When Marc Arsenault of Wow Cool Alternative Comics contacted my editors at the Comics Journal, I expected something on the order of a typical Retail Therapy column. Wow Cool had recently been experiencing some tough financial circumstances, Arsenault said, and was gearing up to launch a GoFundMe the following week in order to keep the lights on through the holiday season (at press time, the campaign has brought in $3,750 of its $13,000 goal). Marc had read our recent interview with Gabe Fowler at the then-similarly-embattled Desert Island Comics, and hoped that TCJ could shine a spotlight on his own store’s future. So, simple enough: an overview of the store’s history, a snapshot of its financial situation, and a forecast into the future of retail. A typical write-up, or so I presumed.
I really should have known better. The conversation with Arsenault turned out to be anything but typical, but then, so was Marc Arsenault. Arsenault’s career over the past four decades has been an eclectic hodgepodge of conceptual and commercial art, small and large-press publishing, and comics retail of various permutations.
A brief and partial overview of his career would run as follows: first entering the comics field as a sales assistant at Electric City Comics in Schenectady, NY in 1985, Arsenault went on to study at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, from whence he intended to work in fine arts. Instead, he found his way back into comics by founding the initial iteration of Wow Cool as small-press publisher and distributor, after which he worked in turn as an assistant art director at Kevin Eastman’s Tundra Publishing, a zine buyer for Comic Relief in Berkeley, an art director at Fantagraphics (in which capacity he was nominated for an Eisner Award in 1998), and ultimately the owner of an online comic shop with the relaunch of Wow Cool in 2009. That store took on a now-defunct physical location with the purchase of Alternative Comics in Cupertino, Calif., in 2012, and (for now, at least) consists of both an online storefront and three physical locations of various names scattered throughout upstate New York.
Dizzying as this chronology looks on paper, it is important to note that very little of it actually came up in Arsenault’s conversation with us. For that matter, and despite periodic prodding, neither did any of the prosaic nuts and bolts behind Wow Cool’s potentially impending demise. Arsenault’s GoFundMe page lays out a strikingly urgent case for the store, announcing at the outset that “I will be pursuing different work after the holiday shopping season,” and that, “I am in need or [sic] urgent assistance to remain housed and keep the heat and power on, as well as keeping Wow Cool viable as a part-time concern.”
Instead, the what took place was an often bewildering, frequently discursive, and periodically philosophical discussion about a longtime comics professional’s various careers in art and commerce. It’s not a Retail Therapy, but it’s not bad, either. – Zach Rabiroff
ZACH RABIROFF: Let’s kind of go back here, because you've been in the business for quite a while at this point.
MARC ARSENAULT: Yes, forever. Sheldon Meyer is older than me and he's dead. Beyond that…
What brought you into comics retail in the first place?
When I was, like, 15, I needed a summer job, and my regular LCS was Electric City Comics … they're one of the oldest continuously operating comic shops, same owner. And I got a summer job there. Me and my friend Mike would do extremely little work, that was my first job of any sort. More impactfully, I guess, was when me, Tom Hart, and Sam Henderson started Wow Cool as a small press. And Sam was younger than me – still is – but at that point he was already a veteran zine and small press comics guy, totally blew me and Hart’s brains when we were in college. “What, you can Xerox stuff you drew and put it out … and people buy it?”
And this was what year, by the way? Just to situate this?
1988. And yeah, I only had one school I wanted to go to, the School of Visual Arts [in New York City], and it was because Art Spiegelman and Harvey Kurtzman were there. Art was no longer teaching there, but I met him through those connections. SVA was very foundational in my life. I went there for comics and illustration. I did eventually work in both, but I switched over to fine arts, which I also did, and had a reasonable fine arts career as those things go.
I mean, I don't think you'd get into it for the money.
Yeah, no, I mean, this is kind of an aside, but I try to not do things for no reward and no money, because I've worked in very low-return areas like fine arts and music. But I'm not getting into this [without] expecting something. And I've been paid really well for my work in both those areas. Even for music, I'm like, “I'm not doing this if there's nothing there.”
So that helps illuminate the move into retail, I would think.
Bookselling is a hermetic and bizarre profession. It's a very, very bizarre trade. And it's one I sort of fell back into. One of the big things I’ve done other than Wow Cool is a long-running wholesale distributor mail order house, Comic Relief. When it moved to California the first time it was run by me and Josh Petrin. He was, I think, the original zine buyer and small press buyer at Comic Relief, which at that time was maybe the most profitable comic shop in the country. Comic Relief was a very different store at that time. They were set up with more of a focus on the graphic novels and the perennial titles, and having a solid stock of the European books, and then supporting small press, supporting local, doing all of that.
