Stunt or not, he faced life-changing consequences. His employer, the New York public school system, forced him to leave the classroom and report for nonteaching duty while school officials investigated the charges. Instead of going to work, he went to a place nicknamed the “rubber room,” where teachers who had run afoul of the system sat at desks and waited out the days while their cases worked through the system.
A few months after the arrest, a court dropped the charges. Seuling agreed to refrain from selling potentially obscene material. He continued with his monthly shows and his big show in July. “Since then, only the tamest titles have appeared at the Second Sunday shows,” said a report that summer in The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom. “Unfortunately, that leaves out much of Richard Corben’s work and many of the better-written titles, like Skull.”2
Even with the charges dropped, Seuling’s bosses would not let him return to the classroom. He was on an indefinite hiatus.
As this was happening, the comics industry had gone into one of its periodic downturns. Sales at newsstands had plummeted. The retail world was shifting away from independent grocers and pharmacies and toward large chains. While many older retailers stocked comics out of habit, the chains were deliberate in deciding how to allocate rack space. In this type of assessment, comics did not fare well. They had low cover prices, about 20 cents each, which meant the retailer stood to make only a few pennies of profit from each sale.3
Another factor was fraud by some of the news distributors. Since comics and other printed materials were sold on a returnable basis, the distributors could return unsold items for credit toward other purchases. At one time, returns meant sending whole comics, or at least the covers, to receive credit. This evolved into a system in which publishers allowed distributors to file an affidavit saying that a list of items was unsold and had been destroyed. Some distributors would sell the books out the back door, often to comics dealers, and still report them as unsold.
“You’d send them ten thousand copies and they would send you an affidavit that said they only sold two thousand,” said Jim Shooter, who started writing for DC Comics as a teenager in the mid-1960s and went on to be editor in chief of Marvel from 1978 to 1987. “Well, maybe they sold four thousand. With the affidavits, they only had to pay for two thousand.”
He remembers that one particularly audacious news distributor sent an affidavit claiming that the number of unsold copies was greater than the number of copies that had been shipped. Instead of rejecting it out of hand, Marvel trod carefully. News distributors were gatekeepers to doing business in their territories, and some of the companies had reputations for ties to organized crime. Shooter remembers that Marvel’s circulation managers warned that specific distributors were not to be trifled with.
In 1973, the news distributors were the only option for getting comics into the hands of customers. Sales were way down, which probably was tied to a decline in consumer interest, exacerbated by fraud by news vendors. Now Seuling found an audience that was more receptive to his idea of selling directly to specialty shops.
In August, he was at the San Diego Comic-Con, where he scheduled a breakfast with Sol Harrison, a vice president at DC. The San Diego convention would grow to become the largest in the world, but at that time it was smaller than Seuling’s annual event in New York. Also at the breakfast was Levas, whose role was business partner in addition to girlfriend.
Seuling and Harrison knew each other because of the New York show. Harrison “was an older gentlemen, a dapper New York gentleman,” Levas said. “He was funny and kind.”
By the end of the meal, they had a handshake deal. They agreed to meet soon in New York to set the details. In the months to follow, Seuling would make similar agreements with Marvel, Archie, and Warren, which were other major publishers. In that moment, however, the new venture didn’t seem big, Levas said. It was one of several side businesses involving comics, along with the conventions and mail-order sales of old comics.
“Did he think it was something monumental? No,” Levas said. “But it turned out to be monumental.”
Here was the new business model: retailers could order comics from Seuling and get shipments straight from the printing plants, bypassing the old-line distributors. This meant the comics would arrive sooner than at other outlets, and in precise quantities.
The system would come to be called the “direct market,” because comics were skipping the middleman and going directly to the retailers. This was possible because the major publishers did their printing with the same company in Sparta, Illinois. The printer would collate the orders and ship them to Seuling’s customers, just as they did for hundreds of news distributors.
The new system had benefits and risks. Orders from Seuling had a greater wholesale discount than those from the old distributors, but also were nonreturnable. This meant that if a store ordered twenty-five copies of Superman and sold only five, it was stuck with the surplus. Also, Seuling required up-front payment with each order, even though the comics didn’t ship until months later.
At that time, there were few retail outlets that could be called comic shops. If you broadly define “comic shop” to include used bookstores with large comics sections, there were fewer than two hundred stores nationwide, according to retailers from that time.4 Within this total were only a few dozen of the kind of comics specialty stores that would come to dominate the industry.
Seuling was able to get orders from many of the store owners because the business model made sense to them, and because he had built up trust from his years in fandom and his conventions.5 His new idea was an immediate success, exceeding his expectations.6 The new venture was later incorporated as Sea Gate Distributors.
Within months of Seuling starting the distribution business, Marvel made a similar deal with another vendor, Donahoe Brothers, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.7 Other distributors would soon open, such as Pacific Comics in San Diego and Irjax Enterprises in Maryland, but they mostly sold comics-related goods and did not have contracts with the major publishers.8
Seuling was king, with the best retailer accounts and the best terms with the companies that produced comics. But those other players, at least the ones that lasted more than a year or two, would have important roles near the end of the decade, when the industry got much bigger and more complicated.
Of all the non-Seuling upstarts, Donahoe Brothers, also known as Comic Center Enterprises and by its nickname, Donahoe Brudders, was notable for the swiftness and audacity of its rise and its equally rapid fall. The man in charge was Tim Donahoe, a smooth talker in his midtwenties.
“Some people distrusted him on sight, including my wife,” said Jim Friel, who had built a business selling publishers’ new comics at conventions, and also drew his own comics. “I just thought of him as a smooth guy who was probably okay. Her perception was more accurate than mine.”
Friel was one of the first people hired by Donahoe Brothers who was not a member of the family. He had grown up in North Carolina and came north to attend Michigan State University. His employment with Donahoe Brothers would turn out to be a small blemish on what would become a long and successful run working for some of the key players in comics retail.
Donahoe Brothers’ ambition was to be a regional comics distributor serving Michigan, Ohio, and the other Great Lakes states. The company signed up a roster of accounts that included longtime bookstores and newly opened comic shops. The retailers could order precise quantities of specific comics on a nonreturnable basis and receive a larger discount than what was offered by news distributors on a returnable basis. It was almost the same as Seuling’s model.
The first shipment was in early 1974. Friel remembers that one of the comics from the first batch was Marvel Super Stars #1, which had a cover date of May.9 Comics publishers typically set the cover date three months ahead, which means that first shipment likely was in February. Soon after, Donahoe Brothers added DC Comics to their offerings, along with other publishers.
About a year after that first shipment,