Diary of an up and coming sociopath

This time last week, I made some vague promises about talking about Comic Shops. Well, let it never be said that I don’t keep my promises, no matter how ill-conceived you might think them. Last week, I was concentrating mainly ont he shops that had a fond place in my memories, where this time I’m talking about the utilitarian aspect of the remaining shops.

I only recently discovered Gosh! in London, when Nikki and I went to the British Museum and I noticed a giant Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) on a sandwich-board outside. Naturally, we went inside. Gosh! is a pretty up-scale comic shop. It’s got ceiling-high bookshelves filled with neatly organised graphic novels, and a large wall of more recent issues. It’s all surprisingly clean and tidy, which is rare for comic shops. At the back of the shops is a near-vertical spiral staircase that leads to a basement level which has more books and some back-issues. Gosh! seems to be more of a bookstore than a comic shop, and while I didn’t buy anything from there this time, it’s not going to be far from my mind next time I’m in search of a graphic novel.

Of course, close to Gosh! is Comicana - It is, for better or worse, an embodiment of all the comic shop stereotypes you can think of. It’s small, it’s packed with box upon box of old, dusty-bagged comics that probably haven’t moved in years and leave your fingers feeling tainted somehow. Most comic shops have these boxes, it’s just that Comicana seemed to be entirely composed of them. The only time I visited, the guy at the checkout was listening to a Lord of the Rings audiobook. Don’t get me wrong, if I wanted a comic from the past 10 years, I’d be straight here, but this isn’t really a progressive establishment. Certainly, it’s dead opposite to how I’d run a store but I can’t criticise too much because I guess it’s working for these guys.

Completing the London Triumverate of Tottenham Court Roadish shops, is Forbidden Planet London, which has almost mythical status. Arguably, it is the best-stocked comic shop in the country. It’s at new premises so it’s clean and nicely laid out, though the military grey throughout resembles a bomb shelter, somehow. There’s a nice amount of graphic novels, and a few back issues - Recent ones especially are easy to get here and to illustrate that point, last time I was there I bought the previous 3 issues of Demo. However, this place suffers because, like all Forbidden Planets, it is a Forbidden Planet. The comic prices are set with a competitive exchange rate, but I suspect that’s more than compensated for by their toy and memorabilia prices, which are little short of gouging. They’re the only place, bar eBay, that I can reliably find comic-themed T-Shirts, but they always cost upwards of £20, and that’s just too much. The same holds true for Forbidden Planet Birmingham which is obviously much smaller with a greatly reduced comic section, but still contains as much overpriced crap. Amusingly, Birmingham seems to get the stuff that nowhere else will sell which means every time I go there, there’s a wall of figures no-one in their right mind would buy, like Everquest or something. I go to the Brum store because it’s a comic shop, y’know? The only other reason I can think I’d go would be if I was after the last shop on the planet selling Quake 2 figures.

This brings me to the closing part of my life’s experiences with comic shops. Online comic shops. Frankly, I think that it’s utterly unforgivable for a comic shop to not have an online store, given the market conditions and miniscule cost. I know what comic shop employees do, and the bulk of it is sitting and talking. Believe me, it wouldn’t take much time out of the week to log in new back issues and arrivals, and package up mail orders. An online shop allows customers from all over the country, if not world, to buy something from your shop.

I admit, if something isn’t available at the local store, I go online and track the fucker down. When Transformers licensing problems prevented Transformers comics being shipped to the UK, I went to Reed Comics, who circumvented the embargo, and bought the damn things. Solely because of that, they had months of regular business from me and I continue to buy stuff from their website, which is well designed and easy ot browse, though the logging-in and transactions could be a little smoother. They even have order tracking and history, for god’s sake. Every shop should have a site at LEAST as good as this, as far as I’m concerned. They even sell original artwork. This is the online shop I’d recommend to my friends, that’s for certain.

On the other end of the spectrum, though, is Comix-Shop. I’ve never visited the store, I’ve only bought stuff off there once, and there’s a solid reason for that - it’s a horrendous page to navigate. It’s frequently updated, which is a definite plus, and it works, because I bought a recent issue of Demo from there. I can tell the owners are good guys because when I received my invoice, they had taken the time to write “Cheers, James!” on it, which is more customer relations that you usually get even when the clerk is 3 feet away. They need to sort that page out though.

Finally, there’s Incognito Comics. Haven’t used these guys for a while, but their site and stock straddles the line betwixt good and bad - it’s an old, functional approach to layout, but that makes browsing and buying easy. However, the database is often filled with redundant entries - titles that contain no issues available to buy. I check the place as a last resort, certainly if I was after something old because their library is big and comprehensive, but to be fair it’s not often necessary to get this far down my list.

So that’s about it, the dizzying highs, the suffocating lows, and the comfortable yet unremarkable middles. Practically all the comic shops I have deigned to grace with my presence over the years. I like to think I’ve guided people somehow, into thinking more about their own retail experiences. One day, perhaps all this pontificating will aid me, should I ever start up my own comic shop. Primarily, it has allowed me to actually write about something, rather than what I was doing, which has made a nice change, though I’m about to follow up with the minor events of the next two days, which you’ll probably have just read, in which case, congratulations for making it this far.