Act One: Early Days
Continuing a (personal) History of More Fun Comics.
Marc Ludena conceived and created this, just a few days ago! I am thankful for his friendship, contribution, and artistic skill (we’ve got a thing planned after connecting on all this, stay tuned).
Back row (from left): Chris Mitten, Dan Yelovich, Kurt Dinse. Middle Row: Mark Smith (RIP) and Mark McHaley. Front Row: Marc Ludena, Me, Shawn Spurlock.
Interviews conducted by Joseph Rybandt
“The name ‘More Fun’ comes from the ‘40s comics, and that's what Shawn brought to the marketplace. He just made it fun to walk in. Like Cheers, he knew your name, and there was fun banter back and forth. Don't take it too seriously, just have fun.”
– Dan Yelovich, Owner, More Fun Comics
Do you remember business cards?!
Early days
Dan Yelovich (Owner, More Fun Comics 1987-1996): I grew up in Palatine [IL] and there was a drugstore that had a spinner rack and that's where I would go once a week to pick up my comics. This would be about 1967 or so. It was part of the lifestyle of kids back then. I mean, we would play -- you know, have battles out on the fields, play baseball… and read comics. And we would follow storylines and we would get excited about them.
Shawn Spurlock (Manager Emeritus, More Fun Comics): I grew up between Woodridge [Illinois] and Cicero, where comic stores did not exist. I bought comics from drug stores and grocery stores, and it was all spinner rack until The Book Nook in Naperville. And that was the first newsstand that had waterfall racks and comics. It was just whatever you could find. The Book Nook had everything. So, there would be crazy foreign magazines - anything that was printed. It was almost like when Barnes and Noble had everything and some books, but it was mostly weird periodical type stuff.
I went to school in Downers Grove, which was substantially closer. And I don't really remember how we ended up there. My mother might have found it, I don't know. These days, every once-in-a-while, someone comes into the store where I work now and they'll have a look on their face, like they walked into Valhalla, and I'm sure that was the look on my face. I was maybe 10 years old?
Anyway, it wasn't that close. We still lived pretty far away so it was a trip, and there weren’t back issues. Like, it was the first time I saw a Treasury Edition on a rack. But it was all current. It was still a world where if you missed it, you missed it -- unless you wanted to start doing mail order stuff. You just lived with it, you know?
Dan: I probably started with DC Comics where Superboy joined the Legion of Superheroes, which branched into the Justice League and the Justice Society. DC back then was just more fun and whimsical. I read Spider-Man some and I think what got me into Thor was that it was otherworldly, and it did keep my attention. Not so much with Jack Kirby early on but with John Buscema’s run that briefly followed Kirby. I cared about what happened to the characters and things like that. Marvel slowly brought me over by putting more emphasis on characters and not just the adventures. When [Walter] Simonson’s Thor came out, that really piqued my interest again. And you know, from an early age, comics had saved my life.
When I was 16 years old, I was bareback riding a horse, Venus, I’d been fighting for the last hour. My companion, Becky, and I were riding in northern Palatine in an open field. It was straight-ahead, flat-out riding, but I noticed a line of trees we were fast approaching. Venus, needed to move to the right, but instead she heads straight for the trees, picking up speed. And right as she got to the trees, she stopped and took a quick right, and the centrifugal force launched me into the air. Somewhere in the back of my head, I remember a Justice League comic where they were working out or something or practicing or whatever and a character said “go limp and roll.” So I thought “go limp and roll!” And I rolled and rolled and rolled.
Marc Ludena (Manager, More Fun Comics): I had been into comics, and comic adjacent things, as long as I can remember. Part of that sprang from the superhero cartoons. From my youngest days I was obsessed with Spider Man. My parents did not necessarily go out of the way to supply me with comics, but I read everything. I read the strips in the paper, which at that time included Spider-Man and Dick Tracy. The episodic ones were what I gravitated to. They had more of a narrative.
And on Monday mornings, my dad always did grocery shopping for his business. He was a dentist, but he would go and buy snacks and crap for the week or whatever. And I would go with him in summers and I’d park myself at the magazine rack in the Jewel/Osco in Lombard [IL]. I read whatever comics they had and occasionally he'd buy one for me.
