The Comics Rack

Comic Book Memories Pt. 9

With the demise of Pacific Comics in 1984, one would assume that Glenwood Distributors would have taken up all the slack in sunny Southern California and become the head hog at the trough, but that was not to be the case. Granted, Glenwood did pick up some additional accounts, but what most of of us didn't know at the time, was that Bud Plant's company was poised for expansion. Plant, under the mangership of Ken Krueger, opened a distribution warehouse in LA and picked up lots of the accounts that had been with Pacific and then some (this was still a period of comic store expansion). We'll talk about Bud and Ken later, since this edition is about Glenwood.

As mentioned about 2 chronological columns back, the Glenwood warehouse was the California presence of a distribution company based in Illinois. Pat Broderick (his standing introduction, "Hi, I'm Pat Broderick, not the artist.") was the manager during the Glenwood heyday and, due in no small part to Pat, it was most always a fun place to pick up the comics, shoot the breeze, drink a cup of coffee or, if it was late in the day, chug a beer before heading back to the store. At first, Pat had one employee, Tim, but, as business picked up, Jeff (who I just ran into the other day), one of our customers, Tom, and even my brother were added to the mix (it seems there was somebody else, but I can't really remember a name). All of them were fun to be around and always friendly.

The Glenwood warehouse was larger than Pacific's and set in an industrial area of the city of Downey. Why Downey, I've never quite understood. Granted it was near the 605 freeway, but it was not that convenient for access from other freeways (you can Google Downey to see what I mean...Glenwood was on Woodruff between Imperial Highway and Firestone Boulevard), or even the air freight deliveries from LAX. In fact, if it hadn't been for our regular trips to Kolb, we probably would have been better off going to Plant in LA, at least in terms of access from downtown Long Beach. Personally, I'm convinced that Downey was chosen by a Glenwood employee throwing a dart at a map of the area. I only say this because of the fact that any time the company's owner would come out to visit the warehouse, he would always fly into LAX instead of the more convenient Long Beach airport. When Pat would question this (since it was a real chore to get to LAX in the afternoon), he was informed that LAX looked closer on the map(!).

As with most industrial complexes, the warehouse had a cement floor, cinder block walls and no heat or cooling. There was a two-room enclosed office, where, in the winter, you could usually find the staff huddled around a space heater in the outer office trying not to freeze. In the inner office, Glenwood had a great and mysterious machine, which was a computer (keep in mind this is the mid-80s). This huge monstrosity, added soon after Pat assumed the mantle of manager, kept track of the orders and billing. It had to be coddled and I recall Pat had to arrange for an air conditioner to be installed in the wall of the office to keep the beast cool. The computer went out on a regular basis and had some glitches in its programming, which caused some material to be hand billed, but only when Pat could get it all together. Probably one of the few times that Richard really had a problem with Glenwood was when we were presented with a $900 billing for all the material that hadn't made it to the main invoices over the last couple of months.

I realize that I haven't really discussed how the comics were ordered during these archaic days and this seems to be as good a place as any to digress into how it all worked. Each month, just like today, each dealer would get an order form listing the releases for a given month: a page by page listing of the comic titles, their price and a spot where we would write the number of copies we wanted of each item. Unlike today, however, there was no catalog (like Previews) to go along with the order form. Instead, we got some descriptive material in the order form, a whole pile of promo material from the various publishers telling us who was doing what on which books and then we had to depend on the fan press for any additional information. Of course, just to confuse things, the early days of the order forms were divided up into two sections, since the comics were sold at different discount rates. In order to get a decent discount rate you had order a certain number of items in section one and this had some influence on section two and you had to order a minimum of 3 and blah, blah, blah...needless to say, it was a pain to try to make minimums and, probably still is (if this system still exists). The lack of information on the comics themselves was also a problem and not only was the promotional material often misleading ( a great cover on a lousy book), there was no system in place to protect retailers from last minute changes in creative teams. The fan press was often our best friend when it came to actual information about the comics and, just like today, we spent a lot of time polling our regulars about what they would like in the upcoming comics.