Jan. 5, 1979 Gusto cover story: Comic book collecting

 

Before I started spending all my money on records as a kid, I spent all my money on comic books.

Jan. 5, 1979 

The Comics

         The young fans of Spider-Man cluster knee-high to the comic book racks in Fantasy World, a narrow Hertel Avenue storefront that specializes in comics and used records. They’ve thumbed through this month’s new releases and then they’ve thumbed some more. Now they’re waiting impatiently for their web-spinning superhero.

         “Where’s Spider-Man?” one of them whines.

         “He’s out to lunch,” says Norm Sinski, 22-year-old partner in the store. “He ought to be back any minute.”

         Sure enough, before you can say “Holy moley,” this red-and-blue costumed character pounced into the store, big as life and twice as spectacular. The adults ooh and aah. The kids get suddenly quiet.

         “Hi, honey,” Spidey says, turning to a little girl. She shrinks away in bashfulness. “Hi, young man. I’ll let you touch my costume if you like. We’ll be taking pictures in the other room and I’ll answer all your questions.”

         “How’s the superhero business?” one of the bigger kids asks.

         “Quiet,” he replies from behind the mask. “All the supervillains are home for the holidays.”

         It’s so quiet, he observed, that he’s told the mayor that he won’t shoot his special web while he’s here in Buffalo.”

         “Spiders only shoot webs when they need to,” he explains.

         Does it matter that this Spider-Man is really an actor who also does the Hulk and who appears in the live Bugs Bunny show as Batman? Not really. Like Santa Claus, Spider-Man is a creature of faith. If it weren’t for that Superman movie, Spider-Man would be the king of the superheroes. He’s got a long-running comic book, a daily newspaper strip, a TV show and millions of ardent followers. When the nostalgia of the 1970s is written, Spidey will be one of the things that made these the good old days.

         Spider-Man is a symbol of the status that comic books have achieved during the ‘70s. After 40 years at the bottom of the literary heap, they’ve become respectable. And collectible. A new comic that sells for 35 or 40 cents today may be worth 50 cents within a couple of months and $1 or $2 within a couple of years.

         Sometimes the inflation among collectors can be breathtaking. The first issue of Howard the Duck went up to $18.75 in just 15 months. The most expensive old comic ever sold – Action Number 1 from the late ‘30s – brought a price of $3,500. It originally sold for a dime.

         Comic collecting is no longer kid stuff. Spider-Man helped change all that when Marvel Comics introduced him in the early ‘60s in a bid to appeal to older teenagers and college students. Now the comic book fancier can be a 32-year-old on a salary or a 12-year-old on an allowance. Noted collectors include film director Federico Fellini, who buys from Buffalo native Ed Sumner’s Supersnipe comic emporium in Manhattan.

         The bible of comic collecting is the Comic Book Price Guide, which has been issued annually since 1969. With its suggested prices, it comes the closest to setting up an aesthetic for comics. A number of factors can make one book more valuable than another.

         “Take Conan the Barbarian,” says Emil Novak of Queen City Coin and Book Store near UB. “The early books are worth money to a collector because of the art and because of the character, since it was so innovative. Who ever saw comic books about barbarians in the old days?”

         Some collectors look for the work of a particular artist like Frank Frazetta, Jim Starlin, Steve Gerber, Jim Steranko, Barry Smith, Neil Adams and Jack Kirby, the man who created Captain America and the Fantastic Four. The artwork in the first 37 issues of Spider-Man make them more valuable than the ones that follow. A two-year-old Jim Starlin edition of Marvel Comics goes for $2.50, while books by lesser artists don’t fetch half that price.

         Other collectors go after characters, following Howard the Duck, for instance, back through Fear Number 19 and Giant-Sized Man Thing Numbers 4 and 5. Still others go after representative books of many different stripes – horror, science fiction, women superheroes and even the sleazy funk comics which were responsible for the introduction of the Comics Code in the ‘50s.

         Queen City’s Emil Novak, who’s just turning 21, broke into comic collecting when he was growing up in Kenmore, watching other kids like Norm Sinski buy comics from his father’s coin store and trade them in the neighborhood. Sinski and Novak are now partners in Fantasy World.

         “Norm and his buddies had some idea of what to buy,” Novak says. “Norm used to try to hustle my father for comics.”

         “It paid off when I got older,” Sinski grins.

         “After a year or more of this,” Novak continues, “my father said why not go into comic books. He heard of a comic convention in New York City, so he took down all the stuff he had and he came back with $3,000.”

         Novak has bought comics wholesale for most of the decade and now has a quarter of a million of them in storage.

         “I’d get them when the book came out,” he says. “I’d buy 300 of them, sell 50 or 75 of them and keep the rest on file as back issues.”

         He finds old comics at garage sales and flea markets, in antique stores and estate auctions. Sometimes he’ll run newspaper ads in small towns. The Midwest, he says, is a treasury of old comics. To sell them, he travels to conventions. The big conventions and the big collectors are in California and New York, he says.

         Novak also draws his own comics and has hopes of launching a fan magazine. He won’t be Buffalo’s first comic “fanzine” publisher, however. A crew over on Crescent Avenue puts out a Marvel Comics Index.

         As a fan, Novak finds he doesn’t read as many comics as he used to.

         “I read Conan, Howard the Duck – though I only skim him now – the Micronauts and X-men. I’ve stopped looking at Spidey and Hulk. Since they’re so big with the kids now, they’re more kiddie-directed. But they still sell and they’re still good books. Fandom, that’s what it is. Kids always love comics and they’ll always be around. If a kid starts young and gets good comics, it’s like a bank. You invest your money and next year it’s worth more.”

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IN THE PHOTO: 1979 Gusto photo with, from left, Emil Novak, Spider-Man and Norm Sinski.

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FOOTNOTE: Queen City Bookstore is still there at 3184 Main St., where Emil Novak's father first had his coin and book store. Emil took over when his dad died in 1975 and has become renowned as Buffalo's "King of Comics." He continues to oversee the racks with the help of his son, Emil Jr.

Norm Sinski is hard to trace online, but back in 2019, when Queen City gave him an award, it seemed like he was still collecting and trading. Fantasy World is no longer in business.

As for Action Number 1, an original 10-cent copy sold at the beginning of April for $6 million.