Joe Matt's Beguiling days.

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My Favourite Shop. When comics-friendly guests are in town, I like to show them The Beguiling. I’ve given tours to Kent Worcester and Bill Kartalopoulos among others. Like a well-packed suitcase, The Beguiling contains more goodies than one can easily imagine being squeezed into so small a space. Tucked away in odd corners are the real gems, especially the frame original art, which includes McCay’s Dreams of a Rarebid Fiend page, a Krazy Kat Sunday, and a Jesse Marsh Robin Hood Sunday. In the book side of things, the genuine riches are the volumes that almost no other comic book store would think of carrying. The French language selection in particular must be unparalleled in the Anglophone world, and I’ve met people who have driven hundreds of miles to find bande dessinee not otherwise available. There is also a smaller but still impressive selection of Japanese books; and of course the English manga collection is dauntingly large. I love how some choice out-of-print books are mixed in with the new books. If you wanted to supplement the Fantagraphics Peanuts series with a dose of nostalgia, The Beguiling offers paperbacks by Holt Rinehart Winston and Fawcett reprinting Schulz’s masterpiece.

Curatorship and Bookselling. The concept of curatorship and connoisseurship are gaining currency in the comics world, thanks in no small part to Dan Nadel’s efforts. The Beguiling is, if the concept makes sense, a curated comic book store. The staff is knowledgeable and opinionated, as are many of the customers. You can learn more about comics just by hanging out there. I’ve only spent a little bit of time in continental Europe and no time (since childhood) in Asia, not to speak of the other continents, so I’m not sure if I can safely say it’s the best comic book shop in the world. But it’s certainly the best comic book shop I’ve ever been to.

Joe Matt as Historian. One of the real values of Joe Matt’s The Poor Bastard is that it preserves a record of the Steve Solomos and Sean Scoffield era of the Beguiling, the distant days before Peter Birkemoe and Chris Butcher became the primary public faces of the store. As someone who shopped at The Beguiling from the very start in 1987, I can testify that Solomos was exactly as belligerently sarcastic as rendered by Matt. Anyone who tried to sell alternative comics in the 1980s and 1990s would naturally have become a little embittered in the process. Scoffield was (and is) a gentler soul but he shared Solomos’ critical standards. A good time-capsule of this early era of The Beguiling is the critical journal put out by the store titled Crash, which basically lambasted the entire comic book industry except for Chris Ware. It’s hard to imagine another retail outlet putting out a magazine that so harshly mocks everything sold in the store.

Not a Creature Was Stirring. A memory of The Beguiling, one Dec. 24th a few years ago. On the second floor, Peter Birkemoe and Chris Butcher were sorting through the porn bin, a discreet little corner far away from the many fine comics the store sells. The conversation included phrases like “Where does Rear Entry #3 go?” and “This belongs in the Adult Furry section.” It was the best Christmas Eve ever.

Time Travel in the Hinterland. If you buy comics in the big cities, most of the larger comic book stores will be slick and up-to-date. They’ll have lots of pop culture products (for recent and soon-to-be released comic book movies) and a gob-smacking number of toys. Going into these clean, even sterile, stores, where the back issues are usually somewhere in the back, it is hard to remember that comic book stores were originally an outgrowth of used book stores. The situation is very different in smaller cities and towns, where going to a comic book store can be a form of time-travel, a moving but melancholy return to the 1970s and early 1980s.

I’m thinking here in particular of a store the downtown of a prairie city (I won’t name the store for reasons that will soon become clear). This nameless store occupies two stories of an office building. The first floor is taken up with used books and nostalgic knick-knacks. The books are almost all schlocky paperbacks. It’s the only time I’ve seen a store with a large separate section devoted to “novelizations”: i.e., Star Wars: The Novel (putatively written by George Lucas) and E.T.: The Novel (actually written by a fine but cash-strapped writer, William Kotzwinkle). This novelization section towers over the small space give to another genre: “literature”, which consists mostly of old high school textbooks. Despite this lope-sidedness, I’m very fond of this used bookstore because it carries stuff that is not otherwise available, especially if you are interested, as I am, in genre fiction. R. Fiore recently complained that it was impossible to find bookstores that carry writers like “Robert Sheckley, a C.M. Kornbluth, a William Tenn, a Fredric Brown, a Barry Malzberg, a Joanna Russ.” Well, this store actually has many of these writers. If the Beguiling is a curated shop, this anonymous store is more like a giant garage sale or a flea market with a roof, a place where you can find musty treasures if you’re willing to dig deep.

A stairwell takes you up to the comics. Halfway up the stairwell there is a long plateau. That’s where the local Dungeons and Dragons club meets. If you are not careful, it is easy to trip over an acne-infested Paladin. Actually the selection in the comic store is not at all bad. They do stock manga and many alternative comics. Frank Santoro would have an orgasmic explosion going through their back issue bin: lots of 1970s and 1980s stuff there (I was once sorely tempted to buy a run of the original Omega the Unknown series).

That’s the positive side of time-travel. Here are the negative consequences: The problem with the store is, quite literally, the atmosphere. The whole place carries with it a peculiar stench, like a teen-age boy’s bedroom, reeking of sweaty socks, dried emissions and unsavoury effluvia. I took my friends James and Karine there once. Both are fans of creators like Alan Moore and Frank Miller. Karine is a corporate lawyer. As we entered the comics section on the second floor, we noticed a toad-like clerk squatting behind a counter. Eyeing Karine this wart-encrusted gent croaked out, “Spending some time with the big boys, eh, little lady?” Karine fumed out the store in a shot, carried along by justified rage.

To go to a store like this is to acutely experience the paradox of nostalgia. There is some pleasure in returning to the past, until you encounter attitudes that remind you why you left the past behind.

Labels: Chris Butcher, great comics stores, Heer notebook, Joe Matt, nostalgia, Peter Birkemoe, R. Fiore, The Beguiling, The Poor Bastard