Forbidding Titan
(photo copyright Richard Burton)
Mike Luckman passed away this week. In a rarefied corner of the world, he was a titan.
Mike Luckman, along with Mike Lake and Nick Landau, founded both Titan Distributors, an early and highly successful supplier of comics and science fiction in the U.K., and more meaningfully in my own journey, the Forbidden Planet chain of science fiction and comic book stores.
In the fall of 1987, I made the kind of bold move only a young person would undertake; after nearly a decade in Los Angeles, laboring on the fringes of the movie business, I pulled up stakes and moved to New York City with some vague hope of working in book publishing. Amazingly, I actually did! … for about three months, then was handed a pink slip and kicked back out onto the mean streets of Manhattan.
That was a dispiriting time, but desperation forced me downtown, away from the towering publishing houses on Fifth Avenue and into the shadows of Greenwich Village, where I ultimately felt much more at home. A kindly old shopkeeper named Tony took pity on this poor wretch in a cheap business suit, brandishing a printed résumé, and hired me as a $35 dollar a day bag checker and comic book wrangler for Forbidden Planet, my adopted home in New York for the next few years.
Mike Luckman had an office upstairs, where he oversaw the Greenwich Village store and our sister location uptown. From the beginning, I did not know what to make of him. Mike could be amiable in his Britishness, but also vicious in his Britishness. On a good day, he was all smiles and charm, but if business was not going well, he could be snappish and derisive.
I both admired and feared him. I was too intimidated by Mike to socialize with him outside of the store; and around him at work, at least initially, I was always on my best behavior. This might have had something to do with my own very English grandmother, who inspired a similar admixture of respect and dread.
Other than an initial introduction and the occasional greeting, it was a couple of months before Mike and I had anything approaching a conversation. I sensed that I should wait for him to approach me, and one day I was straightening up the graphic novels when I turned around and practically bumped into Mike Luckman, who was standing behind me and staring off into space with a rhapsodic look on his face. I glanced in the direction of his attention but could not determine what was so interesting until he indicated a radio near the window that was belting out a tune.
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“That’s the Traveling Wilburys”, he said, and went on to explain the lineup of the super-group and the historical teaming of these esteemed musicians. Mike and I found common ground in music and after that, we were friendly, perhaps even friends, and both discovered that each could be devastatingly funny. I never stopped being slightly daunted, and he never stopped being at least a little forbidding when called upon, but we came to understand one another.
Within a year of my walking in the door of Forbidden Planet, following the departure of the previous store manager, I was elevated to assistant manager under the selfsame Tony who had originally hired me. That was a remarkable sign of faith on Mike’s part and I tried my best to live up to it. I apprehend now that I may also have channeled some of Mike’s brusqueness, so to anyone whom I supervised and offended back then, I apologize; I was a kid, as were we all.
That is important to remember. We were all of us very young, in our early twenties and even some teenagers, many of us just starting out in the working world, others with somewhat more experience but not nearly as sophisticated as we thought. Or perhaps I am just talking about myself here.
There was a moment, a couple of years in, when I got fed up with all the drama and abruptly resigned. I do not now remember any of the details, but some confluence of grievances inspired me to write up a letter of resignation and drop it on Mike’s desk. He called me at home that night and invited me to come in the next day and talk to him about it. I did, he listened and gently chided me for not bringing these things to his attention earlier (he was probably right, although he also did not like to be bothered with the day-to-day details of running the store).
In the end, he agreed to be more proactive, returned my letter, and welcomed me back with a handshake. The only concrete promise I remember coming out of that meeting was a pledge to get us all work-sponsored health insurance, which he soon did. Years later, I realized that Mike must have already been working on that, but at the time, I was flattered enough to take credit for it.
And that was him in a nutshell. Mike could be curt and exacting, but he also employed a lot of young people, his people, science fiction (and music) fans who still got excited playing with toys. He was far from my idea of a father figure, but I understand now that, in his own way, he was looking out for us.
After I left NYC in 1991, I saw Mike only a few more times. The first was in the late 2000s, nearly twenty years later, when I dropped in on the store and found Mike working the toy counter in the back. It seemed that his days as a tyrant were behind him. We stepped out for some tea and had a good laugh when we realized that I, by then in my 40s, was closer to the age he was when I had worked for him.
The next memory is among my favorite, from 2013, when a group of us ex-Planeteers converged for lunch in the old store location at 821 Broadway, which had been transformed into a sandwich shop, then trouped across the street for a surprise visit to the new store. One by one, most (if not all) of us reintroduced ourselves to Mike, even some of those who had left under inauspicious circumstances. He remembered us all, or at least pretended to, and was moved nearly to tears, something I thought I’d never see. Even then, it was clear that his health was fading, so the news of Mike’s passing, though sad, is not a surprise.
On a private Facebook group of Forbidden Planet employees, there are many images of that day, but the one I treasure most is a short video of Mike Luckman dancing in the store with my friend Michele, a delightful young woman whom I had the privilege to hire back in the late 80s, swaying to the strains of the store radio in the background. I like to believe that it was playing The Traveling Wilburys.
outside the Greenwich Village Forbidden Planet in 2013
(photo courtesy the author)