And it's the first I heard of a store with a comic book focus, having specialized buyers. That was a completely foreign concept at that point. There were people who knew about collectibles and old books. And then there were people like me who knew about zines and small press, things like that. That was my first real job in that world.
If you want to summarize, what the difference is between Wow Cool's original form c. 1988 and what it became in 2009?
Wow Cool in its original form was a very informal thing at the School of Visual Arts dorms, which is this very bizarre place called Sloan House, which is a YMCA in Manhattan. I was in my sophomore year, and Tom Hart and Sam Henderson were freshman, and Sam brought this whole legacy of small press experience, like mini comics and things that we knew nothing about. And it totally blew me and Tom's minds open. We Xeroxed things and stapled them, put them out to our friends or whatever, but it didn't really turn around until maybe ‘94. I'm not really sure of the whole timeline there, but we started taking over – I dunno if you know Wayno (Wayne Honath), he does the dailies on the Bizarro Comics strip now. He was one of the first people whose stuff we took over doing the manufacturing and distribution for. And his line was like, “Yeah, I got sick of having to deal with quarters in the mail,” because back then, [an] eight-page mini-comic, just a quarter size of a letter size piece of paper, it was something you put in an envelope and people would literally mail you a quarter for the cost of the book and a quarter for the postage, something like that.
I'd been coming from the mail art scene, so I knew about that stuff. I don’t know if you know about mail art – kind of like a post-fluxus phenomenon, where you just mail each other art, and ask how far can I push the limits of what's allowable to mail through the US Postal Service? A lot of us were such crazed fanatics about how the postal system worked. We would learn all the regulations and figure out the sizes, and we'd have charts and things like that.
I was coming at things from a very, very different angle for most people. I have a very heavy duty classical arts education, I mean, I also loved comics. I remember since I was a kid, I really got into the Legion of Super Heroes. I'm like, “Oh, maybe I can draw the Legion of Super Heroes and then do my own work on the side.” And I was in a lecture by Art Spiegelman where he said verbatim, “You may think you can draw the Legion of Super Heroes and then do your own work on the side, but it's going to kill your soul,” something like that. I'm like, “Holy crap!” You really talk about a life-changing moment. Did I successfully act on all this? Maybe not. I still opted for a career, because of having a family and kids. I worked in commercial art, I worked in advertising and marketing.
All of which is to say that during this period, your primary goal sounds like it was to create and publish your own comics much more than to sell comics.
Yeah. The selling of other people's stuff kind of crept in because people would just ask. My career is kind of big. I mean, I worked for Kevin Eastman at Tundra Publishing. I was the art director of Fantagraphics. It's been a long, strange career. So anyway, I was looking for something to do in 2009 when my daughter was just a little baby, and I was kind of like, oh, what are we going to do? Oh, let's go to book sales. They have library book sales and stuff. So I became a rare book dealer and I wasn't selling anything priced under $20. So 15 years ago, I started selling on Amazon. And I'm like, “oh, I'm making pin money,” but very quickly I was making $2,000 a month just doing that. I wish I was making that now.
It was crazy. And at some point it started becoming a bigger thing. I called up Christine Einstein, my rep from years ago at Last Gasp, when they were still a distributor. And I'm like, “Hey, is my account still open? I'd like to order some books from you to sell online.” And she's like, “yeah, no problem. You're still in the system.” A few months later, I have a whole room in our house and all the sides of the hallway filled with boxes of books. I'm like, okay, it's time to find an office or something. I need to move out of the house with this stuff.
It was doing quite well, so it'd be [around] 2011. And so I found a place. I wasn't planning on doing retail right away, but I entertained the idea. And it was in Cupertino, California, in the same parking lot as this dive bar that I later found out was the one that Raymond Carver used to do to go to – the short story writer. He lived down the road. Carver was kind of an asshole, [but] that's beside the point. Famous.
Wait, hold on. I think I want to follow that tangent for a second. Do you know that on a personal level or have you just heard that Raymond Carver was an asshole?
Oh no. Raymond Carver treated his wife like shit. She wrote about it.
Oh, okay. All right. So we're just talking about biographical details here. I was just genuinely curious if you had any personal Raymond Carver stories that you wanted to drop here, but all right, go on, please.
No, but nonetheless, the same dive bar that Raymond Carver [frequented], to some people, it might be more of interest that it was the same dive bar that members of Mohinder went to who went on to be in the math rock band Indian Summer.
I happen to find both of those things of interest.
I tried out for Indian Summer as a guitarist. I didn't get along with the other guitarist, so that didn't happen.
And yet, of all of these potential careers, somehow online comics retail is the one that you end up in, huh?
