Sometime in the next month, a queer single mom will pack up the kids and her comics and move two blocks deeper into southeast Portland.

On such initiative and whimsy are neighborhoods sustained and reborn.

Katie Proctor owns Books with Pictures, a comic shop at 1100 Southeast Division. Her store is bright, colorful and hands-on. “It pains me every time a family walks in and the first thing I hear Mom telling the kids is not to touch anything,” Proctor says. “I want them to touch things.”

That’s why Proctor doesn’t hide her comics in plastic bags. She doesn’t much care if the corners are dinged. In promoting “Comics For Everyone,” she’s catering to readers, not collectors, though I’m surprised she’s found enough of either to keep the store open for the last three years.

The colorful shelves at Books with Pictures' current location ...

Rent -- $3,000 a month – has soared, and parking at SE 11th and Division is almost non-existent, especially when freight trains shut down the intersection several times each day. Small businesses are major headaches.

But comics and stories – Ray Bradbury’s, Neil Gaiman’s, Colleen Coover’s – have been fundamental in the evolution of Proctor’s imagination, her sexual orientation and her sense of purpose. She and her staff might have toughed it out at that corner but for this:

Jon Hagen died 15 months ago. And Longfellows Books came on the market.

Hagen sold books, and stockpiled magazines, on that eccentric corner of Hosford-Abernethy for 28 years. Longfellows remained a neighborhood icon even as its retail business suffered a long and musty decline.

“I’ve loved that building for as long as I’ve been in the neighborhood,” Proctor says. “I’d always stop in and talk to John. I don’t know how he was making money, which is a feeling I know, but he was always engaging.”

Several months ago, Hagen’s son, Nile, pulled Proctor aside and told her the building was for sale.

The sticker price: $1.5 million.

Proctor laughed. Proctor reassessed. Proctor took financial inventory: “It’s a lot of money. I’m just divorced. I wouldn’t talk to me if I were a bank.”

But Proctor is a historian at heart; she has a B.A. from the University of Oregon and a graduate degree from Cornell. “I love history because it’s the legacy of community and human connection,” she says, and she was drawn to the history of the 1927 structure.

... and the raw lines at Longfellows that will soon showcase "Comics for Everyone"

She researched its previous lives and tenants: the Crucchiola family butchers. The brakes-and-clutch repair shop. Another bookstore owner, Jean Bader, who was also divorced and raising her kids in the shadow of books and pictures.

She found affinity and inspiration in a note from Holly Primiano, Jean’s daughter, who remembered the magic of padding downstairs at night to find a new book to read: “What a great gift to your children. I know my mom didn’t buy the bookstore for me, but it was the greatest gift she ever gave me.”

And because Proctor is one of those people who doesn’t bury her great plans and expectations in daydreams and journals, she decided to risk it all on that one turn of pitch-and-toss:

She formed a limited liability corporation with 19 partners, raising $400,000 in three weeks. She put her house up for sale and promised Nile Hagen the proceeds.

There was no lack of personality in Jon Hagen's bookstore, even in the smallest rooms.

She invited Chris McFarlane and Thomas Mosher to open a record store – My Vinyl Underground – in the basement.

She began the permitting process that will allow six food carts in the parking lot.

She launched a Kickstarter to pay moving expenses. And she invited over her comic-book buddies to help with the renovations that will allow her and the kids to move into the second-floor apartment, above her new store.

Jeff Parker – who’s currently exploring James Bond’s formative years for Dynamite – arrived with a sledge hammer to open the walls and make way for new pipes. He left energized by Proctor’s reckless embrace of the impossible.

“To see a beloved bookstore come back as a bookstore, even a comic-book store, is inspiring. It makes you think that what you love about Portland really isn’t going away,” Parker says.

Proctor is adamant the new store will continue to celebrate the illustrated word and the rainbow in the window.

Longfellows' iconic facade on Southeast Division

As she prepared to open Books with Pictures three years ago, a local named Jamie Wenger happened by. He was out on a last-minute walk. His wife, Allison, was 9 months pregnant. He was curious what Proctor was building.

“One of my first customers,” Proctor says. “(Allison) went into labor two days before we opened, so they have a kid who is exactly as old as my comic shop.”

Sullivan Beatrix Gray Wenger. “Livi,” to those she loves. “She’s now three,” Proctor says, “and she’s big enough to come in and see me on purpose, and take books out for herself.”

As Proctor moves east, Livi is along for the ride. On the strength of such journeys are neighborhoods and bookstores reborn.

-- Steve Duin

stephen.b.duin@gmail.com