About once a year, we give Stately Beat Manor a really good going-over — tossing out unwanted pamphlets, moving some stuff into storage, organizing permanent additions and so on — and after doing so we write a post with our thoughts about storage and hoarding and so on.

This is that post, c. 2011.

I assume most of you reading this are borderline hoarders, like The Beat. Your shelf porn resembles a splatter film. You have more longboxes than you do pieces of silverware. Your home contains at least one Billy. You have at one time — perhaps even at this very moment — made use of some kind of  software to catalog your collection even if it was just Excel or Google spreadsheets. You know the drill.

Herewith, some observations on comics and collecting comics.

• Art supply stores have some awesome storage options.

Screw “The Container Store” and all that expensive bullshit. I made a trip to A.I. Friedman, the venerable art supply store here in NYC, and came away with two items that I’ve long thought would be very useful. #1 was a cheap portfolio for storing artwork, flat posters and the like. All of that stuff had been sitting in an unsightly pile on top of my Expedit, and now it looks all sleek and organized in a black portfolio like all the cool kids carry. Less than $15 and you’re good to go.

The second item was one that I did not know existed. Cool-looking poster tubes in colorful plastic! Alvin Ice Tube 25 Inch Clear

You know all those unsightly rolled up posters from Con and so forth? Now they are super sightly! The tubes have a strap for when you are banging around the Javits or wherever.

I should add that this was a prime spot for purging. I live in a New York Apartment and don’t really have room for an art show. I saved a few key pieces –some nice screen prints various folks gave me over the years, Ben McCool’s first signing poster, a giant poster from RETURN OF THE KING that shows Frodo and Sam in a very gay embrace on the skirts of Mount Doom – you know the kind of stuff that will make a great art show some day.

I was pleased to note that although it had started out as an art and office supply store, A.I. Friedman has been attempting to adapt to modern times with a huge section of laptop and iPad bags and covers. Although it was large, it was dwarfed by the row upon row of racks of Moleskine and Moleskine-like little notebooks for jotting important thoughts. Everyone may own a tablet soon, but to be truly profound, a ponder must be scribbled in a little wee bookie.

• A pamphlet is a fleeting thing.
Every time I do a purge, it’s easier to get rid of these suckers. I will, however, never get rid of my original runs of SANDMAN, PREACHER, and INVISIBLES because they had the cool letters pages which were all the contact we had with the industry before the internet.

• BUT — which edition to keep?
As we wade further and further into the Golden Age of Reprints, deciding which edition to keep becomes harder and harder. Which is better the original Epic edition of MOONSHADOW…or the new one from Vertigo? (I did not flip them open to compare repro, which would have been the right thing to do.) For my favorite series — like SWAMP THING or PREACHER or PLANETARY — I now have the pamphlets, the original paperbacks, perhaps the hardcover, and now the DC deluxe trade series AND an Absolute edition. Can you keep only one? How about keeping two, one for reading one for display? So many great books now have multiple editions — HICKSVILLE, SAME DIFFERENCE, BLACKSAD — the newer one is usually the best updated and corrected one, but not always. And sometimes things are just cool for their own sake. I love the collected hardcover edition of Brian Ralph’s DAYBREAK, but getting rid of the cute Bodega editions seemed so wrong.

• If money is no object, assembling a collection of the greatest comics of all time is now an afternoon’s work.

Comprehensive editions of the major work of nearly every cartoonist who appeared in the Masters of American Comics show are readily available: Winsor McCay, Lyonel Feininger, George Herriman, E.C. Segar, Frank King, Chester Gould, Milton Caniff, Charles Schulz, Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, R. Crumb, Gary Panter, Chris Ware, and Art Spiegelman.

Kurtzman and Crumb — among the more prolific — would be the hardest to assemble, and the Gasoline alley reprint series didn’t get too far. But handsome editions of Little Nemo, Krazy Kat, Popeye, Dick Tracy, Terry and the Pirates, Peanuts, THE SPIRIT, and Kirby’s major works for Marvel and DC have all been collected. Spiegelman’s output is slim but most of it is in print. Ware’s and Panter’s work has been in so many formats that a complete set is basically impossible — but the emblematic work is not hard to come by.

Looking beyond this lauded group, the key work of the Hernandez Brothers, Dan Clowes, John Stanley, Alan Moore, and Herge is all available. Lynda Barry is getting the complete works treatment. You can buy Little Orphan Annie reprints and Prince Valiant and now Pogo. Anders Nlsen, John Porcellino, and Carol Tyler have been collected.

