The Good, Bad, and Ugly of Comics Shops

Thinking back on my history as a comics recidivist - as someone who bought many comics between 1968 and 1983, then abandoned the habit until 1996 - some things occurred to me. At the time I gave up the habit, I mainly reasoned that the $0.65 price tag had reached the territory of the ridiculous and did what I had resolved to do when the price passed $0.50: give up buying altogether.

Another force, though, played in my decision. Dredging up chunks of sometimes unwanted detail from the cesspool of memory, I recalled that encounters in a very bad comics shop had helped me quit the habit. High prices and blah product had me on the ropes; but a rotten comics shop provided the knockout punch. Why, after all, should I want to buy indifferent merchandise at soaring prices, and, in the bargain, get mistreated by local comics merchants?

Sample Bad Comic Shop 1

I encountered my first truly bad comics shop in the eighties, right around the time I decided to desist from purchasing comics. I still browsed inventory occasionally, but mainly investigated this place for other merchandise that sometimes appears in comics shops, including paperback books, storage media, and the like.

I will call the man who ran this shop the E------.

In the back issue bins of the E------'s shop, a browser could notice chunks missing - large segments unlikely to vanish to the purchase of a single customer back in the early eighties when a comics reader seldom had much disposable income. Entire titles - popular ones - seemed to absent themselves from the bins. Daredevil, Teen Titans, X-Men and anything one collected in the early eighties seemed to have vanished entirely.

I eventually had to ask about the gaps. To my surprise, the E------ said he had stuff - the missing titles, plus undergrounds, older back issues, and so on - but that he wouldn't put it out because he kept it packed up to take to conventions.

He was saving his good stuff, you see, for customers he liked better. And he put out the lame books for the kind of scum who just wandered in off the street - the customer unfortunate enough to wander into his shop.

Another stunt typical of this fellow involved withholding merchandise on his shelves from buyers because he expected the new price guide to come out in the next week. This means he would refuse to sell in-stock items at that moment, telling customers to come back in about a week; he wanted to delay the sale until the new price guide, with higher figures, would come out. Imagine that: "Go away and come back when the price goes up and I'll sell it to you."

Other factors, however, contributed to making his shop pure evil. The Man Who Would Not Sell His Books had a rather personable, although harried, wife who sometimes manned the counter. One could enter the store when she attended the register. But you didn't want to enter the place when both of them took a shift in that shop.

The E------ once had his shop next door to a hamburger joint, and would sometimes send the missus next door to get lunch while he manned the counter. I had the misfortune of overhearing his distress once when she brought back a hamburger which did not have the precise quantity of onions that he desired - she had dared to bring back something with too few or too many of these, whether through her oversight or that of the wage slave who built the sandwich. The E------, however, began a tirade about people who can't follow instructions - meaning, in this case, his wife - in a way completely unsuited to a gentleman. A man who treats his wife like that over something so trivial as the number of onions on a hamburger deserves, at the least, to die lonely and unmarried; and perhaps he also deserves the kind of visit from hostile strangers that ends in having hoodlums duct tape him to a chair and break his kneecaps with hammers.

The E------, though nasty enough in his own way, had a talent for selecting counter help that reflected his own malign character. He would offer junior high and high school kids discounts on comics to work the counter - probably so minimal a discount that he still had considerable markup on the merchandise. These kids frequently sneered at customers (such as myself); in one case, one of these lads decided to make cracks about offering a "reading buffet" once when he saw me looking at the credits on a book.

After the little snot mouthed off at me, I resolved never to go back to that shop, and said place no longer exists in any form that folks who still live in that town could recognize.

Sample Bad Comics Shop 2

Not having done too much research, I haven't actually found that many bad comics shops, but the few I do find work overtime to justify the time I spend noting the ways in which they abuse the customer and slouch towards self-destruction for various incomprehensible rewards.

