Comix

Apart from the adults-only Hentai section in back, Milo C. felt this was a pretty respectable little store; not bad for a Jay and Slient Bob’s Secret Stash knock-off. Nestled on the hippest block of downtown Portland, far away from the reach of Kevin Smith’s lawyers in New Jersey, no doubt planning to rake ’im over the coals as we speak, Milo, who looks as though Elvis Costello dresses as Dante Hicks from ‘Clerks’ every day of the week, doesn’t just collect comic books, he traffics in comic books. He peddles that shit like a madman, every single issue up on those shelves that every basement-dwelling Cheeto-stained neckbeard carelessly pawed, imprinting a sweat-stained palm-print as he passed through, Milo pawed first. In his studio apartment above the store, he kept an original, first-print, autographed copy of ‘Watchmen’, signed by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons couldn’t be bothered, and a partially signed copy, not first-print, of The Killing Joke, which Moore started to sign, completing his first name and part of his last, before circimstances pulled him away, circumstances which Milo relates every time, few times that they are, he gets a date and brings her over to the store, after hours, (thinkin’, hey, if it worked for Christian Slater in ‘True Romance’), about how Moore had almost finished the occasional single-line squiggle that he called a signature, when he went dead-still, then dashed to the nearest bathroom, a hit of acid he’d taken, a stronger batch than what Alan had done in his (Milo assumed) Ken Kesey days, kicked in earlier than he’d anticipated. It was a beautiful moment, and the day Milo became a man, since his first sexual experience, though successful, was quickly aborted, and to top it off, the girl was put off by the fact that, as ‘mood music’, he’d put on Han’s Zimmers’ ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ score. The place, being stuffed, and not just an over-exagerated ‘oh, we’re slightly overstocked’ sorta way, but full-on John Holmes’ co-star stuffed, with superhero titles, not to mention titles of every other conceivable genre: queer-focus, slasher, queer-slasher, franchise spin-offs, franchise crossovers, every single Freudian guilt-trip Robert Crumb ever penned (being the living, breathing, Philip Roth character he is, God bless’im), but naturally Superheroes were the most popular, most assumed Milo knew every word of every panel of every page around him, and sure enough, he knew enough to get by and speak fluent nerd, but his real passion was romance. He sat behind the counter, feet up on the glass display, flipping through a Japanese part-novel, part-manga adaptation of ‘Chasing Amy’, but with a copy of Death of Superman over the cover so people know he’s a geek who means business, that you can come up to him with any pop-triviality and the all-knowing pop-culture junkie will answer with a huff and a smirk.

During the work day, Milo blasts various Anime themes from the speakers around the store, watching snot-nosed ten-year-olds picking out the same thing over and over again, and Mazzy Star when he’s crying alone in the dark at night, curled up on the floor behind the glass case, thinkin’ he’ll put a slug between the eyes of the next shit-heal who “ironically” asks him to play the Neon Genesis Evangelion theme one more time, draw it quick and plug ’im quicker, like John Cleese in the Cheese Shop sketch. He’s peddled these over-bloated magazines so long, he thinks, he’s actually formed an opinion: his favorites, rather respectable, are Spawn, The Maxx, and the works of the aforementioned Alan Moore. Stan Lee is overrated. Jack Kirby’s a legend, but his work has outlived its prime.

He once went into a pawn shop in a strip mall and bought a thick brick of rotting comics for about two bucks, most of the pile wasn’t much better than toilet paper with faded coloring, but one grabbed his attention: an original, 1947 first-run printing of All-Negro Comics #1, the one and only issue they ever put out. Even used copies sold for thousands. He got ripped off though. He sold it for just $1,200. When not dealing with grown men who still play with dolls, he doodles his own Comix: off-kilter Robert Crumb style illustrations starring a Felix the Cat knock-off that looks more like Fritz the Cat in blackface. Mid-afternoon, hours from closing, and rain pounds the pavement outside. Barely anybody’s in, and Milo has Daft Punk over the speakers, doodling another one-page issue of Franz the Cat, in which he wakes up to find he’s become a giant centipede, Kafka by way of Junji Ito, struggling to remember the name of that other Mangaka who always does a creepy-ass job of penning distorted human facial features. A small but steady stream of perverts had been comin’ and goin’ since just after lunch, hittin’ up the Hentai in back, and every time one shuffles up to the counter gripping a Lolicon book and plopping the cash down, trying to hide his face in the flaps of his trench coat, like a turtle pulling his neck back into his shell, Milo gripped a light-up plastic lightsaber behind the counter, ready to repeatedly and dully boink him over the head with it, but it never comes to that. He is semi-proud to own one of the cleanest comic joints in the Portland, with some of the lowest instances of flash ’n dashers in the Northwest. They in, they out, off into the shower and mist of a Portland afternoon, never to be seen again until ’round this time next week.

The majority of those who come in are not collectors or fans, but hipsters, vegans and hippies, since he’s the only store that carries Das Reich Ist Grün, in which a heroic Adolf Hitler, in his first act as Führer, bans animal cruelty, then turns vegetarian. “He was the first Captain Planet, You know”, a blonde-dreadlocked hippie broad sez to him one day whilst he grips his plastic lightsaber harder.

He looks up from doodling giant pincers poking straight up from Franz the Cat’s muzzle, stretching and tearing his cheeks into a Glasgow Smile, when a delivery truck pulls up right outside and the driver comes in carrying what can only be Saga of the Swamp Thing Vol. 1, at this point Milo is even starting to believe Alan Moore might be the sexiest man alive, with his over-sized Hagrid beard and wizened Gandalf the Grey features. He briefly turns his attention away to hock another Lolicon picture-book at a married man who rubbernecks his daughter’s friends so much Milo calls him Mr. Fantastic, then gets the box cutter and slides it out and flips thru the pages and decides to doodle a one-panel in which Alan Moore kicks Stan Lee’s corpse.  

The next day is pure drizzle, just like the last, and Milo doodles Franz the Cat running a comix shop in the sixties, a shop that only sells R. Crumb’s Head Comix, and Franz (in a wink to the original deleted ending of ‘Clerks’) gets shot and killed in a hold-up.