direct market, from the 1930s through the 1960s, most comic books were distributed through newsstands, pharmacies, and candy stores. The major distributors during this period included American News Company and Independent News, which was owned by National Periodical Publications, the parent company of DC Comics. Charlton Comics had their own distributor, Capital Distribution Company (not to be confused with the later entity Capital City Distribution). In 1957, Atlas (later Marvel Comics), was forced to switch from American News to that of its biggest rival, Independent News, which imposed draconian restrictions. As then-Atlas editor Stan Lee recalled in a 1988 interview, "[We had been] turning out 40, 50, 60 books a month, maybe more, and ... suddenly we went ... to either eight or 12 books a month, which was all Independent News Distributors would accept from us." In 1968, while selling 50 million comic books a year, Marvel revised the constraining distribution arrangement with Independent News it had reached under duress during the Atlas years, allowing Marvel now to release as many titles as demand warranted. By 1970, Independent News was defunct, absorbed into a larger and changing distribution business. 1960s and 1970s The underground comix movement of the late 1960s was part of an alternative distribution network that also served the underground press, which proliferated in the mid-1960s. As underground comix were not sold in newsstands or drugstores, head shops played an important role as retailers of those publications. The underground comix movement was based in San Francisco and a number of distributors originated in the Bay Area, including the Print Mint (beginning c. 1969), the already mentioned comic book store San Francisco Comic Book Company (which doubled as a publisher, beginning c. 1970), Bud Plant Inc. (1970), Last Gasp (1970), Keith Green/Industrial Realities (c. 1970), and Charles Abar Distribution. Around 1970, underground distributors sprang up in various regions of the U.S., including Los Angeles — George DiCaprio and Nova — and the Midwest — Donahoe Brothers Inc. (Ann Arbor, Michigan), Keep On Truckin' Coop/Big Rapids Distribution (Detroit, Michigan), Wisconsin Independent News Distributors (Madison, Wisconsin), Isis News (Minneapolis, Minnesota), and Well News Service (Columbus, Ohio). By the mid-1970s, Big Rapids had acquired all of its midwestern competitors; by that time, the market for underground comix had essentially dried up. The direct market was created in the early 1970s in response to the declining market for mainstream comic books on