Cartoonist Kayfaybe’s Keynote Address To ComicsPRO

In their collective Cartoonist Kayfabe identification, Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg gave the Keynote Address to ComicsPRO by video. It could have been the primary in-person ComicsPRO occasion in three years, however Ed and Jim have been going to do that bit behind the display. And that they had a message to comedian ebook retailers, promote extra comics!

Do you keep in mind your first time in a comic book store?

Jim Rugg: “whenever Image shows up, I’m like, I gotta find a comic book store, so that’s what drove me to the comic book store. The the first one that I ever went to, and it was about an hour away, and I was too young to drive, so it would have to be, like, when could I mooch rides on somebody to get, you know, a pretty substantial ride to get there, and I had parents that were relatively supportive, so they took me there, it was fantastic.”

“There was only one person I ever talked to at Second Time Around bookstore, and she would sell me whatever I’d bring up, and I had never seen a comic book store, so I’m pulling things I had never heard of that just looked amazing. It’s where I bought Faust, that’s where I bought my first Sin City episode, it’s where I bought Hard Boiled #1 and I can remember riding home with that thing in the back of the car and just being, like, this isn’t comics, what is this?”

What alternatives are there are ComicsPRO?

Ed Piskor: “we do have basically everybody from distribution to probably a couple of the top ten Diamond stores are here. We can figure out how to keep this thing going, you and I were talking earlier, man, you said that comics has never been better, like, 50% growth, whatever, that doesn’t matter to me, I want 70% growth and if we ever hit that I went 80% growth, like the numbers it can never be high enough for me.”

Jim Rugg: “every time I go to another store, I feel like I’m surprised by how different it is in every other store, and it’s one of the great things with a gathering, most of my life I would just think comic book stores, it’s all the same, right, like Best Buy, and what I’ve learned in the last several years is it is all a bunch of entrepreneurs, it’s a bunch of individual businesses, so to have a bunch of people who are successful in a room that obviously their business overlaps.”

“Cartoonist Kayfabe is an example of that you know because, ultimately, we started this because we wanted to sell more of our books, and one of the things that has happened is we’ve sold more of our books, we’ve sold more of other people’s books, we’ve sold more of the books that we look at ,we’ve sold mailbag books, there are a lot of different books that we have sold through this channel and there’s got to be more of these models, different ways to just let people know what comics are.”

“This is a Golden Age of comics, and I’m sorry for all the old people that want to cling to like the 1940s as the Golden Age of comics, I’ll take this era anytime, because I can read the best comics from Japan, I can read archival quality reprints of the greatest newspaper strips ever made, there’s never been a time when more people are actually making comics that I have access to than today. This is the Golden Age of comics, and the challenge is how do you build your store around that? I’ve heard retailers tell me this too much good stuff, that’s a weird problem and you’re not going to get a lot of sympathy there, but it is a real thing, how do you sort through these. Virtually the entire history of comics is now available, how do you figure that out? And so that’s one of the challenges I see going forward with comics retailers.”

“If there’s something we’re doing that you simply suppose you’ll be able to apply to your retailer, be happy to borrow, apply it, do it higher, innovate and we’ll steal it again

Send in your retailer movies

Ed Piskor: We name that the sphere of affect or in hip-hop I imagine they name it sampling. During covid, one of many issues that we did on the channel and I might be very excited to proceed this going, is that we confirmed video from the comedian outlets who put in an entry to get one of the best Retailer of the Year award on the Eisners, no matter. like there’s a complete package deal of supplies that the shop wants to organize so as to be thought of for that. And a kind of items is a like a video promo piece. We shared a bunch of these by doing the channel, we simply put the decision out, in case your shops are watching this and also you need to share your your video, we would be completely happy to do this. We’d love to select that again up once more now we’ve the shops right here.”

You know what, I did {that a} truthful few occasions as effectively… possibly Bleeding Cool ought to begin it up once more? Plenty extra within the video… much less a ComicsPRO Keynote Address, extra a Keynote Improv.