This past May, as the annual Free Comic Book Day rolled around, the comics press appeared to be greeted with the sort of bad news that comes around with dispiriting regularity these days, in the form of another closure of a longstanding comic shop. This one seemed especially ironic, in that the purported victim was Flying Colors Comics, a 36-year-old establishment founded and still run by Joe Field in Concord, California. In 2002, it had been Field (inspired, as the story goes, by a promotion being run by the Baskin Robbins ice cream shop next door) who first provided the impetus for comic publishers to launch the inaugural Free Comic Book Day to coincide with the premiere of the first Spider-Man movie.
That moment has since become part of the legend of Flying Colors, not least because Field himself is a promoter by trade: he came into comics retail in the first place by way of a promotional position at a Stockton, California, radio station, which led to a somewhat improbable PR position at the side of Stan Lee, and from thence to a partnership with agent and publisher Mike Friedrich, through which they co-founded the WonderCon convention in 1987. It’s fair to say, in light of that background, that Field has a certain natural proclivity for salesmanship, but there’s no doubting the sincerity of his commitment to the comic industry. In 2005, he helped found ComicsPro as a blanket organization for comics retailers, and served as its director until 2016. Which is to say that if Field is a good salesman for his own legend, he’s a good salesman for comics just the same.
So the news that Flying Colors would be shutting its doors felt like an especially dismal beat of the same drum on which this Retail Therapy column has been banging for the better part of the past several years: another venerable and beloved retail institution no longer able to withstand the brutal climate of rising rents, falling sales, and a faltering direct market. It is with a rare occurrence of pleasure, then, that I can say it was not so. Soon after the initial reports implied the closure of Flying Colors, Field came forward to clarify that it was merely the then-current location that was shutting its doors (having fallen, as it happens, to the landlord’s desire to install a bagel shop). The comic retailer had every intention of carrying on at a new storefront, and as of late May, they had announced the address of their forthcoming new location in the same city.
A happy ending, then, if something of a near miss all the same. But it was a good enough rationale to speak with Field about his long history in comics retail business, and what his own experience might say about the state of the industry as he sees it today. We spoke in May, shortly after the initial news reports, and before the new Flying Colors location had been announced. The conversation that ensued was wide-ranging, forthright, and sometimes blunt, as it drew from Field’s long history in retail to comment on the state of the market in 2024, how we got here, and where we might be going.
ZACH RABIROFF: Let’s start with the question on everyone’s mind. What’s the status of Flying Colors’ closure, or lack thereof?
JOE FIELD: Well, we announced on Free Comic Book Day that we have signed a lease for a new place, so we are not going away, contrary to what it says all over the Internet. I knew going in that there was going to be some misinformation getting out there and people thinking that we were going out of business for whatever crazy reason they might put out there. But our goal has always been to keep going and to keep delivering for the community that we've built over these last 35 years.
Let's backtrack and talk about how this all got started for you. How did you first get into comics retail?
It was a circuitous route, to be honest with you. I worked in radio. I was in sales and marketing for KJOY-AM in Stockton, California. And for Marvel's 25th anniversary, I had the crazy notion to ask Marvel to designate Stockton as the official birthplace of the Fantastic Four. Marvel agreed, and sent Stan Lee and a guy dressed as Spider-Man to deliver a proclamation on the steps of the Stockton City Hall. I met Stan and took him to lunch after the event, and he said, “You know, kid, you did a really great job on this promotion.” And I said, “Stan, if you ever need a PR guy, just give me a call.” And lo and behold, a few months later he called me and said, “Remember when you told me to give you a call if I needed a PR guy?”
He said, “My wife's first novel just came out and the publisher isn't giving her the time of day. Can you go out and round up interviews and reviews about her novel?” And I said, “Stan, I'm your man.” He nicknamed me his “outside man”, which is an old PR term. And for the next three months or so, I would talk to Stan and Joan pretty much daily, tell them what I had done to promote the book, where they were going to be next. I set up interviews and reviews for Joan Lee's steamy little romance novel called The Pleasure Palace. It was published by Dell Books, I think, in 1986.
