Highway 62

Has it really been two weeks? I guess it has. How the time flies.

I spent Thursday of last week up in my old stomping grounds of Los Angeles. Not that I stomped there very long, mind you, but long enough to get a feel for the place. What brought me up there, you ask?

Two things. One, Grant Morrison was signing at Meltdown on Sunset Blvd that evening. And since I was a chucklehead and didn’t know that he was coming to Wizard World, I wasn’t able to get anything signed by him. As it happens, I’m a big enough fanboy to make a second trip to do so.

The second thing was to do some selling. In this case, it was selling retailers on Strangeways. Figure the book is going to be soliciting in a few months, so I could do some legwork and talk to some of the better retailers who I could reach in an afternoon and help my book to stand out from the seething mass that is Previews.

First stop was at Comics Unlimited in Westminster. Well, that was the second stop, really. The first stop was my usual lunch with a friend in Irvine. At Del Taco. But not just any Del Taco. Del Taco #125, which is, as anyone who’s been to more than three Del Tacos is the best of the entire chain. Don’t know if it’s in the water or sunshine or what, but it stands out and above the crowd.

I mention Comics Unlimited because I had occasion to shop there when I was in college, so it was a little intimidating walking in there as a guy trying to sell his book rather than just coming in for the weekly haul. Luckily the guy behind the counter was enthusiastic about new titles and something different, which Strangeways certainly is. Or at least I’m trying to make it such.

My next stop? Well, there were countless opportunities to ride the brakes once I hit the slagheap known as the four-level interchange (where the 5/101/10 collide in a traffic engineer’s nightmare.) And did I mention that I’d dressed for the weather three days ago and not that day’s 80-degree temperatures? Bleh.

Finally the Valley. Got there before three thirty, and that was really a tad too late. Traffic had begun to fuse into a solid mass, both north and southbound (and remember kids, there’s only a limited number of ways through the hills once rush hour hits). I made a quick stop at House of Secrets, which had been recommended to me by Josh Fialkov (he of Hoarse and Buggy fame) as a good shop run by good guys who actively push stuff that’s on the fringes (so long as it’s good).

Funnily enough, I’d shopped there back when I was working as an animator at Netter Digital five years ago or so. They’d moved a couple doors down and condensed a bit, but otherwise remained an outstanding comic shop, giving equal shelf space to mainstream and indies, racking things so that they were easy to get to, etc. You know, all the things that comics shops need to be doing. The guy working the store was again enthusiastic about Strangeways, going so far as to trade me a copy of The Guardian for my ashcan. I can tell ya, I got the better side of that deal. Hell, I got a boxful of these ashcans just taking up space.

I know. That means that I’m not giving them away fast enough.

My last stop in the Valley was Earth 2, which I think is a great store. They’re not the biggest, not by any stretch, but everything is clean and well-presented. Comics are easy to get to and look over (can you believe that some stores don’t let you look through the comic before you buy it? Me neither.) Though neither of the principal partners in the store were there, the gentleman who helped me was well-read in what was going on in comics, and was able to make enthusiastic recommendations of books to the folks who came in (which I can’t stress the importance of). Again, warm reception to the book, and more helpfully, recommendations of other shops to hit up. Of course, my time was running out. I wanted to hit Meltdown well before the signing started, then get down to Cantor’s for dinner.

Dinner at Cantor’s. You just have to do it. Particularly if you’re a pastrami fiend like myself. Which I am.

Traffic, however, did not cooperate. My memory of how things worked years ago didn’t do anything but get me in trouble. I headed into the jaws of death, pulling onto the 405 south of the 101. It ran smoothly for a mile or two. Then shut down.

I kicked myself for not taking Sepulveda. But you live through this stuff. As traffic jams go, it was relatively pleasant, actually. I rolled the windows down and felt the cool breeze of sundown roll through the passs, listening to whatever my iPod felt like playing. I wasn’t hungry or thirsty or wanting of anything in particular. It was an oddly-placed moment of peace, the sort of which is all-too-infrequent these days.

As lovely as my moment of metropolitan zen was, I still had things to do once I got down to the westside. Things to do and not much time to do them. Cantor’s was going to have to wait. I rode from the 405 to Meltdown all along Sunset. And as an aside, if you want LA in a nutshell, just drive Sunset from one end to the other. You’ll get a taste of just about everything, from Bel Air’s creepily totalitarian gates to West Hollywood’s pursuit of all that is trendy and now to Slavadorean nightlife and the folks just hanging along the fringes.

Arrived at Meltdown in time to get some coffee and try to get a hold of someone to show the book to, before Mr. Morrison was set to take the stage (as it was.) Finally managed to hook up with Gaston, who seemed to be in charge of the whole shebang (at least that’s what Parker told me) and, in spite of his splitting head and last-moment preparation for the event, managed to give me a few minutes to talk about the book and look it over.

While I’m here, let’s talk about Meltdown. It’s HUGE. The only place that I know to rival it in terms of selection is Comic Relief. Though Meltdown certainly has more toys and chatchkes (including vintage 7-11 Slurpee cups featuring your favorite DC characters, like . . . Metamorpho and Captain Boomerang? What the?!) There’s also a great selection of art and photography books, as well as minicomics and smaller than small press comics. It’s pretty intimidating, actually. But you know what? It looks like a store that anyone in the neighborhood could and would walk into in search of cultural artifacts of nearly any stripe.

About the Morrison talk/signing, I’m not going to bother attempting a transcript or anything of the like. That would be lunacy. Besides, I already did something like that for Newsarama years and years ago (okay in 2003, at SDCC). And really, there was very little directly comics related content. Sure, there was talk of the iconic take on the new Superman book and some discussion of why he didn’t care for working in Marvel’s street-level universe, but a lot of the discussion was about things like the view from the Fifth Dimension and jump-starting human evolution. Oh yeah, and talk about magic. Or is that Magick? I know there’s a difference between the two, but couldn’t tell you what it is.

Though I can say that I stood right next to Robbie Williams the entire time. Which was weird. Weirder still that he wasn’t recognized by anyone other than a handful of fans after the talk ended. I guess he hasn’t broken in America. Even after “Milennium.”

But I finally have a first edition of Arkham Asylum signed by both of the principal artists involved. Knock one item off my list of fanboy dreams to realize.