Yeah. So how do we end up at online comics retail? The story of my life is people ask me to do things and I say yes. So sometime around 2011-12, I'm still friends with Sam Henderson at that point, and he had stopped doing Magic Whistle. He had put out a thing called Free Ice Cream, collecting all his gag strips. He'd done it for, I think it's called the New York Examiner, the Pink newspaper. And then he's like, “Yeah, I kind of want to do Magic Whistle again. Do you want to publish it?” I'm like, “I don't know, maybe. Oh, I'll ask Jeff Mason”, who ran Alternative Comics. So there's this continuity with publishing stuff that basically a lot of things that started at Wow Cool ended up at Top Shelf and Alternative Comics. Well, I say a lot. It was True Swamp and Magic Whistle. That might've been it. I'm not sure if there are more.
And then, bizarrely, years later, I ended up taking over Alternative Comics and I called Jeff Mason and I'm like, “Hey, I'm going to publish a new issue of Magic Whistle. Do you have the back issues?” And he's like, “Do you want to take over the whole thing?” And then a month later I get a call from the printer in Canada and they say, “We're closing our warehouse. You either have to get 25 pallets of your books out of here, or we're going to recycle them.” So I arrange all the customs paperwork and everything, and all of a sudden I have 25 pallets of Alternative Comics back issues. A year later, I go pick up a whole storage space full of everything else of Alternative Comics that's in Florida.
I go after collecting back debt, which there was a considerable amount of at the time, and chasing down all these things and making use of the contracts they had for distribution to get the books out there and work with Sam Henderson and James Kochalka and all these other people I'd known for a long time. It was a pretty smooth continuity because Alternative Comics had kind of petered out in 2008, which I don't know how connected to the economic downturn that was, but it was probably good timing.
We had a space that would work for retail, and by chance a bookstore had bought out a Border's books [of] their shelves, they were closing. And so I drove up to 'em and bought that out. And so I have all these shelves here in my old shop for all these freaking books, I had no idea what I was getting into.
So, in my life, I've sworn never to do certain things: “I'm never going to throw a comic convention” and “I'm never going to open a retail store.” I haven't started a comic convention yet. But I did start a retail store. We opened December, 2013. I think we almost immediately got broken into in Burglarized twice in a row. This was in Cupertino, California in Silicon Valley, it was kind of a weird spot, but we had a really good run. We were open for five and a half years.
So why 2013? Why open a shop in 2013 for comics of all things?
Well, I've been trying to bootstrap the whole way, and it was working up to a point. And then, the last year, it really didn't anymore. The reasons are a little bit complicated, I guess, and had a lot to do with location, location, location. I've been doing mail order, I'd relaunched WowCool.com. We're now in the third version of the backbone of that, the architecture of the site. The most important thing for me was having a community bookstore. West San Jose, West Santa Clara County, didn't have a bookstore, there just wasn't one anymore. I'm still part of this whole process, me and my daughter. We did all kinds of projects related to it, and it was such a great community thing. Doing things like Free Comic Book Day and Halloween events just felt so nice and amazing. There's just not a lot of culture in Silicon Valley.
What were you selling at that store, and who did you find your customers to be at that point?
Our first year, we didn't have a Diamond account. We just sold indie stuff that I was picking up from people I knew, or conventions or whatever. It was the first Free Comic Book Day. It was all indie stuff that was done out of primarily Portland.
And I feel really bad about this to this day, but [once], I had this older teenage girl walk in, ask me if I had a Fantastic Four, and I couldn't control myself. I just started laughing. I feel totally bad to this day. Oh my God, I feel like such a jerk. Eventually, I did get a Diamond account. I started carrying very carefully curated Marvel, DC, I mean, I know all that stuff. Up to a point: If you ask me, anything after 1986, it gets a little sketchy. We didn't do very many subs. I mean, a lot of the comic book shop culture, I just find kind of gross.
I was trying to be a community bookstore with a focus on indie comics and be super inclusive. And I come from the punk and hip-hop scenes from the eighties, I don't need to put it on a billboard, what we're doing. You should be able to walk in here and be like, “Oh look, I'm seeing black stuff. I'm seeing queer stuff and I'm seeing stuff that relates to me or things I'm interested in.”
So was that model that largely focused on independently published non-Marvel, non-DC, non-Diamond distributed comics, did that make money for you? Did that find an audience, at least at first?
We did okay. We made rent. Pretty early on, bizarrely, some of my oldest customers, a couple of whom have become friends, they're right at the start. We became more of a fixture in the community and people would go there and bring their kids, and we'd have events. We had a book club one year, a kid's graphic novel club, and that was fun. They'd read Dog Boy (Dog Man!- ed.) or whatever. I've worked my whole life as a writer and artist and designer. Having a bookstore opened me up so much as a person. It's so deeply meaningful to me, the way I could communicate with people the way I wasn't able to before. That's my biggest takeaway. It was nice that we made money and sold books, and connected people with things I like to read. And then after a big break, it's interesting being back in retail and [with] a totally different model. It's not any typical model at all. None of 'em. I have three locations down, none of those are typical.
