In a recent column about the history of the fire-damaged Lawrence Hotel in downtown San Jose, I remarked that the building was once home to San Jose’s first comic book shop.
After the article published, though, I heard from Jim Buser, who told me that Bob Sidebottom‘s Comic Collector Shop wasn’t the first. It actually was a store down the block on San Fernando Street called Seven Sons — and Buser would know because he was one of the guys who started it.
This was a stunning piece of news. Not because I was wrong — just ask my wife how often that happens — but because it had been well-established San Jose lore that Sidebottom’s store was the first in town when it opened in the late 1960s and one of the first in the country. It’s like finding out Sarah Winchester really lived in an apartment on North Third Street instead of her sprawling mansion. (In fact, she spent most of her later life at her home in Los Altos, not the Mystery House.)
I asked Buser to tell me how a store I’d never heard of turned out to be a big part of my hometown’s history.
“It’s a very obscure part of comic book history, and because Bob Sidebottom had a much longer presence in downtown San Jose, many people did believe his shop was the first,” said Buser, who now lives in the East Bay. Seven Sons was opened March 1, 1968 by six people, including three teenagers — Buser and Bud Plant were 15 and John Barrett was 16. The eldest was 23-year-old Frank Scadina. They added an honorary partner because “Six Sons” didn’t sound right.
The store at 40 E. San Fernando St. was “incredibly amateurish and rinky-dink,” Buser recalled. Comics were displayed in cardboard boxes and on wooden crates. They had a little cash box instead of a register, and when things were slow, they’d sit out on the second-floor balcony and play poker. “Sometimes when we made a sale, the customer would toss coins up at us and we would throw down the change,” Buser said.
The rent was dirt cheap — between $50 to $100 a month, Buser thinks — and Seven Sons fit right into the counter-culture world that was growing downtown in 1968, joining bead stores, poster shops, import joints, and another classic San Jose business, Underground Records. Things went well for the first few months and then business seemed to nose-dive that summer. Scadina, who had been working the day shifts while the teens were in school, offered to buy his partners out and they accepted. A short-time later, a story appeared in the afternoon San Jose News about the store that was now Scadina’s alone and business skyrocketed. To this day, Buser suspects the younger partners were outfoxed by a shrewder businessman.
Scadina moved the store a few doors down and renamed it Marvel Galaxy, around the same time in 1968 that Sidebottom opened his store, also on San Fernando Street. Buser, Plant and Barrett — along with Dick Swan, yet another comic-collecting San Jose teen — tried again a year later. They opened Comic World in a hole-in-the-wall space on First Street, a venture that lasted less than two years. But for a while, downtown San Jose had three comic book stores.
After Comic World closed, Buser and Swan decided to concentrate on college, while Plant and Barrett opened a store in Berkeley in 1972 that grew into the Comics and Comix chain. Buser drifted back to comics for a while, got a degree in psychology from Stanford and did well in the button and bumper sticker business. Swan went on to own Big Guy’s Comics in Mountain View and still deals comics on eBay. Plant eventually went into the distribution business and became one of the nation’s biggest mail order sources of art books and comics-related merchandise.
Marvel Galaxy eventually closed, but Sidebottom’s Comic Collector Shop continued until 1996, operated by his wife, Liz, after Bob died in 1993. That longevity in the business — Sidebottom was known for his ads in the Comic Buyers Guide and was a regular at early conventions — coupled with his distinctive, curmudgeonly personality is likely why Sidebottom’s store left such a lasting impression.
“I liked him a lot. We were friendly competitors,” said Buser, who would sometimes hang out at the store. He remembers once when famed underground artist Robert Crumb came to visit Comic Collector Shop while he was there and Sidebottom asked him to keep an eye on things while he and Crumb — both passionate jazz and blues fans — went upstairs to swap records.
Plant remembers being friends with Sidebottom, too, as well as selling new comics to him after he started his distribution company. But their business relationship soured and was never put right before Sidebottom’s death. “I wish I would have gone down to San Jose and buried the hatchet somehow with Bob,” Plant said. “He was a decent guy, and we had a lot of history together.”
