Comic Shop. Dan Gearino
novelty of Victory Thrift Shop in Woodside, and that was why Jim Hanley’s life changed the day he and his friends entered the place. Hanley would grow up to become one of the most successful comics retailers on the East Coast.
“It was the most amazing thing we’d ever seen,” he said. “We went there in the elevated train to the store, and as we get there, there’s a window, a display window, floor-to-ceiling comics. There was Action Comics 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Superman 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Marvel Mystery 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.”
There is some debate about where and when the first comics specialty shop opened, often turning on how you define “comic shop.” The store in Woodside, starting in 1961, was one of the first to publicly display comics as collectibles and sell them for more than cover price. The comics were protected with clear plastic bags, another innovation of the store’s owner, a pioneer of comics retail: Robert Bell.
Many fans from the 1960s to the 1980s know the name Robert Bell because of his ads in comics and fanzines, selling his products through mail order. Fewer people know that before the eponymous mail order business, he had the Queens storefront, which he opened when he was just eighteen.
There is a tall-tale quality to what old retailers and fans say about Bell, but I have yet to find one of those stories that doesn’t check out. Yes, Bell hoarded copies of Fantastic Four #1 when it came out in 1961, acquiring them for as little as a dime apiece and then holding onto them as their resale value soared. Yes, he had at least a single copy of every Marvel comic from 1961 to about 1980. Yes, he had a prominent ad on the first Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide and remained a key advertiser in later years as the guide became an industry standard. The stories end with Bell selling his collection in the mid-1980s and vanishing from the comics scene.
“I bought my first property, real estate, when I was thirteen,” said Bell, speaking from his oceanfront condo in Pompano Beach, Florida, where he is semiretired. His success in comics gave him the money to invest in commercial real estate, and that was the focus of his professional life in the thirty years since he stopped selling comics. “I had a vending route with gumball machines. I had mail-order drop shipping for multiple different products. And then, at eighteen, the bookstore.”
The store was a successor to the thrift store that had been run by his parents in a separate part of the neighborhood. He grew up in that store, and, when his parents decided to get out of retail, he took the name of their business, Victory Thrift, and put it on a new location that would be his to run. The name referred to the Allies’ victory in World War II.
At the start, his top-selling items were paperback books, which he bought for one-fourth of cover price and resold for half of cover price. But he could see rising interest in his small selection of comics. New titles, such as Amazing Spider-Man and Fantastic Four, were attracting an older reader and a more devoted fan. He found that he could resell back issues of those comics and others for more than cover price.
To protect the most valuable issues, he cut and folded clear plastic from a dry cleaner and then taped it shut in the back. Finding that some customers wanted to buy these makeshift bags, he decided to mass-produce them. He shopped around for contract manufacturers and selected one that would make him tens of thousands of clear bags. Unlike the dry-cleaner bags, the “Bell bags” were the perfect size for comics.
Comics were about 10 percent of his sales in 1961 and grew to half of his sales near the end of the decade, when he left the storefront and focused on selling comics through mail order. (After he left, his mother took over the space and turned it into more of a thrift shop, buying and selling household items.) He built his comics sales by making connections with suppliers, following leads toward private collections, and advertising on the radio.
He tells the story of a woman who phoned him and said, “I have a box of books and I was on the way to the dump to throw them out. My son said they might be worth some money.” Her collection included the first three issues of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories and the first issue of Batman, all in near-perfect condition, among many others. He paid her $3,000, which was “a lot of money back then,” Bell said.
The most valuable comics, then and now, were from the early days of superheroes in the 1930s. Among the first publishers of periodical comics was the company that would become DC Comics, which began with New Fun in 1935, an anthology series. Three years later, the company published Action Comics #1, the debut of Superman, and kickstarted the era of the superhero.1
Almost immediately, comic books were a mass medium, sold through grocery stores, candy stores, newsstands, and about anywhere else newspapers could be found. As with almost any printed material, some readers saved the old issues and some retailers resold them, providing a glimmer of a secondary market.
One of the earliest known comics specialty retailers was Harvey T. “Pop” Hollinger in Concordia, Kansas, a small city about a three-hour drive northwest of Topeka. Starting in the late 1930s, he opened a store selling used comics and other items, according to a profile in the 1981 edition of the Overstreet guide. He found that one of the big problems with comics was durability, so he developed modifications that included brown tape and extra staples along the spines. The results, which would horrify collectors seeking “mint” condition, can still be found on the secondary market, often described as Hollinger-rebuilt comics.2
Another early comics retailer was Claude Held in Buffalo, New York, who had a well-stocked comics section in his used bookstore and sold comics through mail order beginning in the 1960s. On the West Coast, one of the important early retailers was Cherokee Books in Los Angeles, which opened in 1949 and by the mid-1960s had a comics section on the second floor.3
In the New York City area, Bell was one of the big players in a small world of comics dealers. His contemporaries included Passaic Books in New Jersey, a giant used bookstore with a comics section, and Howard Rogofsky, who ran a mail-order business out of his home. The dealers knew each other and shopped each others’ inventory, maintaining a polite rivalry.
The early dealers were a mix of adults and teenagers. In Texas, Buddy Saunders began to collect comics in earnest in 1961, when he was in his early teens. “When Fantastic Four #1 came out, I was pretty impressed with it, so I bought two copies, one for my collection, and one I sold a month later. Doubled my money at 25 cents,” Saunders said. “I can make the claim that I am probably the only comics retailer around today that has sold a mint copy of Fantastic Four #1 for a quarter. Probably would have been better then if I had kept it, but I was doubling my money, and impressed with myself.” Today, that comic would sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
He was a key player in some of the early fan-produced publications, including Rocket’s Blast Comicollector, which started in 1964. He contributed illustrations, and also placed ads in which he sold his own comics, generating money that he used to buy more comics. More than a decade later, he would found Lone Star Comics in the Dallas area. It would grow into a chain of stores, and exists today as MyComicShop.com, a large online retailer of classic comics.
Most of the early dealers knew of Bell because of his ads and his mail-order business, but his Queens store was not as well known. The store is notable in hindsight because it looked so much like the shops that would follow. He turned out to have near-perfect timing, opening the business right on the cusp of a boom in fan culture and a growing interest in collecting comics.
As Bell sees it, everything changed in 1968. He got a table that year at the Convention of Comic Book Art, held at the Statler Hilton in Manhattan. The event was a leap up from its predecessors in terms of the level of organization and the size of the crowd. “People came in with money in their hands, not their pockets, they were so eager to buy comics,” he said.
This is where Bell’s story crosses over with a much bigger one. The convention had been organized by a high school English teacher from Brooklyn, a tough guy with a goofball smile who would turn out to be the instigator of an explosion of new comic shops. His name was Phil Seuling, and much of today’s retail model, the good and the terrible, can be traced back to what he soon would start.
The New York convention got much