I Made And Sold About 100 Of These Back in 1983 (A Nerd Reminiscence)

In 1983 I was attending New York University, specifically the Tisch School of the Arts, studying film, and hoping to become an animator. I was commuting to school from my home in Staten Island, which was a mistake, but I was afraid of living on my own -- despite not having a happy home life -- and I can't be sure of it but I wouldn't be surprised if my not getting housing on campus was a money-saving decision. I don't remember. 

Comics were going through changes, in regards to the direct distribution system replacing the newsstand distribution system. I was buying comics from two sources, the main one being the infamous Paul's Sweet Shoppe on New Dorp Plaza. If Paul's didn't have an issue I was looking for, I'd walk down along North Railroad Avenue on my way home to check out the racks at a corner deli on Liberty Ave. 

You can't reference Paul's Sweet Shoppe without mentioning a couple of thins about the place. One, it was a cramped, cluttered and ill-kempt old-fashioned joint, piled with newspapers, magazines and comics. Whatever didn't fit the wall racks would be piled in stacks in front of them -- to my everlasting horror customers would step on the comics to reach the Playboy and other soft-core magazines. The guy who ran the place, Paul, was a miserable piece of shit. There was no other way to describe the grubby old man in the dirty apron who yelled at practically everyone, especially us kids. If you happened to go within thee feet of the skin mags he'd bark shit at you, whether or not you were trying to get a peek at a copy of Penthouse or whatever. I never even tried. Fuck that noise, I was after the comic books. A friend of mine, Steve Waldner, said if you went right up to the Playboys, picked out a copy, stepped up to the counter and simply paid for it, Paul wouldn't say a goddamned thing (it might have helped that Waldner was very tall and older-looking, but who knows, none of us ever tried it or even really wanted to, I had a small stack of Playboys and Penthouses I found that my step-dad tossed in the garbage can, many of the pictorials are still burned into my retinas to this day. I also read the articles. Eventually.). You couldn't dawdle, not just with the dirty magazines but pretty much anything, if you were a kid. Paul was big on the "this ain't a library" thing. I was big on not coming back at him with "Since when  were libraries shitholes?".  Paul threw kids out on the regular and he remembered that he threw them out. If you were banned it could be for life. That was a nerd death sentence. 

Paul's (Not-So) Sweet Shoppe

Paul of Paul's Sweet Shoppe lorded over his dirty domain behind the counter of an abrupt, cluttered soda fountain, serving up egg creams, swamp waters and malteds. I very rarely ever got anything from the soda fountain. I wanted to, I thought ordering a milk shake or malted was the highest sort of living. I still feel anxious ordering anything like that, even if I am miraculously flush, because it still feels like a luxury I can't afford. I was not rolling in dough back then, like I am now (that's called a joke, ha ha). The truth of it was, if you bought a malted, you pretty much wiped out your comic book budget.  And comics were king.

After Paul's wife died he got even nastier. I mean, going in there was always a crap shoot, but at that point it was a gauntlet. It was stressful, honestly stressful for most of us to go in there. But there was one screwy time he was nice to me, and I'll never forget it. 

Quick backstory -- I had fallen out of comics for a couple of years, until high school friends talked me into checking out George Perez' art on The New Teen Titans (Perez was my favorite Marvel artist when I left the comics life for a passionate affair with animation geekery). I went to Paul's Sweat Shoppe for the first time, and bought a copy of Tales of The New Teen Titans (the issue spotlighting Raven -- #2?). I was hooked and back on the comics wagon. The New Teen Titans became my favorite book as I started collecting DC for the first time in my life, and was sucked back into my old Marvel habit. 

Anyway, one day an issue of Titans shipped with a carboard counter display, featuring a blown-up image of Starfire drawn by Perez. I was always fascinated and entranced by store displays and signs, stills and movie posters, industry ephemera that a kid like me had no idea how anyone got their mitts on (other than buying that pricey stuff at conventions or Jerry Ohlinger's collectibles store on 8th St in the East Village). I somehow screwed up the courage to ask Paul if he would sell the display. It was like asking Cerberus to let me pick up a quarter held under it's paw. Or what I assumed asking a girl out was like, because I was so nervous I wanted to throw up. But I wanted that display like it was the most important thing on Earth. And for some crazy reason, after I stammered out my question, Paul of Paul's Evil Sweet Shoppe took the two or three comics out and gave it to me. For free. Cheap-ass Paul of Paul's Horror Shoppe. I couldn't believe it.  

