"The Hunt". Collecting comics in the 70's

[namor]

As I was talking to my nephew about comics this weekend,mostly about
changes over time,he is 19 and I'm 45.We went over most of the changes that we both had experiance in,cost,artwork,content and such.
What hit me was ,he has never had to worry about missing a issue,he shows up to the comic shop,pays for whats on his pull list and goes home.Need a
back issue?They are their,or Ebay or somewhere on the internet.
In the early 70's,it was a different story altogether I would tell him.
Before direct marketing,you had to cover all your bases.I had a route of
several Sav-a-minutes,7-11's,Zippy Marts and grocery stores.This consisted
of several miles of pedaling my bike around town on Mondays to get my comics.
One store in peticular was a Mom and Pop grocery store call Muphy's Market.
It was a flea bag of a store,but for some reason they got all the hard to find
comics,the Giant Size Marvels,black and white Savage Sword of Conan,The
Deadly Hands of Kung-Fu and such,AND they were the only store in my small
southern town to get the Treasury Editions.
My mom would scold me,because she said it was to far to ride my bike,..I
always chance it and take my punishment.
Remember the panic if for some reason,not of your doing,of missing a issue?
Any other older collecters on here with stories of what they went thru to
get their comics?

[MichikoS]

Boy this brings back the memories. Trying to hunt down my favorite comics was practically a full-time pursuit as a kid.

In suburban North County St. Louis, in the late '60s - early '70s, I had NO nearby stores that carried comics. None.

The 7-11 carried paperbacks, and they were my source for the Bantam Doc Savage series books (love those Bama covers!) which seemed to come out every freakin' week.

The A&P Supermarket at Northwest Plaza had a weird mechanical comic book vending machine. You could only buy the top comic in the stack at any point, which dropped down to the bottom of the machine after you put in your dime and two pennies (soon, dime and nickel) and pushed the money plunger in. I hated that thing, but I bought a lot of comics out of it. In retrospect, I should have asked the store manager to just open the damned machine up and I would have bought only what I wanted, but I didn't know any better.

But. Comics, lots of them, were found on the spinner racks at Union Station downtown. My parents made a bi-weekly trip to Soulard Market to buy Asian vegetables (which you can get anywhere these days) and so I got up at the crack of dawn to accompany them. If getting up at 4:45 and driving with my parents into the city was the only way to get my comics, that was a sacrifice I was willing to make. Grudgingly.

There was one Rexall Drug that had an excellent comic selection, but it was in a part of town my parents didn't like to frequent. I'd harangue my dad until he relented, and once a month I'd go there and blow my allowance in one gluttonous orgy -- $1.50 or $2.00. Big spender!!

One time, I was talked into comic book mail subscriptions by my Dad, who was Mr. Practical, but I just couldn't live with the crease. Yes, they used to fold comics down the middle and put them in a brown paper wrapper to deliver them in the mail. They were often damaged in other ways, too. Yecch.

I didn't know about comics shops as a kid. They existed in St. Louis, and I even went to a few comic swap meets where I would see these people, but since I didn't drive and had very little understanding of how business worked, I was in the dark. Comic shops were for more sophisticated readers.

I did do a regular mail-order business in the 1960's with a guy named Buddy Saunders, who would send out a typed list of comics for sale which I would eagerly pore over. Buddy Saunders is now the owner of Lone Star Comics. And I still do business with him!

Michi

[Red Oak Kid]

During my first swim thru comics in the 60s there was the drugstore magazine rack where I could get my Batman and World's Finest comics. I actually had a subscription to Superboy around 1964. I have no memory of how they were mailed but they weren't folded.

When I started "collecting" comics in 1971 there was a local 7-11 with a nice selection and a local used book store with back issues. 15 cents each or trade 2 for 1. Eventually this store morphed into a regular comics shop.

My best bit of luck during the early 70s is that we visited an Aunt once a week and there was a great bookstore/newstand across the street. They had 3 or 4 spinner racks plus a newstand which had the b&w magazines and treasury editions. This was my main source of comics for years.

There was an antique store that my mom went to occasionally and I remember there was a table with stacks of old comics. I think they were 20 or 25 cents each. If I had a time machine and could go back in time just once, this would be the store I would go to. I'd love to go thru those stacks again and see what gems I passed up.

When I got a car in 1975 I went on a regular Sat. morning route of half price book stores across the city. By then I was losing interest in comics and the price of back issues was starting to go up, even in tiny used book stores.

