Nostalgia & Comics & Me - Part 20and that's me done for now....

After 19 posts and various extras in the Nostalgia & Comics & Me series I'm calling it a day for now.
I'm sure there are more things I'll want to say, but those things can wait for now.
Hopefully I've given you all a little taste of what a wonderful time I had in my 19 years at the greatest comic shop in the country.
The good news for me is that the friendships I've made over the years are friendships that will last and my reviewing for the FPI weblog means I'm still connected with the shop in at least a minor way. After all, I have to go down fairly regularly to pick up those comics to review.

But for now, that's it. Nostalgia & Comics & Me is done. 19 main posts for 19 years. I hadn't noticed the synchronicity until now, but that's nice.

(Click here to get back to the beginning post)

Nostalgia & Comics & Me - The photos part 4

No convention or signing stuff now, just wonderful shots of the shop in all it's glory. Just looking at these fills me with all sorts of weird nostalgic feelings.......



First up, a lovely view of the shopfloor and the main comics wall. Judging from the comics on display, this would be around 1987/8 and may even be around the time of the Watchmen signings.
My eyes immediately drawn to the central column and those wonderful flying Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers wall plaques. They were a feature of the shop for decades.
Then you have the shelves absolutely sagging with the weight of comics. None of them full face at this stage, we just didn't have the room for that luxury.

Another shot of the shopfloor below, this time looking down at the back issue section in the corner. This was the time when back issues were at their height and to be honest Paul really should get off his arse, stop reading the comics and put some of those back issues away.

Different view of the shop, different time. The long haired rock thing stalking the aisles in the photo below is Jason, who introduced me to the hilarious treat that was Edwards #8. Judging from the bottom left of the picture this would be around the time that the Turtles hit really big on the TV, as we've got some of the merchandise on the shelves....

And next, the wall. This was a big feature of the shop from very early on. Personally I think Phil just didn't want the expense of painting the walls so just wallpapered with some posters he had lying around. From this photo you don't really get an idea of the scale, but this is a two storey high wall of posters we're looking at.
Later on it was at least partially covered over with absolutely huge posters of Batman, Terminator and Indiana Jones. As far as I recall when we were having the refit after being taken over by FPI, there was talk of removing the posters and giving us a really nice iconic wall display complete with huge panel and character blow ups. It would have looked absolutely spectacular. But it never happened, partly I think because they realised that the posters were actually more structurally sound than the plaster and taking the posters off the wall would have brought the plaster down as well....

And to end with, more recent shots of the shop: A nice exterior shot

The Propaganda shelf with a Cerebus display and the view towards the tills. This was where I would regularly highlight everything I thought you should all be reading, something I was always very proud of and something I'm carrying on (in name if not in shelf presence) at the FPI weblog by doing the Propaganda reviews:

Nostalgia & Comics & Me - the photos part 3

More photos from various Nostalgia & Comics signings.

First a couple from a Cerebus signing tour. Probably circa 1986/7 based on the comics I can make out in the photo. Gerhard on the left, Dave Sim on the right:

Dave & Ger in full flow. Again, interesting to me because of what's in the background. An entire wall full of MAD magazine. How times change.


Howard Chaykin & fan dressed as American Flagg. God knows who the fan is. If you know, or if it was you, please let me know.

Jim Shooter, posed carefully against the main wall of comics just to show how bloody tall he is I'm guessing. No idea of the date again, maybe 1985/6 based on some of the comics....

Nostalgia & Comics & Me - the photos part 2

More photos provided by Dave at Nostalgia & Comics.

These Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons signings happened around the time of the Watchmen finale in 1987.

Of particular interest to me in all these old photos is looking at the stock we carried back then. For example; in the first shot with Alan Moore talking to his fans, we have a shelf full of Asterix and Tintin in the background and Garfield in the foreground. We haven't carried them in years. Interesting perhaps only to me.

Of note in the photo below of Alan Moore doing his meet & greet is the gent in the check shirt with the beard. That's Steve Pugh, noted artist. Also in the white jumper looking nonchalantly off-photo is my good friend Simon.

One wonderful anecdote from the Watchmen signings. Firstly it was possibly the best signing session i've ever worked - possibly because it was my first at the shop - I was only 16 at the time and had just started reading Watchmen and was loving it. But the best thing was after the signing. Alan and Dave finished the signing, we ushered the last people out the doors and locked up. Then Alan and Dave started wandering round the shop, picking stuff up from the shelves and amassing a big pile of stuff they wanted. But at some point it became obvious that etiquette for the tour had been set at some previous signing date on the tour. It appears that somewhere they'd been told to just take their pick of what they wanted and take it for free. Sadly, no-one had bothered to inform Phil (the owner of Nostalgia & Comics at the time) about this. So to see his face blanch as realisation dawned was a very funny sight.

This wonderfully photo comes from the special DC Comics 50th birthday party we hosted in 1988. Given Alan's continual fallings out with DC over the years, his threatening stance with the knife looks like he's just looked deep into the future......

And finally, two from a London convention. The first is Alan Moore in his famous white suit, a very young Neil Gaiman (still a journalist back then) & Dave Gibbons. Circa 1988/9?

And judging by the insipid grey background this is from the same convention, this time it's Frank Miller & Lynn Varley:

Nostalgia & Comics & Me ...... the photos part 1

On a recent trip to Birmingham, lovely Mr Dave, boss at Nostalgia & Comics handed me a pile of convention and signing photos - presented here as some form of interesting historical record.

Of course, seeing as he gave them to me in the pub, we don't really have any confirmed dates. Hell, you're lucky I remembered to bring them home.

(DAVE - If you're reading this, please let me know if I've got the names or dates wrong so I can amend as necessary!)

Lets start with a couple of early Birmingham convention shots. Nostalgia & Comics held the first comic convention in the country back in 1968, organised by my old boss at Nostalgia & Comics, Phil Clarke.
These would be from the Birmingham Comic Art Show sometime in the mid 80s possibly.... (Classic X-Men #1 in the second picture, Art Adams signing)

In the last one, if my memory serves me right, the ginger haired , blue shirted gentleman is Art Adams, a famously slow comics artist before it became the norm.
Art is also seen below in deep conversation with Paul Gambacinni.
(I think it's the same convention):

Brian Bolland:

Brian Bolland, Art Adams, Mark Farmer, Kev O'Neil:

Charles Vess, Bryan Talbot, Mike Kaluta (we think!), John Ridgway & Hunt Emerson:

Nostalgia & Comics & Me part 19the staff

One thing I should mention is all the members of staff who've made the work at Nostalgia & Comics absolutely nothing like work. Without whom etc etc........
Apologies to all I've forgotten, I'm old and the brain doesn't work that well any more.

Firstly to Dave; a manager and a friend.
Phil Clarke (for hiring me in the first place)
Sue Williams (for being so nice on that first day)

It's always been the staff that have made Nostalgia & Comics the most wonderful place to both work at and to shop at. I'm lucky enough to have worked there long enough to have met, worked with and become friends with many of them......
so, in no particular order:
Mark, David, Ted, Martin, Jason, Carl, Jeff, Casey, Beckitt, Frodo, Lisa, Beth, Dan, Sarah, Kay, Morgan, Mikey, Jeff, Paul H, Ben, Dennis, Cat, Stuart, Rich, Gemma, David Wells, Perry, Jon, (add your name here or add it in the comments and I'll edit it in)

& finally, a belated mention to three people who I should have previously mentioned in all my posts on the basement.
Paul Slater
Roy
Tara.

