Sean Turnbough, MyComicShop chief operations officer, pulls out a box of comics Jan. 19 at the MyComicShop warehouse in Arlington. The store has around 10 million issues in inventory, including duplicates.
Photo by Samarie Goffney
In 1960, an Arlington junior high student named Buddy Saunders began selling comic books through the mail. It was the start of something that would become more: a lifelong hobby, career and passion.
In 1962, Joseph Licklider was appointed head of the Information Processing Techniques Office at the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, according to Britannica. He’d write memos talking about a world where machines could access data or information about any subject the human mind could think of — a precursor to the internet.
Buddy Saunders wouldn’t know about Licklider’s memos or concepts at the time, but Licklider’s ideas would change the lives of Buddy Saunders and his family down the line.
Now, the Saunders family owns one of the largest online comic book distribution websites in the United States.
Sean Turnbough, MyComicShop chief operations officer, takes out a 1897 issue of Life magazine Jan. 19 at the MyComicShop warehouse in Arlington. The oldest piece of media the shop owns is from the 1600s.
Photo by Samarie Goffney
MyComicShop sells comics of varying value not only to all fifty states, but also internationally. It is all done through an online marketplace, with orders shipped in the mail.
But first of all, it is a family business — literally and figuratively.
The company now has around 135 employees in a warehouse in east Arlington. Many of the employees started in entry-level positions and have worked their way up through in-house promotions.
“It’s a wonderful feeling, you know? Buddy and I only have the one son, Conan, but in a way I feel like I have a really big family,” MyComicShop Vice President Judy Saunders said.
Eden Rojas, MyComicShop human resources manager, began his career with the shop by working in the shipping department in 2014. Looking back on it, Rojas said it was a pretty big leap.
“This place has a lot of opportunity if you’re willing to do it and take those opportunities to do it,” he said. “I became the shipping manager after about three years working here and then at the end of 2024 is when I became the HR manager.”
Before working at MyComicShop, Rojas had only had one other job, at a shrimp processing plant in South Texas.
MyComicShop workers look through packages for shipping Jan. 19 at the MyComicShop warehouse in Arlington. The comic shop first opened as a brick-and-mortar store in 1977 and started selling online in 1997, according to its website.
“It gives me hope for other employees,” he said. “Being the HR manager now, with my journey in the company, I have the reference of being just a base-level employee and being upper management. I try to see in people what I did.”
The business starts with a nearly 60,000-square-foot warehouse. The comics and other products, such as pulp magazines, graphic novels and coffee table books, are stored in a room in the warehouse filled with shelves. Packers come in first thing in the morning and begin collecting books from inside the storage area.
Sean Turnbough, chief operating officer, said the area is sorted to try to minimize the amount of walking that the packers do.
“We programmed it to be smart enough to say, ‘Hey, you need to grab this book as you’re walking past it for order X, Y and Z,’” Turnbough said.
Once an order is picked, it goes through three check-in stages: Is it the correct book? Is it the correct grade? Is the order 100% correct? After everything is confirmed, the order goes to the mail order department to be boxed and shipped at the end of the day.
Turnbough said some of the other jobs within the business include bagging and labeling, comic grading and imaging.
Apart from getting shipments of new stock comics, a big way MyComicShop keeps up inventory is from the pre-owned market. The business contacts collectors and receives general inquiries from people interested in selling their collections.
Turnbough said for some collections, the company will fly employees across the country to evaluate comics and determine whether to buy a collection.
Sean Turnbough, MyComicShop chief operations officer, pulls out a “The Making of Aliens” coffee table book Jan. 19 at the MyComicShop warehouse in Arlington. The store switched to a fully online business model in the 2010s, selling off the last of its retail stores.
Photo by Samarie Goffney
“Sometimes we’ll do cross-country buying trips where we’ll start out in Seattle, Washington, and drive all through the Rockies all the way back here, picking up 20, 30, 40 collections at a time,” he said.
As the collection grows, MyComicShop continues to climb up the ranks as one of the biggest comic distributors in the country. Turnbough said right now they are in competition for the largest distributor.
Judy Saunders said it was never their goal to be the biggest online distributor. In the start, being an online distributor wasn’t in the cards.
In 1977, the first Lone Star Comics brick-and-mortar shop opened in Arlington. At the height of the company’s in-person stores, there were eight around the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
About 20 years later, the opportunity to sell online presented itself. Judy Saunders said they hired a software company in Dallas to build the first iteration of the website, but $200,000 later, there wasn’t much to behold.
Judy and Buddy Saunders’ son stepped in at this point. A computer science freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Conan Saunders helped program a website as a way for his parents to sell comics online.
“There might be a little glitch or something, and Buddy would say, ‘Hey, when does Conan get out of chemistry, I need to call him,’” Judy Saunders said. “Those were fun, early days with the website.”
She said neither she nor Buddy Saunders expected their son to work with them after he graduated. Judy Saunders said they didn’t know what he’d do, just that it would be fantastic.
Stacks of graphic novels sit on a table Jan. 19 at the MyComicShop warehouse in Arlington. The shop ships new comics every week.
“A huge part of our success is because of our son,” she said.
Like what he did in college, Conan Saunders, now president of the company, continues to work remotely while living in Austin with his wife and child.
As Judy and Buddy Saunders get older, neither have begun to slow down or have any thoughts of moving their business from Arlington.
“It was just that Arlington was the logical place for us to start our business and keep it based,” Judy Saunders said. “We live here now, just an easy commute from our house, and don’t have any desire to move any place else.”
“We did not have this as our ultimate goal; it just evolved over time since 1977. It’s just been growing and growing and growing, and we just love every minute of it.”
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