Time Warp Comics Has Sold to New Owners

One of the best comic book stores in the Denver area is about to enter a new era. Wayne Winsett just celebrated his fortieth anniversary in the comics retail business, and this is his last year heading up fan-favorite store Time Warp Comics and Games.

"It was just time," he says. "I'd planned for various reasons to retire at 65. That was five years ago, and I had just gotten the ball rolling and had some interest — and then COVID happened. And it was just impossible to sell a business during the pandemic."

So Winsett waited. After all, it was still a job he loved. "I still enjoy coming into work every day," he admits. He kept the store going through COVID, in part through the stream sales he does with his employees every other Tuesday afternoon from 4 to 6 p.m., selling rarities from the store and from his own collection. "I've come to love those stream sales," he says. "I owe it all to the guys at I Want More Comics, who'd convinced me to start doing them to help pay the rent. And it has. It's also become one of my favorite things to do."

Winsett isn't alone in that — a core group of longtime customers joins almost every time Time Warp runs it as a Facebook Live event. "A lot of people tell me it's become the highlight of their week," Winsett says. "And I get it. It's mine, too."

But as Stan Lee used to say, fear not, true believers: Winsett isn't giving up the stream sales even after he's no longer the owner. He'll just be joined by the new owners, Kelly and Dottie Cooke, who will take over on January 1.

"They're going to do a great job," promises Winsett, who says he's overjoyed to be able to sell the store to such people as the Cookes. "Over the time I've had the store on the market," he says, "most of the interested parties just wanted to invest in a business. They didn't know anything about comics, and owning a comic book store — successfully, anyway — involves a lot more than that.

"The biggest challenge has been finding a buyer who had the combination of desire, money, and knowledge of the comics themselves," he continues. "There's just so many tiny details that you have to know to make a store like this run and serve your customers well. That's key. People can get their comics from any number of places, so you have to make your store a place they want to come to, a place where we all speak the same language."

So it meant a lot to Winsett that the Cookes were longtime customers. "I'd love to have sold it to my employees or had my son take over," he says. "But those options just didn't work out. And this really feels right. I've known Kelly and his dad for forty years or so. It's fantastic for me to get to sell the store to someone I know and have known for a long time."

Kelly Cooke was only a kid when his father first took him to Time Warp. "First comic book I ever bought," Cooke recalls. "It was an issue of Transformers back in the day. It's amazing to say that I bought my first comic from Wayne, and now I'm getting to buy the whole store. It's an honor and a privilege. And it'll be a lot of fun."

Winsett's run with the store hasn't always been easy — comic shops are a specialty market, and many of them have fallen with the boom-and-bust roller coaster of the collectibles markets. But Time Warp — and Winsett — have stood the test of time. "Too many great shops have had to just close their doors at some point," he says. "So many of us started these stores back in the 1970s, and many of us are getting pretty long in the tooth. It's not an easy business."

Luckily for comic shops in general, collectability skyrocketed in the 1980s, despite simultaneously being vilified by some for the speculation it brought about, which in turn caused some lean times for the industry when the bull market went bear. But collecting has buoyed the medium. "It's unlike most other publications," says Winsett. "It's similar but also very different from other publications like newspapers and magazines. Those might be endangered, but comics aren't. People still want to fill collections, people still want to hold a comic in their hands. There was great worry a few years back that digital comics would kill print, but comics fans still want to have the physical copy. There's a tactile sense that fans find important."

That draw of the comic itself is something to which Winsett still isn't immune after all these years in business. "When I started collecting comics as a kid, I used to volunteer to help put out the books on the rack so I could get mine first," he laughs. "I still love that. It's one of my favorite things, opening up those boxes of new comics and seeing the amazing cover art and holding them in my hands. Even smelling them — that comic book smell never gets old."

Still, Winsett says, the thing he'll miss most in no longer heading up Time Warp Comics and Games is the people: "I've made so many great friends through Time Warp over the last forty years. And not just customers — employees, too, especially once they've moved to whatever they do next. That's been very, very satisfying, and many of those people I now count as my best friends. In some cases, the best I've ever had."

So yes, this might be the end of the Winsett era of Time Warp comics. Call it — in true comic-book tradition — the store's Golden Age, where it all began. But remember comics' Silver Age, which not only continued the great old stuff (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman), but also brought in some new (Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Avengers).

So here's to Time Warp Comics: May it have even better continuity than the comics it will happily continue to sell.

For more information, see the Time Warp website.