Obviously, I didn't work completely in isolation down there and every member of staff has helped out down in the basement at some stage, for which I thank them all.
But throughout my entire career there, trapped in that underground hell, those three very special people have, at various times, laughed, cried, sweated (or in Tara's case perspired), swore, kicked / punched the stock into place (mostly Paul it should be said) and generally been totally supportive of me down there.
Thank you to them for being my special basement friends.

Nostalgia & Comics & Me Part 18actually this is more Nostalgia & Comics & Molly....

One horrible side effect of me moving up to Pocklington and leaving Nostalgia & Comics is that we're never going to see the day that I was really, secretly hoping for.

Ever since she was the tiniest thing Molly has been a regular visitor to the shop. She came in the first time just a few weeks old and since then she's always been made welcome. She's always been around comics in one form or another and has, since she was able to walk, loved trundling round the shop grabbing the latest fun things to play with.

As she's grown older she's also had the joy of being allowed behind the counter at various times when she and Louise visited on Saturdays.
She's bagged up, she's fetched comics, tidied shelves and done various bits of stocking up through her short life.

And she's always said that one day she'll come to work with me.
In fact, it was sort of taken as a given by all three of us I think that Molly would, sometime after 16, turn up at Nostalgia & Comics to earn a little extra cash to spend on whatever horrible music she was tormenting me with that week.
My heart that day would have been bursting with stupid pride.
Hell, knowing me, I'd have been wiping the tears away at some point.

But now that's not going to happen.
The nearest she gets is the special Nostalgia & comics t-shirt she's got in the cupboard, a leaving present from the staff to her.

Of course, should she somehow end up at university in Birmingham like her old man was, I'd certainly expect her to take full advantage and pester Dave for a job.
And I'd also expect Dave, knowing how good her shopworking and comic genes are, to give her a job.
I'd imagine she'd even be pretty good at sorting out the basement.

Nostalgia & Comics & Me part 17Shopfloor tales

After a long time in the relative obscurity of the basement, I obviously decided it was time to flex my creative wings and take over the shopfloor as well. Okay, maybe that's not precisely how it went, but you get the idea.

In truth, although I was hired by the owner to sort out the basement I'd always been involved in working on the shopfloor.

Even if sometimes the owners idea of what that entailed was hours at a time of standing on the stairs. Or even worse - by the doors. Mid-winter, it's freezing cold and the doors are wide open because he doesn't believe people will come in if they have to open a fucking door.
And what were we doing on the stairs or by the door?
Playing shoplifter spotter.

Unfortunately for us the owner's idea of what a shop-lifter was could be easily summed up as anyone under 18 years old. In fact the venom he saved for kids is quite ironic seeing the line of business he was in. It was always a horrible moment when he decided to spring into action. He usually didn't wait till they left the shop. In fact, thinking back, he didn't actually wait till they tried to nick anything. Just leaning on the shelves or failing to put something back in the right place was justification enough for him to bellow his disapproval across the shopfloor.
All the staff got used to this and started trying to take preventative action, because we hated seeing the looks on these poor kids faces. We'd quickly tidy around them, sidling up and around them so that they had little choice but to get off the shelf. Or we'd immediately pounce and replace that copy of Conan back in the right place.
(As another aside - given the tip that the boss described as his office, it was particularly rich that he got annoyed at anyone putting something back in the wrong place).

Anyway, my shopfloor experience started early on with the holy grail of working in a comic shop, something you should teach everyone that comes to work for you on their very first day. How to tidy a shelf properly.
I've been in countless Comic shops over the years and it always amazes me at how bloody messy the places are.
These things have covers on them for a bloody reason, didn't you realise that?
On my very first day at the shop, as a nervous little 16 year old hired to sort out the basement over my summer holiday I was called up at 5pm by Ted and told that we spent the last half hour every day tidying the shop. He gave me a quick run down of what that entailed and left me to it. And over the years, that always stuck. The last half hour would always be saved for tidying the shelves.

Added to the shelf tidying I did stocking up as well. Lots of it.
In the modern comic shop environment where comics have pitifully small circulations it seems strange to think that stocking up could take up a large amount of a persons day.
In fact, at one point my dear friend Mark was employed just to stock up the new comics on a Saturday, so great was the turnover of stock.

Back in those days of vacations from school and later University I also worked during the week and used to love Thursdays. In the UK this is the day the new stock comes in.
Well, it's the day the new comics come in. In the past it was also the day when everything else came in, but those days have long passed and there's virtually a delivery a day. But I know that Thursday still has a little magic though.
But nothing compared to what it was like back then.

Usually around an hour before the comics arrived we'd get the first customer hanging around trying to pretend he wasn't just there waiting for his weekly fix of new comic goodness.
By the time the boxes arrived there were many more of them.
On particularly bad days when something really exciting was due in there was almost a palpable sense of expectation (or maybe that was just poor hygiene?).

And when the boxes arrived they arrived in style. Loads of them. Because these were the days before the glut of stock, before the black and white boom, before sales went through the floor. We'd have maybe 40 titles to put out, but we'd have hundreds of copies of each issue.
The race was on, find all the titles first, get the subscriber pull copies into a few boxes, then hit the shelves. Of course, by then there was usually a crowd of customers around you as you got the comics ready.
Because they had the UK prices on as well we had to price sticker every one - these were the same comics that appeared on the UK newstands three months later remember, we'd got them as import copies. But invariably whilst in the middle of frantically price stickering someone would either: ask if they could have one of the copies in the pile or, even worse, just reach in a snatch one away off the top of the pile.

Meanwhile, someone invariably was rooting through the subscriber pull boxes. Like there was some buried treasure of comic-dom in there, some secret comic that we just weren't going to put out. We tried everything to stop these desperate souls going through these boxes. But if physically hiding them behind the counter didn't work, what good was a polite sign going to do?

After getting the comics out came the fun of sorting the bloody shelves out. Because the 40 new titles had replaced 40 old titles, which then had to drop down onto the lower shelves. Which of course meant the lower shelves were a mess. So the next job was to get down on these lower shelves, working your way through the throngs of customers eagerly picking up all their new comics and sort the bloody things out. Back in those days Back Issues were a huge part of the business and pulling back issues off the shelves was a huge job. We always had at least 4 long boxes of back issues, usually more. And of course, all of these had to go somewhere. (Basement of course).
But despite all this, Thursdays were special. (wipes away Nostalgic tear.......)

Nostalgia & Comics & Me Part 16Princess bloody Diana hated comics

Around the mid to late 90s I found myself more and more involved with the shopfloor at Nostalgia & Comics, and particularly more involved in trying to push the product mix to include some of the great stuff that was being published.

I was particularly involved in pushing the wonderful British stuff that was being published at the time. We sourced this direct from the publishers and actively restocked so we had every issue in.

Particular successes for us included:
Kane by Paul Grist.
Strangehaven by Gary Spencer Millidge
Sleaze Castle by Terry Wiley and Dave McKinnon

We had a separate section in the shop and aggressively promoted all of these titles. I had lots of nice phone calls and emails with all the creators involved. All in all it was a great time for us and for the titles involved.