From there, there were comic book retailers in the San Francisco Bay area who were getting ready to launch a convention, which became WonderCon. And when they saw the feedback that the Fantastic Four campaign had gotten – it just went all over, including the Comics Journal – they called me and asked me to do advertising and promotions for them.
I started to work for the Northern California Comic Dealers Association. Mike Friedrich was a part of that as well. He was putting on trade shows through Star*Reach [Friedrich’s agency and publishing house], and the retailers decided to put on a show, attached to a comics convention, attached to the Star*Reach trade show. And that's how WonderCon was launched.
Had you known Mike Friedrich at all before this?
No. Not really. But I got to know him a little bit when Mike and [comics retailer] Mel Thompson became consultants for the opening of Flying Colors. I'd known Mike from his work; not only his work writing for DC and Marvel, but for the Star*Reach stuff, as well. When I look back, I think, “There's a guy who's been at every critical juncture of the comics business in the last 60 years.” So I felt very fortunate that I was meeting these people.
When I would go to the meetings to talk about setting up WonderCon, I realized that these guys were having fun doing what they were doing. They actually enjoyed going to work in the morning. They had their complaints like everyone does about their job, but they were actually having a good time. I wanted a piece of that. I had tried to get out of radio and get into something else. I’d interviewed with some advertising agencies in San Francisco to become a copywriter, because I had written hundreds of radio commercials during my time. But that didn't work: I was always starting as the mail room kid. And at that point, I had a young family; I really couldn't afford to do that. I interviewed as a sales rep for Marvel, for DC, for Eclipse. I interviewed for a marketing director's job with Bud Plant Distribution. I was trying to go to all corners of the comics business, but almost all of them came back and said I have no experience in publishing.
And then when I really thought about it, what I had always wanted to do was to move back closer to where I grew up. Stockton is 65 miles away from where I grew up, but Concord is five miles from where I spent my childhood. The way to do that was to open a comic bookstore. So I worked with Mel Thompson and Mike Friedrich. My other consultants were my father and my father-in-law, who both were good in business. My marketing research consultants were my wife and three young daughters. We would visit comic book stores all over California, and we would shop the stores and then jump back into the station wagon, and I would download their notes: what did they like, what didn't they like? It was a pretty amazing thing to have four women basically tell me what they liked and didn't like about comic shops, at a time when comics shops were thought of as old boy shops.
At this point we’re talking about the late '80s?
We're talking about ‘86, ‘87, yeah. It was really more a matter of being super realistic, not super progressive. Why turn off half the population? My goal was always to have a welcoming store for everybody. Anybody who walks into my shop will be able to find something they like. That was always the goal. And I knew that one of the ways to accomplish that goal was to get the perspective of people who were on the outside of what the traditional comic book store looked like at the time.
What were they telling you when you asked them about what they wanted to see?
At that point, my daughters were between the ages of four and eight. One store we went into had a merchandise boat - you can walk 360 degrees around this thing that has merchandise on several different levels. It kind of looks like a cruise ship, but with books on each level. As you walked into the shop there were Disney books, and kid-oriented books that were down at kid eye level, but at that same level, there were hardcore, and tattoo, and alternative culture books congruent to the kids' books. One of my daughters said, “Daddy, I think I saw some things I shouldn't have seen.” [Laughs]. And that was a merchandising lesson. They were really good about shopping a store, telling us what they liked and what they didn't like. I asked them questions like, “Did you feel comfortable? Did the people treat you well?” And we would take notes on whatever they said. It was always the goal to be able to have an accessible shop for everyone.
So you got the sense of a more well-rounded market, both in terms of gender and in terms of age. At what point did you decide this is something you wanted to do, to take the plunge and open up a place?
