Month: May 2007

Cerebus 1, the Counterfeit


When I first started the blog, someone offered me the opportunity to write a weekly or biweekly column in some electronic publication about the history of FantaCo, the comic book store/mail order house/publisher/convention operator where I worked from May 1980 to November 1988 (actually longer, but that’s another story). I believed I could, because I had come across some old diaries that covered the period. But it proved to be harder than I thought. I still want to do it someday, but at least I want to address one of his specific questions from a year and a half ago, which was, how much did we pay for those counterfeit Cerebus #1s we sold?

For those of you not in the know, Cerebus the Aardvark was a black-and-white comic book by Dave Sim. Interestingly, when Dave Sim and his then-wife Deni came to FantaCon as guests on Saturday and Sunday, September 19 and 20, 1981, we didn’t even carry Cerebus because our distributor, Phil Seuling’s Seagate Distribution, didn’t/couldn’t carry Cerebus; I don’t know why. But this was a problem when Deni, who I didn’t know by sight, came to the FantaCo table on Saturday and demanded to know why we didn’t have any Cerebus. I told her we’d try to get some from somewhere. On Sunday, and this is a direct quote from my journal, “Deni Sim harassed the people at my [FantaCo’s] table re: not having Cerebus there, as tho’ the conversation I had w/ her had not taken place. Tom [Skulan, owner of FantaCo] later got her a ride to the airport, rightly fearing that she’d otherwise make a scene…”

Anyway, we subsequently started carrying Cerebus in the store. Then on Friday, April 23, 1982, Tom bought 54 VF/NM (very fine to near mint) copies of what was purported to be Cerebus #1 from a guy allegedly from Binghamton, my hometown, for $770, $700 from money Tom borrowed from Steve at our neighboring business, World’s Records, and $70 from the drawer. That’s about $14.25 each; I don’t know what a real Cerebus 1 was going for at the time, but I expect it was at least thrice that. I bought one copy for my girlfriend at the time, who was a fan of the book – I never was, for some reason.

On Sunday, Mitch Cohn from FantaCo called me. The Cerebus 1s we got were apparently counterfeit, since the ones Sparkle City had gotten that weekend were deemed so by an underground comics expert.

Monday, Tom, Mitch and I made a number of calls to comic distributors, the South Jersey FBI [I don’t remember why them in particular], and the Comics Journal. We bought our 54, Sparkle City 62, Longhorn Distribution 10, hundreds in the Bay Area, and who knows how many more, all between Friday and Sunday? Jay from Sparkle City believed the culprits were from a syndicate from Detroit. They were selling to Pacific Comics on this day, and somebody got the license plate numbers.

Wednesday, we believed we would be able to get our money back. Here are notes right from the journal: “the guy who sold them [to us] (who says he got ’em from Big Rapids) didn’t know they were frauds. Somehow, Silver Snail has something to do with this as well as one of Glenwood’s employees.” (Those companies were comic stores and/or distributors.)

Now that’s the last journal mention of the incident. In all likelihood, we discovered we wouldn’t get our money back – I have a vague recollection that the FBI wasn’t all that concerned over phony funny books – and we decided to sell the counterfeit Cerebus #1s as counterfeits for $20 or $25. I seem to recall that we eventually sold out of them.

Recently, I came across this discussion over the ethics of selling a counterfeit comic. Sure, we had over $700 invested in the product, but I never had any moral discomfort about selling them since we were very clear that they were fakes. Anyway, here’s a piece that describes how to tell the real one from the fake. ADD, that’s pretty much all I know on this topic.

Oh, not coincidentally, today is Dave Sim’s 51st birthday.

EDIT: Since the above link to the article that describes the difference between the real one and the fake one has occasionally overloaded that website from time to time, I have appropriated the piece and copied it here.
***
And now I see Cerebus has purchased Chrysler. No, wait, that’s Cerberus. Never mind.


