Comic Books!

I don't follow the big companies in comics like DC and Marvel but I'm curious how things are going down in the comic book store world. Other than popping in to see my local curmudgeon I don't even go into other comic book stores but once or twice a year. Sadly, I rarely buy anything, other than a sale item. I'm just not interested in collecting comics in general and specifically on paper. Other than a few Disney titles from IDW, Uncle Scrooge, Duck Tales and Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, I don't buy much else, other than the Hellboy titles. Disney titles like Tangled or Frozen, that sort of movie tie in product, just aren't worth the money to me. Sadly there isn't even a Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck title anymore. IDW and Dark Horse put out occasional reprint collections of Mickey and Donald stories from overseas.

 

Fantagraphics has license to reprint collections of older material, their Carl barks Library and Don Rosa Library collect some of the best comic stories out there. Those titles and their Disney Master series come in nice attractive hardcovers with well printed artwork. I have the original comics of some of that stuff and these are better printings. I have some digital comics from Amazon or Comixology and they also have a nice image. You can resize it and read a page at a time or double click on the first panel and read it a panel at a time. Nice technology. I have a lot of scanned comics off of public domain websites and while they have good images they aren't all jazzed up like the pro-product.

 

Back to the present day and the death knell of the comic shop. There are a number of comic YouTubers, some are more interesting than others, some are nightmares to watch. The guy at Nerdrotic, Gary Buechler, used to have a comic shop, now he talks about what's going on in the industry. He's less hyperbolic than some of these guys and he aggregates material from all sorts of comic blogs I'm never going to read.

At the best of times things can be tough for an Indy comic shop. Many live hand to mouth on small margins. On top of the forced shut down, Diamond, the big comic distributor, just announced that they aren't going to accept new books from anyone. They also aren't paying their vendors what they owe, citing cash flow problems. The comic companies all send their books to the comic shops through one distributor. That company has no money and is closed. Comic shops have no income and there isn't much by way of help from the big companies. It doesn't look good for them. Part of the pressures of having a small business in the modern world. Glad not to have much invested in the new comics every Wednesday, though I still like getting the few Disney and Hellboy titles that come out.