Comic writer and artist Bernie Mireault died this month. He was 63. I was not familiar with him or his work, but my friend and collaborator Nat Gertler, wearing his About Comics publisher’s hat, worked with Mr. Mireault to get his much-lauded comic, The Jam, back into print.
In the remembrances that followed Mireault’s passing, his work was praised and cited as being too little known for how well-regarded it is. He was described as a cartoonist’s cartoonist. About Comics made their reprint available at cost for about a week, so I grabbed a copy to see for myself what everyone was talking about.
The story opens with our would-be hero, a mere mortal, getting the upper hand in a mugging about to go very wrong. That’s something I really loved here — The Jam is about a superhero who is not superhuman. He’s a guy who wants to see some good in the world and has realized he can be part of that good. But, darker forces are gathering. Disillusioned young men are being drawn to a leader with a plan, and soon enough, the Jam has pissed off the Devil himself. So, if you read The Tick and thought, I wish this had a dash of Sandman, well, you’re in the right longbox.
Mireault’s The Jam is great! The writing and art are a lot of fun, and very well done. It’s a grownup comic, but not quite what modern marketing people would call “gritty.” There was also something really charming about the art that reminded me of, well, The Tick or old concert posters of the era. That late-1980s indie comic feel, from the black-and-white explosion. But story also felt rooted in a very real vision of a real city. There’s also a ton of technical know-how and thought going into each panel, each word balloon. I realized I was analyzing the lettering at various points, and thinking about how crazy it is, but still really well done, really fun. Reading The Jam made me think, “Yeah, comics are good.”
But, I should note that comics are rarely kind, or just. If you are having thoughts of suicide, you can reach out for support by texting or calling 988. The helpline is available 24/7 across the US and all of its territories.
Action Comics #1 (DC, 1938) sold recently for $6M, breaking all previous records for a comic book sold at auction.
Action Comics Number 1, sold for $6 million, image courtesy Heritage Auctions
$6M for one comic book? That’s *a lot* of money for a comic book. It is nearly double the previous record set only a few years ago in 2021, which I think has since been regarded as funded through someone moving crypto around.
Granted, this most recent purchase is perhaps *the* comic book. If there is one comic book to own, one of these copies would be it. I’m not begrudging the auction result. $6M is a small number in the world of fine art auctions. Even for rare books, $6M wouldn’t crack the top 10 of record auction results. But for comics, it’s enormous.
But, for $6M, you could buy something absolutely unique—not just one of a handful. Totally. Unique. And if you want to stay with comics, you can buy *a lot* of original comic art for $6M. Not just a piece or two, but an incredible collection. Original comic art is still among the best art bargains in the world, and perhaps if we play a game, I can show what I mean.
Let’s say we’ve hit some kind of Brewster’s Millionsscenario1 where we must spend $6M, and must be spent on original comic art. And not $1M in comic art and $5M on a really nice house and estate for it all. All $6M of it on comic art. I will buy stuff I like, not things as “an investment,” and talk about my selections. Art I want to hang on my walls and live with and enjoy. After spending $6M on original art, conservation funding, gallery space, and state-of-the-art storage will be added as a reward, so I don’t have to worry about it as I’m splashing out for big-ticket items and don’t let my museum curator brain get too distracted about planning and worrying about caring for it all longterm. I’ve worked in museums for over twenty years now, so I can’t help but think about these things.
Some parameters: The budget must be respected — I will only spend $6M and get as close as possible to spending all $6M.
In the interest of transparency, I will only shop publicly. Gotta show those receipts. No bidding up the next cool thing to $6M and be done. No deals with a wink and a nod to pay $6M for something not worth anywhere near that and split the difference on the back end. Let’s keep this as above board as high-end art buying can be. [cough]
And let’s make the prices recent. No buying Jack Kirby art from a fanzine auction in 1972 and owning every piece by Jack Kirby to cross into private hands. So, let’s say anything purchased must be from any 2020 or more recent public sale. Also, no buying a whole comic shop for $6M.
And lastly, as curator of the Schulz Museum, it’d be a conflict of interest for me to buy any Peanuts art, so there will be no Charles M. Schulz art on this list, though it’d be a dream come true to own anything by him.
Did I forget anything? Write me and let me. Ok, let’s go!
This particular Calvin & Hobbes Sunday has so much going for it. We get the stars of the strip doing the classic “ride downhill in a wagon” theme having a fun conversation.