ROG

ROG

Good Deed

Sunday, April 29: I”m riding home on my bicycle from church. Lying in the street is a checkbook. It’s face down, but I can still tell what it is. It’s located at what I call the “change line”. Quite often, I find loose change lying on the street about a car width from the curb, which I suspect has fallen out of drivers’ pockets.
If the address on the checkbook were in my neighborhood, I would have dropped it off at the address, but it’s not, so I ride home. Call the number on the checkbook, which is a person in Watervliet, the next town over.
R: May I speak to [X]?
X: This is [X].
R: I found your checkbook.
X: What?
R: I found your checkbook.
X: I don’t know.
R: It’s an HSBC checkbook.
X: Oh, that’s mine. I’ll call you back in 15 minutes.
R: O.K. [I figure he needs to get a ride.]
[15 minutes later]
X: Hi, this is [X]. O.K., I’m coming over. What is your address?
[I give it to him.]
[10 minutes later, while we’re eating lunch before I get picked up to go to my conference in Utica an hour later, the doorbell rings, and I go to the door.]
R [to person at the door]: Here you are.
[In my peripheral vision, I see two Albany policemen.]
P1 [in his best “talking to a perp” voice]: What’s going on here?
R [stepping onto the porch, trying to stifle a sigh]: I found his checkbook on the ground.
P1: When was that?
R: Right before I called him. It took me five minutes to ride home, oh about 30, 35 minutes ago.
[At this point, the second policeman takes X, who seems to be jumping up and down as though he’s helped in the bust of the century, onto the sidewalk.]
P1: Where did you find it?
R: On the street, on Western Avenue, about two car lengths beyond Ontario Street.
[By this point, my wife and daughter have come to the door. P1’s tone lightens.]
P1: Usually, in 90% of these cases, there’s some kind of shakedown.
Then they leave.

As it turns out, X had been robbed of his wallet and checkbook, I inferred; this was never stated to me outright.
O.K., what could/should I have done?
1) Leave the checkbook there on the ground – unacceptable. If I had lost mine, I would have wanted someone to do something.
2) Mail it back anonymously – not optimal. I thought he was missing it, and would want it back right away.
3) Drop it off at the police station; there’s one on the way home – what I probably should have done, an idea I had dismissed at the time because I was trying to save time to get ready for the trip, and didn’t want to have to go through the bureaucracy of filing a police report.

Being a Good Samaritan has become such a hassle.

BTW, and I didn’t know this until I was retelling this story to some friends, my wife and daughter coming to the doorway was not a happenstance. The wife heard the policeman’s first utterance and decided to make herself and our child known to him. “See, he’s a family man,” the message would be. Smart wife.

ROG

ROG

Eight years of wedded bliss


I think when I was lavishing praise on my wife at some point on this blog, indicating that her only real flaw is that she’s sometimes (OK, often) late,usually trying to squeeze one more thing in, someone scoffed mightily. Well, it is about the only one that I notice now. Well, that and her need to tell me more about Dancing with the Stars than I need to know (which is to say, nothing). Or that innate ability to talk to me about something important just after I’ve turned off the lights. But this is all minimal stuff.

The more substantial problems we had in the past – the reason we broke up for a time (1996-1998) before we got back together – has to do with, for her, me being too judgmental (if this is wrong, she can clarify it in her OWN blog, if/when she starts one), and for me, her operating on assumptions not in evidence. I can think one specific example of this. She was visiting my apartment and she and/or I were cooking. She put the hot pan or pot on the counter, assuming that it would be heat-resistant; it was not, and the paint began to melt. One does not like to leave visible damage like that in a rented apartment. It made me crazy, not that she scorched the surface, but that she assumed.

Oh, and the other thing was that she didn’t keep up with current events. At all. I’d make comments about something that had been in the news for a month, and she didn’t understand what I was talking about. She’s much more on top of things, especially about politics and government, just by listening to five minutes of NPR news in the morning. I was listening to former CIA head George Tenet on one news program, and she rightly noted that it was pretty much the same as the stuff he said on another, even though she wasn’t even in the room either time. She even delves into other areas: when she told me (SHE told ME) Roger Clemens was re-signing with the Yankees, she knew he had been with the Houston Astros during the previous season; the 1994 version of Carol would neither have read/heard that nor would have been interested enough to retain that.

