From Mail Get to Brick and Mortar Suppliers to E-Commerce, Immediate Marketplace Pioneer Buddy Saunders is Continue to Adapting

In junior large in Texas, Buddy Saunders seldom ate university lunch.  He desired to conserve the 35 cents his mom gave him every single day so he had much more to invest on comics.

“I was genuinely a skinny kid,” he mentioned.

He utilized lunch cash, an allowance and proceeds from a paper route to establish a gigantic assortment of comics.  Science fiction titles have been his favorites, like DC’s Secret in Place and Unusual Adventures.  By 1961, when he was 14, he began to offer some of his inventory by way of mail get in early fanzines.

Saunders manufactured his name in mail purchase, expanded in the 1970s to bodily shops in the Dallas-Fort Worthy of space below the title Lone Star Comics, and in the 2010s marketed his stores to concentrate on his company’s flourishing site, MyComicShop.com.  Today, the web page is 1 of the major sellers of new and back again concern comics in the globe.

Saunders, 76, has demonstrated a knack for managing by means of modify.  He profited from the booms and survived the busts in a profession that spans the whole fashionable history of comics retail.  And, he expanded into e-commerce in advance of most of his peers, realizing how the reach of a web page was well-suited to meet up with the wants of comics purchasers.

In interviews this thirty day period, talking by cellular phone from his compact, windowless office at the MyComicShop.com warehouse in Arlington, Texas, he mirrored on the evolution of his business enterprise.  He offers a great deal of the credit rating for new achievement to his son, Conan, who is now president and a co-proprietor, and whose abilities as a personal computer programmer have been critical for making the website.

But comics retail is only aspect of Saunders’ tale.  While in university in the 1960s, he wrote horror and sword and sorcery comics tales for editor Archie Goodwin at Creepy and Eerie journals.  In the 1970s, he co-wrote science fiction prose stories and a novel.  He recalls that he could have targeted on crafting, but he enable it transform into extra of a interest as his enterprise grew.

“Comedian retailing took in excess of my lifetime,” he said.

He is well-recognized to comics retail insiders and to the 30,000 or so persons who receive his company’s weekly newsletter.

“Buddy is only a quite sensible person with pretty good business enterprise sense,” mentioned Bud Plant, owner of Bud’s Art Publications, and an individual with his individual loaded historical past in comics retail as a shop owner and a distributor.

Plant is talking as another person who has recognised Saunders for a long time as a fellow retailer but also as a consumer.  He buys comics from MyComicShop.com, and, when he is offering comics from his particular collection, he often does so on consignment by the internet site.

“He has excellent persons performing for him he evidently trains them perfectly,” Plant reported.  “And it’s possible just as essential, he enjoys what he is undertaking.  He is a comics admirer 1st and foremost.”

Saunders Once Marketed a Great 4 #1 for 25 Cents
Developing up mainly in Texas, very first comic reserve he can recall purchasing for himself was Donald Duck #71, printed in 1960, which exhibits the sunshine shining via a telescope and burning Donald’s tail. He before long was looking at science fiction and superhero comics.

Saunders had a deep assortment by the time Marvel began its new tremendous hero line with titles like Fantastic Four #1 in 1961.  By then he also experienced started marketing and investing comics by way of the mail, promotion in fanzines like Rocket’s Blast Comicollector.  He recollects providing a near-mint affliction copy of Amazing 4 #1 for 25 cents.

“I doubled my funds,” he mentioned.  The address value was 10 cents.  “That was great at the time.”

He made close friends among fellow comedian readers at his faculty in Arlington and formed connections with friends in comics and science fiction fandom.  He and two buddies in Texas, Larry Herndon and Howard Keltner, started publishing a fanzine, Star-Studded Comics, in 1963.

Now in substantial university, Saunders required to be a comic reserve artist and his illustrations appeared in fanzines along with the do the job of artists who would go on to become comics gurus, like Dave Cockrum and Jim Starlin.

“My ambition by way of junior significant and high faculty was to come to be a comedian guide artist, but God blessed me with not enough talent,” he mentioned.

What he means is that, in hindsight, he is familiar with that he would not have been joyful with the daily life of a freelance artist, so it was fortuitous that he wasn’t great enough to severely go after artwork as a profession.

He shifted to concentrate much more on creating, which include function co-composed with his university classmate Howard Waldrop.  The two of them had been aspect of a tiny team of aspiring science fiction writers who would meet up with every couple months to critique each and every other’s function.  Among the other customers was George R.R. Martin, now greatest acknowledged for A Song of Fire and Ice, the sequence that he served to adapt for the tv display Video game of Thrones.

Saunders graduated from superior university in 1965 and received a training diploma from East Texas State University in 1970.

His strategy was to educate and use the summers to create, and he got a work instructing art at a middle university in close proximity to Arlington.  He grew to become a posted novelist a handful of many years afterwards with the release of The Texas-Israeli War: 1999, co-published with Waldrop.

But he in no way stopped studying, shopping for and offering comics.  His mail-get small business ongoing and took up a spare bed room.

During this same interval, Phil Seuling and Jonni Levas in New York experienced started a enterprise that would offer comics from significant publishers straight to corporations like the one Saunders was running (see “Phil Seuling: The Guy Who Invented the Immediate Market place”).  Ahead of that, comics suppliers necessary to obtain from a community of newspaper and journal distributors who often had minor appreciation for comics.  The 1973 begin of Seuling and Levas’ corporation, later referred to as Sea Gate Distributors, is the commencing of the Direct Market era in which comedian shops blossomed (see “Immediate Market place 50th Anniversary”).

Saunders’ enterprise grew so considerably that he felt a need to have to open a physical retail area, which he did in 1977.  The 700-sq.-foot house was the 1st of what would be several places of Lone Star Comics.

By this time, he was married to Judy, who did not in the beginning operate at the organization, but would be a vital section of it in afterwards years.

He ran the keep and ongoing to educate, but he and Judy agreed that he would leave his career as an artwork teacher if and when the income from the retail outlet grew to a lot more than his training salary.  It ended up occurring sooner than they envisioned, inside a single year, and he grew to become a full-time retailer.

Comedian stores went by means of rapid expansion in the 1980s, and in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that progress was noticeable by means of the expansion of Lone Star Comics from one particular modest site to, at its peak, eight areas, alongside with a host of competing merchants.

To help handle the growth, Judy left her administrative occupation with the federal government and joined the loved ones enterprise total time, controlling human assets and accounting.  Buddy Saunders claimed this was an crucial minute for the company’s development mainly because Judy was extremely powerful at handling the pieces of the small business that he wasn’t as comfortable with, and that allowed him to concentration on the blend of products the retailers were promoting.

Though some stores were purists in focusing pretty much exclusively on comics, Lone Star had a willingness to broaden into other products spots, like function-enjoying video games in the 1980s and Pokemon cards and Beanie Infants in the 1990s.

“I hated Beanie Toddlers, but they ended up very hot at the time, so I discovered as substantially as I could about Beanie Toddlers,” Saunders reported.

Lone Star Goes On-line, and Conan Will save the Working day
All along, Saunders tried to keep on being in advance of the curve in making use of know-how in his shops for things like tracking inventory.  So, when corporations started off to get internet websites in the 1990s, he observed an option.

The 1st iterations of the Lone Star site ended up crude, but in the late 90s, Saunders took just one of the most important dangers of his profession by putting aside about $200,000 to retain the services of an outside business to style a fully functional e-commerce web-site for the mail get part of his company.

It was a disaster. Even though the contractors were good programmers, they did not fully grasp the nuances of comics amassing, with a huge amount of goods and information for each product. The result was a site that Saunders felt was unusable and nowhere near to staying prepared to go reside.

“They just have been not able of doing a little something as sophisticated as what we required,” Saunders mentioned.

His son, Conan, who was an undergraduate at MIT, available to acquire a look at the site and see what he could do.  At this stage, Saunders has retold the story of Conan’s rescue of the internet site so numerous periods that it has the sense of a tall tale, but he assures that it is all legitimate: In-involving courses and research in Massachusetts, Conan wrote the code to create the MyComicsShop.com web page virtually from scratch.

Conan acted as a section-time program developer for the loved ones business enterprise via faculty, graduate university and then decades in work opportunities with other organizations.

Then, in 2010, he arrived to get the job done at MyComicShop.com total time as vice president.  In 2021, after his father experienced a stroke, Conan became the company’s president.

Nowadays, the corporation is as significant as it has ever been, with about 130 workers, like about 40 individuals who do almost nothing but grade the condition of back problem comics, and five programmers who preserve the internet site.  The company’s primary obstacle is retaining up with development, reported Buddy Saunders, who has recovered from his stroke and back again at function.

Conan grew up in the organization.  He employed to bag and board comics and do odd employment at the shops as a child. He remembers that the comics he read through as a kid tended to be many years aged due to the fact they had been types around the property.

His upbringing geared up him to operate the organization, equally from becoming all-around the corporation and viewing his father in action.

“He is pretty structured,” Conan said.  “He’s very good at developing units and documenting items and designing matters.”

Conan described a place in which matters operate smoothly and where men and women are expected to act with integrity.

“He’s established a wonderful example for me in my total lifetime,” he stated.

Section of that example is a perception of joy about performing the do the job of comics retail.  When asked how long he programs to continue to keep doing work, Buddy Saunders stated this:

“If I retire, it’s heading to be to a cemetery.”

This article is becoming introduced as aspect of ICv2’s Immediate Sector 50th Anniversary celebration for far more, see “Comics Direct Marketplace 50th Anniversary.”