Seth and Christopher trade off Fridays to talk about the comics they love, as well as the people who made them happen, in these personal entries.
Christopher’s Love:
1: Tales from the Crypt Amidst a Twister
I can tell you the exact date I first picked up Tales from the Crypt: May 5, 1990. In a very dramatic way, it was minutes before a twister came through my hometown.
2: Remembering Joe Gill
Joe Gill was the most unique and outstanding anonymous author I knew. He's also my "fuckin' hero".
It was 1989 when I first stumbled across a copy of Comics Buyer’s Guide on the wire rack in a used bookstore in my Virginia hometown. CBG was a literal weekly newspaper for comics then, featuring everything from breaking news, to columns by industry insiders, to previews of upcoming comics. To a 12 year-old boy, it was heaven smudgingly printed on cheap paper.
In the end, the Holden Caulfield walked away with his kid sister, while the well-meaning Peter Parker walked away alone.
Seth’s Love:
01: My Youth in Comics
Between the ages of three and seven, my comics were picked up sporadically from newsstands and I got collected editions, treasuries and digests from various used bookstores. When my addiction started hitting it’s stride around the time I was eight
02: How Harvey Pekar Got Me Laid
I met her in front of the Sunshine Theater on East Houston Street. I waited beside the poster of Paul Giamatti channeling Harvey Pekar when she arrived and it took me a moment to recognize her.
03: Jeff Newelt ACT-I-VATEs the Hype
I arranged to talk to Jeff Newelt on the rooftop of the building that houses Deep 6 studios, in Gowanus, Brooklyn. It’s the type of location where one would almost expect to meet a superhero, or a superhero’s publicist, in this case.
04: My Lifetime of Collecting Star Wars Figures
Actually, it wasn’t all that far away; it was Brooklyn, at the Toys R’ Us on Flatbush Avenue. It was 1977 and I was four-years old. I walked next to my father down the aisles of toys and they seemed to extend up so high that to me they could have reached the stars...Just then we turned a corner and there they were, right on the endcap—the Star Wars toys. My face must have lit, as though I were looking at the blinding explosion of the Death Star itself.
Schmuck: The term entered English as a borrowed pejorative from the common Yiddish insult, where it is an obscene term for penis. It a range of meaning depending on context. In its most innocuous use, a schmuck is a person who does a stupid thing, in which case "dumb schmuck" is the appropriate expression. A schmuck's behavior ranges from pesky and inconsiderate, to obnoxious and manipulative.
