(This article originally appeared in COMIC MEDIA #2, dated March 1972, ed. Nick Landau). As a science fiction and comics dealer I'm often asked to give authoritative verification of supposition, legend and doubt. And all too often I'm made painfully aware of the narrow limits of my knowledge. I can, however, write with authority, without any fear of contradiction, on one of those particular aspects of comic collecting: comic dealing in Singapore. My interest in comic dealing began when I visited a second-hand bookshop and noticed a pile of second-hand comics. In those days I did not know a Sad Sack from a Famous Funnies but spent a few months rippling through the pile looking for any title, such as Tom and Jerry, which might interest my son. No luck, but I did catch sight of a few titles from the Fawcett stable of which I hadn't heard - not surprisingly - since my own comic reading days a quarter of a century earlier when I had been as au fait with the field as any Ditko fan of today. After some days of considering the situation I returned to the shop and bought up all the old titles I could find. I spent the remainder of the day visiting every bookshop and roadside bookstall on the island, twenty six in all, scattered over an area the size of the Isle of Wight. I filled my car with comics and after cataloguing them, no mean task, I was in business. I had some unique ideas on comic values in those days, listing a 1948 Blondie at 10/- and a 1947 Captain America at half that price. The Singapore dealers had themselves an interesting method of pricing comics. Virtually all comics from a 1950 Batman in good condition to a month old Sgt. Fury which was falling to pieces, were exactly the same price. Slightly higher priced were the newer, more popular range of Marvel superheroes, which, incidentally, were banned in the Republic the following year. Within a very short time of my taking an intensive interest comic prices began to soar. It appeared that there was an Englishman on the island who was crazy enough to pay the increased prices. And unlike the majority of customers he did not follow the tradition of bargaining for the comics he bought but had even been known to amaze the store-keepers with a cheery, "Keep the change." It soon became evident that the majority of the more important dealers were buying their supplies of old comics from a single source and a little stringent footwork put me in contact with their supplier, a Chinese from the Katong district, who had soon realised that he was sitting on steady source of income. We quickly came to a mutually beneficial agreement. I would call in every two or three weeks and he would give me first refusal on any old comics he hod managed to obtain in the interim, and of course I would pay an inflated price for anything I purchased. I never did discover his sources. Nor those of some of the other dealers, for of course I continued to look elsewhere, too. Two or three months would sometimes drift by without my being able to obtain comics more than a year or two old and I would tell myself that I had finally denuded the island (as I really had done in the science fiction field within the first few months of arriving) and then, unexpectedly, a dealer would unearth twenty, thirty or perhaps even forty Golden Age comics. One dealer telephoned me without warning. "You want old comics," he said. "I have." Two statements of fact. "What are they?" I asked. "You come see," he said, "customer bring in. You want, you pay, I save." I agreed to go along and see them and pay a high price for any I bought. In the Orient one makes a purchase according to a set of carefully laid-down but never mentioned rules and one does not, at such a juncture, rush out excitedly to examine the wares. One has to show disinterest. I managed to show disinterest for an entire twenty four hours, and then rushed out excitedly. "I just happened to be passing," I told the shop-keeper, so I thought I might as well call in." That's the way to play the game.He wasn't impressed. "I see if I still have 'em," he said, with his experienced brand of one-upmanship. In a considerably short time I held a monopoly of the entire island, as far as being the middle-man between Singapore and organised fandom, and estimated that any comic coming onto the market stood a 99% chance of passing into my hands.I also tried hard to establish a similar monopoly with the comics circulating in Malaya, but there the pickings were erratic, to say the least There are two shops in Jahore Bahru which deal virtually entirely in Charlton romance titles. Malacca boasts the Riverside Book Shop whose few comics are offered at prices you wouldn't wish on a rival collector. Kuala Lumpur, the Federation's capital, must be able to claim the highest incidence of book-shops per square mile in the entire world, making the tourist's conception of Charing Cross Road as bustling in comparison as the Gobi Desert. And not one of them deals in comics. In fact, I found only one which deals in anything other than Malay textbooks. But if you go down to Tek Soon Street in Penang you're sure of a big surprise. There are three or four well-stocked comic stalls there and as far as I know inflation hasn't yet caught up with their prices. (They don't, incidentally, answer letters!) The most amazing incident to befall a comics dealer occurred during the latter part of my Singapore tour. I had been visiting my Singapore friend one evening and had parked down a darkened side-street. I had returned to my car and was about to insert the key in the lock when a voice in the darkness behind me said, "Excuse me, you are looking for comics?" I turned round to find facing me the tallest Chinese imaginable. He was a double for the Japanese wrestler in the old Cagney film, "Blood on the Sun". I admitted that I was interested and he told me that he had a large pile of pre-code horror comics for disposal. He verified his statement by naming some of the titles. "Come to my house and see them," he invited. He piled them up on a table before me and as I examined them he kept pulling out different comics and putting them to one side. "This one I have not read... .this one I'll keep for now," and so on. The pile began to dwindle alarmingly, forcing my hand. "How much do you want for them?" I asked. He named a figure twice as much as I'd estimated his ceiling price to be. I gasped. "Ah," he said, "I know you will pay this price. I have calculated that these comics are worth this price to you." "How do you know that?" He said, "Because I have followed you in different shops and know how much you have willingly paid for comics very much like these." Who could quibble with enterprise like that? I whipped round to a nearbye store where Elizabeth was shopping for a new dress. The money I gave you for the dress," I gasped, "where is it?" The dress had to wait. I lie awake at night thinking about caches like that one. If, in Singapore and Penang, Golden Age comics can come to light with astonishing regularity in abundance, what can one find hidden away nearer to home? Just think...that little old lady living at the corner of the next street might have, in her attic? It isn't insomnia which keeps me awake at night. - Ron Bennett.
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