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| Phil Seuling, from an article in Famous Monsters of Filmland |
Back in 2009, I did a deep dive for
Wizard magazine on Phil Seuling, the man who essentially invented direct-market distribution and the modern comic convention. As old
Wizard articles are hard to find online and I think there's some very cool stuff here, it's presented below for your edification.
ALSO: I like using the word "edification."
Jim McLauchlin
***************************************
TITLE: THE MAN WHO
INVENTED YOUR COMIC SHOP (AMONG OTHER THINGS)
SUB: Phil Seuling saved
comics, invented the direct market, and pioneered the modern comic con. So why
haven’t you heard of him?
If you visited a comic
store this week or perhaps hit a comic convention over the last couple months,
here’s an idea: Maybe you should point yourself in the direction of a small
neighborhood in Brooklyn called Seagate and mouth a word of thanks to the man
responsible.
Don’t know who to thank?
You’re not alone.
“He is the great unsung hero of this business,” says longtime
Marvel and DC Editor Denny O’Neil. “You never
hear about him any more. But it’s hard for me to imagine where comics would
have gone if he hadn’t been there.”
The “he” is Phil Seuling, a hyper-kinetic, jutting-jawed
trailblazer who appeared to lead the way at the perfect moment when comics was
ready to explode as a business. He may have been the
Richard Branson of comics, a crazy, free-spirited personality who had no qualms
about trying the next idea that popped into his head, and usually had a measure
of success in doing it. He was a dealer, a convention promoter, a distributor,
a publisher. And in wearing these many hats, he undoubtedly shaped the
landscape that is comics today.
But for all his career
accomplishments and résumé points, it was sheer force of personality most
remember. “Phil was larger than life,” says 35-year comic retailing vet Chuck
Rozanski of Mile High Comics. “When he came into a room, there was hardly room
for anyone else. He was bombastic; very opinionated. If Phil didn’t agree with you, boy
howdy, he’d let you know. He’d tell you that you were the biggest numb-nuts in
the world. Then he’d throw his big arm around you and take you out for dinner.”
That duality of
personality made Phil Seuling…so very Phil Seuling. Dick Giordano served as DC
Comics’ editor in chief, and attended all of DC’s distributor meetings from
1980 to 1993, where he got to know Seuling very well. “He'd jawbone you into submission,” Giordano says. “He looked
like a hood, with a thrusting jaw and hard angles to his head and body. But all
this hid a sharp mind, a well-honed intelligence, and a desire to improve the
comic industry.”
Seuling’s improvements started when he was one of comics’ early
back-issue dealers, as fandom was just starting to grow. Comic conventions started circa 1964-65. The earliest cons were
really glorified swap meets, perhaps without the glory. A few back-issue
dealers would gather, and a smattering of collectors would appear to fill in
some holes in collections, Accounts of these early cons peg attendance
sometimes at a couple dozen people. A con with 200 attendees was cause for
raucous celebration.
But one dealer at these
early cons kept an eagle eye on the proceedings: Phil Seuling. The English
teacher from Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, NY saw a potential
infrastructure. It just needed some dressing up—creator guests, booths from
publishers, some panel discussions. By 1968, Seuling gussied up his first
con—The Comic Art Convention on July 4 in New York. Seuling’s bells and
whistles proved a huge hit, and the Comic Art Conventions grew to the point
where people would refer to them by a different name—they became known simply
as “Seulingcons.” And they became the standard all others would have to rise
to.
“Those early conventions
pioneered everything conventions have become since,” says longtime DC President
and Publisher Paul Levitz. “Flying guests in was considered an absolutely radical idea. The panel, the auction,
the art show, getting publishers to have a presence on the floor, these were
all things that happened on Phil’s watch.”
Seuling had a store in
Brooklyn—that a 12-year-old Levitz shopped at—a thriving yearly convention, and
a growing number of contacts in the industry. He also had poker night. “Every Friday night, we’d play
at his place near Coney Island, right at the end of the subway line,” remembers
Roy Thomas, a 40-year comic writing vet who was befriended by Seuling as soon
as he moved to New York in 1965. “Sometimes we’d play ’til 5-6 AM, and I won or
lost $100 a time or two.”
But even when Thomas
would win, Seuling was the real
winner. As one of comics’ earlier dealers, well…he had the goods. “He had one
room at his place that was just a wonderland of comics,” Thomas remembers.
