Time Warp Comics celebrates 25th anniversary of local ownership

The big news this week at Boulder's Time Warp Comics and Games has nothing to do with the new story line for Green Lantern, a long-awaited graphic novel by Neil Gaiman or even the latest Hollywood superhero movie.

"They just announced today that Disney is buying Marvel (Comics) for $4 billion," says Wayne Winsett, who bought the store and rechristened it in 1984.

He sees the Disney-Marvel deal as a nice little birthday present for Time Warp, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this month.

"This is going to be a good thing, because it looks like Disney plans to keep the publishing arm," Winsett says with palpable relief.

That means Marvel, the long-time heavyweight of American comics, won't take its superheroes exclusively digital, at least for now. Time Warp has battled its share of economic villains for a quarter of a century, but Winsett says a digital revolution in comics would break the store's back -- just as Bane conquered Batman, but with no promise of eventual resurrection.

"That would be disastrous for us. What am I going to do, start selling Kindles?" he says, wearing jeans and a rumpled "District 9" T-shirt.

Winsett, 54, came to Boulder in 1976 after a hitch in the U.S. Air Force. He discovered Mile High Comics in its original home, a

"creepy little" basement dungeon on pre-Mall Pearl Street. He started working there ("A 14-year-old kid was basically my boss," he says with amusement) and eventually became manager.

In 1984, Mile High Comics founder Chuck Rozanski of Boulder, offered to sell five stores to their managers.

"I jumped in with both feet, against the advice of my attorney and my parents," Winsett says.

Faced with steep monthly payments of about $3,000 (about $6,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars) Winsett lived in a cramped room at the back of the store at 1717 Pearl Street and "ate macaroni and cheese most nights."

Somehow, he stayed afloat. Fads like Pokemon, Pogs -- "Basically little circles of paper that were a license to print

money," he says -- and more recently, trading-card games have helped him survive wild oscillations of popular interest in comics. Like a superhero itself, Time Warp has so far been indestructible.

"It's a testimony to his perseverance and grit that Wayne has toughed it out," says Rozanski, 54, an elder statesman in American comics and still master of the Mile High Comics empire. "Think of all the businesses that were (in Boulder) in 1984 that remain; I'd say 95 percent are gone. ... But Wayne has a real adroitness, an ability to deal with changing times and circumstances."

Long-time customers of the store say Time Warp is among nation's best comic stores and has always been more than simply a place to shop.

"When I first went in there, I felt like this is my subculture, these are my people," says Seattle's G. Willow Wilson, 27, a 1999 Boulder High School graduate and author of the graphic novel "Cairo" and comic-book series "Air."

Winsett cites a statistic that only a tenth of one percent of Americans read comics of any kind. Yet 80 years after Superman's debut, comics have finally gained a certain cachet, even cool.

"That's completely opposite of when I grew up," Winsett says. "People really looked down on them."

Today, the University of Colorado has a stupendously popular course on graphic novels (for which Time Warp supplies the books on the syllabus) and comic readers no longer need skulk in the closet. Even Winsett's own son, a Colorado State University student who resisted his father's adoration of comics most of his life, is coming around.

"Now he wants to know what he should be reading," says Winsett, who started his son off with Green Lantern.

But comics, like anything, must evolve with the times and Winsett says the current state of the industry is encouraging: More titles than ever, better writing and art and a gradual move from those beloved, flimsy monthly comics to book-quality graphic novels.

Still, befitting its name, Time Warp looks, feels and definitely smells ("That musty, almost moldy smell," Winsett says lovingly) much like it has for a quarter of a century. Books adorn every wall, rows of carefully filed comic boxes fill display shelves and $400 busts of square-jawed superheroes look protectively down from high shelves, teeth gritted. Kids and adults constantly flit in and out the door, and whatever their interests, superheroes, alternative comics, or the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, some old-time customers say how the store makes them feel.

"There's a community there. Wayne knows his customers really, really well," says long-time customer Robyn Marcotte, 32. "Buying there is not like buying a book at Barnes & Noble."

But is Time Warp too old-school, too friendly, too local to last in a digital, Internet world? The Disney-Marvel deal may change the game -- for now. Beyond that, who knows?

"But if anyone can meet the challenges, it's Wayne," Rozanski says.