Comic Attitudes

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"The comic-book industry today is like the Oklahoma land rush," declares Thompson. Contenders in the race include everyone from the Blockbuster Videos of the world to mom-and-pop stores like Comic Attitudes.

In terms of household penetration the industry has slipped from its golden age, in the 1940s, when comic books were in 90% of all U.S. homes with children, to about 50% today. Even so, signs of comics' increasing presence in society abound. Comics grace the silver screen and the TV screen, the hallowed auction halls of Sotheby's and the literary academy. (The 1992 Pulitzer Prize for literature was won by a comic book, Maus, which chronicles the Holocaust.) Even Wall Street has been affected: Marvel went public in July 1991. The U.S. Army even publishes a comic book that teaches soldiers how to load a gun.

Comics are no longer just for adolescents, says Schwindinger, and recent demographic studies bear him out: while comic-book readers are typically males from ages 8 to 45, 67% of comic-book consumers are over 18 years old. The typical adult consumer has above-average levels of education and affluence and spends $1,200 a year on his (or increasingly, her) hobby. While Comic Attitudes wants to serve all kinds of customers, its tidy upscale stores are designed to appeal to older, affluent, and more-educated readers.

Mullen and Schwindinger think the industry is ripe for a make-over. "Most retailers have the approach I used to have," says Schwindinger. "They have a love for comic books, and their store's an extension of their hobby. They think that the customer is going to come even if their store is located in a lousy neighborhood and looks like the bottom of somebody's shoe. They don't understand that they should have a nice place for their customers to come to."

Thompson, who has seen the inside of thousands of stores all over the country, concurs. "The traditional comics store has a marginal location in a marginal part of town. It's dirty; it's dark. All the windows are covered with posters." Buddy Saunders, owner of the eight-store chain Lone Star Comics, based in Arlington, Tex., agrees: "In many ways we're a very backward industry." There are very few trade journals, and the only one to offer business-management advice, Comics Retailer, is barely a year old.

It is precisely the industry's backward reputation that propels Schwindinger and Mullen forward. Mullen views it as an engraved invitation: "There's so much opportunity, and so much that could be done." They are both convinced the American public is ready to support a national chain of comic-book stores.

Comic Attitudes opened its second store, 972 square feet bathed in neon, in New Jersey's upscale Menlo Park Mall in September 1991. Last year the store's revenues were $474,400, compared with $338,000 for the New Brunswick location (called Kilmer Square), or $488 versus $243 per square foot. The national sales-per-square-foot average for all mall retailers is $275. The rent for the Menlo Park store, even in what Mullen concedes is the worst location in the mall, costs $51.72 per square foot, nearly four times what Comic Attitudes pays in Kilmer Square. The buildout, even at the lowest bid, cost $142,500. "I imagine you're standing in the most expensive comic-book store in the world," says Schwindinger with a wince.

The Menlo Park store is the model Mullen and Schwindinger plan to replicate nationwide. Every detail has been calculated. The storefront windows, designed to resemble the front panels of a comic book, are filled with icons like Batman and Disney characters. Throughout the store, as in comic books, a four-color scheme predominates: red, yellow, blue, and black. The wall space above the racks is covered with Velcro, to which posters of superheroes and fantasy characters are affixed with peelable tabs (enabling the merchandise to be sold as new).

"In general, merchandisers don't consider anything above your eye level as specific retail space," says Schwin-dinger. "We decided right off the bat we wanted to open the ceiling up. We wanted to create something interesting and visual in what would normally be considered dead space, to promote or sell things."

The ceiling treatment continues the comic-book theme, with the lighting fixtures shaped like dialogue balloons. Neon Spider-Man and Superman fixtures hang from the ceiling. Below Superman lies a particleboard New York City skyline.

To offer something for everyone, Mullen and Schwin-dinger have taken the smorgasbord approach to stocking Comic Attitudes: new comics make up 35% of merchandise; magazines, price guides, trade paperbacks, and graphic novels, 16%; back issues, 15%; role-playing and strategy games, like Dungeons and Dragons, and their accessories, another 10%; 4,000 titles of science-fiction and fantasy paperback books, 4%; supplies for collecting comics, 3%; and what Mullen and Schwindinger dub "sidelines" -- an eclectic product mix that includes non-sport trading cards, Japanese animation videos, T-shirts, posters, original comic artwork, a variety of pewter and ceramic fantasy figurines, and even Danish lottery dice -- the remaining 17%. The merchandise mix is based on previous sales, and tinkering with the percentages is still an ongoing process, says Mullen.

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