Organic-man to the rescue! What comic book giant Chuck Rozanski ate for a week

By John Lehndorff, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published September 23, 2008 at 3 p.m.

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When Chuck Rozanski really likes something, he tends to want more of it - a lot more.

Fascinated with Spider-Man and all comic books as a teenager, he started to collect them. At age 53, his Denver warehouse and stores contain 8 million comic books, give or take 100,000, making it the largest such cache in the world.

Rozanski loves all things Southwestern, and in 1994 he started gathering Pueblo Indian pottery. His Mile High Comics warehouse also is home to a 6,000-piece, not-for-sale collection of pottery, the largest in the United States.

And when it came to food, Rozanski wanted the fresh, unadulterated fare he ate as a child on his grandmother's farm in Germany.

"She had worked for a Parisian household. She was a great cook," he said. "Sunday was rabbit day. She made wonderful rabbit with onions."

In 1991, long before organic, sustainable and local became common culinary adjectives, Rozanski and his wife, Nanette Furman, moved their four daughters - Rowan, Aleta, Tanith and Elsbeth - to the 32-acre Jay Hill Farm just outside Boulder.

Their collective passion for organic gardening has blossomed into an enterprise that supplies restaurants, including Denver's Z Cuisine, and customers at the Boulder County Farmers' Market with everything from cinnamon basil and yellow chiles to salad greens and San Marzano tomatoes.

Rozanski said his love of good food and a compulsion to keep track of things prompted him to immediately say yes when the Rocky asked him to keep a food diary for a week.

"It was interesting to find how I made my food choices," Rozanski said. "I saw that I ate a lot of nuts and berries."

Rozanski has another compelling reason to focus on nutrition: his bouts with West Nile fever in 2003 and 2007. Oddly, he felt such symptoms as severe fatigue and headache on exactly the same day, Aug. 12, four years apart. Doctors are unclear whether it was a relapse or a rare second incidence.

"I was advised to increase my intake of proteins - nuts, fish, dairy and eggs - as part of my recovery," he said. He also was told that staying home on the farm wasn't stimulating enough.

So he hit the road for a parade of comic book shows "to increase problem-solving stress," he said. He described an early September visit to a show in Montreal as therapeutic as well as good business, since he brought home more than 50,000 "books," as he calls them.

At home on the farm, his wife does most of the cooking.

"When you're traveling, it is really hard to eat good," he said. "I look for salads and yogurt. I end up eating a lot of sandwiches and bananas. When I can, I try to find organic foods."

Rozanski's journey to America began when he was a boy and his mother married a U.S. serviceman in Germany.

"I found myself in a trailer in Michigan eating Ding Dongs," he said. "The best thing about moving to the states was that I got a subscription to Classics Illustrated Jr. comic books."

The family eventually settled in Colorado Springs, where Mile High Comics was born in his parents' basement in 1969. In 1972, he started studying finance at the University of Colorado.

"I just had to quit because the comics business became so demanding. I had a choice to make."

In the industry, Rozanski is as well known as Spider-Man, the bug-bitten superhero who captured his imagination. The story goes that as a 21-year-old, he found the Holy Grail in 1977: a treasure trove of 18,000 comic book classics in perfect condition hidden in a Denver basement.

Although he still owns about 100 of those originals and has a penchant for 1960s underground comics, Rozanski says, he's just another fan.

"It's an ethical dilemma to be a dealer and collector. I have customers who expect me to find them the best books," he said, and not save them for himself.

"I started collecting pottery to be as excited as a little kid again about collecting."

He also spends more than a third of his week chronicling his interests for the nearly 100,000 people who subscribe to his newsletter and visit his various Web sites.

"When I get up in the morning, I try to do good in the world no matter what I'm doing," Rozanski said.

He continues his role as an advocate for local food, organic growing techniques and preserving agricultural diversity.

Inexpensive, imported food is readily available. But, Rozanski said, "I don't want to eat it. There's no control on the chemicals used to grow it." He said the current buzz about eating local food is perfectly understandable.

"It's a return to quality and a reaction to god-awful food."

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