Some coverage of a Cleveland specialty store that's out of touch with the real picture

The Land did some coverage of a comics store in the Cleveland area, and the way they describe all this is sadly not looking at the modern picture of where mainstream comicdom sunk down to:

Carol & John’s Comic Book Shop feels less like a retail space and more like a place where stories are handed down. Some people come in looking for something specific, some people come in just to browse, but everyone leaves with something. A kid walks around looking at a Spider-Man book, a longtime customer flips through new releases on a table in the center of the store, each one of them there for the same reason. They’re a part of a community.

This is part of why comic books endure. They survive because we share stories with each other. It is a part of how we got to where we are culturally. Comic book heroes are America’s mythology. Much like England has its Arthurian myths and Greece has its Hercules, we have Superman, and places like Carol & John’s are the reason why our heroes have endured for generations.

But do we have these creations appearing in modern stories that are readable anymore? Sadly, quality's gone down so badly, with Superman's downfall in story merit just the beginning. Yes, comics as a medium can survive in some form or other, but what about IPs owned by conglomerates? Why doesn't that matter?

For Dudas, the story stretches back even further, to a great-grandfather who used comic books as a bridge into a new country.

“My great-grandfather was a Polish immigrant,” he said. “He could speak English, but he couldn’t read or write it. So he would learn from the context by reading comic books.”

When his great-grandfather died, the comics were left to the kid who cared. Dudas was 6 or 7 years old and studied them closely. By the time he was 12, he was working in a comic shop. Then, later, he and his mother opened their own.

“Between my great-grandfather and my daughters, it’s five generations of comic books in the city of Cleveland,” Dudas said. “I could talk to my great-grandfather about Superman, and I could talk to my daughter about Superman.” It’s a bridge that ties them.

That inherited understanding is what turns stories into cultural touchstones. Spider-Man and Captain America aren’t just characters. They’re mirrors. These stories persist because their morality transcends eras and they answer the same questions for every generation. Questions about responsibility, sacrifice and how tough it can be to be a righteous person when it is so easy to give in and quit.

That, alas, is what modern leftists writers did, in a way. This part completely obscures the disaster Cap's stories became in 2002, after the regular series was cancelled and a Marvel Knights series replaced it, which turned out to be apologia for Islamic terrorism. It was so stunningly vile, and quickly degenerated into even more aimless propaganda that seemed more about blaming America than actually solving problems like barbarism in modernity. IIRC, that series was easily the shortest lived of the Knights imprint, being jettisoned after 2 years, but the damage that began there was sadly never fixed, and successive editors/writers/artists never tried to avoid the kind of pettiness that first brought down Cap as an icon, seeing how later, there'd be stories where Steve Rogers was repeatedly replaced by other characters, some of whom were diversity-pandering tokens, and the worst moment was when Cap was made to say "hail Hydra". And Joe Quesada never apologized for what he enabled.

I think it's impressive the store owner's great-grandfather learned reading from comics, but the way this article airbrushes the bigger picture concerning the moral collapse of mainstream comicdom is very appalling.

I asked John whether comics had always shaped who he was, or if it was something that he discovered about himself later in life.

“I’m a better man for it,” he said. “My morality was developed around it.”

But was that decades ago? Because not many people seem to have grown attached to the creations since, and morality isn't developed based on the newer stories post-2000, based on the defeatist politics and ideologies they fell victim to since.

On Free Comic Book Day, thousands of people pass through the doors, and tens of thousands of comics are given away. The store provides free vendor space for local artists, hosts cosplay groups, and runs charity events that have helped generate more than 200,000 meals for the Greater Cleveland Food Bank. Free Comic Book Day is scheduled for May 2 this year.

On a Saturday, standing in the middle of the shop, that story becomes easy to read. Comic books endure because we need heroes. Not perfect ones, but flawed ones who try the way we try. We pass these stories down because they help us explain who we are and who we want to be.

“I believe in the hobby,” Dudas said. “I believe this hobby makes you a better person.”

I'm afraid the hobby alone doesn't do that. It depends on if you understand any of the messages clearly, show the guts to tackle challenging issues, which wasn't what the Knights volume of Cap did, seeing how it followed a leftist Blame-America narrative. Why, even reading literature alone doesn't make one a better person, if said literature happens to be built on negativity. It's a shame we seem to have here folks too full of themselves to show the courage to admit that, like Hollywood movie production, even comicdom's fallen victim to political correctness that won't be fixed by painting a superficial picture of the hobby that doesn't acknowledge what's gone wrong over the years. Also, have they considered what a disturbing emphasis on villainy turned up in the past 2 decades, sometimes at the heroes' expense? That kind of approach is also what brought down Cap, and makes it hard to believe Marvel's staff at the time respected heroism. Comicdom may continue to survive, but if store owners aren't willing to raise all the relevant issues, all because they may worry publishers won't do business with them, then they've failed again to solve anything.