That's the Big Town Market. It was located at the corner of Pico Boulevard and La Cienega in the eastern part of West Los Angeles but it's no longer there. Twenty…probably more like thirty years ago, it and the "dime store" (that's what we called them even though nothing there was a dime) next door were replaced by a building that now houses a Chase Bank, an Autozone and a big retail space that's been unleased for quite some time. For a while in my teen years, I was a frequent patron of the Big Town Market even though I don't think I ever bought anything edible there.
Why was I a frequent patron when I wasn't buying food? To explain that, I have to explain how we bought comic books in those days.
There were no comic book shops or conventions and certainly no Internet. Comics were distributed like magazines. A store that had rack space for them would get deliveries of the current magazines, usually on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The store took them on a consignment basis, meaning that they put the magazines on display for sale…then they paid for the ones they sold and returned the ones they didn't sell. They could also return the ones that got wrinkled and shaggy from browsers poring through them without purchasing. They could also return the ones they didn't want to display or didn't have room to display.
Let's take Action Comics as an example. It came out monthly so every month, a store would get in X number of copies of the new issue of Action Comics. "X" was determined by the distributor's representative and the store manager taking a look at how many they were selling, how many they were returning and (mainly) how much rack space was available. They generally did not look at how individual titles were selling or whether the store's customers seemed to like super-heroes or talking ducks. The distributor gave them an assortment and the store manager might say, "Give me 20% fewer comics next week" or "I have space on my racks…give me 20% more comic books."
The store would keep the January issue of Action Comics on the rack until one of these things happened..
- He was sold out of it.
- The remaining copies became too tattered to sell.
- The February issue of Action Comics arrived or…
- The rack was getting too crowded so he'd return some of the comics that had been there for a few weeks to make room for the new arrivals.
Regarding #4: Curious about the process, I asked a few storekeepers how they decided which ones to send back. The unanimous reply was "The ones that look like they've been there for a while"…meaning the ones getting wrinkled and tattered. Comic books then were printed on the cheapest paper possible so they had a tendency to wilt easily in the racks.
This decision was usually made with no regard to the content of the comics or the publisher or anything. The guy who ran the store didn't know one comic from another and they made too little off each comic they sold to bother paying attention to whether their patrons preferred Archie over Casper. But there may have been one exception to this.
I have a theory that one of the reasons Marvel did so well in the sixties — to the point where they had DC sweating — is that some Marvel fans made their presence felt. They actively began asking at stores when the new Marvels would be in or complaining because the store was sold out of Fantastic Four. I don't know if Marvel fans were more plentiful than DC fans but I think they were more loyal. It may also may have had something to do with Marvel doing so many stories continued from one issue to the next.
The arrival of the February issue of Action Comics was, in theory, the time to send back the unsold copies of the January issue. In truth, most distributors would take back any unsold product at any time. Also in truth, most comics did not get a full month on the racks. See #4 above.
And in my theory, when it came time to send back unsold comics because they needed the space for newly-arriving books, some store proprietors were aware they had kids asking about the Marvel books and chose to not send them back. So the Marvels got more time on the racks and therefore, more time to sell.
Now, I know this is getting too deep into the weeds for some of you and you may be wondering what this has to do with Mark going to a supermarket often to not buy any food. I'll get to that in Part 2, which will be up here in the next few days.