Geez, I go to lunch and all kinds of good stuff pops up around the comics sites and blogs. Much of it deals with ways the comics industry might make buying their product a more convenient, pleasant, cost-effective experience.
At Comic World News, Shawn Hoke takes a look at local comic retailers, good and bad. Shawn makes a lot of good points, as do folks talking about the column at Fanboy Rampage.
As I’ve mentioned, I don’t live in a major metropolitan area, but I still have two comic shops to choose from in town. One has a friendly staff, a front-of-Previews selection, a reluctance to stretch beyond it, and a decidedly unpleasant ambiance. It’s not that the people aren’t nice; it’s that the shop is dingy and dark and smells funny. Boob-a-licious art is all over the walls, and it’s cramped, with every available flat surface covered with something, from Elektra busts to eight-sided dice to whatever.
The other shop has a friendly staff, a slightly more diverse selection, real interest in what’s out there that they might not be familiar with, genuine eagerness to help you track down a book if they don’t have it immediately in stock, a decent selection of manga, a great selection of trades (including a fair amount of indie stuff), and an appealing, well-organized retail space. The shop is clean, brightly lit, doesn’t smell like anything it shouldn’t, and would make just about any customer, from diehard comics nerd to parents with young children, feel comfortable shopping there.
And this is my pet peeve about some comic shops. Clean your space already. Make it an appealing place to spend money. I can’t imagine you’ll lose any of your existing clientele (unless they like the smelly, dark, cramped, creepy version because it gives them giddy, porn-store sense memories), and new kinds of customers might actually be inclined to shop there more than once, if they could actually muster the courage to stay long enough to make a purchase the first time. I’m watching right now what happens when these two kinds of stores directly compete with each other. The dirty, dank one gets its ass kicked.
Elsewhere, Dave Carter at Yet Another Comics Blog wonders about the potential of the comics anthology. For a success story, he cites Shonen Jump with its high page count, lower print quality, and crazy low per-page price. It’s something I’d love to see Marvel or DC try, though I’d want to see a mix of current material along with the reprints Dave suggests (though many of his ideas for themed anthologies sound really, really cool). Kind of like a Marvel or DC “Sampler.” Then, of course, I try and contemplate what exactly they’d be able to include in such an athology that isn’t too insular or too “mature” for general audiences and still features the kind of marquee character who would lead a kid to pick it up.
I also wonder about the likelihood of a major publisher willingly lowering the quality of their print stock for a concurrent reprint, even if it’s for a potential loss leader. And that would be the most sensible reason to do an anthology like that. While I’m sure some profit could be made off of the anthology itself, there wouldn’t be much point if the ultimate goal wasn’t to use it as a gateway for the publisher’s regular product, the monthly floppies and collections.
Last but not least, Heidi MacDonald at The Beat has broken news of Marvel’s brave re-entry into the convenience store. And that story pushes soooooo many nostalgia buttons for me, as the carry-out was my primary source for comics as a kid. They were pretty much my only source of exercise, too, as I would travel on foot from one to the other to find all of the comics I wanted. It’s weird to think that Marvel actually has to decide to go back into a 7-11, because up to a certain point, I never really thought of comics as being anywhere else. They were at the drug store and the UDF and the Convenient next to the library.
I mean, it’s nice that they’re branching into other outlets, but it makes me kind of sad that they have to consciously decide to start doing something that was pretty much a given during my formative comics years. Great. Now I feel really old.