By Maddie Orton
Arts Correspondent
You may know him as Silent Bob, but get Kevin Smith on the subject of comics, and he’s got a lot to say. The New Jersey-born filmmaker “chatted” with a packed house at Comic Con in New York on Friday about his AMC TV show, Comic Book Men.
“I was like, ‘Well, I don’t have any TV ideas, but if you were going to do something, I would put a camera in a comic book store. It’s visually interesting, the people behind the counter are usually pretty acerbic and fun to be around,'” Smith says. “So they took the idea to AMC and AMC really liked it. And I didn’t even pitch my comic book store. I didn’t even think about my own.”
He does have his own comic book store. Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash in Red Bank now doubles as the filming location for Comic Book Men. His long-time friend Walter Flannagan runs the shop on the show and in real life. Comic books have had a big influence on Smith — and maybe not in the way you’d think.
“What a wonderful moral barometer,” Smith says of comic books. “It’s very rare that you get to read every month a story about thousands of people running away from the worst thing ever and one person heading toward it.”
Smith’s got devoted fans, and they appreciate the authenticity of his love for comic books. Though it took a little convincing for Kevin Uribe from West Orange, dressed as Silent Bob, to talk with us about it.
“As a comic book reader, he’s not a fake fan. He reads comic books. He loves Batman,” says Uribe. “And the way he talks about Batman with such passion makes me love him even more, makes me love his work even more.”
As for his movies: “They speak to people who are cigarette smokers and comic book readers and pop culture junkies and people who just don’t really have a voice out there with the young adult films and with the explosion films,” Uribe says.
Smith has received his share of criticism as well. His 2004 film Jersey Girl was mostly panned and his recent horror-comedy Tusk was a box office flop. But he isn’t apologizing.
“I always thought of being a failure as being success training. You can’t fail at something without trying it and if you’ve tried it, you’re already 99.9 percent more successful than everyone else on the planet because most people won’t bother trying,” says Smith. “Because we all have that inner voice that’s like ‘Why you? Why do you think you could do this?’ And we talk ourselves out of cool things and whatnot.”
Smith says going for it is a Jersey thing. “Jersey teaches you to try,” he explains. “I don’t know why. I don’t know what’s in our water or our blood or our fluoride when we were growing up, but maybe it’s because Manhattan’s right there, but there’s always this sense of like ‘All right, well I’ve got to give it a shot.’”
Judging by the crowds, fans are glad he did. Season 4 of Comic Book Men premiered last night with Smith’s daughter, aptly named Harley Quinn, trying her hand at — what else? Clerking.
WATCH MORE OF THE INTERVIEW WITH KEVIN SMITH: