By Peter Erickson
“Hello,” he says, and continues reading.
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As a kid Charet bought comic books from Acme and from the A-1 bookstore in the Loop. “This was a cluttered shop with thousands of magazines piled in the center of the store. It was haphazard. Sort of like my store. Acme was more a rare-book store. A-1 had stacks of old 50s comics. The owners would throw you out and not allow you back in if they found out you’d sold a comic for a profit that you first bought from them. Imagine such a thing. Me and my friends were thrown out, obviously.” He laughs. “Kids don’t read comics anymore. They come into my store look at a comic and go ‘Blah.’ Kids know superheroes from television. When I was young I read newspapers. I loved the comic strips. Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon, Prince Valiant. Kids don’t read newspapers today, do they?”
Charet says that in the early 80s other people began to become distributors. “Comic stores began to multiply,” he says. “In the early 80s I had two people open comic book stores near me. Both had been customers. One guy told me, ‘I’m going to put you out of business.’ I didn’t like that. Both were jerks, and neither stayed in business long.”
Two ten-year-old boys come into the store. Charet stands up to watch them. One looks at the new comics, the other stands on a stool and begins to pull back issues out of a box. “How much is this?” the boy asks, holding up a comic printed a decade before he was born.
The two boys get together, speak in low voices, and walk out.
Ray, who now has a small mail-order business, has been dealing golden-age comics, the comics of his youth, since the 60s. He can tell at a glance whether a comic book was drawn by Dick Sprang, Jerry Robinson, Jack Cole, Mac Raboy, or any of a couple dozen other artists. He says he always preferred to deal in high-grade old comics, ones that look as if they’d been printed yesterday, but he’s been priced out of the market. He now sells movie-music sheets to supplement his social security checks.
