Before the geek underground went mainstream—before the Internet exposed its numbers as legion; before corporations fully understood that superheroes were woefully underexploited billion-dollar assets—there was no better place to both talk and learn about pop culture than the neighborhood comic shop.
When it opened in 1991, Magnum Comics & Cards wasn’t the first direct-market specialty store in the northwest sector of the Bronx where I grew up, but it was inarguably the liveliest, the one with the most personality. That was owed, in no small part, to its colorful proprietor, Neil Shatzoff.
A photo of the shop I snapped on December 30, 2010
Holding court from behind the register, Neil would speak with juvenile exuberance and encyclopedic authority on pop esoterica: why Brian Dennehy would’ve made for a better Commissioner Gordon than Pat Hingle (I agree, but, hey—at least we eventually got Gary Oldman); why Joel Schumacher’s track record for dark-skewing commercial cinema (The Lost Boys, Falling Down) made him a promising candidate to take over the Batman franchise from Tim Burton (well, it seemed like a good fit on paper…); why Kevin Smith’s unproduced Superman Lives script was budgetarily impractical and narratively quixotic (turns out, it was twenty years ahead of its time). His disquisitions were all the more entertaining for his impish, whip-fast wit; reflecting on the Academy’s arbitrary predilection to honor films over movies, he once noted: “Gandhi won an Oscar for Best Costume Design, and all they did was throw a couple of towels over him.”
COMIC ESCAPADES
All throughout high school, I’d pop by the shop every Wednesday to get my weekly fix of superhero soap opera—the now-classic Death of Superman and Batman: Knightfall storylines were unfolding at the time—and, more to the point, to listen to Neil wax pop-cultural. A decade my senior, he supplemented my cinematic education—the way an older sibling’s musical tastes might rub off on you—by introducing me to genre essentials that were just a little before my time: The Thing and An American Werewolf in London and Thief (the feature-film debut of Michael Mann and spiritual precursor to Heat) and the Dirty Harry series. (Though I can’t say for certain, it’s possible the first Dirty Harry sequel, Magnum Force, influenced the name of the shop itself).
It was by way of the file cabinet–mounted TV behind the counter that I first became aware of things like aspect ratios and audio commentaries and director’s cuts; Neil was an early adopter of LaserDisc, and would dub them onto VHS and play them in the store. Imagine my surprise to learn there was a “secret” longer version of Aliens (by seventeen minutes!), or a definitive two-hour documentary on the making of Jaws. In the days before such things were standard-issue features on DVDs, there was only one guy I knew who had access to all that amazing arcana, and he delighted in sharing his zeal for it with his customers.
This led, inevitably, to some of the most spirited—and hilariously inane—conversations I’ve ever overheard, like the time Neil and one of the neighborhood regulars, Pete, were vying for the title of World’s Biggest Clint Eastwood Fan. Both claimed they could name every character Eastwood had ever portrayed, so Neil starting quizzing Pete on the spot: Who’d he play in The Gauntlet? “Ben Shockley.” How ‘bout Tightrope? “Wes Block.” Heartbreak Ridge? “Tom Highway, a.k.a. Gunny.” On and on this went—there was simply no stumping Pete.
Finally acknowledging he’d been bested, Neil joked: “Yeah, all right, but can you tell me who he played in The Outlaw Josey Wales?”
Pete stammered, silence falling over the store as he searched his memory. As the rest of us looked on in this-must-be-a-goof disbelief, Pete was reluctantly forced to confess he’d never seen Josey Wales, and, thusly, had no idea what Eastwood’s particular character was called. He graciously, if somewhat stupefyingly, conceded defeat.
Who DID Clint Eastwood play in “The Outlaw Josey Wales”? We’ll never know…
At no time was Neil’s passion for pop culture more evident than on Halloween. He’d close the shop at 8:00, per usual, then a bunch of us would hang out in the store for the next couple hours before heading down the block to (the now-defunct) Hudson’s bar to drink and dance—and sweat!—the night away in our makeup and bulky costumes. The year the first X-Men movie came out, Neil opted to suit up as—what else?—Wolverine, and, accordingly, began growing out his Hugh Jackman muttonchops in July. Fuckin’ July—for Halloween! Even in our current era of professional cosplaying, that reflected a level of theatrical commitment seldom matched.
The most horrifying thing about this picture of me as the Master from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (dated October 28, 2000) is that I’m drinking a Budweiser! Eww…
After a while, Neil started selling me my comics at cost—basically half off cover price—and was even instrumental in getting me a job at the video store a few doors up (the other wing of the neighborhood’s entertainment depot–cum–town hall), where I worked throughout college. Clerking at a local retail establishment ten hours a day, four or five days a week, it doesn’t take long before you get to know the names, personalities, and eccentricities of everyone in the community—I recall one regular who’d authoritatively slam his fist down on the counter to hail your attention, then almost immediately corkscrew his head in bug-eyed bewilderment as he strained (with hit-or-miss success) to recall what the hell it was he’d wanted mere seconds earlier—and if our Magnum friends spied a customer like that headed up the sidewalk toward our shop, they’d call to warn us so we could lock the front door, flick off the lights, and hide behind the counter till he moved along. Those were some of the best days of my life.
