London Life and the Westminster Comic Marts

by Nigel Brown

© GT-Man, from Wikipedia

[This time around SuperStuff co-editor Nigel Brown takes us back to the days of the late 70s with memories of those great Westminster Comic Marts past -- Baggsey (Ian)]

Portsmouth in the early 1970s was a great place to collect American comics (see the ongoing SuperStuff73 series on ‘Searching for comics in Portsmouth, 1970s style’), but as I wrote back in 1984, in SuperStuff #11, “Of the second-hand shops we haunted, on a recent trip I was only able to find two that possibly had some comics for sale”. Combined with the distribution problems that limited the availability of new comics off the newsstand, by the mid-1970s Portsmouth began to lose its lustre for the enthusiastic comic collector. 

We’d already begun to take the odd school half-term trip up to London to Dark They Were & Golden Eyed in Berwick Street, and to Alan Austin’s ‘Crypt of Comics’ in Clapton, so when it came to decision time, I can’t say that I’d chosen to study in London just because of the accessibility of comics, but I admit it was a major factor!

My choice of London paid off. By late 1978 I was studying close to Angel tube station in Islington (not yet the gentrified area it was to become). I was within an easy walk up Islington High Street and Upper Street to Canonbury Lane, where I would spend many a happy hour hanging out in Alan Austin’s Heroes shop after he opened there in June 1979. In those days he still sold mainly comics.

(As an aside: before Alan Austin moved his business to that location, I used to visit his First Floor Offices in Mare Street, Hackney, on the odd Saturday, where I remember buying a pretty ropey (though intact) Fantastic Four #1, and also us both speculating on the future value of the newly published Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #1. That would place this latter memory in September/October 1976, when I would have been visiting up from Portsmouth. I do recall that the consensus was that this new # 1 Spider-Man issue would never match the highly sought-after comics Amazing Fantasy # 15 and Amazing Spider-Man # 1, and the years have proved us right.)

©Marvel. Spectacular Spider-Man #1

Another regular destination in my student days was Dark They Were & Golden Eyed, by then in St.Anne’s Court, along with the newly opened Forbidden Planet (founded in 1978) in Denmark Street (Paul Hudson’s Comic Showcase in Covent Garden wouldn’t be opening until April 1982). By then, Dark They Were was becoming a shadow of its glory years, suffering under the high shop rent demanded in Soho, and the real excitement was reserved for Forbidden Planet. Not only did Forbidden Planet stock items not seen in Dark They Were, but Forbidden Planet pioneered creator signings that generated big thrills for fans, including a signing that had the fans queuing around the block in June 1979 to meet Neal Adams. 

Other notables that I met at signings were Philip José Farmer in January 1981 and A.E. van Vogt in May 1982. It was also the kind of shop where I recall seeing Stephen King queuing up at the till, and Bob Monkhouse making a noisy visit.

© Unknown. Forbidden Planet, Denmark St , mid-Aug 1980

But the bonus of my new London-based life was the Saturday mart at Westminister’s Methodist Central Hall.

I’ve lost count of the number of comic marts I’ve attended over the years, beginning with the Emsworth comic mart in May 1974 (see SuperStuff73 June 2021: ‘Announcing the publication of Alan Austin’s book…’). I still occasionally make it to the marts held these days at the Royal National Hotel in Bloomsbury, but those Westminster marts in the late 1970s/1980s stick most in my memory.

Located almost opposite Westminster Abbey, and at that time the headquarters of the Methodist Church (who’d raised the money to build it), Westminster Central Hall is a Grade ll listed building built in Edwardian times, at the height of Empire (and it looks it) clad with cream limestone in a baroque style that both reassured and awed in equal measure. The perfect place for a comic mart… comic collecting had finally ‘arrived’!

At the time, I didn’t realise that the Westminster marts were instigated and organised by Nick Landau (Titan Distributers), also one of the names behind Forbidden Planet. Although we can remember attending Westminster Marts as early as February 1975, the marts became a regular event  from November 3rd 1979, with five marts in 1980 and were bimonthly throughout 1981.

Westminster Central Hall is a large venue, but the dealers managed to fill every niche (in both senses of the word!) with over 100 stalls, even up on the stage that looked down upon the palpably enthusiastic crowds. I remember Ken Harman used to have that spot.

