Additionally, though Cox and Gibbons have added a table to the center of the store that features a cornucopia of “Staff Favorites” and, more recently, a couple of spinner racks, the aisles are generous, providing more than ample room for the neighborhood’s many stroller-encumbered comics fans. It makes no sense.” Instead, the pair take each book on its merits, shelving it where it makes the most sense. “It’s like going to a video store and looking for things by Paramount. “A store I used to work at shelved things by publisher,” Cox muses. In terms of organization, books are arranged by genre, while monthlies are stacked neatly at waist level and underneath the shelves. The secret of their success is deceptively simple: They run their comics shop like one would a local bookstore. Nevertheless, Cox enthuses, “Business was way beyond our expectations right from the start.” For the first six months, the shop’s inventory was low, and it took Cox and Gibbons about a year to fill the shelves. This meant eschewing the typical setup-dim lighting, character cutouts in the windows, and row upon row of long boxes packed tight with back issues-in favor of accessibility and a focus on the more literary side of the medium. “I wanted to have a store that I would shop at,” Cox explains. Financed by only a few small bank loans, Rocketship officially opened in August 2005. Brooklyn seemed the most likely spot for their venture, and they found a storefront in the neighborhood of Boerum Hill, part of a larger area underserved by comics shops. Mark’s Comics in Brooklyn Heights (Cox worked there for roughly seven years, and Gibbons for four), the pair opted to go into business for themselves. Their goal is to make shopping for comics a friendly and inviting experience for first-time buyers, while also stocking the books and monthlies purchased by regulars.Īfter meeting at St. Like any quality bookstore, where the shelves are a pleasure to browse and the selection seems catered to each visitor’s taste, Rocketship’s proprietors dote on their clientele. Each month, the shop hosts at least one event (they’re almost always packed), and a rotating exhibition of drawings and sketches is displayed on the walls. Their shop offers an impressive variety of mainstream and indie comics, graphic novels, manga, reprinted strips, minicomics, cartoonists’ sketchbooks, illustrated classic tales, and children’s comics, as well as periodicals such as Juxtapoz and the Comics Journal. Surely this wasn’t overlooked by Alex Cox and Mary Gibbons, the proprietors of Rocketship, Brooklyn’s real-life analogue to Coolsville. Some viewers may even have noticed a rocket ship on the shop’s sign. In a 2007 episode of The Simpsons, the venerable Android’s Dungeon, owned by the irritable and corpulent Comic Book Guy, is given a run for its money by a new shop, the aptly named Coolsville Comics & Toys, a brightly lit, spacious store that carries books like Tintin, Asterix, and Alan Moore’s Lost Girls and features modern art on its walls.
The established fact of this transition in comics retailing is best illustrated by its appearance on television (for when, in recent memory, has a trend first been introduced on network TV?). More recently, though, there’s a new breed of shop on the scene, one that offers a selection of indie comics and graphic novels-books that have been appearing with increasing regularity in literary-minded publications. It is a shopworn stereotype that comics shops are dank holes of nerddom, in which flabby, ponytailed men argue the finer points of Spider-Man’s relationship with Mary Jane over a game of Dungeons & Dragons or Magic: The Gathering.
0 kommentar(er)
