In his downtown Vancouver store, owner Chris Simons can show you when nobody knew who Batman was.
And if people knew who Superman was, maybe they just didn’t care.
These days, those characters represent two of the biggest pop-culture superhero franchises of all time. Their combined movie revenues alone can be tallied in the billions.
It’s unlikely Adam West would have appeared on 2017’s list of dead celebrities if he hadn’t played Batman on TV.
In their printed formats, comics have become big business for stores such as I Like Comics at 1715 Broadway. Simons and the store are sponsoring a celebration of comics in a two-day run beginning Saturday at the Clark County Event Center at the Fairgrounds.
If You Go
What: I Like Comic Con
Where: Clark County Event Center at the Fairgrounds, 17402 N.E. Delfel Road, Ridgefield
When: 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday.
Tickets: Weekend pass, $25; Saturday pass, $20; Sunday pass, $15. (Children under 12 free.)
Simons can point to a couple of issues in his display case that reflect these characters’ modest roots.
One example is a copy of Action Comics No. 4, which has a cover date of September 1938. Even though it features the second appearance of Superman, “a Canadian Mountie is on the cover,” Simons noted.
Superman made his debut in Action Comics No. 1, including an iconic cover illustration showing him lifting a car over his head.
But there were no focus groups or online feedback in June 1938. “It took three months to get sales data,” Simons said.
The publishers did decide that Superman was worth bringing back, but he was not on the cover again until Action Comics No. 7, Simons said.
The Bat-what?
Superman got his own comic book in the summer of 1939.
Batman made his debut with a cover appearance in Detective Comics No. 27, with a cover date May 1939.
The character was mentioned, however, in an earlier comic. Deep inside the book was a promo for “THE BATMAN!”
Simons has a pretty good guess what was going through the minds of readers who saw that name for the first time: “What the heck is The Batman?”
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from newspaper beats to write the story behind the story.
