Comic Shops: Threat or Menace?

Whether it be through shoddy business practices (Cleanliness is Next to Impossible) or surly counter people (the blank stares, the "Oh, you read "blank"? I'm so over that..."), I've rarely left a comic shop without thinking that a kid running a lemonade stand has better business sense than most shop owners. Don't get me wrong, there are some good ones out there. But I'd say the majority of comic shop owners I've dealt with are simply kidding themselves, squandering an inheritance or an insurance settlement on trying to turn their hobbies into careers. At least a kid selling lemonade has a vision of a future beyond his own front yard.

First impressions count in business, so let's start with many comic shops' appearance. Things can generally be labeled Good and Bad in appearance, even in these politically correct times. Dank is bad, unless you're an animal looking for a place to die. A store that is aired out at least once a month is good. Air fresheners are good, especially in the winter when trapped air gets stale and so do counter people. Burning musky, oily incense to cover up the funk of a decade's worth of cigarette ashes dropped and lunches spilled is bad. Picking up trash from the floor is good. Use of a broom is better. Use of a vacuum cleaner weekly will guarantee the owner of the participating store a naked lady birthday card every year for the rest of my life.

A kid with a lemonade stand picks up any dropped, used paper cups from around his place of business without thinking, so why is it such a stretch for a shop owner to arrange for a simple cleaning of his store? There's a comic shop/head shop that I used to frequent in Bloomington, Indiana that smells like the squeezing from a bum's wet shoes topped with a handful of potpourri. My girlfriend at the time could always tell when I'd been there, even hours later, from the stench of incense and decay that clung to me like a monkey to his momma. The store literally stank. It stank like something you wouldn't want to step in, much less step into to shop, and all the '60's radical hair-farmer behind the counter could do was whine about how the comics distributors and the comics industry were letting him down.

As far as counter people go, I seem to have terrible luck finding a comic book store that employs people with the slightest hint of interpersonal skills. In the small city of Muncie, Indiana that my wife and I recently lived in for a short time, there were two comic shops. One, taking up over half of a used bookstore, had a nice stock of back issues at decent prices, and their new issue selection was very up to date. They even kept the place pretty clean, which enamored me to them right away.

The only trouble I had with the store, and calling it trouble is like calling death a minor setback, was the owner and her counter people, three young ladies of questionable parentage who I eventually started thinking of as "The Scary Marys." Beginning with my first visit, they would literally stare, glare, and despair at me the entire time I was there. And you'll just have to take my word for the following: I'm not hypnotically good-looking or revoltingly ugly, nor do I look like the kind of guy who would stuff a bagged-and-boarded HULK #142 in my pants. I was usually one of the last people in the store before closing time, but I never once even hinted that I was thinking of keeping them late; in fact, I usually left fifteen minutes before the posted closing time. I didn't pester them about their grading, I didn't knock over racks of books or mess myself on their floor, but they seemed to hate me with a passion to rival the love between Rob Liefeld and himself.

After a few weeks of this, I slipped in unnoticed one Saturday afternoon and hung around away from the comics, back by the musty stacks of mystery books, to see if I was the only one. To my great relief and infinite puzzlement, the Scary Marys hated every customer they had. They sneered at the little old ladies with their romance novels, and they whispered to each other about the nervous guys, eyes downcast, who bought porn paperbacks. But they seemed to take great glee in terrorizing the generally hesitant, shy comics buyers. I couldn't believe it, but I saw it time and again: they would make the transaction, flip through the poor guy's comics, smirk, shake their heads, and glare at him as he picked up his books.

I didn't go back much after that.

The other comic store in town was owned by an older, dead-looking gentleman who could have been selling widgets for all he cared. Outside his store, near a heavily traveled road, he had set up one of those electric signs shaped like an arrow that you can display messages on by changing the letters. Unfortunately, he and his store manager had last changed the message when Jimmy Carter was president; there were just enough letters left hanging off the sign that anyone driving by could tell which terrible business owned it. I think I saw a small group of people worshipping a rust stain that ran down the side because they thought it looked like Jesus.

The old guy didn't do much around the store except slough off skin and wait to die. The youngish store manager, Terry, responsible for ordering books, (mis)handling customers, and running the store into the ground, is hard to describe without cursing and demonstrating. After sitting here, trying to think of a way to get across his pure awfulness as a businessman and as a person, I settled on a quote. When the last issue of KINGDOM COME came out, Terry said to me, "I thought for sure that at the end, everyone on Earth who wasn't a superhero was going to be turned into a mutant by that bomb! That would have been a better ending! I'm not recommending the book."

Go into Terry's store, and you'll be pepper-sprayed with inanities as you try to fix his mucking up of your pull list. He's the kind of person who waits for his turn to talk instead of listening to you speak. More often than not, he doesn't wait for his turn, he just interrupts you and prattles on. And he laughs constantly for no reason, like a broken record of a baby duck being stepped on. Drove me nuts. I defy you to dig through back-issue boxes with a nitwit compulsive giggler breathing down your neck.

When my wife and I moved, I thought, prayed, and hoped beyond hope that I would stumble on the perfect comic shop in our new city of Kokomo, Indiana. I haven't. The first one I came across has a sign out front reading "DNC COMICS" with a tiny little notation underneath that says, "More Than Just Comics", which is silly, bordering on dorky, aimed toward stupid and building up speed. When I went inside and asked the owner about setting up a pull account with them, he reacted as if I had just offered to clean his silverware with my butt cheeks. Too much work for him, you see, punching all those letters into that computer. I took my meager business elsewhere.

I found another store and it turned out to be pretty good, content-wise and cleanliness-wise. I shopped a bit, and when the woman behind the counter was friendly and quiet, I thought I had found my comic book Heaven. Unfortunately, my Heaven was shot all to Hell when Satan himself, in the form of the counter guy, popped up from behind the register very Hee-Haw like and started in. There are two things you can do in my presence that'll tick me off and make me want to strike you: one is to sing along with music on a radio, and the second is to sing along badly with miserable '80's music blaring on a radio. This guy seemingly does everything in his power to make me (and others, I've noticed) want to flee the building as quickly as possible: he shouts out stupid jokes that aren't funny on even the most microscopic level, he screams along with some godforsaken classic rock station he has blaring from a radio, he talks on the phone to his friends instead of ringing up customers, he suggests GREEN LANTERN and FIGHTING AMERICAN to me every damn week just because he over-ordered, he screws up my pull list, and he eats while he rings up my books (if my comics are going to have greasy fingerprints on 'em, they'll be mine, damnit!).

As far as I can remember, I've never seen a filthy lemonade stand. My wife has never refused to go to a certain lemonade stand because it smells like a pair of testicles hanging in front of a space heater. I've never seen a lemonade kid too busy doing nothing to accept my business. I don't recall ever having been sneered at by a lemonade kid for liking lemonade. I've never had a lemonade kid follow me around his stand, mewling, pestering, screeching out Poison or Meat Loaf songs, generally making me feel like I want to run away screaming. But that's what I get at comic stores.

I'm seriously thinking of going mail order.