I grew up in the 1980s and ’90s, so Watterson hooked me early on and was the “cannot miss” comic strip each day. Calvin & Hobbes was the strip we talked about on the playground of Ruth Hill Elementary School in Lincoln, Nebraska. I begged for the reprint paperback book collections when they came out, added them to Christmas wishlists, and celebrated the arrival of each one like a long-lost treasure. I wish I would have clipped them out of our newspaper (the Lincoln Journal-Star)! The strip is still hilarious today, even though my perspective has shifted from that of the adventurous, yearning kid to that of the beleaguered and baffled Dad. My 9-year-old has discovered Calvin & Hobbes, too, and I’ve had to do *a lot* of explaining. But it’s been a lot of fun. Still, repeat after me: Calvin sometimes makes *really* bad decisions.
Bill Watterson’s originals are incredibly rare in private hands. He kept most of his originals and has since donated the collection to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State University. So, the above strip is the onlyCalvin & Hobbes original Sunday sold since 2020. After working with Charles Schulz’s original artwork for Peanuts for a few years, I finally got to see some of Watterson’s originals for Calvin & Hobbes, and I was shocked to see they were so small! He packed a lot of fine work into that small space. His art is even more impressive now than when I first saw it growing up, though even then, I knew it was something special.
Yes, I’ll have this one, too. Watterson’s dinosaurs and monsters have always been so much fun, but after I saw somewhere that Schulz admired how Watterson drew furniture, I look at that too, and admire it.
This daily, originally published on 12/30/1987, was sold at Heritage Auctions, and even in the photos they posted, the condition looks a little concerning. It’s heavily toned, and I have seen them sweeten the photos before, so I don’t quite trust it 100%, which gives me pause. However, with the promise of conservation funding at the end, I feel good diving in.
$6M – $852.000 = $5,148,000 remains to spend.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
In 2010, I moved away from a metro filled with bookstores to a small town in northeast Montana. Oklahoma City, though not a mecca of bibliophiles, at least had some nice bookshops and was close enough to the Dallas-Ft. Worth area to go see great authors if they stopped there. Big-name authors almost never came to Oklahoma City, with Dallas being closer. Authors that did visit usually had some connection drawing them there, like they were originally from Oklahoma or had family there.
There was no bookstore in this small town in Montana of about five thousand souls, even though it is the biggest town around for nearly a hundred miles in any direction. There had been one little bookstore, but it closed. The county library, located there, had a small shelf of books for sale for dimes and quarters — cast-offs from the donation bin. Thank God for the library. Also, the museum where I worked had a gift shop that sold books by local authors and local history, which was nice but did not go far in feeding a bibliophile’s soul. But, just a short drive away, across the North Dakota state line, was a town large enough to have a movie theater: Williston. There were also bookstores in Williston.
Hedderich’s was not a bookstore, but they had enough old books for sale to be a point of discussion when used books came up in conversation. At one time, the building for Hedderich’s was a large downtown department store building, from the heyday of downtown retail long before online shopping or even shopping malls. By the time I lived in the area, the once proud, huge store had been converted to a sort of antique mall, army surplus, model train store. And in the cavernous basement of this enormous place was books. Nothing but old books, almost entirely unsorted and sold by the pound. There were thousands and thousands of old books down there. I called it a book mine.
The book prices were quite reasonable, circa 2010. 📸 Benjamin L. Clark, the author.
What is a book mine? I don’t think I originated the phrase, but I don’t know if anyone has ever endeavored to define one. I’ve seen a few book mines, but I see them less often now. I find they are rarely advertised and don’t have websites beyond maybe a placeholder with hours — typically not updated since 2001. Book mines can have weird, irregular hours. A book mine is also usually huge. Cheap real estate helps, so they are usually in huge, rundown, leaky buildings in a part of town that’s seen better days.
In the past, I’ve called author Larry McMurtry’s Booked Up in Archer City, Texas a book mine. It had almost no web presence and a huge inventory. One of the biggest book stores I’ve ever seen. You could easily spend days, not just hours, looking. Perhaps book mines tend to be in out-of-the-way places. Or, maybe I’m the one in out-of-the-way places. It seems even the ones in major cities are in parts of the city that meet these descriptions, too.
