Unless you’re a Midtown, most comic shops are small and will not have 25 subscribers for Spawn. If you’re in the business of selling comics you should know that a Spawn anniversary issue one per store signed by mcfarlane will fetch WAY more than a $62 buy in. Well worth the gamble. $350 would pay the rent for some stores in small towns. That’s just good business even if you don’t sell a single copy of Spawn.
One of my LCS does this. He takes advantage of these promotions to help his business thrive. When he has extra stock of books like Spawn 350 that he can’t sell he will give them away free on FCBD or on Halloween for kids. FCBD at his shop is great, besides the usual fcbd books, the shop will have a generous selection of overstock books availability for free to hook in new readers. Usually it’s Saga, children’s books, LOTS AND LOTS of marvel/Dc event books or something like that.
When Diamond has these omnibus/tpbs blowout sales he would order these books by the pallets and sell them at his shop for cheap. Needless to say his shop is thriving while other shops in my area are closing down. He is personable and has a great reputation, when people bring in their comics to sell he is fair and won’t rip you off. It’s no wonder his shop has been around for decades. Some of his staff were teenagers when they first worked there, they’re now old men.
I can write an entire essay on why some of my comic shops in my area are going out of business, it’s not the economy or other external factors. I understand that it’s tough to run a successful LCS in today’s world but some of the way the shops are run here by bad business owners will blow your mind. There’s a shop here that i truly believe is the worst LCS in the world. The shop is so small and the owner refuses to get storage for his overstock so he piles boxes up to the ceiling. When you walk in you’re in serious danger of boxes falling on you. The store is so dirty and there’s crap everywhere, when you ask the shop owner for something there’s no chance he will find it for you even though he knows he has it and will not look for it. The shop owner is a creepy dude that stares at you and doesn’t say a word when you walk in and keeps watching you. It’s highly uncomfortable because you will ALWAYS be the only one in the shop. If I was a woman I would not feel comfortable shopping there, feels like any moment he going to lock you up in his basement.
At a Mondocon back in 2017 or 2018, Francavilla during a panel went into details that if you as an artist can’t pump out a cover in at least a day or at least do 6-10 pages per week if doing interiors, you’re never gonna make it as a comic book illustrator. I kind of have to agree with him. If you’re doing comics as your main gig, you have to be efficient in order to keep up.
Anyone that can find small town rent for as little as $350 should jump at it. I was paying more than that back in the 90’s. Overall though, getting into business isn’t a you know what you’re doing thing. It feels more like an always changing and growing learning experience that you only get better at by surviving long enough to learn those lessons. I had someone in earlier this week talking about wanting to start up a card shop and how people were telling him he had to get into comics and all this other stuff to survive even though he knows absolutely nothing about the topic. The only way you’re getting $62 or more for that Spawn comic is selling it online or having a customer wanting it, I imagine some places out there don’t or just do not know. That’s why it’s important for locals to let them know what they want, what they can do differently, what you like and what you don’t like. Take manga for instance. I know nothing. It doesn’t even interest me. Year after year people come in asking “you have manga?” Not one person has ever taken the time to name a title or series they’d like me to purchase for them and start shelf stocking. They seem to only know the word manga itself and nothing more. I’m a slow learner so if you have me order something, I’ll probably get 2 copies, one for you, one for the store and grow from there but someone has to be first. I could say the same thing about games and cards, especially Pokemon.
If you feel the boxes are dangerous, point it out, he may simply not know. The more people point things out, the more likely they are to get changed. If you want more interaction, make it known with some small talk. Some people actually hate it if you get too close to them and try to talk. It takes time and experience to learn to read customers body language and figure out which camp they’re in.
It’s also a gamble bringing in pricey comics. I’ve had multiple times where I’ve purchased enough of something I couldn’t return to find the ratio arrive damaged and the wholesaler not having replacements. That’s one of the things I’m most worried about right now starting back with Diamond. I’ve been burnt a lot.
I think for shop owners who sell comics, having a tertiary knowledge of manga is vital. It doesn’t take much time to get up to speed on manga. Just know that any manga that gets translated into english and sold in america is the creme of the crop. In Japan manga is a different beast and culture there with thousands and thousands of titles, the best/most popular make it to the foreign market.
The great thing about manga is that it brings in lots of kids. At bookstores here Chapters (the Canadian equivalent of Barnes and Noble) has a giant manga section, it’s always expanding year after year with more shelf space. All the while the american graphic novel section gets smaller and smaller. The manga section is many times bigger than the graphic novel section and it keeps selling. The great thing about it is there’s lots of kids sitting down reading it.
There are stores in my area that only sells manga and funko pops and they are really successful. It won’t take much effort to see what manga titles are selling well. Just take a trip to Barnes and Noble and see what titles they’re stocking a lot of. At my bookstores, they have entire sections devoted to Naruto, One Piece, Demonslayer etc. If you don’t have a Barnes and Noble just a quick glance at Amazon manga bestsellers will give you an idea on what is selling.
Having a small manga section, just having titles available will bring in kids and other customers into the shop and hopefully they get into other things. My LCS does this, I’ve notice his manga section getting bigger and bigger each time I come to visit. These are old grizzly LCS guys that knew nothing about manga. There wasn’t a section there before. If I ask them about manga now they still don’t know and will have no interest reading it. They just know what sells well and keeps bringing in people.
Any thoughts on the future of Spawn when Todd one day kicks the bucket? Will the character and prices fade into oblivion, or will things like the autographed 350 explode in price like art after the artist passes away? I was looking at the prices of the autographed King Spawn 1 and Gunslinger Spawn 1 on eBay and prices are about half of what they were when those first hit. Also, Spawn is Todd’s creation and he really has kept it under his absolute control. Unlike all the characters at DC and Marvel, when the creators die the character keep going since so many people have written/drawn them over the decades. Spawn isn’t exactly a household name (despite what Todd thinks).
Peter got his Spawn powers from the nanites in his prosthetic legs-nanites that were affected when Al Simmons initiated his necroplasmic detonation in the present.
Looks like this ties in to issue 301.
Cairn’s powers come from Al Simmons’ explosion of necroplasm in Spawn #301, which affects the nanites in his prosthetic legs and transforms him into a Hellspawn.
I’m still trying to figure how they resisted the urge to toss a couple more covers and some ratio’s at it. It’s just A and Blank for B, nothing else for #1. #2 and #3 don’t even have a variant. Someone’s going to get fired over this or put back down in the mail room.
I always keep wondering the same thing with Spawn. God forbid, once Todd passes on or walks away due to retirement (if he ever does), can someone else do something more with Spawn that he was not able to do. I just can’t see Spawn dying off considering how he has built such a huge mythos and universe, that I find it difficult that this could die off.
Spawn traditionally doesn’t have a ratio variant for any title. It’s a fairly uncommon practice by Todd to issue one. It seems like a lot recently with King Spawn, Gunslinger, Scorched, and Batman/Spawn but having this many so close to one another is an oddity.
Doesn’t this break the streak of an indie book being written and drawn by Todd? Does it still count as a record every single new issue? Imagine sailing around the world by yourself to set a new sailing record but 3/4 of the way around you replace yourself with someone else? Is it still a record if such record is broken? I wouldn’t think so…