About this time Pete Ashton (weblog) was heavily into the small press and self publishing scene. He ran a small press distributor: Bugpowder (which later mutated into the excellent website here) and was a frequent visitor to the shop. Pete and I got talking on various occasions and we ended up stocking several of the comics and books he represented on our shelves and did a nice little trade in them as well.

After months of doing this Pete gets it into his head to organise a little convention, more like a formal pub meet with events and a few guests. He called it BrumCAB97 (Comics and Beer) and billed it as an informal mini-convention with the emphasis on meeting and chatting about comics in a relaxed environment.

Pete's always been at the sharp end of the ideas business, very early on he was running fanzines, doing the BugPowder distro thing, organising comic pub meets and got into this blogging lark very early as well. So the idea of getting a few dozen quality British comics names together seemed like a really good idea at the time.

To tie in with this we decided that Nostalgia & Comics should invite some of the British writers and artists we'd been supporting for so long down to sign and appear at BrumCAB97.

From memory and the convention booklet I can make a list of: Paul Grist, Terry Wiley, Dave McKinnon, D'Israeli, Jeremy Dennis , David Morris, Fiona Jerome, Jason Cobley, Lew Stringer, Paul Rainey. But there were others.

So we set the date; all scheduled to take place on the weekend of 6th & 7th September 1997.
Anyone spot the huge problem with that date?
Go to this BBC page to find out.

Okay, all back. We'd managed, through no fault of our own to schedule a really nice Brit comic weekend on the one weekend of the year where NO-ONE was in Birmingham.
Literally, no-one.

As Terry Wiley put it when I asked him for his memories:
Ah yes - I recall it was a lovely day for it, if it wasn't for the tumbleweeds blowing along Queensway it would probably have been a pretty good turnout!
I remember the hotel TV was showing the funeral on EVERY CHANNEL.
So when we went to BrumCAB later I remember we all went to a Balti house and the Oxford crowd started having a loud conversation about some unscrupulous person committing necrophilia on Diana! I was surprised there wasn't a fight ;)
The next day I think the drinking started early, while the TV showed REPEATS of the funeral, for god's sake - and Jeremy Dennis ended up with D'Israeli drawing on her (jeans) leg with a Sharpie....

I was never a big fan of Princess Diana. I'd long thought she was an aristocratic waste of space who should have known exactly what she was marrying into. Her job was simply to produce the heir and the spare, shut up about any of hubbies infidelities and wave at the right points. But the simpering, stupid woman decided not to play along.
I know it was a tragedy that she died in such a terrible accident. But she was stupid enough to get into a car with a drunk driver high on something or other.

Of course, as these events were unfolding, all I was really thinking about was what impact it would have on the attendance at the weekend. Selfish and small minded of me I know. But I certainly wasn't going to be part of the herd of cattle weeping and moaning for a woman they didn't know and who probably secretly hated them.

Come the day of the mini con we set everything up and got the shop all nice and ready for our guests and the customers. The guests turned up. The customers didn't.
Even on the bus into the shop that morning I knew we were onto a real loser. I think there were two other people on the bus. And they were just drunks still reeling from last nights wake or something or other.
When we got into town it was even worse. The silence of the city centre was incredible. I've always loved the quiet that descends on Birmingham in the early hours of the morning (before the clubs kick out anyway); it has a wonderfully unreal feeling to it.
But this quiet was very different. This was the quiet that signalled that we were going to have the most embarrassing of days.

Bless the guests though. They were very sympathetic and understanding. They sat behind the table and amused themselves for a couple of hours before we all headed to the pub.
We held our own wake that night and it had absolutely nothing to do with some royal bimbo.

Update 05/04/07:
Pete has put up his account of the weekend as well - here. Well worth a look.

Nostalgia & Comics & Me part 15From the Recommended Shelf to Propaganda

One of the most wonderful things I ever got to do in Nostalgia & Comics was recommend comics and graphic novels to customers.
Often when someone was browsing the shelves or came up to the till myself and all the rest of the staff would make pleasant comments on what they were looking at/ buying and gamely suggest that if they liked ------ why not try -------.
Of course, we never, ever criticised the selection. It's up to the customer to read what they liked. But we could always find a way to try to suggest something wonderful to them, no matter what they brought up to the till.

The rarest of prizes though, the really fun one was when a customer would come in and tell you that they'd read everything they wanted and could you suggest anything to read. That always made for a fun 10 minutes or so of chat and selling.

I always sold the books to people with the promise that if they didn't like them all they had to do was bring it back in and we'd refund the money, no questions asked.
To me it seemed the only fair thing to do. After all, this wonderful customer is putting down good money for a book just because I'm telling them it's wonderful. I've spent a little time asking all the pertinent questions to gauge exactly what sort of thing they're after, but I could always misjudge their comic character and sell them something they hate.

I'm very proud of the fact that in all my years of doing this, not a single copy has ever been returned. Not one.

So the inevitable end to this love of selling stuff I love to people would be the recommended shelf. About 1995/6 I was sorting out some of the shelves, changing a few things round and generally keeping myself busy on a long Saturday afternoon when I realised that if I moved this, shifted that and squeezed some horrible books a little I'd have a whole endcap to do with as I pleased.
(Quick explain, before the FPI buyout, the shop's shelves were a horrible wooden affair. Really, really horrible. And at the end of each run of shelves was the end cap, 4 shelves about 2 feet wide.)

So this endcap became The Recommended Shelf.
Every Saturday, after toiling in the basement I'd emerge, sweaty and blinking into the light and go about the shelves looking for what I want to put on the Recommended Shelf for the coming week. Quickly get them together, knock out a quick review sheet and pin it up on the shelf.
Over time, the reviews got longer and the shelf got labels and I started to think about what I could do with it to make it better.

Luckily Dave at Nostalgia & Comics has always been very good at letting us get on with stuff if he thinks it's a good idea and will help us sell more comics and graphic novels, so with his blessing I went about moving the shop around a bit and eventually made myself an entire rack of space.
This became, over time, my PROPAGANDA shelf. The top shelf would be a regularly changing selection of great stuff and the shelves underneath it would be a home to all the stuff that was worth reading but tended to get lost on the main shelves.
PROPAGANDA was where you'd find stuff by Chris Ware, Joe Sacco, Andi Watson and the rest. And the top shelf became my mission. Every few weeks I'd select some books, take them home and labour over reviewing them. The resulting A4 review sheet/newsletter became PROPAGANDA. It took bloody ages to do. Mostly because I had to design it, write the reviews and then spend ages trying to get them to fit into the A4 space I had.

But I really loved it.
In fact, leaving the shop meant leaving PROPAGANDA behind and meant I could no longer have access to all the goodies in the shop to read and review as I saw fit.
Of course, regular readers will know that I've started reviewing again and am now putting PROPAGANDA up before you every few weeks as part of the FPI weblog.
The PROPAGANDA @ FPI weblog posts are here.

On the plus side it means I no longer have to condense the reviews to fit an A4 sheet, but the downside is that I no longer get to have the satisfaction of selling stuff to our wonderful customers from my very own PROPAGANDA shelf.

Nostalgia & Comics & Me part 14Expansion. No No No No No No No No No.

In a post a little while ago, I touched on the other Nostalgia & Comics stores that we had at one time around the country.

What an absolute complete and total bloody disaster that all turned out to be.