To be clear, Hedderich’s was *not* the Northern Plains version of Booked Up. The comparison disintegrates quickly when looking at almost any part of it. McMurtry’s store had top-quality stock, immaculate buildings, and shelving, and all of the books were knowledgeably sorted, organized, and priced. Even when I was actively selling online, I had a hard time finding books to resell to make up for the cost of my trip to Archer City the prices were so spot on. I was not a super-talented book scout, but I could usually cover the cost of books I wanted to keep, gas, and food when I went anywhere to buy old books. Sometimes, I could turn enough profit to feel good about doing it.
Hedderich’s was the opposite of Booked Up. There were easily tens of thousands of books. But, the store’s basement, which was filled with books, was dirty. Only most of the fluorescent tube lights worked. Some flickered constantly. I could hear something dripping somewhere. Another version of the sign above announced these prices are NEW. The sign was also dated 1992. The books were barely sorted. Books seemed to be mainly from the 1940s-1980s, which was strange. Nothing very old. Nothing more recent. If you’re a Soviet/ Anti-Communist collector, this was the place for you. Do you collect self-help, pseudo-religion, or pseudo-health? Nurse-themed romance novels? This place would have scores for you. There were more Reader’s Digest Condensed Books than I’ve ever seen in one place. These can be worth selling to realtors and interior designer types by the yard if you have that kind of client, but there was not much worth bothering with for resale online.
To a collector, there was a lot of crap. But at these prices, who wouldn’t be tempted to at least dig a little? I found a gorgeous 1930s booklet from Zion National Park … but someone had cut a few of the photos out of it, but found another for Glacier National Park from the 1920s, which was pristine. There was a pile of old phone books, which helped fill gaps in the county archive, which was exciting for historical research purposes, but that’s a different kind of thrill. It was that kind of place. All was not lost, however. I did find a few books for myself, but mostly roamed and tried to figure out where everything was, my brain trying to impose order or find the order that led someone to bring all the books there.
Writing this essay several years after my last visit, I looked online to see if it was still open. The Hedderich’s building burned in 2017. Photos from local news sources show the multi-story building’s roof collapsed. Days later, the wreckage caught fire again, and eventually, all of whatever remained collapsed into the basement. Maybe the total loss of those tens of thousands of books won’t be missed, but the loss of the experience of searching, mining, and discovering will be something any book lover would love to find in a dream.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
Archives Books in Edmond, Oklahoma in 2009. Photo by Benjamin L. Clark
When I first visited Archives Books, it was very small, in the end unit of a nondescript commercial strip not far from the interstate in Oklahoma City’s northern suburb of Edmond. Apparently, the owner, Wayne, had a bookshop earlier and had a giant reset as things moved online. My first visit would have been in 2005, shortly after moving to the OKC metro. Chatting with Wayne, I gathered he closed the earlier shop to transition to going fully online, retool his business model a bit, and then realized a little walk-in traffic in a room full of unsorted dreck could still make enough money to cover the rent and be a place for walk-ins to sell him a houseful of old books when a bookish relative died.
There were several thousand books. He had a couple of shelves up front for “better books,” individually priced but still not very expensive. Everything else was $1 per book: six books for $5, fifteen books for $10. You might buy the store for a very modest sum at some point in the scale. It was a great place to rummage around for the joy of the hunt and because there were treasures to be found.
It was like panning for gold. Most of it was crap — damaged books missing dust jackets, book club edition fiction from the 1970s, partial sets of dentistry yearbooks, 1980s self-help, pyramid schemes, political memoirs of candidates long forgotten, microwave cookbooks, that kind of thing. According to the staff, these were the leftovers that had been swiftly sorted for selling online — the duds. But, the staff seemed to know little about books. I suspected they used devices to scan barcodes and ISBNs to compare prices online since much of what was in those dollar shelves was too old to have an ISBN.
Condition was a problem, and the books were completely unsorted, except to be put onto shelves generally upright with the spine out. Generally. It wasn’t as bad as one thrift store I remember from my days in Lubbock, Texas, where I once observed that they must sort their books with a hay rake, given the horrific condition of everything.
It was the kind of jumble where you didn’t feel bad about buying books to harvest bookplates or bookseller labels. The books had broken hinges, detached text blocks, or were otherwise irredeemable specimens. A touch of mold wasn’t out of the question. It was a wonderful place to hunt because anything can be found anywhere.
