Local Comic Shop Day opens 2023 registration
Midweek Update: LCSD is Nov. 22; RIP Joe Matt
Local Comic Shop Day registration is open for 2023, and one of the first items announced is a variant for the upcoming “Spider-Boy” comic book from Marvel.
This year’s Local Comic Shop Day will be held on Nov. 22.
The annual Local Comic Shop Day event is organized by ComicsPRO, the comics industry’s trade organization. This is the fourth year for Local Comic Shop Day to take place on a Wednesday, after beginning on a Saturday in 2011.
Marco Davanzo, Executive Director of ComicsPRO, said a goal of Local Comic Shop Day is to get comic fans into their local shop for the holidays – to celebrate the local comic shop.
Stores can order Local Comic Shop Day items whether or not they have registered as official participants, but official participants will be eligible for special deals and included in advertising from the ComicsPRO organization.
ComicsPRO stores can register through a link they have been sent in e-mail. Non-member stores can register for $20 at the link: www.comicspro.org/2023LCSDreg
Dan Slott and Paco Medina are the creative team for the upcoming “Spider-Boy” comic. Chris Campana is the artist for the “Local Comic Shop Day” variant.
This Spider-Boy character first appeared in “Spider-Man” #7 from Dan Slott and Mark Bagley in April 2023. More was revealed in his first solo adventure in “Edge of Spider-Verse” #3. The solo series begins in November.
RIP Joe Matt
Sad to hear of the death of autobiographical comic creator Joe Matt, whose “Peepshow” was one of the innovators of that format in the 1990s. Matt, who also worked as a colorist on comics including “Grendel,” was 60. Friend and fellow comic creator Matt Wagner shared the news on his Facebook page:
Hey gang...it's with a heavy heart that I have some extremely sad news to share. My longtime pal, occasional collaborator and fellow pop-culture junkie...Joe Matt has suddenly and unexpectedly passed away. As many of you know, Joe and I first met when we were both students at the Philadelphia College of Art and our mutual love of comics and music soon sparked a friendship that lasted through the decades. Eventually Joe was a color and production assistant on my final issue of MAGE--THE HERO DISCOVERED and he graduated on to beautifully coloring many issues of the original monthly GRENDEL series and, of course, the classic first BATMAN-GRENDEL crossover series. But his greatest fame and expression came in the pages of his own warts-and-all autobiographical comic, PEEPSHOW. Anyone who knew Joe knew that, yes, he was often as frustratingly stubborn and neurotic as he portrayed himself in those pages...but he was also charming, funny, insightful and loyal to the few friends he deemed worth the effort. I dug through an old sketchbook of mine from "back in the day" and here are a few drawings I did of Joe when we would all gather in my studio/apartment on Green St. in Philadelphia. The first was a mutual portrait as Joe and I sat at opposite ends of my couch and sketched each other. And the second is of Joe hard at work; I'm pretty sure he's cutting friskets for the blue lines colors of one of the last several issues of MAGE. Joe had lived in LA for the last decade or so and we mainly kept in touch every couple of weeks via late-night chats on Messenger. I'll dearly miss my old buddy and his unique outlook on the world...and how we began every phone call babbling in Donald Duck talk at each other. So long, broheim...the world's just a bit more boring without you.
Fourteen issues of Joe Matt’s “Peepshow” comic were published by Drawn & Quarterly between 1991 and 2006. Brian Cronin has an obituary for the cartoonist at CBR.
Matthew Price, matthew@matthewlprice.com, has written about the comics industry for more than two decades. He is the co-owner of Speeding Bullet Comics in Norman, Oklahoma.