(Ken, incidentally, was the dealer with whom I once swapped my Portsmouth-collected run of 1960s and early 1970s Superman titles – Action Comics, Superman, Superboy and some others – for a selection of fine-graded Marvel first appearances, including Fantastic Four, Hulk, Spider-Man, Iron-Man, Thor… all now long sold on…)

SuperStuff stalwarts Ian Baker and Geoff Cousins would sometimes make the trip up from Portsmouth for these events; Ross Carter, Portsmouth’s resident Star Trek specialist, would come up on occasion. We would join the anticipatory queue inside the marble foyer and, when the heavy oak doors opened at noon, unhampered by any entry charge, be part of the rush inside towards the treasures within.

Clutching our wants-lists, it wasn’t long before gaps in our collections were being filled as we did creditable impressions of frantic bees searching out pollen amongst fellow swarms of enthusiastic fans.

Particular comics I bought at the Westminster Marts included an Action Comics #28, with its striking Shuster-like Paul Cassidy cover, and its interior Superman art by one of my favourite early Superman artists, Jack Burnley. I also remember buying a copy of Avengers #3 with its classic battle between the Avengers and the Hulk, with the Sub-Mariner in his first cross-over from the Fantastic Four comic. I can’t remember the prices of these comics, but – and it pains me to admit this in these times, whereby the target to get more students into university has resulted in the costs being borne on students’ shoulders – these comics were well affordable from my student grant…

©DC. Action Comics #28. A Westminster Mart acquisition.

© Marvel. Avengers #3. Another Westminster Mart find.

Apart from Ken Harman, I remember other dealers attending included Paul Hudson (from whom I bought the Action Comics #28), and others I recognised from the earlier marts held at Lyndhurst Hall in Kentish Town and at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Old Hall. I remember chatting with Mike Lake, by then one of the founders of Forbidden Planet, as I used to correspond with him when he dealt with comic imports at Dark They Were &  Golden Eyed in their Berwick Street days, back in the mid-1970s.

By then, Alan Austin had stopped being a big player at the marts – he would just have a few boxes of comics on a friend’s table.

Many regular comic fans and dealers became familiar faces in that time, even if we didn’t know their names, but I recall one particular conversation I had with a non-fan: the Yes musician Steve Howe. Someone mentioned that he was there, and – in those days – I wasn’t yet a curmudgeon so I simply went up to him, introduced myself and we had a nice chat. He was friendly, and explained that he was there as his son was a comic fan. I remember giving him sound financial advice: that comics were a good investment! I have no idea if he took me up on that…

After the mart, I would sometimes return to my digs with my fellow Portmuthians to gloat over our newly acquired comics.

Given where this particular memory sets the scene, I know that this must have been after one of the earlier marts at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Old Hall in late 1978, possibly on November 5th; I have this particularly vivid memory of happily inspecting a copy of Amazing Spider-Man # 18 which I’d purchased at the mart that day, notable in that it completed my set of Spider-Man.

The day sometimes ended with a visit to the West End, to see a film at the superior cinematic facilities at the Empire Leicester Square or at the Dominion in Tottenham Court Road. That additional attraction of life in London is another story, to be told elsewhere. Suffice it to say that when I first saw Star Wars (as it was simply known back then) in its first run in early 1978, I saw it at the former Odeon Festing Road in Southsea with Ross Carter. The Millennium Falcon jumped into hyperspace and, at that exact moment, we were left looking at a blank white screen. The film had broken. Needless to say, when I re-watched Star Wars at the Dominion Tottenham Court Road a few weeks later, it was a less hapless performance!

Nowadays, I’m grateful that the marts at the Royal National Hotel still offer the comic mart experience, and in truth the depth and range of comics on offer means that there are still desirable comics to be had, and even the odd bargain on offer. Perhaps not always for comics these days; I recently picked up a near mint copy of the ‘Magpie ABC of Space’ book by Peter Fairley (1969) for just £5.

All marts have been fun, but looking back, the Westminster Marts were magic.

© Nigel Brown

London Comic Shops - Memories of Dark They Were & Golden-Eyed in the Seventies by Ian Baker

Hey folks - baggsey (Ian Baker) here. As Superstuff73 is a shared blog with Nigel Brown, and he’s been doing the heavy lifting of late when it comes to writing articles, here’s some memories from me of the famed Fantasy & Science Fiction shop in London from the seventies - Dark They Were & Golden Eyed.