Our comics heritage is accessible — and that has never existed in this country before. Huge props to Fantagraphics, IDW and Drawn & Quarterly for leading the charge on this.

• Many master great cartoonists have now had the resources to publish a body of work that could potentially stand the test of time.
While I was writing about Chester Brown the other day it dawned on me how important it is for an artist of his caliber to have his work in print. This is a guy who started out drawing a story about a man who couldn’t stop shitting, after all, and now he’s a master.

The best part of cleaning up is organizing everything, and putting all the books by one author together. It gave me great pleasure to assemble a single shelf containing the works of Bryan Talbot, Carla Speed McNeill, Richard Sala, and Paul Pope. Not that they have anything in common…and that’s the point. Sala’s work is so consistent and marvelous for over nearly 30 years; FINDER gets deeper and more magical with every page; Pope’s works are sporadic but create a lyrically violent world of sex and drugs; has there ever been a cartoonist who tackled so many subjects as Bryan Talbot? From child abuse to dystopic science fiction, steampunk funny animals, and a a scholarly exegesis on the history of one town?

Putting together the works of Posy Simmonds, Rick Geary, Kyle Baker, Marjane Satrapi, Seth, Tom Hart, Natsume Ono — that there is some good shit, and it’s only scratching the surface.

• Man, there have been a ton of books about comics in the last 10 years.
I counted three separate surveys of artists in their studios, and a surprising number of “The [finite amount] of GNs you must read!” surveys. These are not all going to fit into the house, so some culling is going to occur. I can tell you one thing up front — I’m keeping the ones by Paul Gravett. Also, cartoonist bios. Haven’t read them all!

• The self-publishing scene has sure improved in the last 15 years.

In a long unopened short box I found an envelope of comics that had been given to me at a long ago SPX back when it was a Sim-model self-publishing fair. They all looked so horrible that I chucked them all — behavior quite unusual for me. By contrast, even the student publications from last year’s SVA show were so professional and cute looking that I couldn’t bear to do anything but shove them into another shoe box.

• What do you do with mini-comics?

Not just minis but little publications like SULK and MORNING STAR and so on. You can make colorful piles of them on one cube of an Expedit or put them in a mag file or just shove them in a shoebox…but none of these solutions seem ideal to me.

• While I was cleaning up I found a few promising first efforts by cartoonists little heard from since. Maybe I will do a few spotlights on them over the next few weeks. Also, at least one publisher, when their books were assembled, displayed such an odd esthetic that it deserves a thorough retrospective which maybe I will do before I die. No promises.

• I love my paper world.

This weekend I suffered the technocrat’s greatest nightmare and dunked my iPhone. It’s currently sitting in a bag of rice and soon I will find out if my life is over or not. In the meantime, for someone who is attached at the metacarpal to her iPhone, this past weekend was very interesting.

For instance, I had to find my way to someplace I’d never been. Instead of relying on GPS when I got out of the subway, before leaving the house I had to look it up on a map and print it out. And then pull out a paper and look at the map when I arrived. It was like a Geico caveman commercial.

The daily routine of life was much different as well. While ordering a Vietnamese coffee I found myself reflexively reaching for my pocket. Even though it takes less than two minutes to get a Vietnamese coffee, I would normally pull out my phone and look at my Twitter or gmail “to kill time”. I’ve pretty sure my time was long ago stuffed and mounted over the mantelpiece. Is twiddling really necessary?

My socializing was rocketed back to 1997. It’s amazing how much we use our gadgets to isolate in a crowd. Unable to whip out my phone and google whatever was passing through my mind, I found I had to actually sit and talk to people. Weird! How on earth did we survive those primitive times?

Thing is, I don’t actually use my phone as a phone very much. The problem of ordering some sushi for dinner was solved with Skype and my iPad. I tried to retrieve my messages from another phone but realized I’d never bothered to learn the architecture for doing so. Oops.

Don’t get me wrong. I want my phone back. But a little lesson in non-digital life was a bit refreshing. In fact I found I had way MORE time. So much so that I decided to take the evening to clean up my RSS feeds. A bloated thing of 600+ feeds, I found countless dead or misdirected feeds, and long ago ghosts of an internet that was. Where have you gone, Chesterfest blog? I was kind of saddened that so many art blogs that I once loved to visit have been moved to Twitter or Tumblr. Even more have moved over to Facebook, much to my sorrow. I consider Facebook the AT&T of the digital era, a giant corporation that has no real interest in helping its customers — it only wants to keep customers.

