My last restaurant meal took place March 10, 2020 with Michael Dirda — on which you got to eavesdrop during Episode 117 of this podcast. I’d planned to get together for lunch with this episode’s guest three days later at a Thai restaurant in Silver Spring, Maryland, but before that day could come, I realized COVID-19 had made such a meeting unwise.

More than 10 months later, with no sense we’re coming to the end of this pandemic any time soon, I’m once again refusing to let this world steal a good conversation, and so longtime comics retailer Joel Pollack and I are reclaiming that lost meal — though with bagels and cream cheese and whitefish and smoked salmon rather than Pad Thai.

Joel Pollack has been a part of comics fandom even longer than I have — he attended one of Phil Seuling’s 4th of July Comic Art Conventions two years before I did — in 1968 — and founded Big Planet Comics in Bethesda, Maryland in 1986. That flagship store has expanded to other locations in Washington, D.C., College Park, MD, and Vienna VA, and I thought it would be fun to chat about the world of comics and comics fandom of the past half century, and how comics retailing has changed over the past three and a half decades.

We discussed what the pandemic has done to the comics shop business, the comic his mother bought him which changed his life, the card game which led to him getting his first piece of original art, how his run-in with a young Howard Chaykin convinced him he wasn’t cut out to be a professional comics artist, what opening day was like at the first of his Big Planet comic book stores, the biggest sales event he’s seen during his 35-year retailing career, what inspired Bernie Wrightson to draw a freaky issue of Swamp Thing, how he fights back against the Comic Book Guy cliche to makes his shops welcoming places, our joint distaste of slabbing, why he doesn’t like doing appraisals, and much more.

Here’s how you can eavesdrop on our conversation — (more…)