KANSAS CITY, Mo. — It's Wednesday, and that means Barbara Edgerton needs her fix.
The production artist at Hallmark leaves her workday behind and heads to Clint's Comics on Main Street in Kansas City, Mo., to check out that day's new releases. She has been reading and collecting comics for most of her life and doesn't see that changing any time soon.
"My brother got both my sister and me hooked in 1966," she said while thumbing through a rack of superhero titles. "We started out with Betty and Veronica, Betty and Me, Spider-Man and Fantastic Four. We got so involved in those stories, and I've just loved it ever since."
She estimates that her collection includes about70,000 books. "They're stuffed in any place I can find," she said. "Right now some are at my boyfriend's. He thinks it's OK, because he's into music, and he collects albums and CDs."
Just don't tell her comics are only for nerds. "Oh no — I'd say they appeal to people who appreciate good art and good writing. You look at the books coming out today, and the art is just beautiful."
Clint's Comics owner Jim Cavanaugh said collectors are the core of his customer base, and their numbers are legion. "I can't tell you how many boxes of books my average customer has, but it's more than a lot of them would want to admit, I'm sure," he said with a laugh. "It's nothing to have dozens of boxes. You should see how many I have myself."
"Maybe 20, 30 percent of our business is 'pull and holds,'" he said, referring to patrons who leave a list of titles for workers to bundle and hold at the counter for easy checkout. "But here, I'd say we're 70 percent browsing customers, people who like to come in and look through the racks, see what's new. They're why we keep all this. It's just out of love for the books, the stories."
Jeff Garrett, owner of Limited Figures Toy Store in Kansas City, said comics aficionados don't fall into the usual typecast role — anti-social outcasts who turn to comic books in lieu of friends.
"It's become kind of an expensive hobby," he said. "You almost have to have a good job and some social skills to do it." Most current comics cost $2.99, but pristine specimens of some vintage titles such as Batman from the 1940s can trade on the collector's market for $5,000 or much more. But "reader copies" of the same era — legible books with stains, tears and other normal wear — go for a tenth that.
To Garrett, comics are an intellectual diversion. "You think about it: These are people whose hobby is all about reading," he said. "A lot of the people who are into comics are very intelligent. It's amazing how many people are into it that I would never have expected. It's all types. You can't stereotype the fans at all."
IT worker Roger Nichols, of Kansas City's Brookside neighborhood, has vivid memories from his childhood about how he discovered the escapist world of comic books.
"When my brothers and godbrothers and I would walk to school, there was a liquor store at 39th and Indiana called Jay's. We'd stop in there to get a pop or some candy, because back in that day the liquor store was your candy store, too. And they had a comics rack. We would just gravitate to that, and we'd take them home and read them, because that was a relatively cheap kind of entertainment.
"As we got more interested in them, we'd hop on the Indiana bus and go to the Time to Read Bookstore" — the now-closed downtown institution at 7 W. 12th St. best known for its extensive selection of "girlie" magazines, in addition to its traditional newsstand selection.
"There was a section that had comics there. They had a much wider selection of the comics of the day, actually. But there was also the, um, the adult book section you'd call it, I guess, up at the front.
"I remember the guy behind the counter yelling to us as we went back, 'Turn your head! Don't look over there.' He could see what we were there for. So we'd get to the back, to the comics, and we'd have a field day."
Back then, he and his brothers were into the superheroes and their action-packed battles with supervillains.
"I think my first comic book, the first one I can really recall, was probably one my brother bought — Spider-Man, in a book called Amazing Fantasy. I think he had that very first one. If I had some of those books back today, I wouldn't be looking for a job right now."
Today, Nichols guesses, his collection numbers somewhere around 5,000 books. "They're mostly in my attic, but I've got tons in the basement. Total boxes, all told, I've probably got about 30 -some."
But he has lost the impulse to track down the comics that fetch high prices on the collectors market.
