The recent passing of Dolly Parton caused quite a few people in and around Athens, Georgia to post this photo of Dolly hanging around in front of the Howard Johnson’s on Atlanta Highway.
Nobody who shared that photo in any of the online spaces I checked was ever able to positively identify Dolly’s be-blazered companion, but we’re all looking at Dolly, anyway. I get it. The orange-roofed Howard Johnson building is still standing today, and if you were to visit the site of the photograph above and step just a few feet toward the road, you’d be able to see a white building that looks like some sort of brutalist interpretation of a Tolkien castle. That building is the home of the all-new location of Bizarro Comics. This was, I know, a long walk, but I kind of just wanted you to see that photo of Dolly Parton.
The last time I wrote to you about the state of the comics scene in Athens, the news was pretty dour. Today, I’m glad to report, things are looking up. Devlin’s back to selling comics and the town once again has a weird, wonderful comic shop staffed by someone who cares intensely about the art form and brings over three decades of knowledge to work with him every day. That’s the remarkable part, really. While it’s fine and good that a new store has opened, new stores open all the time. What makes the newly opened Bizarro Comics noteworthy is that it represents a direct connection not just with comics retailing but with the comics scene in Georgia and the remainder of the Southeast. The grief at the loss of Bizarro-Wuxtry came not from the loss of a store where you could by Spider-Man but from the loss of a community hub, a gathering place for like-minded artists and appreciators of art. I can’t walk there from my office on my lunch break, but that’s fine. I’m glad it’s around. The future, though, is (as always) uncertain. It’s rough out there for everyone and starting a new business is a big leap. It’s helped by the fact that Bizarro Comic, while “new,” is something that’s been around for decades now. One afternoon (September 26, 2026 to be exact), while we were standing around putting backing boards into comic bags, I talked to Business Owner Devlin Thompson about Bizarro Comics and his 36 years behind the counter.
ROBERT NEWSOME: How long have you been here?
DEVLIN THOMPSON: At this point, about a month and a half… maybe two months
What happened?
Well, the building [the one that housed Bizarro-Wuxtry and still houses Wuxtry Records and other local businesses] was sold. They wanted us out to make room for the luxury student housing that our town so dearly needs.
Bizarro Wuxtry had a huge pile of backstock… generations of accumulation that were up there. Do you know anything about where that's going or what's going to happen with it?
The graphic novels and toys have been separated from the bulk of the regular back issues and will presumably be sold online sometime down the road.
But you got all the good stuff out of there. The art, the one-of-a-kind stuff, the flyers, the “character pieces.”
Yes, I would say the vast majority of my debris is here. I mean, not everything. Some of the... Some of my personal back stock of my own mini comics. Some of the “art toys,” shall we say, that I made were lost. But the Bippies are safe. The old flyers are safe. I would love to get some of the fixtures that we went to great lengths to remove from behind department stores or out of vacant buildings, but whether that happens or not, I can't say.
You were selling comics downtown for a long time…
36 years, 35 years in the upstairs location.
I think it's important to note that you sold comics for 36 years, and the shop that you were effectively running— you were not the owner, but you were, for the most part of those 35 years, the guy in charge— didn't close because nobody was buying comics. It didn't go out of business because of the state of the industry or because of lack of interest from a customer base. It went out of business because simply somebody sold the building it was in. It's commendable because it’s rare that a comic shop can last for 35 years or more. How did you do that?
I had a level of, you know, indulgence and autonomy that gave me both remarkable freedom, but also a lot of restraints, in that there were plenty of things that I just wasn’t able to do from a financial perspective, so I just had to do what I could. We just kept going. Whether I can do it now, where I am… well, the truth is yet unwritten, I believe.
Does it look promising?
I believe so. I've got the goodwill of the community behind me. Almost all of my subscribers are here, other than a few people that basically just looked at the move as their “Get Out of Comics Free” card, which, from my understanding… anytime a comic shop closes or moves, a significant portion of the customers just…stop getting comics.
