Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Cartoonist Kayfaybe, comicspro, Ed Piskor, Jim Rugg

Cartoonist Kayfabe's Keynote Address To ComicsPRO

In their collective Cartoonist Kayfabe identity, Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg gave the Keynote Address to ComicsPRO 2023 by video.

In their collective Cartoonist Kayfabe identity, Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg gave the Keynote Address to ComicsPRO by video. It may have been the first in-person ComicsPRO event in three years, but Ed and Jim were going to do this bit behind the screen. And they had a message to comic book retailers, sell more comics!

Do you remember your first time in a comic shop?

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 opportunities 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 anything we're doing that you think you can apply to your store, feel free to borrow, apply it, do it better, innovate and we'll steal it back

Send in your store videos

Ed Piskor: We call that the sphere of influence or in hip-hop I believe they call it sampling. During covid, one of the things that we did on the channel and I would be very excited to continue this going, is that we showed video from the comic shops who put in an entry to get the best Retailer of the Year award at the Eisners, whatever. like there's a whole package of materials that the store needs to prepare in order to be considered for that. And one of those pieces is a like a video promo piece. We shared a bunch of those by doing the channel, we just put the call out, if your stores are watching this and you want to share your your video, we'd be happy to do that. We'd love to pick that back up again now we have the stores here."

You know what, I did that a fair few times as well… maybe Bleeding Cool should start it up again? Plenty more in the video… less a ComicsPRO Keynote Address, more a Keynote Improv.

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