HAVERHILL, Massachusetts — Nestled away in a small, nondescript plaza on Primrose Street, Glenn O’Leary stands behind the counter in his store, eating a slice of pizza and marveling at his good fortune.
“If you were to have asked me 20 years ago if I would still be here, I wouldn’t have known what to tell you,” O’Leary said. “The landlord was skeptical and he’d only sign me to one year leases initially. He asked me, ‘you can pay the bills with a comic book store?’”
He has. And then some.
Since January 1993, O’Leary, 47, has owned The Comic Book Palace, a mecca for area comic book aficionados and the subject of a 2013 documentary he is hoping will soon become a multi-episode series through New York production company Olive Tree TV, which hopes to stream the series on Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime.
Compiled and edited by local filmmaker Felipe “Phil” Jorge after several months of hanging around the shop, filming O’Leary’s interactions with customers, “Comic Book Palace: The Documentary” was a smash hit, and appeared in multiple local, national and international film festivals, winning several awards in the process.
After getting laid off from his job at Polartec in 2012, Jorge approached O’Leary about filming with his one-man camera crew at the one-man comic shop, a place which he himself had frequented as a kid.
“I told him I didn’t want to make it like ‘Pawn Stars’ or one of these scripted reality shows. It’s not a Newbury Comics — it’s ‘The Comic Book Palace,’” Jorge said. “It was like putting a kid in a toy store and saying ‘buy what you want.’”
A labor of love
Like O’Leary, Jorge, 34, is a Haverhill native who began filming his documentary in August 2012 and continued until February 2013.
“I used to come in as a kid to buy 25-cent comics. I moved to Florida for four years, but when I came back, it was like the place had never changed, like it was frozen in time,” Jorge said, remarking that the shop still has the same carpet from when O’Leary moved in, as well as the same faint smell of mildew.
“I thought he was a quack at first when he told me he was looking to do a documentary,” O’Leary said of Jorge. “He said he wanted to do something on comics because he liked them as a kid. So he came in and just taped what was going on.”
Long stereotyped as the domain of geeky kids and socially awkward middle-aged men, the world of comic books has exploded following the release of several blockbuster movies and the success of television programs, such as “The Walking Dead,” a series which O’Leary said many people are unaware came from a comic.
“You don’t see that stigma anymore. Doctors come in here, lawyers come in here, people who have respected professions,” said O’Leary, who owns the entire run of “The Amazing Spider-Man” and still remembers his first Batman comic in 1975. “It’s no longer just folks who live in their parents’ basement. Women buy comics now. I always hoped it’d be this way.”
A former grocery store clerk, O’Leary opened The Comic Book Palace with a dream and a massive inventory, composed of his own 50-box comic collection and several boxes he purchased from another collector.
On a good day, O’Leary said he makes about $1,000 from the sale of sports cards and fantasy trading card games, and $500 from the sale of comic books. When he opened the store in 1993 though, it was a risk worth taking.
“If it didn’t work out, I knew I could go back to Market Basket,” said O’Leary, who now resides in Plaistow, New Hampshire, with his wife, Annette. “But I didn’t want to be a 40-something wondering what I could’ve done.
“Financially, I’d probably have been better off staying there,” he said. “But I’m doing what I love.”
A devoted customer base
Over the two decades he has owned the shop, O’Leary has spread his love of Spider-Man, Daredevil and many other beloved characters to two generations of area comic book fans who have grown up in his store.
“I have customers who came in with their parents as kids who are now bringing their own kids in … it’s kind of crazy,” he said between bites of pizza.
Standing in the shop with his son and nephew Thursday, Steve Melito of Salem, New Hampshire, said he lived near O’Leary growing up in Bradford and though they didn’t know each other then, he is happy to give The Comic Book Palace his business.
“I started coming in six years ago when the store I used to go to, Collectors Coop, closed. It’s part of my Thursday routine,” said Melito, who works at night for a defense contractor in Nashua. “I was in the Navy and served eight years in Guam, so it was tough to get comics then.”
An avid reader of The Avengers, X-Men and The Green Lantern, Melito said the shop’s atmosphere is “pretty much the same” as shops he remembered visiting when he was younger.
“You have people who come in and can talk comics. If you haven’t read a title in awhile, they can tell you what’s going on,” he said.
Melito estimates his personal collection to be around 35,000 books, and purchases between 10 and 15 books a week from the shop, while his 7-year old son, Cameron, helps O’Leary organize his shelves of baseball cards.
“It’s a pleasure,” Cameron, a fan of Disney comics, said, while Melito’s nephew Kolby Dezan, 14, of Salem said he prefers books by Marvel over those published by rival DC Comics, which counts Batman and Superman in its roster.
Dezan said his uncle got him into comics about six years earlier and that he’s been accompanying him to the shop for about a year.
For young teenagers like Kolby, the allure of comic books is coming back, thanks largely to big-screen adaptations of titles, such as Marvel’s “The Avengers,” “Ironman” and “Captain America,” which have grossed billions of dollars worldwide.
And it is this resurgence that has Jorge and O’Leary hoping enough people have a desire to see the inner-workings of the comics industry, and that this curiosity will lead to a series on the shop.
Hopeful for the future
If the five-episode treatment being pitched by Olive Tree TV gets picked up, it will lead to more episodes being filmed for a series, which would bring more publicity for The Comic Book Palace, which O’Leary “conservatively” estimates has an inventory of at least 30,000 books.
No matter what potential success a show could bring, Haverhill’s comic book king said he is content right where he is.
“If I was to move to a larger place, it’d be a bigger rent, I’d have to hire employees. People know where I am and I sell what I know,” O’Leary said.
The Comic Book Palace’s customer base is wide, with regular customers traveling from not only New Hampshire and Maine, but also New York and Pennsylvania. O’Leary even airmails new release comics to a former Haverhill customer who now lives in Utah.
“He said I’d rather get my books from you,” O’Leary said proudly. “We have another guy who lives in Pennsylvania but has family nearby, and when he visits once or twice a year, he stops in.”
Jorge, the documentary filmmaker, said he hopes that a successful series would catapult him to be able to work in film full time.
“If I could pay my bills with [filmmaking], I’d be totally fine with that,” said Jorge, who works in Newburyport and is currently working on another documentary about a boxing club in Haverhill in his spare time. “I don’t want to be a millionaire, but I want to make filmmaking my job.”
Despite the onward march of technology and the continued rise of the Internet, which Jorge and O’Leary hope will introduce the shop to even more people, the Comic Book King said he still believes the essence of what draws people to comics will never change.
“A lot of people, they want to feel the book, the paper and pages,” O’Leary said, reminiscing on the first comic books he purchased at a variety store in Lafayette Square in the early 1980s. “If you’re reading online, it’s just not the same. There’s an experience to this and we’re all in the same thing.”
“It’s never changed and I hope it’s there for a long time to come,” Jorge said of the Palace.
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency LLC.