Preaching moderation and long-term thinking plus $20 All The Graphic Novels You Can Stuff Before the Bag Rips Sale

Take care of your entire holiday shopping in a one-shot spree of unbridled gluttony... and also ponder the future of humanity.

Robot Roll Call

A quick alert that Uel will be spinning the Wheel of Fate to find the winner of the tasty Transformers variant on the upcoming Tuesday YouTube stream, so if they aren’t sold out yet, come get your requisite issues of Transformers so you can get in on the action.

The Big Goodbye

Rain or shine, this Saturday and Sunday Dec 9-10 will be the long-threatened but finally happening Last Chance Dance of clearing out boxes and boxes of trades, hardcovers and comics. After this weekend, they will be gone, by Crom!

A $20 cash donation to the Gizmo foundation for Gizmo (or a $20+tax purchase from us) will get you one of our evergreen Free Comic Book Day bags with as many books as you can stuff.

Easily fits 8-9 Walking Dead vol 19’s which you are totally welcome to get...

You can likely fit 8-9 trade paperbacks in without it ripping (honor dictates at that point you should buy another bag!), but we’ve got plenty of cardboard boxes on hand to cover your shame.

We also have a limited three novelty jumbo bags for $50 — great for those oversized books!

For the Out-of-Towners

A good portion of you whose spam filters have graciously allowed us into your inbox won’t be able to make it to our big blowout, but we’ve still got more boxes of graphic novels offsite and if you enjoy spending money and delaying the gratification of ever having it manifest in merchandise, you’re absolutely welcome to pre-load auction credit (quantity adjustable from 1-999), and trust us, we will not be offended if you decide to never use it!

Hint: adjust QTY to change dollar amount

In fact, as covered in a previous missive, buying credit and never using it is one of the best ways to support the store — we’re not taxed until you use it, and we’ve also wrangled a year’s worth of free online credit card processing, meaning just $20 worth of credit and letting it sit can help the store as much as buying $50 or more worth of comics.

But buying comics and never actually getting the comics kind of defeats the purpose of a comic book store, so we’ve finally set up a Bookshop.org online storefront pre-loaded with gift ideas for those out of our area looking to get trades shipped to you without contributing to the Amazon Industrial Complex.

It turns out this was easier than building our own shop from scratch after all, but we’ll still probably end up doing that eventually.

We ostensibly get 30% of any books purchased when you first visit that link and while nominally we get 50% of new books when you buy one directly from us in the shop, what with shipping, returns, inventory, time, sometimes that 50% gets eroded to less than 30%, all things considered.

But, fair warning, part of Amazon’s strategy of undercutting any potential competitors means that often the books on Bookshop.org, or any other regular bookstore, are more expensive, even when they are sold at a discount off cover price. For example, take R. Crumb’s fantastic Illustrated Book of Genesis, a great gift for the devout-ers and doubters alike. Crumb himself is a lapsed Catholic but committed himself to doing as faithful and respectful a rendition as possible (it shows!) and was apparently so exhausted by the effort, he swore off doing Exodus.

Religion is divisive, but everyone loves this book!

If you buy it through our Bookshop.org link, as of right now it’s roughly $32 while if you buy it through this Amazon link (of which a small percentage does not go to us, but rather our evil landlord), it’s under $20(!)

Now, you might say, “What’s a few bucks if it means more for my favorite local bookshop” and bless you if that’s you, but as a long term strategy, how long can something like Bookshop.org last against that kind of price disadvantage, and can it even be neutralized?

Oddly enough, either by intention or accident, the books by the excellent Silver Sprocket in SF seem to be immune to this price degradation. They’ve always had a maximalist approach when it comes to distributing their books with the attitude of making it as easy as possible to get their books into anyone’s hands, which means as a retailer we could even get them through the Distributor Who Shall Not be Named, which until relatively recently was the only game in town for comics. This approach means we can also find their books on Bookshop.org, including the hilarious but absolutely filthy and legally precarious Mr. Boop.

It’s priced about the same on Bookshop.org as it is on Amazon — in fact depending on how Amazon’s algorithm is treating you that day, it may even be more expensive there! How could that happen? I have a suspicion that for smaller press books where the actual inventory of books is ultimately coming from the publisher in a rather handmade fashion, Amazon steep discounting tactics simply cannot scale downwards, even when a huge distributor like Ingram is in the middle. At a certain point, if Amazon sells it for less than what the indie publisher is wholesaling it for, the indie could just buy up all their books, reap the profits, rinse, repeat, then buy up all the commercial real estate in SF (hint hint).

In the midst of comic retailer challenges in the Mission District, that’s maybe not the worst idea for how to keep comic shops around not just in the next few years but also for the next few generations. As varied and real and new as these challenges are, here’s something to consider:

College towns have always been havens for comics and record stores, but as far as I know, there hasn’t been a comic book store serving Stanford for at least a few decades.

Here’s the average commercial retail price per square foot (from loopnet):

Berkeley: $39.24 per sf

San Francisco: $42.40 per sf

Palo Alto: $57.06 per sf

As much as it’s awesome for Cal students to have one over on their tree-worshipping rivals, it might just boil down to comics and comic culture being determined by owning your retail space.