Amid the ups and downs, comic shops have a knack for launching ideas into the broader culture. Few do this as well as The Beguiling in Toronto. One example was in 2004, when a recent former employee had a book coming out from a small publisher. The store’s owners had a launch party at a nearby bar, and about fifty people came. There was no reason to think the book would be a sales success, but the people at The Beguiling wanted to support their guy, and they loved the book: Scott Pilgrim Vol. 1: Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life by Bryan Lee O’Malley. That night, the entertainment was provided by O’Malley’s garage band.
“It was going to be a blip as far as I could tell,” O’Malley said. His publisher, Oni Press, had told him that preorders of the book were about six hundred copies, which was respectable but not great. He had no plans to quit his day job at a Toronto restaurant.
In the weeks that followed, The Beguiling sold the book with an evangelistic passion. Selling Scott Pilgrim was easy because the book was great, said the store’s owner, Peter Birkemoe. Grounded in the real Toronto and sprinkled with bits of fantasy, it told the story of a young man getting his life together and falling in love. The artwork was strongly influenced by Japanese comics and the aesthetics of 1990s video games. Scott Pilgrim became a sales success at a few stores across North America, which built word of mouth and turned the book into a sensation at other comic shops and then in the bookstore market.
As of 2010, Scott Pilgrim had completed its seven-volume run and had more than one million copies in print in North America, according to Oni Press. That was the year the movie adaptation, Scott Pilgrim versus the World, was released. “I’m convinced that Scott Pilgrim will go down as one of those series that changed comics forever,” said Joe Nozemack, Oni’s publisher, in a 2010 news release. “When I’m out and see someone wearing a Scott Pilgrim T-shirt or sitting in a cafe reading one of the books, I get so excited about comics entering the mainstream and to know that Oni Press’s books are helping lead the way, it’s an indescribable feeling.”2
By the time the movie was released, O’Malley had long since quit his day job to be a full-time comics creator. He remains grateful and a bit baffled that his book, of all books, was the one that made it big when many great ones do not. “There’s no way it was going to be a success without this kind of network of people who were going to be enthusiastic about it. I didn’t see it coming at all,” he said.
The best comic shops have a connection with their customers that leads, repeatedly, to some artists and series bubbling up to prominence. This dynamic also plays out at the best independent bookstores and record stores. The difference is the way that many comic shop customers make weekly trips, allowing shop owners to get to know their clients and what they want to read.
“We’re bartenders,” said Brian Hibbs, owner of Comix Experience and Comix Experience Outpost, both in San Francisco. “We’re the friend that you come to and go, ‘What’s on tap this week?’” He is one of the leading comics retailers of his generation, and played a role in the rise of several creators, such as Neil Gaiman, whose Sandman, from DC Comics, began in 1989, the same year Hibbs opened his store. “We’re selling to alcoholics, essentially. We’re there to solve their problems and take the burden of their lives away for a few minutes.”
At first, I thought this book would be about comic shops facing an existential challenge as the country shifts away from print media and as Amazon and other mega-retailers continue to take market share. I learned, however, that the industry has had a nausea-inducing level of volatility almost since it began in its modern form in the 1970s. So yes, comic shops are at a crossroads, but they find themselves in a similar situation every few years. What is interesting is how this crossroads is different from the others.
To begin to answer this question, I went to Milton Griepp, an industry veteran and chief executive of ICv2.com, a website that covers the business of comics and pop culture. “The biggest force affecting comic stores right now is the demographic diversification and taste diversification of the audience,” he said. “You’ve got women in sort of unprecedented numbers reading comics. We haven’t seen this gender mix, I think, since the early fifties.”
He also has seen a growth in sales of comics for children, and a resulting increase in material aimed at elementary school and middle school audiences. Among the superstars in this set is cartoonist Raina Telgemeier, whose books have sold in the millions to mainly middle-grade readers. But comic shops are not guaranteed this business, Griepp said. If shops do not work hard to accommodate all audiences, there are plenty of other places to buy the same stuff.
These new readers are in addition to what he calls the “core audience,” a term that evokes the image of a certain type of fan, a white man in his thirties and older. However, the core group is defined more by its buying habits than by age, race, or gender. These fans make weekly or near-weekly visits to the shop, often on Wednesday, which is when new comics go on sale. These are some of the same people who were an untapped audience before shops proliferated in the 1980s. And now they are a tapped audience, relentlessly and ridiculously tapped, as Marvel and DC narrowed their focus in the 1990s with products that enticed a shrinking fan base to spend more money per capita, as opposed to broadening the audience. There are no reliable data available to help define the size of the core audience or see trends in its spending. But store owners told me repeatedly that this audience continues to suffer attrition. Many stores, and the industry as a whole, are growing because new types of customers are coming in to fill the gap.
Griepp got into the comics business while a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. In 1980, he cofounded Capital City Distribution, which grew from two employees to become the country’s largest wholesaler serving comic shops. He got caught on the wrong end of a massive industry consolidation in 1995 and sold the business to his main competitor. Since then, he has reinvented himself as one of the leading analysts and writers about the comics industry.
“I think the story of comic stores is really the story of community,” he said. “That community is a shared interest and a shared passion for these characters. Not just superheroes. Communities around manga and many other genres and subgenres and creators. It’s just reinforcing community. ‘Oh, yeah, that’s really cool.’ ‘I think that’s really cool too.’”
In Philadelphia, Ariell Johnson has managed to build community in short order. She opened Amalgam Comics & Coffeehouse there in late 2015, with the goal of creating a hub for all types of readers.
“I thought it would be cool to have a place where you could buy your comics and stay there and read them and hang out,” she said. The space is split about 50–50 between a comic shop and a coffee shop.
Johnson, who is in her early thirties, got a flurry of media coverage when she opened because she is one of very few black female comic shop owners in the country. Her success has come from appealing to everyone. Her message, to staff and customers, is that all are welcome.
“I have gone into shops, especially when I was just getting into comics, and I was afraid somebody would question my geek cred,” she said. “You feel scrutinized being the only person who looks like you.”
The challenging part for her has been to learn the business side. She has an abundance of coffee-fueled energy and works sixteen hours most days, but only sometimes does she feel that she is getting on top of things. As generations of store owners could tell her, the key to success is learning how to read a chaotic market and manage risk. It also means controlling costs. Long-term retailers need to either have a reservoir of money to call upon or become masters of these practical issues.
The comics business is unlike almost any other. Consider:
• The country’s comic shops are almost all single-site, independent stores. There are some