Happy Blogiversary to Ramblin’


Finishing year number three at that. If you were to tell me I’d be blogging for nearly 1100 straight days 1200 days ago, I’d say you were nuts. Well, the joke’s on me. Maybe I’m nuts. So be it.
I blogged 32 times in May, June, August, September, and December 2007, 31 times in July and November of 2007, plus each of the first three months of 2008, a whopping 34 times in October 2007, and a mere 30 times in April 2008. That would be 380 posts in 366 days. And this doesn’t count the posts I’ve made elsewhere.

Over the last 12 months – heck, ever – the best single day I had, in terms of people coming to the blog was May 18, with 477 visitors. It was fueled on the piece I had posted the day before, about counterfeit Cerebus #1, which ADD and subsequently other members of the comic book press picked up.

Likewise, it fueled the highest month I ever had.

The second best single day was 366 hits for a January interview with someone named Fred Hembeck, aided undoubtedly by a mention from Greg Burgas; it was among the first interviews of Fred to see the light of day, which helped. The worst day in the past year was a day in July, probably a Sunday, when I had 76 visitors.

I check my Technorati score periodically. It’s been as low as 22 and as high as 44; last I checked, it was 36.

When I Google Roger Green, my blog is generally in the Top 3 hits, along with Roger Green + Associates, Roger S. Green of Duluth, GA, and/or the former assemblyman Roger L. Green. The Denver ambient jazz musician’s on the rise, but the feng shui guy has been sinking. One of the Google oddities is that both my blog and one particular post has been near the top. For a while it was Chronicles of the Fantastic Four Chronicles, featuring Jack Kirby and John Byrne. More recently, it’s been the little piece I did about the death of Steve Gerber, which made me mildly uncomfortable, for some reason.

I want to thank those folks who’ve come by. More on all of this in the days ahead.

ROG

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

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