If memory serves me well, Nostalgia & Comics had, at one time or another, stores in Birmingham, Nottingham, Sheffield, Coventry, Stafford and Kings Lynn. (Hardly London, Paris, New York is it?)

Anyway, in much the same way that the owner at the time didn't have a clue when it came to publishing (post) he didn't exactly have the best idea about how to open new Nostalgia & Comics stores. In fact it may be fair to say, based purely on the result, he had NO idea how to open new Nostalgia & Comic stores.

Lets take a look:
Nostalgia and Comics has attempted expansion five times,
each time has met with disaster,
lessons learnt were quickly forgotten and mistakes repeated five times over:

Sheffield (taken over by Titan Distributors after failure to pay bills).
Nottingham (Incompetent manager, Taken over by Titan again).
Coventry (under-funded, no stock, badly organised, closed after 6 months of losses).
Stafford (partnership with local businessman, who went out of business owing Nostalgia and Comics several thousand pounds).
Kings Lynn (Same person as Stafford, same result).

The last two are my favourites. To get ripped off by some local businessman once could almost be considered an unfortunate accident or minor negligence. But to have it happen to you twice in quick succession indicates a colossal lack of business skill.

Anyway, the basic business model for opening a brand new Nostalgia & Comics appeared to be this:
Pick a small, dank, preferably dirty location somewhere as far away as possible from the main shopping area.
Ideally the only passing trade should be dossers and drunks looking for somewhere to kip for the night. (This also helps to give the shop doorway it's pungent inviting smell).
Don't bother with silly pointless things such as shopfitting, decorating or improvements in flooring / lighting / damp-proofing etc.
Stock it with whatever crap you can get cheap from any distributor. Don't bother with new stuff, that would be far too expensive.

My own personal experience comes from helping to set up the Coventry shop.
It was an amazingly incompetent shop set up. But there was absolutely no way I could have made it work, no matter what I had done. As you can see I was hampered all the way by the tightfisted, frankly insane ideas the boss was having at the time....

First, we had a stunningly bad location.
As far away as you could get from the city centre without actually being ON the ring road. And to be honest, if we had been on the ring road at least we may have gotten a little passing trade out of it before we caused an accident.
It was a tiny shop. No really, tiny. About 300 sq ft at best. That's about the size of your bathroom.
Into this, we were expected to install several hundred metres of really crappy wooden shelving and old metal racks that have been in the Birmingham shop basement for at least 5 years just waiting for a wonderful opportunity such as this.
Then the owner appears with the stock.
Box after box after box after box of the sort of crap that the basement at Birmingham was overflowing with at the time. 2000AD, Oink, Poot, old Viz, essentially anything the boss could get without actually having to pay much (any?) money.
We had no credit card facility to speak of. Even better, we had no bloody phone at all and had to pop into the shop next door to get in touch with the Birmingham shop.
As for new stock, forget it. All our stock came from the Birmingham store in the back of the owner's van, as the owner didn't think it worthwhile to fork out the extra money for a separate order with the distributor.

And surprise surprise, with no money to fit it out, no money to advertise it, no money on getting stock in - guess how much money we made from it?
Absolutely right.
No money.

But ridiculously, after seeing it fail in one awful location, a few months later I was back in Coventry to move the shop to another, equally bad location.
This time we were renting the upstairs to a surf clothing store. Slightly bigger, but all the problems of the first location and the added extra stupidity of having no real signage to actually tell passing trade that we were upstairs. We eventually arranged a small bit of window space and put up a couple of makeshift signs.
But guess what? That's right - No money again.
The whole thing was over within a year or so.

This was in the 80s/early 90s if I remember it correctly. At this time there were quite a few stores expanding and trying to become chains. Stateside, Fantastic Store, Forbidden Planet and others. As far as I remember every chain except FP / FPI went to the wall in spectacular fashion.
What does this tell us about Nostalgia & Comics in particular and most other comic shops of the time in general?
Probably not the best idea to think you're the next Richard Branson when in actual fact you're closer to Del Boy Trotter. Most of these comic shop businesses got lucky; the owners opened up at the right time in the right place completely by chance. They weren't businessmen, they had no idea how to approach running a comic shop in the 90s and paid a heavy price when they got stupid and greedy and decided that they were ideally placed to build a little empire.
As for me, I haven't been back to Coventry since. I don't think I'm missing much.

Nostalgia & Comics & Me - Supplemental 3Return to Nostalgia & Comics......

Possibly the strangest thing for me on going back to Birmingham for the first time since we moved away to Yorkshire in October 2006 was setting foot in Nostalgia & Comics again.

I walked into the place on Saturday not knowing what to expect. But I really shouldn't have worried, it genuinely felt like I hadn't been away. Which in itself was a strange feeling, somewhat disconcerting really. I knew that I no longer really had a place in the shop but it's almost as if my mind isn't fully prepared to give it up completely. Maybe I'll be better to just think of the shop in itself as an old friend that deserves a visit every time I'm around?

But everything was how I remembered it. Indeed it was hard sometimes as I walked round the shopfloor to avoid starting to tidy the shelves and make sure all the books I thought should be on display had proper prominence like I used to.
It was nice to have a good look along the shelves again and pick up a few things while I was there. And bless them all - Rich, Tara and Dave had spent a while getting a care package together of things for me to have a look at:
Pride of Baghdad, Spirit, Newuniversal, the new Shazam by Jeff Smith, Criminal and more.
(Reviews are coming eventually, give me time to read them!)

Of course, no trip to Nostalgia & Comics would really be complete for me without a trip to the basement. Of course this time I'd had the foresight to bring a camera down to actually illustrate some of the things I'd talked about on the blog. A tiny bit of me was quite put out by how tidy and organised the place was. I suppose deep down I thought only I could sort the damn place out properly. Still, I can always hold onto the idea that I'd done all the hard work and set the place up properly so it's not that difficult to keep it looking good! (Yeah sure, whatever makes it easier to let go - you sad, sad man!)

And Molly came down as well, just to be nosey as always. She's perfectly at home in Nostalgia & Comics and has enjoyed coming in for years. In fact she's still slightly ticked off that her Saturday job that we've all been promising her for as long as she's been coming into the shop is looking a bit unlikely now.

In the first picture you came see the long aisles of dexion full of overflowing toys that just wont fit into comic boxes properly (Thanks Todd bloody McFarlane)

And in the second picture, with Molly carefully providing a sense of scale you see what we came up with for all those toys and dolls that just refused to go in any size of box.

So not as difficult as I thought it might be to return. But still sad to think that one day I might actually not feel at home in the old place.
Later on that day Louise and I stopped off to have a last look at our old road and our old house in Birmingham. I'm not quite sure what it means apart from the obvious fact that I have a strange set of values but I felt less sadness and loss over our old house than I did when I stood on the shopfloor at Nostalgia & Comics with the realisation that it wasn't an integral part of my life anymore.
Strange. And possibly a little sad as well.

Nostalgia & Comics & Me part 13The Basement part 6 The Final Days....

After the last two posts here & here detailing the evolution of working at Nostalgia & Comics, getting taken over and the travails of working the basement, it seemed a natural progression to finish the trilogy with a little bit on my final years at the shop.
It's not the end of the posts or the series though - lots more stuff to rake over still but this is the final real basement post
(thank god for that I hear from the crowd, more muckracking please....)

So, to get on with it........