Anyway, everyone was able to escape the wrath of Paul when The Merchant of Venus (pfffft!) opened up a few blocks away on New Dorp Lane and the corner of 10th St by the Lane Theater. This was the first full-service direct market comic shop I'd ever seen, and it was even a little closer to New Dorp High School than Paul's Swamp. The owners, Jim Hanley and Dave Brucas (and his wife, Cathy, who didn't work there) made you feel welcome rather than terrified. Soon every nerd I knew was a regular at the shop, which had changed its name to The Fantastic Store (still a fucking ouch, but a lot better than The ha ha ha Merchant of ha ha Venus). 

Sidenote: RIP Dave Brucas, who passed away a few months ago. I will never forget his father's funeral service (at the Hanley Funeral Home, funny enough). Dave wasn't close to his dad, and we were all sitting there with the coffin swapping family stories and were so loud the funeral director had to ask us to calm down because the mourners from another funeral could hear us laughing our asses off. Oops.

So now we finally get to the little paper comic book figure seen in the image above. Oh, wait, not yet, because there's one last anecdote about Paul's Sweet Shoppe. One that kind of defined the store in it's waning days, and Staten island in general back in the day.  A few years after the nerds migration to the Fantastic Store, 1987, to be precise, the body of one William Ciccone was found in the basement of the Shoppe, shot five times in the face with an automatic weapon. Mr. Ciccone apparently botched a hit on John Gotti's life and found himself bundled up in a limo, and then taken to Paul's Sweet Shoppe of Torture and Murder. I always pictured customers stepping on the corpse to get to the Playboys and model railroad enthusiast magazines that were just out of reach. Anyway, that was the last time any of us really talked about Paul's. It was a big deal. 

Another win for the local comic shop: no mob slayings.

Nice plug! For the shop, The photographer got the shop's name framed perfectly above the deceased. 

So. What's the deal with the Princess Python thingamajig drawn by a young George Perez fan with way less talent? I'll tell you. This part is nifty. Ready?

I ended up working at The Fantastic Store (and getting fired, but that's another story), but before that I had given Jim a few cut-out drawings I had made of five Marvel characters for fun. I had inked them, colored them in Dr. Martin's dyes, and cut them out. They were all about six inches tall. Jim stuck them into a few books at the counter as little displays. One day, I got a call from Jim -- someone wanted to buy the little bookmark figures. He wanted to know what to charge for them, and he'd give me the money. I had no idea, I didn't make them to sell them, I made them for fun (kind of like the little drawings I posted on Instagram that people asked to buy). Jim suggested $20 for the lot. And I got $20 for them, which was kind of a big deal. Having someone like the drawings enough to want to buy them made me feel really good. And I could buy more comics!  

One of several business cards I drew for The Fantastic Store and Jim Hanley's Universe. The little character is "Goog", my childhood signature character, abandoned when I realized I cribbed him from those little sticky-footed puffball gift item things that stores always seemed to have stuck on their cash registers in the 70's.

Some time later, Jim admitted to me that the sale actually had fallen through. The mother of the kid who wanted to buy the drawings thought spending $20 on them was ridiculous and out of the question. Jim didn't want to disappoint me, so he bought the drawings and hid them from me. Jim could be awesome like that. It meant a lot to me.   

To make a long bunch of anecdotes and asides shorter, buoyed by the sale I started making paper figures out of the drawings, which Jim and Dave gave me space on a shelf to sell. I got most of the money for them. And the damned things sold! I did a few requests but mostly drew whatever I felt like drawing, like the stuff I draw nowadays on Instagram, come to think of it. A lot of obscure favorites.  

You can see the basic construction of the figures in the photos of the Princess Python example above (I hadn't kept any of these, a reader kindly sent me this figure after winning it on eBay). After inking the drawings, I'd color them, cut them out with an Exacto knife and then back them on a cut piece of Bristol board. The figures would have a flap at the bottom that I'd glue to a cut piece of mat board that served as a base. I used wooden coffee stirrers glommed from diners and coffee shops around NYU to prop up the figure, attaching the stirrer with glue and Bristol board. The standing figures were precarious affairs, but they mostly held. If they broke people could bring them in to the store to get them fixed. 

