I used to have a penchant for sifting through the obligatory 25-cent bin at just about every comic shop I could find. I wasn’t seeking lost, valuable treasures as much as I was seeking out a great story or inspiring artwork. Anyone hoping to stumble into a comic shop and walk out with an unrealized treasure is in for a sad realization, because they just don’t work that way. I’ve always leaned towards the eclectic, so someone else’s junk comic may just be an ideal find for me.
Usually, the comics just plain old sucked – but it’s hard to go wrong for a quarter. There’s a level of suck that can be reached that cyclically runs back around into the scope of ‘unintentionally awesome’.
Back in college, I picked up a few stray issues of The Puma Blues that I found in one such bin. After reading a whole lot of Sandman in high school, I became a fan of Michael Zulli’s artwork, so I was excited to find a whole comic series illustrated by him. While I couldn’t make much sense of the story, due in equal parts to missing issues and a storyline that was thick with dreamlike weirdness and shifting through time, it was only recently that I realized the significance of this series in the larger world of comic books and how they are distributed.
It all comes back to Cerebus’ creator Dave Sim, the Angry Man of Comics. The Deranged, Frothy Man of Comics. The Misogynistic, Unapologetic Man of Comics. Either way, he’s notoriously controversial and he takes comics very seriously, love him or hate him. It’s this seriousness, overblown or not, which changed the face of comics and how we collect them.
Initially published under Sim’s ‘Aardvark One International’ imprint, The Puma Blues moved to Mirage Comics after ‘The Puma Blues Distribution Incident’ of 1987. Sim’s own Cerebus comic was a very popular title at the time, so when Sim decided to not use Diamond Comics Distribution Services to distribute a Cerebus graphic novel, Diamond retaliated by arbitrarily deciding to also not carry The Puma Blues anymore. Because Diamond is now, and has always been, an almost monopolistic force when it comes to comic distribution to your neighborhood comic shop, this was a noticeable blow to both parties.
This battle led directly to Sim orchestrating a series of meetings to establish The Creators Bill Of Rights, which was established in 1988 by a handful of prominent independent comic book writers and artists. While this hasn’t completely stopped Diamond Comics from butting heads with small creators and shops, it marked an important landmark in the treatment of comics as a valid creative medium. The establishment of these ideas were instrumental in the formation of Image Comics in 1992, when many creators walked away from mainstream publishers Marvel and DC Comics and their questionable contracts to focus on original creations. Image has since established itself as the fourth largest comic book publisher in the United States, which is impressive when you consider that they’ve been around for only a fraction of the time that Marvel and DC have existed.
So, The Puma Blues is the little comic that changed the way that we collect today. And I found it in the back of my closet.