While I was doing these interviews with other companies, trying to get a sales job with a comics publisher or distributor, I could see that that wasn't going very well. I could tell what the answers were going to be as soon as I would have the interview. And that's okay. I was new to the comics business. So again, it goes back to those early WonderCon meetings with the Northern California Comic Dealers Association, where these guys were having a good time. They were helping each other solve problems. They were sharing advertising ideas and merchandising tips, and what was working sales-wise and what wasn't working. They were cooperating with advertising, and I helped them a lot with that.
There was a camaraderie there that may be unusual for regional retailers. But that was my first experience being in a regional trade network for comics retailers. And that colored my thinking for years to come about those organizations. When the sales and marketing jobs just weren't there, and there were precious few of those in the comics business to begin with, I knew I had to take a different route. Opening a shop was the way to get my family back to the area where we wanted to live, although that took five years after we opened the store to make that happen. It was the way to get into the business, be a part of the business, but also be home.
So the store opened up when?
October 3rd, 1988.
That’s a hell of a time to be entering the comic market, because this is really when the late '80s boom is taking off, right?
We had the boom and bust of the black and white market that had just started to filter through the system. And then as things were progressing, particularly in late 1988, there was this anticipation for the Tim Burton Batman movie that was coming up in the summer of 1989. It was a very good time to open a shop because in the real world the mass market had no idea what to do with Tim Burton's movie. It looked creepy, it looked weird. Mass merchants basically took a hands-off approach. So what that did is it opened a wide door for comic specialty retailers to stock all kinds of bat guano and do well with it. In 1989, 1 out of every 5 dollars that Flying Colors took in was bat guano. And I'm not talking just comics or graphic novels, but other stuff – the t-shirts, and the drink cozies, and the little PVC figures from the Applause Company. all that kind of stuff.
And you anticipated this?
Well, the beautiful thing is we got into it and started to do well with it, but we were placing reorders right and left. I can tell you right now, I don't sell 144 t-shirts in a month, but I was ordering them 144 at a time for the Batman movie. And for a shop that was not even a year old, that was pretty remarkable. It was a big risk for a small shop, for a new shop, but it was also a huge opportunity. It got people into the store. It got them to see what we carried, whether it was traditional periodical comics or some of the comic strip books or the nostalgic comic books that we were carrying. It got warm bodies in the door, and that was the important thing for us.
And was DC active in facilitating that?
That was a beautiful time for the relationship between comic book specialty retailers and publishers, because our market was their market. It was real. The newsstand market had really filtered off to almost nothing. Although we also had an account with a Newsstand distributor to back up our orders, which was unusual for that time. But our [direct] market was where the publishers were putting their emphasis, their time, their energy, and their money. They, the publishers, were actually pouring money into the comic specialty market via co-op advertising, promotions, signings, all that kind of stuff. It was a good time to get into being a comics retailer. I think when we opened, there were somewhere around 3,000 shops in North America, and over the course of the next couple years that number went up pretty dramatically.
Now we're down to about that same number again, aren't we?
We are down to that same number, but we're also down to it because our specialty market doesn't mean anything anymore. The direct market died. And yes, we are comic specialists, and there's so much more that can happen in comic shops related to the product than can happen in a mass market store like a Barnes and Noble, or Target, or Amazon the Evil Empire. But unfortunately, now we're a barnacle on the book market rather than our own specialty market.
It's an interesting thing to say, and I think a lot of retailers would be tempted to say the opposite. Not that the direct market died, but rather that the direct market is all that's left. The newsstand market evaporated, and that's what's left of comics. But I think you're making the point that it's sort of an auxiliary of the larger bookstore market, right?
Unfortunately, yes. Our last exclusive, if you want to call it that, for the comic specialty market is the periodical format. And publishers - particularly the larger publishers - are using periodicals as a way to amortize the cost of their book sales or book production. There's really nothing being done other than a Free Comic Book Day, for instance, to promote the periodical market. That’s the last real exclusive that retailers have. I would hope that publishers will wake up to the fact that they really need to start promoting that format if they want to have a more sustainable comics ecosystem in the specialty market going forward.
