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Walking Through The 50,000 Comics That Travelled From Arizona to Alabama

Published Sat, 06 Jan 2018 13:00:59 -0600

Last updated Sat, 06 Jan 2018 13:10:39 -0600

Last week, we mentioned that this weekend an Alabama auction house was selling 50,000 comics from a comic shop that reportedly closed in 2009. Turns out it was 2011, and the Arizona comic chain Atomic Comics, which we reported on closing at the time. Owned by Mike Malve, he put the closure down to a number of things,

Too high rents, a falling economy, but Mike points to one moment in 2006 as the catalyst for the company's problems, "when a 16 year old uninsured driver, drover her car through the window of our Mesa Superstore, our largest and greatest revenue producer. This in turn caused a flood as the water main had been hit. This caused such severe damage and loss that we had to shut down for over 5 months. The damages were so severe we lost close to a million dollars in product. The loss of revenue due to being closed all those months as we headed into retail's busiest season was astronomical."

Their stock has been stored somewhere until now. And shipped thousands of miles across county lines, from the western state of Arizona to the eastern state of Alabama. Quite a journey for so many comic books.

A few people have popped by, some because they saw the mention on Bleeding Cool. And they have posted what they discovered…

Oregon Live reports,

The selection was eclectic and thoroughly random — Marvel books next to DC books, which were on top of old Wildstorm while two piles away was a stack of Virgin (they published comics?) and other publishers lost to the boom-and-bust of the 90s.

…But what I really took from the auction yard was an appreciation for the history those books represented and a sadness that the business and the culture they were part of died such a quiet, ignoble death so far from home.

While on the ValiantFans board, possumgrease wrote,

I've walked through it. Apparently it's the 3 of the Atomic stores inventory from 2011. Didn't see any keys on the floppies, but was hard to sort through the stacks. There are some deals on the tpb/hardcovers. Good people handling the sale.