Fast forward a little and I was old enough to ride my bike to the local 7 Eleven and pick up a comic book or two. I remember reading Masters of Kung Fu and the G.I. Joe comic that came out a little after that. I wasn't doing a lot of superhero comics at that point - for whatever reason – and I wasn't a regular purchaser. I did not have a comic book shop within walking distance. I didn't know such a thing existed. And then a friend of mine had a copy of the X-Men vs. Avengers mini-series and he loaned it to me. And later, maybe 8th grade or freshman year of high school, my brother and I started taking guitar lessons at a new place and on Park Avenue in Lombard, around the corner from a comic book store. While my brother was taking his lesson, I wandered over there and that’s when I started buying comics. Th store was TJ’s Comics, owned by Jeff Haines, which would eventually become More Fun.
That spot there? Second in from the road? That was the second location of More Fun Comics in Glen Ellyn, IL. Photo taken on my last visit to the area, Fall of 2021.
Early shops and the early comics scene
The Direct Market system of selling comics via comic book specialty shops came together in the ‘70s, though comics were still available at newsstands, supermarkets, drugstores and the like (I bought most of mine from the long-gone Wheaton Pharmacy long before The Comic Cave opened in the early ‘80s). But it it was the rise of the comics shop in the ’80 and beyond that cemented its place in the pop culture landscape.
Shawn: There were stores like Unicorn that I went to, but it was still pretty far. And I didn't really drive until senior year and comics weren't cool. So, there were only a couple people who knew on the down low that I was that much of a nerd. We were still all keeping that pretty secret, and then the direct market shows up.
Dan: I remember going to Mount Prospect and discovering Moondog Comics, in the late ‘70s, I think. So, I'm thinking that’s when local comic shops started popping up in the suburbs. Much later, when I was out of college and working, there was TJ’s Comics in downtown Lombard with Jeff Haines, and that became my go-to comic shop.
Marc: Around the time I found TJ’s Comics, I also met a friend who was a year younger than me. We started to talk about comics and he had an older brother who was pretty hip. Through him, I got to borrow copies of The Dark Knight Returns, and some others -- less mainstream, at least for me, based on what I was looking at or reading. Once I could drive, I started to look at all the different comic shops in the area and expanded my horizons. I learned the city of Chicago by driving to different comic shops all over the place, not telling my parents where I was going.
Kurt Dinse (customer): I went to Moondogs for quite a while before I knew about More Fun. I honestly don’t remember hearing about the store. I just started going there. I just ended up at the first location, maybe before Dan owned it? I’d also been to the original Comic Cave and then there was a store after the Comic Cave that was in Lombard and there was also a store in Villa Park, Unicorn—but I stopped going because the owner was a weirdo. I worked nights, so after I started to know all you guys, I became the classic "guy who hangs out at the comic store too much".
Eric Dinse (customer): My first comic book was Amazing Spider Man # 53, which featured Spidey fighting Doc Ock. This was in 1967. As you can tell, this left an impact on me. My father was my original source. He had grown up with (the original) Captain America & he was a life long Jack Kirby fan. He would buy me comic books, but he'd only get ones where he liked the art (i.e. Kirby). I remember I wanted an issue of Daredevil, but Dad didn't like Gene Colan's art. When I started buying my own, it was at drug stores, some grocery stores, even at various White Hen Pantry’s. But not all of these kinds of stores carried comics. For example, the White Hen closest to me had no comic books but there was one on Roosevelt Road that did. I did a lot of bike riding to get comics. One of my favorite spots was the Wheaton Pharmacy. I don't remember how or when I discovered The Comics Cave, but I was very happy when I did. It must have been around 1984 or so. I don't remember exactly when, but I must have met Shawn [Spurlock] there. It was great to be able to talk nerd with Shawn.
Marc: I went to Moondogs, to Graham Crackers, Unicorn, Pages and then I started to expand out. Norm (Joe’s note: Norm was a fellow lover of the form who would go on to arch-nemesis status with the store Shifty Lizard, which Dan helped open up, but things got weird and no one I talked to but Marc remembered it!) and I would get out a map and a phonebook. And we would kind of plan out where we were going. And I would carry a little card with all the back issues that I was looking for… and that's really nerdy. I would still go to TJ’s or Unicorn, but I didn't have a lot of loyalty at that particular point. And in fact, at one point, I got on a mailing list and got my comics mail order through a service to save a few bucks. I did that for maybe six months to a year. But all of that was before I started working for the shop.
(Joe’s note: I ordered most of the Comico Grendel run from what may have been American Entertainment. Which, I wound up working for before they transitioned to AnotherUniverse.com.)
