Sunday 29 June 2014

The Late, Lamented Moondance Comics

DAVE SIM:
The late, lamented Moondance Comics -- the first time I ever saw a comic-book store in an upscale shopping mall and I was doing a signing there! How cool is that? It was also where I first met Kevin Eastman (see photo: Kevin faked me out, I thought he was going for his gun) and where Michael Zulli and Stephen Murphy showed me a few sample pages from a comic book they were working on to be called THE PUMA BLUES.

You know, Dave. It's a SHOPPING MALL. Middle of the day. It's really not that SUNNY in here.

7 comments:

Birdsong said...

Horrible sign, cramped quarters, bad fashion. Takes me back...

Travis Pelkie said...

Looks like Kevin Eastman was going to tell Dave "you ain't Fat, you ain't nothin'! You ain't nothin'!" And then sing a delightful Michael Jackson parody.

"Upscale shopping mall" is a contradiction in terms, no?

Anonymous said...

Comics historians sometimes claim that the Direct Market saved the comics industry from the low-profit, inefficient, outright fraudulent, and Mafia-controlled Independent Distributor system, and there's something to that. The smaller, independent publishers (A-V, WaRP, Fantagraphics, Eclipse, First, Pacific, Malibu, Image) probably couldn't have arisen without the DM. Dave himself championed the non-returnability aspect of that market (and, later, the speculators' boom of the 1990s) as being a great advantage to the self-publishing creator.

The downside of that is that the comics industry turned inward, becoming more insular. Fans would make the deliberate journey to the local comics shop, and civilians would rarely encounter comics at all and thus never have the opportunity to become fans and readers.

So placing comics shops in malls was probably a good idea, ensuring a steady stream of pass-by traffic, some of whom would wander into a comics shop if the business looked attractive and become customers.

One downside of that is that mall rents tend to be prohibitively expensive to smaller, independent, low-profit businesses.

-- Damian T. Lloyd, pos

Jeff Seiler said...

Yeah, rock-star Dave days. You still got that knee-length leather coat, Dave?

CerebusTV said...

And there's my dear friend Harry Kremer from Now and Then Books in Kitchener in the background!

Karen Pratt Smith (Zulli) said...

WOW - I've never seen this photo. A moment in time that changed my beloved's life forever. Thank you, Dave x

shadowfoot said...

Whoa, Hampshire Mall, Hadley, MA!

I worked there for a year or so.