Broken Frontier

People often wonder what free comic book day is like for a retailer. Maybe not people, but I did. Well, now that I happen to manage the Northgate Mall location of Ultimate Comics in Durham, NC, I can fill in those people like me. www.ultimatecomicsonline.com

Free Comic Book Day begins for us on the first Sunday following the first Saturday of May. It is then that we judge how successful that year’s event was and begin the planning process for the next year. Not a whole lot is really done until January, but it is in the back of our minds for that much of the year. When an idea pops up, we let each other know. Now, you might think this would mean that this is meticulously plotted out, but for the most part it’s not. Hence, the reason Ultimate Comics has never had a signing. It’s not that we don’t want to, but by the time February and March rolls around, we are too late for the kind of guys that would do us any good. One year, we’ll remember to start contacting people right away, but the problem is that convention season is in its throws when FCBD happens. Conventions take more planning as it invariably pulls two key members of the staff out of the stores.

That being said… it begins full force in January when we get our first glimpse at what the FCBD offerings will be. You order heavy on whatever DC and Marvel offer and anything that is all ages friendly. We love the Owly and Archie offerings, but this year’s offering of Tiny Titans and Marvel’s recent addition of a Marvel Adventures title are just as important to the success of the day. See, the aging comic fan is a captive audience, as long as the stories go the way the fans want them, they tend to stick around. It’s the kids and potential readers outside the niche market that we focus on.

This year, Marvel threw us an Iron Man & Incredible Hulk book. It wasn’t a FCBD offering, but had a FCBD ad on the back of it. We took all of these books to our local theaters and let the theaters pass them out. With Iron Man opening the day before FCBD and Incredible Hulk getting its first good trailer at the same time, this seemed a no brainer to us. Stickers graced the back page with our telephone number and web address. Couple that with an appearance by Iron Man at our Mall location (which is our most trafficked store), and we were hoping for a massive amount of new faces to enter the stores.

But that is getting a little ahead of myself. FCBD is hard work for your retailer. Beginning anywhere from a month to two weeks before the event itself, we begin to get in product that is related. The books themselves arrive, which, since they are purchased by us, have to be counted to ensure that we have received the proper allotment. Merchandising materials flow in at the same time. Northgate Mall, where my home store is located, graciously allowed us to put stickers on every entrance door of the mall, stating that FCBD would be happening there. See Mall owners are business people as well, and they understand that when you get 1500 people in one store in one day… well that means more money for everyone… the Carousel operator, the Dairy Queen, the food court, and hopefully everyone else sees some extra cash as well.

For an operation like ours, with three fairly small stores, it means that we are looking at about 8,000 books that have to be split up and delivered to the separate locations. We receive them at our base store (Chapel Hill) and then distribute them ourselves to the others. It is a lot of work, but means that we only need one manager in charge of ordering, which in turn gives our company a much more open communication line then most corporations for whom I have worked in the past.

It also allows us to uniquely cater to our clientele. With three very different stores, we have three very different customer bases. The Northgate store sells more event books, the original Homestead location sells more of everything, and the Chapel Hill store sees a wider range of people able to remain open to recommendations. This means that for the purposes of this FCBD… most of the Marvel Adventures Iron Man & Spider-Man & Hulk books went to the mall, most of the X-Men book went to Durham and the majority of the Atomic Robo books stayed at Chapel Hill. This also means that you will get some cross traffic as customers will visit all three stores to get that book that they missed or the one item that is purely exclusive to that store… for example to tie in with the appearance, all the Iron Man Heroclix went to the Mall…

The event itself this year was a rousing success. It was up about a thousand dollars over last year in sales. However, we also spent less money on physical books this year. That is huge to be up in sales and down in expenditure. But the fans themselves had a ball; we’ve actually gotten several emails from customers telling us that this was our best FCBD ever!

Other then the Iron Man appearance, we ran a dollar sale at the original store (Homestead in Durham) and that was about it this year. Still we had the ubiquitous appearance by Tommy Lee Edwards (1985) and Family, Ben Lictitus (creator of The Black Coat) and Michael Kronenburg (designer of those sweet EC archive books)… but they are all customers, so while being special to you guys and the customers of the shops, they are just regular people to us. We had appearances of some Cosplay… with Batman, Robin, Wesley Dodds, Frank Castle, Deadpool, Darth Vader and more making appearances at the stores throughout the day. I even heard rumors of a rather shocking Skrull at the end of the day at Northgate.

The dollar sale was the big money maker. These were the best dollar books I have ever seen, even causing me to send one of my employees into shock as I bought an Ultra #3-8 from the bins. One more and I’ll have all the Luna’s works in single issue format! The sight of a customer leaving with a diamond box overflowing was not an uncommon sight throughout the day.

We opened the doors at the Homestead location at about 9:45 am. Normally we open at 10:00 am and that was the plan this year, but we were set up and there was a line. The way it was set up is there were two tables with the free books on the sidewalk outside as well as the eighty long boxes of $1.00 books. At 10:00 am I had a line to the back of the store and that line remained until about 11:15. After that, business came in spurts all day. There were many times where I studily worked the register for an hour at a time. By 7 o’clock, it was down to a steady trickle and my guys boxed up the sale books. At 8:15, I rang up the last customer and closed 15 minutes late. Having made more money than the other two locations together, I got bragging rights.

The day at the mall store was not as big as the year before, but gave it their best week since they opened. I guess the hype in the mall drove customers in during the week. It will be interesting to see how many of the new faces we retain. Generally FCBD is when we begin to add subscribers in quantities of 5-10 a week. This week I saw five, up from one the week previous. This is how our shops grow. That steady growth in pull boxes usually lasts until November, being in the low 700s now; I expect to be in the mid 800s then.

The stores where pretty much wiped of all Iron Man trade paperbacks and there were strong sales on the single issues. While the response to the appearance of Iron Man yielded about half as many people at the mall store from last year, the purchases were definitely more related to the character. On Monday morning, I had a couple of copies of the newest Iron Man and Legacy of Doom, a trade of Demon in the Bottle, an old Marvel Legends figure, and a CD-rom collection of Iron Man. I don’t quite remember that kind of wipe out of Spidey product last year.

So beyond just thinking about what to do next year, the main focus of my staff now is to continue getting the new faces back in the shops. I told people about the new Iron Man books this Wednesday so many times that I even bored myself with it, but you have to get them to come back, so you say it with a smile and enthusiasm.