What do you feel they could or should be doing to promote the periodical format that they're not doing now?
In the past we've had co-op advertising. We have had price promotion. We've had a deeper discount for a better sell-in so that the product is actually on the stands. We've had creator tours or publisher tours. We've had all kinds of different things that could still happen if publishers really wanted to push our market. There's good movement that's happened recently in that DC has announced that they're moving back their new release day to Wednesday, so the comic specialty market will be all on the same day. And there is some strength in that because if everyone is pulling in the same direction for new release day being Wednesday, that has something of an effect when it comes to how consumers buy their comics, and the energy that's in the stores at the beginning of each new release week.
It sounds like a lot of what you're mentioning here is what publishers historically used to do, and have really pulled back from in the past decade. Is your sense that that's just cost-cutting plain and simple, or is it a deliberate strategy to pull their emphasis away from the direct market?
I'm not one of those who's going to put a hundred percent of the blame on publishers, because I think retailers definitely deserve probably more than 50% of the blame. And part of that is that our market has become incredibly risk-averse. We don't take chances with anything. And what that's done is turn most of the remaining shops in the specialty market into subscription stores. There’s way too much emphasis on having people come into a shop to buy their comics out of a box, rather than experiencing the full array of what's out there on the racks, if a retailer is actually racking a lot of different titles for casual purchase. So a lot of things go into that. One of them is that as things have gotten more expensive, comic retailers generally have gone to less expensive retail footprints.
It plays into the diehard comics fan rather than growing the market by being in a spot that will attract different, potentially new, customers. That’s a part of it. Another part of it is that the games that publishers play with periodical comics makes it a much higher risk item. I think there needs to be some risk mitigation. There needs to be some creative promotion, and then, on the retail side, there needs to be some push by retailers – individually or collectively – to actually have comic books in stock on a regular basis, rather than just sell 95% of their periodicals out of subscription boxes.
When you say the games that they play, are you talking in terms of canceling series and restarting with new numbers, that sort of thing?
Canceling and restarting with new numbers, a varying number of variant covers per issue. So issue #1 has 20 variants, issue #2 has three variants, issue #4 has five. Publishers are putting risk onto the backs of retailers where they see variants as a way to promote titles. What they're doing is frustrating a lot of buyers because they may not be able to get what they want. They don't know whether a variant title is a 1-in-100 ratio variant, or whether it's easily open to order. But every one of those variants becomes a little bit of a higher risk for retailers. One of the reasons we're risk-averse is that it has been forced on us. I think publishers really need to look at how to do a little bit of risk aversion. I think they would see their sales perk up a bit if they did.
So what are you, as a shop owner, doing at your end to try and mitigate that or account for that?
We watch our inventory pretty carefully, but we will go deeper on the things that we believe in, that we think we can move more copies of. I follow what the staff is excited about. And that can be a variety of different things. I listen a lot to what customers are saying about what they like, what they don't like. I do take some risks. Would I love to be pulling less dead stock from my racks on a monthly basis? Yeah, I would. That's part of the risk. It's as much an art as it is a science.
You've been around for a while, and you've obviously seen the market as a whole go through some pretty radical transformations, up and down. What have been the biggest changes that you've had to account for over the several decades your store has been around?
When I got into the business, it was almost entirely periodical-driven. Graphic novels were a relatively new item when we opened in ‘88; Dark Knight was three years old, Watchmen was two or three years old. Those were the two big graphic novels there. Publishers weren't doing a lot of those kinds of things. But we went from that periodical-driven market to one that was much more of a combination of periodical and book format. Within the next five or six years, we went from a market which was very reader-driven right after the bust of the black and white market, to one that was very speculator-driven with the Death of Superman and the onset of Valiant and Image in the early 90’s.
