Nostalgia and comics are two topics that I’ve returned to many times over the nine years I’ve been writing this blog, so it’s surprising to realise that I haven’t, to date, mentioned the shop of the same name in Birmingham, where I spent a fair amount of time (and money) during the late 70s and early 80s. If ever there was a shop that did ‘exactly what it said on the tin’, Nostalgia and Comics was it (although I always found their stock leaned more heavily towards comics rather than nostalgia). Although most people will remember the shop in the Albany building on Smallbrook Queensway, it started life across the road in very cramped quarters on the corner of Hurst Street subway. The subway is long gone, but the building is still there.
It was here, some time in 1977, that I acquired a copy of the first ever Eagle comic for the princely sum of £5. I’m not even sure if the shop had a name at this point in time: to me it was simply ‘the comic shop.’ It didn’t last long in its cramped quarters – within a year, it had relocated into the subway itself, occupying a long, narrow retail unit beneath Smallbrook Queensway. From here, in September 1977, I acquired a few more vintage copies of Eagle.
I’ve never been a fan of American comics or their merchandising off-shoots, so much of the shop’s stock held no interest for me. It was, however, the first place I’d seen selling vintage copies of British comics like Eagle, TV21 and others, alongside odd annuals, TV and film tie-in paperbacks and occasional vintage toys. It was in hope of securing similar items that I took to visiting the shop on a reasonably regular basis.
I was keeping a diary in the late 70s, and although I neglected to log the date on which I acquired that number one Eagle, I recorded a few more visits to the shop over the years, often accompanied by my friend Tim Beddows (who would later go on to form the Network DVD label). A couple of typical entries:
Friday 31 March 1978: ‘Go to comic shop. Tim gets T Birds cards and returns later for ‘The Spotlight’. This gives a good indication of the shop’s eclectic stock at this point in time: The Spotlight was two volumes of the actors directory dating back to 1969. If you’ve never seen one, imagine something the size of an old telephone directory filled with page after page of promotional photographs of actors, categorised according to type: leading men, younger leading men, etc. These were very unusual items to find. The Thunderbirds cards were from the Somportex bubble gum series issued in the mid 1960s.
Friday 29 June 1979: ‘See T. Birds game and S. Car (Supercar) annual in comic shop.’ It was hard to find old toys from the Gerry Anderson series: one occasionally turned up examples at jumble sales and junk shops. In this case, it was Waddington’s board game of Thunderbirds. The Supercar Annual was a fairly hefty price, perhaps as much as £10, and I passed on it – at a jumble sale it would have been 10p. As a comparison, the same edition sells today for £15-£30 on ebay. I did, however, return a few days later for the Thunderbirds game.
By 1980, the shop had moved again, to what would become its definitive trading base in the Albany building. Now operating over two floors, the ground floor was devoted to American comics and brand-new merchandise, whilst the upper, mezzanine floor concentrated on vintage items. Whenever I visited the shop, I would make straight for the upper floor. I already knew bearded Phil Clarke, the shop’s owner, by sight, and now I made the acquaintance of Colin who manned the upstairs counter, a friendly guy who, unfortunately, also happened to collect Gerry Anderson merchandise. This gave him first dibs on anything cool that came into the shop, and, like old man Steptoe, he would keep the best items for himself. This was going on as early as June 1980, when my diary records a visit to the shop when I was shown a very nice, boxed example of the Lincoln International battery-operated Stingray: 'shown' being the operative word – It wasn’t for sale. As compensation, he did allow me to buy a vintage Thunderbird One pencil sharpener!
One other item I managed to prise out of their hands, for around a tenner was a ‘Codeg’ branded Dalek moneybox, a ‘new old stock’ item recovered from a shop, in mint and boxed condition, which proved to be a decent investment: an example is currently listed on eBay for over £300. This same diary entry also named the shop for the first time.
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| The ones that got away: the shop actually allowed me to purchase these two 'new old stock' items, but anything else was strictly for looking at and not for sale. |
As with Stingray toys, so too with copies of TV Century 21. Colin was evidently putting a set together for himself, and again got the pick of whatever came into the shop. I don’t blame him, I’d have done the same myself. Around this same time, I managed to walk away with a copy of number 6, but there was no sign of issues 1-5. As time went by (and Colin, presumably, filled the gaps in his collection), it became easier to find TV21s for sale, mint and bagged copies selling for £2.50 each. I also bagged a fair few Eagles, choosing them for their covers rather than trying to complete a run. As you can see below, the price of these items crept upwards over the years.
In 1983, I began working at an advertising agency in Birmingham which, as luck would have it, was located in Western House, just across the road from Nostalgia and Comics (the original shop unit was now a sandwich bar which I visited most lunchtimes). I took to popping across to N&C a couple of times each week, and the TV21s in my own collection slowly began to mount up. Once, finding a particularly large pile in their display cabinet, I left a deposit and nabbed the lot for myself. These are all worth a lot more now than I gave at the time, but perhaps the best buys I made were a couple of the TV21 summer extras, and the first three editions of Lady Penelope comic, which command very high prices today.
Aside from TV21s and occasional ‘look at this, it’s not for sale’ Gerry Anderson toys, the most interesting item in the shop as far as I was concerned was an original page of artwork from the Dan Dare serial ‘Terra Nova’, which was framed and mounted on the wall. There seemed little point in enquiring if it was for sale, and I wouldn’t have been able to afford it anyway.
Eventually, the company I was working for relocated to Birmingham’s Jewelery Quarter on the other side of town, and with only an hour for lunch, it was hard to get to the shop and back and have time to browse their stock. By the early 90s, I was working at home, and visited on fewer and fewer occasions. Eventually, the upper sales floor was roped off and no longer accessible to the public, and the vintage British comics that had once been a staple of the shop’s stock disappeared altogether.
The shop is still there today, and still selling comics from the same unit at 14-16 Smallbrook Queensway. It was bought out by Forbidden Planet a long time ago, and was probably trading under that name the last time I crossed the threshold, whenever that might have been. Today it’s called Worlds Apart, which as a name has a sort of intriguing fantasy aura, but is, dare I say, a world apart from the ‘tell it like it is’ branding that was Nostalgia and Comics. Somewhere, I’m sure I still have an old Nostalgia and Comics bag, complete with the shop’s logo in the old ‘Ripping Yarns’ typeface (actually called ‘Algerian’). If I can find it, and scan it, I’ll post it here, but if not, a Google search will turn up a copy for you...
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| Inflation at work... copies of Eagle in their original N&C bags and price tags, as sold circa early 80s. |
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