After getting the basement finally sorted not once but twice it was meant to get a lot easier and I should have been having a lot more fun in the shop.
But sadly it just wasn't the case.

Instead of actually relaxing and enjoying myself - after all this was still only my Saturday job, the one I did to be with my friends and to be immersed in the comic world - I found myself getting more stressed about the 9 hour Saturday shift than anything else in my life.
I spent most of Thursday and Friday wondering what sort of a mess I'd end up walking into when i went in on Saturday morning. I'd deliberately try to get in extra early on a Saturday morning just to have a little extra time to sort the basement out.

I'd get angry when they needed me on the shopfloor because i was stressed out that I hadn't got the basement sorted to my high (impossibly high) standards.

It just wasn't working and it was obvious.
But of course the answer took a lot of working out.
Eventually my obsessional nature and the stresses I was putting onto myself got to boiling point and I had a bit of a hissy fit at the staff over some stupid things. God bless them, they didn't respond as they should have and kicked my sorry arse out the door but basically told me to stop being such a prick and get a grip.

Which I did.
I almost immediately decided to reduce my work there, dropping down to every other Saturday and gradually got used to that. Although having worked solidly Saturdays ever since I was 16 or so it came as a shock to discover that the weekend actually has two whole days to it.

But I was still getting stressed out coming into the shop every other week and was still getting obsessive about the damn place. Until eventually sometime in October 2005 I actually quit. A very sudden thing. I remember having a truly shit day, very stressed about the basement and the mess down there and eventually telling Dave I was done, finished. Effectively immediately.
To say this was a bit of a shock to wonderful Mr Dave would be an understatement.

But bless him, he understood the reasons and let me go away and get it out of my system, keeping in touch through email until he felt comfortably enough a month later to slowly start to reel me back in. He's a cunning swine, that Dave. He asked me if I'd mind coming in to do a Saturday when he was really short staffed and I agreed.
So I started working there again and, freed from the stress I'd been under before (completely of my own making of course) I found that I really loved it again.

And that was it. Another few months and then I dropped the bombshell that not only were Louise and I thinking about moving up to Yorkshire we'd taken steps, found the school for Molly, found the house and put ours on the market.

And that really was the end. No more Nostalgia & Comics for me.
But of course, the shop never really leaves you.
And I'm still in contact with them and I'm writing these posts to talk about my experiences there.
So to finish, I'll point you to the first post in this series: Nostalgia & Comics & Me part 1.

Nostalgia & Comics & Me 1987-2006.
A glorious place where I had many fantastic times, met so many wonderful people who would become good friends to this day, became a better, more rounded person and created a damn fine basement.
Not bad really.

Nostalgia & Comics & Me part 12The basement part 5The final push is always the hardest/stupidest

Sometime around 2002/3? ish, Nostalgia & Comics is now Nostalgia & Comics (a Forbidden Planet International associate store - but we certainly weren't advertising that little fact and I'd warrant most of our customers don't fully realise it either).

Also around this time I'm daddy to a 3 year old bundle of fun with a Saturday job AND a full time job. The grind of working 6 days is sometimes getting to me and my love of the wonderful world of comics is being tested somewhat by a pathological obsession with sorting out my basement.

The tipping point of my obsessional behaviour with the basement came with an off the cuff remark by one of the directors of FPI;
On a trip into the basement he'd mentioned to Dave how organised and laid out it was but he was surprised that I'd never thought about organising it length ways in long aisles rather than having lots of short aisles running across the shorter width of the basement.

Little did Dave realise that traumatic effect this would have when he in turn mentioned it to me.
Obviously way back in time when I started work in the basement it was laid out in a haphazard manner & completely full of shit. But over time we got various bits of shelving in and fitted it in wherever we could. This meant that all the dexion was arranged in short library shelf style sections rather than long warehouse type runs.

Within a week it had gone from a chance remark to me seriously thinking about it.
From just thinking about it to taking the decision to actually do it took a few weeks.
I was essentially going to turn the entire basement and all the stock down there through 90 degrees. Reorganising where everything was stored at the same time.

Much to the amusement and amazement of everyone I might add.
They all thought I was beginning to lose it.
Louise, meanwhile, was absolutely convinced I had.

Because I hadn't just been thinking about it at home.
Oh no, I'd been planning. That's planning as in "Tonight Pinky I shall take over the world"
I was sat in my room thinking, drawing, cutting out, measuring and laughing, somewhat manically at this stage.
I made lots of diagrams of the entire basement; big scale diagrams, in cardboard, with removable scale models of all the dexion and units.
I was taking the planning to a hideously obsessive level.
The final design was measured out and scaled to perfection.
I knew exactly where everything would go.
And just in case I forgot anything I had the whole thing mapped out tighter than a royal wedding with a written 50 point plan of the exact order to do it in.

Because of course, this wasn't just going to be the incredibly complex job of essentially turning the entire basement through 90 degrees.
No, I had to make it even more difficult by deciding it was time to have a complete rethink on where everything went as well.
This would have been stupid even with just an empty space, but this involved a basement already full of toys, books, boxes, crap, crap and more crap. I had to plan to the smallest detail how I would move stuff from dexion A,B,C & D, where it could go temporarily, whilst not blocking the path for swinging the selected dexion around to point the other bloody way. Then all the stuff had to go back on and I had to repeat this process with Dexions E through to god knows what.

It often meant that the plans were almost inch perfect as I had calculated that sometimes the dexion would have to swing in such a way as to have only an inch or so clearance whilst doing so.
Of course, next up I had to put it into practice, which was where the really obsessive behaviour kicked in. Over the course of several weeks I logged lots of extra time down the basement.

I sorted, I moved, I cajoled dexion into place.
I pushed dexion, pulled dexion, propped up dexion with nothing but my back as support, I even provided some dexion with a nice soft landing when it decided to fall over.

I moved boxes 1-50 from A to B to C. Then moved them back from C to B to A so I could put boxes 51-100 into position B. (You get the idea)

It took ages, it took sweat and in more than one occasion blood to do it
(those corners of the dexion are sharp you know).

But I did it.
I turned the entire bloody basement around.
Got loads of extra space out of it as well.
Now instead of a lot of small aisles of dexion we essentially had 3 long rows of dexion for the toys. And smaller bits of dexion fitting in the nooks and crannies for supplies, comics, books, back issues (what little we had) and all the other shit that comes down into the basement.
It's actually funny how much extra stuff there is. Spare shelves, metal racks, posters, comic boxes, carrier bags - all of it has to be found a space somehow.

One of the most difficult things in a comic shop is to find a space for the huge amounts of waste cardboard you get. Every single week we receive something like 100 boxes of stuff. All the cardboard needs flattening and putting somewhere. You'd be honestly amazed at some of the towers we've had in the past. Immense things, impossibly stacked.
Luckily no-ones ever gone to hospital with cardboard related building collapse injuries.

But the cardboard does have one way of inflicting pain that is truly horrible.
Think paper cut. Now think cardboard cut. Bigger, more blood and stings like fuck.

So that was it.
Finished for a third time.

That was pretty much my last big act in the basement before eventually leaving to make the move up North. But from time to time I get horribly nostalgic for the work down there. Who knows, next time we're visiting Nostalgia & Comics when we pop back to Birmingham I might be tempted to put in a couple of hours again?

