I advocated behavior modification last week, making changes to the way we act as fans so that we appear more appealing to outsiders, and the local comic shop is the best place to put those changes into practice. The comic book store can be a haven for comic book fans at times, a place where they are around similar people and are best understood. It’s kind of like Cheers in a way because “comic book fans who might otherwise be afraid to talk about their hobby for fear of ridicule can go to a comic book shop and find themselves reaffirmed. At the comic shop, reading comics is normal: it is what everyone there does” (Pustz 6).
But because of the local comic shop being a sanctuary of sorts, it attracts all kinds of people. The huddled masses that in the end find their way there are a sundry group, and some of those various people engage in the types of behavior I was talking about last week. They stand out more than other fans because they’re more vocal, more flamboyant, more boisterous in their passion for comics. For lack of a better term, they act like “fanboys” and make us seem like an uninviting group, and if we are not more inviting, we will continue to be like the ouroboros, devouring ourselves until there’s nothing left (again, a concept that I’m going to come back to again and again in the next few weeks).
Now, enthusiasm in and of itself is fine. You SHOULD be excited, be vocal and passionate about your love for comics, because enthusiasm has a way of carrying over to other people. People will see you fired up about the new issue of Berlin that you bought this week and be naturally intrigued. But it must be an INVITING form of enthusiasm. Sometimes our fervor can be too much and borders on obsession. Sometimes we do have to censor ourselves a bit and tone down our excitement for the benefit of new folks.
Let’s verge into metaphor land for a moment so I can explain. Imagine you go into a restaurant—a fun place like a sports bar and grill, let’s say, so there’s an expectation of some noise. As you walk through the door, you see two customers sitting at the bar, arguing passionately about which food there is the best—the jalapeno poppers or the potato skins. Simple human nature informs us what your reactions to this situation might be. There is a point at which you would see these customers and think “Wow, the food here must be really good to invoke such discussion” and a point at which you would turn around and walk out the door.
Often in comic shops we cross over from the former to the latter without realizing it. We’re talking about, say, how Hal Jordan ended his time as Green Lantern, for example, and we move from discussion to argument to a total lack of reason, the yelling and spittle stage, without ever realizing we made a transition. We need to keep our heads about us and try to maintain that first position. If you don’t like a certain story choice, you can complain, but do so in a calm and intelligent manner. Nor should you harp on things. A lesson all fandom needs to learn is how to let things go sometimes. When I deride “fanboy” behavior, these are the things I think need to change: obsession, a lack of self-control, and an inability to move on.
I’m not saying we need to be the four-star restaurant where everyone eats in silence. A comic book store is not a library, and letting a shop become a very dry place can drive away customers just as much as too much passion. Again, some enthusiasm is good, but too much, or not enough, can be deadly. It is a very fine line we must walk between too stodgy and too unruly.
We need to especially be aware of our language. We all complain about there not being a new generation of comic readers coming into the fold, but part of the reason we have lost our young audience is that comic shops are not always kid-friendly. I’m not even talking about the prevalence of adult books, just the atmosphere of the place. First of all, a lot of twenty to thirty year old men hanging out in one place can be kind of intimidating for children. But second, these men have a tendency to cuss up a storm.
My local comic shop when I was a kid was a place called Scottie’s Comics. It doesn’t exist now, which is unfortunate because it was a great shop. I always had to beg and plead to get my mom to drive me there, even if I actually had money and she wasn’t buying my books for me. It was a half-hour drive, so that was part of her reluctance. But the time it would take wasn’t always what made my mom hesitant to drive me there. Usually it was the fact that Scottie cursed like a sailor. My mom didn’t approve of Scottie’s penchant for turning the air around him blue, so it was always a chore to convince her to let me go there. We must then be careful; part of being inviting to newcomers is recognizing what is appropriate and what is not.
A path to the register is also necessary. Huddling around the counter is important to us as comic shop customers because the comic shop owner is given some authority. The comic shop owner is the leader of the pack, the person turned to as the settler of debate, and of course the provider of our weekly fix. The spot by the register is then a prized position; it’s close to the center of the action, like sitting center stage at a concert. People get quite territorial about their place at the counter, seeing a spot there as something that must be earned.
This is not friendly and inviting. It creates a hierarchy of fandom that makes it difficult to get into. It makes us seem a bit cliquish, something we all have tried to separate ourselves from in our real lives by taking refuge in the comic shop. New readers should not feel ignored, and a crowd around the register that they have to fight their way through makes them feel that way. They should not have to earn their space in the fan caste system. Everyone should be equal and united in their love for comics.
While we’re trying to avoid being exclusionary, we should similarly not be superior and arrogant about our reading choices. Making fun of someone’s comic choices is the worst kind of “fanboy” behavior, yet it happens in almost every comic shop in America. Just because it’s not for you doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. Rather than demean a person’s choices of reading material, we need to guide them towards something better and make no judgments on what they read now.
In college I used to go to a shop called Marvels and Legends. The owner Ken recognized the caste system that could sometimes spring up. When new people came to the store, he always made an effort to know their names and, if they got a pull list, their general preferences. He would always come out from behind the counter when strangers entered to try to guide them along, to make them more comfortable there. He welcomed them as best he could. He allows some hanging out, some discussion of this controversy or that, but he also knows when to pull the reins in a bit on them. That’s probably why his business is doing well and he’s been able to move into a bigger store.
That store itself, the setting that plays such a large part in comic culture, needs to be as inviting as the people. That usually means that the place must be organized and neat. We complain about comic book stores being destination shopping, and then we don’t make it easy on walk-ins. New books and back issues should be easy to find, which probably means alphabetizing them by title, like a movie store would. Comics scribe Warren Ellis advocates using authorial organization in Come In Alone, saying that “all the comic shops I know of that have tried it have discovered that it works very well indeed. Because people who don’t come from the comics-store culture will walk into stores and look, not for the title, but the new Neil Gaiman, or the new Alan Moore, or the new Frank Miller” (Ellis 25). I think that works for graphic novels and trade paperbacks, but new issues, like the new release wall at the video store, should be in clear alphabetical order with new issues in front of the old. (And no matter how small your store is, you should have a few trades in stock for those walk-in customers; making them place an order and wait for it is a detriment to actually making sales.)
Shop owners need to know their product too. Movies like Clerks and even comics like Box Office Poison have taught us as customers that those who wait on us hate us most of the time, but we really invite their ire when we’re clueless. But retailers need to recognize that we hate going to the bookstore or video store when they have no idea what we’re talking about. A retailer needs to know what books came out that week so they can actually help their customers, as opposed to simply sitting behind the counter and waiting for the money to come in.
All of these things we can do as customers and as retailers to advocate comics. Even the smallest of things, like a smile or a friendly word, might be enough to break through someone’s barrier, to turn the comic shop from a place to fear into a place they too consider a home away from home. It will create a true sense of community, something that the other major comic book seller, the chain bookstore, can never hope to replicate.
References:
Ellis, Warren. Come In Alone. San Francisco: AiT/PlanetLar, 2001.
Pustz, Matthew J. Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.
