Comic Shop. Dan Gearino
to look at a camera. A few smiled. The resulting black-and-white photograph is a jolt of nostalgia, showing a time when comics fandom was so small that many of the country’s best-known comics creators, and their fans, could fit into a room and have a meal together.4
Along the back wall are the guests of honor, including the one most likely to have been known to the general public: Hal Foster, creator of the Prince Valiant newspaper strip. He has white hair and dark-rimmed glasses, and is among the oldest people there. To his left is Gil Kane, the artist known for his work on DC’s Green Lantern and The Atom, dapper in a jacket and tie and looking, as he often did, like the coolest professor on campus. Standing by the side wall are some of the Marvel guys, such as the boyish writer and editor Roy Thomas, whose glasses are white from the reflected flash, and his frequent collaborator, artist John Buscema, big and tall with a bushy goatee. In the foreground are tables for the paying guests, mostly young men in jackets and ties.
For Irene Vartanoff, it was the summer between high school and college. In the photo, she is dressed in a serape; she remembers that the room was chilly and that she wished she had brought a coat. To her right sits her younger sister, Ellen; they are some of the only women unaccompanied by a boyfriend or husband. Irene would go on to work on the editorial staff at Marvel and DC, and Ellen would become an artist and arts educator in Washington, D.C. Also at their table are friends they had met through the Illegitimate Sons of Superman, a fan-organized club for young DC readers. Among them are Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, and Dick Giordano, all of whom were already, or would become, prolific comics creators and editors.
“Everybody knew everybody,” Irene said. “We’d all troop out to Tad’s Steakhouse, where you could get dinner for less than $2. We’d talk about comics or James Bond or The Prisoner or Modesty Blaise, a bunch of the things that were related.”
Among the overwhelmingly white crowd, the photo shows three black men: Richard “Grass” Green, a cartoonist from Indiana who was known for his work in fan publications; Arvell Jones, who would go on to draw comics for DC and Marvel; and a man dressed in a suit whom I have not been able to identify.
In all, there are more than one hundred people shown. But I want to draw your attention to someone in the back, next to the guests of honor. He is dressed in a jacket and tie and has slicked-back hair. He has a blank expression, choosing not to show his goofy smile. This is Phil Seuling.
He had organized the Saturday luncheon, a small part of his convention, a better follow-up to the convention he had done the year before. A few years later, he would help develop a new way of distributing comics. He was, in many ways, the father of modern comics retail.
“He was this bold guy,” said Jim Hanley, who went to his first Seuling convention as a teenager the following year. “He didn’t walk into the room, he stormed into the room. He jumped onto the stage and grabbed the microphone and captivated the audience instantly. He had spent probably ten years at that point teaching school, so he was used to being in front of an audience every day, and he was good at it. He always had the loudest voice in the room, and he knew us.”
The “us” part was important. Hanley and the other mostly younger fans at the conventions saw themselves as a tribe, a group whose loyalty was hardened by the outside perception that comics were a kids’ medium. “I was the reticent kid, which was pretty common among comics fans,” he said.
Seuling had a way of welcoming strangers. For the 1968 convention, a young comics fan from San Jose, California, drove across the country to stay with Seuling and his family and serve as an assistant at the show. That was Michelle Nolan, who was twenty, and would go on to be prolific writer and editor on comics history.
“I stayed in his comic book room,” Nolan said. “He had a nice apartment in Brooklyn near Coney Island. You could see the Wonder Wheel and Cyclone from his window.”
Nolan would turn out to be a crucial connection. Back in California, she was part of a close-knit group of comics fans. Among them was a high school kid named Francis Plant, who went by his nickname, Bud. He would go on to co-own what may have been the first comic shop chain, Comics & Comix, and would have a separate business selling comics and books through the mail.
(Top) Phil Seuling on stage at the 1971 Comic Art Convention, held at the Statler Hilton in Manhattan; (bottom) outside the ballroom was the dealers’ room, where dealers set up to sell to fans and collectors. Credit: Mike Zeck.
For the 1970 convention, Nolan, Plant, and others loaded up a van and made the drive east to stay with Seuling and help at his convention. Other than Nolan, who had worked at the two previous shows, Seuling didn’t know any of them.
The van rolled into Brooklyn at about 11:30 p.m. The visitors found parking and then arrived at Seuling’s apartment door. With some reluctance, considering the hour, they knocked. The door swung open, and there was Seuling, dressed only in a pair of white briefs.
“It’s New York and it’s July and it’s hot as shit,” Plant said. Instead of being upset or embarrassed, Seuling waved everyone in and showed them to his living room, where they would sleep.
Plant was meeting a man who would become his most important business mentor and an even better friend.
“When there was a group of people, he would always be the center of attention,” Plant said. “He told the stories. He flirted with the cute waitresses. He always picked up the dinner tabs. He was older than us, but he was a high school teacher, so he was used to dealing with lots of kids.”
And yet there was another side to Seuling. He could go from a smiling pal to a red-faced fury. For out-of-towners, he fit the image of a tough New Yorker, tall and broad-shouldered, with a Brooklyn accent and a short fuse. “Phil was a streetwise guy,” Plant said. “He was from Brooklyn, and they grow up a lot faster than little neophytes from California. We went back there and our eyes were opened. It was just a different world.”
The Bay Area had its own burgeoning comics scene. Despite his youth, Plant had been a part of it for years. He grew up reading Disney comics and moved on to DC and Marvel. In his early teens, he shopped at Twice Read Books, a used bookstore in downtown San Jose. There was a stack of old comics by the door for a nickel each. Then one day he saw another customer ask to see the dollar comics.
“I was aghast. I never heard of a dollar comic,” he said.
From behind the counter the store clerk pulled out a box of comics from the 1940s and early 1950s. Plant was fascinated by the idea that comics had a rich history of characters he had never seen. He bought Thrills of Tomorrow #19, cover dated February 1955 and published by Harvey Comics, which was itself a reprint of a Harvey comic from 1946 called Stuntman, written and drawn by the cocreators of Captain America, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon.
From his visits to the dollar box, he met other fans of old comics, and they became friends, a mix of adults and teens that included Nolan. “If anything, I was probably very shy in high school,” Plant said. “I just wasn’t one of the hip guys. I had glasses. I had acne. I wasn’t that good at sports.” With comics, he felt like he was part of something.
In March 1968, when he was sixteen, several of the group pooled their comics, books, and cash and opened a small store, Seven Sons Comic Shop. Less than a year later, the partners sold the business to one of the co-owners. Some of the same people, including Plant, soon opened an even smaller store in San Jose called Comic World. It lasted about a year before the co-owners moved on to other things. For Plant, this meant enrolling at San Jose State. He would study business, having already been a co-owner of two businesses.
Meanwhile, an hour’s drive north, Gary Arlington opened San Francisco Comic Book Co. in that city’s Mission District. He was starting in April 1968, a few weeks after Seven Sons, although the people involved did not know of each other’s stores at the time. His business became closely associated with underground comics, the irreverent and boundary-pushing publications that nobody would confuse with DC or Marvel. One of the key underground