Wednesday’s Hero
A small comic shop in northern Michigan that became a refuge for me long before I understood why. The red carpet, the shelves wrapping around the room, Dave’s bike outside the window, and the feeling of stepping into a place that made me feel less alone.
A frequent haunt of mine starting in my junior year of high school (2006) was a quaint local comic store called Comics North. It was run by a bespectacled man in his fifties with a receding hairline, a salt and pepper beard, and a burgundy long sleeve shirt with rainbow suspenders. His name was Dave. According to its long defunct Facebook page, Comics North was the longest running LCS in Northern Michigan, having been around for 28 years. It sat on the corner of Main Street and US 23 in downtown Cheboygan, directly across from the State Street Bridge, a drawbridge known as the Cheboygan Bascule Bridge. Across the street was the Kingston Theater with its bright gold marquee. Dave also worked there as the movie splicer in this pre digital era.
My immersion in superhero comic books began with falling in love with the film Batman Begins, the first in the Dark Knight Trilogy by Christopher Nolan. My brother and I saw Batman Begins across the street at the Kingston Theater. Not long after, we walked by Comics North, which had mannequins in superhero uniforms and a magnificent display poster for a bi monthly comic book series called All Star Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder. The artwork was so crisp, detailed, and hyper realistic by Jim Lee, who instantly became my favorite comic book penciller with his portrayal of an ultra masculine and herculean Batman leaping through the sky with his grapple gun and his young sidekick in red, yellow, and green at his side.
Frank Miller, the writer of the All Star Batman series, has been mired in controversy due to his political views. He is also known for the movies adapted from his graphic novels, including 300 and Sin City, among others. Hugely contentious, All Star Batman was panned for portraying an unhinged Batman who cackled while proclaiming, “I’m the god damn Batman,” racing in a turbo charged tank Batmobile through the seedy, graffiti covered underbelly of Gotham City. Many readers and critics were shocked that Batman knowingly put a minor, Robin, through danger and deprivation. In Miller’s defense, I believe he was correct that if there really were a Batman, he would have to be a little insane.
Wednesdays quickly became my favorite day of the week because it was new comic book day at Comics North, when it received its weekly UPS shipment of titles from DC, Marvel, Image, Dark Horse, and more. Dave later nicknamed me his “Wednesday guy” because I was so punctual about arriving at his store around noon. If I saw his signature vintage bike with its rear pannier in front of the shop, I knew the store was open. Often, I would head there on my lunch break from high school, ecstatic to get my hands on the latest issues of The Amazing Spider Man, DC’s The Brave and the Bold, and Marvel’s Civil War. The covers were bombastic and colorful, superheroes in dynamic action with their brawny arms out in flight and jovial smiles on their faces. Entering Comics North made me feel like I was in a spaceship speeding through vast parallel universes. These stories assured me that the good guys and girls would prevail.
Sometimes I would sleep with my beloved comic books, such as Wanted, Kick Ass, and Criminal, spread around me on my bed, careful not to damage any of them in my slumber. They were all meticulously “bagged and boarded,” as it is called in the comics community, in a plastic bag with a piece of cardboard to protect their condition, then placed in a cardboard box with dividers for alphabetical order. In those years of going to Comics North, I accumulated hundreds of comics and read most of them multiple times. A perk of being the first to visit Dave’s store every week was that I had first dibs on variant covers, which were rarer editions with different artwork from the main cover and sometimes had collector value.
Comics North is long gone now, and there is no local comic store in Cheboygan anymore. I remember feeling lucky that my hometown even had a comic book store at all, because it was not a large town, with only about 5,000 people within the city limits. Comics North burned down sometime around 2011 or 2012. By then, I was no longer living in Michigan. I had moved across the world to be with my father in Punjab Province, Pakistan, my provenance.
A friend of mine who still lived in Cheboygan shared photos on Facebook of an inferno on Main Street, which primarily affected Comics North but also the adjacent Lindeman’s furniture store, owned by my aunt’s in laws, and a small restaurant called Top of the Greek on the second floor.
Curious to find out what exactly happened, I reached out to Dave through either Facebook or email. He confirmed there had been a large blaze and that he had lost most of his inventory to smoke damage. The store was insured, but he told me he would not be reopening. Riding around this sleepy small town on his vintage bike, he had an artistic spirit. Northern Michigan in the mid to late 2000s was not a very welcoming place to people in the LGBT community.
I vividly remember what Comics North looked like. It felt like it had red carpets and the scent of a worn library. The layout started on the left, with shelves in alphabetical order holding comic series from the previous month or older. The shelves wrapped around the store, and the blessed new comics were displayed on the right side near the front. In the middle was a display with collectibles such as older, valuable comics like the original The Incredible Hulk series and other memorabilia.
Dave also penciled and inked his own locally made series, but I was so absorbed with Spider Man, the New Avengers, Planet Hulk, and major crossover events like Civil War and Infinite Crisis that I asked him little about his hand drawn comics. The store had displays with graphic novels and of course the mannequins in superhero uniforms. Dave confided that a substantial part of his income came from selling games like D&D.
Last I heard, Dave was still working at the Kingston Theater. Over the years, I have daydreamed about creating cosmic, multiverse shattering superhero stories with Dave in sequential art form. Not being a comic book reader anymore, I do feel a sense of loss, because Comics North was a refuge for me as a minority person in a rural American town that often marginalized people like me. Once, a pick up truck chased my friends and me around Division Street, and we had to hide in a ditch. One of my childhood friends looked at me and said, “Thanks a lot, Ameer.”
Looking back at that time, I was disillusioned with rural America because, throughout American media and society, people who looked like me with similar names were depicted as bloodthirsty and misogynistic terrorists intent on America’s destruction. From my perspective, it was America that had bloodlust, waging multiple aggressive wars overseas. It was even more disheartening because I had roots in Cheboygan on my mother’s side, people who were my flesh and blood.
Copyright © 2025 Ameer Kiani. All Rights Reserved