For instance, once you get sucked in there is no way to get sucked back out. Sure I’d like a nice discrete feed of all my actual friends and family. Unfortunately I did not have the foresight to start this five years ago, so now I have a bloated 2000+ friends, some of whom are not people I actually know. There is also no easy way to create a feed of an individual page — once there was, but Facebook keeps fiddling with the settings.

While cleaning up the feeds, I found this post by media expert Anil Dash called Facebook is gaslighting the web. We can fix it in which he points out several alarming things. As of today you can no longer import your own content to Facebook Page notes. You must do so manually — right, like I’m going to physically make a FB note every time I make a blog post. Because, as FB puts it:

We want you to connect with your fans in the most effective ways possible. That’s why as of September 30th you’ll no longer be able to automatically import posts from your website to your Page notes. The best way to get people to interact with your content is to give them insight into the links you share on your Wall by adding personal comments and responding to feedback from fans.

Oh, so that’s the best way? Thanks, Facebook! You know best!

Dash also pointed out something that I’d found vaguely annoying: Facebook warns you everytime you leave Facebook, just like that kid who insists on leaving the hunting lodge after hearing screams and gurgles outside. Dash writes:

• Facebook is warning its users about the safety of a page which incorporates Facebook’s own commenting features, meaning even web sites that embrace Facebook’s technologies can be marginalized

• Facebook is displaying this warning despite the fact that Facebook’s own systems have indexed the page and found that it incorporates their own Open Graph information.

I know that railing against Facebook makes me the equivalent of your Uncle Ted who can’t even turn on a computer unaided and refuses to let go of his typewriter and buggy whip. Being a Facebook denier has cut me off from the circle of life. Unless I comb through the mind-numbing information feed of “Mary Mucous is listening to the Dave Matthews Band on Spotify!” “Yegreb Pronto likes Anique Kittenplan’s status” and “Barry Stinkus just read some stories about girls with big hooters on Yahoo!” I’ve missed out on pregnancies, engagements, weddings, deaths and other life-changing moments that folks used to get on the phone and gab about.

Of course I don’t have a phone any more, so that’s useless, too.

I guess it’s pointless to warn folks that “Facebook is made of people!” That’s what everyone likes about it.

In the comments on Dash’s piece, some people compare what Facebook is doing to how AOL “dumbed down” the internet when it was the primary portal for many beginning surfers. While I appreciate the news sharing and trafficbuilding aspects of Facebook and the “Like’ button, giant monolithic corporations that want to be all-inclusive never seem to work out, no matter how easy they make tagging your photo albums.

Speaking of Vermont, Beat Spy Inky Jen passed along this epic photo of a huge Batman carved from the icy terrain spotted by a passing motorist/blogger. (Click link for larger image.)

A little Googling reveals that this is the crowning glory of the Totem Pole Ski Shop in Ludlow, VT. Digging around we found some even more impressive photos of the two-story high sculpture:

[Photo by SkiDiva]
The masterpiece seems to have been crafted in February but as you can see from the more recent photo, Batman is surviving the rising temperatures. Of course, he won’t last forever…someday only a puddle will mark this great achievement. But the Legend of Snow Batman will live on in the hearts of men, yes, it will.

Once I was paid to review websites. In a magazine. And look what was cutting edge in 1997 in the pages of CMJ Monthly.

Click for a larger version.

DAMN! Warren Ellis is “the only writer with a web page”? How things change!

“Why American comics can ape Japanese manga without understanding what makes them work as stories.”

Some things never change!

“The SF series Transmetropolitan looks very cool.”

Had I but known…

As funny as this is, the next review — which I have no memory whatsoever of writing — is even better.

I wish we could still “Just ask Jerry.” It was all so simple then.

Oh yeah, that’s how the Federation rolls.

Take one part Kanye West’s completely solipsistic Twitter feed. Add in one part abstruse New Yorker cartoons. Result: comedy.

So according to I Watch Stuff, Christopher Nolan got the idea for INCEPTION from a Don Rosa story featuring Donald Duck and the Beagle Boys.

