Death of a comic book dream

I remember reading this item in early 2008, about a new comic book shop that was opening up.

He wants to draw a different crowd

James Welborn, 34, thinks the average comics shop still feels like a “man cave . . . a smelly hole where a bunch of kids sit around and play Magic cards.”

As he prepared to open Hub Comics, he put a sign in the window promising a different kind of establishment: “a comics shop for NPR listeners.”

Creating Hub Comics has been an act of love. “When I got my first job, I spent probably every dime on comics,” Welborn said, recalling that he would take an hourlong bus ride to a shop in Las Vegas.

Now a software engineer at Akamai, Welborn hopes Hub Comics can become his full-time job, but would be happy if it simply breaks even.

The thing is, the “man cave with kids playing Magic cards” formula is how a lot of shops have survived, and as a business plan “act of love” and “simply break even” sounded shaky to me, but Welborn had a day job that presumably paid well. Hub Comics is a short walk from where my friend Morris lives and I went there a couple of times. The place seemed to have a good combination of location, selection, and atmosphere. I bought a few things and put my name on their mailing list. Then last year there was trouble.

Hub Comics struggles to survive

Hub Comics owner James Welborn sounded the bat alarm in an open letter dated Oct. 13 announcing a plan to raise “basic survival revenue,” including the option to buy “comic credit” and a nine-day sale.

Eric and I went there and dropped more than a hundred bucks, and we returned again after another “emergency sale” mailing was received. When Free Comic Book Day came up this year it seemed that Hub Comics would stay in business, but a couple of weeks ago the manager sent a message saying that Welborn had been seriously injured and was in the hospital. He didn’t say what sort of injury.

James Welborn, comics store owner, dead at 37

Emergency personnel discovered Mr. Welborn in his Summit Avenue home May 16. Police have been investigating circumstances of the death, which included a note on a bathroom door warning of poisonous gas.

I’m running a road race in Boston tomorrow, and I’m planning to see Morris after that. I’ll walk down to Hub Comics and see if the store is still open.

Hastings’ pudding

I never used Blockbuster Video. In fact, 1999 was the only year I rented VHS. Before then I bought and rented LaserDiscs from a great store in Waltham, Mass., called Sight & Sound, that also did a big mail-order business. When talking to Dennis I referred to it simply as “the store.”

Note: Somebody out there will see my name, Douglas Pratt, and think I am the LD/DVD Newsletter Douglas Pratt. I’m not. He’s in New York, I’m in Boston. I met Doug once at Sight & Sound, and I still get his newsletter.

After patronizing the store for quite a few years, the assistant manager of Sight & Sound, a guy named John, told me I was one of their top customers. I asked John who was a better customer than me, and he said, only half-joking, “Roger Ebert,” who really was a customer. Between that shock, and knowing that the DVD format was on the horizon, I knew I had a problem and it was time to stop spending money on LD’s. Breaking my habit was made easier when we moved, and Sight & Sound was no longer on the way home from work.

There was a small, independent business called Video Paradise that rented VHS and, later, DVD. It was a 4-mile drive, but the owner was smart, because not only did he also rent video games — a big plus for Eric — he had drop-off boxes for returns. There was one a mile from home, so we only had to make the longer drive once per week. He was also good about hiring good help and waiving late fees for good customers.

I don’t recall exactly when Netflix flickered into my consciousness, but it was before 2003, when the owner of Video Paradise sold the store. He got out of the business while the getting was good. By then Sight & Sound was gone, swept away by DVD, that had made high quality home video a consumer commodity, instead of the specialty item for a small number of enthusiasts that LD had been.

The new owner of Video Paradise was a problem from the start. He had an attitude and seemed to enjoy displaying it. He didn’t rent video games because he wasn’t interested in them, he ended the drop boxes, and then he hired some obnoxious kids for clerks and instituted truly onerous late fees. We continued going there for another six months, but when a kid behind the counter was being too much of a jerk, I decided the owner wasn’t interested in staying in business, and in January 2004 I signed up for Netflix. Bloomberg has this half-hour profile of Netflix founder Reed Hastings.

Frank talk about Freddie and Fanny

When the Tea Party got rolling, some of the anti-government furor was directed at Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank for being a primary mover behind the mortgage mess, because he pushed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to promote mortgages for low income Americans and immigrants. The commercial banks practiced predatory lending, and the investment banks turned sub-prime mortgages into risky securities, but it’s true that Barney Frank shares some of the blame, as explained in this interview with Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times, on NPR’s Fresh Air program.

[audio:http://pd.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/fa/2011/05/20110524_fa_01.mp3|titles=Fresh Air: Gretchen Morgenson on ‘Reckless Endangerment’]

The Soul of ‘The Soul a New Machine’

I never met Tom West, who died a few days ago, but he had a big influence on me, through his work at Data General. DG was bought by another Massachusetts company, EMC, in 1999, and what made DG worth buying was CLARiiON, a mid-range storage system that I know quite well. The development of the CLARiiON was led by Tom West, and it marked the second time he postponed scrappy DG’s inevitable extinction. West’s first great success was the MV-series of 32-bit minicomputers, as detailed in the Pulitzer Prize winning book The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder.

West didn’t smoke cigarettes while he was at work. Away from Westborough, between sunset and bed, he might smoke a pack or more. Once he muttered that smoking wasn’t harmful if you didn’t do it at work. Of course, West knew it was silly in any literal sense, and he uttered it barely loud enough to be heard. Some nights he would go away from Eagle [the project name for the MV] and play music, with friends and acquaintances, sometimes all night long, and then, fingers raw from his guitar strings, he would drive right in to work and become once again the tough, grim-looking manager. One evening that winter I said to him that I didn’t think it was really possible to be a businessman and a dropout all at once. West said, “But I do it.”

I worked with DG MV’s and Digital Equipment Corporation’s MicroVAX computers throughout the 1980’s. Then, during the dot.com boom of the 90’s, the unthinkable happened — DEC failed, despite having a new, cutting-edge 64-bit system called Alpha that put Data General’s AViiON servers to shame. Prime and Wang were the first Massachusetts minicomputer companies to fall, and the assumption was they’d be followed by DG. The idea that mighty DEC would disappear all together, let alone be survived by its much smaller competitor DG, was ludicrous, and yet it happened. What kept DG going was the CLARiiON. Even though DG was itself later acquired, the CLARiiON brand named lived on. It’s only now being retired, and to this day when you do a SCSI inquiry on a CLARiiON logical drive it returns “DGC,” for Data General Corporation.