The true story of Al Comics

August 15, 2009

Al Comics is a comicshop that opened its doors fours years ago in Bradenton, Fl, a few blocks away from where I live. He found a nice retail spot in a mall right in front of a school and he thought had a gold mine in his hands. When he made his business plan he wrote that the strategic position of the store will make very easy for kids to cross the street after school and buy their comics. In paper it was a fail proof business.

By the time I met Al three years ago, he was already one year open for business, but Al wasn't swiming in money, kids weren't flooding the store buying tons of superman comics. In fact he was barely making rent and some money out for himself. He said that the most frustrating part was that the few kids that actually entered the store were asking for video games or titles labled for adults and he could not carry because he was located right in front of a school and zoning laws restricted the things he could sale in that spot. 99% of his sales came from adult pockets.

You could see that Al was bored, frustrated and just wating for time to pass by! He was waiting until his lease expired so that he could move his store to an address far away from the school and add adult titles to his inventory.

Six month later he moved and when I visit the new store I couldn't belive the difference. There were clients inside! There were clients browsing titles, and there was a line to pay!

I noticed a lot more variety of titles and a lot more adult merchandise. Al said that he changed his business model. Now he only order a nominal amount of DC, Marvel and mainstream titles, and put 60% of his order budget on indies, foregin, manga, and adult titles and was considering adding a section for anime and hentai DVDs.

I asked him about kids? He said "One or two per week! Thats it!"

And then he leveled at me: "Lets be honest, kids this days are into Nintendo and PlayStation. They don't care about comics, specially not Superman and Spider-Man. Have you noticed how superheroe movies have taken a bit adult approach? Does that give you a hint of who are they targeting? The cliché "Comics are for kids" is more like a myth these days! You can sit here for weeks and not see a kid walking into the store by himself, unless he is with daddy, and all he wants is go back home to play Final Fantasy. But society in general is still ignorant about this and they insist in messing with a business they don't understand and a model that no longer exist.