WE SAID HELLO GOODBYE
After I moved to Los Angeles in 2001, I’d make it a point to pop into Magnum whenever I was back in town for a visit, to catch up with Neil and Tony, a sweet, good-humored, soft-spoken (though, like the rest of us, assertively opinionated) gentleman who manned the register when Neil wasn’t there. In 2011, Neil moved the shop a mile uptown, and though it was by no means far from my mother’s apartment where I’d stay, I had to go out of my way to get to it, and never actually managed, during one of my (increasingly infrequent) East Coast sojourns, to set foot in the new location.
It’s possible, if I’m being perfectly honest with myself, I was even avoiding the place. It wasn’t my Magnum, after all; I had no memories or history there. I’d been out of the neighborhood for a decade at that point, and as someone who’d long since come to accept that times change, like it or not, perhaps I was trying to distance myself from an erstwhile heyday I knew I could never hope to recapture. It’s the same reason we don’t revisit our old schools on a lark, or find reasons to drive past the house where we grew up: Moving on is as much an emotional necessity as it is a practical consideration.
But I’d nevertheless run into Neil around town from time to time, so I was aware of what he was up to. For my thirty-fifth birthday, he gave me, in a gesture of generosity that still leaves me staggered when I think about it, a hardcover, slipcased edition of Batman: The Long Halloween. To this day, I don’t know if he fully appreciates the special significance of that particular volume—whether it was selected carefully or randomly, consciously or unconsciously—being that it emblemizes the two things I most associate with his store: Batman and Halloween.
“Batman: The Long Halloween” (art by Tim Sale)
On a recent trip home, I was disappointed to learn—though not altogether surprised to hear, given the state of the industry—Neil would be permanently shuttering Magnum Comics & Cards. In an article that appeared in a local Bronx newspaper, he attributed the closing to a confluence of factors: the decline of the collector market; an increasing emphasis on mature content often unsuitable for younger readers; rising production costs (and correspondingly higher cover prices); digital distribution innovations (reading through apps rather than on paper); a fractured media landscape (more platforms and entertainment options); and, of course, the collapse of linear narrativity (video games that allow you to be the superhero in an open-ended adventure, rather than merely follow him through a closed story arc).
None of that, to be sure, happened overnight; the specialty shop as a cultural institution, if not a viable brick-and-mortar business, probably entered its prolonged extinction phase, though we certainly didn’t see it coming then, right around the time Magnum first opened.
THE GEEKS SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH
Given the robust health of Hollywood’s superhero industrial complex here in 2018, the decline of the comic store, and corresponding cultural irrelevance of the medium itself, can be a frustrating, often misunderstood phenomenon by even (especially?) seasoned industry professionals. In response to the massive box-office haul of Avengers: Infinity War, Jimmy Palmiotti, writer of such titles as Painkiller Jane, Jonah Hex, and Harley Quinn, recently tweeted this:
I’m happy superhero movies do well but wish it had an impact on comic book sales. We need pop up shops in theaters when comic based movies come out pushing our books. Imagine getting a free comic with a food combo as well ! They have the power! #ILOVECOMICS
— Jimmy Palmiotti (@jpalmiotti) April 30, 2018
That’s a nice enough notion, but, like, say, the coal-mining trade, nothing can save comics now. Such, in this case, is partly owed to natural selection, and partly to self-destruction. Publishers made a (questionable) decision a long time ago to cater to aging fans at the expense of courting younger ones. In the meantime, photorealistic CGI, along with the evolution of the “shared cinematic universe,” obviated the special appeal of comic-book storytelling: Unlike when Kevin Smith scripted the unrealistically ambitious Superman Lives in 1997, motion pictures can now convincingly (and cost-effectively) conjure grand-scale superheroic spectacle that could once only be achieved through sequential illustration. Furthermore, the supersized mode of narrative once the exclusive province of comics—sprawling, serialized event crossovers—has now been effectively (and oh-so-profitably) appropriated by movies and television.
Twenty years ago, a movie that supported this many characters would’ve been unthinkable
Let’s face it: Comics are no more alluring to the iGeneration than radio dramas would’ve been to an Xer like myself. They’re a pop-cultural curio, at best—a quaint vestige of the humble origins of the Superhero, before he moved on to occupy the kinetic, open-world dimensions of cinematic mega-franchises and immersive multiplayer video games. To borrow an analogy from the evolutionary trajectory of the very first superhero: comics are Krypton—stodgy and archaic; the hyperlinked multimedia “universes” of DC and Marvel, on the other hand, are Metropolis—thriving and electrifying.
But for those of us who predate the Digital Age, comic books—with their crude art, arcane scenarios (Crisis on Infinite Earths?), and priced-for-poor-kids accessibility (couch cushions and supermarket bottle-return machines could be raided for suitable funds)—were a secret realm of cosmic adventures and underground lairs, to say nothing of wondrous gimcracks (X-ray specs!) a mere six- to eight-week shipping window away. And specialty shops, with their glorious racks of new titles and musty boxes of back issues, were concealed doorways to that fantastical multiverse—private clubs hiding in plain sight, like the socially marginalized subculture that patronized them.
Those stores did more, though, than merely supply the kind of collectibles now so easily ordered from Amazon or eBay. Like the barbershop, or the OTB, or the video store (ours went out of business in 2007), comic shops were communal spaces that encouraged and inspired discussion, debate, and fellowship. Owners such as Neil—and I can’t imagine there are any others quite like him—cultivated relationships with their customers that transcended the perfunctorily transactional. Neil endowed Magnum with his unique personality, and Magnum, in turn, affected the very character of the community it served for twenty-seven years. The store itself may be gone now, but the mark it left on that corner of the Bronx will echo there forever.