"I used to be into collecting valuable stuff, sure, but that's passed now. There was a big glut in the early '90s, where stuff was just marked up incredibly high, and that didn't last for long. You get a little older, and it matters not as much."
Today, he keeps coming back every Wednesday for more intrigue from the story lines he follows.
"You know what, I tend to focus more on stories about government policy, espionage, that type of thing. Some of the more science fiction, the hard-core science fiction, I'm really into that. If there's a Captain America out, or Secret Warriors — those are good books. That one's got Nick Fury in it, and goes back to the '60s. I like Daredevil, Batman — the detective stuff."
Nichols said he knows people from widely different backgrounds who follow comics as enthusiastically as he does. "I know FBI agents who read comics. It's everywhere.
"And I would say that if you've got to get a kid interested in reading, a kid who may not be into something traditional like books, then (comics are) a perfect way to spur a kid's imagination, especially if you get some of the more positive stuff. It's a great way to get kids reading."
I just flat come from a collector family," said Gene Verley of Pleasant Valley, Mo. Today he works at the Mid-Continent Public Library, but he spent most of his career working in shops that sold comic books.
"My sister collected sports cards, and my dad collected John Wayne movies, so it was natural I'd go into that line of work."
That family tradition led Verley to take better care of his treasures than his peers, and that gave him a leg up as an adult collector. "We got all that we could and we took care of it, so I still have everything I had from my childhood that I wanted to hold on to," he said. "I used to joke that I'm the guy who still had all the stuff my friends would want when they wanted to get their childhood back. I'm pretty much your standard-issue fanboy."
He studied music at Emporia State, but he realized partway through the program that comics were his real calling. "I worked at at least five different comic stores through the years, and a lot of those were smaller mom-and-pop-type shops. That's where I got my work ethic. Today, I'm loving my job at the library, where I'm still using my comic background."
In fact, Mid-Continent is putting his knowledge to use, having him oversee the library's order of American graphic novels, an art form that Verley thinks is continuing to mature.
"I happily see the graphic novel growing in stature as literature," he said. "Of course I'm biased, but I've seen things I've read for years like Alan Moore's 'Watchmen' or (Frank Miller's) 'The Dark Knight Returns' — some of the classics of the genre — that are getting respect as art today. Sure, like all things there are some that have been too extreme, too grim and too gritty, but it's come into its own, and it has respect with other kinds of books today."
In his youth, superheroes weren't Verley's focus. "I really got into them with G.I. Joe and Transformers, the toys," he said. "Then those were my first comics as well, and I still have them today.
"I still buy monthly G.I. Joe books today, and I have the full run of it, all the companies who have ever had the license to it. That's the pride of my collection. But other than that, every once in a while I get suckered into a story."
But today, Verley has turned to the trade paperback editions of some comics — collections of story lines that first played out over multiple individual books. He said some comics merchants are wary of this relatively new business model.
"You'd hear a lot of store owners complain a lot that trade paperbacks are killing their business, with the Borders and Barnes & Nobles getting in on that business," he said. "But the way that it'd usually turn out is that the money would be displaced at the comics shops if you got them to convert their weekly purchases to trade paperbacks at the same store."
The comics companies are keeping up with the rest of print media's gradual adoption of digital delivery, beginning to offer comics in tablet computer and Web formats. Verley is on board so far.
"There's always going to be someone who likes the paper, like some others really want to hear the pops and the snaps on vinyl records. I get that. But I enjoy reading (comics) on a computer screen or on my netbook, where the pictures are very crisp and clean, very nice.
"I think electronic comics are a wave of the future, but not the wave. I think it's just another way to reach your customers."
Wesley Brockman collects comics as a reward to himself.
"It was my present to myself for quitting smoking," said the Parkville, Mo., resident, who works as a tattoo artist at the Mercy Seat in Westport, Mo. "It was an incentive."
