Australian comic shop ads

Back in the day I used to have to offset the costs of printing my comics by selling ads to comics shops. In the early ninties I could rely on Kings Comics (George Vlastaras) for a juicy full colour back cover ad and Phantom Zone (Glenn Ford) would always take the inside back cover - the prime spots! Eventually Kings dropped out and it became harder and harder to recoup my costs ... the early Hairbutt newwstand editions would hardly ever sell beyond 13-17% ... which left a heck of a lot of unsold copies to throw/give away. Later I found out the distributors would dump bundles of copies that remained in the back room unopened, but that's another story! I really appreciated the response from Comic shops and rarely encounted any negativity. One popular Perth store repeatedely refused to put my calls through to the manager. One Queensland store raved about the dummy copy of 'Soft Boiled Tales' I sent ... 'best Australian comic ever' etc etc ... but next time I called the guy virtually hung up in my ear. Sheesh ... I'm just trying to start an Australian comics industry here! Gimme a break!

Those were the days ...