It seemed to emerge almost by accident, the vast warehouse in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. That was always a part of its charm, really. For the past 25 odd years, the Koch Comics Warehouse has been less a proper retail location than a magnificently overgrown garage; or maybe it's closer to the museum archives at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, if its contents were up for sale. The warehouse’s origins were as accidental as its design. Joseph Koch had long been a player in comics retail - both of the brick and mortar variety (he operated Dragon’s Den in Yonkers for a time) and especially in the realm of catalog mail-order. It was the latter field which prompted his investment in warehouse space in the 1980s, when empty South Brooklyn warehouses were both plentiful and cheap.
But collectors love nothing more than sharing well-kept secrets, so the glories of the Brooklyn warehouse gradually spread. By the 1990s, the Koch Warehouse had become a shopping destination in and of itself: a fixture of any article about New York City’s hidden gems for comic lovers. If Koch was bemused by this, he didn’t exactly resist it: he called it his “warehouse of wonders” in the press, and decked out its environs with used sofas and secondhand holiday decorations. Even so, it steadfastly retained its disorganized character, which was always the lure of the place. Come to Koch’s, and you never knew what you’d walk away with: a bundle of British-printed Warrior magazines, perhaps, or microfilmed copies of mid 20th century syndicated comic strips. A hardy skeptic of corporate IP in all its manifestations might lay down pocket change on a set of Toy Biz Marvel Super Heroes figures, simply because they found it. All part of the warehouse’s wonderfully manipulative charm.
Appropriate, then, that word of the warehouse’s demise should have spread as casually and uncertainly as its birth. Around early March, word began to spread through word of mouth and social media that Joe Koch had decided to shutter his wonderland once and for all. The news was received with a combination of mournfulness and mild urgency: another grand old comics retailer closing down, but this time you’d better be sure to see it while there’s still time. On Thursday, March 7, I called Koch on the phone to see if the news was true. It was. And while Joe Koch isn’t making plans to exit the world of comics just yet, his decision nevertheless marks one more casualty in a growing string of losses for storied retail destinations in general, and for New York City in particular. Our conversation about his decision, his history, and his retail future follows.
-Zach Rabiroff
The Comics Journal: So you’ve decided to close up shop on the warehouse. What's going on? What motivated this?
Joseph Koch: When I moved in, this was a devastated neighborhood. You know, a perfect warehouse location. It has since become a hot neighborhood. As a rule of thumb, when artists start moving in, the rents start going up. So some of the choice was taken out of my hands. The rent that they're looking for at this point is not something I'm enthused about paying for.
How long ago did you get the news that the rent was going to go up?
The rent's been going up. It’s easily 5 times what it was when we moved here, maybe 10 times. And obviously some of that was absorbed by the fact that we also were growing. But it's gotten a little out of hand. For the last 10 years or so, this has been a changing neighborhood. This was a very colorful neighborhood at one time.
'This' being Sunset Park [in Brooklyn].
Right. In 1955-- I don't know if you ever saw On the Waterfront, but that would be basically this neighborhood. In 1955, this was the biggest import-export manufacturing distribution center on the planet. Forget about Shanghai. Forget about Brussels. Forget about every other place. This was it. There was nothing that compared. You had deep water piers. You had tracks coming from the piers into the buildings. You had these ridiculous buildings, you could park aircraft carriers on top of these things. It was bustling, but it had a ridiculously high shrinkage rate. Basically, the mob was all over the place. Fifteen percent of everything that passed through here “disappeared.”
And the only way the government was able to deal with it was, literally, moving everything to Elizabeth [in New Jersey]. They just shut the neighborhood down. So by 1961, 1962, this neighborhood, Sunset Park, was a wasteland. Seventy years later, it’s the biggest shopping center on the planet. There are all these massive, massive old buildings, and developers come in. There's a BMW showroom here now.
This is kind of fun in its own way. We're not complaining, necessarily, but the rents have shot through the roof. I have more modest spaces available to me. So I will probably tailor my future activities to something that accommodates that kind of overhead instead.
You're not planning to get out of the comics retail game completely?
Well, we've expanded beyond comics anyway; we do pop culture in general. But I would definitely be dabbling all the time. It's hard not to dabble. Comics [specifically] are a little trickier.
How so?
Right now, comics are really tricky, with the 500 variants [i.e., variant covers]. It used to be that people collected a title. These days you can’t collect an issue with 50 variants. So I don't know exactly where all that goes.
You're talking new comics, but obviously your main line, certainly with the warehouse, has been older collectibles.
Right. It's mostly vintage-y stuff, but the new stuff has an effect on it. I mean, mostly we are vintage-y. We just picked up a huge Elvis collection from the last 30 years, that kind of thing. Not a comic in the batch. There will be aspects of this that I'll miss. A lot of it is pretty fun. I'm still figuring out what the business plan is in the new location.
