Maybe I’m being a complete policy wonk, but I’m fascinated by the minor-bombshell-potential offered by retailer Steve Bennett in his latest columns for ICv2. What potential, you may ask? Well, the fact that Bennett’s store, Dark Star Books, has changed focus:
This will be the last Wednesday that Dark Star Books will sell new, single issue comics; because next Wednesday, August 29th, will the first comic book day for a new store opening roughly a block away from us, Super-Fly Comics & Games. It’s owned and operated by our former manager Tad Cleveland and former employee, extreme sports enthusiast/mathematician Tony Barry who have purchased the new comics portion of the store from its owner, Mary Alice Wilson. They’ll take with them our file customers as well as considerable good will and our best wishes… I’ll still be working for Dark Star which will still have graphic novels and manga as well as Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon cards and back issue comics… Now Super-Fly will also have graphic novels (though it will take them a while to build the extensive and eclectic back stock Dark Star has), so unfortunately you can’t label this split as “pamphlets vs. graphic novels.” Still this will definitely change how Dark Star orders it graphic novels — for one thing we’ll definitely be focusing more on literary graphic novels and kids stuff, material more in line with our book store clientele.
The next week, Bennett was already thinking about the future:
After wishing Tad and Tony the best of luck before going to work all sorts of things came to mind. Naturally the new arrivals shelf would be where we’d put the incoming graphic novels, but it suddenly occurred to me in the past we had never had enough space to properly display all our comic book art and “how to draw comics” books. Now we did.
And DC’s Minx line–I’ve always liked these little books but they’ve never really taken off for us. But, now that we have the room, maybe if we cross-pollinated them with similarly themed new release manga we’d create a girls section that would increase sales of both lines (not that I delude myself into thinking that a title is somehow exclusively male or female; the girls sure seem to go for the seriously creepy Death Note).
I wish I knew why I found this as fascinating as I do – Part of it may be that I’m curious whether Super-Fly will end up stealing business from Dark Star, or whether Dark Star’s customers will slowly fade away from a store that doesn’t offer a reason to come in every Wednesday…
September 4th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
There’s definitely a niche in the market here, but selling trades puts them in more direct competition with the big bookstores like Borders. They can, of course, do very well in this regard by conversing with their customers about the titles they sell. Mainstream bookstore employees typically don’t know much about comics, manga especially.
September 4th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
Graeme,
Thanks for the interest in the Super-Fly/Dark Star “experiment.” Things have definitely been interesting this first week, and we’ve seen more “cross-polination” than competition, and I think that’s going to continue. I know we’ve seen a lot of folks with Dark Star bags come in our store, and from what I’ve heard it’s the same over there as well. Dark Star has always had an incredibly extensive collection of used books that’s been the core of their business, and a lot of those folks tended to just ignore the comic book sections. Hopefully, with a focus on graphic novels, some of those “book people” will become comic people. At Super-Fly, we’re still seeing the regular comic fan that comes in to get graphic novels and manga with their weekly pickups, as well as the casual reader who comes in for single issue comics. Feel free to email me is you’d like to chat more, or check out our myspace (myspace/superflycomics) for more info.
Thanks!
-TEC