by Jason Mojica
Dear reader, the last time we talked was, oh… October of 2022. Hey Kids Comics! had just celebrated its first anniversary as a brick-and-mortar store in Brooklyn, and I was feeling good about my decision to open the business. So good, in fact, that I went ahead and re-upped our lease. Our second holiday shopping season was around the corner and I was excited to start fulfilling the rewards on a successful first-time Kickstarter campaign.
The Kickstarter project was, in a way, my maximalist interpretation of advice that Steve Svymbersky from Quimby’s Bookstore NYC gave me on how to increase profit margins: make your own stuff. Steve, who is smarter than I am, generally does this by making very cool little zines featuring things like great quotes from counter-cultural figures and selling them at a nice margin. I, on the other hand, have to make things as complicated as possible, so my interpretation of “make your own stuff” was to ask my favorite band of all time, Naked Raygun, if I could manufacture & release an etched 7” record packaged with a comic book by James Romberger & Josh Bayer adapting the song.
Cover for the Naked Raygun etched 7” record + comic with art by James Romberger & Josh Bayer
We launched the Kickstarter in May of 2022, and with the insane backlog at vinyl pressing plants across the country, didn’t expect to get the records back until October of that year. My plan was to spend the month before Thanksgiving using my otherwise slow early afternoons packing up the rewards and pre-orders and getting them out into the world. Who needs a fulfillment service when you have time on your hands? Money in the bank!
Naturally, things did not go according to plan. The records didn’t actually get pressed until the beginning of December—our busiest month of the year. This meant I was capping off my already long days at the shop by boxing up rewards til midnight every night for weeks. But hey, a successful Kickstarter campaign and a busy retail store are good problems to have, right?
Right?
Well, while we did have a good holiday shopping season, it wasn’t as much of an increase over the previous year as I was hoping for. So, when I sat down and looked the numbers for our first 15 months of business and tried to make projections about the year ahead, I came to a startling conclusion:
I was going to have to get a job.
As in… another job.
I always read that you should have some absurd amount of cash savings when you start a business, so much so that you wonder how anyone can ever possibly start a business. But now I had run headlong into the reason why: there’s a good chance that at some point you will need more money than you are initially able to make.
Basically, the shop was doing fine, just so long as I didn’t actually pay myself. But as we all know, working full time for no money is not sustainable. Luckily, the timing of this realization coincided with an offer from the good folks at Big Think to embrace one of my more marketable skills and direct a big documentary series on the search for meaning & purpose through the lens of science, art, and the human experience. I got to spend the better part of a year working on a cool project with amazing people, and yeah… I was able to keep a roof over my head and pay the staff I hired to take my place at Hey Kids Comics! while I was in the field. Sure, I was paying that staff completely out of my own pocket from the other gig, but I thought that if that’s what it took to keep the store open, so be it!
But as the months went by, and I found myself barely spending any time at the shop that I created, I found myself wondering why I was forking over a substantial portion of my wages to keep the shop going. The whole reason I opened it was so that I could be there, behind the counter, fully immersed in all things comics. I mean, what’s the point in just owning a comic shop? The joy of bookkeeping? Bragging rights? Hah!
Waiting for the sun.
I tried to tell myself that I was just doing what it took to keep it afloat for when I would eventually return, and that it was certainly a worthwhile investment as long as there was growth. That is, so long as we were increasing our customer base and the sales charts kept ticking up and to the right, then this ritualistic burning of money (I mean this investment) could kinda-sorta make sense.
But to my dismay, there really was no discernible growth. Sales were pretty flat. Some months, they were even down over the same month the previous year. And so I was faced with a pretty fundamental business challenge: how to a) cut costs and b) increase sales? Basically, I had to find a way to stop bleeding money.
The first step was the painful decision to end our subscription service, the Hey Kids Comics Club. Its unique selling point, a monthly zine featuring interviews with comic creators along with comics and activity pages from great indie artists, was costly to produce, lost money every month, and spread me far too thin while I was simultaneously doing a whole other job. Had we been able to get the subscriber numbers high enough, it could have worked, but I lacked the funds to make that happen via paid marketing and I had run out of time for slower organic growth, so I had to pull the plug.
The next decision was a counter-intuitive one: to be closed more often than we are open. This was something I had been toying with since I realized that Wednesdays & Thursdays were money-losing days for us. I know that might come as a shock to those of you whose shops revolve around Wednesday Warriors, but as I’ve mentioned before, periodical comics are not what people come to us for. Still, I was quite hesitant to shift to a weekends-only (Fri-Sun) schedule, because you don’t want to become that shop that people think of as “never open” and therefore never think to visit. Plus, I was afraid to alienate the customers that did come to the shop during the week. But when Emma, the super-knowledgeable and outgoing staffer who worked the shop Wednesdays & Thursdays decided to move on to greener pastures, I took the opportunity to declare our 3 days a week “summer hours” and… it worked out just fine! It was the craziest thing to see no decrease in weekly sales at the same time as we reduced our labor costs.
Speaking of the floppy comics (as Heidi told me to never call them), we didn’t completely eliminate them, but we’ve come pretty close. We’ve reduced our offering essentially to Godzilla comics, horror titles like Dwellings & Creepshow, and Ultimate Spider-Man. Anything else eventually winds up filed into a long box labeled “regrets only.”
King of the periodicals in our shop.