How long have you had to mentally and emotionally prepare yourself for this? You've been watching the rents creep up for a while.
That's kind of funny. There’s a certain amount of delusion, because as long as you can keep up with the rent, then you're not thinking brilliant thoughts. And at some point you say, wait a minute, this is actually silly. That's all been in the last year or so.
So the news that finally prompted this decision was at the beginning of this year?
It was when I realized last year that I was not willing to sign a lease for more than a year because I didn't like the rent. That forced me to think about it a little bit.
What's the timeline now? What's the plan to close everything down?
Any promotion you want to give us, right? [Laughs] We’ll be running sales out of the warehouse. We have been doing that for a while. And we're talking to an auction house about all the loose ends getting picked up. We're talking June, July, something like that.
You're going to be unloading on auction houses? It's a big warehouse.
People are dubious of my schedule, but it'll get done. We're about to ship out eight or nine pallets in the next week. Obviously, there are hundreds of pallets here, but we're working on it.
How many people are working there right now? What does the staff look like at the warehouse?
Right now? There are about four people here. Not that many.
Any idea what will happen with them? Are the other employees going to move over to whatever the new version of your retail business will be?
The people who have been with me for a long time saw this coming. The people who are here now are all sorts of familial people. They're just looking to help out.
So it’s a labor of love at this point.
Right.
You said there are parts that are really difficult to give up; tell me about that.
Well, the fun parts I can actually take with me, so I'm not missing anything. I'm a reader, not a collector. What I enjoy about comics has zero to do with some aspects of it. Certainly all the speculative aspects have never meant much to me. The pop culture stuff, though, I can continue to enjoy. Part of the fun is having somebody walk in with a nifty Elvis collection. But I will certainly not miss worrying about the rent and various kinds of overhead.
What brought you into this line of business in the first place?
My brother Pete basically spent the late ‘70s and early ‘80s hanging out with the original Marvel bullpen and buying artwork off them like crazy. We were both comic fans, so all this branched out from his enterprise. He was a reader and so was I. He was a collector of sorts, but he draws. He was really enthusiastic about meeting all these people. And that sucked us in. I guess that would be the origin story. We started with a little mail-order business on the Upper West Side in Manhattan.
And what year was that?
‘75.
You started with the mail-order business. When did that expand into a brick and mortar location?
About 1981, ‘82. We were in Brooklyn. It was our first warehouse. My brother and I also opened a couple stores that are no longer with us. I'm involved with Forbidden Planet now, but that's a different deal.
How did you get involved with Forbidden Planet?
It’s sort of a sad story. It was through one of the original Forbidden Planet’s partners. Now, if anybody wanted to write a real history of comics or fandom-- I assume you know who Phil Seuling is, right?
Of course.1
Okay. This is relevant to Forbidden Planet as well. I don't think there's anybody else on the non-creative side who is even close to being as important as Phil. He and Jonni [Levas, both a romantic and business partner of Seuling’s, and another key direct market founder] worked on almost every account. I got involved with Forbidden Planet because when Phil and Jonni were running the New York Comic Con [i.e., the New York Comic Art Convention], they had started Sea Gate, which is the first actual direct comic distributor. You know that, right?
They were the founders of Sea Gate. They had friends in England who saw what they were doing, and wanted to do the same thing in England. That would be Titan Distributors, currently Titan [Entertainment]. They came over, and they talked to Phil about doing the same thing in England. They got a clearance from Marvel to do it in England, but they couldn't get a clearance from DC. So they ended up having to get all their DC comics through Phil and Jonni through Sea Gate. As a result of working together on that kind of distribution, they ended up opening Forbidden Planet. The British people had successfully opened up a Forbidden Planet in London, and had a great response, so they tried it here. Had Mike [Luckman]-- who was the British partner managing the Forbidden Planet here, had he just sat in the Village and counted his money, he would be in Tahiti now. [Laughs] Unfortunately, he was somewhat too ambitious, and opened up a store near Bloomingdale's, which was a really expensive proposition at a time when comics were about to collapse. The first big collapse was in the early ‘90s.
This was just before the crash in ‘93, ‘94?
He did it somewhat before that, but he had put so much money into it. I think he paid something like $800,000 in key money. It was a silly undertaking, but he felt that the real money was on the Upper East Side, not in the Village. I didn’t agree with that, and we had conversations about it in the beginning.
The original Forbidden Planet, the Union Square store, just went to the dogs. They got drained of money. The Bloomingdale’s store was a beautiful store, but it was, literally, a huge money loser. And that just about killed Mike. He called me up—it was 1996 or ‘97—and asked if there's anything I could do to salvage the store. We had to go through the courts, and creditors meetings, and debtors meetings, and God knows what, but we salvaged the store. Mike continued working there until he got very ill. He had Parkinson's disease and he had a pretty hard time at the end anyway, mentally. So, that's how I got involved with Forbidden Planet.
