I have a pro-comics bias, thank you.
Employee Aaron revealed that, several months ago, on a day when I actually wasn’t in the store, a customer said this to him:
“Wow, you guys have a really great store…even though you have an obvious pro-DC Comics bias.”
Um, wow. Okay, we have a spinner shelf devoted to Vertigo books, and we have a line of DC Archives on one side of our front counter (primarily for lack of anywhere else we could put ’em). Aside from that, we’ve got lots of Marvel promo posters and retail-sale posters up, we have more boxes of Marvel back issues than of DC, the majority of shelves in the front of the store are manga or kids-oriented (including a smattering of the Marvel Adventures books), the spotlight bookshelves have a few Marvel and DC, but mostly indie books, and the new comics rack features every (or at least as many as we can fit) new Marvel, new DC, and new indie book.
In other words, you’re not going to able to look at the shop and say “hey, everything in the store is obviously DC-dominated…boy, these guys must hate Marvel!” If you look around, there’s a pretty large mix of everything. If anything, the most dominant feature of the shop is the Giant Wall O’Manga right inside the front door. No one’s accusing us of having, say, a pro-Tokyopop bias.
And Employee Aaron assures me that he was doing and/or saying nothing to disparage Marvel.
So I’m going to translate this person’s reference to a “pro-DC Comics bias” as meaning “having any DC on display at all,” because I don’t know what the hell else he could have meant. And, because someone’s gonna say it…yes, I do prefer DC to Marvel, personally, but that’s just me. For the store, for our customer base, I order and stock and display Marvel as needed…I don’t ignore or openly disdain Marvel books because I don’t care for them. I stock and display the Marvel books that sell because our customers do care for them. And I do the same for the other companies.
Like I say in the title of this post…I have a pro-comics bias. It’s my job to sell comics, regardless of publisher. We’re not a Marvel store, or a DC store, or an Image store, or Dark Horse, or IDW, or Fantagraphics, or About…we’re a comic book store, and I think we stock and display a pretty good mix of every publisher and genre, without obvious favoritism.
(Well, there is that giant poster of me hugging Swamp Thing right behind the register….)
