Saturdays we close at nine. Most nights, once the last customer is out and the sign on the door is turned around, Daniel puts on one more record before we count the drawer. He has done it every night I've worked there, which is seven years now, and I'd guess every night before that. Nobody asks him to. Nobody has ever asked him to stop.

Panel 2 is how it really looks: the three of us in a row on the counter with the lights off, Elisabeth with her eyes shut, Daniel looking down at nothing the way he does when it's a good one, and me with my eyes open, looking at the bins in the dark. Somebody ought to.

The red lamp in the window is Daniel's. It came from his house, it has a red bulb in it, and it stays on all night so the store never looks empty from the street.

Elisabeth asked if I was going to say what he played. I'm not. Partly that's the rule of this strip, no names on the records, and partly it's that the last record of the night belongs to whoever stayed for it.

About panel 4: tomorrow is Sunday, and on Sundays we don't open till noon, so it won't be the same time tomorrow at all. Elisabeth knows that. It isn't the kind of question you answer with the hours.

-- Adam

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 1999
Strip #4 is up. That makes a month of Saturdays. The listening station kid came in Tuesday after school and stayed till six. Nobody said anything about the CD, him included. He's still saving up. Daniel still denies it.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 1999
Strip #3 is up. Also, the listening station has new headphones. The old pair had one working side and most of a roll of electrical tape on it. Daniel took them home. He doesn't throw away anything that ever played music.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 1999
Strip #2 is up. Daniel has never seen this page. He doesn't own a computer and says he's too old to start, so I printed strip #1 at the copy shop and he taped it to the side of the register. Customers read it while they wait for change. One man read it, looked at Daniel for a while, and bought the whole stack he was holding instead of half. I'm not sure what that means, but I'm counting it.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 1999
Here it is: SIDE B, strip #1, a diary comic about the record store where I work. I've drawn the store in the margins of the want list for years. This summer I started drawing it on purpose. A new strip goes up every Saturday morning, before I go in. Thanks for stopping by.

My name is Adam Henley. I'm 29, and since 1992 I've worked behind the counter of a record store in Minneapolis. It sells new and used records and CDs, mostly used. It's long and narrow and too full: wooden bins of vinyl down the middle, a wall of CDs on one side, flyers on anything that holds still, a turntable behind the counter, and one listening station with a pair of big headphones. I'm not going to tell you its name. If you live here you may already know which one it is. If you don't, it's a little like every store you ever lost a whole Saturday in.

Why SIDE B: the A side is what people come in for, the new releases and the thing they heard on the radio. The B side is everything else. The man with two boxes, the hum at the counter, the kid at the listening station, the last record after we lock up. That's the part I wanted to draw.

There are three of us. Daniel owns the store. Elisabeth works the register. I mostly price things. You can meet us on the cast page. The customers in the strip all really came in, but they never get names, because they didn't come in to be in a comic, and because, honestly, I don't know most of their names. I know what they buy.

You will never see a real band's name in SIDE B, or a real record cover. Every cover I draw is plain, or just shapes. The store is full of other people's music, and none of it is mine to draw. Also, if I wrote down what Daniel thinks of certain bands, he would lose half his customers.

Every strip is one sheet of plain copy paper, out of the box under the counter that we use for the want list and the sale signs. I rule the four panels against the edge of a record mailer. Those are the only straight lines in it. Then I go straight in with a black felt-tip pen. No pencil first: when I pencil, it comes out stiff. If a face goes wrong, I start the sheet over. Copy paper is cheap. Strip #3 took four sheets, all because of Daniel's face in the last panel.

The words are the same pen, in capitals, with the balloons drawn around them after.

Then the color, and there is only one: a red marker, the same red as the price gun. I hold that price gun more than anything else all day, so the red felt like the store's. It goes on last, and not much of it: a price sticker, a record label, Elisabeth's hair, a lamp in the window.

Saturday morning, before work, I scan the sheet on the flatbed scanner I got from a customer in a trade (his scanner for a box of cassettes nobody wanted). I shrink it to 400 pixels wide in the program that came with the scanner, put the red bar across the top with the number and the date, and save it as a JPEG, about 50K, so it comes in on a modem before you lose interest. I tried GIFs first. The red went blotchy. Each strip has a bigger version too, 640 wide, if you want to see where the pen skipped.

"Do you buy records?"
Yes. Bring them in. Daniel will look at every one, by the edges, so bring something to read.

"It goes like da-da-dum-dum..."
See strip #2. Try again slower. Somebody will get it.

"Can I listen to this before I buy it?"
That's what the station is for. If someone's on it, wait. He'll finish the side eventually.

"Why is this one forty dollars and this one is a dollar?"
Ask Daniel. Pull up a chair.

"Is this any good?"
Elisabeth says yes or no. Daniel talks for twenty minutes. I ask what else you like.

"Do you have it on cassette?"
There's a box of cassettes under the last bin. Nobody has ever found anything in it, but people love to look.

"Will your register still work after New Year's?"
Daniel says he'll write the receipts by hand if he has to, and the turntable doesn't know what year it is.

"Do you work here?"
Seven years.

If you'd like to put SIDE B on your links page, here's a button. It's red, of course. Please save it to your own page as sideb.gif instead of loading it off mine, then paste in this HTML:

Then write and tell me where it is. I'll go look.