It's sad that part of my life's work is the construction of a superb storage facility at a comic shop, but it was mine and I'm proud of it.
(Actually that's very, very sad. But sod it.)

Nostalgia & Comics & Me Supplemental 2 - They're talking about me again mother......

Very sad meta commenting things going on here.
Kenny at the FPI blog put up a link to my recent Nostalgia & Me posts.
I commented on them and then I talk about doing so here.
Bizarre. And a little sad.

Anyway, Kenny said:
Rich Bruton, ex employee in our Nostalgia and Comics store, has posted his latest two entries on working there for 19 years on his Fictions blog. The latest post concerns the takeover of the business by FPI in the late 90s and the misgivings the staff had at the time about that. I’d say from Rich’s post there are still things they would do differently but that over time they have seen that less changed than they might have expected.
I remember when we first bought it from the previous owner and the problem it had then was that it had run up a lot of debt which was endangering it’s supply, which in turn was close to making the shop a less attractive location for buyers. The shop now runs well and much of that has really come from those who were already there doing a fine job, allied to us bringing sounder finances to it. It’s an interesting read and I’m sure posts to come will deal with some other decisions we’ve made along the way that didn’t quite work out. It’s always interesting to see someone else’s view of these things, especially someone whose wages you are no longer paying.

To which I added this as comment:
(How incestuous is this, commenting on a post about my own weblog. sad, sad, sad, sad)
Cheers for posting it up guys.Like I say in the post I think all at Nostalgia & Comics would ideally like to have a shop just doing comics and graphic novels. That is, after all our first love (and I suspect it's Kenny's and Joe's as well) but we also acknowledge that in a shop our size financial necessity means we stock the merchandise as well.
But I certainly don't want anyone to think I've an axe to grind against FPI, my former employers. If I wasn't 131 miles away, I'd still be working there now. It was a pleasure to work at Nostalgia & Comics and being taken over by FPI meant that Nostalgia & Comics could continue providing on of the best comic shop experiences in the country.
FPI has been a surprise. They aren't the huge corporate beast many think. And certainly at the core, as represented by Kenny and Joe on this blog, they dearly love the comics. Which is what we do best after all.

So stop by the FPI blog, they're doing a good thing over there and proving to be as valuable to the UK comic scene as Journalista and Comics reporter is to the US scene.

Nostalgia & Comics & Me part 11The big takeover..... suddenly we're part of the FPI chain.

Shortly after getting the basement exactly the way I wanted it (here) and taking more interest in the shopfloor (more on that in some later posts I'm sure) the inevitable happened and the owner of Nostalgia & Comics sold the place.

It wasn't exactly a surprise, seeing as he had the financial and business skills of a goldfish.
I think one of the easiest and kindest ways to describe him was that he was very much old school comic shop owner.
His one genius move was the very first idea he had; to open a comic shop in the first place. In those early days, he'd run it well, catering for the market at the time. But as the 80s and 90s progressed he continued to run the place as if the market hadn't changed in the slightest. His financial decisions were always spur of the moment things, he was always trying to do things on the cheap, always scared of spending money, never understood that it's necessary to buy good stock if you plan to sell more stock.

So when the rumours of the sale came out it wasn't a real shock.
The best rumour I heard was that he sold the whole place for pennies because the new owners had taken on his considerable debts. In actual fact that wasn't completely true and I imagine he made a good deal out of the sale eventually.

So from 1997 Nostalgia & Comics became:
Nostalgia & Comics (a Forbidden Planet International Associate store).
We became part of the large FPI chain.

Forbidden Planet International is a completely distinct company from Forbidden Planet (although I don't think the majority of comic customers actually realise that).

This quite silly situation, having two competing comic shop chains sharing the same name came about through some incredibly complex business stuff that went on.
To make it fairly simple; Forbidden Planet, Titan Distributors and Titan Books were all owned by the same people. Forbidden Planet expanded, other comic shops were either bought by FP or became partners with FP and took the name. And then Diamond distributors bought Titan distributors. The retail side of things went it's separate way and split into two.

This meant there were now two lots of Forbidden Planet stores. One set run from London by Forbidden Planet and the other lot run by Forbidden Planet Scotland (later to become Forbidden Planet International FPI).

Luckily for us they had a competition rule. The rules of the split said that there couldn't be two competing Forbidden Planet stores in the same city and because we already had an FP Birmingham, we got to keep our name.

And because of that we felt we also got to keep our reputation, our relative independence and our unique way of doing things in the FPI chain.

Because unlike a lot of stores, we were still a comic shop and very, very proud of it.
Of course, the product mix in the store changed. We became much more of a pop culture store, stocking lots more merchandise (ie toys), but because we still considered ourselves separate to the FPI chain we kept going as a comic shop and put an awful lot of work into comics and graphic novels.

When the take over happened, the immediate impact on the store was obvious. We got a nice makeover and refit. But everyone was really unsettled. We all had this horrible image of FPI being this huge overbearing corporate thing concerned only with bottom line and more than willing to change Nostalgia & Comics into Toys R bloody Us if the money was in it.

So we worked bloody hard to keep it as a comic shop. And we all think that we succeeded. Sure, the toys and merchandise take up half the store. But we're a big store and the half with the comics and graphic novels is still bigger than most comic shops. We also happened to be at the start of the Graphic Novel explosion which meant more and more of our shelves had lovely big books on them. We worked and worked and sold and sold and all of us on the shopfloor had the embattled mentality of sticking it to the FPI-man.
We were going to show them that we were right. We were going to show them that comics and graphic novels were what we did best.

Ironically, over the years we've actually found out that quite a few people were on our side. A number of people behind the scenes fought our corner and stuck up for us and all because they were of a similar mind to us.

If you want the best example of that, go to the Forbidden Planet International weblog.
It turns out that some folks at FPI love comics as much as we do.

But for those early years, feeling like we were fighting the good fight probably made the shop into a better place.


But because we were an FPI store, we had to carry merchandise as well as our beloved comics and graphic novels and this meant one big thing for me........

Every bloody week 100s of bloody boxes (and very bloody big boxes they were too) were appearing in the basement and poor little old me had to do something with them and their excessive plastic packaging. We reached the tipping point rapidly and the basement stopped being somewhere to store the comics and became somewhere to store toys instead. Of course by this time the Back Issue market was almost dead and instead of a basement filled with valuable back stock we had 1000s of boxes of completely dead stock.

We worked very hard after that to shift as much back issue stock as possible, cheap box sales, great value packs and more. And eventually we turned around and realised that the basement didn't actually have more than 50 or so boxes of comics anymore.

But if that was the case why was it still full of shit?
Toys. Toys and more bloody toys. That was the answer.
They seemed to suddenly appear and take over. Of course it didn't help that we had the Star Wars thing kicking off again. Every week that nice Mr Lucas milked his characters (and the fans) dry. New characters, old characters, characters on screen behind a crowd and visible for 1 second in the Cantina scene. It didn't matter to old George. He had a ranch and a state of the art special effects department to fund.

One good side effect of the toy invasion and the FPI takeover was that eventually, many months after the takeover, all of the previous owner's stuff went from the basement. Joyous moment that was. Of course, within a week it's place had been taken up with yet another 100 boxes of crap McFarlane toys or something equally shit.

So the basement got more and more toys, meanwhile I was getting more and more stressed over the place. Which wasn't a good thing - remember this was my little Saturday job, a place to relax, sell comics and have fun with my friends while selling comics.

