Life Doesn't Give You Seat Belts

When you’re a little kid, you dream big. You might want to be a firefighter, an astronaut, in the military, maybe even a teacher, doctor, or nurse. It’s usually a profession based on someone you know who has had a profound effect on you, or something cool that you saw on TV.

I had great real-life role models growing up, but there was a certain somebody whose job I thought had to be the coolest ever; Stan Lee.

I had already fallen in love with superheroes thanks to the Super Friends and other Saturday morning cartoons, but it was in 1981 when I was just 8 years old that I discovered that working with superheroes could be an actual job. When Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends came on my TV for the first time, Stan’s voice came out of the speakers announcing that he was “Stan Lee of Marvel Comics!” and I immediately thought “Wow!! I want to work there when I grow up!” that dream stuck with me.

I made it a point to start reading “Stan’s Soapbox” and the “Meanwhile…” page in DC Comics because I wanted to know both the behind-the-scenes goings-on at the comic book companies and what cool stuff that they were working on. Like almost every little kid, I wrote and drew my own comics, and even as a little kid I remember thinking “I am NOT good at drawing”.

For the record, I got a little better.

Growing up in central Wisconsin, I got my comic books at grocery stores, drug stores, and book stores. But as hard as I tried I always missed an issue here and there, or suddenly the store I got Avengers at, didn’t have Avengers anymore, so I had to try and find it somewhere else. One day I was reading a comic and came across the words “Coming to your local comic book store!” and my head almost exploded. There were stores that just sold comics. I had to find one. I grabbed our phone book, turned to the yellow pages, and looked under the letter “C” for a comic book store and found……nothing.

Cue the sad tuba music that plays when someone loses on the Price Is Right.

So, I asked my Grandma, and she said I should try looking under “H” for Hobby Stores. There were a small handful of hobby stores in other tows (our phone book included the other towns closest to mine) so I started calling every store and asked them if they sold comics.

I got a stern “NO” from every store until finally, mercifully somebody said, “Yes, we do”. Hallelujah!! So I started begging (or bugging) my grandparents to take me there, but it was 30 minutes away, so I had to wait a few weeks. (Yes, I know that’s shorter than an average commute, but I think you track distance differently when you think everything you need is 10 minutes away or less.)

When I finally made it, I was mesmerized. There was half of a wall of comics!! And there were boxes with older comics, stuff I had never seen or had missed. It was great. I wanted to spend the whole day there. After about 25 minutes, I had to leave, but I left happy. The only downside is that this was a ‘special occasion” trip, not one we’d make all the time.

Fast forward a “few” years, I’m all grown up. Married to the love of my life, living in the suburbs of Chicago and then, (as is the turning point of so many interesting stories right now) Covid hits. Life is thrown into chaos. Nobody can go to work, the only time you can go somewhere is if you need food. Toilet paper is going for almost $100 on eBay. Heck, the CDC recommends that you don’t even go outside for a WALK because of this virus. So everybody stays at home and businesses deemed “non-essential” have to close. You remember, right? You couldn't go to a movie, or a book store, you couldn’t even get a haircut.

Unfortunately, the local comic stores were deemed “non-essential”. Apparently whoever made that decision wasn’t a comic reader. That time made me immediately flash back to when I was a kid, and I could only get comics on special occasions. Except this was worse. Because the grocery stores, drug stores, and places similar to that had STOPPED selling comics. The closest that they came was the occasional Archie Digest in the supermarket checkout lane and while those are fine, they just aren’t what a lot of people were looking for..

So there I was, sitting on my couch watching whatever streaming platform I decided to turn on, not reading comics. Sure, I could’ve read my older issues, but I wanted to know what was going on now. It was just like I was back at West Junior High. It made me think back to those days and how bummed I was not being able to get and read the comics that I wanted. It also made me wonder if other people were out there feeling the same way. Here I had moved from a town of 18,000 to the greater Chicagoland area, and I still couldn’t get the comics that I wanted.

As everybody knows, during the pandemic a lot of things changed. People learned how to work from home. Zoom went from being something that was only used by business people who needed to talk to their coworkers on the other side of the world to something that let families have thanksgiving dinner together without being in the same house! I saw the way people used the internet was changing and thought about how I could use that to bring comics to people who didn’t have a local comic book store.

After a lot or problem solving, brainstorming, and tossing around ideas, we came up with a good place to start. Then we rolled up our sleeves and got to work. SuperPowers will be constantly evolving. New products and features are being added on an almost daily basis.

And don’t get us wrong. If you have local comic shop, we want you to support it. But, we believe we’ve solved the big problem that a lot of people still have. If you don’t have a comic book store near you, we can help. Is your shop out of the newest issue? Don’t have a book you’re looking for? We can help.

Our commitment to you is that we’ll bring you the comics you want, at a reasonable price, as fast as we can get them to you. We do this because nothing beats spending time with a great comic book, and we think everybody should have that experience, no matter where you live.

Please feel free to drop us a line if you have any questions that you don’t see answered in our FAQ section, we’ll get back to you in a flash. But most importantly always remember, no matter how bad things get, no matter how big the villain is, never, ever hide your SuperPower!

<img src="https://tracker.metricool.com/c3po.jpg?hash=7857e5544c6efae5ebb28f73afe27542"/>