One of my favorite comic shops, Norman's Atomik Pop!, is not paradise, nor is it about to be replaced by a parking lot -- it's one store in a small shopping strip and its neighbors would be surprised to find themselves under the asphalt. But it is about to close, and it is about to be replaced with nothing, which is one of the ideas behind the refrain in the Joni Mitchell song "Big Yellow Taxi" to which the post title refers.
Atomik Pop! has been in that Norman location for a long time, operating under two or three different names, as I remember. It was here when I moved to central Oklahoma in the late 80s and has been one of the places I've gone to buy books ever since: When I moved to Dallas for school I'd stop by on the drive up through Norman, when I lived in SW Oklahoma I could take the Highway 9 spur in and pay them a visit.
A couple of people have been working there for as long as I can remember, and of course there have been others who've come and gone. It sells comic books, naturally, but it's had gaming stuff, Pokemon cards, T-shirts and whatnot, and in recent years even included some of the costuming kind of stuff that some people like to dress up in for conventions. For several years, one of the clerks was a very cute young lady who may have been the only female peer with whom some of the less socially adept customers -- remember, this is a comic book store -- could actually speak, as they shared so many of the same interests.
There are a lot of reasons Atomik Pop! is closing -- like every brick-and-mortar store, they face competition from online retailers with immense inventories and lower prices. Just as e-books are eating into the sales of real books, so are web-only comics growing in popularity. Fewer people read comic books, and even fewer kids are getting into the groove of doing so.
Some of that problem is, of course, self-inflicted by the comic book industry. I've made fun of the dumb upcoming reboot planned by DC Comics, or of ridiculous-even-for-comics storylines like Grant Morrison's Batman R.I.P. and Batman International runs. Crappy high profile superhero movies like Green Lantern, Spider-Man 3 and The Fantastic Four haven't helped at all. During the eras of some of their most widespread success, comic books wove together elements appealing to kids and to adults who were OK with suspending enough disbelief to accept men and women who fought crime wearing capes and longjohns. Call it telling kids stories with adult sensibilities or telling adults stories in a way that reached kids too -- the characters, the art and the tales they made kept longtime readers hooked and enthralled new ones every day.
But not today, not often enough. Superhero books seem to rely on big stunt stories and such, like the upcoming DC reboot. Lightning struck once with Crisis on Infinite Earths, so it can strike again with another big crossover-type series -- we don't need a good story, we don't need to present the heroes our readers look to us to provide; all we need is to stick the word "crisis" in there somewhere and we're gold! We'll just darken it up a little so it'll be more adult -- who cares if that means parents won't let their kids buy it or it makes for a story that hinges on details the little tykes won't understand? We're not writing for kids anymore!
And so the buying pool shrinks.
There are writers who do get it and do understand that one of the crucial jobs of the heroic comic is to grab the imagination rather than the amygdala, to soar instead of muck, to offer champions instead of charnel. They acknowledge the world they write and draw isn't the real world but instead the world we might all wish for, but even when they do they offer the idea that the choices you and I make could bring into being more of that world than we see right now. But they are few, and the publishing houses' belief that more books equals more bucks means they get crowded out.
And so the buying pool shrinks.
Go independent and you can find some great work, but you can also find page after page of four-color carcinomas with which no self-respecting alimentary canal would wish to be cleaned nor any self-respecting ordure accept as a companion at the flush. Their creators, far from being urged to get the professional help their metastasized misanthropy suggests they need, are regarded as subversive, transgressive and courageously revolutionary for producing books that repel the casual buyer at the same time they appeal to their own undiscriminating group of fans.
And so the buying pool shrinks.
The clerk I spoke with the other day, who's been there a long time, said he figures eventually only really big metro areas will boast physical comic book stores as the dwindling group of buyers goes more and more online. That's the way the free market operates, and it's still the best measuring tool for determining what works and what doesn't in the arena of buying and selling. If the comic book industry published things people wanted to buy and read, it would not be in so much trouble and neither would its stores. When the day comes that it's decayed itself out of existence entirely, some of the folks making its decisions may then finally see the consequences of the decisions they made.
But remaking Paradise from a parking lot won't be an easy job. Might require powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, in fact. Might be a job for...Superman. Hope someone will be able to find him.
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