Booksteve Tweets

I am back on Twitter! This brand new account is my third personal account. I never really did much with the other two and a few months ago, Twitter locked me out of my account citing "possible suspicious activity." I was instructed to change my password and that instructions to do so had been sent to the email with which I had originally signed up. That would be one of a number of emails I eliminated a few years back. At one point, I found myself with a dozen different email addresses! I had long since consolidated them into my original email address. Twitter didn't care. Their advice was to contact my email carrier and work with them to re-establish my email address with them so I could then re-establish my Twitter account...and then apparently delete the email address again!

I should add that the reason I couldn't switch and use my actual email address is because it was already in use for another account. Over the past few years  I have been two other (real) people on Twitter. These were folks who needed a Twitter presence but either weren't tech-savvy or simply didn't have the time to keep up with it. By this point they're doing their own and I added one's email address to their account...but it still wouldn't let me delete my own and use it myself!

In my frustration, I wrote a long email to the Twitter tech service folks detailing in careful, simple English exactly what happened and what needed to be done to fix it. They assured me that it simply couldn't be done unless I restored my long lost, unwanted email address.

Personally, I think they were lying. 

That said, I found that I was able now to create an entirely new Twitter account without using an email at all!

I'm still setting things up but I already have some followers (and some obvious fake trolls!) and I'd appreciate it if you'd give it a look-see if you Tweet.

At the moment, I've decided to use my Twitter to share some of the many photos, anecdotes, and stories I've gathered in my decades of bookselling! Those have been some of my most popular posts here at the blog over the years but I have plenty more that have never been documented so check me out! Info as to where to find me is in the above photo.

Thanks!

Back Issue Wins the Eisner!

TwoMorrows celebrates its 25th anniversary this year and the San Diego Comic Con celebrates its 50th! TwoMorrows' BACK ISSUE magazine celebrated its 100th issue not that long ago, too.

I haven't been to San Diego in 29 years but last year I had a piece I had written in their official program book and this year, I'm represented in the tribute book to the late Batton Lash by a reprint of a long interview I transcribed for TwoMorrows' COMIC BOOK COLLECTOR. Assuming it remains unedited, Batton even tells a story about me in the interview.

But there or not, last night...I won an Eisner Award! Or rather, I shared the Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism with super editor Michael Eury and my fellow BACK ISSUE contributors such as John Trumbull, Andy Mangels, Jerry Smith, Rob Kelly, Mark Arnold, and all the rest! A learned bunch of geeks all around!

Oh, and we also shared the award itself with the digital mag PANELXPANEL. It was a tie!

Up top are the three issues that contained my writing last year. I wrote about Archie meeting the Punisher, about the many non-Archie Archie types of comics' Bronze Age, and a long, well-received  piece on Shang-Chi, Marvel's Master of Kung-Fu. I also contributed transcriptions, research, and moral support assistance to various other writers in other issues last year.

This year I only have one BACK ISSUE article, on Holo-Man. Came out a couple months back. I've already turned in one for 2020, though, on Mike Sekowsky's MANHUNTER 2070. And I have until November to finish another long piece for next year that covers...Well...Shhh! You'll have to wait and see.

Can't say enough about Michael Eury, by the way. A thoroughly professional editor and yet he never loses track of the fact that most of us aren't in a position to spend 24/7 on our assignments. And most importantly, he never loses sight of his audience. He fearlessly flies his own lingering fanboy tendencies and realizes that that's what his readership wants.

It's that kind of thinking that deservedly won him--and thanks to him, the rest of us!--the Eisner Award this year!

If you haven't looked at a copy of BACK ISSUE lately, check your local comic shop shelves or the TwoMorrows website. If you like what we do around here, I think you'll like what you see in BACK ISSUE.

ABC's New Fall Season 50 Years Ago--1969

The Batman Theme

In 1966, the Batman Theme was perhaps the most recorded song of the year. Certainly ONE of the most recorded songs of the year. Here are just three trade ads for three different versions, all from the same issue of CASH BOX magazine.

Stranger Things 3--The Return of Waldenbooks!

In case you haven't heard, STRANGER THINGS 3 premieres overnight tonight on Netflix. It's 1985 and mall life was still a major thing so a new mall figures prominently in the series' plotline. The producers have gone to apparently great pains to reproduce the look of so many long gone stores that used to be mall mainstays. One of these is Waldenbooks, my alma mater! Looks like they've done a reasonably good job...except they got the color scheme wrong!

Having spent most of the 1980s as a Waldenbooks Assistant Manager, I can assure you that the company insisted that every store look alike and that the corporate-provided signage was, as seen here in this 1987 shot I took myself, dark blue and a deep yellow. ST3 has the color scheme as red and white. 

Now, here's the thing! Below is the front of my store when it reopened after a week and a half of remodeling in 1993. This was the first store in the country designed with a different look using the red and white color scheme...eight years after ST3. 

Someone told me I need to stop being so negative. I'm actually very pleased that they've re-created what was my second home for the better part of three decades. Just wished they had asked me first. ;P