Then we went back to a much more reader-driven market when that speculation market crashed. We've gone from our early days when there were 12 to 14 distributors in North America to the great distributor wars of the mid-'90s when it whittled down to essentially Diamond, and now back in the other direction. It's going to look wavy if you put it on a line. There are ups and downs. Prior to COVID in 2020, we had the longest sustained relative health in the market from about 2001 up to 2019. The comics market was steadily growing, if not spectacularly growing.
All phases of it were experiencing good health. For the most part, it was a very steady market, but steady isn't good enough sometimes for corporate overlords who are just gluttonous about how much they want market share and dollars. There are so many good comics, good people working at the different comic book companies, but there are some hard things that have happened in that time. Two of our largest media companies are creating pressure on the comics market that is not always healthy.
It would seem to me, and I'm not sure if you agree, that a lot of this has to do with the gradual consolidation of comic publishers into larger media corporations, so that maybe comics are, at best, a tiny end of their business.
Yeah. And yet, there was still this hard push during COVID to keep publishing, to keep going, and that wasn't coming from people who were working in the warehouses and were concerned about social distancing or any of that kind of stuff. This was from corporate bosses who are used to the slave labor who make the shoes and the computers in Asia and India, so what's a little bit of a problem in the U.S. if you're going to distribute comics? That may sound really harsh, and it is. But I do think there is kind of a slave-master relationship. It's unfortunate that the corporations look at the comic book publishers as the place where the ideas start, but not the place where the ideas get credit. There's so much more to comics than comic book movies or TV shows.
At the same time, though, it's also true that there's been an explosion in the manga market, and especially comics for younger readers. In terms of the same age groups that historically have gone to comic shops and bought American superhero comics, it's really the manga market now.
It is. I don't know a lot about manga, to be honest. It's a little bit out of my wheelhouse. But again, we do a lot of listening. And what we heard, even when we opened back in 1988, was that there's this stuff going on in Japan, and there's some really cool things happening there. And so we would bring in the Viz and Eclipse versions of Japanese manga. We've been in on it since the very beginning when it really exploded. We haven't done as well with it as I would like. But that's one of the things that we're looking at expanding more as we go forward. We've always been really good about trying to get people just what they want, whether we have it in stock or not. Those special orders from consumers also drive our orders. If somebody's asking for something, that probably means somebody else also wants it. And so often that's how we develop categories in the store – by customer request. And then there's a lot of stuff here that is very much driven by the personal tastes of the staff members.
There are traditional superhero buyers who are buying manga, and then there are those who just come in for the manga. What's been something of a difficulty when it comes to growing the manga market is that a lot of manga readers are not manga buyers. It’s almost a cultural thing that it's okay to sit around bookstores and read as much manga as you can and then put it back on the shelf without buying anything. We've seen a fair amount of that, although not nearly to the degree that you would see at a Barnes and Noble. I think that if everyone who went in and read manga cover to cover at a Barnes and Noble actually bought them, we would see sales go up even further.
But what have we done to make our store more accessible to that? Again, it's about listening. It's about responding, and it's when we see something that's working, we really try to make it work a whole lot more. I'll give you one example: the series Witch Hat Altelier. We brought that in with volume 1. I think initially we ordered a couple of copies just to try it, to see what would happen. It had an easy pitch line – “Harry Potter meets Miyazaki” – so we were able to move that to people who wouldn't be buying manga traditionally.
I can't tell you how many; I know we've sold a good couple hundred of the first volume of that one, and hundreds more of the subsequent volumes. It's one of those books that breaks both ways. It allows us to show that to someone who's been buying Amulet from Scholastic, the Kazu Kibuishi book. We can move people around to different spots in the store. Based upon what they're liking in one section, we can move them to another section.
How would you describe the reader demographic that's shopping at your store these days?
Back in the early days I explained it this way: the average age of our customer back in the late '80s was about 22, and was predominantly male. These days, the average age is about 42, and is a lot more evenly split between male and female. I would say it's still probably 65% male, 35% female.
