they have in common. And it works in a way that most local businesses do not. Like your local food co-op isn’t exactly a place where everyone goes to be around others with a shared interest. I mean, I don’t look at the guy in line behind me and say, “hey, you like eggs from Blount County, too?” or “you catch that last batch of greens from the Johnson farm?” But it’s not uncommon while I am emptying out my pull file to chat with whoever is around about whether or not Geoff Johns needs to write maybe a dozen less titles or what new books are floating around out there that maybe I don’t know about yet or if Brightest Day is ever going to get any better (spoiler alert – it doesn’t).
I do not mean to assume that any given comics reader always takes up the fanboy identity or wants to belong to a community of other comics readers. I can’t even definitively say what a particular person would mean when proudly carrying the fanboy banner. Hmm. I smell an ethnography brewing. Dibs. And that’s academic dibs, which we all know is legally binding as per the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. What I do want to argue here, having been in high schools as a student and teacher long enough and having hidden my comic-book personality from many a potential friend and date until the moment I figured I had sufficiently secured their unequivocal acceptance, is that the comic book/fanboy community is consistently othered with that dreaded n-word – nerds. It’s not the kind of systemic othering that perpetuates deeply rooted social inequities like racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, able-ism or any others. But the nerd epithet broods over self-policing adolescents and can leave those pure, permanent high school scars that sting even decades later. If nothing else then, your local comic shop gives a place to let that nerd flag fly.
A safe space. A community space. The third space outside home (first space) and work/school (second space) where people negotiate their identity and the identity of those with whom they want to relate. That’s what this entry is about. That’s why I am asking you all to support your local shop. You can get your comics anywhere, really. Order from the publishers themselves. Use an online service. Wait until stories come out in trade paperbacks and then buy them from a bookstore. Borrow them from somebody like a week after they are done with them. For that matter, just read it over their shoulder until they become uncomfortable with your breath on their neck. My support for the local shop is not really about extolling the small business model, although it is a nice thought. But I cannot imagine a guy with a monthly pull list that includes almost entirely Marvel titles (the company that makes up the majority share of total sales nearly every month) is in any place to say he is fighting the good fight for the small fish, comrades. I am asking you to consider using your local shop instead of another service because it keeps that community space open. And not just the comics community. Many shops, like my own favorite here in Knoxville, offer space for RPG gaming, collecting, trading and other activities that fall under the larger umbrella of fanboy culture. Pretty much everything, really the only thing, I know about D&D comes from watching folks play for a spell while grabbing my own weekly reads, all in the same space of that beloved shop. Because so many of these activities remain part of a subculture, a culture pocketed away from the mainstream, it is worth protecting the place where they all come together. A community, if you will. And I will. I just did.
Other comic-book purchasing options get the books in your hands, but they can’t offer you the community. Without your business, the community literally can’t keep its doors open. So I suppose it’s worth reiterating:
SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SHOP!!!
much peace,
Dr. M
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