Comic Shop: The Retail Mavericks Who Gave Us a New Geek Culture by Dan Gearino

Author:Dan Gearino [Gearino, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2017-12-11T05:00:00+00:00

Raina Telgemeier drew big crowds and long lines at Cartoon Crossroads Columbus in October 2016. Here, fans read the author’s books as they wait to meet her. Photo by Fred Squillante © The Columbus Dispatch.

She is big in comic shops, and also bigger than comic shops. Her success underscores two major changes in the market. First, she is someone whose work does not appear in periodical form before it gets published as a book. This is different from many other top-selling creators, such as Neil Gaiman and Brian K. Vaughan, whose comics often make their first appearances as periodicals. Second, her core audience is middle-grade readers, contributing to the diversification of comic shop customers.

The element that’s missing in this description is the sheer scale of Telgemeier’s following. To explain that, I’m going to flash forward to a few months after the period covered in this book. On a Saturday in October 2016, I was a volunteer at Cartoon Crossroads Columbus, a celebration of comics culture organized by group that includes Jeff Smith. Most of the events that day were at the Columbus main library branch, where comics creators were selling their work and appearing on panels.

I was working on the show’s main floor when another volunteer came up to me with a worried look. She needed help with crowd control in the Telgemeier line. At that moment, on a separate floor, a line had formed to see a special presentation by Telgemeier. I came down to see hundreds of girls and boys and their parents, many of them clutching books and reading books. Some of them had planned to buy books at the show to be signed, only to learn that the books had sold out. Others had just learned that they needed to have tickets to have books signed. The crowd was simultaneously elated, chaotic, and grumpy.

For an hour or so, I helped keep the line organized so it would not double back on itself. During the lulls, I asked some of the fans which book was their favorite. The most common answer: Sisters.

Soon the doors opened and the line began to file inside. I remained in the lobby to help with the line for the book signing that would take place right after the talk. I barely saw Telgemeier that day, but I saw everything around her. She was adored in a way I had never witnessed with a comics creator.

Telgemeier has gained a huge following by selling work in a format that was almost completely absent from early comic shops. Whether you call it a graphic novel or a graphic book or anything else, the format’s growing popularity is one of the key forces that has changed the direct market.

In the early days of the market, comic shops often stocked prose paperbacks along with periodical comics. The few comics in book form tended to be mass-market paperbacks that reprinted comic books or comic strips. And a few stores stocked imported comics that were in book form.

At Comics

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