![]() ![]() I love comics, they are the ultimate storytelling medium. My comics journey started very young, but it nearly died because I lacked a LCS. Your LCS is the critical linchpin, the ether that binds us together. Creators wouldn’t be able to connect with fans. Without those stores and their passionate owners, fans would never read these stories. Local Comic Shops are the lifeblood of the comics multiverse. I’d have missed out on so many great stories and so much incredible art. It’s no exaggeration to say that without Pulp 716, their awesome owners & staff, I wouldn’t be writing this. Making that connection with Pulp awoke something in me that had been dormant for nearly 30 years. I felt like a kid going into those old newsstands again, minus the pipe smoke and smoke bombs. Chris had been telling me I had to try out Pulp 716 and one day I popped into the North Tonawanda location. All of a sudden I had multiple LCSs near me. That is, until 2018 when my wife and I moved to the Buffalo metro area. So for as much as I wanted to get into a series I saw coming out for a favorite character I just had no access. I spend hours soaking in the art, picking apart the panels and details. Without a LCS it just felt impossible to follow any series. The MCU was for me, and probably for many others, a spark that reignited a deep love of comics. That pattern probably says a lot about my childhood.īut Captain America always remained tops. It might look silly today, but at the time the special effects were stunning.īatman, Spawn, and of course Punisher were characters that appealed to me too. Oh, and there was that one Captain America flick! The Spawn movie was something that blew my mind. Batman movies were about the only live actions, along with the less popular films for The Phantom & The Shadow (the Shadow knows!). This was the 90s – before the MCU and *gasp* the Internet! But there were Saturday morning cartoons packed with X-Men, Silver Surfer, Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man. When the shops closed up that was pretty much it for comics. A few brief good years provided a handful of good memories. US News and Pete’s News eventually closed up. One day my dad brought home the trade paperback of the whole series. This was such a big deal it was even on CNN, the only cable news network at the time. A weird couple panels to remember.Or maybe my faulty memory is making that up? After that the next comic that stands out in my memory is the Death of Superman. Cap has to suck the poison out, with one panel showing the emphatic discharge. I can remember one comic where Crossbones gets Cap with a poisoned blade. Suppose that’s one hell of a generational marker.Ĭaptain America was always my favorite. It’s so odd to me that a major distinction in my memories is what places stunk like smoke and which ones were clean. That was another place thick with tobacco smoke and old men playing scratch offs. I’d always try to talk him into buying me some comics or baseball cards. My dad would stop in for a Sunday paper after church. And I can remember Matt’s News on 3rd & Main. I remember the bright storefront of Pete’s News on Central Avenue where we’d play Pac-Man and buy candy & smoke bombs with our comics. ![]() The dank pipe tobacco scent that coated the US News shop on 4th Street. I have flashes of images of newsstands, but mostly I remember the smell. My own memory just does not work that way. When people recall their childhood with clear eyed certainty it makes me instantly suspicious. My earliest memories of buying comics are pretty hazy. ![]()
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