Steve Gives Us a Personal Tour of Geppi’s Entertainment Museum You’d think hitting a few imaginary home runs with one of Babe Ruth’s 1927 bats might be the capper for the day. Nah. We could have spent days checking out the treasures in Steve Geppi’s office but he was eager to give us a tour […]
Lost Weekend Sorry I didn’t manage to post anything over the long Thanksgiving weekend. I had some pay-the-bills work that had to be done and it took longer than expected, as everything always seems to. Speaking of Thanksgiving, I am very thankful for your kind donations, which have enabled JayJay the Blog Elf to devote […]
Good News!The President has pardoned JayJay and me! JayJay and Jim having a Happy Thanksgiving Thanksgiving with Don Perlin’s Father I guess I saw Don Perlin a few times during my early days at Marvel, when he occasionally came into the office to deliver the art for an issue of Werewolf by Night. I was […]
First This One more thing about mass-market distribution…. The other day, while making a point about digital piracy, Nick Yankovec said that “…most of the stuff available is overpriced and not good enough.” Yep. In response, I said this: I think I’ve been pretty clear in all my rants that “not good enough” is the […]
Tue Sørensen commented: Great and interesting reading as usual, Jim. All this talk of the mob makes me wonder how things are today. Is there still a mob with significant influence on many aspects of show business (under which I include comics) or did all that fade away a few decades back? Anonymous said… “The […]
JayJay here. Jim is in the city all day today and hasn’t gotten today’s blog written. But when I was digging through old files yesterday, looking for those Marvel ad rate cards, I ran across some of my old logo sketches from our VALIANT days. I think I was able to do some ok designs […]
More on Newsstand Distribution Mob involvement? Well…. Anytime you have businesses holding monopolies in certain territories, like the linen business south of Canal, or the poster “sniping” business (putting up advertising posters on walls and fences) in Manhattan, garbage hauling in the New York metro area, or the parking racket—did I say racket?—I meant industry, […]
In the mid-1960’s, Mort Weisinger explained newsstand distribution to me. A publisher contracted with a National Distributor. DC Comics used Independent News, which was owned by the same parent company, National Periodical Publications. Through some strange circumstances I’ll explain later, Independent News also was Marvel Comics’ distributor.The National Distributor was like a bank as much as anything else. […]
I was fired by Marvel in April of 1987. Sometime in May, Marvel’s business affairs veep, Joe Calamari called me to ask for help. Marvel’s new owners, New World Entertainment (it was New World Pictures when they acquired Marvel, but they’d changed the company name) wanted Marvel to have a balloon and a float in the […]
JayJay here. I’m posting one of Jim’s answers to a comment as a mini-post since it’s kind of fun and about one of everybody’s favorite, but least known, Marvel Bullpenners.czeskleba commented: A couple people have mentioned the old rumor that Ditko uses his old original art as cutting boards. Most likely that is an urban […]