Hey everybody, this is Rob Lefeld, welcoming you to another episode of Rob Observations.

Robeservations is where we continue to chart the path, the course, the road that finds comic books and pop culture, combining meeting up, defining so much of what we enjoy our entertainment

uh it it starts with me in 1975 pulling my first comic book off the spinner rack and uh a few

months before that getting my first comic book from the Barbershop, my first Marvel comic book, that just blew me out of the water.

But then the addiction started.

The spinner axe became my new haunts at seven and eight years old.

And it has informed me and taken me down this path where I would

become someone who makes comic books as well as consumes them. I can proudly say that some many 40

plus years later I am as obsessed with comic books as I was when I started this journey, when I was

a wee lad going to the liquor store and to the corner market to get my comic books. We have

covered so much territory as we have investigated comic books, how they grew, how they expanded, how

comic shops started opening the direct market is what it's called in the field, in the business

of comic books they call the direct market because comic books are sold directly to stores

that sell them as opposed to where they used to be carried by the corner

market, the 7-Eleven, the U-Totum, the stop-and-go.

I don't know what your corner market store was, but in Southern California there was

7-Eleven, there was stop-and-go, there was U-Totem. Yes, these are names of stop and go and in 7-11.

Maybe at some point they had more outlets than 7-Eleven, but that quickly changed.

And 7-Eleven became the dominant here in Southern California and from what I can see nationwide.

But when I was a kid, stop and go and U-todom actually had more comics, better selection, than 7-Eleven.

And as anyone who knows who has followed me on this podcast, the liquor store, which is just rife with so much tequila and vodka and beer, was where

little Robbie Leifeld found his absolute best stash of comics, in, out always.

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