Pennsylvania specialty store does little to differentiate itself from how others market their products
State College reports there's a retailer who's opening a specialty store around Westerly Parkway, and here's what they're offering:
Unless anybody in the press and industry starts making a serious case for why the time's come to make a wide shift towards paperback and hardcover, no concrete steps will ever be taken to improve the industry's fortunes going forward, and no improvements will come to artistic merit either.
Comic Cove will hold its grand opening from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday in its new space at the Westerly Parkway Plaza, next to NovaCare Rehabilitation.On the subject of the MTG trading card franchise, who knows if it's worth it to buy their packs, considering it's fallen victim to wokeness over the past decade? Maybe Pokemon would make a good choice, but whatever's owned by Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro may have suffered badly as the result of political correctness.
The shop will offer new and vintage comic books, Pokemon and Magic: The Gathering trading cards and more, said State College resident Justin Behrens, who co-owns the store with his wife, Liza.
Saturday’s grand opening will feature deals, giveaways and appearances by artists Kevin Conrad, who has worked on titles such as “X-Force,” “Spawn,” and “Kiss: Psycho Circus,” and Chris Ring, who has created and worked an a number of series. Conrad and Ring will be available to do sketches and sign comic books that they’ve inked, Behrens said.I wonder if the IM stories he got were published after the early 2000s, when Marvel went downhill? Some very bad ideas were shoved into every Marvel book at the time under both Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas, and I wouldn't recommend anything coming after 2003. But now, here's where the store's MO becomes fishy and disappointing:
An Army veteran, Behrens became a comic book enthusiast while serving in Iraq, when his family sent him “Iron Man” comics. From there, he began seeking out other titles he found interesting.
He said he wanted to open a store as a way to make comic books accessible and affordable for everyone.On this, here's the challenging query: does he advocate for archive collections? Both Marvel and DC have put out specific paperback and hardcover archives reprinting their past storylines from pre-2000, in example, and anybody who wants various storylines complete should be able to afford said archives. Unfortunately, if the following answer says something:
“There’s not a place around here to get older comics or vintage comics and I wanted an opportunity to get them into the hands of people,” Behrens said. “Alan Moore is one of my favorite writers in comics, and he made a comment in an interview one time that comic books are no longer for the middle class; they’re for the rich because the prices are going so high. So I want to get them back in the hands of the middle class.
“I want the younger kids to get back into comics and people that said ‘You know I really wanted that fancy No. 1 ‘Iron Man’ but I can’t spend that exorbitant amount of money,’ I want to make sure I can give the opportunity for them to get it at an affordable price.”
The store will also offer a “subscription” service.What is this? He wants everybody to get specifically into buying monthly pamphlets instead of paperbacks and hardcovers, and to top it all off, he even wants to cater to the speculator market? Wow, this is insulting to the intellect. And once again, we have people here who're not thinking forward by a long distance. This is not how to encourage anybody to get into readership and hobby at all.
“Back in the day when we were kids you could order subscriptions and the comics would be mailed to you,” Behrens said. “What I’m doing is, people would come in, they’d tell me they want a ‘subscription’ for ‘Iron Man’ and I would then make sure I have the ‘Iron Man’ available for them every single month and it would be at the store so that they could pick it up.”
Comic Cove will have a membership club with incentives and discounts, and each month members who spend $100 will be entered in a raffle to win a free “slab,” or professionally graded comic.
Unless anybody in the press and industry starts making a serious case for why the time's come to make a wide shift towards paperback and hardcover, no concrete steps will ever be taken to improve the industry's fortunes going forward, and no improvements will come to artistic merit either.
Labels: Iron Man, marvel comics, msm propaganda, sales
