I don’t know why this is on my mind. Maybe it’s all the recent talk about comics retailing. But what’s the most attractive exterior you’ve seen for a comic shop?
It’s got to be tough on the shops that have a great big window display to deal with. If you put merchandise in it, you probably have to rotate it fairly regularly so it doesn’t bleach in the sun, or call the window-display merchandise a loss from the outset. (And even then you probably need to rotate it, because nothing says “Come, spend” like bleached-out paperbacks in the window.) I can understand the desire to block out all of the light to protect stock, but making the glass opaque (particularly black) makes the place look like another kind of periodical vendor entirely, and I’m not sure that’s the ideal solution.
Packing the window space with posters seems like a good idea, because you can fill it with colorful, varied images. Unfortunately, most of those posters seem to fade and yellow even faster than a display of books would, almost before you’ve got the fourth piece of tape up. I’ve seen this solution applied at a few different shops, and you can tell who doesn’t bother to rotate their posters. (Seriously, if you thought some of those ‘90s Image posters were ugly in full color, take a look at them in sepia.)
The worst solution I’ve ever seen was to have someone paint various super-heroes in front of a neutral background to provide the desired opacity while keeping it from looking like an adult bookstore. And wow, those were some ugly, B-list X-Men in that window. Terrible anatomy (though not cheesecake-y, so points for that), just plain weird faces, and odd choices that I doubt any average person off the street would recognize (like Psylocke version 3.7, or something).