So, I’m less of a pill, and she’s more engaged, and we have a great kid together. It’s all good. Happy anniversary, honey.
***
Most New Yorkers vote today on the school budgets; some vote on school boards, though Albany do not. Albany does vote today on the library trustees, 17 candidates for four slots. A good friend is high on Dennis Gaffney, but at this second, I haven’t decided fully on the other three. Polls open 7 a.m.-9 p.m.

ROG

Underplayed Vinyl: The Talking Heads


While I liked the Talking Heads well enough on the radio in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I’m not sure I reached that critical point necessary to actually buy one of their albums until I saw the group at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, August 3, 1983, still one of my two favorite concerts ever. After that, I HAD to buy some of their music, and ended up with most of, if not all of their output. I started with the then current selection, Speaking In Tongues, released in June of ’83.

Here’s the playlist:

A1 Burning Down the House 4:00
A2 Making Flippy Floppy 4:36
A3 Girlfriend Is Better 4:25
A4 Slippery People 3:30
A5 I Get Wild / Wild Gravity 4:06
B1 Swamp 5:09
B2 Moon Rocks 5:04
B3 Pull Up the Roots 5:08
B4 This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) 4:56

I LOVED this album. I practically played the grooves off. “House”, of course, was supported by that strange video. I don’t know which of the next two songs is my favorite. “Slippery People” has a beat that evokes Tom Tom Club. The Progressive Ruin feeling of “Swamp”. The vulnerability of the vocals in “This Must Be The Place”.

Eventually, I had to replace the LP with a CD, at some point after 1987. I was playing it, but only half listening, since I was so familiar with it from repeated play. Yet it sounded…different.
Burning Down the House 4:00
Making Flippy Floppy 5:50
Girlfriend Is Better 5:41
Slippery People 5:02
I Get Wild/Wild Gravity 5:15
Swamp 5:09
Moon Rocks 5:40
Pull Up the Roots 5:08
This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) 4:56

It WAS different. Cuts 2-5 and 7 were longer, sometimes substantially. “Flippy- Floppy” even has an extra verse.

When CDs were introduced in the early 1980s, the record companies were trying to induce buyers to purchase this shiny new technology. Synchroncity, the Police album that also came out in June ’83, had an extra song, “Murder By Numbers”. Other albums did likewise.

The longer versions, to my ear, have now become the standard. Now I listen to the TH LP and the songs sound truncated, incomplete. I wouldn’t be surprised if one can buy yet a different package with both versions, but I’m not purchasing it yet another time.

Oh, not so incidentally, David Byrne turns 55 today.
***
Shoulda known Fred would remember Rocco’s birthday.ROG

ROG

M is for the many things she gave me

I’m happy to note that my mom is alive and well in North Carolina. She’s turning the big EIGHT-OH this year.

It’s quite convenient, my in-law’s birthdays and my parents’. My mother is a decade older than my mother-in-law, and if my father were still alive, he would be a decade older than my father-in-law.

Carol, her brothers, and their spouses planned a surprise birthday party for my mother-in-law last month. It was a surprise because it was almost a month after her actual birthday. We used the birthday of one of her sons, Dan, whose birthday was April 1, as the ruse to get her to Brooks Bar-B-Q, where her siblings, other family members and friends were all gathered. It was great fun, especially when her husband read this poorly constructed letter from an insurance company indicating that she (rather than her policy) would be terminated. (You had to be there, I suppose.)

My sisters noted Father’s Day when I first became a dad, so I think it’s only fitting that I give kudos to Leslie and Marcia.

Then there’s my wife, but since I’ll be talking about her soon, we’ll keep that in abeyance.
***
Best wishes and prayers to these folk.
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Will Gay Prof lose his gravitas now that his mom is visiting?
***
And aprops of Stevie Wonder’s 57th birthday, I was listening to some of his tunes, and what significant lyric gets stuck in my head? “Do you want some can-day? Do you want some hon-ey-suck-le?”
ROG

ROG
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