Ahead, apparently, of a story in the next issue of The Comics Journal, both Valerie D’Orazio and Alan David Doane revisit bad comic stores of their youth:
Downtown in Greenwich one day with mom and my younger brother, we went into Hughes Newsroom. Ah-ha! There on the bottom tier of a two-tiered magazine rack were the comics. Well, you knew they had to be here somewhere, right? 1980 was still in the beginning years of the direct market, and comics were living out their dying breaths in the mainstream magazine distribution chain, so they generally could be found in most towns, but you had to look.
I grabbed as many as I could afford (read: talk my mom into buying for me) and went up to the counter. And here is the meat of this tale, which laid buried in my mind until Val brought it back for me in her post (linked above):
The old man, Hughes himself, took the stack of maybe half-a-dozen comics. He put them on the counter. He put the palm of one hand on the bottom half of the cover of the top book on the stack, and then, one by one, he bent the covers back to see the prices and ring them up on the cash register.
Again: He put the palm of one hand on the bottom half of the cover of the top book on the stack, and then, one by one, he bent the covers back to see the prices and ring them up on the cash register.
In my head, a voice screamed: OH MY GOD. HE IS KILLING MY COMICS. STOP KILLING MY COMICS!
In the store, a young teenage boy smiled meekly as the old man, Hughes himself, handed me a bag with my now-ruined comics and no doubt told me to “have a nice day.” A day he had just destroyed by KILLING MY COMICS.
March 24th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
It’s important to note that the store I talked about in my post this morning was not a comic book store at all, but a mainstream newsroom/magazine shop. I was not casting aspersions at the direct market at all (for a change — haw haw!), but rather relating my most horrific experience buying comics as a young teen.
March 24th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Well, I had the same thing done to me (well, not to me, ME, but some comic books) just a few months ago at one of New York’s Midtown Comics store.
I asked for a back issue of Immortal Iron Fist, and the employee got one of those long boxes from under the racks, pulled a bunch of comic books halfway up, and then happily proceeded to search for the issue in question by bending them all. After creasing the spines on all of them, included the one I was looking for, he handed it to me expecting me to buy it.
I was infuriated, because I had been searching for that issue for a couple of months, and it seemed to be sold out on every New York store. And when I finally found it… this guy ruined it for me.
I had to wait a couple of months more for another decent copy to surface at another store.
(I should stress that this is NOT my typical experience at Midtown Comics, quite the opposite, but they do have a couple of employees who should not be handling the books themselves)
March 24th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
I remember in the 1960s and 1970s when the only guys you’d find selling back issue comics were old guys in book stores who’d heard that comics were worth comething but knew nothing about them. One store in Buffalo was like this and the guy had that Dracula comic strip paperback with an introduction by actor Christopher Lee. He wanted $10.00 for it (this was in 1969) because “Chris Lee is Stan Lee’s brother.” When I insisted that he wasn’t, the guy claimed I didn’t know what I was talking about.
March 25th, 2008 at 1:39 am
Obviously not, Jim, since everyone knows Jim Lee is Stan Lee’s brother! Sheesh!
March 27th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
It doesn’t serve any good purpose to complain about bad comics shops or bad comics shop experiences from decades ago. It’s just filling bandwidth for the sake of filling bandwidth, akin to pi$$ing into the wind.