Can I Give You Some Comic Books?

I used to give out free comics every Christmas. I figured that anyone whose on-line pattern of stops on a Christmas Day included The Comics Reporter had to be a frequent visitor of the kind I'm enormously grateful to have reading the site. So I would put up a post early on the holiday morning that anyone who wanted a free box of my doubles and throwaways could just send me an address and sooner or later I'd try to get them something. It worked great at first. I gave out over 90 boxes in the first three years, probably 20-25 comics each, working off the toss-outs in my own collection and the then-massive number of doubles I would get in the course of receiving review copies. (I don't believe in giving away review copies unless they're doubles, but as much PR personnel turnover as there was the middle of last decade I got a lot of doubles.) Icing on the cake, I received about 20 lovely thank-you notes the first time, and diminishing numbers of same the next two yuletides. I greatly appreciated them.

The fourth year I sent out about 35 boxes. I got back two notes thanking me… and eight complaints. The complainers all told me the same basic thing: that they thought they were going to get a better class of free comic book. One e-mail I remember went on and on about how accepting my freebies was an intellectual exercise for this guy in trying to figure out the kind of comic books CR received, and thus my critical profile, and I was clearly just giving him the dregs and had somehow ruined his new year. I double-checked, and I had definitely made it clear that year the same way I had the other years that what I was going to send out was a lot of random doubles and stuff I weaned from my collection proper. It wasn't going to be Jack Kirby-era Fantastic Four, Fort Thunder mini-comics, and my copy of Outbreak Of Violets. I keep those, and when I get a double it usually goes to a friend. What I had to offer was 99 percent everything else. I have to admit: the complaints upset me a bit, and I spent much of January that year vacillating between going on a follow-up tour of physically visiting certain people to scream at them in person and quitting the freebies dispersal. Fearing lawsuits and readers much, much fitter than I am, I gave up on the freebies.

I'm in the process of moving my studio. This has freed up about 10 boxes of comics. I've had a difficult time finding places that will take the kinds of comics I'm willing to give. I still managed to move most of them, though, the vast majority through personal contacts. (Anyone waiting for me to write an article about getting rid of comics that you can then use in dumping your own extra stock, you're out of luck, unless "foist them on your classmates from seminary" somehow applies.) That still leaves me with about four boxes of comic books. There's a range of stuff in them, although it leans towards superhero stuff of the bodies plastered with coral variety -- just like always. For instance, the pile I'm looking at right now has copies of a DC mini-series that basically read like the Anti-Life Equation in comic book form to me on a recent re-read, a 2001 #1, and some crime comic books in a cartoony style from Image I've since bought in trade form. The usual.

I'd love to give them to somebody. It has to be an adult, because I'm not sorting them for dirty comics -- you'll have to do that, if it's important. It's not the work involved, it's that I'm porn deaf, and I'd likely miss something that would get us all three minutes on Fox News and a phone call from Charles Brownstein. I'd love it to be someone I don't know that well or that doesn't participate in things like Five For Fridays, I have no idea why and please don't let that stop anyone. I'd particularly love it to be someone who maybe hasn't bought as many comics as they used to for vocational reasons and wouldn't mind be surrounded by a bunch of lovely, silly, goofy, messed-up North American funnybooks to sort through, maybe read, maybe toss with impunity if they don't like what they're seeing. In other words, I'd love to send someone a box or three of crappy comics who could appreciate such a thing right now in a way that goes beyond just wanting free stuff, and could articulate why in a couple of sentences in an e-mail to me. Is there anyone interested? Otherwise I'll just toss them, even though it's against my religion.

I'm afraid this has to be US-only; it costs too much to send things anywhere else anymore

Update: Okay, please stop sending these now. Thank you. I'll read them soon.
 
posted 10:15 am PST | Permalink
 

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