For a boy living in grey Britain in the early 1970’s, American comics painted an exciting and colourful world of heroes. Of equal impact were the ads for fabulous toys (from huge Hot Wheels sets we could only dream about in the UK, to the mysteries of X-Ray specs and fascination of Sea Monkeys) which all contributed to the mystique of a glamourous American world beyond our horizons. And when you’re twelve or thirteen, and the hormones are kicking in, and an awareness of the adult world is starting to intrude, comics became a reliable constant in a changing world.

In those early days of the seventies, part of the mystique of American comics was the very scarcity of the items. I now know that my hometown was relatively well served by newsagents and second-hand book shops when compared to other regional towns in the UK, but the feeling we had while collecting comics in Portsmouth can be likened to panning for gold. Never sure of what was to be found, but sustained by a faith that fortune lay just beneath the surface.

It was a magical time. Yet once we had been to our first Comic Mart, and then been exposed to the wonders of the nascent comic and science fiction shops in London, we would leave behind that old world of scruffy bookshops and worn comics with Thorpe & Porter stamps , to be replaced by a world of certainty and plenty.

Considering what an impact that London Comic and Fantasy shop Dark They Were & Golden Eyed had on our young lives (and I imagine the lives of many other early 1970s UK comic fans), there is remarkably little information out there on the internet. 

As my good chum Nigel Brown documented in the Days of the Great DC Comic Hunt , our teenage comic collecting days were transformed when we traveled to London on our own for the first time, taking the train from Fratton to Waterloo without parental oversight, and first visited Dark They Were & Golden Eyed (named after a Ray Bradbury story) at their premises at 10 Berwick Street, Soho. There we were confronted by a cornucopia of piles of non-distributed comic books for the first time, piled on the bare wooden floorboards inside the front door, with all manner of fantasy, science-fiction and pulp-reprint paperbacks filling the shelves.

Remember, our previous experience of comic collecting had been scouring the local newsagents and second-hand shops in our native Portsmouth, on the last Thursday each month for DCs and the 2nd Wednesday for the limited set of 16 Marvel titles that World Distributors imported.

In my memory, 1974 in Britain was a rainy place dominated by miners’ strikes, 3-day working weeks and power cuts that shut television down at 10pm. There was no easy access to American pop culture outside the mainstream of music, films and television  - it had to searched out.

Nigel and I both struggle to place the exact date we first visited DTWAGE.  My best guess is probably the last week of July 1974, (the first week of the summer school holidays, plus Nigel and I had both recently turned 15);  certainly prior to the groundbreaking BBC broadcast of the documentary The Dracula Business on 6th August 1974 in which the shop was featured (but not named).  

Nigel’s Uncle was a London taxi driver, and he met us at Waterloo train station and dropped us off at 10 Berwick Street, deep in the heart of Soho, a place surrounded in equal measure by Fruit & Veg stalls,  strip joints and dubious magazine emporiums. This was an area (and era) later to be celebrated in the TV drama Our Friends in the North, or more recently in the BBC documentary series Bent Coppers. 

Berwick St in the 1970's...DTWAGE out of sight on the right

I’m sure that my parents would have been quite concerned that their 15 year old son was moving anywhere near these circles. However, the rubbing shoulders of American comics and saucy magazines always seemed to go with the territory. The spinner racks in Portsmouth newsagents often seemed to have salacious mags at the top and American comics at the bottom, and I always felt obliged to divert my eyes as I assiduously thumbed my way through the unsorted new batch of DCs stuffed into the lower rungs.  Similarly the second hand shops we frequented always stored piles of “mags” and American comics in equal measure, usually in close proximity. I always felt the comics suffered in adults’ eyes through this unsought association. But it was the seedy seventies, folks.

But back to Dark They Were & Golden Eyed: According to Stan Nicholls in his fascinating account of the history of Dark They Were & Golden Eyed and Forbidden Planet in fanzine Prolapse #11 (what a title! It sounds like a medical journal) which can be found here on page 19, efanzines.com/Prolapse/Prolapse11.pdf Stan notes that Derek (“Bram”) Stokes, the owner of Dark They Were first started the business as a mail order operation called Vault of Horror.  

Stokes then set up the first DTWAGE at 28 Bedfordbury (a back street in Covent Garden) where it became very successful. Having outgrown the premises, in December 1972 Stokes then moved the business to a shop rented from the Salvation Army at 10 Berwick St, Soho.