In grad school, I picked up selling books and ephemera online for extra cash. And, though now out of school and gainfully employed, I still sold books and ephemera online. Also, sometimes, I would sell to dealers if I found something good that I couldn’t sell myself and get a good price. Dealers can sometimes pay better than a random buyer on eBay because the dealer has a client looking for that specific thing, and they understand the value better. For example, I could sell a $1 find online for $30, but a dealer may offer $50, because they have a client for $100 waiting. It’s a hard habit to break.
I’ve had some nice finds over the years and even sold some really nice things for pleasing sums, but funny enough, I don’t think I ever had one of those big finds at this shop. Nothing that paid the rent that month or anything with a single sale. But it was steady enough to go regularly, even just to add to my collection of bookseller labels and bookplates.
I did find a few issues of the first Star Trek fan zine, Spockanalia, in wonderful condition. Although I am not a die-hard fan of the show, I recognized that the zines would be of interest to someone else and probably worth more than the dollar or two it cost me to take them home. They earned me a little money and were fun to look through while I had them.
The shop also didn’t value old museum exhibition catalogs. I found some great references for the work I was doing at the time for the Oklahoma Historical Society and for my own interest. Once I was done with them, they were also worth a bit online.
Sometimes, there were notebooks or loose papers mixed in with the books. Usually, someone’s long-lost homework or lecture notes. In those early days at the bookshop, there was often a large garbage can in one of the aisles to throw away any garbage you found. However, once I did find a small pocket notebook. From the outside, it looked old. Being a little familiar with old stuff, I was excited and opened it, fully expecting it to be a farmer’s running tally of planting wheat or something similar. But, no, it was a diary. It was not just some anonymous thing, but a diary where the young woman wrote her full name, location, and date of birth on some of the earliest pages, including when she began the diary — 1886.
I put the little diary in my pile of books for the day and headed up front to the checkout counter. I thought Wayne would see the diary and tell me there had been a mistake in shelving it in the back. He meant to put it up front or even in the battered glass case he used as a counter. He never did that before, but you can never tell. “I wondered who would find that,” was all he said. I didn’t have the nerve to ask what he remembered about where it had come from. I wish I had.
Other things could be reliably found there and sold online for a small profit, keeping my other book collecting funded. These included the little Golden Guide books edited by Howard S. Zim, some more esoteric Time-Life series books, Random House’s Landmark series, older Loeb Classical Library volumes, and many more.
As time passed, the shop expanded into neighboring storefronts and became more organized. It was no longer nearly all unsorted dollar books, but sorted sections. Prices, of course, went up. The last time I went was several years ago, and they still had a small section in the back dedicated to the unsorted dollar books that stole my heart all those years ago. I hope they keep it forever, and some book lover is still finding treasures.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
I made a free mini-zine for the Santa Rosa Zine Fest this past weekend at the Northwest branch in Santa Rosa, California. This post basically includes all the contents of the zine for you. I gave them away when anyone asked about swaps, or if we just visited, or I bought a zine from them. The selection of comic panels are what I used for interior pages, and if you unfolded the whole thing, you’d see the full-color Sunday strip, like a mini poster. I had a blast seeing everyone, enjoying a little sunshine, and swapping with everyone, too.
A few favorite panels from F. Opper’s Maud the Mirthful Mule, from 1907. Frederick Burr Opper created an entire Opper-verse on newspaper comics pages in the early 20th Century. Different strips with characters as popular then as any pop culture favorite today, like Happy Hooligan, Alphonse and Gaston, Maud, and more. The dynamic drawing found in his comic strips inspires artists today.
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See below for the full strip for this panel.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
Trina Robbins speaking at the 2023 WonderCon in Anaheim, California. Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia
I did not know Trina Robbins very well, but she has impacted my thinking and my work. She was the kind of person that, after hearing her stories and reading her work, I have a deep appreciation for what she accomplished, and I wish I could have gotten to know her more and talked with her about something we share — a passion for the work of comics history.
