At least three 1960s comic book collections burned in a recent Forsyth County fire, the store owner says.
The back room where vintage Xmen, Avengers and Amazing Spiderman comics were stored is off limits until an investigation into a recent fire at Kapow! Comics concludes, store owner Andy Diehl told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Fire damages comic book store in Forsyth County. Batman was there. pic.twitter.com/G4liVou9ni
— Berndt Petersen (@BPetersenWSB) February 27, 2017
About $30,000 of vintage comics were in those three boxes, Diehl said.
“Those books are irreplaceable,” he said. “It’s not like they are minting any more. Those comics are gone forever.”
Diehl said about 60 percent of his inventory was lost in the Feb. 16 blaze that effectively put him and his seven employees out of work.
“We’ve been beating ourselves up about being under insured,” Diehl said. “No one has been collecting a paycheck.”
He had just last year moved his store into the new location in the Lanier Crossing Shopping Center. More than four years of hard work had just finally started to pay off, Diehl said.
“We just started making a profit,” Diehl said. “It takes a few years and we had just started to hire more people.”
And all the inventory they bought over the holidays went up in smoke, too.
After crews cleaned the store, Diehl said he got a bill.
“We have literally shelled out every dime we have to get people in here to clean our stuff up,” he said.
Insurance agents must determine the cause of the fire before closing the case.
“We were going to try to open Saturday, but we have to get an inspection so it should be mid-week next week,” Diehl said.
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