How did you get there? Because we sort of skipped over those steps between A and C. You had one location in …
I had one location in California, and then they were raising the rent by far too much. And then we'd gone through a year of fighting over parking lot space, and we were at the back of a building, so we weren't the easiest to find. We were starting to do bigger events. Nate Powell did an event and he flew out to the West Coast. Me and Comic Experience, Brian [Hibbs] sponsored him. We want[ed] to do these on a larger scale. And we looked into taking over a movie theater, but then they got bulldozed so that never happened. They were across the freeway from us. We were near – did you ever watch the Steve Jobs movie?
They made two of those, right? Do you mean the Aaron Sorkin one, or the one with Ashton Kutcher?
Oh, geez, I'm not sure.
I can't believe I remember both of those, but there were two of them.
Yeah, I've only seen the one where it's different parts of his life. And there's the thing where he's like-
So that's the Aaron Sorkin one?
Yeah, the Aaron Sorkin one.
I am ashamed of myself for knowing all of this off the top of my head for some reason. But there we are.
So across the street from where we were, just for some sort of weird Silicon Valley reference is De Anza College and the theater where they did the 1984 Mac launch. When they shot the movie, the parking lot across the freeway from us, near the theater that we wanted to take over, that's where all the production trucks were – catering trucks, everyone's trailers and stuff. Some sort of weird bizarre point of reference. We're around Apple stuff, Apple headquarters is down the street from me.
It was really just [that] the lease was running out. They wanted to raise some rent more than we were willing to pay. The location wasn't working anymore. This was the end of April 2019, and little did I know if I'd even renewed a year, I would've gotten screwed at the end of it.
Meanwhile, I started working for an agency that was one of the vendors doing language services for Netflix, South Korea. And so I did that for four years, which is not very comics-related, but it actually ended up being more so than I expected. I mean, to be honest, it paid really well. It was a great job. But that eventually ended. Netflix kind of screwed everybody. I worked for Webtoon for a little bit doing writing for 'em, but that all kind of fizzled out. I am like, “What am I doing in my life?” And then I turned into an empty nester, and me and my wife got kind of distant, so I was like, I'm going to move back to Troy where I hadn't lived in 22 years. And my one thing that had been continuous through all this was I had my online retail business.
And by chance, I get to Troy, I walked into the store Paper Moon, back in April, a few weeks after they'd opened, where I'm sitting in the back of now, and I'm like, this is amazing. This is my shop but someone else did it. And a couple of months later, I'm part of the business and working with 'em. Through them, I curated the comic and graphic novel section at a shop called Braveheart Books in Stephentown, New York, which is the only "Stephentown" on Earth. And so they have a lovely little section. We started small expanded toys there, then just last week opened up a more general book and graphic novel thing at a cafe called Mojo's here. And I don't know, the reality is the money's just not there. How am I in four venues as a book retailer? And I'm not making ends? It's not right. And I have to rethink things, or make this more of a part-time part of my life.
So what do you think the answer to that question is?
I had to sit down and look at the numbers, and the devastating one was October, half of September, and that was where I'm like, this is a problem.
And this was the first time you had really seen a fall off in any of your profits.
I looked at it – I say we, it's always just me in this case – So I left California early March, got here roughly mid-March, early April. And there was a whole thing. My kid had to go back to school after break, and I was taking my other kid to go visit friends in the Midwest, and I'm moving. Originally it was supposed to be all of us were moving. It didn't happen.
The shop was going to be on hiatus one way or another for a month or two. The big thing is I had to physically move the stock across the country, but I also switched our shop infrastructure system from WooCommerce, now we're on Shopify, it's cheaper, it's more efficient, but somehow it's not producing the same results. So we're about a third of what we were a year ago, a month per month. And then all of a sudden October, it was a drop of a half. I'm like, okay, this is not sustainable.
This is really worrisome. I mean, it's like keeping the lights on worrisome. If I was doing the numbers I used to do last year, I'd be comfortable, and I'm like, oh my God, what is happening? And then in the shop, we're like, today was a good day, but Saturday's always our best day. It wasn't an amazing day. It wasn't a great day. I'm not in a position to be doing charity. We do a lot of events. We've had artists, authors, we have rotating art shows, we have music, we have DJs, and I love that we're part of this community. I think it means a lot to other people, the things they've written to me, the things they've told me, oh my God, it means so much, no joke. It's like I'm enriching people's lives, and that makes me feel good. I feel the love from my customers, this is making things so much more exciting, getting such a positive response.
