Nik Dirga

The quest for comic books drove much of my youth. I wrote in Part One about the thrill of the hunt, of trying to find my comics in a small mountain town where shops came and went like the wind. (Big thanks to pal Bob for his very kind words on that essay!) Let’s turn the page now to the late ‘80s. 

Eventually, I got older, learned to drive, even got jobs so I could buy more comics (notably a rather unsuccessful 6-week stint working at McDonald’s in the summer of ’88). After Kayo closed for the final time, there was a year or so there where the only places I could find new comics was at supermarkets. 

Then, in the shiny new shopping mall at the south end of town, a brand new comic store opened around 1989. It was a glorious change from the rather poky, uncertain shops I’d been used to. This was in a MALL, and it was a big, well-lit, clean space, with row after row of comic books. It hit during the peak of Batmania thanks to the ’89 blockbuster, and I recall an entire rack being filled with copies of the multi-coloured first issue of Legends of the Dark Knight.

It was a boom time, comics were cool, and I was old enough to have a part-time job and spent way too much money on Batman and X-Men and Amazing Spider-Man, where this weird artist named Todd McFarlane was making a splash. It was kinetic and expressive but I wasn’t entirely sure I liked it, being a fan of John Romita Jr.’s sturdy Spidey. The art seemed flashy, but lacking in substance. Welcome to the 1990s.

That mall comic shop – whose name I can’t even recall – was blandly professional but it did lack a certain style that the McNeil’s and Kayo’s of my youth had. Maybe I was just older, and less easily dazzled. But it was gone by the time I finished high school and moved across the country to little ol’ Mississippi to go to college.

My transient state and lack of a car led me to sign up for Westfield Comics, a thoroughly cool mail-order comics service I used on and off for many years until I moved overseas – they were great, but I’ll admit, I mainly used them because I didn’t have a comic shop within walking distance for long periods of my life. There’s nothing quite like discovering a new comics shop, with its hidden treasures and quirks. 

And I found a great one in Memphis, an hour or so away, that I made frequent trips to for years – Comics & Collectibles. This was now the mid-1990s, when I became less and less interested in Marvel and DC as the “Image Comics” art style became prevalent and stories and artwork became contorted, incomprehensible messes for too many years. 

Fortunately at the same time there was a golden age in great independent comics, and I would regularly hit up C&C for my fix of Hate, Eightball, Dork, Naughty Bits, Yummy Fur, Cerebus and more. Those creators kept me going through what I still consider the direst years of mainstream comics, the naughty ‘90s.

I don’t collect quite as many titles today as I once did – maybe 6-8, and a handful of miniseries and specials. I don’t do digital comics – they’re fine for some, but not for me. I’ve got two very good comic shops in my current city, which I dig.

I do still trawl the shops and online an awful lot for the old comics, because the things you grew up with are always the best things. Comics from roughly 1976-1988 hit that sweet spot for me, and always will. Obsessed comics geek for life, yo.

I’ll do some crazy stuff to get my comics. 

It’s easier now, that I live in a big city with a few very good comic shops, and of course the internet, but back in the ‘80s a young Nik spent a lot of time on the comics hustle. 

I got sucked into the addiction that would claim most of my life by spinner racks at Lucky’s in 1982, where our family would sometimes stop in after church. Marvel’s Star Wars, Roger Stern’s Amazing Spider-Man, Gerry Conway’s Batman, Claremont’s X-Men, John Byrne’s Fantastic Four… these were the hooks. These spinner racks were like Christmas trees to me. 

Right around that time circa 1983, an actual comic book STORE opened for the first time in my small California mountain town, right on Main Street. It was called McNeil’s, and run by a laconic man who seemed ancient to this 12-year-old. There were long boxes full of OLD comics, which I could never afford, and stopping by there on the way home from school once a week became a must. You’d inhale that peculiar smell of old comics, an entire room filled with them, and I was done for. 

But then McNeil died (he actually WAS ancient), and the store soon closed. Back to hustling for comics off the spinner racks at the supermarkets across town, or occasional trips to the amazing Comics & Comix down in Sacramento, which was like a Catholic visiting the Pope for me. Unfortunately, a pre-teen kid couldn’t get down there very often. 

I’d go hunting for anything, once even walking a ridiculous distance in summer heat to find the only comic even slightly interesting was an issue of G.I. Joe Vs Transformers. I didn’t even really LIKE G.I. Joe. 

Then another comics store opened in town, in a weird suburban spot just down the road from my house. It was called Kayo’s, run by a peculiar little elf-like man out of what seemed to be a converted front living room, with the rest of the house crammed away behind another door. 

It was a tiny but decent comic shop at an amazing time for comics circa 1986. DC was suddenly exploding with the creativity of Alan Moore, Crisis and Dark Knight. We were just getting into the great indy comics era then, with publishers like Eclipse, First and Renegade putting out strange, cool books that weren’t at all like the Marvel and DC stuff. Mr Monster, The Flaming Carrot, DNAgents, Cerebus. I picked up the third issue of some oddball black and white comic about ninja turtles on Kayo’s recommendation. I do wish I’d kept that. 

Kayo’s was a good fix, so of course it closed down. But then they opened again. And closed again. They did this several times over the course of a couple of years, moving around town to various locations – an old beauty parlor, a tiny space hidden upstairs in an office building downtown. 

Kayo was one of those hustling optimists you often see in life, sweating and trying to hold something together. He loved comics, but couldn’t give the business a go. The makeshift appearance of his shops said something – they seemed slapped together overnight, ready to move at a moment’s notice. One of the stores closed so suddenly that the next time I popped by it was empty, abandoned save for a big box of old Comics Buyer’s Guides left out on the porch. I took them all, of course. 

But he was my comics fix for a few desperate years there. Kayo hit his low when he was briefly selling comics out of a motel room. I still remember knocking on a hotel room door and getting an issue of West Coast Avengers from him. There was something vaguely seamy, absurd about the transaction, me a teenage kid going to cheap hotels to buy my comics. 

Kayo vanished eventually, but not without a whiff of scandal. There was a crime in the family, maybe even a murder – not him, but as I vaguely recall it was a son or a son-in-law – something that briefly made the local news, and then shortly after Kayo and his comics disappeared forever. I often wonder about the mysterious Kayo. 

But he left with me getting a final prize – in the final throes of his business, everything had to go, and so I ended up buying a comics spinner rack from him for $20, and hauling the stupid, awkward thing at least a mile or two back to my parents’ house. I kept it for years, moving from California to Mississippi with it, on into college, into tiny apartments. Eventually in my more vagabond years it ended up in a barn at my parents’ house, covered in spiderwebs, before it vanished entirely from my history. 

The comic shops I grew up with were always temporary, and the hustling, impermanent state of Kayo’s summed something up about them. But eventually that would change. Comics would get big time.

Next time: Flashy new shops, Batman goes Hollywood, and a move to Memphis