In junior high in Texas, Buddy Saunders not often ate faculty lunch. He favored to conserve the 35 cents his mother gave him just about every day so he had much more to expend on comics.
“I was actually a skinny kid,” he mentioned.
He employed lunch revenue, an allowance and proceeds from a paper route to create a gigantic selection of comics. Science fiction titles have been his favorites, like DC’s Thriller in Area and Odd Adventures. By 1961, when he was 14, he began to sell some of his inventory by mail buy in early fanzines.
Saunders designed his title in mail purchase, expanded in the 1970s to physical outlets in the Dallas-Fort Really worth location beneath the title Lone Star Comics, and in the 2010s offered his shops to concentrate on his company’s thriving web-site, MyComicShop.com. Today, the internet site is one particular of the premier sellers of new and back concern comics in the earth.
Saunders, 76, has revealed a knack for handling as a result of alter. He profited from the booms and survived the busts in a career that spans the entire present day historical past of comics retail. And, he expanded into e-commerce just before most of his friends, realizing how the get to of a web page was well-suited to satisfy the demands of comics buyers.
In interviews this thirty day period, talking by cellular phone from his modest, windowless office environment at the MyComicShop.com warehouse in Arlington, Texas, he reflected on the evolution of his business enterprise. He provides significantly of the credit score for the latest good results to his son, Conan, who is now president and a co-owner, and whose capabilities as a laptop programmer have been necessary for setting up the web page.
But comics retail is only aspect of Saunders’ story. While in school in the 1960s, he wrote horror and sword and sorcery comics tales for editor Archie Goodwin at Creepy and Eerie magazines. In the 1970s, he co-wrote science fiction prose tales and a novel. He remembers that he could have centered on producing, but he allow it switch into extra of a hobby as his organization grew.
“Comedian retailing took more than my daily life,” he mentioned.
He is properly-recognized to comics retail insiders and to the 30,000 or so men and women who obtain his company’s weekly newsletter.
“Buddy is simply a pretty clever man with incredibly very good business sense,” explained Bud Plant, operator of Bud’s Artwork Textbooks, and a person with his personal wealthy heritage in comics retail as a store proprietor and a distributor.
Plant is speaking as another person who has regarded Saunders for many years as a fellow retailer but also as a shopper. He purchases comics from MyComicShop.com, and, when he is advertising comics from his personal selection, he often does so on consignment by way of the web-site.
“He has fantastic individuals performing for him he evidently trains them very well,” Plant stated. “And perhaps just as vital, he loves what he is accomplishing. He is a comics admirer initial and foremost.”
Saunders Once Offered a Amazing Four #1 for 25 Cents
Growing up generally in Texas, initially comedian e-book he can remember acquiring for himself was Donald Duck #71, published in 1960, which displays the solar shining via a telescope and burning Donald’s tail. He before long was looking through science fiction and superhero comics.
Saunders experienced a deep collection by the time Marvel began its new super hero line with titles like Superb Four #1 in 1961. By then he also experienced begun providing and buying and selling comics by way of the mail, marketing in fanzines like Rocket’s Blast Comicollector. He remembers selling a around-mint ailment duplicate of Wonderful Four #1 for 25 cents.
“I doubled my revenue,” he claimed. The include price tag was 10 cents. “That was good at the time.”
He produced close friends among fellow comic readers at his faculty in Arlington and fashioned connections with friends in comics and science fiction fandom. He and two good friends in Texas, Larry Herndon and Howard Keltner, started publishing a fanzine, Star-Studded Comics, in 1963.
Now in substantial faculty, Saunders required to be a comedian ebook artist and his illustrations appeared in fanzines along with the do the job of artists who would go on to come to be comics pros, like Dave Cockrum and Jim Starlin.
“My ambition by junior higher and substantial college was to become a comic e book artist, but God blessed me with not ample expertise,” he mentioned.
What he means is that, in hindsight, he appreciates that he wouldn’t have been content with the everyday living of a freelance artist, so it was fortuitous that he was not superior more than enough to seriously go after artwork as a occupation.
He shifted to concentrate far more on writing, including get the job done co-penned with his school classmate Howard Waldrop. The two of them were part of a modest group of aspiring science fiction writers who would satisfy each few months to critique every other’s work. Among the other customers was George R.R. Martin, now finest acknowledged for A Song of Hearth and Ice, the series that he aided to adapt for the television show Sport of Thrones.
Saunders graduated from significant school in 1965 and got a instructing degree from East Texas State College in 1970.
His strategy was to teach and use the summers to compose, and he bought a task educating artwork at a center university close to Arlington. He turned a printed novelist a few several years later with the release of The Texas-Israeli War: 1999, co-published with Waldrop.