We [the warehouse] carry nothing new. Nothing. These days, old comic stores don't carry old comics in the urban areas. Out in the hinterlands there's still space. But on the whole, Forbidden Planet is entirely new stuff. And we at the warehouse are entirely old stuff.
You draw attention to an important point that I should bring up here, which is that the warehouse is one of the last spaces for a lot of old stuff around comics, certainly in New York City. It leaves a vacuum, doesn't it?
We hardly managed to fill the vacuum. The vacuum is there. So this just makes it worse. There are a couple - Silver Age Comics in Queens, and there are a couple of places that have some back issues. But if you think about it, while even Midtown has some back issues-- back in 1990, if you had 80 long white boxes of comics, and it was a well-distributed 80 boxes, you could have a credible inventory of books from the last 15 years. If you have 80 boxes of comics today, you don't have a credible inventory of books from the last two years. To have a comic book store with comprehensive back issues, you really need to be in a place where space is very cheap. It doesn't make much sense in New York. So, yeah, there's a vacuum, of course. These days with the mailers being eBay and Amazon, most people who collect back issues don't count on stores to provide them, they count on the mail.
You've moved into online sales as well, which is the new version of the mail-order business, so this takes you full circle. How long ago did you open up your online shop in earnest?
Actually, we were on eBay in 1998. But we were still living off the catalog at that point, so we were a mail-order business already. We just weren't online mail-order.
So it's been a fairly easy transition for you.
Are you familiar with our catalogs at all?
I bought from your catalog.
We had a cycle of four catalogs. They came out quarterly, and altogether they were 250 tabloid pages. If you spent two hours with the four catalogs, you could survey half a million items at a glance. The problem with online-- I'm very sad that we gave up all of our software for the catalog, because when you think about it, if you survey, if you sort of peruse the catalog for a few hours, you saw a lot of different stuff, right? To actually see that much stuff online would take you a month, two months. You really can't survey things online. You can find things online, but you can't survey them. I’m always thinking, wow, there's a hole here. I don't know if Buddy [Saunders, of mycomicshop.com] or Chuck [Rozanski, of Mile High Comics] should be putting out an annual catalog or something, but there's just no way shopping online is entertaining in the same way. Obviously there are pluses and minuses, but there just is no equivalent to a catalog.
I would guess from the retailer perspective as well, because people aren't encountering things that they might otherwise buy, right?
There. I think that's a huge thing. Obviously at various points I was thinking, okay, we gotta retrieve some of that old software, but we never quite got around to it. Forbidden Planet has been too distracting. And the challenges of mail-order the way we were doing it were also too distracting. But it does strike me as kind of odd that nobody’s doing that. It’s a vastly different experience that online offers, relative to the catalog.
As your warehouse grew over the years, it gradually became a kind of destination location for people who would come into the city. What sort of people have been coming in these past few years?
We've never really promoted it as a destination. In fact, it literally is only in the last 10 years that we promoted it as a location at all. I mean, obviously people came in, regardless. But it's not like we ever did any promotion at all.
All kinds of people show up. Can't say that I've pigeonholed them in any way, shape or form. And I'm not even entirely sure how some people hear about us, because our outreach is somewhat limited. We haven't been that ambitious. Having the entire mail-order [catalog] available to somebody walking in the store creates logistic annoyances that we have obviously managed to deal with. We’re just trying to sell stuff, and whichever way it goes is fine.
It sounds as if actually operating it as a physical location has never been particularly thrilling to you.
With visitors? Actually, in the last 10 years, we definitely were more thrilled by visitors. For a long time, especially when the neighborhood was not such a fun neighborhood, we were not out to have visitors. You could get mugged in this neighborhood rather easily in 1990. Everything has changed now, regardless of whatever kind of hysteria is going on.2 New York is safer now than any place you can imagine, right? But in 1990, not the case. So we weren't really out to have people come in unless we brought them in under some controlled circumstances, shall we say.
But in the last 10 years, although we haven't promoted it, we're certainly happy to have people show up. I mean, as long as they're not looking for the 50th variant of some issue that just came out, we're fine.
What sorts of people do tend to come? Older collectors? Nostalgists?
There's the latest hot book people. It’s funny, because one of the things about “hot” books is that some of these books have been around for 20 years. They just become hot now because the character shows up in a movie or something. So that's not fun, having people chase that stuff down. But it is fun having people come in since we've spread out into pop culture. If you came into the warehouse in, say, 1995, you would see nothing but comics. If you came in 2005, it would still be mostly comics, but there'd be other stuff by that time. Comics are half of it; the other half is everything from vinyl to to action figures, to cards, to whatever else. People show up for this stuff. We see what we can do.
