As a young lad, my family moved from Chicago to a small town in Southwestern Michigan when I was six, around 1972. There were always comics around, but maintaining a consistent collection was nigh impossible for me. I would get comics at the Hardings grocery store, and drugstores in Coloma, Waterveliet and South Haven, but it was quite inconsistent.
We moved back to Chicago in 1979, and from there finding new comics was pretty damned impossible. There was a local home/store a couple of blocks away that had the 3/.30 comics that I would frequent, but of course you didn't always know what you were going to get, which could be a good thing as I was able to sample stuff I wouldn't have been interested in before.
It wasn't until I was in college in 1983 that there was a shop I could go to on a regular basis and stay on top of things. I was lucky to have a Hall Director that also had similar interests in both comics and music, and I got to read a ton of stuff because of him, including All New X-Men, Miller's Daredevil, Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, Badger, Nexus and American Flagg from First! Comics, Love and Rockets, and many other historical entries. Unfortunately, post-college, I just plain didn't have the money to keep up. Really, I had dropped comics from 1989-1998, both from lack of funds and from lack of comics shops.
So, that's my history. I could never stay on top of what was happening back when I was a kid/teen. I'm wondering what other people's experiences have been.
Replies
Well, before I discovered comics shops, I bought most of my comics as 10-cent back issues from neighborhood corner stores -- some with covers, some without. There was a place I went to on Saturdays after visiting my house of worship where I would load up on all kinds: DC war books, Marvel and DC superheroes, the cheesy Marvel horror anthology reprints, the slightly less cheesy DC horror anthology books with new stories, humor books like MAD and Cracked and CRAZY, and more.
Growing up, we lived out in the country. There were two small general stores in our community, neither sold comics. The main town was 20 minutes away by car, and I had to rely on the whims of my parents to go the convenience stores and other stores that sold comics, while I was in elementary school. No comics shops in town. I certainly didn't get to go into town every week, and even when we did, there was no guarantee of hitting the stores with comics. But I was lucky in that when I visited my grandmother and aunt for any extended stay (an hour from where we lived), my aunt spoiled us and would take my brother and I wherever we wanted, and took us to several stores that sold comics. So a few times each year, I would come back from my grandmother's with a big stack of comics. I wasn't until I started high school in 1983 that I could go to the stores nearby on my own, which I did every week - the school gave us "free" periods, we were supposed to study, but frankly we could leave the school grounds and do what we wanted. It made collecting a lot easier. When I started university in 1986, I had my own car the first two years, and then lived in an off campus apartment for the next two. Even more freedom to go looking for comics. I also got to go to Halifax, which had comic shops, a few times a year from 1986 to when I moved there in 1993.
I always found hunting for back issues fun. I came across them in a lot of ways. In elementary school, we had "bake sales" every month, where kids could bring in anything they wanted to sell - got lots of comics that way in the late 1970s. A friend in sixth grade also read comics and we were best friends - his mother drove us into town one Friday evening and we went to a used bookstore. It had tons of comics, and this was 1979 or 1980 - I wish I could take a time machine back to that place! There were also convenience stores in the mid to late 80s that didn't have new comics but had older ones form a few years earlier. I don't know where these comics came from but the stores seemed to get new stock every 2-3 months. It was usually 2-3 dozen comics in a small rack.
In 2006, when I moved back to the town I grew up in, there were 4 or 5 places that carried new comics, and sadly, now none of them do. I don't know if it was the case in the U.S., but here the comics all had a cover price $1 over whata comics shop charged. I'm about an hour and 15 minuted from a comic shop today, and 2.5 hours from Halifax, which still has several good stores.
Just kitty-corner to our elementary school in Vancouver was the Keller's drugstore that had a spinner rack. This is where I remember buying my first comics with my own money.
But on weekends and in the summer, we were more likely to go across the road from us--because we lived right on the line between Vancouver and Burnaby--and walk a few blocks down on the Burnaby side to where there were a bunch of stores.
When I was a little I couldn't make this trip on my own because that was a very busy road with traffic, so usually one of my sisters would walk with me. And on Saturdays we'd go to spend our allowance (a whole quarter when I was eight).
