Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 22, 1990 TAG: 9007250600
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOE KENNEDY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
They were pleasant, but they were preoccupied. They were about to become part of comic book history.
Inside, owner Sharon Perdue and her assistants feverishly readied the 53 new comic book titles that had arrived that morning. Among them was a new edition of Spider-Man drawn and written by Todd McFarlane, a rising star in the comics world.
At 11:52, eight minutes earlier than usual, Perdue and her people turned the lock and allowed the eager customers in. Murmuring with excitement, they headed for the new release shelves. By 12:03, 22 people, nearly all young and male, crowded the store to get their mitts on the hottest comic book of the summer.
This is the world of the comics enthusiast, a person who, no matter how mainstream he may look or conservatively he may live, is much in touch with the perils and triumphs of the X-men, Batman, Superman, Spider-Man and less famous heroes and villains from alternative publishers.
Some simply like to read the stuff. Others like to preserve them in the hope they'll rise in price. In many cases they read comics when young, fell away from them in their teens and then came back, drawn by memories, the possible money or how much they missed the fantasy worlds.
"I don't usually collect Spider-Man," said Gene Whitlock, who is 23 and who recently received a master's degree in counseling from the University of Virginia. "This is a first."
Jeff McCray, 13, bought multiple copies of Spider-Man as well as his usual favorites - $26.12 worth, to be exact.
His father, David McCray, spent another another $12.93 on behalf of his son, of whom he said, philosophically, "Well, he reads."
The McCrays and other fans lined up patiently at the counter to purchase their prizes. It was no quick or easy procedure. This issue of Spider-Man came in four formats - a silver cover, a black cover, a silver cover in a plastic bag (to preserve it for posterity or later sale as a collector's item) and a black cover in a plastic bag.
There were limits on the how many bagged copies of each they could buy, and there were delays as the customers asked for their other favorites, often several copies of each - one to read and the others to collect.
The Dusty Corner and its competitor down the street, the B&D Comic Shop, offer subscription services for advance ordering and hefty discounts on new issues.
The competition can be fierce.
B&D also was busy on Spider-Man Day. At 11:30 that morning, with the shop set to open at noon, Terry Baucom, Phil Davis and their help rushed new arrivals onto the shelves. Baucom paused reluctantly to report that they'd had 16 hangups on the answering machine and five knocks at the door as eager customers tried to beat the crowds.
Like the Dusty Corner, B&D sold a lot of books that weekend.
\ Casting a spell
\ You could write a book about the lingering fascination of comic books, but we're not here to create an academic tome. For us it's enough to report details of the spell they cast over people.
Take Tim O'Brien, from all appearances a healthy, 33-year-old married man who works in his family's meat business.
He buys 100 to 120 different comic titles per month, spending up to $100 total on them.
A room in his house contains 16 boxes full of comics, comic spin-offs and novelties like the Iran-Contra scandal cards put out by Eclipse, a comics publisher in California. On the floor sits a framed color reproduction of Jack Nicholson as the Joker, the character he portrayed in the "Batman" film.
O'Brien's wife, Yvonne, won't let him hang it up: "She said it's ghastly."
Across town, young Jeff McCray occupies a bedroom adorned with Batman posters, books, toys and novelties. A large Batman clock hangs above his bed, a Batman cap and Joker's purple hat on the adjacent wall.
There's a hand-held Batman computer game, a compact disc of the movie soundtrack, the movie in video form.
On another wall hangs a color photograph of McCray, his younger brother Greg and one of Greg's friends paying homage to William M. Gaines, the bearded, white-maned publisher of Mad magazine, at his office in New York.
On the floor are six boxes of comics. McCray's favorite is Batman, obviously, for reasons that are well-thought-out.
"One thing is, unlike Superman, it is possible to become him," he says. "Of course, he's rich. He's strong. But you can really identify why he does what he does. His parents were blown away."
Another asset: "He doesn't possess super powers," though he is athletic in the extreme.
And another: His villains "are not take-over-the-world-type villains, like the superheroes'."
McCray can't afford to buy the rare back issues that serious collectors crave, but he saves his comics anyway.
"They'll be more valuable if you keep them in the bag," he says. "And they're something to show my kids - `This is what daddy did.' "
\ Uncertain value
\ Take Jeff McCray and the $35 to $40 per month he spends on comic books and multiply him by a million or two, and throw in the millions of casual readers who pick up their comic books at newsstands or the chain bookstores, and you get an idea of how big a business comic books are, even in the video age.
"We have quite a few people who order more than $100 per month," says Terry Baucom of B&D. On occasion, individual customers have run up tabs of $500. After receiving a 30 percent subscriber discount, they spent more than $300 on their orders.
"A conservative figure for the annual retail sales of new comics is $400 million per year," says Don Thompson, who with his wife, Maggie, puts out the weekly Comics Buyer's Guide from Iola, Wis.
