You are currently browsing the sterling silver comics category
…including this latest example from pal Casie:
…given to me as a going-away present, as I near the final hour of my lordship over
Seth’s Games and Anime/Ralph’s Comic Corner. This Sunday, October 19th, will be my last day of employment at the shop, so come see me steadfastly refuse, out of sheer cruelty, to assist Employee Aaron in his transition to the managerial position.
Ah, I’m just jokin’. Even after I leave I’ll still only a phone call away, willing to assist the guys for a meager per-minute charge.
Speaking of my own store, which I really wasn’t but it’s too late to go back and retype that transition now, its official website will be open this coming Monday, should things go as planned, and will feature my brand new, 100% swell logo created for me by The Rack‘s Benjamin Birdie! It’s great…I can’t wait to show it to you!
Thanks again to pal Casie for the great drawing, and thanks to all of you for your support and readership. I’ll see you all on the other side.
So basically any free time I have that isn’t earmarked for working in the new shop is devoted mostly to pricing up comics for my back issue bins, which is still going strong. As I noted last time, there are some hard decisions being made regarding what goes in the “keep” pile and in the “sell” pile. By and large, I’m being a good Small Business Owner and putting most things in the “sell” pile, including Vertigo titles I love like Invisibles and Sandman and Preacher because those will probably always be in print (or at least in print long enough for me to eventually reorder them for myself).
And then there’s the occasional moment of “why do I have this one issue of Lucifer?” until I realize “oh, it’s kind of a Swamp Thing tie-in.” (Issue #49, if you’re wondering.)
There’s still lot to do, such as getting my logo prepped (already have seen the nearly-finished version by an artist pal, and it looks great…more details to come!), plus an out-of-town trip or two to pick up some sellable goodies for the shop, such as the one I’ll be making to Los Angeles in just a few hours, as I write this. I’ll keep this short, then, and I’ll make further updates soon. Thanks, pals, and in the meantime, check this out.
That would be the brand new floor just put into my shop, so now we can start putting in, you know, all that other stuff, like “fixtures” and “comics” and other luxuries.
The pricing of comics from the Increasingly Less-Vast Mikester Comic Archives continues apace as well, where I find myself preparing my run of Walt Simonson’s Thor for sale with some minor hesitance, while simultaneously discovering I cannot bear to part with my full run of Hex.
There is no explaining the human heart.
I wrote up a little thing on the Seth’s/Ralph’s site about my impending departure. Includes lots of photos y’all have seen before, but may be new to my customers. Nice to have them all in one place, anyway.
By the way, pricing up my own back issues for sale is a terrible thing. I wavered on Quasar, but priced ’em up. I’m not giving up my Squadron Supreme, however.
Also, in my price researching, I discovered that this particular issue of the 2000s series of The Brave and the Bold is selling in the $20-$30 range, presumably due to the Killing Joke tie-in. One guy on eBay right now is shooting for $75, believe it or not. Huh, who knew.
The store plans continue apace….my dad volunteered to take down a drywall partition that needed to go, and that was very kind of him. I’ve started to remove the carpet, and oh, yeah, the building finally has power! I can see what I’m doing! The air conditioning works! The cyclotron’s acceleration of particles is satisfactory!
And then there’s the other side of the business, where I have to plan out my orders for the shop. Now, just ordering stock to fill shelves and racks so that there’s something there in the store when I open, that’s fine. That’ll be the perennials, the items that always sell, your Walking Deads and your Scott Pilgrims and such, plus the previous month or two’s new funnybook releases that, sure, other stores will have had as new items when they came out, but should be on the shelf and available anyway since not everyone is Johnny on the spot when it comes to New Comics Wednesday and I should probably put a period in this sentence at some point.
It’s the stuff that I’m going to want on the shelves once the store is open for business and I supposedly want to, you know, make some money rather than watch it sprout wings and fly away for such trivialities as “water service” and “a phone line.” When people come into the shop looking for new books, I want to make sure I have those new books to sell. At the same time, I don’t want to overspend and overorder and get stuck with lots of product at a time I especially can’t afford to do so.
There are a couple of things that help. One, I already seem to be lining up a number of comic saver customers for my shop before I even have a proper floor put in, so that gives me an idea of at least a certain minimum of copies I’ll need to have.
Two, there’s my decades of comics retail experience, which will give me, if not the exact numbers I’ll need to order, at least the relative numbers. I know about how well, say, Batman sells, and I know Supergirl sells about a third of that, and Infinity Man and the Forever People sells…well, let’s not talk about that. But you get the idea. It still leaves a little guesswork as to what exact numbers to order, but it’s a start. And if I’m off…well, I’m off. I can always reorder, and hopefully folks will understand that I’m starting afresh and am still in the process of determining what the local market wants.
All I can do is the best I can, and see how it plays out. At the very least I want every customer who walks in to be happy they made the trip…and the first step for that is to make sure I have a floor for them to walk on, so I better get cracking on that.
…just to thank all of you for your well-wishing and support and eBay purchases and what have you in response to my announcement on Monday. This was a pretty big decision to make, even after thinking about it and planning it out for so long, and it helps ease my trepidation receiving such encouragement from my family, my friends, and all of you guys ‘n’ gals.
Again, thank you, and hopefully when next I write something here I’ll have more news about how things are progressing. Like, oh, I don’t know, maybe finally getting the power turned on. C’MON, EDISON.
So in about a month, I will be leaving the employ of Seth’s Games and Anime/Ralph’s Comic Corner. And shortly thereafter, in late October or early November, barring any unforeseen circumstances, I will be opening my own store: Sterling Silver Comics.
I’m not leaving out of acrimony or any other negative issues…it’s simply long past time that I start doing my own thing, and after a very, very long time of planning and searching, a place finally opened up in a location I really like, and I jumped on it.
I’ve already done a lot of work in preparation, but there is a lot of work to be done still. I still sort of feel like I’m not entirely, well, ready to do this, but if I waited ’til I was 100% ready, I’d probably never do it.
In the near future, I’ll have more details about the business, like, you know, exact location and contact info and such, but in the meantime, here’s the barebones “coming soon” page on the website, with links to my equally barebones Twitter account and my somewhat barebones eBay listings (but only because I’ve sold a bunch of stuff in the last couple of days and haven’t had a chance to replenish).
Anyway, for those of you who still tolerate reading my site, I should warn you that, for the next month or so, posting on this site will be very light while I focus on getting my new store up and running. I won’t disappear…you can always find me on the Twitters, and I’m sure I’ll post occasional updates here on how things are going. Don’t expect an End of Civilization post, though, or at least much of one, either this month or the next. I like doing ’em, but making sure I’ll be able to make a living must take precedence, otherwise my civilization will come to an end.
I’m remarkably nervous and excited; this could be a great new direction in my life, or it could be an expensive way of finally getting me out of comics retail. Hoping more for the former than the latter, obviously, because I don’t want to pass my dotage wandering from neighbor’s house to neighbor’s house asking to borrow a cup of food. But I’d like to think after two and half decades in the comics industry, I know a little something and that I can use that knowledge to build a successful and profitable business.
Well, we’ll see. Wish me luck, pals…I can certainly use it.
I’m going to miss the old shop, and my regulars, and my coworkers, but this needs to be done.
Oddly enough, even after paying for the business license and clearing the zoning and buying fixtures and all that stuff, it all still seemed somewhat abstract to me until I sat down to write this post.
It almost feels real now.
Newer Entries »