For instance, let us move to the near present, sometime after 1996 when I took up the comics habit again. After I found the place where I resolved to do my occasional business in comics, I visited another shop closer to where I worked at the time, somewhere in downtown Austin. Bus routes and other logistics pointed to a likely site just barely in the territory of the University of Texas campus.

I entered this place, but it took less than five minutes for me to dismiss it as a business. I didn't want to buy anything there. If I had needed a kidney and they had a compatible organ, I would have hesitated about dropping any money there.

Why, you might ask? The help at the counter, for instance, were ignoring goings-on in the shop. I wanted to ask a question about a piece I had considered buying there, but even with two counters manned each by a separate employee, I couldn't get anyone's attention. Both of them instead bent the ears of wanderers-in, to whom they related their fascinating "Magic: The Gathering" stories. Little did it matter that their audience had no intention of dealing with merchandise; that someone would listen to these inane anecdotes evidently justified the monopoly of the staff's attention. I doubt that mothers or = less likely - girlfriends would have heard out the stories with any patience.

In the absence of anyone in the store to direct me to particular items, I self-motivated toward the shelves, reconciling to find the book myself. However, a wall of baggy-pantsed loiterers formed a barricade that kept me far enough away from the shelves that I could only barely make out which titles occupied the shelves - by no means could I approach closely enough to see numbers or dates.

Consistent with the pieces at the threshold of my ability to focus detail, however, the newest nearly-visible items on the shelves looked to date from about six months ago. Perhaps I should complain less about the human wall of freeloading fanboys who rendered the shop impassable to the occasional money-bearing customer in light of the knowledge that I didn't actually want what they had there.

Having failed to get anywhere near an employee nor near the old "new" releases, I turned then towards the boxes of back issues. The posters on the walls, the decorations on the outsides of the boxes, and the separator labels inside the boxes, I realized that this store mainly dealt in Youngblood, Bloodstrike, and Witchblade. A few years ago this would have represented a viable policy, but the store seemed to have missed the crash that shifted the market to other pieces. The store didn't seem to understand that 1994 had passed years ago.

I had wandered into the wrong place, certainly. Had I intended to find an Essentials volume, a Perez/Busiek Avengers, or a Grummett/Hazelwood Superboy, I would need to go somewhere else.

As with the E------'s shop, I left and never came back. If that place doesn't go out of business, then one must suspect divine intervention, because I see no way the place could survive under those conditions. I would explain its continued survival by presuming that someone has capital to sink into it for which no one has to account; perhaps some very rich and wasteful soul created and sponsors this shop so a son can pursue his hobby (not a career) in selling comics.

The Salient Features of Bad Shops

My descriptions deal with rather different shops, but threads of misery bind them. Both of the sample bad shops committed similar crimes against the customer and the business. One would do well to avoid such shops for the following reasons:

• Poor service. A store with too many customers can sometimes fail in the customer service department. Such a condition typically does not beset a comics shop, however. Poor customer service tends to derive from a few rather loathsome faults of character, such as counter help who feel somehow superior to the persons who consider keeping said shop open with the occasional purchase. Some comics shops tend to attract help that really does not belong in any aspect of a service industry; if you feel contempt for your customers, you should not take work behind a counter. Nonetheless, one can run into a few places where the clerk in a shop sneers at the unfortunate souls who wander in based on his presumption of superior taste or his estimation of the customer's ability to appeal to the opposite sex. Why someone who works in a comics shop should feel entitled to make such judgments must ever elude the thoughtful; no logical reason has yet suggested itself.

• Poor inventory. Stores can run out of worthwhile merchandise, or fail to acquire it in the first place. Something else makes a comics shop qualify for rottenness on the basis of poor inventory, however. When the shop has nothing to buy because a) the proprietor has chosen to withhold merchandise he finds it too difficult to unpack - particularly for the unworthy likes of the scumbags he deigns to allow to enter his palace - we have a store made rotten by poor inventory. Similarly, if the entire stock of the store consists in bagged copies of some abandoned fad book from about five years previous - material the market rightly forgot about years ago, and no one wants, regardless of the proprietors' lack of awareness that the world has moved on - we can label a store rotten for what lines its shelves.