Proceeds from the buying, selling and trading of back issues are difficult to pin down. Transactions are usually private, and some collectors are circumspect about what they have and what they can get for it. They go by Overstreet's comics price guide, but supply and demand determine ultimate value.
The biggest cash sale Thompson knows of was an $80,000 purchase of Detective Comics No. 27, published in 1939 and featuring the first appearance of Batman.
Money magazine reported in 1988 that an unblemished, 575-issue set of Detective Comics from 1937 until that time brought $118,121.
Traders in Roanoke are laconic about what they have, what it's worth and where they keep it. Davis and Baucom of B&D say they each own more than 30,000 back issues of collectible comics, but they claim to have none worth mind-boggling sums.
They say, though, that they've brokered the sale of at least one title for an amount between $30,000 and $40,000.
Many of the enthusiasts who queued up for the new Spider-Man suggested it would quickly rise in value.
Don Thompson doubts it (and Baucom agrees with him), because the issue has a printing of 2.5 million, the largest ever.
"I've heard of stories where people were standing in lines reaching out of the store and down the block and buying enormous quantities," he says.
"This makes no sense to me . . . Apparently they're saying, `There are more copies of this than of any comic book in history. Obviously, it's going to be rare.' "
\ A new golden age
\ Newspaper comics in the United States date to the 1890s, and the first comic book, a collection of previously issued "Mutt and Jeff" strips, was published in 1911.
The first comic books with original stories were issued in 1935. In the 1940s, with World War II, comic book sales took off.
"They were a dime and a lot of people were in the Army," Thompson says. "They had 10-minute breaks and time to read a comic book, and you could carry it with you."
Television put a dent in comics sales, and violence and obscenity in a few publications led to a public outcry, which hurt circulation and led to the adoption of the Comics Code in the early 1950s.
The 1940s and '50s are considered the Golden Age of comics, the '60s the Silver Age. Mint-condition copies from the golden era are uncommon and highly valued, and many Silver Age will fetch a good price, too.
"In the '40s nobody ever thought anyone was going to buy a [used] comic book," Thompson says. "They read it, traded it, passed it around and threw it away. Nowadays, everybody knows that comic books are worth money."
Though bargains are more difficult to find, some people are getting rich off used comics, he says. "But you have to know what you're doing."
Comic book sales declined by the early '70s, but the emergence of comic specialty shops like the ones in Roanoke, and the interest in old issues, put life back into the business. Now, new issues have come back strong. And a line of related objects - hardcover books, "graphic novels" with extended storylines and merchandise based on comics characters - adds to revenues.
Ten years ago, comic specialty shops accounted for about one-third of Marvel Comics sales, according to Pam Rutt, the company's director of publicity. Now they account for more than half.
In 1974, Steve Geppi, then a 24-year-old Baltimore resident, opened his first comics specialty store. Four-fifths of his stock was old comic books, 20 percent new. Now, the ratio is reversed.
And Geppi has prospered. According to Nation's Business magazine, his five stores had $2 million in sales in 1988. By then Geppi had become a distributor of comics and novelties to 2,000 retailers. Revenues of his Diamond Comics Distributors exceeded $55 million in 1988. He concentrates on the direct-sales market comprised of comics specialty stores.
At B&D, new issues outsell old by a ratio of about 3 to 2, Baucom says. Nowadays, new comics go from 75 cents to $4.95 and higher.
Nationally, gimmicks and new lines abound. The same day the new Spider-Man arrived, an issue of the Hulk was published in which the character changed from his gray color back to green.
Demand for it was high.
Comic books are based on television series like "Married . . . With Children," and even Richard Wagner's "Ring" cycle of operas, which was televised recently on PBS.
Alternative comics and independents also have their followings.
Guest appearances - where characters turn up in series other than their own - help boost sales, and so do multiple titles. Spider-Man alone appears under the banners of "Spider-Man," "The Amazing Spider-Man," "The Spectacular Spider-Man," "Web of Spider-Man" and "Marvel Tales of Spider-Man" reprints.
The most recent measurement put Marvel's monthly sales at 6.6 million copies.
Baucom and Davis opened a comics mail-order service in 1980, their store on Williamson Road two years later.
"We had a lot of ground to break," Baucom says. "I went six months with no paycheck."
Even now they work 70 to 80 hours per week for pay that is less than princely, they say. They've gotten used to that, but not to another unexpected side effect.
"There's very little time to read comics when you have to sell them," Baucom says.
***CORRECTION***
Published correction ran on July 22, 1990\ Rick Knobloch's last name is misspelled in a cutline on the front page of today's preprinted Extra section.
***Published correction ran July 24, 1990
\ Amplification
While mentioning some discount policies at one store, a story on comic books in Sunday's Extra section neglected to give the discount policy at The Dusty Corner Bookstore. New Marvel and D.C. comics are discounted 30 percent with no minimum purchase; subscription and other discounts also are offered.
Memo: CORRECTION