By Randy Zimmerman
We'll start with my background. Hope you don't mind, it's a little long winded, but I'll try to keep it short.
Grew up with comics. Comics taught me more than my restrictive parents who initially thought comics were way too violent for my young mind to read. Keep in mind that this was the 70's, LONG before cable and video games. Anyone owning a personal computer was the stuff of crazy science fiction, and Star Trek was as close to a cell phone that anyone was going to see for 15+ years or so. In fact Star Trek was on in prime time on one of the three TV stations we could get on the set.
Restricting me from comics only made me want them more. I researched, read, walked home from school and absorbed any scrap of information on comics I could at the local library (which included Fiefer's Great Comic Book Heroes and Daniels' Comix: The History Of Comic Books In America - I currently own 2 copies of each) or wherever I could find it. Comics were my rock, my entertainment, my value base, and my sanity.
I fondly remember spending hours in our fenced in woods, in a tree house my brothers built and abandoned when they left home (which was at the magic age of 18 with little, if any, hesitation) reading Carl Bark's duck comics because that and Strange Adventures (featuring Adam Strange) was about the best adventure comics my Mom would allow in the house, or on the grounds. I remember getting my ass beaten with a coal shovel when Mom discovered I had smuggled a Batman comic (80 page Giant) into the yard.
Mom finally relented when she looked through a Twilight Zone Digest I had bought that had a morality tale of a guy making a deal with Satan. She rationalized that having superheroes in the house was better than pictures of the devil and reluctantly "allowed" me to buy superhero comics with my allowance.
The first comics I ever bought were Secret Origins #1 and the short lived reprints of Legion of Superheroes #1. next came Marvel Team-Up #6 (Spider-Man and The Cat) and it went on from there. Soon I was collecting every kind of superhero comic I could buy sell or trade for. My Mom had created a living, breathing, comics nerd. During my Junior High School years I used to walk home 2 miles from school so I could walk through my small hometown of Montrose, stop at Duggan's Drug Store and straighten out their comic rack for a buck's worth of comics a week.
High School was spent drawing comics (again, I blame my restrictive parents who rationed me to two pieces of notebook paper a day, so I quickly learned to divide the page up into panels and draw whole stories), and living, breathing, and researching comics. Looking back on it, I see it as an escape from a terribly restrictive childhood and a refuge from a religion I had already rationalized as "not for me". In an effort for acceptance I was baptised at age 15, then graduated from school at the age of 17. My parents started me in school a year earlier than most kids because the family doctor said I was more than ready for it. I did a lot of walking home from school, alone time in my room and woods, then in High School I was accepted for my Junior and Senior years at Genesee Area Skill Center for Commercial Art and also held down an after school job at a hardware store in Downtown Flint. Eventually my folks got me a car, just so they didn't have to drive me back and forth to work.
It was also during this time that I had a small comic strip in my hometown paper, The Montrose News. I'm sure they were just patronizing me, but they gave me full reign to write an adventure strip, Silvermane, that I quickly wrote myself into a corner with. My printing history and relationship with newspapers had begun.
Driving home from work I discovered the Front Page Bookstore had comics (as well as all the other magazines and even an adult isle where I received most of my sexual education). In fact, they got comics from one of the first direct distributors in the country (Big Rapids) and got comics a whopping three weeks earlier than all the other places. I was in heaven. At this time I also got to know the budding independent market spawning Cerebus, as well as a number of Underground Comics (a favorite was George Metzger's Moondog comic). I also remember spending a few lunch hours at a couple of awesome bookstores in downtown Flint, where I bought collected comics in paperback form, many of those books I still own today.
During my Senior year in High School (I did lots of illustrations that year for the high school yearbook) Star Wars came out and life changed. I remember getting mentioned from the graduation podium for being the kind of independent spirit that would go on to do BIG things because I was my own person. The heckling, pointing, and name calling had ended around the Sophomore year, and what little respect came at
graduation (where I found out there were a few girls that had DEEP crushes on me I was never able to act on - LOL!). My older sister graduated in '76 when everyone's school colors were red, white and blue, and the religion consider the Flag as idol worship, so my sister refused to wear her graduation gown. The year after ('77) it was our school colors, red and black, so I wore my gown to the school rumor that I had thumbed my nose at my religion for doing so, I guess that's what brought the attention to my "individuality". I graduated with a 3.9 and councilors telling me I NEEDED to go to college and a religion that was telling me we were past due for the end of the world. The only school teaching comics (Kubert's) was way too expensive and in New Jersey, so I wasn't going.
Right after graduating I got a job at Circus World in the newly built Genesee Valley Mall. It was a third shift stocking shelves job that put me at an opposite schedule than the parents. I now had a legit excuse not to attend the church meetings, make a paycheck, and have complete autonomy because my hours were so funky, I began absorbing late night movies on my days off (blaming my third shift schedule for keeping me awake). Luckily I didn't discover strip clubs during this period or my life would have probably gone in a whole other direction.
