Wednesday - November 24, 2004:

Superhero orgy. That's what it feels like walking into a comic store anyway, tight costumes, big breasts stuffed into tiny costumes. I confronted a store owner on the issue a couple of months ago. He was happy I picked up the only copy of King of the Geeks he had ordered by accident. I asked why he didn't carry more independent and alternative comics. He let me know that the local community, a rather poor one, would never support anything but superheroes. As a result, the store buys almost exclusively out of the top 100 each month. They rarely carry much in the way of graphic novels either. Oh sure, there are a couple of copies of Hush, the reprint of Jim Lee's run on Batman and one set of Hellboy showed up about a month before the movie came out because they're sure-fire sell-throughs.

I'd argue that carrying at least some of the standard graphic novels will always be worth it in the long-run. They are the only thing in the comic world that has a shelf-life of more than a week and that may be why some dealers are afraid to stock them.

One store I visit has devoted more than half the store to graphic novels, Buried Under Comics in Manchester, Connecticut. Unfortunately, it's more than an hour and a half drive from me.

As comic sales skew more and more to graphic novels and manga, stores had better start courting that audience. I haven't been into manga for years, but I've seen more of my students reading it than any other kind of literature. I disagree with the experts in this area. Manga moved lots of books in the eighties and failed, but the cross-marketing wasn't there, Pokemon, Cartoon Network, Anime conventions.

-But will they ever be shoving each other aside for my copies of Xenon, Kamui, Mai, Horobi or Area 88? Oh, and keep your hands off the Nausicca. That one's a keeper (I've even got the movie version, found it at K-Mart for $2.99 disguised as a He-Man ripoff.).

(Note: There's a nasty little bug that I can't get out of the archives. It's related to the next and back buttons. This page is the easy part: the script didn't create a next button so I'll just paste one below. The second part is a bit of a pain. Starting with the next page, you've got to hit back to go forward. Believe me, this one is on my list of things to fix, but I don't really know how to go about it.)

-Bob Stevenson