I knew [the October numbers] were lower, but that was the first month where they were so dramatically lower that it was kind of an existential crisis moment where I'm like, “holy crap.” And I hadn't really actually looked at the numbers, is the other thing. I think if I had, maybe I would've panicked earlier.
So, your sense now looking at the books is that maybe this had been a problem that was building for a while?
Yeah, there's too many factors. We had a dormant period where we were closed and we had limited stock available in the shop, and we completely changed shops. And so you have a drop off in however your SEO works. And then I spent more on advertising, but it wasn't paying off, so I was paying nothing on advertising that's not paying off either. I got better about things like the newsletter and outreach like that. I dunno. I've had moments where I'm like, God, I've been doing this too long. Despair. I need to do something else with my life.
Well, I mean, aside from the existential crisis, there's just the crisis of was the shop making money and can the shop make money?
The shop definitely was making money. We kept going as a profitable entity for 14 years. So it's really only been 2024. It's like, okay, we're having problems. And the fact that we expanded greatly to have not the return. That's a little disturbing. [There] was money coming in, but it's not the kind of money you need to pay your bills or eat or any of that. It's just, it's dollars. And I mean, I think one of the locations made like 56 bucks for my end of it last weekend. It goes up and down. The newest one, the cafe. I haven't heard anything from 'em on sales because it literally just started a week ago. Paper Moon is very up and down. If we were talking thousands, not hundreds, it would be very, very different. But we're talking hundreds, and we're talking low hundreds.
Well, so I'm just going to toss this out as a hypothetical. Maybe the comics market and maybe specifically the small press comics market isn't large enough to sustain that kind of footprint. Is that possible?
My online store wowcool.com is very much all over the place. It's a lot of mainstream stuff. It's a lot of old stuff. It does have the small press as the bookstores go. We're a newsstand bookstore. We sell Vogue and Rolling Stone. We're the only newsstand in Troy, and we sell records and comics and Godzillas and things like that. And we have new and used books. Used books have actually been really nice, balancing things out and getting more people coming back. You tend to roll over that stock pretty regularly.
We're more of a general interest bookstore, but we do have a graphic novel section, and it's a lot more fun to curate that kind of thing. That was one of the things in my old shop, I had three shelves that were dedicated to slightly used prose and nonfiction. And it was funny. Imagine you only have 150 books of our comics in your shop, and people would come in and they'd ask for one thing and you would have it. So I don't know how we managed to pull that magic off. We'd be like, oh yeah, we have that. [Happened] more than once. Very weird.
Well, it's a little bit all over the place.
My life is all over the place. Business is all over the place.
Well, allow me to suggest that maybe that's the problem. This is also everything that we're talking about here – and this is getting philosophical, but that seems to be the nature of this interview. Everything we're talking about here is diffused. We're talking about four different outlets, some of them physical, some of them online. And these outlets are full-service curated magazines, prose books, graphic novels, even sometimes single issues and back issues like Fantastic Four. And it sometimes turns a profit and sometimes doesn't turn a profit.
I sold a set of Miracleman comics this morning. That's about as mainstream as anything I've sold in this location. Sorry, can you state your answer in the form of a question?
Start again. I think my editor is going to have a wonderful time with whatever it is that I turn in here. (yes, if the bar for wonderful is in hell- ed.)
Or what is this? It's 2024 in upstate New York with, comic-related content.
Listen, this country just elected Donald Trump again a week and a half ago. I can turn in whatever the hell I want and nobody's going to blink. All right? There are no rules anymore.
That wasn't the part that got to me. The part that got to me was every single branch of government being right wing.
Oh, yeah.
That part really disturbed me. On a theoretical, philosophical level, I'm definitely in the branch of people who are like, well, let's just let it all fall apart. Let's just tear it all down.
We're at the point [where] it doesn't even matter whether we want to let it or not. We've been taken over by fascists now on every level of government. So if we live to see the other side of this, we're not going to be in the same thing we were in before.
Yeah, it's been so weird. I don't even know what to think about it. I mean, you're talking to somebody who literally dropped out of college to protest the Gulf War. I'm a pacifist, I'm a Quaker. I'm very far past left. I mean, I have queer trans kids. And I work in a fucking BIPOC fricking owned and operated bookstore.
Maybe there is a connection here to what we're talking about because the sense certainly that I've had in the last week and a half is I don't even recognize this place anymore, just on a basic human, cultural level. I don't really know what this country is and what other people are anymore. And I don't know if maybe that means that there just isn't an audience for cool comics. I don't know if that's what you're seeing, but I just don't have answers for that anymore.
I think if I based anything on what kind of clientele we have, we do open mic poetry and noise shows here, and that's primarily trans people in both cases. My immediate experience doesn't adequately inform anything because it's very selective to the sort of people who go to literally the only newsstand in the county. And it's weird. I mean, Troy is just weird.