But it's aging pretty dramatically.
The whole market is, yeah. I think that speaks to the maturation of comics. Comics in the 1980s were made for a general audience. Comics today are not made for a general audience. There are far more comics that are geared at an adult audience. And I don't mean that in the puritan sense; I mean just age. They're much more adult than they were back in the late 1980s.
But that's also a problem, right? Because if that demographic keeps aging, you're going to run out of younger readers to replace them.
If you look at our best sellers list, it is populated mostly with Dogman, Amulet, Rayna Telgemeir, Jeff Smith's Bone. It's really interesting that the adult market is very spread out in terms of what gets bought and what people enjoy. But the kids market is a stronghold. There are pillars in the kids market that allow us to show other things once someone has read all the volumes of Bone, for instance – and Bone volume 1 is our all time bestselling graphic novel.
Have you had success with that? Because that seems to be the intractable problem for everybody: there are vast numbers of kids who are buying Dogman and Bone, but how do you get them to move from that to some other kind of comic as they get older?
I think we have built up the trust to be able to do that. But there's also a distinction that needs to be made, in that when we look at customer demographics, that's slightly different than visitor demographics. Customer parents are buying Dogman for their kids. There isn't a 6-year-old who comes in and puts Dogman on the counter and gives us his credit card. It's definitely a parent-driven purchase, so that consumer is counted in the 42-year-old range, rather than the 6-year-old that the person is buying it for. That has a tendency to skew those demographics somewhat, because the bestsellers are in the children's category, but they're being largely purchased by adults for children,
True enough. But it also, I would think, makes it harder to get those kids moving on to more mature comics in an organic way, because you don't have that personal contact with them.
One of the things we found over the years is that there are holes in the market in terms of demographics. Younger kids love getting into kid-oriented comics, and when they get into high school they seem to fall in love with their phones. And maybe they drift away a little bit – not all of them, but some – so we've had a hole that is basically from the ages of 16 to 22. That is almost the hiatus years for comics, for a lot of comic buyers. I'm not saying a hundred percent, but we've seen that. I can't tell you how many times we have somebody come in and tell us that they used to buy comics as a kid, and they just heard about this new comic that came out that they’re interested in. We ask them, “When was the last time you were here?” And they say, “Oh, it had to be when I was, like, 11,” and they're 23 now. Once we have readers as young kids, they may drift in and out of being dedicated comics consumers, but comics are still a part of their lives. They just need the reason for entry again at a later stage.
What do you see as the reasons for entry that can get people back in?
It could be a lot of different things. Sometimes it's related to other media. Sometimes it's related to the press that someone sees about artists and writers. It can be students taking classes at a community college that deal with graphic novels. It could be working with libraries. We do a lot of work with local libraries, and when someone checks out a graphic novel from a library, it will often ignite them to come in and see what else is out there. There are a lot of different ways to come in. The difficulty in our market is that we are in a situation where we have maybe 2,500 stores in North America, but there may only be 500 of them that have any depth of comics content in stock at any one time.
I think I may have had this conversation with Gary Groth a long time ago, when he told me that there were only about 300 comic shops in North America that did much with indie comics. That stuck with me. We're one of them. We still sell a lot of superhero comics, but the indie thing is definitely a part of what we do well. And that was when 300-500 stores would be indie stores, out of 2,500 or 3,000 stores. Now we're in a situation where we've got maybe 500 full-line comic book stores in North America and another 2,000 or so stores that may have comics in the name, but not necessarily in stock. And that's an area where I would love to see change. I would love to see retailers actually retailing comics again.
Meaning moving away from the ancillary products – the modern version of the “bat guano” that you were talking about earlier – and back toward keeping actual comics in stock at any given time.
