COMIC BOOK STORES MAKING A COMEBACK
The three main shops are in Vacaville, Suisun City and Benicia
1992 was a big year for the comic book industry.
“That’s when Image Comics came to the market,” explained Kevin Brown, owner of the Boys of Summer Comic Books and Sports Cards in Vacaville, “where Todd McFarlane, Erik Larsen and Rob Liefield left Marvel and some of the big publishers and created their own company. It was a character- owned company. If you created a character, that character stayed with you no matter where you went in the industry… Then fast forward to when the first Iron Man movie came out (2008). That’s when it (the comic book industry) became really mainstream. Before that it was a closet kind of a hobby.”
It’s now a big hobby for many in Solano County who venture out to Brown’s store or to Zeppelin Comics in Benicia or Waterfront Comics in Suisun City.
Brown opened his store in 1988 as a sports card shop and started in on comic books in 1993. He stocks 300- 400 different titles. Many of his customers order in advance. Although the store specializes in comics, Brown will also order graphic novels on request.
“We’re just kind of squeezed for space because there are so many comic books,” he said.
Dan and Natasha Curtis, owners of Zeppelin Comics, have been in business for five years.
“We’ve always liked comic book and pop culture,” said Dan. “Our children were very artistic so we would go to comic book conventions often and at one point we just decided that it was an industry that we wanted to be more a part of.”
He noted that starting a comic book business is a lot different from launching a retail store.
“The inventory is quite a bit more diverse,” he said. “If you were to open a clothing store you might have five kinds of different sweaters in all the different sizes but that’s it. We basically have 200 different sweaters coming in each and every week.”
“We definitely sell more in individual issue comics. Second to that is graphic novels. We do a fair bit of the other things — buttons, apparel, statues, board games. Japanese Manga is upcoming. They are graphic novels, read right to left, in black and white, and as thick as a classic paperback novel.”
His store uses ComicHub, a network that allows customers to search the comic catalogs, place orders through Zeppelin and pick up their comics at the store.
“A lot of our customers utilize that to make sure the titles they’re reading don’t get sold out before they get a chance to get to the store,” said Curtis.
Waterfront Comics is also a mom-and-pop store, owned by John and Jaime Harter since they founded it in 2003 when John was 30 years old.
“I took that as a milestone year to do something I actually wanted to do,” Harter said. “Otherwise I would probably not have a chance to ever do it. I started with pretty much just new comics and acquiring other collections from different people to get to where we are now.”
He now stocks 20,000 graphic novels and over 100,000 comics.
“Primarily what we have here is from the 1980s on because those are still easy-ish to get,” he said. “Anything that is 50, 60, 70 years old is harder to get and harder to find stuff in good shape.”
Many of his customers have become regulars over the years.
“I like to joke that I can often set my watch by knowing when x-customer is going to be coming in,” said Harter. “Some have started with me since I opened 18 years ago.”
All three stores had to adjust to COVID-19.
“We were down for about a month to a month and a half,” said Brown. “Most of my customers have the phone number, so I would just say, ‘ You’ve got product coming in. If you want to come pick it up we can walk it out to the curb.’ And it worked out well.”
He said sports card sales have spiked during the pandemic, and comic book sales have also increased.
“The biggest problem I have at this point is I can’t get enough product to get to everybody because the last six months people were at home recouping their childhood memories,” said Brown. “And they all got interested again (in sports cards and comics).”
“We did free delivery to Benicia, Vallejo, American Canyon,” said Curtis of the two months Zeppelin was closed for COVID. “And ComicHub allows us to ship and maintain an email list and an address list plus it remembers all the weights of the thousands of things we have.”
Waterfront was shut down for almost two months.
“The whole comic industry shut down too so there wasn’t any new stuff to sell people even if we had been open,” Harter pointed out. “They shut down for the same period of time. I was doing some curbside and some mail order, but in those two months I essentially sold what I normally would in about a week and a half.”
“And then being closed for all that time you’re worried, are people going to come back? And it took about a month to ramp back up to that. And I still today get people calling, ‘Hey are you guys open?'”
Yes, they are, as are the other two stores, even in the current COIVD purple tier, ready to serve the comicbook loving public.
Waterfront is at 609 Main Street, Suisun City; phone: 707- 425-6308; hours: Noon to 6 p.m., Monday through Saturday.
The Boys of Summer is at 490 Merchant Street, Vacaville; phone: 707- 4480833; hours: 11:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., Monday through Friday; 11 a.m to 5 p.m., Saturday.
Zeppelin is at 929 1st Street, Benicia; phone: 707297- 6126; hours: Tuesday through Sunday, Noon to 5 p.m.