The Opening Day Gamble (No More Bets)

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By Jason Mojica

If you stopped by the storefront at 157 Huron Street in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood on September 30th of this past year, you would be forgiven for not believing that it was going to be open for business as Hey Kids Comics! the very next day.

There were some empty shelves on the walls, a bunch of wood on the floor, and my friend Chris with his arm in a sling trying to explain to me how to use a pneumatic nailer for the first time in my life. Actually, not all of the shelves were empty: A small area toward the front was stocked with books for early readers, and these were the ones that the locksmith who had just finished working on the front door was eyeing. I put down the nailer and looked over the locksmith’s invoicel–all these little things were really starting to add up. I was burning through money so I couldn’t really afford to not open on time. I gave him my credit card, he gave me a receipt, and then pulled out $25 in cash. “If my math is right, that should cover these three,” he said, having picked up a Spider-Man My Mighty Marvel First Book, plus a couple of Spider-Man Little Golden Books. He explained that he had recently run over his neighbor’s tricycle, wanted to make it up to him, and knew the kid liked Spider-Man. I wondered why he didn’t just buy him a new tricycle, but hey–I wasn’t about to risk losing my store’s very first sale!

jason mojica hey kids comics — When you can open any door, you don’t have to wait for opening day.

New York locksmith seeking to make amends with a child he had wronged was not a customer type I had factored for when I dreamed up the store, but that just goes to show you how difficult it is to make generalizations about who your customers will be and what they’ll want to buy before you meet them. Unfortunately, you have to make a whole bunch of bets on what you’re gonna put on your shelves, long before they walk into your shop.

And so you do try to make educated guesses based on whatever information you have on the type of clientele you’d like to attract–who is it you hope to dazzle? Everyone? C’mon… I mean sure–I’d like to be able to sell comics to every single person walking down my street, and if you challenged me to find a comic or graphic novel suited to each of them, I could probably do it. But this is the real world, and there are constraints! As I mentioned last time, our two major constraints were size & budget, so taking a kind of “general store” approach wasn’t going to work. Instead we decided to specialize by being an “all ages” shop: carrying a tight selection of books for kids & YA readers, but also some great stuff that could be read by the young but probably wouldn’t be (think Krazy Kat).

Back at the shop on the eve of our opening day, we managed to successfully and pneumatically nail a bunch of boards together into something resembling a retail counter and I was finally able to start stocking the shelves with the literal ton of books I had been amassing in my family’s apartment.

Every book I chose for the shop’s opening inventory was essentially a small wager. It’s kind of like placing chips on a roulette table while the ball is already in motion. You know that with each passing moment the ball’s orbit is degrading, and you’re running out of time for fine-tuning or second guessing. Suddenly the croupier calls out “no more bets” and all you can do is hold your breath and see how it all shakes out.

So how did it all shake out?

Considering most of opening weekend customers consisted of familiar faces–friends, family, and folks we had met while selling on the sidewalks of Greenpoint over the course of the previous year–I wasn’t sure how much I should infer from those first few days, but my initial takeaways were that a) Dog Man books sell as well as expected, b) Little Golden Books sold more quickly than I ever imagined, c) people still love seeing Jeff Smith’s Bone on the shelves, and d) there is something about the format of floppy comics that makes them invisible to young people–regardless of the content.

To this last point, I had seriously debated whether we would even carry periodical comics at all. Compared to kids graphic novels priced at $10-$13 for around 200 pages of story, spending $4 for 20 pages seems like kind of a bad deal. Plus, I was opening at the very moment that getting comics from the top three publishers required dealing with three different distributors, two of them–Diamond & Lunar–with minimums I wasn’t sure I’d be able to meet. But was I really going to open a comic shop that didn’t actually carry comic books–the kind I grew up reading? No, I was not. So I bit the bullet and decided to stock a classic spinner rack’s worth of floppies. In our first month, we sold four? Five?