![]() For this updated and expanded paperback edition, he covers the wild retail landscape of 20, a time that was brutal for stores and rich for comics as an art form.Īlong the way he interviews pioneers of comics retailing and other important players, including many women top creators and those who continue to push the business in new directions. When the book was first published in 2017, Gearino had spent a year with stores around the country, following how they navigated the business. Dan Gearino brings us from their origins to the present-day, when the rise of digital platforms and a changing retail landscape have the industry at a crossroads. Shops opened up a space for quirky ideas to gain an audience and helped transform small-press series, from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Bone, into media giants.Ĭomic Shop is the first book to trace the history of these cultural icons. Stores could then better customize their offerings and independent publishers could access national distribution. Its rise was due in large part to Phil Seuling, the entrepreneur whose direct market model allowed shops to get comics straight from the publishers. The modern comic book shop was born in the early 1970s. “There are precious few prose books that have elucidated the quirkiness of the comics industry more than Comic Shop.…In clear and compelling language, Gearino lays out how comics specialty shops were born in the 1970s and ’80s, how they flew too close to the sun in the ’90s, and how they’ve managed to endure decades into the Information Age.” Johanna Draper Carlson, Comics Worth Reading That’s not a story that’s often been told.” “ has clearly done his homework.… Comic Shop is an essential read for anyone interested in the mechanics and money of the comic industry, but I was most amazed to learn that, beyond Carol Kalish, there was another woman behind the formation of the direct market. “Dan Gearino offers a more compelling and complex place for the comic shop in popular culture by demonstrating how entrepreneurs and distribution channels have reshaped that commercial space over the last 50 years.…Gender issues feature heavily in the text, and this offers scholars…a point of consideration lacking from many other outlets.…Above all, this work personalizes the comic shop as a collection of people who, through emotion and personal desire, embrace an evolving and unstable place in the commercial world of pop culture.” “Gives a fascinating glimpse at the challenges and pressures that store owners have to face in this hybrid retail business.… makes the case that the modern pop culture era we’re living in wouldn’t exist without the rise of comic book stores.”
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