In the mid-’90s, indie movies like “Clerks” and “Smoke” (pictured) celebrated the role mom-and-pop shops play as local institutions
Still, unlike independent comic stores, the superhero industrial complex, for better or worse, ain’t goin’ nowhere. The unstoppable multimedia hydras of DC and Marvel will continue to expand and evolve, capitalizing on innovations in both technology and storytelling to offer bigger, increasingly more experiential superheroic thrills. Blogs and podcasts, meanwhile, will only further entrench themselves as the go-to public forums to discuss and dissect the meaning and minutiae of it all, to report on rumors and comment on all the latest developments. Such is where things stand in the era of New Media: Fanboys got respectability, their once-derided four-color fantasies legitimized and commodified by corporate America; far from ignominiously relegated to pulp magazines sold at candy stores and specialty shops, superheroes now almost exclusively dominate both the cultural spotlight and conversation.
So be it. But, for whatever it’s worth, take the word of an analog kid who’s experienced it both ways: None of that grandiose digital wizardry or web syndication will ever supplant—or eclipse—the simple, no-tech, peer-to-peer pleasure of bullshitting away a Saturday afternoon at Magnum Comics.
>Comics are no more alluring to the iGeneration than radio dramas would’ve been to an Xer like myself.
Radio dramas are getting a new lease on life w/ fiction podcasts. Have you heard Welcome to Night Vale?
New England Comics seems to be going strong, or at least still in business
Welcome to Night Vale is supposed to be something quite special, but I admit I haven’t listened to it. I don’t have a commute, which is mostly a good thing… except that it gives me very little time to listen to podcasts or audiobooks! (Hell, I barely have time for television anymore!)
I certainly take your point, Dell, and sometimes an outmoded art form (like the radio drama) can become so antiquated it actually reacquires a measure of cultural novelty again. Case in point: Look at the way The Artist (2011) cleaned up at the box office and Academy Awards a few years ago. Eighty years had elapsed since the heyday of the silent film — and half a century since color film stock eclipsed B&W — so The Artist provided a delightfully retro (if somewhat meta) cinematic experience for several generations that had never had the pleasure seeing a movie in that particular style.
But I don’t think anyone assumed — quite rightfully — that the surprise success of The Artist signified a restored cultural relevance/prominence for or sustained popular interest in silent film. It was an anomalous, one-off phenomenon. And I think the same case could probably be made for Welcome to Night Vale: Has it inspired a wave of similar scripted podcasts… or is it merely something special that can’t be so easily replicated?
Comic books (and feature films, too, as I discussed in my recent interview with Bookshelf Battle) are in something of an extinction phase. There is still an audience for them — the one that grew up with them — but the popularity of those particular modes of artistic expression will continue to wane as we continue to age. Closed-ended, two-hour movies will mostly be a thing of the past within a decade or two (and first-run theatrical exhibition will certainly cease to exist within the next handful of years).
Comic books will also see seismic changes in the years ahead, though it’s hard to say where the medium will ultimately end up, exactly. Comics still operate as a “loss leader” for the superhero industrial complex, so I imagine the pen-and-ink adventures of Superman and Spider-Man, et al., will continue to be published by DC and Marvel… even if no one really cares or bothers to read them. But, moving forward, when kids think superheroes, those will no longer be synonymous with comic books as they were for my generation.
In terms of non-superhero comics, I suspect there will still be an audience for graphic novels as an art form, the way there is still a substantial readership for novels, despite the prevalence of television and other media. Innovative artists will find ways to best utilize the medium to tell compelling stories, as Douglas Rushkoff recently did with Aleister & Adolf; a story about the power of symbolic imagery, there was no better form through which to tell that particular tale. (Though I don’t see it becoming a bestseller…) Comic books, like the stage and silver screen before them, may never regain their cultural eminence, but they can remain viable, even relevant, modes of expression in the hands of great artists.
Thanks for reading, Dell! Hope you enjoyed your Memorial Day and are looking forward to a great summer!
Yeah. Every now and then a western or a pirate movie or some such will be successful, but not lead to a general revival of the genre
The important takeaway for writers, however, is to appreciate that there are many mediums for stories, and you just have to figure out which medium is (or mediums are) right for you at this time
Of course, each medium has its own particular challenges, but facing those challenges and using each medium to its best advantage is just part of the craft of being a writer
I know the plural of “medium” is “media”, but “media” did not seem right in that sentence
You raise a great point, Dell: Each medium has its own advantages/disadvantages, and an artist should pay due consideration to which form best serves the story he is trying to tell. Equally as crucial as selecting the right story model, a writer needs to choose the right medium.
At the time superheroes were first created, comic books were the right vessel for their stories, because they were all about color and visuals, so prose alone wouldn’t have sufficiently conveyed their particular dynamism, but motion pictures (still B&W) weren’t yet at a place technologically where they could do those kinds of eye-popping adventures justice, either (just check out the old Columbia Pictures Batman serials from the forties for evidence of this).
Or take Stephen King’s Misery. Rob Reiner’s movie adaptation is great (if somewhat stylistically dated), with a faithful screenplay, taut direction, and stellar performances. And yet here’s the thing: The book is a thematically rich ode to writing itself; it’s a story about how fiction can save us from life’s unplanned (and often undeserved) miseries. So as suspenseful and well-produced as the movie is, it misses the point of the story entirely! Misery was meant to be a book; it was done right the first time. (Another example of this is Roman Polanski’s half-great occult mystery The Ninth Gate, which is based on Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s novel The Club Dumas — a book about how we interpret what we read in books. Polanski’s screenplay incorporated the plot of the novel, but missed its point.)