[dan bailey]

During my comics-buying days as a kid -- roughly mid-'67 to late '70, & then late '73 through '78 -- the backwater where I lived had 5 stores with full spinner racks (2 pharmacies, 2 mom-&-pop groceries & a Piggly Wiggly), & every couple of weeks I recall making a point of hitting them all, the vagaries of distribution being what they were. (The corner drugstore I always visited every Tuesday or Thursday afternoon, depending on whichever one new comics were being distributed on during a given period; I know it changed at least once.)

Even so, every now & then a certain comic just wasn't to be found. Memory tells me Howard the Duck #1 fell in that category, but it wasn't always #1 issues or anything special; the occasional issue of, oh, Iron Man or whatever could fall through the cracks as well. Sometimes an elusive issue would show up in the next town over, where I wound up going to college beginning in 8/77 (& where more & more of my comics-buying occurred beginning at that time, of course, especially at a convenience store right across from campus).

[Patrick Dean]

One time, I was talked into comic book mail subscriptions by my Dad, who was Mr. Practical, but I just couldn't live with the crease. Yes, they used to fold comics down the middle and put them in a brown paper wrapper to deliver them in the mail. They were often damaged in other ways, too. Yecch.

Michi

A shop here in town got a batch of 1967 Detective and Batman comics that were subscription copies. They look like they were read once, since the corners are sharp and they still have a nice gloss, but yeah... that crease. The neat bonus was that every copy came with the original envelope from DC's subscription service.

[Jolly Mon]

My early collecting was similar in the 70's, except I had the added challenge of moving around a lot as a kid. In late 73, my mother decided to move us to Florida in an 18 foot travel trailer. We (mother, her boyfriend, three boys, and a dog or two) lived in it for the next three years, moving to various parts of Florida following various jobs. Trailer parks generally had camp stores, which were great sources for comics. I also became expert at finding and canvassing convenience stores that I could ride my bike to, and also at begging to stop the car at ones I couldn't bike to.

Kissimmee, FL, which has since been practically swallowed up by Disney World, was a particular favorite hunting ground. Not only were there convenience stores within walking distance from the downtown, but they had a genuine old-time news shop that was dark and smelly and had a huge wooden rack of comics. I remember one time I was out of school because I'd been stung by a scorpion the night before and felt like crap, so my mom brought me to work with her at the Goodwill store in downtown Kissimmee (which is where we got our Cheech & Chong records that she never knew what they were really about) and I drifted in and out of consciousness on the old couches they were trying to sell. During a concious period I walked the rounds of the stores downtown and came back with Marvel's Champions #1, which has been a favorite since.

Later ('81) when I was in stationed Charleston, South Carolina in the Navy, I discovered my first comic book store, Galaxy Comics, and was in heaven.

After that I was sent to Newport, RI, and ended up having to drive to Providence once or twice a month to get comics at Iron Horse Comics.

Things are sure easier now.

[Dan Felty]

I'm not qualified to speak on the seventies (born in '85, you old farts! ), but I just want to mention that newsstand distribution was still incredibly important when I was growing up. I used to walk or bike to the gas station to buy comics, but the stores near where we moved in '95 (just across town) didn't carry comics. That was all it took; I was out of comics until 2003.

I'm always heartened to see comics at gas stations, grocery stores, and book stores, because I'm sure there are kids who wouldn't be involved with comics if they weren't as readily available.

[benday-dot]

As a kid I simply frequented whatever drugstore or bookstore was nearby and opportunistically picked up whatever cool looking comic was there, usually a Hulk, Spider-Man , Thor, Avengers, or Fantastic Four. But I was ignorant as to when new comics came out and never tried terribly hard to build up continuous runs. I was always content to simply pick up whatever random, but "cool looking" comic I could find. Sometimes my friends and I would later trade with each other to build up little story arcs to enjoy.

[The Confessor]

Great post MichikoS, really fascinating to hear what you had to do to obtain your monthly comics. One part that particularly surprised me though was this...

One time, I was talked into comic book mail subscriptions by my Dad, who was Mr. Practical, but I just couldn't live with the crease. Yes, they used to fold comics down the middle and put them in a brown paper wrapper to deliver them in the mail.

Maybe you're talking about an earlier time period but I'm surprised to hear this beacuse when you see the subscription adverts in old Silver Age Marvel comics, it always specifies that "all comics are mailed flat."

[MichikoS]

Maybe you're talking about an earlier time period but I'm surprised to hear this beacuse when you see the subscription adverts in old Silver Age Marvel comics, it always specifies that "all comics are mailed flat."