Right. One of the things that has happened over the course of this evolution of the last 35-plus years, is that comics is now a generic term for pop culture. And that's great and awful all at once. Because people know the source is comics, but the percentage of people who then go to that source is very small. Some of those people might be frustrated by trying to go to the source and not finding what they want in shops that may not be very well stocked.
That goes to one of the things for which you're most notable, which is Free Comic Book Day, which you instigated the year that the Spider-Man movie came out. So that was – at least in part – a way to get people going to that source material from the first really big media explosion.
And it worked. But Free Comic Book Day was never meant to be a promotion about superhero movies or big summer movies that are related to comics somehow. When we were deciding when to have it, my idea was to have Free Comic Book Day some time in the middle of April and do it on a Wednesday or a Thursday evening, when it would be free scoop night at Baskin Robbins. But it would be done as an evening thing and only part of a day. I was wrong with that [suggestion]. It made more sense to make it a full day. But the idea wasn't related to comic book movies.
And it wasn't until we had a meeting with representatives from the Comics Buyer's Guide that we had to decide whether we were going to do a free comic book day at all. Maggie Thompson was there, John Jackson Miller – the editor – was there, executives from Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse were all there. The team from Diamond Comics was there. And it was then-Image publisher Jim Valentino who suggested we put Free Comic Book Day on the weekend when the spotlight on comics content would be brightest because of the Spider-Man movie.
That worked very well because the publicity machine cranked overtime to do good things for comic shops launching Free Comic Book Day, and be able to tie it in with a big budget movie. We haven't had those big budget movies every year for Free Comic Book Day. We did not have a big budget movie this year, in 2024. And by all accounts, this was probably one of the most successful Free Comic Book Days in its 23 year history.
What defines a successful Free Comic Book Day for you at this point? When you first instigated it, what were you hoping would be the outcome from it?
I'll take it back a little bit further. I was involved in retailer trade organizations way back with the Northern California Comic Dealers Association, which morphed into a thing called BACR – Bay Area Comic Retailers. We joined up with east coast retailers to form Comic Book Retailers International. I was asked to write something for Diamond’s “Year in Review” for their magazine that came out at the end of the year in 1997. I proposed that there were good things going on in comics, even after the crash of the speculator market and the winnowing of the distributor field, but we had no mechanism to tell people about it.
The number of people coming into shops was dwindling. The circulation of comics, the signs were way down. Things were not good. So I proposed an industry-wide open house, but it was an unwieldy kind of a deal. It didn't have the shape to it. So in 2001, I saw the line out in front of my store for Baskin Robbins free scoop night. I thought, “Here's a mechanism. If we give free comic books away, we'll get people in.” And that worked. The idea was to bring in potential new readers, call back former readers, and thank current readers. Twenty-three events in, and we're still doing this.
I think this is why 2024 is seen as more of a success. From what I've seen so far, the feedback is that there were more people coming into shops. There was a lot more excitement about the variety of stuff that was being given away. And there was generally a more positive attitude about comics and being a part of the community. We also had the announcement of a new store opening, that sort of thing. But I'm hearing that it was a very positive deal, even when there was no movie attached to it. More people came into shops and enjoyed the day. Hopefully, some of them find their community there, and will come back on a weekly basis.
That's really the goal, to try and get new readers into the store?
It works on all three of those levels that I mentioned: bringing in new readers, we had more than 1,200 people who came through the shop on Saturday. And about 200 of those people had never been here before, which seems to be the case for most of these Free Comic Book Day events. When you do something special, you will find people that you haven't been able to find before. Free Comic Book Day has been able to solidify the entire comics market into doing something on the same day. It's a shared experience that goes crazy online with people sharing what they got and what they liked about it. But what I've also seen year after year with Free Comic Book Day, is people who come to us for their first visit realize who we are, what we do, and they want to be a part of it and keep coming back afterwards.
Does it hurt that the indie market – really what we could call the mainstream adult comic book market now – doesn't really exist in periodical format anymore?