Occasionally, a story is produced for the wrong medium the first time around, only to find the right one later. The core concept of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (a Superhero story, per Save the Cat!), for instance, was too mythologically fertile for the constraints of a standalone movie; serialized television was a much better fit for its narrative potential and creative ambition. Thankfully, it got a second lease on life.
And then there are some creations, like Dracula, that have thrived in nearly every different medium. But those are the exception rather than the rule: Most stories are best suited to just one or two types of media. This is, admittedly, a discussion that would make for a great blog post of its own.
What a wonderful memoir/homage to a time gone by. As a kid who also really loved comics (but who lived in a very small town with no comic book store), I really appreciate this. Also, in terms of ‘gimcrack’–I was one of the many who fell for the Sea Monkey ads, and actually mail-ordered them. Turned out they were nothing more than some kind of weird larvae, and none of them had crowns OR tridents. Sadly disappointing!
Thanks, mydangblog — that means a lot. I honestly wasn’t sure anyone but myself would appreciate this post!
Oh, man, those novelty items they advertised in the old newsprint comics looked amazing, didn’t they? Once I had my Atlas body (in seven days!) and X-ray specs, there’d be no fuckin’ stopping me! I had a plastic Sea-Monkey aquarium, too! Is that right — were they larvae? They looked like silt — marine snow — suspended lifelessly in the water! I figured they’d be more exciting than a Pet Rock, but, alas. I think I wound up knocking the damn aquarium over, spilling the entire undersea empire onto the bathroom floor. That marked the ignoble end of the Great Sea-Monkey Experiment!
I guess what was wonderful about that stuff is that we believed it was possible — that we were once so delightfully naïve. Those “worthless” gimcracks may not have fulfilled our expectations, but they certainly fueled our imaginations, and for that, they had a kind of value after all.
I too could not wait to get my Sea Monkeys! Turns out they were a bio-engineered breed of brine shrimp. RIP-OFF!
Perhaps our first tipoff that all these amazing technologies were bullshit should have been — I don’t know — the fact that they were being advertised for $1.99 in children’s pulp magazines! But, like Santa Claus, we believed in them. It’s kind of nice to think we were once so guileless. I’m not lamenting the loss of that naïveté, mind you — I both accept and embrace the wisdom we get in return for coming of age — but it’s nice to put oneself back in touch with it every so often. As you might say, Erik, it’s the difference between being childish and childlike.
This post gave me the warm fuzzies, Sean. 😀 I grew up on comic books even in Vermont. My brothers and I would walk a mile to town with our money for penny candy and a comic book – usually Batman or Spiderman, and the Archies. 🙂 When our place burned down, we had a stack of well-loved, coverless, wrinkled comic books that stretched back 3 decades. That stack was one of irreplaceable things we grieved.
So…. I can relate to the love of old-fashioned comics as well as how they’re tied to a time and place and people. I never bought another one after the fire. It wasn’t the same. Neil sounds like a ticket and the perfect comic-shop owner to instill a love of the old graphic magic and excitement in a bunch of kids. He undoubtedly had an amazing impact on your future (you think?) Ha ha.
Thanks for sharing your memories and evoking a few of my own. 🙂
Aw, thanks, Diana. Before Magnum — back in the mid- to late-eighties — my friends and I would scour the gutters for seventy-five cents (the going rate for a comic book in those days), head out to the candy store on West 238th Street, buy a comic (because we could only afford one), then sit in a park somewhere, taking turns reading it. We didn’t have iPhones, or video games, or streaming services, but I wouldn’t have traded our low-tech, low-rent upbringings for any of those digital distractions. I’m sure I sound like an old fogy, but those were the days…
I’m glad you bring up the subject of Neil and the impact he had on me, because it was something I thought about as I was drafting this piece but opted against explicitly assaying. (That’s why we have the comments section, I guess — to address some of the subtextual things we didn’t have room for in main body of the post itself.) As you’re aware, because you are such a steadfastly good and loyal friend of this blog, we’ve spent the last several posts discussing, in one form or another, the influences that have shaped each of us as people and as artists. I’ve noted elsewhere on this site that writing about a given subject always yields deeper, more nuanced insight into it than I would’ve ever gleaned from merely thinking about it, and it was only in composing this particular post that I realized — I mean really acknowledged to myself — just how influential Neil was on some of my own passions and perspectives. Yes, he exposed me to movies like Assault on Precinct 13 and Escape from New York (both of which served as major creative inspirations for Escape from Rikers Island), and, yes, he introduced me to concepts like widescreen aspect ratios (which became directly relevant to me once I was in film school, and later working as a film and video editor), and for those things I am grateful…
But perhaps more importantly, he taught me — by example if not formal instruction — how to think in such a way that’s influenced the subjects I write about, and even the way I write about them. My wife once suggested I change the tagline of this blog to “Highly Academic Discussions about Really Dumb Shit,” and I suppose my partiality for that particular kind of discourse — smart, analytical conversations about utterly trivial horseshit — probably took root in Magnum Comics all those years ago. I’d never really considered that prior to writing “Counter Culture.” Last summer, I wrote about a man I’d known in my formative years who only in retrospect did I come to see as a mentor; I think it’s fair to say Neil, in his own way, was a mentor to me, too. One of the gifts of getting older is a greater perspective on and deeper appreciation for the people who’ve made a positive impact on your life, even — especially — if you weren’t aware of it at the time.
