The Comics Rack

Comic Book Memories Pt. 1

   My interest in comics retailing dates back to my first year of high school. At a time when most were tossing aside the trappings of childhood, I did a sort of reversion and rediscovered the genre that I had given up upon my entry into Jr. High ("comic are for kids...hrumpph!"). Living as we did in an outlying area, this was no mean feat, but there was a small shop in a larger town about 20 minutes away that my mother heard about from a friend. It was basically a small news stand off the main drag and it stocked current magazines, new paperbacks, a curtained area at the back for "adult" content and, to my surprise, comic books. After looking at the paperbacks (my mother and I both enjoyed science fiction, particularly the Burroughs reprints from Ace), I picked up a couple of issues at random and was hooked. Soon, I was reading about every comic I could lay my hands on and also went through all the books about comics that I could find at the local library.
   The news stand closed just a couple of months after we discovered it, much to our dismay, but I soon made a new inroad at the local Circle K, which was run by the parents of a friend of mine. Since I was nice and polite to their daughter (wonder whatever happened to her?), the parents took some time to explain to me how the comic shipments worked: although the comics were published monthly, they received a new shipment each week on Friday; the top edges of the comics had a colored stripe painted on them to help know what issues to return, which meant, of course, that unsold comics were sent back for credit; a really new concept for me. They even took enough of a liking to me that they kept the bundles of new comics unopened until I got to the store on Fridays, so I could have first crack at all the titles (I've often wondered what they would have said if they knew that I paid for the comics with money I made playing nickel a hand blackjack during lunch at school).
   Eventually, my friend and her family moved on and, since the new management of the store were not interested in my buying habits, I was forced to look for a new source of comics. After trying many different outlets (including a Circle K where you could usually find 3 consecutive issues of many titles) I found an ad (possibly in The Buyer's Guide) offering a comic subscription service in Long Beach, CA. All you had to do was send them a list of titles you wanted, along with $5 to start, and they would pull all of your titles (including annuals) and ship them to you each month. Heck, they even carried some of the popular fanzines of the time, like the RBCC and The Comic Reader that I had read about in Alan Light's Buyer's Guide.
   So, without a second thought, I opened an account with one of the first comic shops in the country...Wonderworld Books.