I had the pleasure of meeting her a couple of times in the past few years. The first time I met Trina was when I joined her on a panel at FanExpo in San Francisco in November 2022. I remember it as the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and our panel topic was the centennial of the birth of Peanuts cartoonist Charles M. Schulz. Cartoonist and maze master Joe Wos, who organized the panel, invited Lex Fajardo, the editorial director for Schulz Creative Associates, and me (as curator of the Schulz Museum) to join him and Trina in a wide-ranging discussion of Schulz and his impact on cartooning. Trina was the only one of us to have really known Charles Schulz, bringing not only her stories of meeting Sparky (as he was known to those who knew him) but also her perspective as a Bay Area cartoonist and younger contemporary to him. It was fascinating and, of course, a lot of fun. Few people can tell the story about getting Charles Schulz to contribute a piece to a collection of cartoonists’ nude portraits.
Trina was in high demand that weekend, rushing from panel to table, signings, and other events that day. She joined us a few minutes late and had to leave the panel early for her next commitment, so I didn’t really get a chance to visit with her in that first meeting, though I got to basically sit next to her and hear her tell stories for an hour or so.
I’m so glad I remembered to bring my tape recorder with me, so I at least got audio of the panel—most of it, at least. The brand-new batteries I installed died, and I had to switch to my phone, but something went wrong—don’t try to talk on a panel and record yourself simultaneously if you can help it. At least I got a good chunk of our talk, which is now in the Schulz Museum’s archives.
The next time I saw her was at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2023, when we both had books nominated for an Eisner Award in the same category: Best Comics-Related Book. Attending the Eisner Awards is another story, but there’s a little time as people arrive and get settled in to say a few hellos. I saw her and said hello, and wished her good luck. I’m not confident she remembered me or even knew I was one of the other authors in her category, but she was very gracious. I was so overwhelmed just being in the room, so I don’t remember any other details, especially after Nat Gertler and I were announced as winning the category.
Though she was not awarded an Eisner that night (I thought she would win), her book about Gladys Parker is fabulous. Just as all of her historical work is not only well done but groundbreaking and essential reading. Comics is a rich field for study and enjoyment, enriching our lives as readers, thinkers, artists, and whole people. Trina brought that home, especially preserving, sharing, valuing, promoting, and shouting about women in comics from the rooftops.
After meeting Trina, hearing about her work, and finding her books, I looked at my own writing, my own thinking, and my own historical work and asked myself, “Where are the women?” In one project in particular that I’ve been slowly working on for a couple of years, a collection of short historical essays about the working methods of cartoonists, there were very few women initially. Now, it’s better, but there’s always room to improve. Thank you, Trina, for your work, for being wholly you.
“We set our stupidities in dignity when we set them in print.” —Montaigne, 1592
I like Michel de Montaigne — I’ve written about him before. For a guy whose life is pretty drastically different from mine, he made observations from his life that I find eerily applicable to my own. And I’m not the only one. HisEssays have been in print more or less since they were first published in 1580.
Writer-who-draws (and thinker) Austin Kleon shared the quote I copied above (and into my journal) the other day, and I didn’t understand it right away. What does Montaigne mean? The more I think about it, the more it confuses me.
Portrait of Michel de Montaigne, 1570s
Does Montaigne mean that setting our stupidities in print improves them? My stupidities remain pretty stupid no matter what I do with them. Setting them in print sure doesn’t dignify them.
Or does it change the nature of stupidity at all? Is Montaigne saying that printing them merely dignifies them and does not correct them? In fact, whatever dignity is gained, the stupidity is all the worse now that it’s in print? Folly upon folly.
I don’t know.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
This was a nice used bookshop. Good books, a nice selection that was well organized. A little higher priced than some of the other used bookshops in town, but still good stuff. I specifically remember being on the lookout for good niche local, state, and regional history books here. This shop was close to a place I liked to get BBQ — a little shack two brothers ran out of the parking lot of a nearby grocery store. I had gotten to know one of them well in my time in Oklahoma City, so I always called it Crain Bros. BBQ, but I think I was the only one to bother giving their smoke shacks a name. This younger brother, working on a Ph.D. in philosophy, ran this one near 23rd Street and Penn. They had a very nice lady who ran the till for them and packed up the orders inside the grocery store. The other brother ran other smoke shacks with other helpers at a couple of other locations. It was more his empire than the philosophical younger brother’s, who was helping out. The younger brother finished his PhD and is now a philosophy professor in the area.
The smoke shack made a nice stop on a Friday when I felt like I could get away with a little extra long lunch break and could have a little drive. From the Oklahoma Historical Society, where I worked, down 23rd Street, I would grab some sliced brisket and sliced hot link and maybe a bag of chips and a bottle of ice cold Red Diamond iced tea from the grocery store — definitely not the cole slaw from the grocery store’s deli, which tasted like it had been soaked in fishy lake water. It was safer to stick to the pre-packaged stuff.