Thanks for sharing your memories, Diana, and for responding so thoughtfully to this post. You would have fit right in at Magnum back in the day!
Diana, I would not have pegged you for a lover and collector of comic books, and enjoyed learning this about you. I can’t imagine the depth of impact that fire had on all areas of your life; but I suppose it added it’s piece to the puzzle that has become your developed sense of empathy for others.
Funny enough, my own comic books — the ones I bought at candy stores in the eighties and then Neil’s place in the nineties — are really the only keepsakes from childhood that have (somehow) survived. Everything else — the toys and term papers and cassette tapes, etc. — either got destroyed or lost or thrown out along the way. You and I talked about this very matter, Erik, in the comments section of “Different Stages”: the sentimental value we ascribe to items that “were written or touched or created by a then-me who, if not for those artifacts, will be erased with no proof he ever existed.” So I can certainly relate to the trauma Diana must’ve felt when she lost those comics in that fire (among, I’m sure, many other things).
All I can say is this: The most important memories and feelings can never be extinguished, because they exist for all time in our hearts. Totemic reminders of times gone by — the people and places of yesteryear — are nice, because we can touch them, but they’re merely a representation of the sentiments we carry inside. We can only really lose touch with those if we choose to. And anyone’s who’s read Diana’s work — particularly her most recent blog post — knows how sensitive she is to the plight and pain of others, and how straight her priorities are. She is the very definition of in touch. I am grateful to call you both my friends.
I’m going to jump in here. You may be right that parts of culture that appeal to Gen Xers (being one myself) will die off as we age. But one thing that’s wonderful about raising children is sharing with them the things we love. I enjoy Motown music because my parents did. Smokey Robinson is one of my favorites. I own his music and I’ve seen him in concert.
What never dies off is good story-telling. Comics, if told right, just might have a place for young people again. Maybe they can’t look exactly the same or maybe they can. And if now isn’t the time for them, then they’ll be back. Everything old is new again. Everything. Look at fashion.
I may have to disagree with you about the end of the two-hour movie. Again, story-telling done right will always captivate an audience. The problem lies in Hollywood movies that are all spectacle and no substance. I know some pretty savvy teens who search out film festivals, drive an hour, and sit through a two-hour film because the cinematography is exceptional and the story is well written and interesting. These same teens don’t want a Hollywood flash and burn. They want their minds to be challenged. That’s the future, my friend.
I even think bookstores will make a resurgence. People want to go into stores, look around, ask questions. They want knowledgeable sales people who can make suggestions. But this time around book stores might have to have more of a niche. Local authors. Special events. Outside the box thinking.
The computer is easy, but it’s not personal. We long for human interaction. You enjoyed your comic store because of the friendships as much as the comics. The need for that will never go away. It has to evolve and grow into something new and exceptional. It will.
And if I may quote Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail, “Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal.”
Thanks for such a thoughtful reply, Stacey! So many great points here! Let me see if I can do some of them justice…
Sharing the arts and entertainment you loved in your youth with your own children is essential. Like I said: By exposing me to the cinema of the seventies — which was just a hair before my time — Neil broadened my understanding of the history of our popular culture. Case in point: As a child of the eighties, I grew up watching the old Fred Dryer police drama Hunter every week on TV. But it was only upon renting, at Neil’s urging, the five Dirty Harry movies that I realized there was virtually nothing original or innovative about Hunter — it was simply Dirty Harry on the small screen! Going back and watching older productions helps you realize that the narrative arts are a continuum, which each new product owing a debt to at least one thing that came before it.
Comics and feature films will continue to have a future, but I don’t think they’ll ever again be as influential or as culturally eminent as they were in the previous century. Much the same way theater was once the dominant form of entertainment — in its day, it drove the cultural conversation — movies and comics will continue to wane in popularity in the New Media Age, but not disappear altogether. I do believe, as a form, the two-hour, self-contained movie is going to become an increasingly occasional event, though, because those kinds of short-form, closed-ended linear narratives just don’t reflect the “hyperlinked” realities of 21st-century living. We’ll continue to see more open-ended series, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or “closed” stories like Barry and Stranger Things that tell their self-contained arcs over a (limited) number of bingeable installments (which gives them more room to develop over having to cram it into a finite two-hour feature).
With respect to your point that teens nowadays are actively seeking out things like film festivals, and practicing appreciation for the endangered two-hour movie, perhaps there will be a palpable yearning, amongst the iGeneration, for old-fashioned pleasures as time goes by. As media theorist Douglas Rushkoff so eloquently put it:
And that, in a way, goes to your point about bookstores: There will be a longing — certainly for a generation born into a digital world — for physical experiences and peer-to-peer interactions again, for analog warmth over digital cool. The linear world you and I grew up in will one day become as mythologized as the Old West, and future generations will hunger for the simplicity of those bygone times, and perhaps even reshape the world — by self-restricting their own digital activities — to get the best of both modes.
I’m optimistic we will become a society that puts renewed emphasis on the personal — on the human touch — and not rely so heavily on technology to facilitate our relationships (via social media) and, even more troublingly, save us from ourselves (through nanotechnology or the singularity or what have you). The generation coming of age right now will certainly have its unique challenges, but I’m more hopeful than ever that they will rise to the occasion and restore balance to the social, artistic, political, and ecological orders.
