As recently invoked in this post, I am reviving this sprawling entry, which I originally started … and then summarily abandoned again … back in June….
This is a somewhat irritating post, as I’d already written about a third of it, only to have my MacBook Air experience some sort of inexplicable purge and lose it all. Not that I can’t piece it back together, but I’d been quite pleased with what I’d written, and now I have to start from scratch again. C’est la guerre.
Suffice to say, while on the surface this seems like just another post about yet another vanished spot, it’s really more about my associations with the place than the place itself. I guess all my posts take that approach. Hopefully, that’ll ring true.
In any case, I should preface this all by talking about my friend Shawn. Shawn was a kid I’d known since pre-kindergarten (or, as it was called at the time, “Nursery School”). My mother would be very quick to point out, at this stage, that Shawn was the grandson of a very prominent author whose last name carries an extraordinary legacy, but honestly speaking, when I was friends with him, that never entered into it. I wouldn’t go onto read any of that author’s works until much later in life and, while impressive, they had absolutely no bearing on my friendship with Shawn. We were just two, similarly inclined little boys.
Shawn lived nearby me in the Carnegie Hill section of Upper East Side and, even then, was a profound aficionado of the deeper dive. Where we both harbored interests in nearly identical subject matter, Shawn would cultivate rich understandings in said subjects’ minutia. Never was this more the case than with comic books. We both bought them in maddening bulk, but Shawn’s investment went very deep. I remember going over to his house after school, one day, and noting that he meticulously stored his comics in crisp, thin plastic sheaths with stiff white boards behind each to preserve and protect each issue. Suffice to say, this was in stark contrast to the messy piles of dog-eared comics that lived under my bed. I immediately felt ashamed of this and quickly started to emulate the care with which Shawn looked after his collection. In doing so, I also developed a rich appreciation for the artwork, the narratives and the mythology of the titles I collected. In no time at all, I was a rapturous comic geek, just like Shawn.
During the course of that indoctrination, Shawn and I — still both in our grade school years — turned our fandom for comics into an excuse to explore our native New York City. Whereas prior to this I’d simply been blowing my allowance on comic books at a local newspaper joint on Madison Avenue called Epstein’s (long, long gone), I was now accompanying Shawn on treks to further-flung concerns like Supersnipe on Second Avenue and 84th Street, a tiny corner shop that catered to the more discerning comic book fan. That was alright, for a while, until Shawn learned of another venture a little further downtown. As I’d go onto remember it for the next several decades, that place was called the Comic Art Gallery.
That’s where we need to pause in the preamble.
I’ve alluded to the Comic Art Gallery on this blog more than a few times. For a start, it was located on the relatively nondescript strip of East 58th Street between Lexington Avenue and the magisterial sprawl of Park Avenue. As it happened, it was located directly across the street from the office of my family’s dentist, Dr. Herman J. Bossboom (now presumably long dead). By this point, I would have been in about seventh grade and only about twelve years old. While my mom was not entirely keen on me wandering around parts of town that were thirty-plus blocks away from our neighborhood, she trusted me enough to be able to navigate the mass transit system (usually via bus, at this stage) to get to and from Dr. Bossboom’s office, and was actively relieved that I could get myself there and back on my own. I was already sporting a retainer by this point (which I was sorely derelict in regularly wearing), so I was frequently going to East 58th Street, ….which means I was also frequently going to the Comic Art Gallery.
Had my mom ever seen the place, however, I doubt she’d have been very enthused. Through a nondescript front door and tucked onto the second floor of a frankly seedy looking building, the Comic Art Gallery was up two flights of dark, seriously dodgy, graffiti-slathered stairs that looked like a great place to be jumped, mugged, stabbed and/or abducted. Upon entering the space — a somewhat spartan couple of rooms outfitted with boxes and boxes of comics and framed prints by noted comic illustrators — Shawn and I would immediately start rifling through the boxes, looking for our favorite titles.
Strenuously low on frills and amenities, the space didn’t exactly exude an air of permanence. In the winter months, I seem to remember the staff — a gaggle of beardy, ashen-faced gents usually looking strung-out and embittered — all wearing down vests to keep warm.
…
It was at this point where the original post stopped. Like I said, I don’t recall why I left it there, as there are other things that need to be said and show, so let’s try and do that now, shall we?
…
I cannot say how long the Comic Art Gallery lasted, as I knew it, on East 58th Street, but it seemed like a fairly lengthy amount of time. Then again, all time spent as a youngster seems lengthy. At the very least, I certainly remember the place still being open beyond November of 1979. I only know that, as I would have been deeply ensconced in my fixation with Pink Floyd The Wall (still only an album, at that point, not a film), and I seem to remember the place selling some ephemera from same (tour program, maybe?) I remember it being out of my price range, in any event.
At some point, however, the endeavor shut up shop. I cannot remember the last time I went, but Shawn and his family moved out of New York City around the same time and decamped to the wide-open spaces of Bozeman, Montana, of all places. I can’t remember if I stopped going to the Comic Art Gallery because Shawn was no longer around or because the place shut, but regardless, that was the end of it. I kept going to Disc-O-Mat around one corner and Fiorucci around the other, and even kept going to Dr. Bossboom’s office well into my college years, but comics were no longer an item to be had on that street.
From there, specifics get fuzzy, but I believe some or at least one of the dudes from that iteration of the gallery later opened a sprawling new comic shop on Sullivan Street, just down the ways a little from my beloved Second Coming Records. That operation was a much more expansive, bright, airy and presumably lucrative affair that lasted at least into the late `90s, but — again — I’m not quite sure of the specific affiliation to the East 58th Street spot.
The frustrating thing about all this was, given my pronounced penchant for nostalgic rumination on the pivotal landmarks of my distant youth, for the longest time, I could never find any semblance of any indication at all that, once again, a venture called the Comic Art Gallery ever existed on East 58th Street. I mean, sure — everybody remembers Supersnipe or the original Forbidden Planet — but I found zero evidence to support that this place I’d spent so much time traveling back and forth with Shawn to in the late `70s ever actually being there.
… until this past summer.
I don’t remember what I was actively searching for, at the time, but I stumbled upon a video clip with a gent named Mark Rindner, who was disclosed to be the founder and owner of the … FUCKING WAIT FOR IT…NEW YORK COMIC ARTS GALLERY!
For years and years, my failure to append an “s” to the word “art” made searching for details about the, ahem, New York Comic Arts Gallery moot.
In any case, you can find that video below, but ready thyself. Shot in January of this year, it's yet another laborious interminable zoom-chat interview. Suffice to say, if you're not super-invested in the subject matter, it might be a bit of a chore. And poor, self-effacing Mr. Rindner doesn't exactly discuss the era of the New York Comic Arts Gallery with a pronounced amount of glee, despite the significance the place had on impressionable young snotnoses like myself and Shawn, at the time.
For the sake of context, here's what the former site of the New York Comic Arts Gallery looks like today. Exciting, right? `Twas not alway thus. And for the full, authoritative story about the back history of the New York Comic Arts Gallery, I defer to the video below.
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