The Four Color Media Monitor

The Yes Weekly in Greensboro covered how Acme Comics has become the city's first black-owned comics specialty store:

Nine years after being officially designated “Comic Book City,” Greensboro has its first Black-owned comic book store.

Jermaine Exum, dubbed Lord Retail by award-winning science fiction writer M. A. Foster, has been the public face of Acme Comics so long, some customers have assumed he owned the Triad’s oldest comics shop. But no, Mark Austin, who founded Acme on Greensboro’s then-desolate Elm Street in 1983, was its owner until September, when Austin sold it to his longtime manager Exum.

Exum kept that under his trademark hat until this week. He’s always been shy. When I reported in 2020 that he was heavily featured in Anthony Desiato’s award-winning 2019 documentary My Comics Shop County (available on Amazon Prime Video, iTunes, and YouTube), he couldn’t bear to watch it. Over three months after buying Acme, he still hasn’t told most of his numerous friends.

While I think it's great he's gotten this kind of job, here's what's disappointing:

“I held onto this for so long that, when the time came, I had to be convinced to say something,” he wrote in an email on Monday night. “That’s how I can be in matters regarding myself. I have many emails sitting in drafts to major comics creators like Brian Michael Bendis, Jonathan Hickman, Gail Simone, who played a role in my journey. I really need to send them. Time has been so weird in the Pandemic Era.”

To think this guy would associate with some of the most pretentious scribes - especially Bendis - who've done far more to bring down the industry as we know it is dismaying. On which note, to date, many of the SJWs who allegedly complain about sexism in entertainment have never complained how outrageous it is that Bendis' rendition of the Scarlet Witch served as fodder for the recent WandaVision TV show. If not, that demonstrates their hypocrisy right there. And Simone's long proven bad for comicdom, based on her own leftist activism.

One of the very few creators he said anything to was former North Carolinian Tini Howard, who has written X-Men, Thanos, Conan, and Doctor Strange titles for Marvel, and just took over DC’s Catwoman last month.

I'm not sure if she's got anything to do with the current stunt in Dr. Strange penned by Jed MacKay, where Stan Lee's creation is put in the afterlife for the sake of replacing him with Clea (who'll probably end up another tool for politicized storylines), but if so, that's another reason why I find this guy's acceptance of modern deconstructionists so devastating. And speaking of deconstruction, they also mention:

Exum first encountered comics in spinner racks at Bessemer Curb Market or Waldenbooks at Four Seasons Mall. He doesn’t recall how he discovered Acme in the Elm Street space now occupied by Little Brother Brewing.

“An entire store of comics! The new stuff included Watchmen, the original twelve issues, so it was probably around 1988.”

A story I find overrated by today's standards, based on how depressing its viewpoint was. Whatever Alan Moore could provide in Swamp Thing that could make me think, there was too little of it in Watchmen, and the dark vision, again, has been way too overemphasized in this day and age. To the point where, as I recall, DC actually dredged up some of the characters in the past decade, just so they could use them in one of their overabundant crossovers. It's too bad this is what influences these store proprietors.

Labels: dc comics, marvel comics, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, sales