There were other stores in the area, but the suburbs of Chicago stretch long and far. When I was growing up in Wheaton, there was the Comic Cave and Pages, and of course, further to the west, there was the mighty Graham Crackers, which plays a role in this story down the line.
Dan: Thursdays were new book day, and all the regulars would pretty much come together. We’d be talking about comics and storylines, and talking about life in general. I got to know Jeff [Haines] pretty well being just a normal customer. And when I got some extra cash, he kind of hinted that he was thinking about doing another store - doing something different. And we talked about it, and I said that would be something I was interested in. Because at that point, I was out of a job and I was getting a severance package from my employer – I had been selling software strangely enough to churches way back then.
Even at that early stage, we were saying you know what, we're not going to be able to make a living with just comics. It's just not gonna work. If we can broaden the merchandise a little bit -- bring in T-shirts, maybe we can bring in cards. You know, what else can we do, and we started to brainstorm. So, More Fun became the new store, which was about things that are fun. We had comics and comic related items, plus some things that were not related, like baseball cards and other pop culture types of things.
Marc Ludena painted this Cerebus in the store window of the second More Fun location. I don’t have a picture, but in the Wheaton store, Mark McHaley pained a massive Batman inside the store…
[Regarding the choice of Glen Ellyn] I lived about a mile away, but what did it for me were the bikes. When you start heading west on Roosevelt Road [location of the first More Fun Comics], you see two things. People are earning more money and you see bigger, nicer houses. You also see everything is pretty much connected and people can ride bikes. So, whether you’re going to Glenbard West or Glenbard South [local high schools], you're able to get there. And one of the things that we did early on, we noticed this metal bike rack on the Prairie Path that was just overgrown with weeds and grass, so we figured it was neglected and no one had a use for it. We threw in the back of a truck and brought it to More Fun and gave everybody a bike rack. All that was that was our formal research: ‘Hey, it looks like people make more money over here. And it's easy for kids to get to!’
(Joe’s note: The Comic Cave, which I wrote about to open this overall piece, was a downstairs shop on Front Street in Wheaton, IL. In its first location, it had one way in and out and no windows… come to think of it, it was the same in its second location. As a kid, I went there a bunch, and for sure have memories of Shawn Spurlock behind the counter. Our paths crossed at the time, but it was a silent crossing…)
Shawn: I started working at the Comic Cave like everybody…. I was just there all the time, hanging out and talking to them and I'd be straightening the back issues as we were talking and it just kinda morphed into an actual job. They also had a karate studio, of course, and had a waterfall rack of comics in the karate studio. So, he would sell comics there. (I suspect he might have also been selling weed.) But at some point, he decided to open a store in Geneva [IL]. And that was weird and that was the one that I had to go to. My first car, which was shitty, was a station wagon and he had me drive all the way to Geneva, to a store that literally had no electricity. The store hours were daylight [laughs]. So that was, for a while, that was okay. I still lived with my parents, so I didn't have any obligations or anything. It just started to get really stupid and annoying ‘cuz clearly there's no oversight at that point -- no internet or cameras -- and I would just close for a couple hours and go get lunch and stuff ‘cuz he didn't care. He wasn't paying me on time. He stopped paying me towards the end. It got ugly. It certainly wasn't a professional endeavor.
Dan: I ran Glen Ellyn and Jeff ran TJ’s in Lombard. And people began to hang out, and if you're hanging out long enough, eventually I give you a job. Exactly what happened with Shawn and Marc (Joe’s note: and me!) — I don't remember hiring them. They just seemed a part of the whole atmosphere without me realizing.
Marc: I had become friendly with Jeff at the original store. And so when they made the move, I followed him, and that became my home base. I believe the way it worked out is they needed help setting up for one of their big sales. So, Norm and helped. I think we did it for the first couple days, maybe even the first week or two, on trade. And then Dan offered to actually pay us.
