The Four Color Media Monitor

The Williamson Daily News covered a new specialty store now working in the city, and whose proprietor is a big collector, who inherited from his father. And he said:

Roberts said he’s looking to help fill the gap in the market that has been left in southern West Virginia.

“We’re always talking back and forth to check on prices and always asking what the people want, what kind of comic book characters, what they’re really looking for,” Roberts said. “We just want to try to meet the area’s needs as far as that as we don’t want people to have to go travel for this stuff. The market is very vast and there’s a lot of new things that are out there and highly collectible. But it’s good if we can keep it local.”

Roberts said the characters found in the comic book pages are timeless icons, but that sometimes these books hold a bigger place in the hearts of those who read them. He said he’s had the opportunity to meet many talented artists from southern West Virginia who found their niche through a childhood of reading comic books.

“These characters are timeless, and they always will be,” Roberts said. “There’s always going to be an appeal to these characters. And sometimes it’s about helping kids. Some kids struggle reading, they don’t have an interest; but if you could find something for them that is a super hero or a character and maybe that will have an appeal. And not only that, but they’ll look at the artwork and they’ll begin doodling and you don’t know what that’s going to inspire.”

Roberts said he was inspired to get into the business after attending a comic convention in 2016 in Cincinnati. He was there with his father to meet Stan Lee of Marvel Comics, and while there was inspired by the booths he saw and told his dad he thought they could do something like that.

Yes, specific characters can be timeless, but not necessarily the stories they star in. And those mainstream tales produced since the turn of the century are nothing to admire, nor do they make a good wellspring to emulate. Oh, and I wish the guy would at least define what he means by "highly collectible", because there's a lot of new mainstream titles, if anything, that're so dreadful, to say they're collectible would be a joke.

I would think the comics that could have real places in the heart now would be independent titles of more recent. Certainly, there's Marvel/DC books of past decades that'll have meaning, but today's most absolutely not. And that's something I wish these store proprietors would be willing to acknowledge. Also, who knows what artwork will inspired today's children to try emulating? Certainly not modern mainstream, if we take the worst items from Axel Alonso's time as Marvel EIC as an example, that's for sure. The best place to look would likely be, again, in the indies.

Labels: conventions, history, sales