Phil Clarke as he appeared at the
2014, London Film & Comic Con
(Thanks to Lew Stringer's Blog Blimey!)
Not too long after that, Phil Clarke opened his first
store at 1 Hurst Street Subway.
#1 Hurst Street Subway was in the
rounded corner unit at the lower
right of the photograph.
They dismantled the subway some
years ago.
This was not the first time that Phil had gone into the business,
in the late Sixties, he and Mik Higgs of The Cloak and Moonbird fame,
had operated under the banner of
"Unicorn Comics"
and even published several issues of a fanzine with the same name.
I have looked around on the Web and
I haven't found any images of them yet.
So here it is.
This is "Unicorn - the graphic fantasy magazine"
issue Five, from 1972.
Published by, "Mike Higgs & Phil Clarke"
of Birmingham, England.
Number One Hurst Street Subway was a tiny little space, tucked away on the corner of a building
and as I recall, was on two levels! I also believe, that in the beginning, Alan ( the same guy from Japetus )
was the the person running the shop. My memory is somewhat blurred, with some
clear spots dropped into the mix for fun and I don't believe that there were any back issue bins,
so it would seem to have been a New Comics only business.
Thunder Dogs came along a few years later but
I remember watching Steve Leialoha and Frank Brunner
commenting on the original art pages that Hunt had with him at the 1979 Comic Con, at the NEC, that Colin Campbell, of Biytoo Books, organized.
This was where I first saw the original art of Hunt Emerson, a local Art College attendee,
who went on to bigger and better things. It was also where I ran into a group of young guys
who actually made the pilgrimage to one of Phil Seuling's New York ComicCon's!
When they returned, one of them sold me some original art, that he had picked up while he was there
and I still have them today.
This is a photograph from soon after the subway opened and
long before I got there!
The kiosk in the foreground, on the right
hand side of the photograph,
is very much the way I remember Phil's
place was.
A while later on, Phil also had a kiosk in the Hurst Street Subway, which no longer exists, the subway and the kiosks fell to the redevelopment of the Birmingham roadways, some years ago.
For a while, there were four addresses listed on the advertising for
Nostalgia & Comics
but that was all before they opened the big store on the Queen's way
and became the centre of comic book life in Brum.
This is similar to the way that it looked in my day.
The present location of Nostalgia & Comics
is just out of the picture, round the corner,
to the right of the man walking up the ramp.
I am starting to put some time and place references together and that had to be in the summer of 1978,
because I knew where the art, by the odd combination of John Byrne and Joe Staton, had
originally been printed. It was part of a six page story that appeared in CPL #12 and I had bought
my copy while I was in Toronto, Canada, on vacation in the Fall of 1977.
That being said, I am getting a couple of years ahead of myself and I need to backtrack a little.
Rog Peyton and Phil Clarke had known each other for many years.
Not much of a surprise really, Fandom was a a much smaller community back then
and the overlap of collecting Science Fiction & Fantasy books and collecting Comic Books
was much broader. So, for a couple of years or more, there were two comic book shops in
downtown Birmingham but all things change and eventually, Phil and Rog reached an agreement.
Rog would stop selling comic books and return to his main focus on Science Fiction and Fantasy books,
leaving Phil free to focus on all things comic book related.
Here is a relatively recent photograph of Nostalgia & Comics as it is today.
I think that all of that must have been safely agreed upon before Phil and
his partners opened the big new location of
Nostalgia and Comics at
14/16 Smallbrook Queensway,
which was located at the opposite end of the Hurst Street Underpass from
the tiny little store where it all began.
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