Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by retailer Steve Bennett of Mary Alice Wilson's Dark Star Comics in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This week, Bennett talks about working in a comic store on Wednesdays (or not), and recently rediscovered treasures of the Golden Age.

Of course one of the principal perks of working in a comic book shop in the first place is being able to work Wednesdays, and for fifteen years I was lucky enough to do just that.  Oh, I managed to miss a couple over the years but so dedicated was I to my job that I always arranged my vacations so I returned on a Tuesday and even worked my shift after a death in the family (it was better than the alternative--doing nothing).

Winter, summer, spring and fall in all sorts of weather (though mostly I seem to remember a disproportionate number of torrential downpours) I would get myself up entirely too early and drive the twenty minutes to neighboring Springfield.  There I would pick up the week's Diamond shipment at the UPS hub, usually filling my mid-sized Saturn all the way to the roof with boxes.

For years I've cut open boxes and broken them down, counted and recounted comics, made and remade displays.  As I'm sure all of you know a lot of labor goes into processing the new comics but I would never call it 'work' exactly.  It was fun, decidedly the best part of my work week; being amongst the first to see (and sometimes even read) the comics, recovering a twinge of the thrills of childhood Christmas mornings past as I rifled my way through boxes and pulled out presents (which of course I had  ordered for myself and still had to pay for...).

But starting in June there have been some changes in the Dark Star schedule and for the last couple of weeks someone else has been having all that fun.  I won't say I was 'burnt out' exactly but I was definitely in something of a rut and have found, not to play the cliche card too hard, a change really is as good as a rest.

Do I miss it?  Surprisingly little.  I still get the opportunity to chat with our regulars when they come in for the pull files; I just get to breeze into the store refreshed and relaxed at noon to do it.   Do I regret having done it all these years?  Hardly. If you really want to know the business of running a direct market comic book shop you have to work Wednesdays.  It should never be your only busy day but it is where you pick up the skill sets you need to deal with both stock and customers, and how to introduce one to the other.  And I'm genuinely glad someone else will get to benefit from this experience.

And I got to see things I wouldn't have believed if I hadn't been there myself.  Like a couple of months ago when Tad the manager (he's my witness) and myself were elbow deep into a freshly opened box of comics when a pretty young woman of maybe 20 came into the store.  She passed us on her way towards the back of the store and just as I pulled another double handful of comics out of the box she smiled at us and said (I quote, without embellishment or exaggeration):

'Ooooh, comics'.

There you go my friends, the perfect slogan for a national campaign for comics and/or comic shops.  It doesn't have to be done in a dirty, salacious way (like the current Axe body spray ads, which of course are a grotesque rip-off of the Hai Karate cologne ads of my youth); just focus on a pretty girl coming into a comic book shop and watch everyone stop dead in their tracks...until she says the line.

Although it'll never sell the same number of copies as the Civil Wars trade paperback I certainly hope you all have ordered copies of I Shall Destroy all the Civilized Planets!  The Comics of Fletcher Hanks.  Fantagraphics Books has certainly outdone themselves, producing a singularly beautiful artifact collecting Golden Age stories featuring the unique and haunting (i.e. primitive and grotesque) vision of artist Fletcher Hanks.

You don't expect Fantagraphics to champion a bunch of old super-hero and jungle girl comics (though recent issues of Comics Journal have included a color section featuring comic book reprints from the 40s spotlighting specific artists), but then the back cover is covered with quotes from Kurt Vonnegut, R. Crumb and Gary Panter announcing that something ordinarily considered lowbrow trash has been rescued and is now deemed worthy of serious consideration as 'outsider art.'

I'm glad Hanks is finally getting some serious mainstream appreciation at long last thanks to this book, but this time I can honestly say I'm ahead of the curve.  Thanks to the efforts of Bill Black and such AC titles as Men of Mystery I've been unironically enjoying the original and apocalyptic stories of Stardust, the Super Wizard for years.  So it would be nice if Bill got some of the credit for Hanks' rediscovery.

The opinions expressed in this column is solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.