Last night, following The Walking Dead, Kevin Smith’s reality series, Comic Book Men premiered across the country.
AMC’s new unscripted one hour series, Comic Book Men, dives deep into fanboy culture by following the antics in and around master fanboy Kevin Smith’s New Jersey comic shop, Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash. The six part series documents the daily banter of the Stash staff and customers as they geek out over mind-blowing pop culture artifacts and the legends behind them. Comic Book Men features Secret Stash employees Walt, manager and de-facto leader; Mike, a comic book virtuoso; Ming, the store’s technical expert and go-to whipping boy; and Bryan, who doesn’t actually work at the Stash, yet can always be found perched on a stool behind the front counter. As the team buys, sells and discovers the treasures of the comic collecting world, they share all the juicy details with Kevin through their outrageous podcast, which is woven throughout the series. The Secret Stash is not only a place for these comic book men to buy and sell, but it’s also a refuge for many to hang out and be part of a community that loves comics.
According to Smith, there are six episodes that have been ordered, and there has been no announcement of a second season.
We want to know what you think. Was the show a great ride? Was it Pawn Stars meets Comic Con? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.
21 Comments
I’ll say this – one of the secret projects the Major Spoilers Crew has been working on is now shot to hell, ’cause if we release it, it will totally be called “a Comic Book Men rip-off.”
Just name it Critical Hit Guys and do D&D instead of comics. :P
Do it anyway!
How long did we have to put up with being constantly compared to Clerks? Now we’re compared to Big Bang Theory.
Antimatter, Forever Wednesday, The Variants, and another one I can’t remember made there own show about working in a comic shop. The Rack is a web comic about working in a comic shop. These aren’t new, but they’re still good.
In other words, who cares if you’re compared to another property as long as it’s better. (And something tells me you’d make it way better than CBM) :-)
I’m sure you guys could do it better!
That’s no reason to call it off! Just about every one of these reality shows have successful copies.
Their show is terrible you guys could do much better.
I enjoyed it. Bryan was pretty annoying for a good chunk of the show.
As a kid, I was picked on because of some of my favorite hobbies and interests. These included 1) Reading..(which was a shameful sin for any male in the 60’s and 70’s because we were apparently supposed to be illiterate idiots or else we were “long-haired book reading hippie freaks); 2) Computers. My brother and I shared a Tandy 1000 and were immediately told that those role playing games like “Kings Quest” would never amount to anything; 3) NASCAR – “Only rednecks want to see cars make left turns all day”; 4) Comic Books – or “dem Funny Books” as folks would sneer and; 4) Professional Wrestling. With the debut of all the comic movies and now “The Big Bang Theory” and this series I am almost sorry to see my “nerd-ness” going main-stream. It’s almost like being a Metallica fan when they went into the Rock Hall of Fame and realized it wasn’t a “cult” thing anymore….(sigh).
why hasnt there ever been just a weekly comic show with reviews, previews, interviews and such? i would be way more interested in that than this…was entertaining i suppose, but its really just another “how much is this worth” show….couldnt believe the prices they were giving the stuff away for at the flea market tho!
I kinda dislike Kevin Smith.
I have heard he dislikes you too
http://www.flickr.com/photos/54644045@N08/5055032357/
I liked it. I thought they were pretty fair in their pricing and negotiating tactics – it wasn’t watching them low-ball people for 45 minutes straight ala “Pawn Stars”.
I thought the show was OK. I disliked the guy with the long beard (Bryan?). He was a jerk to just about everyone on the show including the customers. I would be very surprised if this show gets a second season.
I enjoyed it. We all need to remember, at its heart, it isn’t a show about comics or even the comic book store per se. It is a show about the “men” who work in the comic book store. So, it is going to be character-driven as opposed to comics driven.
The great thing is, these guys are indeed the real deal. Mike and Walt know as much about comics as anyone (Mike especially is crazy-knowledgeable. Pull some obscure scenes or panels and describe them and he can likely tell you which book it is from). Smith is also unquestionably a comic-book geek.
