the stuff inside my head that must get out
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Sun, 22 Apr 2007
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Wed, 04 Apr 2007
25 and loving it
I'm very pleased to celebrate 5 years of self-employment and 25 years of continuous comic sales in Willow Glen. Hijinx opened when I was 6 years old and I didn't even know about it until I was at least 10 and was allowed to ride my bike outside of my immediate neighborhood.
Until that point I was picking up comics at the Li'l Professor bookstore's magazine section and reading a lot of comic strips in the newspaper or in paperback collections. My elementary school closed down after my 1st grade year and we were all transferred from Kirk Elementary to Booksin. This was much closer to old Willow Glen and it was only a matter of time before somebody told me a bout a shop called Mike's Coliseum that sold nothing but comics and baseball cards. A year or so later and I was working there for comics at the age of eleven years old.
This was something pretty new in the early eighties. Comics were just beginning to emerge from the newsstands into their own market place, what we today call the Direct Market. This meant that comics weren't returnable but they were available more reliably and at a better discount. This meant whoever was buying them had to know a lot about them in order to not get stuck with a ton of unsellable product.
But back then, comics were about 60 cents each, so having a few left over to bag and board to sell later at a premium was the order of the day. By having back issues available, retailers could increase their profit margins by having comics after they were out of print and unavailable. This business model is still probably the predominant one in the direct market today, but there is a new model emerging that many new shops employ.
The new model is that of a specialty bookstore focusing on the medium of comics. Instead of collecting old single issues, we concentrate on Trade Paperback collections, also known as graphic novels. This is the major part of the business that didn't exist when this store opened. To an industry focused on collectibles, graphic novel is just another term for a reprint, which is usually not considered as collectible, or "valuable".
That notion is pretty absurd, since there's nothing more valuable to a comics reader than a good story. The better a comic is, the more widely available it should be in order to share that story with as many readers as possible. That's how any other great entertainment industry medium works (apart from performance arts like theater and opera) and that's where the comics industry is headed.
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with collecting comics or coins or commemorative plates or anything else. The difference is that comics are meant to be read first and possibly collected later. Make sure that you're reading and enjoying what you buy and you can't go wrong.
Thank you all for making my first 5 and the store's first 25 as great as they've been. I owe it all to you!
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