You said earlier that you are a reader and not a collector. What drew you to comics in the first place? What appealed to you about it?
There are a lot of great comics. There's a lot of talent around now. But my personal collection is lots of tattered Little Lulu comics. There's a lot to pull from. What hurts right now is that it's a self-conscious kind of medium. Once you get to Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, who are really aware of traditions, you're getting to see people create almost a secondary language. A language that is not [made] out of in-jokes, but out of everything that reverberates. It’s not that it’s bad, but it's almost too easy now to be sophisticated. It's like doing old, classic guitar riffs: if you know them all, then you can keep playing off them. And people are doing a lot of that.
It’s a little bit similar to how the really vital period of rock 'n roll was 1950 to 1970, and then everybody just had to iterate on what other people had done before them.
That sort of thing. You can be very sophisticated about making those kind of references, everything from sampling to this, to that, to the other. You're seeing that in comics a lot. I don't know if that's a bad thing.
Are you reading anyone who's putting out comics now? Or is it mainly the creators of the past for you?
We are playing catch-up all the time. Anything Drawn & Quarterly puts out, I'll take a look at. I'm not sure that there is any other publisher or creator that I would say the same thing about. I look at Fantagraphics stuff. By the time I catch up with something, I don't even know if it's new or old. I just looked at a Kyle Baker book about Brian Epstein [The Fifth Beatle, 2013] that I assume is 10 years old, but is a wonderful book.
When you stock things, is it based on what you think is going to sell or just what piques your own personal interest?
We don't stock things, we buy collections as they walk in. We stock what comes in. I don't go chasing down anything. There's no particular formula. We buy almost everything that walks in the door if the people are happy with the price. We very seldom turn anything back on content alone. I mean, we do turn it back if somebody wants, for instance, double retail for something. But on the whole, we will look at anything. Unfortunately, if I don't have as much space, I won't be quite as able to bring it all in.
So, by necessity, you're going to have to be a little bit more selective about what you're doing.
Yeah. And it'll be opportunistic, you know? I'm not promoting anything in particular. There's always stuff to be enthusiastic about. There's a lot of good stuff in the world. I'm a big Elvis fan, so I was happy to see the Elvis collection. Somebody walked in with a Willie Nelson collection, and I was real happy about that.
You sound like you're not exactly checking out of this whole business. You still seem pretty bullish about staying in the retail game.
I'll be involved in something. [Laughs] I just don't know what the picture's going to be.
Speaking personally, for yourself, do you still feel good about comics as a field? As something that you're interested in?
Yeah. Except for the self-consciousness and traditions - like you said about rock 'n roll. At some point it becomes self-referential, and sometimes that's a little too cute. But the amount of talent and intelligence out there is really good. There are a lot of people-- it's actually amazing how many people, and there are some pretty good artists around. Except for the speculative side and whatever, it's all fresh and interesting.
But this is about the speculative side, and why it gets absurd. First you have comics-- and you can substitute any medium for that. People like to read, then they start to collect - which doesn't cancel out the reading, but it means that suddenly they end up with some books that they actually never get around to reading because it just fills in a hole. Then, of course, you get very concerned about condition. So you get to the point where your younger brother or sister is not allowed to touch the comic book because a comic book has to stay in very nice shape. Then somebody comes along and decides you have to slab the comic book, which means you can no longer read it.
Slabbing it suddenly becomes very important. Then you reach the next level of absurdity, which is people start grading the slab - and you say, okay, we are really off the deep end here. [Laughs] If you're playing games with CGC, certain labels are worth more than other labels. Certain periods of time of grading suddenly become important. People get very prissy about grading.
Is it taking some of the joy out of this whole thing for you?
No, that doesn't take any joy out. I just sit there and think, “Wow. All right.” But also, these days there's so much good stuff in the world that doesn't cost anything. I do find it weird that it that doesn't sort of overwhelm the other stuff.
Good stuff such as?
If you want to read War and Peace, or if you want to read [The Amazing] Spider-Man #1, the story, you have any number of cheap ways of getting it. In some cases—more with War and Peace—you can probably pick it up for free. In the case of Spider-Man #1, I'm sure there are reprints that are perfectly serviceable. I have to say that the Marvel Masterworks reprints weren't serviceable, but there are certainly great reprints of Spider-Man #1. You don't have to pay a million dollars for it. And for me, I guess that side counts a little bit more.
* * *
- Seuling, it may be unnecessary to note, was a key player in the founding of comics’ direct market, largely credited with extending that distribution system to the major mainstream publishers.
- The afternoon this conversation took place, New York Governor Kathy Hochul had just deployed armed members of the National Guard to perform security checks in subway stations, ostensibly in response to violent crime.
