The Four Color Media Monitor

FFX Now spotlighted local specialty store Big Planet Comics in Fairfax County, whose management tells how they've adapted to the times since the Coronavirus fiasco 5 years ago, yet it doesn't sound all that different from previous coverage of specialty stores:

Kevin Panetta, a manager, has been at the shop for roughly 18 years. He’s also the author of several comics, including the excellent Bloom. Panetta said he’s watched the shop go through many changes in that time, most recently facing dual threats of online comics retail and Covid.

“The [shops] that remain are doing okay,” Panetta said. “The pandemic was rough on everybody, but we’ve seen stores shut down before that. We used to have three shops in Vienna.”

Panetta says Big Planet has had to adapt to survive — taking advantage of a significant back issue inventory, getting involved in an indie book store crawl, and annually boosted by Free Comic Book Day.

“You can get [back issues] online, but you can’t really browse them online,” Panetta said. “We’re offering something people can’t necessarily get on Amazon.”

I'm sure there's plenty that can be done to promote indie comics, but the whole talk of pamphlets, again, doesn't impress me when no questions are raised for whether such a format should be jettisoned in favor of paperback/hardcover formats. And what's FCBD done for comics in the long run? As previous news reports revealed, it never made much money for any involved, so how could it have done much for Big Planet either? And then, when they talk about recommendations, it's the easy ones:

When it comes to newer customers, both workers said they also really enjoy making recommendations.

“The thing I always ask is, ‘What do you like outside of comics?’ Because there’s really every single genre,” Panetta said.

“Horror has been insanely good lately,” Nicole added. “There’s been a couple writers doing a lot of great titles and there’s a lot more creativity in that section.”

They said Patrick Horvath’s graphic novel Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees about a serial-killing brown bear and even more grisly holiday horror The Deviant have been two of the most popular titles recently, though they also enjoy making “weirder” recommendations like Grog the Frog.

“That feeling when someone picks up a book you recommend — that’s great,” Panetta said. “That’s the whole thing… Getting that feeling every day is so satisfying.”

When they start recommending and sugarcoating the horror genre, that's decidedly when you know something's terribly wrong. If this is what's big at the store in focus, it only makes clear there's a serious problem at hand. Worst, it practically sounds like a lot of virtue-signaling. At the end though, they say:

One of the harder parts, Panetta says, is the threat of burnout.

“You can also get kind of tired of reading comics, and that aspect can feel like as much of a job as the rest of it, when I feel like I have to read all the new things that come out,” Panetta admitted.

The best way to counteract that, both agreed, is going back to the comics they truly love.

“It’s about reading stuff you actually like,” Nicole said.

Well in that case, why not recommend stuff that's more optimistic, like Superman of the past? Or why not argue why more needs to be done to improve how brighter-angled storytelling is written up, and whether divisive politics should be avoided if that's what it takes to make it work effectively? I'm sorry, but this is another example of store management not rising above the cliches that're decidedly making a joke out of the medium and industry, and it needs to be changed to be more convincing. Unfortunately, Big Planet's management isn't succeeding at that so far.

Labels: history, indie publishers, msm propaganda, sales