List of Notable Comic Shops of the United States and Canada
Epilogue: A Golden Age of Art and Anxiety
Foreword
Almost nothing about the existence of comic shops makes sense.
There is very little money in comics, period. There is less money than that in comic shops. Bookstores carry much of the same material. Nearly everything that you can read in a comic shop can be bought online.
There are no national chain stores that specialize in comic books. In a century defined by giant retail, comic shops stagger forward as a collective of sole proprietorships. They do a job that used to be performed—quite ably—by thousands of steel spinner racks sitting in the dusty corners of drugstores and supermarkets, shouting “Hey, kids! Comics!” When comics faded from mass-market outlets, comic shops rose to help fill the void, a shift that was not by design and far from ideal.
Comic shops are frequently and accurately parodied as bastions of high nerdity: monasteries of geekdom, inscrutable and inaccessible to all but a few true believers. They are historically for boys in a way that has ignored or even been hostile to half of their potential audience. They are few folks’ idea of cool and almost no one’s conception of a sound business decision.
And yet: here they are.
Comic shops were present for the birth and the death of video stores. They lived through the fall and gradual revival of record stores. Their market continues its unlikely growth across the board and is currently the dominant first medium for cross-platform exploitation. Several top-rated TV shows were once something you could buy only in a comic shop. Many top movies can be traced to a collectible back issue. There are even comics taken seriously as art, a notion that at one time seemed more quixotic than any superhero’s quest. Comic shops have been there for those comics, too.
How is any of this possible?
In Comic Shop, Dan Gearino provides a patient, sane, and rigorously examined answer. When did our particular nation of shopkeepers grow ponytails and wrap things in Mylar and make every Wednesday a fantasist’s holiday? What combination of luck and grit allowed some of them to survive? And now, how are the best comic shops evolving to appeal to new audiences? If America’s castle on a hill rests on a foundation of how we buy and sell things, Dan Gearino shows us what’s in the basement. Keep your eyes straight ahead. This isn’t a library. You touch it, you buy it.
Tom Spurgeon
Tom Spurgeon is editor of the Comics Reporter, an Eisner Award–winning website, and author of, most recently, We Told You So: Comics as Art, an oral history of Fantagraphics Books that he wrote with Michael Dean. He also is director of Cartoon Crossroads Columbus, or CXC, a festival of comics and cartoon culture in Columbus, Ohio.
Part 1
The Cockroaches of Pop Culture
We are the cockroaches of pop culture.
We will survive a nuclear fallout.
—Joe Field, owner of Flying Colors Comics & Other Cool Stuff in Concord, California
1
Magical Powers
ON A Saturday, Gib Bickel sees a woman step into the children’s section of his shop. He approaches and gives his usual opener: “Canwehelpyoufind-something?” The woman, with tattoos down both arms, is shopping for a graphic novel for her daughter. She has no idea what to get, although a book called Hero Cats has caught her eye. He points her toward something else, a favorite of his, Princeless.
“This girl, she’s a princess,” he says. “Her dad puts her there in a tower with all her sisters until a prince will rescue her, and there’s a dragon guarding her. And then she’s like, ‘Why am I going to wait around for some dumb boy?’ So she teams up with her dragon and they have adventures.” Sold.
Bickel has hand-sold more than one hundred copies of Princeless, a small-press graphic novel that has become a cult hit and been followed by several sequels. This is what he does. It is what makes him happy.
He is in his midfifties, with a graying goatee and a wardrobe that is an array of T-shirts, shorts, and jeans. And he is an essential part of the Columbus, Ohio, comics scene. In 1994, with two friends, he founded The Laughing Ogre, a comic shop that shows up on lists of the best in the country. Though he sold his ownership stake years ago, he still manages the shop and can be found there most days.
Laughing Ogre is one of about 3,200 comic shops in the United States and Canada, mostly small businesses whose cultural significance far exceeds the footprint of their revenue.1 They are gathering places and tastemakers, having helped develop an audience for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the 1980s, Bone in the 1990s, and The Walking Dead in the 2000s. And yet, for all the value that comic shops provide to their communities and to the culture, their business model has a degree of difficulty that can resemble Murderworld, the deathtrap-filled amusement park from Marvel Comics. Publishers sell most of their material to comic shops on a nonreturnable basis. By contrast, bookstores and other media retailers—some of which sell the same products as comic stores do—can return unsold goods for at least partial credit. The result is that comic shops bear a disproportionately high level of risk when a would-be hit series turns out to be a dud. And there are plenty of duds.
This book is a biography of a business model, showing comic shops today and how they got here. I come at this as a reporter who covers business, and as a lifelong comics fan.
Before going on, I need to define one important term: “direct market.” The current comic shop model was born in the 1970s, and it came to be known as the direct market because store owners received comics straight from the printers. Before that time, nearly all material had to be bought from newspaper and magazine distributors. Today, the network of comics specialty shops are still called the direct market, although the “direct” part has not been accurate for a long time. More on that later.
The staff at Laughing Ogre, and at shops across the country, let me into their worlds for what turned out to be a tumultuous year, from the summer of 2015 to the summer of 2016. The two major comics publishers, Marvel and DC, did most of the damage, with many new series that did not catch on, relaunches of existing series that often failed to energize sales, and a months-long