I think the figures came about because of my fondness for action figures and Dungeons & Dragons miniatures. I was one of those fans who daydreamed a lot about toys that I wished would be produced, back in the days when a Mego Iron Man or Falcon was like some kind of nerd miracle from on high. My father was an electrician and he had a work relationship with whoever owned Red's toy store on Utica Avenue in Brooklyn. They stocked Mego figures pretty heavily, and I would stare at the ones I didn't have while my father was off doing whatever he did when he took my sister and I along with him on Sundays. We didn't figure out until we were older that he was probably working while he left us to sit and do whatever we could find to do. Long stretches of time were spent at an auto supply parts place in Brooklyn and a kosher pizzeria in Manhattan. Either he was working or hanging out with friends. Either way, dismal days for us two. He didn't even tell us to bring a book or anything, why we didn't bring something to read or do, I can't tell you. Maybe there was a ritualistic aspect to the Sunday visits, the hope that if we took books or toys along it would give my father an out and there wouldn't be a chance of something happening that was anything like how a parent and child have a relationship. Sundays sucked, but out of guilt or whatever we'd be brought to the Te-Amo on King's Highway and Nostrand to buy us as many comics as we wanted.  I also got Mego catalogs out of the deal, and they fascinated me. All the figures in one place, including the apparently impossible-to-own playsets. I would pore over them and daydream of Mego figures I wished for. Hawkeye. The Beast. Dr. Doom. It's funny that Mego is back in operation these days making all sorts of new figures like Utraman, Leatherface and licensed Universal and Hammer movie monsters in their signature style. It takes all my will to not order a ton of those things, especially the re-releases of the ones I had as a kid. I'm scared if I get one...I'll wake up drunk in a Las Vegas motel with forty of them and a warrant out for my arrest.

So. Then. Anyway. 

I made my own figures for a while, selling them at the store for $5 or so. I tried to keep them all in scale to one another, because, duh. Nerd brain. I'd draw several on one piece of Bristol and fit them in on as few sheets as possible to save money. They were a pain in the ass to cut out and back, especially if I put details in without thinking about how they'd 'cut". I sometimes put effects like explosions or flames with particular characters so they'd be easier to cut out with the knife. I made one "giant" figure in scale, a Sentinel.  I didn't even try to make a stand for it, I just mounted it on thicker backing. 

Photocopies I made of WIP figures (scanned, I'm pretty sure I threw the copies out). They're muddy because of the colored dyes. The Magneto was one I was proud of at the time. It's funny that the Beast and Hawkeye are on the second sheet, those were two favorite characters I always wanted toys of as a kid. The George Perez influence is strong here, with John Byrne, John and Sal Buscema and a little Marshall Rogers. Some Jack Kirby was always in there somewhere in spirit if not in approach, at the time Perez and Byrne were my absolute favorites and my biggest influences.

I have a list somewhere that I made at the time of all the figures I made. I ended up making about 95 figures, give or take. I meant to do a series of cosmic heralds -- The Silver Surfer, Terrax the Tamer, The Destroyer, Fire Lord and Air Walker -- leading up to an-in scale Galactus as figure 100. But I was starting to do pinups that I sold along with the figures and they were less time-consuming. Making the stands and cutting the drawings out (twice) and getting the sticks to sit right was a decent amount of work for very little money, all told. Which, of course, is the story of my life. The pinups replaced the figures. 

End of project, end of story.

When I find the "master list" of all 90+ figures, I'll post it here. I think it's stashed somewhere with papers and clippings, either in an envelope or in with materials in one of the big archive boxes. I can't go searching because I know I'll fall down a rabbit hole, going through everything. I want to do that someday to look for things to post here, but time is against me for the time being.

I enjoyed making the figures but they really were a pain in the ass. At one point it was getting hard to grab enough coffee stirrers because a lot of places were dropping the wooden ones. I sometimes wonder where the figures ended up, and how many are still around in boxes and basements. I've run into a few folks from back in the day who told me that they'd kept theirs. I wonder if Jim Hanley has the original non-standing ones. It's so funny that one ended up on eBay, and that it ended up with me. Opening the package with the Princess Python figure in it brought back a lot of memories. Same goes for writing this post.  

I've been meaning to post about this for a while, but I kept hoping I'd come across the master list. I figured with my computer nonsense prohibiting me from accessing files I'd go ahead and write something involved to make up for the lack of substantive posts this month. 

Hope you enjoyed it!