In the '60s, Mrs. Ryan had a drugstore that sold comics there. These were stacked on a bottom shelf, as I recall. I would look at the covers and pick two 12 cent comics or one 25 cent comic, to buy with my quarter. Since Mrs. Ryan was right there, it was impossible to thumb through these comics. I had to decide just from the covers what I most wanted to buy. No wonder I was attracted to the comics with Infantino and Anderson covers, which were the most enticing (Swan and Klein covers also attracted my interest).
By the early '70s, Mrs. Ryan had moved a few doors up the street and now only dispensed drugs. But another store opened up on the same block, a mom and pop milk store, that sold comics. In addition, I began to realize that comics were sold on other days than Saturdays, so I would sometimes pop in the Keller's drugstore on my way home from secondary school (being as I was in grade 8 by then). A couple years later, a store opened up on the same block as Keller's that specialized in comics and books, new and used--and this morphed into what we now think of as a comic book store (changing owners a few times).
I subscribed to some titles, as well, in the '70s. My reason wasn't to save money (in fact with all the charges for mailing to Canada, the comics probably ended up costing me more), but mainly so that I would 1) be assured of always getting the comic (which sometimes wasn't at the drugstore when I looked for it) and 2) getting it early enough so I could write letters to DC that had a chance of getting there in time to be published in the letter column.
I hated the brown wrapper and the folding. Later they sent the comics flat, not folded, but still in a brown wrapper--this was sometimes better, but often the wrapper was glued to the comic. I liked getting comics in the mail, but if I had it to do over again, I probably would not have bothered with most subscriptions.
Charlton did mail their comics in a nice manilla envelope. I subscribed to E-MAN (probably because it was very hard to find in local drugstores).
DC sent the tabloid editions (you had to special order each issue--there wasn't a subscription for those) in nice crush-proof mailers. Those were definitely worth it, since the books always arrived in perfect condition (although two issues would often come in the same mailer and you had to be careful pulling them out).
A convience store on Centre street. I can still close my eyes and know the layout of that store.
There were two stores across the street from each other that my father would take me to close to our house. One dropped their comics when I was about eleven or twelve. I remember going in, walking to the comics section, and seeing panty hose. The owner said he'd dropped comics because they didn't make enough money. He sounded annoyed, like he'd told a lot of kids that. The place across the street got all of my business for about a year or so before they closed up. It was then a much longer trip to get comics, and, since I was in junior high, I kind of lost interest for awhile. A couple of years later I found the Defenders at a bookstore and that got me back in again. Eventually The Crossing and Onslaught got me out again.
I think of Onslaught as "The Year I Didn't Read Marvel Comics."
I think of Onslaught as "The Year I Stopped Reading Marvel Comics." Wasn't about to touch Heroes Reborn. By the time Heroes Return came out I had decided there were other things I could do with my money. A year or two away from an impulse buy and it's difficult to get back into the habit.
Like some of the other (ahem) veteran guys here, I was a kid in the 60s, and I had a regular route of three drugstores that I biked to. Frequently, I got there before they'd gotten around to snipping the wire bands and counting them out, getting me into trouble when I identified ones I wanted from the corner I could see and yanked them out. One store got in the habit of being sure the bundles were at least open and counted by the time I usually arrived each week.
I also had a longer route to several further-away general stores (with lots of cool penny candy) that I biked to a couple times a month on Saturday mornings. Finding issues was a challenge--but that was part of the fun. You never knew what you'd find--and bless the retailers who didn't police their spinners and had months-old comics stuck in the back!
When I went to college, I subscribed to a few of my favorites (ASM, DD, FF) but soon found a newsstand near campus, and I found a few others in my dorm were reading some cool stuff (Captain Marvel, Conan, Dr. Strange).
We moved back to Chicago in 1979, and from there finding new comics was pretty damned impossible.
I don't know where you lived, but if it was on the North side, you missed out. After I got out of school in 1977, we moved to Rogers Park, a few blocks from Larry's Comics, a hole-in-the-wall with a fantastic array of oddball stuff--he made frequent trips to London to bring back imports--and lots of beat-up early SA stuff for a buck or two. He kept me interested in comics at a time when the standard spinner rack wasn't working.
Without that store, I probably would've given up on comics. But with it, there hasn't been a month since I was about eight that I haven't bought some comics.
-- MSA
-
1
-
2
-
3
of 3 Next