But are you planning on getting out of this career completely, or are you just going to downscale?
I have so much stock and much of it's not even listed online for sale yet. And some of it's quite collectible, and I keep putting it up there and it sells, but it's just like there's only so much you can do in a week for a day or whatever. So no, it's going to keep going on. And the other thing is, I have these capital finance loans I've taken for the business to keep things going, and those weren't off to cover stuff. I still have to pay those back, and I'm directly tied to the way Shopify works, so when I have sales, X percentage of those goes to pay off my loans. So that's one of the weird financial realities, I'm totally locked into it.
But on the other hand, yeah, I have enough passionate interest in the materials still, but I'm kind of like I'm reaching a burnt-out point. But then again, you do something for 36 years, and I think maybe you might, a couple times in the past I've taken six months off or whatever, and this time I kind of did too. I had this whole intense cross country drive, which is great because it was with my daughter.
But it's sounding to me ... you're not seeing any fundamental shifts to the market or to who's buying from you that would change the basic calculus of, can you make money selling these comics.
I'm seeing a general economic downturn. I'm seeing it with regular customers, and we are getting new customers and new traffic, and then the physical shopper, definitely getting new people all the time, but I'm not seeing the numbers going up or being meaningful. And it's like, I hate for this to be a hobby, and I think I can't maintain it as a hobby for very much longer.
Well, we're not in a recession, but it may be that you're seeing leading warning signs. I mean, we don't really know.
Yeah. I mean, I had a day job in 2008, the last big recession, and I only launched this properly in 2009. I'd started doing comic stuff again and reading, I hadn't read comics at all for years, unless it was a friend of mine doing something, like Sam Henderson or Paul Pope, or someone I knew was putting something out. I'm like, oh, I'll look at that. But yeah, like Scott Pilgrim, John Allison, Brian K. Vaughn … I started looking at their comics 16 years ago, and suddenly I was interested again. I started being a comic reader again. I put out a collection of my old comics and stuff, and then slowly got sucked back into the cortex.
I had a legit marketing job and I could indulge things like that. But then, after my daughter was born, I got back into it as a hobby, and it turned out to be a really lucrative hobby. It's [now] not a lucrative hobby at all. And it's also why I was carrying on to meet my income, and that's failing. I have to suck it up and deal with the reality of that.
I'm not in a position where I can completely shut it down, kind of a catch-22 there. I've done everything I can to cut expenses. And the other thing is the legacy of two publishers, Jeff Mason’s Alternative Comics, and then also Sparkplug Books from Dylan Williams and Virginia Paine, Emily Nillson and Tom Neely, who ran it after he passed. And I want to do right by all those guys. I mean, just the correspondence alone to all those artists for something like 200 publications, let alone whatever else physically or financially has to happen. I mean, that's a lot of work, I don't even know how to budget my time for that right now. I can, maybe at the desk when I'm working at the shop, but it's going to take time.
I hope you get a class credit or something for having to wade through my weirdness.
This seems like the article that I filed just before I had a nervous breakdown, but all right – so you're running a GoFundMe?
I mean, the main thing I want is: please visit my shops if you're in upstate New York, support us online by ordering books there, support all our artists who are still out there, they're also struggling. I mean, we've had a long, entangled history. I've had multiple authors, collaborators and cartoonists die over the last few years, several by their own hand. It's been a very upsetting time to be in Team Comics. I mean, we're right past by a few hours, the anniversary of Tom Spurgeon's death. He was one of my dearest friends. All that stuff weighs on me still. I'd just become friends with Alvin Buenaventura, him, me and Simon Hanselmann played a show together in Oakland, and weeks later he had killed himself. I'm like, what the fuck, dude? I just barely know you. Small press guy, Mark Campos, who I've known forever, same thing. Jess Johnson, who I worked with at Fantagraphics. Brilliant artist, good colorist, killed herself as well. All these things. Kim Thompson, Dylan Williams, these were my dearest friends. It was a horrible time to be – I don't know what – just my particular trajectory in life in comics with these people. And it was just devastating to me. And somehow I'm like, “How am I the one who's still here?”
So, if you had your druthers on this, if there were no outstanding debts to be thinking about, if there were no sense of obligation to the community to be thinking about, is this still a business that you'd be in?
What? Comics?
Comics or selling comics? I guess it's two different questions, but I'm curious about both.
I think I'd still be in bookselling, my passion in these things is kind of my obsession. I have a dedicated section of stuff on psychogeography. I dunno if you know what that is, it's a situationist term, it's like … how to describe it … the spirit of place, I guess. Deeply rooted in a diverse range of things. Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Daniel Defoe, a lot of the classic English literature.
