Seuling was born in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York,[3] and spent his entire life as a resident of that borough.

In 1958, he and a friend began buying and selling back-issue comic books,[4] though his primary career was as an English teacher[4] at Brooklyn's Lafayette High School.

On March 11, 1973, Seuling was arrested at the Second Sunday monthly comic book show for allegedly "selling indecent material to a minor".

Seuling wrote a guest editorial in Warren Publishing's black-and-white horror-comics magazine Vampirella #25 detailing his experience and denying the claim he had sold an underground comic book to someone under 18.

The move from newsstand distribution to the direct market (nonreturnable, heavily discounted, direct purchasing of comics from publishers) went hand-in-hand with the growth of specialty comics shops that catered to collectors who could then buy back issues months after a newsstand issue had disappeared.

[15] A key element of Sea Gate's new distribution system was a prepay requirement for customers, which, given the low margins of comics retailing at the time (and the fact that many books shipped late), was onerous for many of the stores.

This reduced Seuling's paperwork and enabled the sub-distributors to sell smaller orders than Sea Gate's minimum of five copies of each comic book title.

[18] As a result of the suit, Irjax eventually acquired "a sizable chunk of the direct-distribution market,"[17] and many of Seulings's sub-distributors left Sea Gate to become independent distributors.