There used to be this comic book shop on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue in New York that I used to frequent in the 90s. It was a gold mine. You’d walk up these creaky stairs from the street into this dimly lit low ceilinged room that smelled of a dusty attic that hadn’t been entered in years. There were no fancy toys or pricy bagged and boarded comics pristinely displayed on the wall. It was just a largish room with rows and rows of long boxes on tables. You could mistake the table with the cash register as just another one of those tables although it seemed as if new long boxes would magically appear from underneath that table as if there was a portal to a garage in Queens filled with ancient comic books.
A nondescript guy of medium build with curly ginger hair ran the place. He never wore fan boy gear or anything flashy; it was always a fuzzy bland sweater in the winter and a simple mono-toned t-shirt in the summer. You could tell he just got up out of bed, threw on whatever was on the floor, hit the subway, grabbed a coffee and egg on a bagel from across the street and trudged up the stairs every day. He always seemed to have an air of contentedness about him, as if he was exactly where he wanted to be. Ah, yes, the gold mine. Those long boxes were filled with copious amounts of moderately priced silver and golden age comics from every title you could dream of. You could fish in your pocket for a crumpled up ten-dollar bill and get away with a couple if you were lucky.
Many of the books weren’t mint or near mint, there were a lot of crinkled corners, smudges, missing staples, but it didn’t matter back then. You were getting a Hulk #179 for six bucks, a Tales of Suspense featuring the Submariner for, oh, I dunno, 13 bucks, a classic FF versus Doom for five smackers. He always made deals for you at the cash counter, especially if he recognized you. There was no eBay, no Craigslist. A ‘Comic Book Price Guide’ was available but hardly ever checked. Jeez, is there anything worse than shopping a store or even worse than worse perusing comics at a garage sale where there aren’t any prices on the books and you get to the cashier and he just checks the Price Guide to charge you the ‘appropriate price’. Dude, screw you, you’re not The Forbidden Planet on Broadway you’re some random geek who needs money to pay for rent.
Anyway, some of the great gems of my collection came from that very store. It’s not there anymore. Hard to say when it closed up since I left New York in 2000. I bring all this up because ‘Avengers: War Across Time’ reminds me of the types of books I would dive into when I went to this store. The story? Kang wants to take over the world by sending Robotic Versions of the Marvel Universe to defeat the Heroes. In this one he sends a Robotic Hulk. Sigh, gives me all the feels.
Marvel was simpler back then. No ‘Mega Crossover Events’ no ‘MCU Tie-Ins’ just criminals and psychedelic wacky rulers from another part of the Universe who wanted to take over Earth. It was up to radioactive Heroes in Tights to save us. That’s one thing about Marvel that always amused me, most of their Heroes gain their super powers from radiation: Spidey, The FF, The Hulk. I’m pretty sure radiation would kill these people if we really got into it. Daredevil got his super power from a radioactive chemical blinding his eyes. Yeah, that dude is blind and lucky if he lives. He doesn’t get super powers. Perhaps it was just Stan Lee reconciling a world of Nuclear Bombs and Radiation and wanting to transmute that dangerous power into something heroic.
Demon One: If only we could have someone write an old school Silver Age Avengers tale that didn’t suck we could satisfy Beelzebub’s yin for that feel for a 60s book while targeting the old comic dude market
Paul puts down his Corned Beef sandwich and chirps.
Paul: I could do that, easy peasy.
The Demons look at Paul. One walks over and pats his shoulder.
Demon Two: I bet you could pal. I bet you could.
While distracted by one demon the other sprinkles a powder in Paul’s Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray soda.
I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. So poor Paul is tied up right now in a windowless room in Midtown with a Sylvania Typewriter pumping out these issues. I hope they let him go when the run is over. Who knows, they might extract his brain and give it to C.B. Cebulski who’ll put it behind his desk with the other brains that he siphons off original ideas from. Of course they had to release this book now what with an Antman/Wasp movie coming out where Kang, who is as handsome as Denzel in his prime now and purrs his lines like Billy Dee Williams, is the villain.
This book still gives me all the feels of the 14th
Street and 6th Avenue days. I hope that the guy who ran that shop is
somewhere having a garage sale today where I’m sure a kid with eyes as wide as
the moon is rifling through one of his long boxes. That kid’s about to get the
comic book deal and steal of his life. Enjoy it kid. It’s rough out here in
a world full of Price Guides Comic Book Shops and Marketing Schmucks. Keep it real and enjoy that
story. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore. Well, Paul Levitz makes 'em, on borrowed time.
Rating: 8.5
Verdict: Pull
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