All of this lends credibility to the premise of the show and the interactions among the staff, etc. It also passed the most important test with me–I was entertained for the entire show. I’m a big Walt fan.
I’m with some of other guys on here about a show just reviewing what’s new and interviews with artist and writers that are trending now. Not sure I need to hear Kevin Smith and a bunch of other guys ramble on for an hour. You really don’t take away much from it. I say you major spoilers guy do a topical review based who every week and I’d totally watch. I’m normally on youtube searching those kind of shows out and most are pretty bland and bad.
Come on fellas make it happen.
The show follows the pawn-shop formula (Pawn Stars, Sons of Guns, etc) pretty much to a t… if you like that, then you get come comic book flavor with your formula… if you don’t, the comic stuff probably won’t win you over. This kind of show tends to be about the “characters” and they haven’t been fully developed yet…
Bryan was over-the-top obnoxious- presumably- playing a character for TV (because, as we saw with the flea market intervention, normal people won’t stand for that much) to make you love to hate him, but it was too false and off-putting for me.
Ming was the whipping boy and supposed to provide sympathetic comeuppance, but doesn’t really because of his initial spinelessness and his victory bravado at the end… basically you feel as awkward and uncomfortable as he is just by looking at him.
Robert Bruce was talked up as interesting but he just came off as mildly eccentric with the sort of know-it-all-ness of geek culture and that willingness to talk smack after someone’s left the room.
The other folks- even Smith himself- are sort of generic right now. I’ll queue these up and blow through them on a road trip or something….
pretty sure Robert Bruce was simply being his annoying self…but wtf do I know
I can assure you that the ‘Keeping-Up-w/-the-Kardashians producer-rejects’ who now “produce” this show HUNTED DOWN some of the collectors who participated in, at least, the premier episode. They found one of the collectors through an item he was selling & BOMBARDED him w/ calls to appear, claiming to be “huge fans” of the movie genre this particular collector was dealing in. ALL LIES MY FRIENDS. Plus, though it’s not technically ‘scripted’, they re-shoot scenes & the banter in the store over & over.
As a collector, I was a bit offended that these freaks were treating these other collectors as freaks. They bash the Chucky-doll chick because she treats her dolls as if they’re her kids? SHE’S A COLLECTOR, ASSH*LES! You treat your precious comics in the same fashion. As do ALL COLLECTORS in regards to their collections. What a bunch of pretentious hypocrites. & the destroying of the merchandise at the flea market was flagrant arrogance & disregard for a collectable item. No TRUE collector of ANYTHING would do that. But, hey, they CAN do it because “Ungowa! Me Comic Book Man!”
Watching the show I noticed their ‘pop culture’ expert saying about the AUSTRALIAN Dawn of the Dead 1-sht that, to paraphase, ‘American collectors only want American items’. Is this guy for real? & to say that the British DOD lobby card set (retitled Zombies overseas) was only worth the value of each individual lobby card is ridiculous. Go find a complete DOD lobby card set – or, better – see how long it takes to compile such a set. Isn’t one’s time & effort, not to mention the convenience of buying an entire set rather than one card at-a-time, make the value of the set a bit higher? & the collector didn’t say his set was WORTH $800 – that was just his initial asking price. Huge difference. Plus why wasn’t anyone BUYING anything? Let’s see the bartering w/ the tables turned.
All I saw were a bunch of guys figuratively sucking each others d!cks trying to make the rest of us believe that we want to BE these people because they think they’re better than the rest of us collectors & so – what? – cool? Hip? Intelligent? Well, better luck next time!
I really wanted to like this show (I have been a huge comics fan since the early 70’s) but I could not. I found the shop manager to be completely annoying. The other participants seemed to eager to play their roles instead of being real people. I would have rather just had them show more of people coming in with cool old stuff and shown less of the crew and their interactions. I also found the show to be completely disrespectful of collectors of sci-fi and comic book merchandise. Not only in the way they dealt with the collectors, but in how they devalued the whole genre. Why would anyone blow money on collectible items after seeing these jokers sell them off for pennies at a flea market just to get cheap laughs a and a cheap pop for the show?
It wasn’t interesting enough for me to watch another episode.