Comic Shop: The Retail Mavericks Who Gave Us a New Geek Culture - Hardcover

Gearino, Dan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804011907 ISBN 13: 9780804011907

Publisher: Swallow Press, 2017

Synopsis

Comic book shops came into their own in the 1970s, a new breed of small businesses that transformed the way comics are marketed and sold. The shops created a space for quirky ideas to gain an audience, and helped some small-press comics turn into media giants. Gearino, a business journalist, leads a tour through this world, going back to the dawn of the modern comic shop, and also looking at the present-day market. Along the way, he captures the voices of creators, store owners, and players from around the U.S. and Canada including Steve Geppi, Paul Levitz, Diana Schutz, Chuck Rozanski, Bud Plant, and many more.

About this title

Review:

“Gives a fascinating glimpse at the challenges and pressures that store owners have to face in this hybrid retail business.... [Gearino] makes the case that the modern pop culture era we’re living in wouldn’t exist without the rise of comic book stores.” Author: Evan Narcisse, io9

“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.”

“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.” Author: Abraham Riesman, Vulture

“This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand comics in the U.S. Dan Gearino has put together a riveting account of the history of the comics market, and even reveals the forgotten key women who were essential to its creation. Comic Shop is a fascinating page turner.” Author: Heidi MacDonald, editor, The Beat

“If the foundation of America’s castle on a hill consists of how we buy and sell things, Dan Gearino shows us what’s in the basement.” Author: Tom Spurgeon, editor, ComicsReporter.com

“Gearino pulls back the curtain on the seldom-seen end of the business encompassing sales, distribution and retail.... Drawing from original documents and firsthand interviews with key participants, [he] gives the retail and distribution side of the industry an account as dramatic and lively as Sean Howe did for the creative side in his 2012 book on Marvel Comics.... The result is a readable, well-researched account that fills a gap in existing comics literature and provides a great reference for future work.”

“Gearino...effortlessly navigates the byzantine business lore of comic-distribution companies....The author still takes delicate care with their stories, weaving tales of complex heroes and villains with stories directly from the people who lived through the uncertainty and chaos in the industry....It is spectacular how often Gearino makes these small stories of heartbreak and triumph feel herculean in scope....Comic Shop lives in the beautiful struggle to survive and exist.”

“The fickle, frustrating and sometimes joyful travails of owning a comic book store are detailed in a new book by native Iowan Dan Gearino. [Comic Shop] traces the history of selling comic books from their inception on newsstands in grocery stores, pharmacies and gas stations to the rise of specialty stores.”

“Dan Gearino captures the genie in the bottle. He’s gathered together the players and the circumstances to reveal how a generation of entrepreneurs saved an entire industry and changed the very way people discover, buy, read, collect, and even think about comic books.” Author: Bud Plant

About the Author:

Dan Gearino is a lifelong comics reader with tastes that swing from the classic Legion of Super-Heroes to the work of Michel Rabagliati. Formerly a business reporter for the Columbus Dispatch, he has won national recognition for his work and now covers clean energy for InsideClimate News. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, near his home store, The Laughing Ogre, with his wife and two daughters.

About this edition

• Publisher: Swallow Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0804011907
• ISBN 13: 9780804011907
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264