But he by no means stopped looking at, obtaining and selling comics. His mail-buy business enterprise continued and took up a spare bedroom.
During this identical time period, Phil Seuling and Jonni Levas in New York had commenced a organization that would promote comics from major publishers straight to firms like the just one Saunders was working (see “Phil Seuling: The Gentleman Who Invented the Immediate Industry”). Prior to that, comics shops wanted to purchase from a network of newspaper and magazine distributors who often had small appreciation for comics. The 1973 start off of Seuling and Levas’ business, later named Sea Gate Distributors, is the beginning of the Direct Marketplace period in which comedian retailers blossomed (see “Immediate Current market 50th Anniversary”).
Saunders’ enterprise grew so a lot that he felt a will need to open a bodily retail location, which he did in 1977. The 700-sq.-foot room was the to start with of what would be quite a few destinations of Lone Star Comics.
By this time, he was married to Judy, who did not originally do the job at the business enterprise, but would be a key element of it in later many years.
He ran the retail outlet and ongoing to educate, but he and Judy agreed that he would leave his position as an artwork trainer if and when the income from the shop grew to additional than his educating wage. It ended up going on quicker than they expected, within one particular 12 months, and he grew to become a complete-time retailer.
Comic shops went by rapid growth in the 1980s, and in the Dallas-Fort Well worth space that advancement was visible through the expansion of Lone Star Comics from one particular small site to, at its peak, eight locations, along with a host of competing shops.
To support regulate the progress, Judy remaining her administrative job with the federal federal government and joined the spouse and children business comprehensive time, running human sources and accounting. Buddy Saunders said this was an vital moment for the company’s advancement simply because Judy was very powerful at managing the areas of the company that he was not as at ease with, and that allowed him to emphasis on the combine of solutions the outlets ended up advertising.
While some stores ended up purists in focusing almost completely on comics, Lone Star had a willingness to develop into other merchandise regions, like role-actively playing games in the 1980s and Pokemon cards and Beanie Toddlers in the 1990s.
“I hated Beanie Toddlers, but they had been very hot at the time, so I realized as substantially as I could about Beanie Infants,” Saunders said.
Lone Star Goes Online, and Conan Will save the Day
All alongside, Saunders tried using to remain forward of the curve in working with technologies in his outlets for matters like tracking stock. So, when corporations commenced to get web sites in the 1990s, he saw an prospect.
The initially iterations of the Lone Star website were being crude, but in the late 90s, Saunders took one particular of the major pitfalls of his vocation by placing aside about $200,000 to seek the services of an outside agency to structure a entirely useful e-commerce website for the mail buy part of his business.
It was a catastrophe. When the contractors ended up superior programmers, they didn’t realize the nuances of comics gathering, with a extensive amount of objects and particulars for just about every merchandise. The end result was a site that Saunders felt was unusable and nowhere shut to getting all set to go stay.
“They just had been not capable of executing something as intricate as what we desired,” Saunders mentioned.
His son, Conan, who was an undergraduate at MIT, supplied to consider a glance at the web-site and see what he could do. At this point, Saunders has retold the story of Conan’s rescue of the web page so lots of occasions that it has the experience of a tall tale, but he assures that it’s all true: In-concerning classes and research in Massachusetts, Conan wrote the code to create the MyComicsShop.com web page approximately from scratch.
Conan acted as a section-time program developer for the family small business by school, graduate university and then yrs in careers with other firms.
Then, in 2010, he came to do the job at MyComicShop.com complete time as vice president. In 2021, after his father experienced a stroke, Conan became the company’s president.
Now, the firm is as huge as it has at any time been, with about 130 workforce, like about 40 individuals who do almost nothing but grade the affliction of back again issue comics, and 5 programmers who preserve the website. The company’s key problem is preserving up with growth, claimed Buddy Saunders, who has recovered from his stroke and back at get the job done.
Conan grew up in the company. He used to bag and board comics and do odd work at the stores as a child. He remembers that the comics he examine as a kid tended to be decades previous simply because they had been kinds all around the home.
His upbringing well prepared him to run the business, equally from staying all-around the firm and viewing his father in motion.
“He is extremely arranged,” Conan explained. “He is excellent at setting up programs and documenting issues and planning factors.”
Conan explained a place the place things operate effortlessly and wherever individuals are anticipated to act with integrity.
“He is established a excellent illustration for me in my entire everyday living,” he claimed.
Part of that example is a perception of pleasure about accomplishing the operate of comics retail. When questioned how long he ideas to keep functioning, Buddy Saunders claimed this:
“If I retire, it is heading to be to a cemetery.”
This article is staying introduced as aspect of ICv2’s Direct Current market 50th Anniversary celebration for far more, see “Comics Immediate Current market 50th Anniversary.”