What appears to be Boris Johnson entering DTWAGE in 1973 (from The Dracula Business broadcast by BBC1 6th August 1974)

Nigel Brown and I both became aware of the existence of DTWAGE either as a result of an advert seen in Comic Media News or a similar zine, or perhaps learning about it at our first Comic Mart experience at the Spring Comic Con held at Emsworth, Hampshire on May 25th 1974 . The idea of being able to buy comics in England that were one or even two issues ahead of what we were able to buy in our local newsagents was mind-blowing. It was though we’d be able to reach into the future!

And so we eager supplicants made our first pilgrimage to the cramped premises of DTWAGE. My memory of the place is dominated by the piles of non-distributed comics we first encountered on the unvarnished wood floor inside the front door, and by the narrow bookshelf passage on the right hand side of the shop towards the back. This section held a good selection of Bantam Doc Savage reprints with James Bama covers, and would later also carry reprints of Shadow pulps with Steranko covers. I believe there were also more books and comics in the basement, along with a good selection of Warren magazines and science fiction paperbacks.

A "non-distributed" (ND) issue of House of Mystery 220 from September 1973

I’ve posted some screen grabs taken from film of the inside of the shop featured in The Dracula Business. The issue of House of Mystery 220 on sale places the filming in the period Sept 6th-Oct 9th 1973. The shot of the lads in the narrow passage could easily pass for Nigel and myself, perusing the pulps and American Sci-Fi books.

The Pulp Reprint Shelves (from The Dracula Business broadcast by BBC1 6th August 1974)

Take a look at   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e48aCY8shKc  starting at 27:36 for the full film clip.

This was the time of the DC explosion. There were so many new US DC comics being published - Demon, Kamandi etc. - many of which were “ND” (non-distributed for the uninitiated). Similarly many of the US Marvels were no longer on sale at UK newsagents, deferring to Marvel UK’s desire to prevent cannibalisation of their UK weekly comic book business. I believe that I left DTWAGE with a goodly selection of the latest DCs, issues of Steranko’s Comixscene and a number of Doc Savage paperbacks which included a copy of the Bantam Doc Savage #77 (The South Pole Terror, published Feb 1974). 

The memories of subsequent visits become jumbled. On a later visit, I vaguely remember seeing Justice Inc #2 for sale. (1975-04-17). Funny how certain comics stick in your mind.

But that first visit was a defining moment for us. The thrill of going to London alone, of buying fresh, bright comics from the future, of having access to a store which stocked every Science Fiction and Fantasy book that we could possibly want was intoxicating.  

But it also closed a chapter on our Portsmouth-based comic collecting. Never again would we search for new comics locally with such enthusiasm. We became dismissive of buying a new comic with a Thorpe & Porter stamp. Because once you buy comics from the future, you have to keep running to stay ahead. And so comics that we once shelled out 5p,7p,10p for on a newsagent’s spinner rack we now happily paid 25p for in order to get a pristine copy of the very latest issue imported directly from the States.

Looking back through my diaries and our self-produced Superstuff fanzine in that 1975-1976 period, school holidays were dominated by at least one trip to London, incorporating a visit to DTWAGE, to Alan Austin’s Fantasy Unlimited in Lower Clapton Rd, to record shops like HMV and later Tower Records,  and perhaps a trip to the cinema. 

By early 1976 my collecting interests were moving towards paperback pulp reprints, and the attraction of new comics was starting to wane. In retrospect, the innovation in comics that had captured my imagination in those early bronze age years had started to dissipate, with key creators (with some exceptions) moving out into different fields as the second half of the seventies rolled around.

By 1978 the Berwick Street premises of DTWAGE had became too small and Stokes “decided on another move, to a shop in St Anne’s Court, between Wardour Street and Dean Street, at the heart of Soho. The shop was big, new, shiny and very expensive. These overheads were almost certainly an important factor in the eventual closure of DTWAGE in 1981.” as per Stan Nicholls’ recollection.

But once the move to St Anne’s Court had completed, something had been lost in the transition. The place was too slick, a little out of the way. From memory, the focus on the ground floor seemed to move towards more hard Science Fiction and “alternative lifestyle” paraphernalia , with comics taking second place. There seemed fewer customers and the buzz was no longer there. Comics and pulp reprints were relegated to the basement, I believe, and so on subsequent trips we started to drift towards the new Forbidden Planet on Denmark Street which was to become our new spiritual home-away-from-home for the remainder of the decade.

The last time I can remember visiting DTWAGE was for a Harry Harrison book signing in 1978 for “The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You”.

By the time DTWAGE closed down in 1981, I cannot even remember being aware of its passing.