Instead it started to be all about getting the basement sorted. But I worked hard and worked well to get the damn place back to a good state again. Sometime around this time I actually stood back again and realised I'd finished the place again.

And then, one day, one of the directors threw a little off the cuff remark to the manager, nice Mr Dave. Without realising the danger of what he was about to say he mentioned it to me. Then the fun started..........
(And that means that next time, it's more bloody basement stories)

Nostalgia & Comics & Me part 10The Basement pt 4 - finished for the first time

Where the devil was I after the last post?

I'd been working at Nostalgia & Comics Birmingham UK - one of the oldest comic shops in the country, one of the biggest and certainly one of the best - since 1987 when I was a tender youth of 16. This post takes us up to about 1993/4 and I'm fresh out of University, looking for work, but still carrying on with the Saturday job I loved, working on the shopfloor and carrying on my ever increasing obsession with sorting out the basement........

Ah yes, when we last talked toys were invading my beloved comic basement and taking up far too much space with their excessive plastic packaging. People like dear old Todd McFarlane had decided that the sole purpose of action figures was to cram as much detail and articulation into their little plastic bodies as possible, whilst making the plastic packages they came in as difficult as possible to fit into the long comic boxes we used to store things in down in the basement. So where a couple of boxes of action figures would have fitted into one comic box before Todd, suddenly I'm lucky to be able to fit three of the buggers into one box. Bastard.

But I carried on, until I finally managed to get it to a stage where I was pretty much happy with it but knew I had to do something about the third of the basement that was just a dumping ground:

Of course, this involved finally getting rid of all the junk in the basement once and for all. A mammoth task, not helped by still having the owners shit all over the place.



But one fateful day I decided that enough was enough and if I ever wanted to defeat the damn basement and literally beat it into shape I had to do a major clearance.
And it was ruthless. We got rid of a huge amount of stuff. All sorts of things, most of which had been stored for year after year because (and oh, how I hated to hear this line) "we might need it at some point"
In fact I still hate that phrase. I'm incredibly ruthless at getting rid of stuff in my own life. I love a good sort out and always think in terms of getting rid of as much stuff as I can. So working somewhere that the prevailing view was always to keep stuff "just in case" was a constant pain!

By the end of it, we'd removed enough crap from the basement to fill several skips.
But of course, because the boss was far too tight to actually spend the money on a skip we had to carefully break it down to fit into commercial bins - carefully, as in jumping on it, kicking it and stamping on it to break it. Have you ever tried to completely break down a wire racking display? It's bloody difficult & bloody painful. Overall I won on submissions.

Over the course of a few weeks we managed to rid the place of so much shit you would not believe. In the end the basement was looking fantastic. I was ridiculously proud of the achievement. Silly really.

The only bugbear was the shitload of stuff still in the basement from the owner, but as well as getting rid of crap I had also spent my time moving his stuff so that it took up less and less space.
It's one of my great skills that I can manage to organise and organise and organise a space so that it actually occupies less and less space. I'm incredibly good at it. Sadly, there's not a job that I know of that really requires this skill. Shame, because if there was it would be mine.

Eventually I had the whole basement reorganised and moved some dexion around so that the owner's stuff effectively disappeared. It was an amazing bit of construction. Basically I left a 3 foot wide gap between the end wall and the 20ft of Star Wars dexion. Then I filled in the gap with box after box after box full of assorted crap. It was like playing Lego with huge boxes. Boxes full of issues of Poot, Oink, Viz, 2000AD, Radio Times, old western comics, files, phantom comics, original artwork. There were even boxes of clothes down there (strange but true).

Sure it was completely inaccessible, but out of sight really did equal out of mind.

And while we're on the subject of comic store owners, I know it's a stereotype, but the image of Comicbook Guy from the Simpsons is so sadly apt in this case.
Except ours wore a suit.
Of course, it wasn't just our boss. From what I've observed on my travels around the countries comic shops,an awful lot of owners & managers seem to aspire to that image.
We really, really don't help ourselves sometimes in this wonderful medium we call comics.

Anyway, it was done. I had finally finished.
Well, finished for now anyway.
Next came the biggest change in the history of Nostalgia & Comics and that meant the obsessional behaviour could only get worse......

Nostalgia & Comics & Me (supplemental)It's nice to be talked about......

Look ma... that's me they're talking about.

The Nostalgia & Comics & Me series continues to pick up mentions:
Journalista here (down to Comic Retailing for the mention)
Forbidden Planet International blog here.
They've also listed me in the Comics news section as well. Damn, better try to read some of the things then....

Can't help feeling I'm breaking some sort of Blogger's etiquette with this, referencing my own mentions. But never mind.

The FPI entry is particularly interesting because, like Joe says:
"We will try and run links to all Richard’s upcoming posts - where we no doubt will get a pasting at some point."

There are several N&C &me posts nearly ready.
What was meant to be a nice little goodbye to the shop with the express intention of getting soppy old Dave to blub with nostalgia (small N) at my leaving has mutated into a huge ever growing thing detailing shop life in general.
Why? Just because I thought it would be fun to write about.

As for Joe's assertion that I'm about to stick the knife in to FPI, not really.
In fact, what I've got to say about them may surprise a few folks.......
But you'll have to wait.

Nostalgia & Comics & Me part 9The basement part 3or why Todd McFarlane really hates me......

When last we talked about the basement, we got to the stage when the basement was pottering along nicely, we'd got over the troubles with 2000AD mountains in every corner of the shop and things had settled down quite nicely.

Interestingly I found out from the lovely Mr Pete Ashton that there was a nice little trade going on in taking the free magazines from Nostalgia and flogging them for better stuff at the local second hand dealer in Birmingham.
Which was fine, at least we wanted rid of these magazines. Usually the problem was people nicking stuff from Nostalgia and then flogging it in this second hand place!

Anyway, the basement is as tidy as it's ever been and everything is going along quite nicely.
Of course, at least a third of the place is taken up with the owner's shit. Which we're not allowed to touch for fear of it going missing.
But the rest of the place is well organised, tidy and manageable.
This in itself is a feat of Herculean proportions seeing as we're still in the era when we were buying in a lot of collections and had a thriving back issue section.

For those of you who don't know, Back Issues are essentially old comics and in the bygone age we're talking about here, before Graphic Novels became the wonderful norm, Back Issues were very important to a comic shop.

So every month we'd probably turn around 1000s of back issue comics. Unfortunately, even back then I could see the future and realised that the business model of back issues simply didn't work. But we kept going, kept buying in collections, but also kept putting lots of unsold new comics down into the basement to add to the back issue numbers. And although we did sell a lot of back issues, we generally put more away. So every month the back issues grew, and every month we had to come up with more and more innovative ways to bleed a little more space out of the finite floorspace we had down there.
Sometimes this meant just stuffing the boxes ever fuller, sometimes it meant more dexion and increasingly smaller aisles, sometimes it meant shrinking the owner's stuff into an ever smaller space without him noticing.

But then the major change happened that would eventually overwhelm even us.
The toys started arriving.
Those bloody, bloody toys.


Now those that know me know what I think about comic shops. I believe that Comic Stores are as legitimate as book stores and just as important.

Unfortunately Nostalgia & Comics has never been as lucky as stores like Gosh or Page 45 which are basically owned by smart, comic loving people. We've never been that lucky, we may be managed by comic loving people, but the owners always thought there were other ways to operate.

