I bought Mike Allred's Red Rocket 7 on Comixology last night...

Man, I remember when Red Rocket 7 came out.  1997.  It's right at the tail end of what I consider appropriate for this blog-- pre-2000 stuff.  I try to keep to stuff even earlier than that, largely the late 70s through the mid-80s when I was first following comics as a fan rather than an occasional reader.  But why not talk about some late 90s/pre-millennial stuff?  You know, if it's really funky and cool.  Like Red Rocket 7!

Anyway, I'm about to tell you a fun story about buying the original print version of Red Rocket 7.  I didn't start buying it until later, much later, than its debut.  I believe this.  I may be wrong.  I think I started buying it in the summer of 1998, after its print run concluded.  The reason I think this is I have a strong memory of buying it in Athens, Georgia, and getting into a discussion about its weird dimensions.  If I had bought it in Albany, the people there wouldn't have said boo about it.  People in Athens have opinions about things and they like to engage with you about said opinions.

I didn't move back to Athens until the summer of 1998.  I lived in a one-bedroom apartment off Baxter Street and the A/C was a wall-mounted unit in my bedroom.  It sounded as if someone had cranked up a VW Beetle in there, barely put out any cool air at all, caused me to buy two box fans which further contributed to my localized noise pollution and kept me up all night with the sweats.

My job was as a "graphic designer" at the local daily paper and I was supposed to be sort of an on-staff cartoonist as well, but mostly what I did was put together used car ads I had very little say over the design of all day then drive home and read comics and try to draw, draw and draw more at my lovely drafting table in the sweltering sauna I called an apartment. 

My salary was dismal, my career prospects even more so.  My social life consisted of crashing parties with the few friends I had and eating food out of the refrigerators or popping microwave popcorn and having fights with it in the kitchen.  These friends and I sometimes crashed tailgate parties outside Sanford Stadium during football season got on free beer and stuffing our faces with free chicken sandwiches and hamburgers, and, when everyone else had gone to watch the game, stole all the whiskey fifths we could get our hands on and passed them out to homeless people on North Campus like liquored-up, idiot Robin Hoods. My romantic life consisted of mooning over this incredibly cool and well-connected artist and her hair of ever-changing shades of red, who sometimes talked to me and sometimes ignored me depending on her mood or what drugs were influencing her that night. 

What little money I had in those days I spent on Chinese buffet, beer and comics.  Comics, especially those by Mike Allred and Mark Schultz and Los Bros Hernandez and Peter Bagge, were fast becoming an obsession with me again after years of remission.  So of course I wanted to read Red Rocket 7. 

But when I bought it, the guy who owned the comic book store told me it pissed him off.

"Why?  Why would it piss you off?" I asked.

"The size and shape are totally fucked up!" he told me.

I was standing there thinking what a neat little package Red Rocket 7 was.  It had these sturdy covers of some kind of thicker-than-usual stock, and both the graphics and dimensions recalled 45 RPM records, of which I still had a stack of back at my mom's house.  The comic book store guy told me he got all that and thought it was pretty clever and would always be enthusiastic about Allred's work, but at the same time, the size and shape it meant the book sat like an oddity on the shelf.

Maybe it affected sales.  I don't know.  For all I know, Red Rocket 7 sold billions of copies.  Maybe the comic book guy was upset at the idea people would reject Red Rocket 7 because they couldn't fit it in their comic book longboxes and that was a downright shame, because it deserved a much wider readership.  Maybe I destroyed my memory with a few too many drunken weekends-- god knows I can't remember much about any of them but I hear stories that fill me with shame-- and I'm making up most of this story out of bits and pieces of things that have nothing to do with Mike Allred and Red Rocket 7.

Still, nearly sixteen years later, I'm fairly certain the book's size and shape were at issue.  And for some reason, I never bought every issues.  I think I bought the first four or five, then stopped.  I have no idea how the story ends.  And I do know now that it's been digitized, its size and shape no longer matter in the least.  It fits right inside my phone and I can take Red Rocket 7 everywhere I go.