• Loiterers. Some stores, selling whatever they choose to sell, will have the occasional customer who needs time to make up his mind, or who needs to scrutinize the merchandise a bit before he can decide to buy or not. A comics shop loiterer falls into another category. First, he uses the merchandise to his own ends with no intention of purchasing anything, wearing out the books that he refuses to buy. Second, devoid of anything like manners or shame, he provides an insurmountable obstacle to those who might actually with to buy something; where one loiterer exists, expect an entire human blockade between the shelves and yourself. The comics store freeloader has no intention of inconveniencing himself to the point of allowing an actual customer to approach the goods.

Sample Good Shop 1

The aforementioned examples notwithstanding, ill-fortune has not contrived to guide me only into the cesspits when I sought or seek four-color merchandise. At one time, I visited more than one good shop. While not specifically a comics shop, for instance, a Dallas bookshop named "Earthbase Books" provided a great place to look for some comic materials.

Earthbase Books specialized in fantastic literature, meaning science fiction and fantasy books; things like Roger Dean calendars; collections of art; Heavy Metal magazine; gentrified early eighties editions of underground comics, including Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics and the obscure but worthwhile volume Wonder Wart-Hog and the Nurds of November; embarrassing pieces like Wally Wood's explorations into erotica; more accessible, though not less graphic pieces like R. Crumb's Carload O' Comics; and generally more stuff than even a well-heeled shopper could afford to cart away in a dozen trips. I can't recall if Earthbase bothered with superhero books, but the variety of other stuff meant that one need never notice their absence.

Sadly, though, the last time I tried to go there, circa 1986, in search of the latest release of some Lovecraft anthology, I found a Royal Optical at the address. No research provided a new location for the store. I concluded that it had gone under, perhaps a casualty to some new bookstore in a nearby shopping mall, perhaps as a casualty to the difficult economic times of 1983 and 1984. Nonetheless, the excellence of the place inclines me to tip a metaphorical hat even twenty years after I first went there.

Sample Good Shop 2

Ill luck seems to take the best shops I go to. This may represent the symptom of the slump that printed reading matter - not just comics, though comics tend to suffer more than some other media - enjoys today.

A shop whose name I can't recall once existed across the street from the University of Texas, a scant two or three blocks up Guadalupe from the dreadful comics shop I mentioned as the second example of bad places. This store had some of the same appeal that Earthbase did, though it also dealt in greeting cards, posters (anyone recall the "Reaganstein" poster of the early eighties?), independent pieces like Sabre, political literature of a generally leftist bent (such as the extinct volume God's Bullies), and, the last time I visited (around 1983), material like the Marvel comics reprint of the Neal Adams segments of the Kree-Skrull war.

The location excelled for a UT student wanting to drop some dollars better spent on rent and utilities and tuition. Sadly, though, at some point this store went away. No historical trail points to whether it expired or simply moved, but the building in which it occupied a corner belongs to the Scientologists, who expanded their local storefront until all the businesses renting space from them got pushed out. This probably happened before the economic crunch made retail space within five miles of downtown too expensive for anything but franchise businesses (for example, the welcome Barnes and Noble).

Sample Good Shop 3

Try as I might, I never completely ran out of good comics shops. Oddly enough, a place I once visited for other merchandise later focused itself on comics. The sideline had taken over the business in the years since 1983.

Even though I had visited this place before (approaching 20 years, now), I entered it somewhat apprehensively. I could pick up indifferent bagged three-sets of Valiant and Image stuff at the dollar store from foreign-born proprietors who seemed disinclined to pass moral judgments on their customers. However, entering a for-real comics shop meant that the habit had reasserted itself; it meant that I had abandoned my earlier attempts to somewhat mesh with mainstream humanity.

