Zounds! A Hobby-Turned-Business : Success Story Reads Like a Comic Book

Chuck Rozanski began reading comic books when he was 5. By his 12th birthday, he was collecting his favorites. Seven years later, he opened his first shop in the back of a science-fiction bookstore.

Rozanski quickly moved from the basement store to the big time. He now owns Mile High Comics, a mail-order business that he advertises as “America’s Largest Comics Dealer.”

At any one time, he is storing 3 million collector comics. His business generates annual sales of $4 million, with a distribution firm his wife runs and the five stores he started.

Success has come as no surprise to Rozanski, who is 31 now and still loves Walt Disney comics best. In fact, his role model is Uncle Scrooge, the Donald Duck relative who owned 2 cubic acres of money.

“I’ve given my whole life to comics, and I always knew I would make it,” Rozanski said. “I’ve always been able to survive my mistakes. I’ve known people who were much smarter, but for some reason, they couldn’t turn that into anything. You’ve got to have the capacity to capitalize on luck and the capacity to survive bad luck.”

Adopted in America

Born in Bavaria, Rozanski was adopted at the age of 4 by the American soldier who married his mother. He went into business at age 6, going door to door in Michigan offering to shovel snow for neighbors. He also sold pop bottles and fruit.

“I still have some of the coins I made when I was 6,” he said. “I’ve always been big on savings and big on investment. I was in elementary school when I put together my first financial portfolio.”

At 14, Rozanski realized that his friends were willing to pay top prices for certain old comics, and he began selling them.

By the time he entered junior high school, his father had retired and moved the family to Colorado Springs, where Rozanski sold comics at flea markets. At 17, he attended a comics collectors’ convention.

“Before I opened my first store, I spent the summer living in my mother’s car and driving from comic convention to convention,” Rozanski said. “I’d use the money I made at one convention to get a money order and send it on to the next convention, to rent booth space. I’d sleep on someone’s floor or on a picnic bench or in the car.”

Earned Seed Money

By summer’s end, Rozanski had accumulated $800. He used it to open his first shop in Boulder in September, 1974.

Rozanski studied finance at the University of Colorado, but dropped out in his senior year, when he realized that he was making more money than his professors.

Ask a seller of classic books about the money he has made, and he might quote Tolstoy. Ask Rozanski, and he quotes Uncle Scrooge: “I made it by being tougher than the toughies and smarter than the smarties, and I made it square !”