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RECOGNIZING EARTH PRIME COMICS
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, I have long told the story of my love for Batman comics dating back to my younger years growing up in Montpelier, VT. When I was 4 years old, I would race to the Kellogg Hubbard Library in Montpelier with my latest Batman comic. As a child, reading comic books allowed me, like so many others, to broaden the expanses of my imagination. While Spider-Man and Superman are fine, I have always preferred Batman. His values, his pursuit of justice, his balance of human strength and vulnerability have always resonated with me.
I would like to take a moment today to recognize a store where I have bought more than my fair share of ``The Dark Knight,'' an institution foundational to the comic-loving community in Vermont: Earth Prime Comics.
Founded in 1983, Earth Prime Comics was one of Vermont's first comic book stores. It began as a shared venture between Christine Farrell and John Young, first operating out of John Young's attic in Burlington, VT. In that attic, John and Christine's extensive collection of comics quickly garnered a surprisingly large following. Earth Prime Comics soon moved into a real retail space: a converted Victorian house on Bank Street in Burlington. Requiring even more space for its growing business, Earth Prime moved to a storefront on Church Street in Burlington in 1989, a location where it has remained for 33 years.
Over the past few decades, Earth Prime Comics has drawn comic book fans from across Vermont and forged a comic-loving community where all were welcome. Christine still owns Earth Prime Comics, and it has been great to see how she and her team have continued to build and shape their community to keep pace with the ever-changing comic landscape. In the years to come, I have full faith that comic lovers of all ages will continue to thumb through the pages of comics in Earth Prime Comics, as I have on so many occasions.
Earth Prime Comics was recently featured in an article published earlier this year in ``Seven Days.'' I ask unanimous consent that excerpts from the article, titled ``Origin Story: How Burlington's Earth Prime Comics helped unite Vermont's comic lovers,'' be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
Origin Story: How Burlington's Earth Prime Comics Helped Unite
Vermont's Comic Lovers
(By Chris Farnsworth)
I was 10 years old, staring at a strange house on Bank Street.
It was late summer, and my mother was inside the Burlington Square Mall shopping, so my brother Pat and I were cut loose to investigate the comic book shop across the street. Shadows from the trees in the yard cast the house in a mysterious darkness, making it resemble some Jungian archetype of a cave.
Pat and I were no rubes, despite our ages--Pat was 9. We'd been to the comic shops in New York City. We had a growing collection of X-Men and The New Mutants comics inherited from family friends. Hell, we had the Longshot miniseries, something we were rather proud of--and continue to be 30 years later.
Still, the house didn't look like a comic shop, and we climbed the porch stairs with trepidation. We'd only been Vermonters for a little while, and when you're the new kids in town, caution is a defense against disappointment.
I heard Pat gasp and followed his gaze to a poster taped inside the window. Staring out was the ferocious visage of Wolverine, leaping at us with adamantium claws drawn. Our hero.
This was the late 1980s, more than a decade before Hugh Jackman's Wolverine and the rest of the X-Men ushered in the age of superhero films dominating multiplexes. Back then, you wrote letters by hand to the publishers of comic books--and sometimes they answered. Comics fandom in the '80s was a club, and Pat and I were pledges standing before the clubhouse.
Steeling our nerves, we entered the store and breathed in the smell of newsprint and cardboard, the telltale musk of a good comic shop. Posters on the walls depicted more of our favorite characters, alongside many we had yet to discover. The mystery of these strange heroes and villains filled us with tension, a curiosity that had to be satiated.
But the real treat was the comics themselves. Even before we got to see the back-issue room, we salivated over the sheer number of books on display.
A bearded, longhaired man with a knowing grin looked at the two kids who'd wandered in with wide eyes.
``Well,'' I remember him saying, almost smugly, ``looks like you found your place.''
Our place, as the shopkeeper called it, was Earth Prime Comics. One of Vermont's first comic book shops, Earth Prime has been a center of the state's comic community since it moved out of original co-owner John Young's attic and into that Bank Street house-turned-shop in 1983. The shop has remained a polestar in its current home on the bottom block of the Church Street Marketplace, where it moved in 1989.
``Not many places downtown have been around longer,'' said Bill Simmon, who managed Earth Prime from 1989 to 1998. ``Old Gold, Pure Pop, maybe a few others? You can count them on one hand, I bet. Earth Prime is an institution.''
In its 39 years, Earth Prime has fostered generations of local comic fans, helping some of them go on to become comic artists themselves. The store has survived and thrived through the excitement of the underground comics explosion in the '80s, through the crisis and near collapse of the industry in the '90s--all the way to the modern epoch when movies and shows based on Marvel and DC Comics monopolize pop culture and, some say, draw interest away from their source material.
The little shop on Church Street is driven by the passion of its mysterious proprietor, Christine Farrell, who is rumored to have one of the largest and oldest private collections of comics on the planet. While Sen. Patrick Leahy
(D-Vt.) may be Vermont's most famous Batman fan, she's said to have been collecting Bruce Wayne's exploits from the very beginning.
Farrell's store has been as much a clubhouse for the comic community to celebrate groundbreaking independent creators as a place to pick up the latest issue of Iron Man. It's no longer the only comic store in Vermont--many have come and gone over the decades, and the state is currently home to Barre's Wonder Cards and Comics and Rutland's newly opened Night Legion Comics. But Earth Prime has a special status for veterans of the scene.
``I have to give all due respect and honor to Earth Prime,'' Stephen Bissette said. The Duxbury native is one of Vermont's most influential and respected comic artists, having established himself with a seminal run in the early 1980s on Saga of the Swamp Thing with Alan Moore. He has taught for 15 years at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction.