Somehow, though, my curiosity allowed me to resist the vector suggested by these overblown fears ("What if a reporter from the local newspaper catches me here? Can I expect a picture on the front page of the Austin American-Statesman showing me, in the glare of a flash, trying to conceal my face with my hands? What if my family sees?"). In particular, a curiosity about the Amalgam books made me want to see what the mainstream publishers had come to. So, looking over my shoulder all the while, I entered a comics shop on 51st street in 1996, after many, many years of deliberately staying away.

I found, in this place, mainly comics - shelves where not only the last issue but most of the last year sat in deep stacks - plus the occasional sideline merchandise, including things like action figures, some collectible cards, expensive comics-themed statues (I still have never met anyone who owns such pieces), and other items that absorbed perhaps a third of the floor space.

The rest, and rightly so, belonged to comics.

This place had good current inventory - merchandise mostly segregated by publishing line but occasionally broken out by talent (for instance, recently the store decided to create an Alan Moore section). It had fair back issues, including some Silver Age-ish pieces I had looked for and failed to find in years past (such as the second part of the first appearance of the Squadron Supreme in Avengers, the Brainchild story).

It also had a civil, mature, and enthusiastic staff, something I don't recall seeing often at all. I went there years ago and have yet found no particular need to look anywhere else for my regular purchases.

The Face of Good Shops

Good shops, like the bad ones, have some common traits. They can distinguish themselves with hundreds of other details, but expect a worthwhile business to have the following:

• Interesting inventory. Interesting inventory might or might not include deep stacks of recent issues of titles. A shop might, instead, excel at providing back issues. In the bust of the back issue market, this might provide an easier strategy than in the days when a Frank Miller Daredevil could command a ninety-dollar price tag. But other things comprise interesting inventory as well. Anthologies and trade paperbacks, particularly a current selection of Marvel's Essentials volumes, contribute much here. Other pieces frequently seem welcoming, like anthologies of The Onion.

• Civil employees. A comics shop employee, whatever inflated notion he has of his own self-worth, has no business sneering at customers. Good shops realize this, and steer folks away from their cash registers if such persons can't desist from deriding customers and their purchases or nagging them for not having bought anything recently. A real enthusiasm for the merchandise helps a great deal, particularly when detached from any moralistic notions of reforming a customer's taste - a comic store clerk has no business trying to talk a customer out of completing his Youngblood collection. Instead, an on-the-mark employee recognizes that certain tastes correlate, and will have the ability to suggest other pieces that fit well with a customer's tastes. I discovered recent Alan Moore through an on-the-ball employee who noticed me buying pieces with heavy Silver Age themes and occasional cerebral content, and would not have known, without the information he provided me, that Moore had moved beyond the dark tones of his eighties work.

Voting with Dollars

Even if you intend to help support the sagging comics business by various available means, including spreading the money around as many local merchants as possible, avoiding online merchants for items available locally, and (perhaps) buying more books than you should, nothing compels you to drop increasingly outrageous sums of money at stores that do not treat you with respect.

Now, perhaps as at no previous point in the history of comics merchandising, vendors remain sensitive and susceptible to input from customers in the form of revenues. This means that if you choose to avoid a loathsome shop, you can expect a greater result on the practices of the place. High overhead, pricing strategy that attempts to milk margins instead of volume, and a purchasing public increasingly disinterested in the product mean that one annoyed customer who takes his money elsewhere could affect a store.

I don't want to send anyone out of business - options like suffering unemployment or moving from a retail job to a polyester-smock job do not seem particularly pleasant. However, the Norm of Reciprocity applies here. If a shop treats you badly or simply fails to provide anything you want, your response can help the proprietors understand better what they need to do. Perhaps they need to adjust their purchases better. Perhaps they need to talk to a bigmouthed employee. And perhaps they need to view the customer as the central purpose of their commerce rather than a necessary evil to grudgingly endure.

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