It's Andy Fish!

My sons’ comic book dealer company, Robo Picto Comics, was going to setup at a show at a Craft Beer Brewery in Medfield, MA last Sunday. I’ve had a long standing offer to fill in whenever the need arises and they need a second pair of hands. Slated to help at this show was Picto CEO Joe Fish’s best friend Matt who is a Massachusetts State Trooper. As a State Trooper he sometimes gets called in. There was one year he was set to do Baltimore with Joe and at the last minute couldn’t. Joe didn’t tell anybody and he did the show by himself.

Over my Sunday morning coffee I texted Joe Fish:

“Is Matt still in for the show?”

“He was forced.” was his reply.

I sent a HA HA emoji to it.

A couple of hours later I asked him how the show looked. This isn’t code, it’s comic collector talk for “should I drive an hour and check it out?” These tiny little shows are sprouting up more and more at these tiny venues, and while you might think there’d be nothing but junk you’d be wrong. At one of these shows out in Western MA I found a WORLD’S FINEST #2 from 1940- a very rare DC Book featuring both Batman and Superman in nice condition for $1k. That book just three years later is now worth about $3k.

#3 son warned me that if I went it was a box digging show. Another code right? Some buyers like my good friend Mark, and myself– don’t dig through boxes. We assume anything you have in a box is going to be common so we only shop the display books.

Meanwhile Joe texted back “It might be worth coming down.” And then he sent a few pictures of books from the 1940s and 50s that I might be interested in. They seemed to have good prices, the weather was chilly but sunny and Veronica was stuck working on a Magic The Gathering card that would be do the next day so I opted to hop in the convertible and drive down.

The brewery was tiny but unlike every other one I’ve been to this one had Coca Cola (I hate craft beer) and pizza. I ended up sharing a pizza with Joe and the dealer who was set up across from him and it was very good.

I walked the dealer room and managed to find a book that Joe somehow missed (Joe had bought all of the books in the room I would have been interested in). It was a 1965 Batman comic book from Brazil. The cover (pictured above) was bright and colorful and almost like an art print.

The interiors reprint old American Batman Comics in black and white;

Most of the foreign editions are black and white. Comics are even more disposable in these countries than they were in America for the time– making them even rarer which is why I hunt them down.

Oh and as I walked in to the show Joe had the premium spot right at the entrance– I walked over and said hello.

“Where’s Matthew?” He looked at me with some confusion- number one son’s name is Matthew, and his State Trooper friend is called by his last name by his friend group, but since I’m not in the friend group I call him by his first name.

“Didn’t you get my message? He was forced.”

My turn to be confused. “I thought you meant you forced him to come to the show?”

He laughed and told me I’ve spent too many years working for myself and I’ve lost the lingo. Forced now means you were called in to work.

Well, I asked Veronica when I got home how she would take the comment and she agreed with me.

So these kids and their made up work phrases. I guess I’d need a translator.