Comics Lunch

From left: (back row) Charles Ryan, Andy Collins, Stan!, Marc Schmalz, Ed Stark, Rich Redman, Chris Perkins; (front row) JD Wiker, Monte Cook

It all started right after we moved to Washington. See, when Wizards of the Coast bought TSR, it was weird in that, while we all moved across the country to a brand new city, we all moved to this new city. So even though everything was strange and new, practically all of my friends (with some notable exceptions) were still with me.

And we all needed to figure out where to buy comic books now.

Soon after our arrival, Jeff Quick -- then editor of Polyhedron -- and I -- then Wizards game designer -- found a little shop called the Comics Den right here in Seattle (or actually, in our adjacent town/suburb, Renton). New comics came in on Wednesdays.

Very quickly, a tradition started. We would go get comics on Wednesdays, and then have lunch. But we weren't the only comics fans in the Wizards' offices. Editor Michele Carter, writer Stan!, and many others were comics fans, too. If new comics fans joined the company or our department, like designer/editors Andy Collins and Erik Mona, many of them joined comics lunch as well.

The tradition went on and on. Every Wednesday. Eventually, even people who didn't read comics learned not to ask us what we were doing for lunch on Wednesdays. "Oh, that's right," they'd say. "It's Wednesday. Comics lunch."

Now one of the many strange things about this tradition was that we didn't really talk about comics at comics lunch. We'd talk about books, or movies, or TV, or -- most often -- work. Very often, we'd complain about work. Comics lunch became a time for us to get out of the office and vent steam if anything was bugging us. We'd call these discussions "surl," which actually comes from an old joke regarding former TSR game designer Colin McComb, whom we jokingly referred to as "Surly." (This comes from a Simpsons character... it doesn't matter....) We'd say, "Who has 'surl' today?"

At its height, we'd have 10 to 12 people at comics lunch. Eventually, people uninterested in comics would attend too, just for the lunch. Like I said, we didn't talk about comics at lunch for the most part -- you didn't need to be a comics fan to enjoy it.

But then I left the company. A month later, so did Jeff. Then there was a round of layoffs at Wizards. Then another. And another. Comics lunch attendees took their share of hits during these layoffs. The strange thing is, though, comics lunch didn't suffer for this. Just the opposite: It took on a whole new meaning.

Now the majority of people who attend do so because it's the only connection many of us have with each other during the week. No one deals in "surl" anymore. Now we spend the time catching up with all the people we otherwise wouldn't have seen.

It's funny how things change, and how something that started out as just a weekly lunch date actually became pretty important.