Shawn: Jeff Haines was running TJ’s and me and Mark Smith [RIP!] would drive to it. And I know we were buying Watchmen when this was happening. And then he moved to Glen Ellen, which was ACES, ‘cuz it was like, you know, a minute away. So we hung out there a lot. And at that point, I'm a waiter, living at home and I don't pay rent or anything. I'm just fucking loaded. I'm spending a lot of money on comics and this is when comics were just starting to take that turn for the direct market, where they're starting to get written for adults. And Jeff got more and more, you know, ‘comic guy’. Dan was around and Dan was, you know… Dan - positive in his own goofy way. He wasn't a huge comic nerd, but he wanted to get into it. And I think he started as a silent partner and I was hanging around a lot. This is years past the Comic Cave, so I've learned how to be a man and a human being and responsible and stuff. And I'm also used to talking to people. I think that's what Dan probably saw and he's like, ‘Hey, do you want to do this part-time and you can still stay at the Rusty Pelican’, which is where I was waiting tables. And I said, sure -- that's how I got sucked in [laughs]… right in. The Pelican fell apart and Dan was like, ‘Well I'll pay you more.’ I'm like, okay, this is what I do.
Marc: [Shawn] was waiting tables at the Rusty Pelican I think full time at that point. And he would show up and was a known quantity. I don't know if Shawn worked there very long while Jeff was there. I know that Dan wanted somebody with Shawn's experience. And, you know, Jeff had his head stuck in Golden Age Comics and wasn't really interested in anything new. Shawn came on to More Fun when the Pelican closed its doors overnight.
Bruce Bachelder (customer): I went to More Fun before they became More Fun. I think I met Shawn/Marc either in 1988/89? I had been going to Unicorn Comics in Villa Park since January of ‘83 and I remember buying comics from the More Fun kiosk at Yorktown Mall in Lombard. One time, I owed one dollar and I paid Shawn in pennies, which he then proceeded to fling in the air! Pennies were everywhere and he did not care. Lol... hanging out there was like being at the Cheers bar… ‘where everybody knows your name!’
Kurt: A lot of weird stuff happened but I don’t remember any bad stuff. I remember I watched movies -- standing up -- on a small TV because there were no extra chairs, and eating many meals with whoever was working (because I would go and pick up the food). Marc taught me how to say "chile relleno" when I went to pick up at El Famous Burrito. A couple years I helped out unofficially at The Chicago Comic-Con in Rosemont [IL]. Somehow, I was meeting you guys at the show and I got there early and got a good parking spot (not really knowing that was a thing) and you guys showed up and Dan was happy that we had a good spot for load in. I remember I sold my Crow Comics, and I was an ass and didn't give the store a cut.
Mark McHaley (Employee and Artist): When I was a kid, I used to walk into town [Wheaton]. Osco wasn’t attached to Jewel back then and had their comic books all laying flat, under the magazines. I’m amazed I was always able to find the monthly issues I was reading. After that, there was a comic shop in St. Charles, Kurtz’s Comics (owned by Frank Kurtz). I had a bunch of friends living in a Glen Ellyn. I think I just saw it More Fun one day and walked in. I met Marc Ludena that day and we hit it off.
Shawn: And you know, you think of a warm summer afternoon and we're all in charge of the store. We didn't shut the store down. We had a lot of fun and I think a lot of people were having fun, but that's not the best way to make money. Do you know what I mean? Like, instead of playing toy baseball, perhaps you should have been doing an inventory and we would say ‘what's an inventory?’
Local stores would trade inventory with each other and sometimes team up to make certain thresholds with local and even regional and national distributors. Not everyone was looking out for their retail brethren tho…
Dan Yelovich: There was a small shop just south of downtown Naperville. And it's Christmas time. And this guy’s running short of cash. So, I give him a short-term loan. And lo and behold, three weeks later, he's gone. I mean, place is empty and I’m out my money. There was another shop in Lombard and we're friendly with one another, we're trading back and forth. And the owner calls me up and asked for something. And I asked him, ‘Do you have the death statue?’ He says, ‘Yeah, I got a couple.’ ‘Okay, I'll send one of my guys to pick it up, you know, put it down for credit or whatever.’ Turns out, somebody heard me on the phone, dashed out to the guy's place, said that he was the More Fun employee, picked up the statue, and we never saw it or him again. Stuff like that -- now people were stealing because it was just so easy.
Other shops were popping up, but the biggest in the region – and last man standing for the most part -- was the mighty Graham Crackers, who play a role in the ultimate fate of Dan, Shawn and More Fun. There was rivalry, but it was always friendly…
Shawn: If it was anybody, it was Jamie [Graham], but they were better than we were. Do you know what I mean? And I always kind of knew that we were kind of just, okay, well we're way more.. more fun [laughs]. But they were… well look where they are now.