Cutting costs was a great start, but much more difficult is figuring out how to actually increase sales. I can’t claim to have figured it out, but I can tell you where I started, and that is with assessing the role of our shop in the larger context of our Brooklyn neighborhood. Now, Hey Kids Comics! was not the first comic shop to open in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It wasn’t even the second. No, it was the third shop to open in this roughly three square mile area between 2020 and 2021. The first was Comic Book Station, which is a collector’s paradise: tons of high-grade silver and golden-age books of both the slabbed and still-readable variety, dazzling displays of vintage toys, sports cards, and the most amazing dollar bins around–but not a new comic in the house. The next shop to open, Action City Comics, does an incredible job of meeting the local demand for new periodical comics with a selection that stands shoulder to shoulder with Manhattan’s Forbidden Planet & Midtown Comics. Plus, they have a substantial offering of toys and collectible statues. Just one neighborhood over in Williamsburg is Gabe Fowler’s incredible store, Desert Island, which is the place to go for the very best in indie comics as well as beautiful and strange art books from all over the world.
When we opened, I knew we were coming into a crowded market, but with our focus on all-ages graphic novels, I expected that we would attract a different audience. And while that did turn out to be true, only part of that is due to our curation. Yes, we have developed a base of great regular customers who are super into the specific thing we do, but one of the things I’ve been most surprised about is the fact that on any given day, nearly half of our customers are people who have never set foot in our shop before. Not only that, but they weren’t actively seeking us out! They just happened to be wandering down our (primarily residential) side street, or they saw our sandwich board on the main drag, or they were visiting the food-centric Archestratus bookstore across the street, or they were emerging from a boozy brunch at the (now shuttered) restaurant next door.
In short, I realized that if the store was going to survive, I was going to have to round out our over-specialized offering a little to better serve the customers we actually did have rather than the ones I originally imagined we would have. I was going to have to figure out how could I better serve the people in my neighborhood, who like most New Yorkers, spend the majority of their time and money within a mile from their house.
First and foremost, I finally caved and started carrying Pokémon cards. Kids (and their parents, as well as childless adults) had been asking for them day one, but I wanted to be a bit snobby and have my store be all about reading. But my survival instinct finally kicked in, and now I have come to appreciate the passion that people have for those pocket monsters and for learning every fact about them.
With that crack in the dam, it occurred to me that I should perhaps start carrying some graphic novels that would appeal to the adults with disposable income and a love of big, expensive books, and who come in three mimosas deep on Sundays. When you’re feeling squeezed financially, it can be hard to remember that there other people don’t have to be as frugal as you. The number of people who aren’t active comics readers that I’ve seen drop $40 for a copy of Ducks because they’ve “heard it’s supposed to be good” has certainly been inspiring.
Next, I made space in the shop for Burnt Books, which was a little side racket I started in 2022 selling used books at a neighborhood bodega. It’s the sort of thing that headline writers love to write headlines about, so it got a lot of attention (including a TV spot). When the bodega decided it wanted to renovate and reduce the size of the book section and relegate it to the back of the store, I decided to fold it into the Hey Kids Comics, where it displaced underperforming superhero trades (which, sadly, was not a section highlighting tales of underperforming superheroes). We do a decent business in mass market sci-fi and mystery paperbacks, as well as higher end art books, and it sure is nice to have something in the shop with a sizable margin!
Kids checking out their first published comics at the party for the relaunched Hey Kids Comics zine in front of the Burnt Books section of the shop.
Then I decided to take another crack at the “make your own stuff” thing and relaunched the Hey Kids Comics zine, but now it’s a comics anthology made for kids by kids age 5-17, and is available for sale to the public rather than being part of a subscription box. The stuff these kids are coming up with is pretty freaking fantastic, and we’ve been throwing release parties at the shop which are always a hoot. (If you know any young artists who might like to contribute, please send them our way!)
Last but not least, I’ve been trying to increase the number of in-store events we do, including a new evening conversation series for the so-called “adults” that also doubles as a live recording session for my rekindled comics podcast, Buy This Comic! Our first guest was Karl Stevens, author of a book that’s always been big with the grown-ups, Penny.
So that’s where we are currently at: serving the neighborhood, creating new comics fans, and creating a community. It feels good! I like to think that we’ve found some kind of equilibrium, but if I learned anything from that science-centric documentary project that I worked on last year, it is that the world is made up of layers and layers of complex systems, each made up of many moving parts. While there are levers we retailers can pull to encourage people to walk through the doors and part with some of their hard earned money, there are so many factors we can’t influence at all: the spending power of individuals, how ebbs and flows in the real estate market can change the makeup of a neighborhood, transit disruptions, technological disruptions, and finally… perpetually changing lifestyles and tastes. Adapting to the ever-changing world in which we live is a full time job and an exhausting one at that. It’s helped me realize why nostalgia is so powerful: it’s a longing for a brief moment in time when you felt you understood how everything worked… right before it all began to change.
I’m cautiously optimistic that we might have found our groove, but I’m not naive enough to think that the rituals we’ve developed will offer much protection against the winds of change. But for the moment, I’m back at the shop, slinging comics and having fun. Ha! Ha ha! Hahahahahahahahahaha. Wheee!
Jason Mojica is the guy behind the counter at Hey Kids Comics! in Brooklyn, NY. He’s also the host of the Buy This Comic! podcast, and occasionally makes comics of his own. You can find more of his writing on his Substack.
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