I subscribed to several Marvel titles, Avengers, X-Men and Captain Savage among them, for a year, 1967-1968. They all came the same way: folded right down the middle, and covered in a brown unbleached mailing wrapper tightly fitted around the comic. I do recall seeing the "mailed flat" enticement re: comic subscriptions at some point, but it was surely after my experience. Does anyone else have experience with subscription comics during the '60s and '70s? There must have been a lot of collector complaints about folded comics which led to the "mailed flat" practice. I frequently see "subscription creases" on old DC comics from the 1960s, so I assume the practice was industry standard.

Michi

[rick]

In the early 70’s it was the same for me as everyone else.

I’d find some of the books I wanted at 7/11, some over at one of the drug stores downtown and for any of the Treasury sized books, or any other oddball stuff, I’d get those at Kmart.

But then in 1974 I met a couple of guys named Ed Love and Mike Delong who had just opened this little, tiny hole in the wall bookstore that sold nothing but comics, and even though I was only 12, after a short time, I had a part time job with them after school, cleaning, counting, stacking for trade, and I’ve been able to get my comics ever since.

[Rob Allen]

In the 60s, I started buying comics at a neighborhood candy store/newsstand in Belleville, NJ. When we moved to Plainfield, I bought my comics at a stationers/newsstand a few blocks from home, and when we moved across town a few years later, I got my comics, Mad, and wrestling magazines at a deli/grocery/newsstand in South Plainfield. In 1969 I gave up comics for a while.

In 1971, when I resumed, the deli/grocery/newsstand was closed and I was in high school, which was close to the stationery store I had frequented years earlier. So I went back there, and soon established a regular route thru downtown Plainfield - from the stationers to the tobacconist that carried the science fiction digest magazines along with comics, to the variety store that seemed to have whatever the other stores didn't, to the used bookstore that was my first source of back issues.

A few years later, back issues got easier to find as I started going to cons in New York, riding the train in from Plainfield. I went to a lot of cons between 1973 and 1977. Also, a head shop opened in Plainfield and I started buying underground comix. I did subscribe to a couple of Marvels in this era, and they were folded.

At college in Madison, there was a big newsstand/stationer/gift shop downtown that carried comics for the first two years, but then they stopped. That was the beginning of the decline in the mass availablity of comics. I had to walk an hour and a half (round trip) to a pharmacy in Chatham that carried a complete array of comics.

After graduating from college (good) and getting married (mistake) in 1978, I stopped buying and reading comics. Just quit, cold turkey. I saw my first comics shop a few years later.

[devildinosaur]

I had a route of
several Sav-a-minutes,7-11's,Zippy Marts and grocery stores.This consisted
of several miles of pedaling my bike around town on Mondays to get my comics.

You and me both; I trekked all over God's green earth (7-11's, Publixes, Winn Dixies, newstands at local malls, you name it...) looking for my comics. And this was in the very early eighties (I'm 39).

[Red Oak Kid]

I subscribed to several Marvel titles, Avengers, X-Men and Captain Savage among them, for a year, 1967-1968. They all came the same way: folded right down the middle, and covered in a brown unbleached mailing wrapper tightly fitted around the comic. I do recall seeing the "mailed flat" enticement re: comic subscriptions at some point, but it was surely after my experience. Does anyone else have experience with subscription comics during the '60s and '70s? There must have been a lot of collector complaints about folded comics which led to the "mailed flat" practice. I frequently see "subscription creases" on old DC comics from the 1960s, so I assume the practice was industry standard.

Michi

I had subs to Swamp Thing, Shadow and Kamandi in the early 70s and they were all mailed exactly the way you describe. I also had a sub to E-Man and it was mailed flat in an manilla envelope. Same with Foom magazine.

I just have no memory of the earlier Superboy sub but I was happy with them and I wouldn't have been happy if they had been folded.

[dan bailey]

I'm not qualified to speak on the seventies (born in '85, you old farts! ), but I just want to mention that newsstand distribution was still incredibly important when I was growing up. I used to walk or bike to the gas station to buy comics, but the stores near where we moved in '95 (just across town) didn't carry comics.

I've asked this before, I think, but I don't remember the answer ... Just when did comics disappear from non-specialized stores? As mentioned previously, I stopped paying attention in 12/78, so for all I know it could've happened before 1980 (though obviously that wasn't the case). I know very well that I've seen multiple assertions that comics had proven fatally unprofitable from a distribution & general retail standpoint by the time the '80s really got rolling.

In any event, the mid-'90s is definitely far later than I would've thought, from all I've read before. (Maybe Mr. Felty grew up in Pleasantville?)