Now I do own all of it, and if I feel up to it, I'll post some thoughts about it here.  It will probably be the most recent comic we wrestle with on this blog.

Now, call me foolish, call me irresponsible, but it seems to me that there's a new Jack Kirby community on Facebook...

I joined the newest Jack Kirby fan page on Facebook.  It's called simply "Jack Kirby!" and so far, so good.  I'm a little hesitant to engage fully because of my bad experience with the last Jack Kirby fan page I joined.  This one has a lot of big name professionals actively posting there and so far I've learned a great deal about page sizes and blue line pencils versus graphite.

Okay, I already knew a lot about page sizes and pencils, but it's exactly this kind of shop talk I crave.  You know, rather than a lot of insults and guys tenaciously and even furiously arguing minutia as if they were part of the UN Security Council and the Soviets had just put nuclear missiles in Cuba.  I don't know, maybe some people crave exactly that kind of interaction, but for me that stuff smells of locker rooms and sausage parties.  No thanks.

The brief on this page promises "no BS," and I hope that holds.  I want to look at Jack Kirby's art and glean a positive vibe from people discussing its merits-- or even the occasional mistake or odd element-- in a spirit of fun.  And I want to learn of the craft from people who know what they're talking about.  I can get more than my fill of ignorance right here, reading my own blog!

Come for your love of the King and his work, stay for the interminable comment slap fights!

Boy, when will I learn better?  We had some fascinating rocks in the shaded garden on the side of our house when I was a kid.  They were about the size of small bowling balls and they were pockmarked with little trilobite fossils and had these mysterious holes and tunnels running through them, but if you picked them up to look at the evidence of past life, they were cold and slimy and beneath them the soil stayed dark and damp no matter what the weather.  You almost always exposed skittering centipedes and moistly glistening slugs that would go fleeing from the light, or some wriggling worm digging its way to safety.

Better to go ride bikes in the sunshine.

Similarly, I just enjoyed a short stint in one of the more active Facebook fan groups devoted to one of my most beloved artists, but I think I'll enjoy my much longer stint out of it even more.  But I discovered that same creepy feeling from childhood-- nowadays there is nothing more shudder-inducing to me than to look at a gorgeous double page spread from some old comic and below it find one hundred comments of frothing near-psychosis from guys who've apparently memorized the entire sordid history of American comics but have developed diametrically opposed viewpoints on what it all signifies.

It's as if the lower the stakes, the greater the rage.  I've always felt you don't fight a battle unless by winning it you gain some advantage or benefit.  A lot of these comic fans seem to feel the opposite.  They risk crushing ego defeat in hopes of winning a victory that's so paltry and pathetic it amounts to almost nothing.

And let's not even get into the rage storms that invariably follow every news release about a comic book-related movie or change in a character.  I know.  Oh, how I know.  I've been there and back.

This disillusionment has spread even to whatever it is I'm attempting to accomplish with this blog.  I spent a few days struggling with a post deconstructing a vintage miniseries, and in the end, all I could think was, "Ain't never seen anyone so shit-all stupid as you writing this post. You musta got manure for your brains."  Complete waste of time and energy.  I finally just deleted the stupid thing except for the images.  I'll do something with them instead.  Something I hope will be interesting and illuminating and only a little bit asinine.

Anyway, despite my sour mood at the moment, nothing can stop my love for comics or my need to read them and then figure out what a story means, to analyze it in a literary way, put it into some kind of historical context, or simply to find something amusing about it to share here.  I still want to write about my favorite artists, stories and characters.  I still want to write about things I find a little weird or funky.  But I also want to try to keep things lighter and more positive.  Which means posting here to resounding silence.  I could probably garner more hits by turning into one of those slugs or centipedes, but as I said...

I'd rather we ride our bicycles in the sunshine.