Earth Prime has ``outlived every Vermont comic shop I've ever been to,'' Bissette said. ``Long may that continue.''
It Came From the Underground
Earth Prime's arrival in the '80s was perfectly timed, as the world of comics was undergoing a revolution on the national stage. Meanwhile, in Vermont, the store united a ragtag crew of comic fans into a community.
``I find, with people like us, it's inevitable, right?'' said John Odum, who hosts a podcast about all things geek called ``Open World Chat.'' ``It's part of being a comic fan. Eventually, we all start finding each other. It's just a question of where.''
Odum is the Montpelier city clerk and a freelance writer for comics sites such as Bleeding Cool. He grew up during the independent comics revolution of the '80s, when artists like Bissette and Veitch started pushing back against the censorship of their youth, working with writers far removed from the kid-friendly scripts of Stan Lee.
Moore's Watchmen series and Miller's dark, noir-tinged work on Batman and Daredevil changed the mainstream superhero books. The arrival of titles such as Cerebus and Elfquest marked the rise of the underground.
``The 1980s changed comics,'' Odum said. Veitch agrees.
``The '80s for comics were like the '60s for music,'' he said. ``For a short time, before the moneymen caught on, the inmates got control of the asylum.''
Earth Prime was at the forefront of that movement in Vermont. Its reputation drew fans from all over the state.
Don't Call It a Comeback
As the 1980s wound up, the scene changed at Earth Prime. Amidon left for Massachusetts. Many of the first-generation Earth Prime kids grew up and either moved away, as Pat and I did in 1989, or simply lacked the time they once had to hang out at the shop all day.
``The family atmosphere kind of changed,'' Simmon said.
``It was still fun to be there and talk comics, but look, we weren't kids anymore. Life tends to get more serious, even at comic shops.''
In the spring of 1989, Farrell bought out Young's half of the business and moved Earth Prime to its current spot at 152 Church Street. Though none of the original gang wanted to go into details, they implied that some sort of schism occurred between the two founders of Earth Prime. Young opened Comics City at the other end of downtown Burlington, before moving eventually to Winooski. Customers were split; many, like Rovnak, switched over to Young's new store.
Within a few years, the entire comics industry was rocked like never before, as its own increasing cultural legitimacy sent it into a boom-and-bust cycle. Collectors started snapping up ``big event'' books such as The Death of Superman and Batman: Knightfall, creating a bloat in the speculator market that coincided with a disastrous decision by Marvel to bypass the distributors and form its own distribution wing. When the market crashed, the company was stuck with multiple printings of variant issues that were meant to be
``collectible'' but are now the exact opposite.
What kept Earth Prime afloat while all the other boats sank? Farrell herself seems to have been a major factor. Her clear vision of how to create communities of like-minded fans would serve her well, as one industry faltered and another emerged.
In 1989, Farrell opened Quarterstaff Games directly above Earth Prime. With its medieval-tavern vibe, it's Vermont's longest-lived gaming shop. Like its sister store, Quarterstaff has fostered a long-marginalized community and given them a home--another tribute to Farrell's dedication.
Farrell's tenacity was rewarded as the century came to a close and the fortunes of comics changed once again. Though superheroes had made their mark on cinema in the past, notably with Tim Burton's Batman and Richard Donner's Superman films, the 2000s saw the rise of Marvel as an entertainment business. In 20 years, the company went from barely surviving bankruptcy to being a multibillion-dollar juggernaut that dominates Hollywood. Disney would buy it in 2009.
For Giordano, that process started at Earth Prime, where the future illustrator would draw all day at a table beside the back issues.
``I would never have become an artist if I didn't have somewhere like Earth Prime,'' he said. ``People there would see me drawing, whether it was coworkers or customers, and gave me positive feedback. There's power in that--I started to think, Hey, maybe I'm not a total piece of shit. Maybe I have some value. I owe everything to that experience.''
To Be Continued
I remembered Giordano's words as I stared down the front door of Earth Prime a few weeks ago. I hadn't been inside in years, but knowing that the store was there hung on me like a weight, like a gift I couldn't dare take for granted.
I walked inside, unsurprised by the posters this time. The staff were helping customers or reading comics as hip-hop played softly over the speakers.
I thought of Shady, the black cat who used to guard the boxes of comics with a lazy swipe of her paw. I thought about how I've skipped every school reunion I've ever been invited to and how none of them would have felt as much like an authentic reunion as being inside Earth Prime did at that moment.
A man roughly my own age walked in, flanked by several children. One of them, a young girl wearing a white-and-pink Spider-Gwen hoodie, had a list in hand. She bounced on the balls of her feet as she browsed from shelf to shelf, humming quietly.
I looked away, overcome by a rogue wave of emotion. I seemed to see a thread stretching back through time, connecting Bissette, Veitch and Farrell hunting the comics racks to misfits like Giordano and Simmon finding family at a fledgling shop. That thread reached all the way to the girl in the hoodie, humming to herself in her happy place. Earth Prime was hers now more than mine, and I loved that so much that I felt a strange, damp sensation at the comers of my eyes.
As I walked away from Earth Prime, I made a mental note to text my brother. I wanted to say something reflective of the strange epiphany I'd had standing in the shop. In the end, though, I decided to keep it simple.
``Dropped by Earth Prime,'' I texted Pat. ``Still the same.''
(At the request of Mr. Schumer, the following statement was ordered to be printed in the Record.)
____________________
SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 168, No. 92
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