THE FIRE AND WATER PODCAST: Episode 130
The official podcast of THE AQUAMAN SHRINE and FIRESTORM FAN
Episode 130 - Live from Gene Hendricks' Basement
Recorded live and in-person! Shag, Rob and special guest Gene Hendricks reminisce about "road trip comics"!
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Opening theme, "That Time is Now," by Michael Kohler. Closing music by Daniel Adams and Ashton Burge of The Bad Mamma Jammas! http://www.facebook.com/BadMammaJammas
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Shag,
ReplyDeleteI have a long-time friend who collects comics and had lived in Traverse City, Michigan through most of the 1980s -- and upon hearing this podcast I asked him about the Comics Cave. He remembers it well. It used to be the only comic book store in town at that time, and was owned and run by a kind husband-and-wife team. One quirky little thing he had mentioned is that the price tags of their back issues were handwritten on these tiny, neon-green, rounded rectangular stickers (which you can buy at any office supply store) stuck on the top left corner of the comic bag… which were so difficult to remove that he quickly stopped bothering to do so.
In the early 1980s the Cave used to be located downtown on Front Street in one of the multi-shop buildings about a block or so away from Stacey’s (which he says was a 1950s-style diner and malt shoppe that later changed ownership and name in the late 1980s to “Poppycock’s”). The Cave then moved into a solitary shop on Eighth Street near the Boardman River in the mid-1980s. He was very surprised to show up at that location one Wednesday in 1988 to find the building empty and for lease. Fortunately he still had a business card from the shop and called the phone number, and yes, they were continuing their operations and filling comic book pull-lists from the garage of their house, which was up in the hilly area a few miles west of downtown Traverse City, which I presume is where you went as well.
According to what my friend told me, the move was made with absolutely no notice and had to have happened in September 1988, because he distinctly remembers The New Titans #50 being the last comic he bought at the Eighth Street store, and having to drive up to the hills to purchase issue #51 and subsequent issues. Because of the inconvenient distance (he lived out on the Peninsula), he visited the “Comic Cave home base” on a monthly basis instead of weekly, and always had to call to schedule an appointment to pick up his comics prior to a visit. One time he was actually stuck in the snow for a couple of hours and missed an appointment (no cellular phones back then, so help was hard to come by).
In early 1989, a different comic book store opened on Eighth Street off of Garfield Ave (in the same shop lot as the Ben Franklin 5 and 10) -- which was a lot closer to the Peninsula and the Community College he was attending. However, the owner was a chain smoker and had no qualms about smoking throughout the day in his establishment. So my friend very quickly decided to purchase his comics through mail order until he moved out of the city to go to university schooling a few years later.
Shag, I trust you are familiar with where these places are or were, since I had never been to Traverse City myself...