After getting my hours reduced at Circus World I looked around for other employment to pay my bills and comic habit. After working for a short time at an ice cream parlor I got a job at a pinball arcade, Starcade, on Miller Rd, right across from the Kmart. Hours there really exploded as the owner didn't want to stay on site and he needed someone to watch the machines for the long hours they were open. I seem to remember them closing at 1 or 2 am, anyway, there were times when I just slept in the store as opposed to driving home. Then I got offered a place to sleep a few miles away at a fellow employee (and best friend)'s house, so at 18 I was out of the house and about on my own (had my first Christmas when I was 19 - that was weird.).
Working at the Starcade gave my friend and I access to a back storage room that we convinced the boss to allow us to run a comic shop out of. Trilogy Bookstore was born. We had the first comic shop in Genesee County, and got comics directly from the same direct distributor that Front Page did (Big Rapids).
I sold the first Elf quest comics, Cerebus, and the Byrne/Clairmont/Austin X-men out of there. We made a little money, ran radio ads, actually hired a kid to watch the store (which got totally boring after awhile), and bought a small TV just so we could watch Star Trek reruns in the afternoon. Our venture ended when the Starcade's owner found our bookkeeping and wanted to charge us rent (we were already running his pinball arcade- sometime racking up 80 hours a week), so, bored with selling bad comics that I could do better, we shut the comic shop down. I remember getting our last comics shipment after we closed and frantically trying to scrape up the $125 to cover the bill (it was a HUGE week as Conan #50 had come out).
Met my first wife during this period and let "life" get in the way. Eventually, I was fired from the pinball arcade for mouthing off to the boss (who had lost my respect, I was already looking for new employment by this time anyway), got married while working part time as a short order cook for a golf course, and soon found full time employment at The Front Page Bookstore, where I worked for the next decade, eventually becoming regional manager, responsible for three bookstores at once.
In my off time I started looking for work in comics. I had my first story (Lindyjax and The Old Tin Box) accepted by Just Imagine Comic and Stories, and my first story printed in Journey #11 (I'm J.B. Space) before I got divorced from the first wife. During the divorce Tales From The Aniverse #1 was printed from Arrow Comics, during the black and white "boom" and quickly turned doing comics into a "job". then the black and white "bust" happened, I became pretty homeless, worked at a few comic shops and self printed Tales as WeeBee Comics. Before doing that, and during the divorce, I was offered an apprentice job at Marvel from Sid Jacobson (who was doing the short lived Star Comics Kids line with them at the time). I turned them down cold when I learned how much it paid ($9000 a year), that I would have to move to New York and TRY to survive- away from my daughter, and deal with a boss who had already left me a bad impression. No way that was gong to happen, and apparently I had burned a bridge or two in the turn-down, which was okay because the feeling was more than mutual.
After meeting my current wife and a small spat of unemployment while looking for more comic book work (from anyone, but also from a newly formed Caliber Press), I found employment with The Great Put-On, a local t-shirt printer, where I quickly became the art department working full time, and then eventually part time as the art department eventually computerized and my workload time was cut to a fraction of the time (going from rub-on lettering and camera shots to computer and print outs on vellum). During that time I printed as Massive Comics, printing another 3 Tales From The Aniverse and an adult tile names Xcapade (that I made good money on, where barely breaking even with Tales). I was there for 11-12 years until it drove me crazy (almost literally). I then became the art department at another shirt shop that treated me good for awhile, but soon I realized there was no way I was going to be happy working for anyone. After another four years, and almost suffering another nervous breakdown, I had an offer to go into the t-shirt business with two other partners, so we formed All-Star Screenprinting and Graphics.
During the time of leaving Great-Put On, Working for the other T-shirt shop, and starting my own business, I restarted the hibernated Arrow Comics, self publishing well over fifty individual issues from a wide range of folks for over four or five years. I did Arrow Comics in partnership with Scott Moore, who had worked with me at a comic shop I ran in Bay City during the WeeBee Comics days. Scott was listed as "Publisher" and his main job was dealing with diamond Distributors because they had, on occasion, brought me to the brink of madness when I was self publishing as WeeBee and Massive. During this period I printed Oz comics, tried to print a War Of The Worlds series (I had done an awesome arc with Caliber Press and wanted to do more), and a number of other titles including my own Spank The Monkey. There were a number of other false starts and unpublished issues before doing Arrow, just as there were other false starts and unpublished projects afterwards.
The major thing I learned, and was told, while doing Arrow Comics was that there was NO respect in the direct market for almost anyone who was self publishing. Diamond was constantly changing reps with us, as well as their rules and guidelines. Luckily, Arrow Comics was "grandfathered" into their paperwork, which gave is a little leeway, considering the THOUSANDS of copies of comics we sold in Arrow's first run (where I worked for a while as Art Director). With this version of Arrow (3.0, 2.0 had a couple of issues of The Dead printed before Ralph and Stu ran out of money) we sold HUNDREDS, all with product as good, or sometimes better, that the previous versions.