Someone in charge always seems to believe that the future lies in being that hideous abortion of a marketing idea that is the "pop-culture" store. Where comics and graphic novels are just a small part of an extended "product mix".

Obviously I hate the idea of making a comic store into a pop culture store.
On it's simplest level I believe comics and graphic novels, like books, music, artwork and any other creative endeavour classify as art &/or literature.

Action Figures do not.
They are, at best, attractive pieces of fun. They are Toys.
And I genuinelybelieve that they don't belong in a comic store.
They detract from the main aim of the store which should always be to get the wonderful medium of comics to a wider audience.
Most of this wider audience has never been shown what wonders we contain and the last thing we need to do is have most of the store packed with bloody toys to further re-enforce their existing prejudices about our wonderful literary medium.
On an even simpler level:
Go into Borders. Go into Waterstones. Tell me what you see.
Now go into your nearest Comic Shop.
I bet one has lots of juvenile toys and silly card games and the other does not.

But enough ranting on about comic shops in general, this is meant to be a nice whimsical post about the inner workings of Nostalgia & Comics and somewhere I'm meant to be telling you why Todd McFarlane hates me.

The worst thing that ever happened in terms of impact on the basement was the devastating change that happened sometime in the last 10 years with toys and merchandise.
After years an years of learning to cope with a near overwhelming tide of comics and magazines we'd developed many ways of coping, many ways of racking them and many ways of storing them in the finite space we had.
You see it was really quite easy to store comics down there in the specially designed comic boxes, but these horrible toys were another thing entirely.

At first it wasn't necessarily that big a deal, it seemed that early action figure toys were all very simply designed to be on a similar scale to the comics they came from and they fitted quite nicely into the comic boxes and onto the dexion shelves in the basement.
I'm sure many of you remember the packaging for Star Wars figures? Well, most merchandise and action figures were on a similar scale and fitted quite nicely in their regular shaped packs.

But then Todd McFarlane happened.
That bastard.
Now I dislike Mr McFarlane for many reasons; his awful art, his even worse writing, his crappy business practices, his ego and much more.
But the main reason I hate him is that I believe he deliberately set out to make my life difficult with his ever increasing range of shit.
Sorry, that should read; his ever increasing range of action figures and merchandise.

Sometime around the mid to late 90s, he decided that the standard format for presenting action figures just was too easy for me to deal with and started bringing out action figures in ridiculously sized and shaped packaging that just refused to fit properly in my bloody boxes. It used to be that I could fit at least 20 of 30 action figures neatly in a comic box. Now after they'd been McFarlaneded I was able to fit about 4 in.
Obviously this meant huge changes were needed.
And huge changes happened very soon after that.
But that's for next time....

Join me for Nostalgia & Comics and me part 10. Bloody hell, this was meant to be a little series of 2 or 3 posts to simply say goodbye after working there for so long. It's turning into some sort of epic!

Nostalgia & Comics & Me part 8The basement part 2 or why comics shop owners should never, ever publish stuff they like.

Okay, time for more basement stories......

When we last mentioned it, we were knee deep in 2000ADs & UK magazines. The basement was absolutely packed with comics sitting neatly in their comic boxes on rack after rack of dexion. Then suddenly, as quickly as it started, the avalanche of magazines ended.
Normality (or what passed for normality in Birmingham's greatest comic shop) returned.
Remember, we still had what seemed like a copy of every single comic Marvel and DC had published in the last 10 years down there, plus the bosses increasingly erratic collection of stuff.

Another problem we suffered around this time (early 90s - me at University, working at Nostalgia Saturdays and vacations) was the publishing arm of Nostalgia & Comics.
Needless to say, these were not things many of the staff thought were good ideas. Phrases such as "insane, he's gone insane" or "no, you're having a laugh surely" and "what stupid half arsed deal has he done now" spring to mind.

As far as I can remember the publishing arm of Nostalgia & Comics managed to produce:
Nostalgia About Comics (1991): (link) a truly terrible collection of crap pictures of old comic books.
The Phantom: we published 9 issues of this one.
The Ingrid Pitt magazine - 1 disastrous issue
Pin - Up - 3 volumes.

I think Nostalgia About Comics was the first of these 4 financial abortions.
Essentially the owner had the idea that thousands of people would want to buy a very thin book containing a brief introduction by him and then 50 odd pages of pictures of the covers of lots of American & British comics from the 40s onwards from his own collection.
I know it's a no-brainer. I know you know it was doomed to failure. We all knew it was just a way to throw money away. But that didn't stop him printing up 1000s upon 1000s of the bastards. They appeared in the basement one day, bundles of 50 of them, just piled up in the corner. Took us many, many years to be rid of them.

The Ingrid Pitt magazine was another classic of incompetence.
Somehow the owner had it in mind that Ingrid Pitt had enough fans to support a badly produced, amateurish magazine. She didn't.
We had that one boxed up for years as well.

Pin-Up was possibly the exception to the rule that the owner always picked awful material to publish. It was actually really good. He published 3 volumes of this one. It was a hardback reproduction of some really nice European stuff. Gorgeous clean line artwork. A little cheesy perhaps, but much better than anything else he'd done before. Unfortunately it didn't sell either.
In fact the only saving grace about the Pin Up volumes was that they came in very well constructed boxes. Ideal for stacking which meant we could use them to put other stuff on. In fact, even to this day, the shelf above the doors to the main bit of the basement is supported by two rows of Pin up book boxes. Like briezeblocks but more expensive to produce.

But the best (ie. stupidest) publication we ever saw was the Phantom.
Now you may or may not know about the Phantom, but he's a very famous costumed adventurer. His comics sold in huge numbers. Many bloody years ago.
Since that heyday anything featuring the Phantom has sunk without a trace. Although for some reason, his comics are still fairly popular in Australia, I have no idea why this is.

But unfortunately for us the old owner of Nostalgia was a huge Phantom fan. He was at a complete loss as to why he wasn't as popular as Batman, Spider-Man or Superman (althogether now - because he was crap).
Somehow he managed to get the rights to old Phantom strips. So Wolf Publishing was born to publish the Phantom (link). Even better was the fact that one of the members of staff at the other Nostalgia & Comics stores - Sheffield I believe - was Dean Ormston. Yes, famous comic artist Dean Ormston.
(& I must touch upon the huge cock up that was the Nostalgia & Comics expansion plan later).

So the owner had the idea that with new covers by Dean, he was onto a hit.
Needless to say he wasn't.

Now it was pretty obvious to all of us working in the shop that the Phantom was going to be a huge failure. All of us except the owner of course.
It lasted 8 issues before the plug was pulled.
The last issue was meant to be issue 9 but this was quickly redone as a special Subscribers limited edition. Mainly for the Australian market, where a lot of 12 issue subscriptions had been taken out. This "special" issue was meant to be a replacement for the rest of the subscription.
Strangely there always seemed to be just as many copies of this special issue as there were all the other issues and oh my god, there were thousands of each issue hanging around my bloody basement for years after that.

And that, dear readers is four very good reasons why it's never a good idea for comic retailers, particularly old style retailers like the guy who owned Nostalgia & Comics at the time, to get involved in publishing. If he'd have just not published anything he'd have made more money. Hell, he could have even used the money to pay the staff more.