That's the stuff that touches me. I don't know. I mean, I love art. I love all kinds of surrealists, the women's surrealists who we are now kind of coming to light that were suppressed by mainstream art history. Yeah, I mean, I love bookselling. I love talking to people. Being a bookseller, the job is, you talk to people, you find ways to connect and you try to connect them with something they can read, something that might make them happy. It's something that's really opened me up because before I sat in a room and did art, or reading or whatever.
So your hope now is that you can get through this patch with the GoFundMe, eventually survive what you think is going to be a recession and come out the other side still doing what you're doing. Same four outlets, same everything.
I don't have a clear path to something else, but I'm open to something else. I've already switched careers before. I never expected to become a full-time writer and editor and lead a whole team of English writers based globally for Netflix. It was a cool job. Literally one of my closest coworkers was this Thai woman who lived in Scotland. We'd be talking all the time and it's like, "Oh, who else was I? What were you working on?” Korean action adventure and cooking shows. My whole life story sounds absurd, especially now that I'm saying it.
Right?
It'd be awesome if something like that showed up that I'm actually good at, I don't anticipate that being the case. I'm kind of like, “Well, I don't want to work in a kitchen or be a mechanic. Again.” I don't mind doing those things, but I don't see that working out. I'm getting old. I'm in my fifties.
So on some level, this is it. Until you're done, until you're out of all business –
Retirement, you're still a ways off ...
Oh, who retires?
Anymore? I applied to work at a records store the other day. My other life is, I'm a musician and a DJ, and so I'm very suited to do that. And my old store – actually, this store – we sell records. I mean, it's the same job really.
We've taken a delve through your psyche, and I think it's an interesting window into what has got to be an incredibly sui generis comic shop. I'm not sure that there is a model that you have that anybody else fits. What do you think is the future of comics retail?
I mean, I can't tell you how many times people come into the shop and they're just like, “I love your shop. I love it here. This is amazing.” That feels so good. That makes a whole day worthwhile. Everything else could be going to hell.
[The city of Troy, NY] had an event called Troy Glow, it's a 10-day event and art installation. It's all light-up art stuff. That's all night. And so our particular event was this guy wrote two books about guitarists and their stories, and they also played songs. Songs of references, books and things. At some point his wife who had bought a … God, not Tom Wolfe. Who am I thinking of? English writer. I can't think of his name … Oscar Wilde. She'd bought an Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis from me –
I'm sorry. I think it's very funny to confuse Oscar Wilde and Tom Wolfe.
That's me. I was talking about Thomas de Quincey before.
All right. All right. I'm following you. Okay.
She turns to me and mouths, barely audibly, “Your place is so magical.” I'm like, “Oh my God. Thank you so much.” It feels so nice.
You can buy Vogue, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone. We sell Thrasher's long list of magazines. If you want to get a new issue of those magazines on this side of the Hudson in New York State, this is the only place to go. I don't know. I mean, honestly, the number one thing that kind of annoys me, I get people in here all the time who are like, “I feel like I've just walked through a time machine. They're still publishing these stupid things?”
What excites you about comics right now? Because aside from the people coming in, you obviously love just talking to people. Like the actual art of cartooning, the things that you're selling. What excites you about that right now?
I love John Allison's comics. I read them every time he puts out a new one. He's literally my favorite cartoonist.
And people aren't buying?
No, he doesn't have that many books coming out. He clicks every single box for me.
Yeah, and I love Simon Gane's stuff. I was Simon Gane's first American publisher back in the nineties, I'm into the English stuff, apparently. I wish Paul Pope would do more.
Well, every once a decade and a half, Paul Pope descends from Olympus to give us a comic book.
Yeah. I love Dave McKean's stuff. I look at the Journal, I look at Comics Beat. I look at Comic Frontier. Yeah, look at Bubbles Fanzine. We sell the magazine here. When I got back into comics, a dozen to 15 years ago, the stuff that Michael DeForge and Frank Santoro were talking about, fusion comics. We're taking the pulp kind of sci-fi shit and the avant-garde stuff that we're into, and the metal and heavy metal stuff, and the Zap and the Weirdo, and it's like we're smushing it together into this awesome sauce.
I was so excited by that. Sam Alden must've been like 12 or something when I started doing comics, what he was doing, and then so many of these people went off into animation like Helen Jo. Oh my god, if Helen Jo did a new comic today?! I'm friends with Helen, every few months, I'm like “Do a comic. I'm begging her, right?” And so many of these people, they needed day jobs. They went into animation like Graham Annabel. He still does the comic strip things, like Grickle, and I love those.