The major factor with Arrow Comics this time around was that Diamond had manipulated the market into being almost the sole distributor of comic product ("He who controls the spice controls the universe"). Their primary goal was to promote larger corporate companies and shirk off any new and upcoming companies by giving us a different discount structure and going out of their way to discourage their clients (the comic shop retailers) from buying any product from the Green Section of their Previews Catalog. I quickly learned that we were looked at as a "pulls only" company with retailers only ordering enough to fill their up front orders, or "pull" customers. I tried to shift Arrow's product line from more marketable titles (like Oz, Wonderland and War Of The Worlds) to a more market oriented product (like the Barbarian Korvus, or the political science fiction title Semantic Lace, ever restarting our zombie title The Dead, but to little avail).
We butted heads with Diamond on almost ever turn. We'd get a successful book running, like changing the art team on the well written Korvus, only to be told that, despite starting over with a #1, picking up the series after it was independently self published for three issues, Diamond considered it a #4, and with #5's numbers coming in before anyone saw our artist change (that would be our #2), we were not allowed to solicit for a #3 because we were below their minimums (thus causing a REALLY good writer/creator to swear off comics for good).
Our Happy The Clown Manga Special got it's solicitation "edited" to delete all references of it's totally professional manga look (we were told that Diamond reserved the right to edit any/all solicitation content as they saw fit), thus giving us orders way below our break even point. One of my proudest "triumphs" during this period was to resolicit the same product claiming we had exclusive North American right to a great fictitious artist, renaming the product as "Butterfly Gunn" after the assassin who was hunting Happy The Clown, and pushing the book off as a rare event, enough for Diamond to happily run the entire listing and garner us orders of over 3000.
Fed up with the industry, and especially Diamond, I pulled out my editorial underground character, Spank The Monkey for what I had planned as a one-shot to tell off all the industry and quit doing comics for good.
Unfortunately, my cover solicitation showed Spank and his brain dead cousin Shock in the cleavage of a pink bikini'ed large breasted female and Diamond automatically spotlighted the book, along with it getting the attention of the ever aggravating WIZARD Magazine (as their "Hot Book Of The Month") I received orders of well over 2500 on a book I was breaking even on at 800. So within a week and a half I slopped together a Spank The Monkey #1 that better resembled the solicitation and Arrow has a small "hit" on their hands. The numbers of future issues quickly dropped back down to a break-even level by issue 4, and, with all the profits from the first book propping up titles we had been losing more and more money on, I decided to take out the industry again and to a 3 issue Spank The Monkey On The Comic Market.
The series did a little more than break even, and it allowed me to get a lot off of my chest (there were a few community college sequential art courses that used the three issue series as required reading), but in the end it was the last funny books I did for the direct comic market.
It was obvious to me that Arrow Comics wasn't going to go anywhere printing standard comics, so we tried doing trade paperback collections. In fact, Diamond "allowed" us to be a few weeks late on Spank The Monkey On The Comic Market #3 because we "promised" them we were not going to print comics anymore and print bound volumes instead.
Arrow Books began its very short run. We printed a collection of The War Of The Worlds arc I had printed at Caliber and it met with warm success.
Then I put together a black and white collection of superhero proposals, finished issues mind you, and collected them along with notes on the property's use, pitch, and plans that I called Zimm's Heroic Tales. It was a 152 page volume I was particularly happy with, solid, well written stories with totally profession level art, along with notes and history it really served as three solid examples of my writing work and lessons on how these properties all went wonky and never got the exposure I felt the deserved. The book included The Fool #1 (a character and story I used later) The Unforgiven #1 (an open-ended epic superhero team story) and The New Breed #'s 1,2 and an 8 page prologue ( a superhero team concept that I was especially proud of). The finished book sat for months at Diamonds solicitations desk with constant calls and email to our rep asking for it to be solicited. We finally got word that Diamond was not going to solicit the package claiming that us printing the book in black and white was not what their market wanted to see in superheroes. Seriously, that was the ONLY explanation we received as to why they were never going to list the book.
At that point I was totally done with the direct market, or at least direct market self-publishing.
CONTINUED IN PART 2
From the beginning of our Flint Comix venture we knew our name and logo was vitally important to our success as a publication.
I was originally going to call the publication "Flint City Comix" but once I had teamed up with Theo he pointed out that the word "City" was way too limiting considering the area that we wanted to be distributed in (All of Genesee County - BUT "Genesee County Comix" wasn't going to make it either!). 
Behind the words "Flint Comix" I added what is probably THE iconic symbol of the area, and that is an arrowhead. Formed on the banks of the Flint River, the area was originally a main dwelling area for our local Native Americans and was named (obviously) for the primary stone they used for their arrowheads. They use an arrowhead on the Flint City seal, as well as in the recognized logos for bother the police and fire departments. Using an arrowhead graphic to unify the logo was an obvious choice.
