It was an intriguing offer.
Two hundred dollars for the whole stock.
Gary Kendrick was a teenager in 1970s Santee, and he’d heard of a comics seller wanting to dump everything he had. Gary’s job at the time paid two bucks an hour, meaning those comics would cost more than two weeks of full-time work. Then he’d have to re-sell it all.
He decided to take the risk.
Years later, Gary is now the longest-serving council member in East County’s largest city, El Cajon, giving him influence over everything from small businesses to homelessness policies.
One of his three sons, Daniel Kendrick, is a vice president at IDW, where he helps decide what books will become movies and TV shows.
Each position was built on a foundation of comics.
Gary was able to re-sell much of what he got from his intial $200 and quickly netted three times that amount, he said. And there were still issues left over.
He started looking for ways to boost his stock.
Gary had some familiarity with the medium. As a kid, his dad would lie next to him before bed and read Superman comics out loud.
But his parents didn’t take them very seriously. His mother called them “funny books,” he recalled.
Then one day, she returned home from work to discover there was no room to park in the garage. It was filled with comics.
He eventually rented a warehouse, because, as he points out, a garage might only hold tens of thousands of issues. He needed space for half a million. The business was taking off.
Once when Gary was in his 20s and still living at home, he sat down for dinner with his parents. Someone asked what he’d done that day.
“I bought a house,” he said.
Later, he bought another. He rented out both, and kept moving comics.
He tried running a pair of shops — a photo in a family album shows him behind a counter flanked by issues of “Weird Science” — but learned more money could be made through mail order.
The plan was simple. Distributors would send him their excess stock, which he would mark up before offering to fans. On the plus side, supply was cheap. Yet he generally never knew what he would get.
One time he received a stack of something called “Elfquest.” Nobody seemed interested, so the issues sat in storage, collecting dust. Literally. He’d use them as dust pans to clean up the floor.
Then Marvel bought the property, and he could suddenly sell copies for $50 a piece.
While he preferred reading DC comics, most of his sales were for Marvel, especially X-Men, he said. He still has a 1981 issue featuring an ad he took out for his company, Discount Comics. If readers mailed 10 cents to a Santee address, the text read, he’d send a catalog listing more than 100,000 Marvels “priced at 1/2 what others charge.”
Sometimes he’d put more money in. Decades ago, he spent $80 on the first Marvel comic to feature Spider-Man. He sold it a few years later for ten times that number, the most he’d ever made on a single issue.
During an interview Monday, he became curious what that copy might net today.
He picked up his phone. “Hey Siri, ‘Amazing Fantasy #15, in mint,'” he said.
An answer popped up. He looked at the screen.
“Oh my gosh,” he said. “In 2011, it sold for one million, one hundred thousand — I didn’t need to read that!”
Even without a windfall, his revenue paid for college at Grossmont and SDSU and a master’s from National University. That and the houses he’d bought set him up to become a real estate appraiser at the county assessor’s office, and by 2002 he’d won his first election to the El Cajon City Council.
Comics money also purchased his current home, which was big enough to start a family.
Daniel Kendrick does not his first Comic-Con International.
It was 1990, and he was floating in the womb.
But he was there.
A memory he does have is wandering through the family garage as a toddler. Boxes of comics formed narrow corridors he could trundle through, the stacks stretching nearly to the ceiling.
He was allowed to dig in. Books with holographic covers were keepers. And at night, he’d lie in bed while his dad read him Superman.
When you’re a child around that many superheroes, it’s hard not to take their worlds seriously.
Gary recalled one family meal at Rubio’s when Daniel was about 6 years old. His son spotted two cops seated nearby. Daniel got up, approached the officers and demanded to know when they were going to capture the Joker.
“We’re working on it,” Gary recalled one saying.
It’s common to hear people in the entertainment industry say they grew up not knowing how Bugs Bunny walked and talked, or that drawing comics was a real job.
Daniel can’t a time when he didn’t know how the sausage was made. From the get-go he was loading U-Hauls with books for conventions. He’d wander Artist’s Alley at Comic-Con, talking to creators.
He also can’t a time when he didn’t want in.
Daniel attended UCLA and majored in history, with a film and television minor. An internship at the Los Angeles-based production company Chatrone led to a job, where he began working with people from the industry he’d grown up in.
He spent several years there until a friend called with an offer: IDW was hiring, and they needed someone immersed in animation and comics.
“Those are my two true loves,” Daniel thought.
He started at IDW Entertainment in 2020 and is now a senior vice president of film and television. (The related arm of IDW Publishing, perhaps best known for its run of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” has long been based in San Diego.)
He’s 32 and, besides the pandemic years, is confident he’s never missed a Comic-Con.
This convention will be a weird one. Writers are on strike. Actors, too.
He’s still jazzed.
“I’m really thankful to have grown up with my dad, who taught me everything there is know about being a comic fan,” he said. “And making your ion a career.”
