Ray Earles
Evansville, Indiana

Years ago a friend up and boarded a bus -- headed for Seattle, of all places (we lived in southern Indiana) -- with nothing but a copy of Moby Dick and some assorted junk in his backpack. This coincided neatly with my latest landlord's final descent into complete fish-fucking madness, and I was obliged to lean on my friend's hospitality by asking to live in his house while he was gone. As he had so many times in the past, he acceded to this latest unlikely request graciously.

While holed up in his pad, I spent a lot of time sifting through his (rather extensive, it must be noted) collection of Silver Age Marvel comics. Nice stuff, even if some of it was in rough condition. An awful lot of those '60s issues featured the exact same "learn to draw" ad on the back cover, and most of his copies exhibited light browning and "Marvel chipping." I didn't care.

Over time, as I always eventually did, I ran out of money. For no particular reason at all, I started selling comics out of his collection. Especially perplexing is why, when I couldn't get cash for many of the issues at a local shop, I traded them for a nearly complete run of John Byrne Fantastic Fours and some scattered Walt Simonson Thors. Less confusing was the handful of Kirby Fantastic Fours, which I'm not even sure I ever even took out of their bags.

Later, I got a call at work one day from my friend, who was just letting me know he was back in town. Now, I had received a postcard from him from Portland that week, stating that he was enjoying himself immensely, and didn't know if he ever wanted to come back. I recognized immediately that this phone call represented a non-trivial threat to my on-going '60s/'70s-era comics business. Fortunately, he didn't want to move back into his place right away. He was content to let me keep paying rent to stay there, and he'd bunk with his parents.

Basically, when he came over to the (his) house one afternoon bearing a troubled expression, wanting to know why the local shop had a copy of Defenders #1 with exactly the same barely-visible crease in the upper corner as his own cherished copy, I looked him straight in the eye and told him that I'd been selling his vintage comics at cut-rate prices -- and in some cases, even trading them for inferior books -- and that I had no good explanation as to why I'd done it.

He said: "Of course, this means you'll have to move out."

A year or so later, safely ensconced in my new place, I wrote an entire album of almost-listenable songs called StanLee; ostensibly about this period of my life. I don't know Stan Lee, and what I know *of* him is limited to his comic books and the claims made by him and his former co-workers over bitter reminiscences fed by long decades in the industry -- so I'm certain my use of his name to represent the rotten, conniving, thieving son of a bitch I'd become by the mid-1990s is crass and ill-considered at best. But I'm certainly interested in reading Tom Spurgeon and Jordan Raphael's book about him.

Maybe I can learn something.

Here's a choice cut, titled "1963", from my album _StanLee_:
http://www.inri.net/itrecords/album_stanlee/mp3/StanLee-Track_16-1963.mp3