Comic Shop Confidential: Thriving In Isolation

In the first of three essays on comic shop culture, Ben Wooller discusses the troubles facing a comic shop in an isolated corner of the world; Perth, Australia, where the taxes are high and FROM HELL gets impounded by customs.
15 February 2002

Twelve years ago a friend handed me a comic. I had just started high school, and up until this time I hadn't set eyes on a comic since I was about five years old, when my grandfather would read me dodgy Australian reprints of SPIDER-MAN, STAR WARS, and the odd FRAGGLE ROCK comic. In the years between, though, I had become less interested in comics. After all, TV had pictures and sounds.

The comic my friend handed me at recess that day sparked something in me, and got me hooked all over again. I recently found that particular issue after moving house; coverless, yellowed, and made brittle with age, shoved in back of my cupboard. The hero still looks out from the front page, crouching, teeth bared, trapped in the headlights of an oncoming car, surrounded by numerous captions of dialogue and thought.

I started to drag my friends around our small city looking for more of this wonderful drug. I remembered seeing ads in the comics my grandfather read me, advertising things called 'back issues'; advertising shops that sold nothing but comics. Did Perth have any of these?

Geographically speaking, Perth is the most isolated major city in the world. Perched on the southwest corner of Western Australia, it is separated from the rest of the country by an endless desert and the rest of the world by an endless ocean. Although Western Australia is large enough to house the entire United Kingdom, plus a few small Indonesian islands, with room to spare, the city of Perth is tiny. The entire metropolitan area is home to two million people. And those people demand all the mod cons, even if they get here a few years later than the rest of the world.

It's claimed that the osmosis of cultural phenomena - beginning, of course, in America - takes something like ten years to reach the rest of the world. Perth is testament to that.

Not that it's all bad. Like most cities, we do have our own comic shops. As a thirteen-year-old, I tracked them down. It wasn't that hard. Back then, in the early-to-mid-nineties boom of Image and the birth of the speculative buyer, there were at least four shops. However, in the years past the boom, they started to disappear.

The only true survivor of the decline was a little shop called Quality Comics. This is the shop that was the focus of the Australia-wide ban of the Alan Moore/Eddie Campbell masterpiece, FROM HELL (more on that later).

Andrew Firth started Quality Comics eleven years ago, operating out of a tiny one-room shop on the outskirts of the CBD. A lifelong comic reader, Firth wasn't motivated solely by his love for comics. Sick at the inattentive service and inflated prices at the comic shops he frequented, he decided to open his own. "The intention was to always offer a good service," he says.

Remembering the level of service in some of the early shop I visited, with the staff sitting around talking about STAR TREK while the comic neophyte stumbled around unorganised back bins and shelves, I wondered if this may have had something to do with the decline of the local shops.

"It tends to be a cyclical thing," says Firth. "But there's the poor performance of the Australian dollar to take into account. Last year, with the state of the dollar, things were tough."

And the introduction of Australia's "New Tax System" and Goods and Services Tax made it even tougher, and will continue to do so for Aussie readers.

"Comics weren't taxed," Firth says. "The addition of the 10% and the fall in the dollar increased the cost of comics. Over the next 3 to 5 years, the price of comics is due to increase by 80% [in Australia], due both to the GST and price increase by the companies."

Bloody hell. That's, at minimum, an increase of four Australian dollars, putting the average price of a comic in 2007 at Aus$9.00. OGNs and Trade Paperbacks will be even more expensive. Waiting for the trade may not be an option in the future.

Firth's staff caters for about 2000 regular subscribers, which is about 0.1% of Perth's population. Most of them still read superhero comics, and, as many industry commentators have suggested, will probably keep reading them even (or maybe especially) if, say, X-MEN was reduced to 24 pages of dialogue and tit shots. While he doesn't condone speculative buying (or 'chewing-gum for the mind' as he terms it), Firth believes people should read what they like. He cites the FROM HELL debacle as an example of this.

Australian Customs came across a copy of FROM HELL en route to Quality Comics, and immediately sent it to the utterly conservative Office of Film and Literature Classification. Believing that the scene of Jack the Ripper mutilating Mary Kelly's body was a bit too much, they prevented FROM HELL from being further imported. Eventually, Eddie Campbell got around this, and FROM HELL is now being published by a 'mainstream' publisher and is available in 'mainstream' bookshops, providing a much needed boost in exposure for a work that deserves it. (The movie will help too, but hasn't opened here at the time of this writing.)

Firth believes that the FROM HELL incident, small as it was, had the potential to be a big thing. Just imagine if Customs had cracked open a box that had a copy of PREACHER or STRANGE KISS in it - and PREACHER is in full colour, never mind black and white gore.

"Actually," Firth tells me, "It nearly came about with PREACHER. With FROM HELL, it was just one scene, which they took out of context. Personally, though, I don't agree with censorship. It shouldn't be up to the government to say who can read what. But from a business point of view, it was the law. You either accept it or fight against it. As business, we had to accept it."

In such an isolated community, accepting or fighting is something all comic fans have to deal with - including creators. In the time before the internet, and before the major comic conventions, it was impossible to get your work out there where it could be seen by others. Web pages are now the norm for artists who want to get their work seen and their names known. This is what Ben Templesmith did.

Working from the hills that surround Perth, Templesmith is fast becoming noticed in the international comic scene. He has just replaced Ashley Wood on HELLSPAWN, who, as coincidence would have it, also used to live in Perth.

Unlike his HELLSPAWN predecessor, Templesmith shows no desire to leave the area. He doesn't need to. The internet has removed the obstacle of being geographically distant from comic hotspots. Everything is done by email, the computer being his most valuable tool. "The web's very important when it comes to isolation. All I have is the web," he says.

The internet has also allowed isolated creators and readers a place in which to discuss comics, and life in general. Physical isolation doesn't matter as much as it used to. Boundaries are overcome and the comic scene is changing as a result. In fact, local comic scenes may now be extinct, replaced by a global scene. As Templesmith says, "The web has taken over from the local scene. It doesn't matter where you are anymore."

Ben Wooller is a freelance writer and is currently studying for his PhD.

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