“Well, you tell that son of a bitch I’m going to come out there and padlock his fucking warehouse,” Infantino said, according to Friel.
Donahoe Brothers had been receiving merchandise and reselling it, without paying the publishers. Friel had suspected that something was amiss, but did not know the scale of it.
“It was a deal Carmine had made personally, and he felt betrayed personally,” Friel said. “It feels terrible to have one of your artistic idols yelling at you like that. It was Carmine Infantino, for God’s sake.”
Later that day, Friel confronted Tim Donahoe, who matter-of-factly confirmed that many bills had gone unpaid. Within a month or so, the company ceased operation, a little more than a year after it had gotten into comics.
Donahoe Brothers was more than just a curiosity. It turned out to be the first in a succession of midwestern distributors that helped develop comic shops in that part of the country while Seuling’s business was in its infancy. Donahoe Brothers’ fall was followed by the rise of Big Rapids Distribution of Detroit, whose demise in 1980 was followed by the rise of Capital City Distribution of Madison, Wisconsin. These were some of the first few steps that would lead to explosive growth in the number of comic shops, along with turf wars between distributors.10
By early 1974, Seuling and Levas were living together in a house in Sea Gate, a gated community on the western end of Coney Island. From there, they ran the comics distribution business, planned the conventions, and presided over a gathering place for comics professionals and fans.
Jonni Levas during a 1978 trip to London with Phil Seuling, who is seated to the left. Courtesy of Jonni Levas.
After his arrest, Seuling never returned to the classroom. He did non-teaching duties for a few months and then applied for early retirement. He likely could have been reinstated as a teacher, because the criminal charges had been dropped, but he didn’t bother, Levas said. He was ready to move on to something else.
Several people told me that there was a kind of cause and effect with Seuling’s arrest and the founding of the distribution business. In other words, if not for the arrest, Seuling would have kept teaching and not been able to devote himself full-time to comics. Based on interviews with some of the other people closest to Seuling, however, this doesn’t seem to be true. When I asked Levas if Seuling wanted to continue teaching, she said, “No way.” He loved teaching, but he loved comics more.
“And he was always teaching, even if he wasn’t in an actual classroom,” she said. “He would teach whatever silly thing there might be. He would teach what Italian food you should eat, or what movie you should see, or why you should like the Mets more than the Yankees.”
Heather Antonelli, Seuling’s younger daughter, agrees that her father wanted to leave teaching and was not pushed. She was with him the day he went to the administrative offices to file paperwork to leave his job.
“The lady who was processing the paperwork was like, ‘Are you kidding me, because you only have like a year and ten months left to get the pension?’ And he was like, ‘I can’t. I can’t come away from what I’m doing,’” Antonelli said.
Unlike most new businesses, the venture that would become Sea Gate had no cash before its first orders. Seuling and Levas worked for no income. Their operating money came from retailers’ prepayments, most of which was used for prepayments to the comics publishers. There was no credit for anyone.
“It’s insane to think this could work,” Levas said. “I’m amazed we were able to pull this off, with no capital.”
The first accounts included some established and reliable retailers, such as Collectors Book Store in Los Angeles. Among the newer stores was Comics & Comix in Berkeley, California, co-owned by Bud Plant, which would go on to become one of the first, if not the first, comic shop chain, with other locations in Northern California.
Other new stores soon followed. In 1974, Chuck Rozanski used his savings to open a comic shop in the back room of Lois Newman Books, a science fiction bookstore in Boulder, Colorado. He was nineteen and had been buying and selling old comics for years at conventions. The shop was in a basement room with a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. He spent most of his $800 budget on a counter and new lights. Mile High Comics was in business.
“The original shop had to be diversified because in those days you were buying new comics for 14 cents and selling them for 20 cents, so you were making a whopping 6 cents per comic book,” he said. “It’s very hard to pay rent or utilities with 6 cents, no matter how much volume you’re doing.”
His big-ticket items were posters by fantasy artists such as Frank Frazetta. He also sold Playboy and Penthouse, and had a selection of bongs and other drug paraphernalia. He had short hair because he had just been in Reserve Officers’ Training Corps in college. His ponytail, the one he would have for decades, braided down to the small of his back, was still in his future.
Seuling’s distribution business had started by the time Mile High opened, but Rozanski got his comics from a local news distributor. Rozanski had worked out a deal with the distributor to get new comics a few days earlier than most other outlets in Boulder. “Instantaneously, every collector in town came to me to get their books,” he said. “It was awesome.”
For small shops, it often didn’t make much sense to do business with Seuling. He required up-front payment for orders of comics that would not be delivered for two months. He also set minimum order limits, meaning shops could not order just one or two copies of low-selling titles. In fairness to Seuling, many of these conditions had been imposed on him by the publishers. Rozanski would come to see Seuling’s rules as an impediment to growth for the industry. “I loved Phil, but Phil could have his head up his ass for no reason,” he said.
But first Rozanski had to learn to run a business and deal with the public. “I was very obnoxious, kind of like a chipmunk on speed,” he said. “I was so enthusiastic and I couldn’t understand why other people didn’t instantly share my enthusiasm. It took me a while to moderate my own enthusiasm. I was also extremely dismissive of other people if they didn’t agree with me. I was kind of an obnoxious little peckerhead. That’s the God’s honest truth.”
A year after he opened, he met the woman he would marry—she’d gotten a job in the adjacent bookstore. He mellowed. Chuck and Nanette Rozanski would soon move Mile High out of the coal closet, and would go on to have a chain of stores that extended down into Denver. The more experience he got, the more he could see the shortcomings of Seuling’s model. Things needed to change, he thought.
Sea Gate was growing about as fast as Seuling and Levas could handle, but it and its customers remained less than 10 percent of sales by major publishers. Shops continued to open, and existing ones grew. In 1977, there were about two hundred comics specialty shops in the United States, a figure that excluded used bookstores that did not sell new comics, according to Melchior Thompson, an economist who studied the market as a consultant for Marvel. Seuling was the den leader for a small industry that was about to get much bigger.
Meanwhile, Seuling maintained his convention business. In 1977 and 1978, he relocated his July show to Philadelphia, before a return to New York. To publicize the 1977 show, he got a booking to appear on The Mike Douglas Show, a nationally syndicated daytime talk show that was filmed in Philadelphia. The cohost was Jamie Farr, the actor who played Corporal Max Klinger on M*A*S*H. The other guests included General William Westmoreland, who had commanded the U.S. forces in Vietnam; and Fabian, the singer, actor, and former teen idol.
“A grown man with a handful of comic books,” said the host, Douglas. He had just introduced Seuling in what was likely the latter’s only national television appearance. There Seuling sat, with bushy sideburns and a stack of vintage comics in his lap. His plastic-rim glasses looked a few sizes too small.
“I