Over the past 36 years, what, from a retailer's point of view, are some of the most significant events or changes in the way comics are sold or comics are made or comics in general? What are the milestones that you've seen over the past three and a half decades?
Well, the two great fracture points were the two times— 25 years apart— when hubris, and perhaps cocaine, led corporate executives to make stupid short-sighted decisions that nearly destroyed the direct market [Devlin is referring here to the major publishers’ over-reliance on tie-in continuity events, variant covers, and other gimmicks to pump up flagging sales]. With Marvel in 1995 and DC in 2020. Bizarro was insulated from those to a degree because I wasn't playing the speculator game, but... They caused a lot of harm, a lot of damage to all retailers.
The short-sightedness of gimmick and variant covers is, to my mind, a wildly unsustainable phenomenon. On the other hand, there are companies that seem to have managed to go years on that principle… as if they’re saying “there aren't that many people that want this thing, so we have to make them each buy 20 of it.” I’m not really interested in that.
I was in your comic shop in 95, and I remember foil covers on your stands, but not as many of them as would have been in one of the big “mainstream” comic shops in Atlanta. It seemed like they were on your stands because that's all you could get. But you were always giving more attention to independent comics, underground comics, in the 90s especially, you were selling X-Men and Green Lantern but stuff like Hate and Eight Ball and Dirty Plotte and Milk & Cheese, and you really worked hard to promote that stuff rather than the Age of Apocalypse books.
Well, to a degree, it was the right historical moment. Perhaps my personal charisma helped, too. Some folks like it, some don't. But yeah, I was telling customers, “okay, this is what I think you should buy. I mean, we’ve got those other things too, but hey, look at this.” One thing that's different now is that there aren’t so many cool periodicals in the same way. So many of the people that are even doing things in that format are doing it through, say, crowdfunding in a way that makes it slightly more difficult for me to sell their product.
People have gotten better about offering retailer tiers on their crowdfunding campaigns, but even there, a lot of times I could sell 10 of a comic book, but maybe not all at once. Especially since fans want to buy things directly from the creator or maybe they want the extra rewards that are offered through the crowdfunding campaign. So, there are times when I just have to pass on things and hope there will be a later collection. It can be difficult to steer through these things.
Is that where, in your opinion, self-publishing is going? Because one of the things that you've been doing since at least 1991 is making sure that there's self-published, independent-published zines and comics on the shelves in the store. Is that still happening?
Absolutely. I've gotten batches of stuff from at least three people this week, mostly local. I had a nice anthology sent to me unsolicited that looks really good. I've got to promote that on the internet shortly…
Does online promotion work well for you?
I frequently try to feature the artist brandishing their own work on the store’s social media, to kind of reinforce the idea that these are comics being made by humans. They're bringing them to us. A lot of them are less handmade than they used to be. I mean, there's so many people that don't even own a long-reach stapler. How do you get through life like that?
But I know you have at least four. You'll let them borrow one, right?
That's true. I got long-reach, I got saddle staplers, I got comb binders. One notion I have had that I've never really done anything with in the past is having a department here of used guillotine cutters and saddle staplers and such for zine-makers. The new space is a little limited in terms of how much noise and crowding we can do without interfering with the many other businesses in the building. So, right now we're a little limited in workshops and similar events, but we may be able to figure something out going forward.
One final question. What are some comics that are current that you are excited about or like?
Well, let's see here. That's been a lot of fun stuff lately.. we finally got Rick Veitch Swamp Thing finished. That was pleasing. I've been enjoying Santos Sisters... Obviously, many of our locals are also favorites, even beyond the propinquity. Eleanor Davis, Drew Weing, Joey Weiser, David Mack, Abby Kacen. They're all here.
Is there anything you want to note that I didn't ask you about?
Well, my rugged good looks.
Oh, well, I mean, obviously. We'll probably have a photograph of that.
The post Phoenix From The Flames: Bizarro Comics in Athens, Ga 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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