Commander X
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 6, 2018
Since I'm going to vent a bit here, I have some stories about bad comic shops. There were numerous dank little dungeons with posters for forgotten 18-book crossovers and T&A books plastered all over the walls, the sort of places where you'd see stuff like shelves with barely two feet between them and flickering bare 60-watt bulbs overheard, or a cardboard Wolverine stand-up in front of the easily visible adult comics section with a word balloon taped to its head that read, "Back off, bub! Ya gotta be 18 ta get past me!" While the sterile shopping experience is not for me, the dank slum stores, the hole-in-the-wall shops, the shops run by incompetent hobbyists who thought that because they liked reading comics meant that they'd be gangbusters at selling them didn't do much for comics. Places run by people who treated customers with everything from barely concealed disdain to dull hostility, who could not be bothered to tear themselves away from eating, playing Magic: the Gathering or having loud discussions on what the Fantastic Four were like before they gained their powers to ring up customers waiting at the counter. The sort of ratholes where the the owner forgot to order comics on your pull list half the time, or were run by angry, angry nerds who ruled their tiny shit kingdom with an iron fist to feel big.
Some of my experiences with bad comic shops were just from the one and only time I visited a place. I walked into a store once, I went over to ask the man behind the counter something and he looks at me real hostile and goes: "Yeah?! You want somethin'!?"
I just asked where the independent comics were. He looked at me like I was some loser and went: "I have a couple Dark Horse comics in the back."
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One of the first really bad comic shops I remember visiting was this place, during my teens, it had somehow been open for years, it was tiny, dingy, messy, inaccessible, and expensive. They had a massive selection of (overpriced) back issues, but you couldn't even get to a lot of the long boxes due to the clutter and disarray. I mean, there's the fun of browsing and finding an unexpected gem, then there's having to deal with piles of random nonsense gathered together with zero organization. a stack of random toys and other junk here and there etc. The closest I saw to organization there was a shelf of dusty Dr. Who and Star Trek fanzines put in alphanumeric order. The staff, lead by a fat grouchy guy and a perpetually frowning woman, were generally loud, surly, and unhelpful. A shop in the next town over I went to visit occasionally was no better, it was a real hole-in-the-wall. It was never air conditioned in the summer, never heated in the winter, and the owner chain smoked cigarettes and his only employee was an old man who'd throw your purchases down on the counter. Everything here was laying around in a cluttered mess (a disturbingly common detail of these craphole comic book stores). The place was littered with shitty collectible toys covered with a thick layer of dust. One summer the owner was trying to sell an above ground pool that you had to practically step over to when you walked in.
Since I did some moving around in my late teens and twenties, and was willing to drive around to find comic shops in other towns near whichever town I called home, I've seen good shops and some bad shops. One place that I remember I visited with a cousin while visiting family during a holiday. He wanted to check out a place, he hadn't visited in ages. We go in and the guy behind the counter is this hefty gentleman wearing this really awful "Empire Strikes Back" T-shirt, with holes in the sleeves. He looked kind of like an older version of Comic Book Guy. As I was walking past to check out the trades, trying to be friendly, my cuz mentioned something to this guy about how he hadn't visited the shop since he was in high school. He gets this accusatory tone and asks "Yeah, and why haven't you?" My cousin was taken aback and mentioned something about having been busy with college.
The longbox area was completely disorganized and boxes upon boxes were stacked up on top of each other; I don't know how you'd get to the stuff on the bottom, nor did I even know what was contained in each box. In fact, most of the place was cluttered like this. It's as if they had ordered a bunch of crap that he thought would be collectible but never sold, then didn't know how to get rid of it. Apparently their business model was mostly mail-order centric and they could barely be bothered to deal with customers from off the street.
We decided to leave at the point the guy stopped glaring at us from the counter and went into the back and he and some woman started complaining and then arguing loudly about how "those bastards" had shipped and billed them for too many copies of some Dr. Strange comic. They were actually in the back room, yelling angrily about this, which I could hear quite easily as I was walking around.
Another shop I visited not only had the whole "random piles of stuff" style of product display, among the mounds of unsold Image comics, Star Trek model spacecraft on peg boards, a gaggle of Toy Biz Green Goblin action figures from 1992, superhero statuettes and busts, and so on were items like sex dolls, pornographic videos and crumpled old Playboys, which was kind of skeevy, a bit, maybe. The surly and rude clerks didn't help. This was one of those shops that had supposedly been in business for over two decades and you couldn't see how, really. I heard they went out of business later, and it was replaced by a shop calling itself "Justice Comics - In A League Of Their Own!" that's stock was mostly someone's private collection and apparently folded a few months after.
Even "nice" comic shops can have vipers in their midst. One store I really liked shopping at had this one assclown clerk who really got my goat by telling me while I was looking over some back issues of Stray Bullets "Don't read them, buy them." Here I was, a clean-cut adult male, dressed neatly, and I could see there was a gaggle of snot-nosed kids who were pawing through comics a few feet away from me who this fellow was ignoring. I put the issues back on the shelf and told the clerk that I was actually going to buy those books and a few others, but not from that place now and left.
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