St. Mark’s Comics is a New York landmark, but most people around the world, and most people in Manhattan, think of the East Village location. Why not? How many people remember their Tribeca location, at 150 Chambers St.? That’s not a rhetorical question—I’d like to know. My brother and I spent hours in there with our mom talking to Jeff, Alex, and Mitch from 1999 to 2003. That was the only time I was ever seriously interested in comic books—my brother continued reading manga for another six or seven years. I read Marvel (mostly Spider-Man), all of Akira, and a handful of books like Preacher, Hellboy, and The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, which Jeff and Alex recommended. It made for a terrible movie, but I never got to talk with them about it—we’d already moved to Baltimore, and my mom and I saw it by ourselves at the Towson Commons 8, getting lost on Falls and Cold Spring, less than a month living in the city.
Before we left, Jeff gave me a copy of the script for Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy, more than a year away from its release. The first screenplay I ever saw, the first one I ever read, still the best gift I ever received. But the store at 150 Chambers closed in 2004, and we would’ve had to say goodbye anyway; in retrospect, leaving Tribeca 16 months after the September 11 attacks insulated my brother and me from even more trauma, anxiety, and depression living next to the worst disaster in a generation. If that sounds particularly obvious, it’s only because I miss the place where I grew up.
“According to the owner of the store, Mitch Cutler, they were sadly on the wrong side of Chambers street after 911. The police considered everything south of that a crime scene, and so when they tried to reopen there was too much damage done to the neighborhood: thousands of people lost their jobs and were relocated. There was nobody there to sell books to. Mitch built up St. Marks Comics himself and all his hard work in dodging potential setbacks is made worth it when he sees the impact his store has had on generations of customers who depend on him. ‘It was very heartening that on Wednesday morning, September 12th, when we were here open with our new comics (every Wednesday is New Comics Day), we had a guy say to his friends hey, I told you they’d be open!’”
Something that always stuck out to me in the store was a giant poster on the left wall by the entrance. It was for a movie called Army of Darkness. I know we talked about it with Jeff and Alex, and they must’ve brought up the fact that the same guy that directed this movie also directed the Spider-Man movie we were all looking forward to so much, one that didn’t disappoint. There was a man that looked like Jim Carrey with a chainsaw arm and a tattered shirt bestriding a hill above medieval swordsmen, skeletons, and one barely-clothed woman at his knee (and this is all from memory).
But I never saw Army of Darkness. I learned what everyone else knew at some point, but even then, I didn’t seek out either Evil Dead movie until a year into the pandemic. I missed revivals of both at The Charles last year, and now that programmer John Standiford has made Thursday at 9 one night, the place is always packed. It was even pretty full for A Hen in the Wind, a 1948 Yasujiro Ozu movie I’d never heard of, this past Monday. Post-pandemic, I’ve noticed a significant increase in revival attendance, and if we can’t have regular 35mm screenings in Baltimore, houses packed with good audiences are fine with me.
Recently, one of those revivals was Army of Darkness. I didn’t mark it down on my calendar at first, not that interested after the first two Evil Dead movies. But a couple weeks beforehand, I remembered the poster, and I knew I had to go for Jeff and Alex. Jeff Zornow, a great illustrator who also once rendered two of my characters, Idiot Man and Block Head, better than I ever could. Alex went on to open a comic shop of his own in Brooklyn. My mom talked to him once years later on Facebook, and I remember looking Jeff up around then, too. If you ever read this, thank you, guys. I finally saw Army of Darkness. I hope we can talk about it one day.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @nickyotissmith