Thanks for engaging so thoughtfully, Stacey. See what we did here? We turned a simple rumination on a neighborhood comic shop into an existential discourse on the future of humanity. If Magnum were still around, I suspect this is exactly the kind of conversation I’d be having there this very Saturday afternoon…
This was a fascinating post for me–it’s a beautiful description of a completely alien enthusiasm. I never got into comics. Never understood their appeal. The artwork never connected for me–so dissimilar to illustrations that I enjoyed in books. And the stories–they seemed more like reading an outline, really, rather than a finished narrative.
I mentally classified it as “something some guys got into” and left it at that. After all, guys had inscrutable tastes. They’d talk for hours about baseball cards and player stats, and when they got older, about carburetors.
It’s hard to miss the popularity of the cons, though. Perhaps that’s where the real fans have gone. Personally, I think your description of a neighborhood store sounds far more congenial than a giant hall filled with tens of thousands of people, but that seems to be where the focus has shifted.
And speaking of shifting focus…you know far more about Hollywood than I do, so I won’t challenge your assertion about self-contained narratives. But. I think such a shift would be a trend, rather than some sort of epic turning point.
In my own case, I rarely watch episodes as they come out. For things I watched after they were completed, like Battlestar Galactica, the lack of completed narrative in each episode I saw as a minus, although the other story pluses outweighed that.
And lots of SP authors talk about how readers are distrustful of serial-type narratives. They’ve been burned too many times. If you’ve got a series of seven episodes, some readers want to wait until you’ve released them all before they start. Lots of talk on kboards about optimal timing for releasing these things, although everyone seems to agree that it’s best to have the outline at least, or even better, all books in the series completed before pulling the trigger on the first.
There are considerable generational differences between Boomers, Gen-Xers, and Millenials, but in the end, we’re all human. Humans have prized self-contained narrative for a great deal of time, across many cultures. It’s too powerful, IMO, to be shoved utterly to the side. It’ll have a resurgence, in some medium. Perhaps the differences between books and video will become more pronounced.
But I believe in the “hard-wired for story” thing–it even has some research to substantiate it. If you’re good at picking and following trends–which is essentially akin to making your money on the stock market, since it’s all human behavior–maybe you can exploit this sort of thing.
I think cliffhangers are easier to write, and a voracious audience exists. People will write a book a month if the money is good enough–a similar standard would likely exist in film and TV. Perhaps self-contained narrative will emerge as the top of the heap–the serious art standard. Hard to say when you’re in the middle of it. But I don’t see contained narrative being consigned to non-relevance.
Cathleen,
Thank you so much for the careful read and thoughtful reply! It means a lot. I worried this post would be of interest to absolutely no one, that it was such a personal rumination on so specific — so esoteric — a piece of Bronx history as to have no universal resonance. I’m heartened to learn it gave you such a vivid picture of a local experience and bygone subculture so foreign to your own interests and encounters.
As a kid, there’s no question that the appeal of comics was twofold: A) They were simple, easily digestible fantasies that could do what movies couldn’t (and in far less time than books), and B) they were dirt-cheap, which was essential for street kids who had to beg/steal/borrow for seventy-five cents to buy one! If we managed to scrounge up that kind of money — and often we couldn’t — we’d buy a comic at the candy store then all take turns reading it! So, for me, there was always a communal aspect to comics, even from a young age, that you didn’t get from the solitary (though equally valuable) experience of reading a novel. (I loved the Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown.)
For reasons I discussed in today’s post, superheroes were certainly better served as children’s entertainment (I in no way approve of how they’ve been coopted and perverted by middle-aged men), but unquestionably one of the points I’d hoped to impart in this essay was that the comics subculture was ultimately more fun before it went mainstream. Cons certainly gave geeks (and I don’t use that term pejoratively) a forum in which to gather and take heart in their numbers, and then the popularity of superhero cinema in the 21st century legitimized it all. But like so many things that “go corporate,” be it comics or baseball or what have you, it undeniably lost some of its underground appeal — its “street cred,” if you like — in the process. The comic store was the last vestige of that era — the time when geeks still hid in the shadows — so this post was intended to be a eulogy of sorts for both one specific specialty shop and all of them at the same time.
Storytelling-wise, I think we’re in a new frontier in which traditional stories now have to share the playing field with open-ended narratives; we’ve already turned that cultural corner and now those two very different worldviews are going to have to find a way to coexist. For reasons I discussed at length in my recent interview with Bookshelf Battler, I’m in the same club as those who feel burned (and burned out) by nonlinear, postnarrative fiction; you watch a show like Westworld, for example, and it’s fatiguing because you aren’t being told a story — you’re being challenged to put together a puzzle. It’s all about how the pieces connect, and you’re required to watch — and re-watch — the series, scrutinizing every detail and utterance in an attempt to make meaning out of its fractured narrative. I guess some people find that fun, and more power to them, but I long for a more Aristotelian structure to my fiction (this review of last night’s season finale sort of says it all), which is why shows like The Orville are such a breath of fresh air, because you can watch any episode, in any order, and get a complete, satisfying, standalone narrative experience with both a conclusion and a point. And I don’t think I’m alone; I suspect others long for those old-fashioned storytelling pleasures, too. But not everyone is, or will be, so both story models will have a continued relevance in the culture and place in the market. The older model isn’t facing extinction, and the newer one is much more substantial than a passing trend.
