Douglas asked how this comics habit got started.
“I read thousands of them as a kid,” Seuling said. “The interest never died. It’s a love. It’s something that you just can’t do unless you really love it, unless you’re devoted to it.”
Douglas told the audience that Seuling had brought along a superhero. Then out from behind a curtain came a woman dressed in a chain-mail bikini with a prop sword, in the character of Red Sonja. She walked up to Farr and pointed the tip of the sword at his face.
“No nose jobs,” the actor said, laughing. He was known for his oversized schnozz. Seuling was laughing uproariously.
The whole scene epitomizes the late 1970s almost to the point of parody. But the biggest shock for a present-day viewer is the woman playing Red Sonja, not because of the costume, which she wore with aplomb, but because of what she later would do.
Her name was Wendy Pini. She had been performing at comic conventions and other events as Red Sonja for about two years, doing a stage show in which a well-known comics artist, Frank Thorne, played a wizard.
Fewer people knew that Pini wrote and drew comics of her own. She and her husband Richard had created a fantasy story called Elfquest, and they were about to start self-publishing it. Unlike Marvel, DC, and other major publishers, the Pinis did not operate on a scale large enough to get their product into grocery stores and drugstores. They would depend on alternative channels, such as the burgeoning network of comic shops. In turn, comics such as Elfquest would help define the shops as places where fans could find things that were not available through mainstream sources. Elfquest was one of the first big commercial successes of the early comic shop era, inspiring many imitators.
As the show began to cut to commercial, Farr said about Pini, “Now that’s a superhero.”
“The audience loved it,” she said. “But we heard later on that Mike Douglas was quite upset by my racy costume, which didn’t fit in with the tone of his show. C’est la vie.”
Westmoreland was no longer on the set when she made her appearance, but the two did meet backstage. When she arrived, the military man noted her battle armor and said, “I didn’t know we were still at war.”
The first Elfquest story appeared in early 1978 in Fantasy Quarterly #1, published by IPS, a new company controlled in part by Tim Donahoe, the Michigan businessman who had already tried and failed at comics distribution. The Pinis, who felt burned by the poor production values and by some of the business practices of Donahoe, decided to become their own publisher.
The first self-published issue was Elfquest #2, released later in 1978 with a print run of twenty thousand copies. The Pinis called their company WaRP Graphics (WaRP stood for Wendy and Richard Pini). To pay the printing bill, Richard Pini borrowed about $2,000 from his parents.
Self-publishing would have been a highly risky venture if not for the help of Phil Seuling and his network of friends and customers. He knew the Pinis and wanted to support their work. Seuling and Bud Plant pooled their resources to buy the entire print run of twenty thousand copies. They would sell Elfquest through their respective distribution businesses.
“What both Bud and Phil saw, I think, was a new kind of ground-level comic storytelling, heavily influenced by Japanese manga, that had not been seen before,” Wendy Pini said. “They trusted me and my ability to deliver because of my prior experience as an illustrator. And I think, after they sold out the first ten-thousand-copy run of the first issue in under a couple of months, they realized these weird, elfin characters could appeal and catch on. Also we did cliffhangers very well.”
Seuling and Plant sold every copy, giving the Pinis confidence to continue the work. “That took all the pressure off of us,” Richard Pini said. “It was bing, bang, boom.”
There is little doubt that Phil Seuling saw himself as the hero of his story. So who was his archenemy? There are many candidates, but my vote goes to a pugnacious young man named Hal Shuster. As of 1978, Seuling was the biggest player in comics distribution, with the top accounts and the best terms from publishers. Shuster had a small business in Maryland, distributing comics and other material for his family-owned company, Irjax Enterprises.
Irjax had been started in 1973 by Irwin Shuster and his sons Jack and Hal. The name was combination of Irwin and Jack. Although he wasn’t in the name, Hal gave the impression that he ran things. The business was set up to act as a wholesaler of comics and related materials to comic shops. It also was a publisher of magazines about geeky interests, such as Star Trek fandom.11
“I never really felt comfortable talking to him,” said Mike Friedrich, who was on staff at Marvel, serving as the first sales director for the comic shop market from 1980 to 1982. He describes Shuster as an in-your-face kind of guy, with a wardrobe that favored white shirts and thin black ties.
“He was intelligent and confident, but arguably, in my view, overconfident. He was kind of driven by the idea that he was smarter than everybody else and had realized things that the rest of the business had not realized. And, given that he had proven himself to be litigious, I was very careful around him.”
Before coming to Marvel’s sales department, Friedrich was a writer for Marvel and DC and publisher of a comics anthology called Star*Reach. Although barely thirty years old, he had been around the business long enough not to be impressed by Shuster.
Irjax grew from its base in Rockville, Maryland, in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. It wanted to be the dominant wholesaler in the state and neighboring states, and then build from there. This put the company on a collision course with Phil Seuling and Sea Gate. Seuling had started with a few accounts in places such as New York, Buffalo, and the Bay Area. By 1977, he had worked out many of his own organizational problems and was in an expansion mode. He was looking to sign up new retail clients, including in Maryland.
He came into Irjax’s backyard and formed an alliance with retailer Mark Feldman, owner of Maryland Funnybook Shop in Silver Spring. Feldman would serve as a subdistributor for Seuling, obtaining products for his store and then acting as a wholesaler for other stores in the area.12
Examples of this model had already happened in other metro areas. Seuling found retailers to serve as his middlemen. These coveted roles often went to friends and associates he had met through his conventions. In almost every market, competing retailers found themselves in the awkward position of having to buy from their local rivals if they wanted to have the advantages of Seuling’s services.13 At that time, several small comics distribution companies were trying to build and sustain regional territories. Some of them, such as Irjax, saw Seuling’s expansion as an existential threat.
Hal Shuster of Irjax / New Media (left); Mike Friedrich (below right) speaking with Dean Mullaney, who was then an editor at Eclipse Comics. Both photos from the 1982 San Diego Comic-Con. Credit: Alan Light.
Irjax and Seuling started to trash each other in conversations with potential clients. Seuling would say that Irjax was a small-time operator that didn’t know what it was doing. Irjax would say that Seuling was secretly bleeding money and about to go out of business. The comments, made in private, were not unusual for the rough-and-tumble world of comics distribution. Then Seuling kicked it up a notch with this note in his November 1977 newsletter to customers:
A notice I think is probably unnecessary: For a few months, an off-the-wall pseudo “distributor” on the middle of the East Coast has been telling everyone that “Seuling is out. He won’t be able to deliver books any more.” This nut has also suggested returning unsold books (bought from him) through the local distributor as “returns,” a policy which would automatically get you cut off from all supplies from all publishers. . . .
Additionally, this sickie made threatening and harassing phone calls, and has used the mails fraudulently. He is inches away from deep (Federal)