Grave Considerations: Windy City Comics

A lifetime ago, I was a high school student in Chicago. Across the street, in a strip mall that generally held no other businesses than an Army recruiting station, was a store front that was a staple of my high school life: Windy City Comics, a comic book store, predictably. Friends and I would spend hours there after school, and it is one of the more important locales of my teenage years and one of the more formative in my life in general.

Windy City Comics was a small store, generally carrying only current titles, without the usually generous amount of back issues or trades that almost every comic book shop seems to have. This was in the early years of the 1990’s, when the legacy companies were publishing classic titles and trying to introduce new ones with new characters, and newer companies like Dark Horse and the totally new at the time Image were fighting to get shelf space alongside them with titles that people seemed to never have heard of. Prior to my time meandering around Windy City, my comic knowledge was limited to legacy characters and arcs of their stories I’d read sitting on the floor at the local grocery store while my father did the shopping. I feel like that’s a story for sharing as well, but not right now. But by virtue of its far greater selection, Windy City introduced me to actual comic books, not just the few issues of Spider- and Super- and Batman that Dominick’s had. At Windy City I found Spawn, and read DC vs. Marvel, and found Liefeld and Doctor Strange and the other Justice League members like Green Lantern and Flash. It was here I saw Magneto rip the adamantium out of Wolverine, and Bane break Batman’s back. The shop also had some arcade games, which is where I started to realize that comics had this inter-media appeal, as one of the game was the still awesome in my memory Punisher game, where you played either the Punisher or Nick Fury and walked from left to right punching the shit out of generic enemies.

The store was owned by a guy who never came out from behind the counter, which fueled speculation amongst my friends and I that he couldn’t, because naturally, he had robotic legs like the T-101 from Terminator. Why this would have stopped him from moving around, we didn’t think that far. One particular day, we enticed a friend who normally didn’t frequent the place to go there with us through the promise of seeing these robot legs. When there weren’t any robot legs to be seen, our friend said just a little too loudly to be comfortable, “I thought we were going to see a prosthetic leg.” This actually drew the attention of the owner, and we scurried out of the store giggling, and also more confident than ever that our robot leg theory was correct. Otherwise, why would the guy have paid the remark any attention, right?

I think the thing that was most influential about the store was the idea that the owner didn’t seem to mind that most of his business was high schoolers playing arcade games or reading comics without buying them. He’d talk to you about comics, and was never visibly annoyed to do so. I’ve been to comic stores where the staff doesn’t seem to care that you’re there, in the sense that they aren’t very friendly or interactive or that, and that sucks. My wife and I stopped going to a comic book shop because the people there usually tried to act as if they had no idea who we were, despite our being there and spending quite a lot of money several times each month. When we finally decided it was time to take that big relationship step and establish a pull list at a comic shop, we started looking around for a better one, a place we liked better and felt welcome and comfortable. I remember feeling that way at Windy City, just reading and browsing, and that was a feeling that stuck with me so powerfully that we chose our current store in no small part because, for me, it reminded me of Windy City.

And I think that somewhere in this memory is a statement on gatekeeping in the comic community. We all get into comics somehow, and are usually influenced by someone or something, or maybe someplace, that not only shows us these awesome new worlds and characters, but also shows us that it’s ok to be interested in them. The proprietor of Windy City Comics could have chased us all out; he could have made you buy something; he could have given out cold shoulders until you did buy something. But instead, he talked to us. He’d talk about what was going on in comics; he’d talk about what he was reading and what he liked and who he liked in terms of artists and writers and stuff. He’d talk about how the 90’s roster of new characters were often just generic guys in tights, but not in a way that made you feel like a kid or an idiot for liking them. I sometimes wonder what he thinks about a character like Deadpool now, because back then, he wasn’t a fan at all. I’ve got a pretty fractured but stable memory of him going on a rant about how shitty he thought Rob Liefeld was as an artist. You know, the kinds of topics that we, in our youthful folly, were all like “no way!!” about, but wound up being, at times, lasting notions and ideas that a lot of the comic fandom still adheres to. But regardless, he talked to you. I didn’t have an older sibling or family member who got me in to comics; I got in to comics because I loved cartoons and action figures, and so I gravitated towards comics whenever I had the opportunity. My dad had comics, but they were these incredibly lame illustrated versions of classic literature, probably the lamest of all subject matter for comics. He had stuff like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in comic book form, and as a kid I hated those because I figured it would be better to just read the actual book; the comic version felt like cheating. The only ones I liked were The War of the Worlds and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, mainly because I loved aliens and squid. But I was made fun of all through grade school for liking cartoons, because apparently that has an age limit. When I first found comic books, my dad generally thought of them as a waste of money, since, you know, you have to keep buying them as they are not self-contained stories. As a kid I figured it’d be better for me to keep my comic interests under wraps.

But the guy at Windy City Comics, he made it clear that being a comic book guy was not a big deal. It was just a thing you were in to. And he was fine with sharing that. And I think, maybe strictly for business reasons, he knew that in order to continue, younger and newer and different audiences needed to be brought in to the comic tent. The 90’s were a good time for that, as a good deal of the current diversity in the comic world as far as characters go was introduced back then, very similar to the way we see it happening now. That guy knew that, for his store to thrive, he had to be accepting of us, with our questions and hot takes about how Wolverine and Gambit were totally the best X-Men despite one of them being totally new and the other being new in terms of popularity, despite always just sort of being ‘there’.

A real quick internet search leads me to believe that Windy City Comics is no longer in business, and that’s a bit disheartening. We are totally happy with our current comic book shop, so even if Windy City were still open, I might want to stop in, but wouldn’t make the switch to it being our primary store. But it was a really important place in some real important years in my life, and provided me some really important experiences. Of course I didn’t know it at the time, but I’ve never forgotten them.