I took co-workers to the BBQ stand on some Fridays, and being bookminded people, no one would protest if we also made a stop at this bookshop. One of my only distinct memories here was in the parking lot and one of my coworkers describing working with homeless patients with tuburculosis when he was an ambulance driver.
I wish I remembered more about this place, besides the parking on the south side of the building and the hum of the air conditioner that couldn’t keep up with the heat of Oklahoma’s summer workdays. I only vaguely recall the owner of this shop as helpful and alert, which was an anomaly for used booksellers in Oklahoma City in the early 2000s. I wish I had an anecdote of his generosity, kindness, and intelligence, but I don’t. Sadly, the owner was murdered in 2017, and his killer tried to cover his crime by torching his bookshop. I hope the owner’s family has found a measure of peace in time.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
Michael’s Old Books, February 2009, photo by author
This is how I remember it: A sagging roof, peeling paint, cracked windows, maybe a missing pane replaced with a bit of cardboard. But there’s a sign that reads simply: BOOKSTORE. The hardened bibliophile will recognize the urge, this compulsion, to dive into what you are sure is a rodent-infested fire-trap, because, well, you never know. “Anything can be anywhere,” the old saying repeatedly proves. Perhaps it is more the domain of the true bibliomaniac to ignore potential and obvious hazards alike, to shrug away discomforts, and “just stop and look for a minute.” All of us who love books perhaps a little too much understand the impulse.
The proprietor of this establishment had no interest in actually selling anything, though. Michael’s Old Books was a horrid old house converted by someone, I assume, named Michael, but maybe the original Michael was long gone, into a book hoarder stash. If it could broadly be called a book, it was fair inventory for Michael’s. Pamphlets, wrinkled brochures, rain-stained phone books, obsolete test study guides, industrial directories of interest to nearly no one. The truly “old” books were either long gone, or long buried. Here we find merely the out-of-date, out-of-style, out-of-touch. The building was not air-conditioned, which could make visiting on sweltering days completely out of the question. Not as much because of the heat, but because of the smell.
It was also never open. A big, grubby, grouchy man perched on a stool near the back door. My recollections of him are so vague I cannot remember anything more specific, only the memory of his presence. I also vaguely recall an old electric box fan stirring the fetid air inside this building, but that would have meant he had electricity turned on in this place, and I don’t think that’s possible. I have no specific memory of even bookshelves here, but just massive piles everywhere. And the sense that, yes, perhaps it was once a bookshop, or someone many years earlier had started to set it up but gave up.
On one website, I once left this review: “Bring cash. This is a store for those seeking serendipity. Including when it may be open. The owner does not observe the posted hours. Dusty and disorganized. Again, bring cash and dress down. He settles on his opening price by how you’re dressed, how eager you seem, and how much of a nuisance you’ve made yourself.” It reminds me that I stopped there one day after observing some activity — I drove by there almost daily to and from work at the Oklahoma Historical Society. So, I was dressed for the office, and the proprietor had said something about how I was dressed when it came time to negotiate the price — which was always negotiated since none of the merchandise was marked in the customary fashion of used bookshops.
As I wrote about bringing cash, and with the vaguest recollection along those lines, I must have bought something there once, but cannot remember what it could have been. I may have bought some bit of ephemera to donate to the archives at work — something I knew they would need, but was otherwise not that useful to me.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
The book I wrote with Peanuts fan extraordinaire Nat Gertler has been nominated for a Will Eisner Award by the people who bring you Comic-Con International in San Diego each year! Voting has closed for the comics publishing industry award, but it’s been a thrill just to be nominated. I’ve never won an award and tended to roll my eyes at the idea of being grateful for a nomination, but I get it now. This is a recognition of the hard work of *so many* people. I’m so proud and grateful to my team at the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, our publishers Weldon-Owen, and all the fans of Charles M. Schulz, who have supported the museum and all do a part in preserving and sharing the legacy of Charles Schulz and Peanuts.
Of course, the book is still available everywhere that good books are sold, and proceeds support the Schulz Museum. You can also buy the book directly from the Schulz Museum, which is a way to support the museum doubly. You can even leave a note when you purchase to request that I sign it, and I’m happy to do that.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
