Mike Gold: Where’s Our Next Buck Coming From?

Mike Gold

ComicMix's award-winning and spectacularly shy editor-in-chief Mike Gold also performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com (search: Hit Oldies) every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information.

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7 Responses

  1. Martha Thomases says:

    As always, the solution is — more Super-Pets!

  2. There’s a Renaissance of high quality, true all-ages comics these days that I really have hopes will enchant the younger generation and continue to delight the rest of us, if only people would give them a chance.

    “All-ages” has such a negative connotation that so many people won’t even touch the books, dismissing them as “kid’s comics” without even knowing what they’re about. In my local comic shop everything that even smacks of being child-friendly is relegated to an area called “Kids” (including all Archie Comics books, which I not only enjoy but find better written than many “serious” comics) and, unlike everything else, are sealed in polybags, presumably so kids won’t ruin them with sticky little fingers. I have no problem opening a polybagged book if I think I might want to buy it, but I’m sure not everyone realizes you have a right to peruse before you purchase.

    The truth is that the well-known all-ages books of today like Mouseguard, Stuff of Legend, Princeless and Cowboy aren’t KIDS’ books, they’re EVERYONE books.

    • Mike Gold says:

      I’m absolutely with you on the Archie titles, Brandon. And for the past several years Archie’s been a lot more gutsy about content — particularly when you consider the fact that they’re more dependent upon newsstand sales where a lot of controversial books get returned to the distributor without getting any display.

      • I’ve enjoyed Archie books a lot more than anything “mainstream” for the past several years. The four Big Two books I read just barely make the cut to stay on my pull list.

  3. Gevian Dargan says:

    I was that kid. Fordham Comics was my first experience with “Comic Book Guy.” It was this Asian dude who acted like the mere fact that I came in to spend money looking for New Warriors 1 (because I discovered New Warriors 2 at my local newsstand) was messing up his day. HOW DARE I?!! He must’ve had a hot date at three in the afternoon. I’ve always said that “sophistication” in comics did not have to go too much further than the type of work that Marv Wolfman, Chris Claremont, Len Wein and others were turning out in the pages of New Teen Titans and Uncanny X-Men. My other personal favorite was Icon which was written by the late, great Dwayne McDuffie (whose Double Dragon series I really liked, too). I also thought that Archie Comics did a wonderful job of producing accesible comics for both kids and adults with their Archie Adventure series. I have runs of TMNT, Knuckles, and Sonic (which was the weakest of the three). Those were true “All Ages” books.

    Vertigo, Paradox Press, Max, and even stuff like Humanoids’ The Metabarons (which is a great, great read) all have their place in the industry, but as you said, it became snowball of excess.

    I can’t wait to see what you have to say about “retro-expansion.”

  1. June 27, 2012

    […] Last week I bitched and moaned about how we’ve turned our backs on comics that can be appreciated by readers of all ages in order to follow the money that kids ain’t got and some adults might have. I also tied this into continuity impenetrable to newcomers that is spread over about a hundred dollars’ worth of monthly product. I can be snotty that way. […]