Saturday 19 May 2012

FLASHBACK - So... where do you envision yourself in five years time?

This is actually my second attempt at being a blogger. I, like many other folk at the time, had a My Space account and for a time decided to share my thoughts and feelings with the world. I thought it would be fun to look over my old posts and see what I had written and how, if at all, my writing had evolved and it was there that I stumbled across this little ditty from almost exactly five years ago. I thought, given the content of my first post in this new blog, that I would re-post this as sort of a book end for my Apocalypse Comics days, this being the start of the journey. So unedited from 2007, spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and all...



2007, Life and Comics

OK, so the first month of the new year has already come and gone and now so has my 25th Birthday. I have spent a quarter of a century on this planet and I have begun to wonder if I have actually done anything worthy with my life. And the simple answer is... HELL MOTHA FUCKIN YEAH!!!!! If you thought this blog was gonna be a downer about my lowly existence, then you soooo don't know me at all!!! I did however want to talk about the love of my life, my passion, my destiny, my calling... COMICS!!!!!!
For those of you who don't know, I am Kettering towns Biggest comic geek (and I'll challenge anyone for the title). I have been a fan since childhood, spending many hours reading Beano, Dandy, He Man and Transformers, but I really fell in love with the medium in my late teens/early twenties after realising that this art form is not aimed at children, but is indeed written and created by and for intelligent adults who want to be challenged by explosive artwork and gripping story lines.
I became so infatuated with them that I decided that I had to work somewhere within the industry. My only two problems were that I have no patience for writing and I can't draw for shit, so working directly towards the creation of the books was out of the question. So I decided that I am going to open a comic and collectibles shop with my best friend and business partner Brendon. We made that decision 5 years ago and I'm still working at the fucking train station. Not a week goes by that somebody doesn't ask me "Whats going on with your shop, when is it gonna open?" and I always say the same old shit back "We're working on it, it's coming!" and the years have gone by and the excuses have kept on coming and now I get the feeling when I talk to these people that most of them are thinking "If you were going to do it, why haven't you done it already?"
The truthful answer is, we have spent the last five years soaking up as much knowledge about the industry as we possibly can. Trying to learn tricks of the trade and coming up with solid strategies and business plans. Five years ago we could have rushed into this business as naive kids who didn't know fuck all and had to learn everything as we went along only to go out of business in a year. Now we are ready to enter the industry as business men with good heads on strong shoulders still willing and able to learn new things every day, but also focused enough to think more towards the future of our business.
Over the past few months we have been working feverishly toward getting our website together. We have somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand comics in stock and each one has to be individually logged and the cover scanned. We are now two weeks away from completion and as soon as we are done we can hand all that data to the guys who are putting our website together and they can get cracking. Meanwhile, we will be looking into bank loans, tax & national insurance, advertising and everything else we need to get this show on the road. It is going to be a long hard year, but it will be totally worth all the effort in the long run.
For everyone who has had faith in me and the shop, backed me, helped me to learn, taught me new things about the industry that I couldn't do without, from the bottom of my heart Thank You!!! I promise to do you proud.
For everyone who doubted me, thought I would fail, said I was too lazy and that I should shit or get off the pot....
WWW.APOCALYPSECOMICS.COM  is coming!!!! February 2008!!!!

2 comments:

  1. Judge Fred MANSON20 May 2012 at 02:46

    Hi Mario!

    It's great to read your comments on the life of a geek who became a comic shop owner and how it is difficult to maintain such business alive.

    I have known such adventure from a friend of mine, in France, who like you, has started his business at home, then has opened a small store and, unfortunately, failed due to the rate exchange between the French Franc and the US dollar - it was really expensive in those times... AUGH!!!!

    Like you, I am broken (thanks to a nervous breakdown due to my jobs in the high IT fields and the so "friendly" colleagues who stabbed you a knife in your back...), I can no more work, and I want to write stories.

    Before I wanted to draw, like Rob Liefeld (with feet!!), but I am mentally locked. So, I read comic books (no more prose books except some SF and Fantasy magazines).

    But I really want to write all the stories I have in my mind and it is a real challenge for me to write something without being distracted by something, because I can no more stay concentrated, thanks to a deficient brain swimming in a huge bath of strong medication, and I have no more willpower - it is extinguished with all the hard efforts I have made in these harsh years of my jobs life.

    I cross my fingers that you will reach your goals, and, as you have said, then I could say: "I was there, at his debut!!!". That will be great!!!

    Who knows, you can be the trigger which can "unlocked" my mind and help me to write again - yup, I have co-written a lot of IT books and I have written a huge lot of IT white books.

    2012: the year of Mario C. :)
    2013: the year of the Judge Fred MANSON. :)

    Keep going!!! You have a reader of your comments!!! (Thanks to the Bleeding Cool BS!!!)

    Friendly yours,
    Judge Fred MANSON

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    Replies
    1. Hi Fred,

      Thank You for sharing your thoughts with me. I too used to feel completely frustrated with my life and where it was going. You need to just grab the bull by the horns and believe in yourself and most importantly, not be afraid to fail! I feel now that losing my shop wasn't necessarily a bad thing, that I have learnt from my mistakes and am enriched by the people I have met and the friendships I have forged. My twenties were the decade for me to experiment, my thirties will now be the decade that I succeed... hopefully :)

      Just go for it. Tell the stories you want to tell and get them out there. You will have a supporter in me!

      Thank You again for reading and responding.

      My Best,

      Mario

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