He recalls the day he first felt the pull as an adult. "I had bought comics when I was a kid, and we were driving past this comic store one day. I had my two girls with me, and they asked, 'What's that place, Dad?' So we went in, and I bought just a couple comics to see what was going on. You know, 'Oh, what are these characters up to since I last read about them when I was a kid?' So I picked a few up, and the girls got a couple. And I went back the next day to get more. Now it's every week."
Brockman doesn't hold any illusions about his collection's ability to put his kids through college in the future. "For the most part, comics aren't worth a whole lot of money anymore," he said. "The ones from when I was a kid, they were producing like millions of each one. And so once eBay hit and you could find anything you wanted instantly, every (collector) who was interested could get what they needed. A lot of that stuff is almost not worth the paper it's printed on.
"I'm not one of those dudes who's hermetically sealing them and hoarding them and putting them in a pressure chamber or whatever."
The Kansas City Art Institute grad hasn't heard all that many requests from customers looking for comic-related tattoos at Mercy Seat, but he said he has found a few kindred spirits.
"I've done a few different hero symbols, like Batman and Superman logos here and there, and those have been sort of fun. There was one guy who came in wanting a tattoo of (Batman villain) Two-Face. He was an avid comic collector too, probably mid- to late-20s. And when he showed me the design, he was pretty stoked to have someone who knew what he was into do it, and not just someone who would slap it on him and be done with it. I tried to make sure I did my best work on it."
Brockman calls his Wednesday trips to the comic shop his ritual. "It's something I can look forward to," he said. "The kids are usually at school, and that's one of my days off, so it's a fun thing to do since I don't have anyone else around depending on me at that moment.
"I don't go to the bar, I don't go to the casino, so this is the one thing I enjoy. The kids are like, 'OK Dad, you can go get your comics.' They tolerate me."
Dennis Bishop's current collection of the comic books he grew up reading is actually his second — an adult do-over.
"I collected them as a child, I guess," the Prairie Village resident said. Bishop holds a doctorate in human physiology and teaches human anatomy at Johnson County Community College.
"As a kid, I was really into Batman and had pretty much everything from 1956 or so, and then on through to '68 or '69. And then I went to college, and they were given to a friend of mine. I pretty much got away from them in the '70s and '80s, and I'm not exactly sure what happened to them.
"But then at the end of the '80s, when (Tim Burton's) 'Batman' movie came out, I went to see it, and I got to realizing, 'You know, I really enjoyed Batman.' "
So back to the comics shops he went. Slowly and steadily, he began to purchase new Batman titles as they came out while backfilling the books he missed from his childhood.
"Each week I go in and buy whatever new Batman titles come out," he said. "Though I don't always get a chance to read all of them with all the other things to do."
But he still holds special affection for the comics of his youth. "I kind of miss having two or three separate stories in one book," he said. "Now they have really long and complex story lines that run over six, 12, even 18 months at a time. You almost feel like you have to read them in order, and that's a big time commitment."
But he's closing in on his goal of restoring those comics lost in time. Today, he has put back together almost everything he had in his childhood, plus a few more. In fact, after shopping at local comics stores and traveling shows through the years, he has finally compiled a complete collection of every Batman title from February 1956 and every Detective Comics — the book where Batman first appeared — from January 1958 to today.
Bishop doesn't seek out museum-quality specimens, which can often fetch wince-inducing prices in today's highly competitive comic book collecting market.
"I do have a Batman No. 14 from December '42/January '43, and my oldest Detective is No. 50 from April 1941. But I never really was in it for I guess what you'd call the collector side of it, to try to buy the highest-quality book out there," said Bishop. "I was always interested in getting a good sturdy reading copy that I could go back and enjoy, that I could handle."
He keeps most of his books in boxes, with some of them in protective plastic bags on boards to keep them from getting creased. "But if it's one of these 'you don't want to take it out and touch and read it,' I'm not interested."
And how does his wife view his hobby, which he admits might seem a little intense?
"She just kind of tolerates me," he said with a laugh.
"My wife and I are both avid readers, and I've always credited that to comic books. My love of reading really came out of comic books."