But according to Chris Sims, it was Calvin and Hobbes that gave Nolan’s dream epic its inspiration. Which to choose? And apparently, Matthew Vaughn didn’t want X-MEN FIRST CLASS to resemble either Donald Duck or Calvin and Hobbes and had to change 12 pages of plot so Cyclops didn’t suddenly put on a domino mask and start robbing banks.

NOTE: Despite numerous attempts we still haven’t seen INCEPTION, and it still hasn’t been entirely spoiled, but writing these things is hard!!

Actual Time-Warner Cable ad received in email moments ago.

Truly, it is a sign of the brotherhood of Con that Davy Jones and a stormtrooper can just kick back and enjoy a beer together.

Then there’s this. Hoppy Easter.

On Ben Templesmith’s prolific and squid-loving Twitter stream, he suddenly decided to do horrorscopes, so as a public service, we represent the following:

Aries: Don’t freak out much. You woke up today to find your nipples missing. They’ll be back tomorrow.

Taurus: That smell coming from your neighbour’s house isn’t actually rising damp. It’s the body of a certain loved one from last year.

Cancer: No one will like you today. It’s not the way you dress or anything. Today, it’s just you.

Gemini: You’ll meet a new lover today. Only later to find they reveal they’re actually your sibling tomorrow. You find you like it anyway.

Leo: We don’t do Leos.

Libra: Today you’ll find that severed head in the fridge that speaks to you all the time is actually just a bowl of cold beef casserole.

Virgo: Today you’ll start to regret that sex change operation. What? You never had one? Today you must ask your parents some tough questions

Scorpio: Don’t get out of bed today. Not if you want to keep the full use of your legs & not piss into a plastic bag the rest of your life.

Sagittarius: You’ll find the cracks in prison cell walls extremely interesting. This horoscope is actually valid thru til 2034 for you.

Capricorn: Today you’ll fly through the air & fight phallic alien rocket ships. Then the meds will wear off & you’ll be naked in a 7-11.

Aquarius: You may experience some turbulence in the bowel area. Good news is this requires hospitalization & finding out you have cancer.

Pisces: You’re just plain awesome today. Everyone around you thinks so. Ignore the sign taped on your back referencing your genitals.

In Gaelic. Dougal is perfectly cast. [Via David O Reilly]

BTW, if you’ve never seen Father Ted, it is a tear inducingly hilarious Gaelo-Britcom set in Ireland and focusing on some self-defeating priests stationed on a tiny island where nothing much happens. Except tea, over and over and over. It was the first creation of Graham Linehan, best known these days for The IT Crowd. There were 24 episodes produced in three seasons, but the series was cut short when its charming star, Dermot Morgan, dropped dead of a heart attack at a dinner party the day after he finished shooting the third season.

Technorati Tags: The Wonderful World of Legos

If you were going into the end of the world in 2012, with a cold, empty feeling because Gilligan’s Island had not yet been turned into a feature film, rest easy: you will not be cast into the void unfulfilled. Co-producer Charles Roven previously worked on the GET SMART movie, so you know it will be…a movie. The series creator Sherwood Schwartz is attached as executive producer. Variety dryly states “Logline’s being kept under wraps,” but for those who have not been near a TV for the last 40 years, the story involves hapless castaways who are tortured by the ineptitude of a skinny sailor who manages to keep them on a desert island despite weekly appearances of rock bands, mad scientists and doppelgangers.

While it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the title role capturing the essential “little buddyness” of the late Bob Denver, Schwartz envisions Michael Cera as Gilligan. Maybe Megan Fox can play Ginger and Arianna Huffington can play Mrs. Howell.

Casting ideas, anyone?

Since moving this blog, we’ve gotten a lot more, well, random information and pr coming in, and it’s becoming harder and harder to figure out what’s cool and what isn’t. There is so much amazing stuff happening every minute, and luckily we have Twitter, Facebook, SquareSpace and LinkedIn to tell us all about it. But it is getting harder to figure out what’s the REAL coolness – the true cutting edge of visionary consumption — and what’s just clogging the old pipes. In the spirit of discovery, we offer you three things that have been offered to us as cool — we’ll leave it to you, the reader to VOTE upon which is actually cool. And please feel free to defend your answer in the comments:

CONTESTANT #1: The Winter Olympics Biathlon!

The 2010 Winter Olympics may be over (one of the best ever) but the eternal appeal of women wearing lycra, skiing around and shooting things will linger with us for a long, long time. A timeless mixture of sex, violence and endurance that speaks to that it mean to be human and living in a nordic climate. BONUS: Canada’s TRON-inspired uniforms!

