Comedian Brian Posehn Visiting Time Warp Comics Saturday

It was just another mild-mannered Saturday morning at Time Warp Comics in Boulder. Owner Wayne Winsett was there, running the store with his stalwart crew, when the phone rang; someone picked it up, then told Winsett that Brian Posehn was on the line and wanted to talk with him.

“I thought I was being punked or something,” Winsett recalls. “But it really was him. He said he’d done a Twitter survey about which stores would be good for a signing, since he was going to be in Denver for a few shows at Comedy Works. I guess we won that honor. How cool is that?”

The answer: pretty cool, and totally why the comedian-actor-podcaster-writer-comic-collector-supernerd tries to visit stores in the cities where he's booked. “I love doing this,” Posehn says. “It’s one of my favorite things.”

The tradition dates back to when Posehn first started writing Marvel’s super-popular, fourth-wall-breaking, wisecracking, comedically violent anti-hero comic Deadpool. “When I was doing my standup, I’d find the best local comic shop in town and go there, you know, cross-promote," he recalls. "So I’m glad to be doing it again with this new Image comic book I have."

That book, Scotch McTiernan Versus the Forces of Evil, is a trade paperback released earlier this month that shares the stories of stoner-soldier McTiernan as he takes on late-stage capitalism, the failed War on Drugs, Christmas and more. Co-writer Gerry Duggan calls it “sad and funny, just like us.”

“I go to these stores, anyway,” Posehn says. “That’s what I do when I have a Saturday: I like to find a shop and buy some Silver Age. So it’s fun for me on a couple of levels.”

Posehn has been to Denver before — the downtown Comedy Works is one of his regular stops when he’s touring — but he's never been up to Time Warp. “I found them the way I usually do now,” he says. “I went to Twitter and said, 'Hey, Denver people, what’s the best comic shop in town?' And people said, 'Well, it’s not Denver, but if you go up to Boulder, you've got to check this place out.' I’ve done Mile High Comics before — both as a guest and just as a customer — so it made sense to try something new. Time Warp was highly liked by the Twitter people that responded.”

Posehn still collects comics and comic book paraphernalia — mainly older stuff. But he has a fourteen-year-old son whom he just took to Comic Con in San Diego, and “he probably got 89 percent of the swag we brought home," he says. "He collects some Funko Pop figures — movie and horror and metal bands only, really — and Sideshow statues. Usually when I come through a shop, I’m looking for Silver Age stuff. I do ask the owners what they think the best thing to read is, too. I like picking up graphic novels of things I’ve never heard of.”

Posehn’s nerd cred is well earned; he was a comic collector as a kid. “I remember in 1976, I was traveling around the West Coast with my grandparents,” Posehn recalls. “I was ten, and they’d take me to grocery stores and drug stores and liquor stores, the places where we’d all buy our comics off these circular racks. I bought a ton of DC — DC Comics had this Bicentennial series that year, and that was a big thing for me. That was the first time I remember trying to be a completist — I remember going down my checklist and getting all the ones that had the [DC Comics Salutes the Bicentennial] banner on it. That’s where the collecting started for me.”

Posehn's favorites back then were Superman, Batman and the Flash, and he'd love to write about Batman and the Flash should he get the chance; he mentions Plastic Man and a couple of other possibilities. “But I read Marvel, too," he says. "No one ever told me I had to choose between the two, so I didn’t. I love ’em all.”
And he doesn't just love comics: Posehn is also a well-known Dungeons & Dragons fan, an avocation that nerd-Hollywood is fully embracing these days. But he came to it later. “I was a Christian kid in the ’70s, and parents were scared of heavy metal and D&D and all this stuff,” he recalls. “But my mom was a Bay Area liberal Christian, a feminist, and kind of her own person. She took me out to a bookstore one day in seventh grade, and I got all the stuff I needed to join the D&D club at my school. I walked in for that first club meeting, and a kid I hated from my church group was the one running it. He took one look at me and said, 'Posehn, what are you doing here?' And I turned and walked out and didn’t play D&D until my twenties.”

Posehn has since made up for lost time: His gaming group is going strong, and its ongoing adventures make up the core of the gaming podcast Nerd Poker.

Posehn says he’s lost track of how many local comic shops he’s offered to visit during his standup tours, but he’s happy to be able to add Time Warp Comics to the list. “There are a few cities I like coming back to,” Posehn notes. “Denver is definitely one of those places. Any city that has a slogan like ‘Keep it weird,’ that’s where my people are.”

Brian Posehn will appear at Time Warp Comics, 3105 28th Street in Boulder, from 1 to 3 p.m. on Saturday, July 29. He’s bringing along Sacramento comic Johnny Taylor, who’ll join Posehn for his five Comedy Works shows that start Thursday, July 27, and run through Saturday, July 29. For tickets and more information, see the Comedy Works website.