I think that's just the maturation of that market. I do think there is still a very active – I won't call it underground – but ground-level comics market for DIY stuff in self-publishing. There are different outlets for that. It used to be that if you were making your own mini-comics or you were making your own comic book, you would definitely want to hit up every local comic book store and say, “Hey, do you have a local section? Can you put this in?” That's not necessarily the case anymore, particularly with crowdfunding and with as many comics-related events as there are all over the country almost every week. There are different outlets and different ways for startup creators and publishers to move through the market and find their way.
Do any of those ways benefit a shop like yours?
Occasionally, yeah. Prior to the pandemic, we did a yearly event called The FlyCo Mini Indie-Con, in which we would have local creators bringing their stuff to sell, and they would do pretty well with it. There are comics that we have continued to carry because of those events and we've met artists and writers who continue to do work that we continue to support. Content is everywhere, but customers aren't. Our market for comic books used to be Manhattan. It used to be skyscrapers that reached into-the-clouds sellers, but were very concentrated on a relatively small piece of property.
And what we have now is Nebraska, we have corn fields as far as the eye can see, but nothing sticks up from those corn fields. So we have this constant barrage of product that is very wide, but not finding a large audience. I never want to dissuade anyone from creating what they want to create, but I do want them to be aware that they need to be doing it for themselves rather than doing it for an audience, because audiences are really hard to come by.
So the lesson that you would hope people would follow in that case is to just do the comic you want to do, and the audience will develop for it.
Hopefully the audience will develop. You'll find out if there's a market for your stuff once you do it. I never want to stop anyone from being creative, but I also want to teach them some of the business end of things. At WonderCon in 1991, Jeff Smith was a guest, and Bone was just getting started at that point. Jeff was unlike almost every indie comics creator at that point; he not only knew he was producing a really entertaining comic book, but he knew how to sell it. He would grab people by the collar and bring them to his table and say, “You've gotta look at this.”
He grew his market really well by coupling great creativity with a sense of business. That served him well over the years. A lot of people could learn from that example. I know that's an anomaly as well, but there are some basic things about selling your stuff that many creators think about when they are envisioning a bestseller on their drawing table, and it winds up not being a seller at all.
I think that's a classic problem in the arts. The people who are most apt to be great artists aren't particularly great business people, generally speaking.
Right. I get that. But the help is there if they want to get it.
This is gradually taking us back to where we started in this conversation: what has it meant for your business that your market has gone from Manhattan to Nebraska?
What we've had to do is specialize, to a degree. There are things that we're not going to do really well. We're not a store that does underground comics. We're in suburbia; we'll sell a little bit of Crumb, a little bit of Freak Brothers. But that's about it. We're not carrying adults-only comics or underground comics. We'll leave that to the more urban stores that have an audience for it. It comes back to listening, really listening and learning. We're seeing what's out there.
I'm in contact with a lot of retailers every week. I ask them what's working for them, what's not working. We share ideas. And if something is working that I didn't know about, there is a high likelihood that I'm going to try it and see if I can make it work for my shop. But my shop is very much a suburban store. It is very family-oriented. And that's borne out by looking at our bestseller lists. We know what our lane is, right? And it's not that we're completely staying in that lane one hundred percent of the time, because we do try things; that's part of that risk thing that I was talking about earlier. But after all this time I have a pretty good sense of what works and what doesn't work, where we can push and where we have to pull.
Are you making more or less in profits than you were a decade ago?
I'll put it to you this way: I just made a half-a-million-dollar bet on our business by signing a lease.
Yes, you did. And I take it from everything you've said, the fact that shutting down your old location did not have anything to do with declining business.
No. Would I like the business to be better? Heck yeah. Everyone who's in business wants their business to be better. That goes without saying. I still believe there is life to the comic specialty market, even if we are a barnacle on the book market. I believe that there's going to be an increased interest on the part of a lot of publishers to play a little bit better in the specialty market. I think there's still enough juice in the market to keep moving forward.
The post Flying Colors Comics appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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