>>It sounds a bit ridiculous, but hey! Whooda thunk we'd be typing into computers to send messages about comics to strangers ten years ago?<<

Some of us were doing this ten years ago!

Some of us had too much time on our hands, even then.

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"I love him like a brother. David Greenglas." -- Woody Allen - Crimes & Misdemeanors

Yes, some of us 'early adopters' were doing this ten years ago, but not THAT many of us. Me, I didn't get online till I hit on some BBSs in 1993 with my 14.4 modem!

I'm talking about NORMAL people, folks...

(sorry, Nat, but as a comics fan, you're automatically abnormal anyway)

So, wait, you're wanting to know when *normal* people, who under your definition *aren't* comics fans, would've been expected to be chatting on-line about comics?

Why would non-fans want to chat about 'em at all?

Not G said...
So, wait, you're wanting to know when *normal* people, who under your definition *aren't* comics fans, would've been expected to be chatting on-line about comics?

No, I wondered about when 'normal' folks actually even started to USE the interenet or the web in the first place.

For all his faults, my husband-in-law (wife's first husband) is about as normal as the average person I see here. He was on the Internet (they called it "ArpaNet" back then) in the '70s. Used one o' them old-timey modems, with a cradle where you put the phone's hand set.

Quack, Don

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HUNDREDS of daily comics -- and MORE!
http://www.stormloader.com/markstein/daily.htm
"Your Daily Dose Links Page"

>>I wondered about when 'normal' folks actually even started to USE the interenet or the web in the first place.<<

Students and academics could use Bitnet in 1987 or before.

1993 was the year the media discovered the Internet. (Fun fact: in some typesetting systems, the "@" sign was used as a special character, because they knew that no one would ever want to print one in a newspaper -- until email addresses came along.)

1994 or so was when Navigator was released, and the web took off.

Last or this year was the time that women began getting online in percentages more representative of the general population.

Any of that help?

Johanna

Mitch:
I hope your surgery was a success and your recovery allows you to tell us some tales.

My question is, who were the major underground comix distributors and what happened to them? I have read that many of the Ug publishers sold direct to shops and created their own distribution network. So far, people on this thread (thanks Jim & Jim) have mentioned:

Your company (name?) in New York
Keep On Truckin Coop/Big Rapids
Kitchen Sink's Ug distribution arm, which was bought out by Capital City
Last Gasp - who is still in distribution
Print Mint - publisher too
Rip Off Press - still around at least as a publisher
The Comic Distributor - Jim Friel
Apex Novelties - publisher that did distribution too?
Isis News of Minneapolis?
Nova of Los Angeles?
Ron Forman & Walter Wang (Comics Unlimited?) - pre Direct Market origins?
Others?

Also, Jim mentioned that Phil Seuling made the big step of asking DC and Warren to buy books on a non-retrunable basis in 1973. Were the underground comix books being distributed on a non-returnable basis at that time? If so, then Phil took their concept to a more mainstream level with the big comic books publishers. Where/when did the underground distributors get the idea to do so?

- Tim Stroup

Good beginning, Tim. I'd make a couple of adjustments:

First, by the time Big Rapids (Detroit) took over W.I.N.D (Madison) and Well News (Columbus), BR was already heavily into mainstream comics. This would have been 1975 or 76--very late in the game for undergrounds. So I'd include both WIND and Well on your list as early UG distributors.

Secondly, I'm not sure I belong on the list. I wasn't in business on my own as a wholesaler until Spring of 1975, and at first I bought all my product from Big Rapids. My emphasis was always primarily on mainstream comics, though I tried to carry anything I could get my hands on. Later I bought direct with Last Gasp, Star*Reach, Kitchen Sink, Ken Pierce, Aardvark-Vanaheim, SuperGraphics,and a number of other folks--some of them wouldn't deal with BR, so BR and I did trades.
But while I always carried undergrounds, and listed them alongside my other items on order forms, they were never a big part of my volume, nor did I go from undergrounds to a broader spectrum of comics over time--they were part of my mix from the beginning, which in my case was rather late in the history of undergrounds.

And finally, as Gary Colabuono reminds us (hi, Gary! Long time!), there was Windy City in Chicago, an outfit that was tough enough to resist (possibly physically) Big Rapids' takeover tactics that had netted them so much other territory. Windy City, in fact, outlived BR, though I don't know by how long.
Big Rapids died in November of 1980, and I can recall having long phone calls from both Eddie Mandel and Hal Shuster at that time, on parallel subjects, so Windy City was still at least a semi-separate entity (from New Media/Irjax)then.

One of the people I used to get calls from flogging a fairly extensive underground backlist was Keith Green, circa 1976. Does anybody remember who he represented, or whether he was trying to distribute independently?

[This message has been edited by Jim Friel (edited 11-26-1999).]

[This message has been edited by Jim Friel (edited 11-26-1999).]

Forgot to answer the question Tim posed--
To the best of my knowledge, underground sales at all levels were nearly always nonreturnable, unless some special deal was being made.
From some early conversations with members of the Big Rapids collective, I believe that they tried returnable rack-jobbing and eventually gave it up as a bad idea for the same reasons that everyone who's ever tried it has found--too much damage and too few sales for the margins involved, plus all the problems associated with credit, ownership changes, etc. And of course, BR was BUYING nonreturnable. They had a few very favored (and very reliable) customers who (I think) continued to buy some stuff returnable--a great chain of full-service newsstands in the Lansing/East Lansing, MI area, for instance, which was eventually owned by the local ID usually had two or three 20-pocket wire racks of UGs in each store (we're talking about 1970 to maybe 1974-or-5). I can't imagine that chain doing any nonreturnable purchasing.
So the answer is,(I think):
Nonreturnability was the standard;
When returnability was tried it usually failed;
and notwithstanding this, a few returnable deals existed between some distributors and retailers that continued profitably over significant periods of time.
I'm not aware of any returnable arrangements between underground publishers and distributors, but as I said above, I came in late there.
You have to understand that in the early seventies, comix publishers and comic shops (such as they were--with very few notable exceptions) just barely deserved to be called businesses at all. Hell, as late as 1974, Bob Hellems opened Comic Kingdom in Detroit with his personal collection, five hundred bucks, and a card table with a cigar box as a register--and was shortly (and for years thereafter) the highest-volume comic shop in town.
Aside from being so under-capitalized that selling returnable would have been far too heavy a risk, I don't think any of the underground publishers or distributors had the physical capacity to process or keep track of returns on any kind of systematic basis.



[This message has been edited by Jim Friel (edited 11-26-1999).]