Contestant #2: PLASTIC BEACH

New Gorillaz album streaming at NPR. Damon Albarn supplies music and friends (Snoop Dogg, Bobby Womack, Lou Reed, Mos Def, Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys, Little Dragon, The Lebanese National Orchestra) while Jamie Hewlett supplies the visuals and band. “Plastic Beach” is a bit more tuneful and elegiac than the last two outings and has already spawned some nifty toon videos.

Contestant #3: BIG BANG THEORY T-SHIRTS

Apparently there is a website where you can buy the t-shirts worn buy Sheldon and other characters from the Big Bang Theory, the CBS sitcom about super-genius nerds who strive to fight their own alienation and become functioning members of society, meaning they can go to the local bar without being laughed at. Many of these t-shirts achingly capture the isolation of modern man, as he is both emboldened and imprisoned by technology.

And now it’s time to VOTE!

Since moving this blog, we’ve gotten a lot more, well, random information and pr coming in, and it’s becoming harder and harder to figure out what’s cool and what isn’t. There is so much amazing stuff happening every minute, and luckily we have Twitter, Facebook, SquareSpace and LinkedIn to tell us all about it. But it is getting harder to figure out what’s the REAL coolness – the true cutting edge of visionary consumption — and what’s just clogging the old pipes. In the spirit of discovery, we offer you three things that have been offered to us as cool — we’ll leave it to you, the reader to VOTE upon which is actually cool. And please feel free to defend your answer in the comments:

CONTESTANT #1: The Winter Olympics Biathlon!

The 2010 Winter Olympics may be over (one of the best ever) but the eternal appeal of women wearing lycra, skiing around and shooting things will linger with us for a long, long time. A timeless mixture of sex, violence and endurance that speaks to that it mean to be human and living in a nordic climate. BONUS: Canada’s TRON-inspired uniforms!

Contestant #2: PLASTIC BEACH

New Gorillaz album streaming at NPR. Damon Albarn supplies music and friends (Snoop Dogg, Bobby Womack, Lou Reed, Mos Def, Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys, Little Dragon, The Lebanese National Orchestra) while Jamie Hewlett supplies the visuals and band. “Plastic Beach” is a bit more tuneful and elegiac than the last two outings and has already spawned some nifty toon videos.

Contestant #3: BIG BANG THEORY T-SHIRTS

Apparently there is a website where you can buy the t-shirts worn buy Sheldon and other characters from the Big Bang Theory, the CBS sitcom about super-genius nerds who strive to fight their own alienation and become functioning members of society, meaning they can go to the local bar without being laughed at. Many of these t-shirts achingly capture the isolation of modern man, as he is both emboldened and imprisoned by technology.

And now it’s time to VOTE!

Last week, beat pal Jimmy Palmiotti shared the above link with us, and we enjoyed it mightily.

And then we got to thinking about the days when Bollywood musicals and their rapturous innocence were a secret underground thing. You had to live near the Indian cinema or near an Indian neighborhood to even know about them, Benny Lava.

Once upon a time you had to have cool friends who told you about a cool new remix or Sammo Hung or confess that they collected Fischer Price little people. And when you learned about such things you were in a secret little club and you felt cool about it. But it didn’t, like, take over your life.

And then came the Internet. Then came Taiwanese legislature brawls all over the place.

Is nothing sacred? Is nothing secret anymore?

The other day The Beat was walking around the Lower East Side with her gal pals of many years, and we observed how many fun times we’d had in the past. Granted we’re all old and out of it, but nobody seems to be going to the kinds of secret clubs and raves we used to enjoy. I mean now it’s all one big mailing list. Our pal Elim did point out a secret place to get great food that we’d never heard of, but we’d sooner die than reveal it here on the Internet.

We’ve sort of posted about this before, on and off. And our alarm was heightened when we awoke the other day to an interview on the Brian Lehrer show with a lady named Maggie Jackson who wrote a book called Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age and she mentioned how we’re “trapped on the surface” of everything and now lack the comprehension skills to analyze anything. We’ll drink to that because this post has already veered seriously off course aside from an overwhelming feeling of overall dread about everyone knowing who Sammo Hung is and having to dig deeper and deeper and deeper to get to the cool. God help us, we’ll probably die trying, Benny Lava.