Retailing & Marketing

The Denver Post profiles local man Chuck Rozanski of Mile High Comics. If you saw Morgan Spurlock's Comic-Con documentary, you know Rozanski was the star of the film, not only for actually being in the comcis industry but for having home-spun philosophy and a pithy way of expressing it that should make him the star of many more reality shows. Anyway, Rozanski is talking about his vast new 65,000-square-foot warehouse, which holds "more comics than Amazon," and will be open June 14 as part of this month's Demver Comic Con festivities. The edifice is imposing:

The gloomy economy has claimed another victim as Comic Book Ink, a 10-year-old shop outside Tacoma, has announced it is closing. Only last year, the store was in trouble and stayed afloat with help from a benefit campaign. However, this time, owner John Munn has chosen not to look for help. Here's an emotional letter Munn sent out:

FAO Schwarz is one of the most legendary toy stores in the world, located on NYC's swanky Fifth Avenue shopping district. And now comics will be added to their product mix, via a boutique operated by Midtown Comics. The mini-boutique will offer graphic novels, hard cover books, apparel, collectibles, and more.

This isn't anything we haven't covered here before, but here's another take on the end of impulse shopping for comics, this time via Dean Haspiel. Haspiel covers the problem of shops that only order for pull lists, and suggests that there may be a substitute for impulse buying in webcomics. Linking to it also give us a chance to show this cute picture of Haspiel meeting Wallace and Gromit.

We've all had some fun picking apart COMIC BOOK MEN, the kinda incredible show that purports to show life in a comic book store; along the way a few people have suggested checking out THE VARIANTS, a web series produced by Zeus Comics in Dallas. When we say "produced" we mean it's set in the store, and is written by and stars the people who run the store. We're not huge YouTube viewers, so we always put off checking it out . But finally having a few moments to check out a couple of episodes, we can now say that while fictional (we hope) it is definitely much more accurate than COMIC BOOK MEN. In fact it's pretty damned funny.

This is a fun video that shows all kinds of people lining up in the first 20 minutes of FCBD at St Louis's Star Clipper.

Alex Zalben has a fine write-up on MoCCA's ‘To Run A Comic Shop’ panel, which included Tucker Stone of Bergen Street Comics, Gabe Fowler of Desert Island, Robert Conte of Manhattan Comics and Brooklyn Comics, Thor Parker of Midtown Comics and moderator (and former retailer) Alex Cox, currently of the CBLDF. As usual that's a very smart, modern lineup of merchants, and sure enough there was some interesting talk. For instance, some stores actually frown on cell phones when they are used to order comics online—using the brick and mortar store as a showroom of sorts:

What's better than getting free candy on Halloween? Free comics! I offer some crazy ideas for retailers and lovers of comics, using Halloween as the inciting incident to tell a great story about marketing comics!

I have to admit, at this point in my life, I'm not much of a floppy comics reader. I've been fishing SAGA and PROPHET out of my Image comps, and every two months or so I go to Hanleys in search of a missing back issue but...I'm not part of the Wednesday Crowd. Which is why all the talk of pull lists and ordering and racing to get to the store go right over my head. So it wasn't until i read this piece by Todd Allen for PW that I finally understood.

Image publisher Eric Stephenson delivered yesterday's lunch presentation for Image Comics at the Diamond Retailer Summit. Instead of announcing any new projects, he used the time to deliver a speech about Image's history and its present, and to urge retailers not to let readers craving something new slip away to digital by not giving Image's ambitious new slate a chance.

DC is having a special focus group to show off a binder full of BEFORE WATCHMEN pages at the Diamond Retailer Summit.

We're on the scene here in Chicago for this year's Diamond Retailer Summit and survived our biggest challenge, breakfast. No big surprises at the breakfast, but Diamond discussed sales being up for the quarter, a 1% rise in customers (i.e. new shops) and their new Halloween-themed event for retailers to build programs around. Also, as previously discussed at the ComicsPRO meeting, Oni will join the FOC (final order cut off) program, as more and more publishers are hitting their ship dates. More later!