Pioneering comic book retailer Beerbohm dies at 71
Robert Beerbohm, who in the 1970s helped start the first comic book chain stores and then, after a floodwiped out inventory in his warehouse, became a professed archaeologist of comics history, diedmarch 27 at his home in Fremont, Neb. He was 71.
His daughter, Katy BeerbohmYoung, said the causewas colorectal cancer. A pugnacious character on the comic book scene for decades, Beerbohmonce summed up his career as “a hobby that got way out of hand.”
It started in his early teens, when he boarded a Greyhound bus innebraska for a 28- hour trip to sell comics at a convention in Houston. It ended as he was trying to finishwriting “Comic Book Wars,” his eagerly awaited magnum opus about the industry.
In between, Beerbohm waited on Jerry Garcia, Robin Williams andbruce Lee at his stores incalifornia, discovered what was believed to be the first comic book printed in the United States and discussed comic book history with the gentleness of a heavyweight boxer.
( On Facebook, one of his last posts lamented “bold faced liars” at comic book rating agencies who would “make stuff up out of thin air” and prey on buyers as if they were “rubes unsuspectingly entering a carnival.”)
“I liked the presence he had in comic book land as one of those feverishly enthusiastic fans and scholars and networkers,” Pulitzer Prize- winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman, a friend, said in an interview. “He was kind ofmanic. He camewith a lot of enthusiasm, but that was one of his most endearing qualities.”
As a teenager, Beerbohm traversed the country on weekends and breaks from school in his
Rambler Classic, selling comics at conventions. In 1972, he dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco, where he hooked up with comic book dealers John Barrett and Bud Plant.
These were the early days of comic fandom, when the industry shifted from newsstand and supermarket sales to direct retail. As comic book stores began opening around the country, Beerbohm and his partners opened Comics and Comix on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, near the University of California.
Students left with their purchases wrapped in brown paper bags. “When we first opened up, the Berkeley police were convinced we were a major drug smuggler,” Beerbohm said in a podcast with Comic Book Historians, an online fanzine.
The next year they opened a second store, in San Francisco, followed by outlets in San Jose and Sacramento, and Comics and Comix thus became what is widely considered to be the first comic book retail chain. The company eventually operated seven locations in California.
Beerbohm left the business in 1975 after a falling- out with his partners. In 1976, he opened his own store, Best of Twoworlds, on Haight Street in San Francisco. Two others stores followed, including one a block away from his old partners in Berkeley. He was an evangelist for his hobby.
“At the time, comics were still kind of viewed as the bastard stepchild of any other medium that you could think of,” said artist and cartoonist Bill Sienkiewicz, who shopped at Beerbohm’s stores. “He really sort of foretold the acceptance, and really pushed for the level of acceptance, that comics currently have.”
In 1986, a flood at Beerbohm’s warehouse forced him to close two of his three stores. He opened another, but without a large stock, his business never fully recovered.
As timewent on, Beerbohmbecame more and more consumed by comics history. He hosted an internet chat group and contributed articles to trade publications, including The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, an industry authority that publishes treatises on comics history.