This week Chris and Walt are joined by Dave Campbell who runs the Big B Comics shops in Hamilton and Niagara Falls Ontario. The boys talk about the current state of the local comic shops, they also look forward and discuss what the shops can do to engage more comic book fans.
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How’s your local shop doing?
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Throughout the pandemic, my two favourite local shops, Carry On Comics in Waterloo and Lookin’ for Heroes in Kitchener have survived largely through curbside pick-up and the incredible loyalty of their regular customers. I noticed too that when people did get to return to in-store shopping many of them went out of their way to spend that extra little something just to help the stores rebound and that has made a lot of difference I am sure. I was thinking of ways to keep up my buddy Andy’s profile in the community, and my answer was to get T-shirts made up bearing the last page of a story I wrote about our friendship which had appeared in Negative Burn #20. It’s a great picture of the store with Andy and I sitting on the front steps with the last bit of dialogue reading, “Heroes always carry on” drawn by my cousin and former collaborator R.G. Taylor. To date we have sold 30 of these, making it the best-selling T-shirt in the history of the store! It was a simple and small gesture on my part, but I encourage all fans of the medium to get the message out to all your friends and family that these guys are open for business and will be happy to see us all again. Customer loyalty has been the linchpin of this whole recovery, and I hope all of you will drop an extra few bucks at your local comic shop to show your appreciation for the wonderful job they have done of fueling our dreams over the years.