It’s not the self-contained narrative that’s endangered so much as it is the two-hour movie, as I said to Stacey above. That form was dictated by a very particular presentational mode: theatrical exhibition. (See my short post “Presentation and Form” for elaboration.) It made sense for a movie to be between ninety and 120 minutes, so theaters could schedule four showings a day (or what have you). But I don’t see multiplexes even existing within a decade — that’s just not how we receive our filmed entertainment anymore — and more and more filmmakers are going to take advantage of streaming services which allow them to tell a complete story over eight or ten hour-long installments.
Case in point: Stranger Things. It’s inspired by eighties movies like E.T. and Stand by Me, but it takes advantage of new presentational modes that don’t require it be confined to a two-hour running time. It’s still a closed-ended narrative — you get a complete, conclusive story over the course of its eight chapters — but it’s not exactly a movie. Nor is it identifiably a TV series, either — not really. It’s something else — something new. You’ll see more of that kind of thing, and fewer of what we collectively define as “movies” (or feature films), in the coming years. That’s what’s going the way of the dodo — two-hour features, not necessarily standalone narratives.
In the end, all we can do as storytellers is write the kinds of stories we’d like to read, and write them as honestly as possible. There’s more than enough room in both the marketplace and the culture to accommodate all sorts of views, stories, and narrative models. It’s a good time for fiction, overall.
Thanks, as always, Cathleen, for your generous and passionate engagement. In a weird way, these are exactly the kinds of conversations we used to have at Magnum all those years ago, so I thank you for lending your voice to them — for “popping by the shop,” so to speak!
Sean
>But like so many things that “go corporate,” be it comics or baseball or what have you, it undeniably lost some of its underground appeal — its “street cred,” if you like — in the process
Like the internet. Websites in particular. Yeah, there are a lot more of them now, but there was a certain… “charm” to them back in the 90’s. Back before every business had a site. Before Facebook and Twitter took over. Before issues of Net Neutrality…
Or am I just an old man nostalgic for “the good old days”?
BTW, I changed the website page linked to my name for a new project I’m working on. It doesn’t follow any STC genres, but I think it is somewhat postnarrative, in that some of the jokes will be based on earlier jokes from days, or even weeks, earlier. Haven’t gotten that far yet, though (hope you don’t mind me mentioning it here)
As much of a cultural critic as I’ve been on this subject, I’m an Xer, too, and equally susceptible to nostalgia for the good ol’ days of the analog world. But one of the points I’ve tried to make in a number of recent essays (including this one) — whether I’ve been discussing superheroes, or Star Wars, or just the general loss of innocence we all eventually experience — is that we have to learn to keep looking forward, not behind. So “Counter Culture” was meant to be a eulogy for the era of the specialty shop (and, more generally, the medium of comic books), but not a plea to return to those days. I miss them terribly — that’s why I wrote this post — but I acknowledge that they’re never coming back, and we’ve got to learn to accept that. This song says it all.
You are always more than welcome to discuss and/or promote any of your projects here on the blog, Dell! Though this site has evolved over the four years it’s been up and running, it was always intended to be — and has remained — a welcoming space for creatives to congregate. You’ve always been such a great friend to this blog, and I’m happy to return that support in kind.
I’ll admit the need to look forward as well as back
The danger of nostalgia is if you think that since things were so much better in the old days, you should turn the clock back, make things now the way they were
This can lead to anything from movie and TV retreads to a lying racist fascist-wannabe running a country of over 325 million people (MAGA is a four-letter word)
Still. it is good to look to the past every now and then, as long as you learn from it, don’t over-romanticize it, don’t expect it (or worse, try to force it) to return, and most importantly, don’t to cry too hard remembering your old waistline and hairline
And thanks for the kind words in the last paragraph there
Well said, my friend. That’s what I talked about in “State of Grace”: that looking to the past can yield both intellectual enlightenment (a better understanding of your present circumstances) and emotional catharsis (license to move on). Like everything else in life, nostalgia isn’t harmful as long as it is indulged in moderation.
(And yes — Trump tapped into a particularly pernicious nostalgia for a utopian 1950s fantasyland where everyday’s a white Christmas, if you take my meaning, something I explore in my latest post, “Changing the Narrative.” And as I discussed in my recent interview with Bookshelf Battle, Gen X is now fetishizing the 1980s the way Boomers did the 1950s (with Grease and Happy Days and American Graffiti), so let’s not do what they did — let’s not sell ourselves a golden-hued vision of a bygone era that exists only in our memory, less we become susceptible to the lies of a conman who promises to get it back for us. Whatever it was — good, bad, or indifferent — it’s never coming back. I’d love to see us let the 1980s go the way Boomers never could with their beloved 1950s.)
Happy to spread the word about your Patreon page! Best of luck with it!
You said “endowed Magnum.” :: tee hee ::
You certainly not only captured the feel of an era, but the character of a particular location and person. And while I connected with the main topic, I’m sure it’s no surprise to learn that I found myself most moved by the human connections that seem, like comic books, to be losing popularity as the digital age marches on. The image of several of you scraping together change to buy one comic book and then passing it around in the park together… I can’t remember the last time I observed this particular kind of camaraderie. More often, now, I see a group of teens “hanging out” in proximity only, while each of them scrolls through their separate phones, only ever so occasionally interacting to say, “Dude, look at this.”
