“A buddy of mine turned me on to Zap and said, ‘You’ve got to read this underground comic,’ and I read it and I couldn’t really understand quite what was going on,” Plant said. “I was not smoking dope. I didn’t have a kind of stoned attitude. I was a high school kid reading Spider-Man. The undergrounds sort of blossomed from there over the next two or three years, and I sort of grew into that.”
All of this was part of the context when Plant and friends got in their van in 1970 to go to New York. The Bay Area guys were bringing their own bustling comics culture. As they made connections with Seuling, they would help create a national framework for comic shops to do business.
Some of the people and places of the Bay Area comics scene. (Top) A young Bud Plant in the 1970s; (middle) one of the only photos in existence of Comic World, the San Jose shop briefly co-owned by Plant and several others, including Dick Swan, pictured, who was fifteen at the time; (bottom) Gary Arlington at his store, San Francisco Comic Book Co. Credits: Clay Geerdes, except for Comic World, which is courtesy of Dick Swan.
Seuling’s convention took off at a time when comics had begun to attract a broader audience that included older readers. The new fans didn’t want to miss an issue. “There were more creators beginning to do work that presumed the audience was older or more intelligent,” said Paul Levitz, who was a young fan in New York and would go on to be a writer and executive at DC Comics. “It’s really in the early sixties when you get to Stan [Lee]’s work at Marvel, particularly Julie Schwartz’s work on the superhero revival at DC, that it begins to be inviting to an older, brighter audience.” He published his first fanzine in the late 1960s and became one of the leading writers in the fan community, years before he worked at DC.
At the same time, many readers found it difficult to obtain the comics they wanted. The major publishers sold through a network of independent distributors. The distributors were entrenched businesses that had hard-earned territories of newsstands, grocery stores, and drugstores. They sold a wide array of printed material, of which comics were a small and not particularly profitable part.
“There was no way for me to get a comic if I missed it on the stands,” said Irene Vartanoff. She was part of a generation of fans who developed their own system for finding back issues, trading and selling comics through the mail with other fans. Some comics publishers helped facilitate this by printing letters from fans who wanted to buy or trade specific issues. Vartanoff became known in the fan community for how often her letters appeared in comics.
Fans in this new generation were willing to pay more than cover price to get an issue they missed. In turn, the idea of comics as collectibles began to gain currency, a concept that got a boost from news coverage of rare comics selling for hundreds of dollars.
In this environment, a time of rising interest in comics but an unreliable distribution system, Seuling came into prominence. He was a Brooklyn guy, born and raised. He got drafted during the Korean War, and did all of his service in the United States, mostly in Texas. From there, he went to City College in New York.6
He met a woman named Carole in an introduction to geology class, and they hit it off. They got married in 1954, while both were still students. “City College was a place where people let it all hang out,” said Carole Seuling, who is now retired and living in Connecticut. The campus had a bustling political scene, an early glimmering of the protest movements that would later arrive on campuses across the country.
Phil and Carole both studied to be English teachers. After college, they got jobs in the city’s public school system and settled in Bensonhurst in Brooklyn. They had two daughters, Gwen and Heather. Contrary to what Phil would later say in interviews, he was not a regular comics reader during his early adult years. His interest in comics was rekindled in the early 1960s when he and a friend, Doug Berman, came upon a stack of Golden Age comics for sale in a thrift shop, Carole said.
“He and his friend Doug decided there’s money to be made here,” she said. “They started scouring these junk stores and bought up all the comics they could find.”
The couple’s apartment became a warehouse for the growing collection. One memorable purchase was in 1963, which Carole remembers because it was the same day as President Kennedy’s funeral. “They came back with the mother lode,” she said. “I mean, there were six copies of Life #1 and three copies of Action #1. Three. And then that was the tip of the iceberg. . . . People didn’t really know what they were selling. They wised up in the seventies and started asking for more money.”
While Phil depended on teaching for his main income, he developed a bustling side business in comics. He bought and sold through ads in early fanzines. At some of the very first comics conventions in the mid-1960s, he was among the few dozen people there. He was part-owner of After Hours Bookstore in Brooklyn, which sold used books and comics.7 Then, in 1968, he took over as lead organizer for an existing New York convention. The event, held on Fourth of July weekend, grew to become a destination for comics fans, dealers, and professionals from across the country.
The conventions mainly dealt with the sales of old comics, but Phil saw an opportunity in selling new comics. He later spoke about this in an interview with the cartoonist Will Eisner.8
“A friend of mine in the sixties owned a little candy store, so I got an inside view of distribution there,” Seuling said. “Tony Fibbio was his name, lovely guy, passed away. He collected and he knew what kids wanted, but he couldn’t get the books he wanted. The distributors would not give him the titles.”
A store could not order specific numbers of each title and did not know when the titles would arrive. Instead, retailers received an assortment selected by the distributor, sometimes bound in ties that damaged the comics. One of the fundamentals of this system was returnability. If comics, magazines, or other printed material didn’t sell, the distributor would pick them up and return them for a credit. So, while the service was often lousy for comics fans, the financial risk was low for the newsstands and pharmacies that sold them.
“I said and I repeated it: ‘There is another way of doing this,’” Seuling said to Eisner. “You could sell them directly and not even take returns. That was considered so far out, so ludicrous, that it was greeted with laughter, a friendly pat on the back.”
The people laughing were the comics publishers. Seuling was in a unique position to propose his idea because the publishers knew him from his conventions. He could connect on a personal level with people such as Carmine Infantino, DC’s top editor and a longtime comics artist, because they were both New Yorkers and they had a love for the medium and a respect for its history. Despite those connections, Seuling could not immediately persuade the executives to make major changes to their distribution system. But he was persistent, and he was going to keep making his case.
In the convention’s early years, Carole Seuling was there as a confidante and counterpoint. Many of the comics fans and creators who were part of the early shows were friends with both of them. In one photo from the era, Phil is dressed as Captain Marvel, with a sewed-on lightning bolt across the chest, and Carole is next to him dressed as Mary Marvel. They both look clean-cut, him with a smile and her with a grin.
But the couple was growing apart. She didn’t go into specifics other than to say that he had become more interested in the hippie culture of the time. “I changed. He changed,” she said. “He never got over Woodstock, the fact that he didn’t get there,” she said. “He didn’t know a damn thing about it until he saw it on TV. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t heard about it and didn’t get there.” They separated in 1971 and later divorced.
Phil, who was still a full-time teacher, had to adapt to the financial strain of paying child support.9 Their daughters would split time between the parents, who now had two apartments in Brooklyn. The younger daughter, Heather, whose last name is now Antonelli, was