“When I’d play there, sometimes I’d stay the night, and just wander into that
room at look at all the stuff. If I won, I’d usually wind up just giving it all
back to Phil, because I’d buy all these old comics. He always said when I played,
he never lost out—He’d get my money one way or another!”
Seuling’s colorful
personality flourished. He took out tongue-in-cheek ads in fan publications
bragging about his own arrogance. Having built his name and a reputation to an
all-time high, he was ready to take his next step—simply revolutionizing the
way comics were distributed.
There were precious few
“comic stores” in the early ’70s, maybe 20 or 30 nationwide. Seuling knew there could be more. He had dealers
at his conventions who dealt extensively in comics. Their problem was
distribution—getting new books they needed, at a decent price. Under the
newsstand distribution model of the times, comics and magazines came bundled in
odd assortments, and were sold to retailers at 20% off of cover price, a low
margin of profit. Retailers had the cushion of returnibility, and they needed
it—no one wanted last week’s Newsweek.
It was birdcage liner at best.
Not so in the burgeoning
comics market. Hell, when Superman
#206 came out, you wanted extra
copies of Superman #205. The
back-issue business was exploding, and
plenty of retailers could do great in comics if they could get ready access to
them. The publishers’ eyes just needed to be opened to the possibility. Enter a
now 17-year-old assistant editor at DC, Paul Levitz.
“I happened to be
present at DC the day he came in and pitched it,” Levitz remembers. “[Then DC
Vice-President] Sol Harrison came up to me after the meeting and said, ‘Phil
has this idea for selling comics straight to the comic shops. Do you think
that’s a good idea?’ I didn’t know enough to vouch for the idea, but I could vouch for Phil as a person. The comic shops were all trying to figure out how to get
new comics through the newsstand distributors through very imperfect methods.
So they were really used comic shops
as opposed to new comic shops. It was Phil’s system that tipped that over,
opened that door.”
Seuling’s system was to
have the publishers sell to
him at 60% off cover price. Seuling would sell to comic dealers at 40% to 50% off,
doubling their margins or better. Under this system, returnibility was gone,
but who cared? Remember, comic dealers wanted extra copies of last month’s Superman. Roy Thomas set up a similar
meeting for Seuling with Sol Brodsky at Marvel, and as soon as he had DC and
Marvel is his pocket, the rest of the publishers quickly fell in line. By 1974,
Seagate Distribution, named for Seuling’s Brooklyn neighborhood, was up and
running.
Seuling created a
philosopher’s stone for comics—access to the books retailers wanted, in top
condition, at a better profit margin. It was a trifecta that kick-started the
industry. Dealers made money, Seuling made money, and new comic stores started
to pop up and flourish. But the biggest winners of all may have been the publishers.
“With returnibility, the
conventional wisdom was that you had to print 100,000 copies to sell 30,000. It
was a grossly inefficient system,” Denny O’Neil remembers. “But along came ol’
crazy Phil with this wacky idea that created the specialty shop, which carried
with it a guaranteed reader base.”
Many near the epicenter of this creation of this new “direct
market”—Levitz and Giordano included—will also throw credit in the direction of
San Francisco dealer Bud Plant. The only problem with that theory? Bud doesn’t
buy it.
“Phil
Seuling was the guy who created it,” Plant states flatly. “I only slipped in
there on the side. He was the guy who had the idea, and went to Marvel and DC
and said, ‘This is what I want to do. I can make this happen for you. Let’s get
these comics out to people who know them and understand them, and let’s get
them to them at a discount that will allow everyone to prosper.’ That was his idea. The only place where I come in
is that Phil and I used to work together on buying quantities of independent
comics like Cerebus or Elfquest. If Phil could sell 1000 and I
could sell 1000, together we’d order 2000. That was it. But the idea, the
creation of direct market distribution…it was all Phil.”
The path Seuling started
on as a fan as a youngster, a dealer in 1965 and a promoter in 1968 finally
reached fruition. “I remember he would talk to me occasionally in the late ’60s
and early ’70s about how bad the distribution was, how the market was in danger
of drying up,” Roy Thomas recalls. “Newsstands weren’t as interested in a
product that was only 15 cents, 20 cents. He was worried that nothing could save comics, unless there was a
different distribution system. Well, he created that system. He saved it.”
Seuling set up a network
of regional sub-distributors, and other distributors jumped into the fray as
well. But Seuling enjoyed one massive advantage over any competition. At the
time, almost all comics were printed in Sparta, IL, and if you ordered 25 or
more copies via Seagate, the books were shipped right from the plant to your
store’s doorstep at publisher expense. Not so with other companies. Other
distributors such as Irjax, Pacific, and Glenwood got bulk shipments from
Sparta, picked-and-packed themselves, and then shipped to stores. Stores got
theirs quicker through Seagate. It was an insurmountable advantage.