I wish there were more good webcomics, I guess, because that's actually my favorite way to consume 'em. Losing people like Richard Thompson of Cul-de-Sac, that killed me, absolutely killed me when he died. I mean, it's the same thing as people bitching about like, “oh yeah, I wish we still had Calvin Hobbes.” I just noticed the other day, there's some new crazy comic I'd never heard of on the cover of our local Sunday. I was so excited by this. It's called Macanudo and it's very European looking, but it's syndicated into the Hearst Papers Sunday comic section. And I'm like, how is this not on my radar? How is no one talking about this? If Tom Spurgeon were here still, I would've heard about this. I don't want to sound like an old fart. I do keep my eyes open, but I feel like there's an explosion no one's seeing because it's just so far under the radar. I had a guy come into the shop the other day from New Jersey, and he had 12 different zines he'd done I'd never heard of. He's talking about all these other zine people I'd never heard of. He has a zine distro I'd never heard of that has all these scenes I'd never heard of. And this is happening everywhere. And it's probably really super exciting. It's not as widespread as it used to be, and I think we're still reconnecting after lockdown. I used to be able to go to SPX or Ape or whatever, and that was a big chunk of the books that Wow Cool would sell.
Some of those people had gotten into animation. They were doing these little mini-comics and scenes and stuff, and I think that's still happening, maybe. The whole webcomics thing has not kept going the way it was, so I don't know. I don't know what's coming, but I hope there's something exciting, but I feel like everything's just too small and it's maybe not sustainable in a really meaningful, realistic way that makes me nervous without even getting into the AI or whatever.
Comics as a metaphor for society, I guess.
I don't know. I'm trying not to read too deeply into it. Yeah, I've done comics. I'm kind of like, “Oh, maybe I should do that again?” I'm weird. I don't really like narrative, something deep to the core of my personality. I don't want to put words into the people's mouths. Why do you want to create a narrative? I heard this from the vendors, the early Lumier Brothers maybe: So they just aim the camera at whatever for the 50-odd seconds that would record the real film. It's like, oh, you're watching a train coming to the station. And then there's a really, well-known one where the train's coming to the station, but a guy runs in front of the train to the other side of the tracks right before it pulls in and it's like, boom. You have a narrative. I don't like to invent stories. I don't want to imagine things. I don't want to impose things on people. I think maybe that's why I kind of like magical realism, like Gabrielle Bell's comics are amazing to me. ‘Cause it's like, okay, these are based on things you dreamt or things you experienced, but they're fucked up. They're totally going in a different direction. So I love her stuff.
I think that explains a lot about this conversation. I know that that sounds like a wiseass remark, but I mean it on a sincere level.
I mean, it's an exploitative horrible fucking market model, there should be a way to keep team comics out of the big publishing houses, keep companies like VIZ from having such a stranglehold on aspects of the market. I'm curious about what some other people who got out earlier, how they feel. Like Annie Koyama, who's just a saint, an absolute saint, and still doing so much for so many people in comics. People like Dan Nadel, who still has a toe in. If Kim Thompson were still here, what would he think? We probably had a better path forward that made some sort of sense, and those of us were still kind of kicking and screaming on the periphery of it locally. Oh, if we had our druthers and the budget and the resources, how would this work? How do we make this viable?
There's still a publishing industry that contains comic book content and it's controlled by the wrong fricking people, in my opinion. And it's like we're getting resold the same crap. They've been reselling us for a century. What is that? Well, maybe not a century, but you know what I mean.
To declining returns. And then there's a small, but in fact more lucrative market of sort of high-class art graphic novels for the select number of cartoonists who can get published in them. And then there's a massive market for Manga and YA comics.
As a publisher, I was seeing my authors and artists get cherry-picked by Image, and then I was seeing them get cherry-picked by bigger houses, and I was saying the big traditional publishing houses dominate the market. And I'm like, this is no longer viable as a small press proposition. It hurt us so bad. We got in at exactly the wrong time.
And now that breaks the model because if the small press publishers are gone, then there's nobody to incubate new talent that's going to go up to Penguin, Random House, and Harper Collins.
There's very, very few. Silver Sprocket has been a sterling example of a small press that does comics. I mean, all love to 'em. I don't even know who else is even out there. I mean Adhouse went away, we went away, Top Shelf [exists as] some sort of weird subsidiary kind of imprint.
I have personal and professional beefs with the way FU Press stuff is operated, but that's just me. That's more personal than anything else, I guess. I'm one of those crazy people who's like, keep it available, keep it in print. People are going to want this, print those few more or whatever. But I also have 10 cases of- –I can say, an artist’s – books literally right below me on a shelf that I'm like, “I'm never going to sell these.” And it's hard to make the call, but I feel like keeping the margins too tight, if you do have gravy-trained titles like all the Peanuts, I'm going to keep picking on Fantagraphics.
Well, thank you so much for your time.
Oh my God, I'm sorry.
The post ‘I don’t really like narrative’: A conversation with Wow Cool’s Marc Arsenault 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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