One of the things I do as a mentor is to try to continually reintroduce to the next, and the next, generation the joys of real interaction with one another. Funny thing is, if I can convince them to try it, I’ve not yet met a teen who didn’t come to prefer real dialog, discussion, hobby sharing, etc. over digital absorption.
As you continue to blog, consider at some point in the future culling out vignettes like this into their own book, Sean. Readers of well-written memoir, a la David Sedaris, will love it.
Well, goddammit if I didn’t walk right into that “endowed Magnum” Freudian miscue!
Thanks for the encouraging feedback, Erik! As I said to Cathleen above, I wasn’t certain anyone but me would even take anything from this little musing, given how personal and specific it was. But I thought it was important to document the store’s closure, and this seemed like the best forum available. In 2007, when my video store went out of business, I wrote a similar reflection that appeared in the local paper, an op-ed that hasn’t yet been made available via its online archives, alas. Perhaps at some point I’ll scan the yellowed hardcopy and post it here.
I second everything you said about personal interaction in the Digital Age. Certainly one of the points I tried to raise here — though I refrained from letting it take over the essay — was this notion that geeks (a term I in no way use pejoratively) saw all their wildest dreams come true over the last twenty years: They got their own celebrities (the likes of Joss Whedon, among others). They got their own sitcoms (The Big Bang Theory). Blogs and podcasts are devoted to nerd culture. Movies and television now operate nigh-exclusively as paeans to their once-esoteric hobbies and interests. Game of Thrones, which is just Dungeons & Dragons writ large (and remember how socially catastrophic it was to be associated with that?), is a global phenomenon. Aftershows like Talking Dead, After the Thrones, and Beyond Stranger Things feature celebrity fans “geeking out” over plot twists and narrative minutiae. No one could have foreseen the cultural acceptance of all this stuff thirty years ago, when nerds were still punching bags — and cheap punchlines — in eighties teen comedies. It’s a good time to be geeky.
But as the subculture celebrates its newfound eminence — and influence — little to no consideration is given for what’s been lost. The peer-to-peer pleasure of exchanging information and opinions, of being a secret brotherhood of fans, no longer exists. I’m sure most geeks would say that’s worth the trade-off. I’m not so sure. More and more, it seems, we’re retreating to our own virtual worlds (through our iPhones or what have you) to experience — and comment on — our pop culture. In the Magnum days, media like comics and movies were vehicles to inspire face-to-face interaction and debate — to promote social connections rather than stand in for them. Nowadays, though, our fictions are so immersive, they encourage (and reward) spending time in virtual worlds over the real one. I haven’t seen Ready Player One yet, but I read the book years ago, and it’s nothing if not evidence in support of that assertion.
Thank you for the kind closing note about blog in general, Erik. (Assuming David Sedaris doesn’t justifiably balk at the comparison, I may very well use your comment in a blurb someday for a collected edition of essays!) With respect to the particular vignettes cited here, there’s an interesting backstory to that: Years ago, when I was still in film school, I harbored an ambition to make a low-budget movie set in a comic shop, à la Clerks and Smoke. I even went so far as to write a script for it (along with a friend of mine whom you’ve met, who is intimately familiar with all these misadventures). When it came time for this post, I dug that screenplay out of a Bankers Box in the closet (because I no longer even have an electronic copy) and skimmed it for a refresher on some of the zany things that happened back in the day. As a movie script, it’s pretty worthless — it’s an embarrassingly amateurish effort — but as a kind of historical document, it was priceless, because I had a perfectly preserved transcript of some of the crazy stuff that went on at Magnum during the good old days. The anecdotal sampling under the COMIC ESCAPADES subheading accounts for but a fraction of the things that went on there over the years! There’s certainly more to write about this matter, should I elect to at some point…
As for the blog in general, I feel like over the last year or so, it has hit a nice stride — that it’s developed an authentic identity (or brand, if you like) as I’ve found a comfortable balance between personal anecdote, critical commentary, and study of craft. I have thought about rewriting some of these pieces and publishing them in a compendium like some of my favorite essayists. I genuinely love writing short-form essays for the intellectual challenge they present, the different set of cerebral muscles they exercise, and the “instant gratification” of developing an idea, drafting it, and posting it within the span of a week or so. I’ve even been debating the usefulness of blogging with some author friends recently, and the consensus seems to be: Don’t waste your time unless you love doing it. It’s too huge an investment of time and intellectual sweat if it isn’t something you’re creatively compelled to do, a case made in this recent article. I grew up loving fiction and nonfiction in equal measure, and I have every intention of practicing both forms to the best of my ability for the duration of my career. Thank you, on this fourth anniversary of the blog (as of yesterday), for being such a steadfast source of support; I don’t think this experiment would’ve developed into quite what it’s become without your thoughtful engagement these past few years. My WordPress community is my comic shop these days…
SPC
>Dungeons & Dragons writ large (and remember how socially catastrophic it was to be associated with that?)
The 80’s. When D&D players were thought to be Satanists and psychotics, not nerds and geeks. When people knew of D&D from the movie Mazes and Monsters and the Chick tract Dark Dungeons, not the Big Bang Theory and Futurama
I miss those days
Isn’t it funny the way D&D was once thought to have a sinister influence on “impressionable young minds,” much the way twenty-five years earlier Fredric Wertham had suggested the same about comic books? The irony is, far from turning kids into depraved Satanists, comics and role-playing games only seem to be responsible for the interminable adolescence of a generation of middle-aged manchildren! Far from prematurely ending our innocence, these juvenile diversions have indefinitely prolonged it! Go figure…