It was also “unfair
restraint of trade” for publishers not to allow other distributors the same
terms. Irjax sued in 1978, and won. The sands were starting to shift, the first
chinks appeared in Seuling’s armor. “His was undoubtedly the linchpin presence by which comics fandom
was transformed into the direct market. His rise was meteorically swift, and
his reach and control unimaginably strong,” recalls Cerebus creator/publisher Dave Sim. “But he fell victim to the
hubris which accompanies all would-be tyrants like their own shadow. As the one
who made the direct sales breakthrough, he had it all in the palm of his
hand…and then hastened his own steep fall from the summit by trying to keep it
there.”
Chuck Rozanski thought
that Phil Seuling’s ultimate problem was…Phil Seuling. “Phil was probably
borderline-brilliant,” Rozanski says. “But he had blind spots. Phil had faith
in himself, probably too much faith. He could make errors with a shocking order
of magnitude. You could sit there and argue with him and try to point out where
his errors were, and not get anywhere with him. He believed in his own vision.”
Seuling’s critical error
happened shortly after the Irjax suit. All distributors had to move to doing
their own pick-and-pack, and one of Seagate’s employees started falling behind
in billing the stores for freight. Rozanski tried to tell Seuling that he was
shipping the books for free to stores, but Seuling wouldn’t listen. Over a
year’s worth of shipments went out without Seagate charging for shipping before
Seuling checked his records. His response? He sent all his accounts a full
year’s freight bill at once.
“They
walked,” Rozanski says. “Overnight, Seagate lost a huge percentage of their
accounts, because Phil tried to get all this freight money at once. First he
wouldn’t listen. Then, when he found there was an internal problem, he
overreacted. Any other rational person would have tried to figure out a way to
recover this money without losing their accounts. But Phil saw the world in
black-and-white. Instead of trying to get paid over time or whatever, he just
sent ’em all a bill. That was the nature of Phil Seuling. Brilliant on one
hand, but so stubborn on the other.”
Seagate was starting to
winnow away, as distributors including a new contender called Diamond were
starting to rise. Seuling was starting to winnow away as well. He had a rare
liver disorder, and was looking jaundiced, losing weight. Seuling missed one of
the annual distributor meetings, and as news of his illness rippled through the
room, his fellow distributors and publishers grew quiet. “It definitely cooled the ardor of that meeting,” Dick
Giordano recalls. “A thin, subdued shadow of his former self showed up at the
next meeting, but the fire was gone. And a little later, so was Phil.”
On August 21, 1984, at
the age of 50 years, Phil Seuling died. Seagate died with him.
All that’s left is
legacy, and that legacy is a massive one. “I don’t think comics history would have gone the way it did
without him,” says Denny O’Neil. “And the way it did go is a healthy one. As a
business, I don’t think you’d have the recognition for comics, and thus these
umpteen-billion dollar comic movies. And the comic stores that cropped up
around his idea created a marketplace, which could be a marketplace for
anything. As an art form, comics are, by God, real capital-A Art. That’s all at
least partially because of Phil Seuling.”
Dave Sim witnessed Phil Seuling’s fall, but he also recalls sending Seuling a sample copy of Cerebus #1 back in 1977, and a request that maybe Seagate might be
able to move 500 copies. Seuling calling almost immediately with an order for
1000 copies.
“He was a person of boundless generosity and warm open-heartedness,
larger than life,” Sim says. “For all his faults and foibles, he remains a
large and significant presence in the history of the comics medium, literally
the man ‘without whom….’ No one who met him or spent any time with him could
ever forget him. And I doubt anyone who came to the point of parting ways with
him did so without a large and enduring sense of regret at the loss.”
You should know. You should turn in direction of Seagate and
mouth that word of thanks. Because Phil Seuling’s legacy lives on. “He helped popularize comics,
get people interested. For people who were already interested, he helped make
them part of a community as well with his conventions,” says Bud Plant. “For
years, when San Diego was just a minor blip, his convention in New York was the
Mecca. That’s a great effect he had as well. The stores became a meeting place,
too. He built community.”
“I
remember him as a friend,” Chuck Rozanski says. “And I remember him as sort of
a flawed genius. He created so much good in his lifetime that none of us
collectively can thank him enough for the great things that he did.”
