A Rocketship Lands in Brooklyn

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on May 9, 2006 Sign up now!

by Laurel Maury, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 5/9/2006

Last summer on Brooklyn's trendy Smith Street, amid bars and restaurants where New York's artistic young things drink and canoodle, Rocketship, a new kind of comic book store, took up residence in an old shoe store. The store's wooden shelving makes for low-key but stylish bookshelves; the electric train that the earlier occupants had in the window has been retained and the shoe-store benches are still in the basement. It's well-lit, friendly (comfy chairs in corners), and has that open, sure feel of a store (and gallery space) that knows its business. It's not your typical crowded, dimly lit, slightly dusty comic book shop.

Proprietors Alex Cox and Mary Gibbons don't follow the typical comic-book store model, either. "It was kind of a reaction to the stereotype of comic shops as being small and dirty and cramped and filled with tchotkes and junk," says Alex, a soft-spoken man with glasses and a fuzzy blond beard. Rocketship is inspired by such stores as the Comix Experience in San Francisco and the legendary Lambiek in Amsterdam.

The difference lies in how Rocketship is run. Instead of simply using Diamond Comic Book Distribution, Alex and Mary carefully go through the catalogs from many publishers, including traditional trade book publishers who are now branching out into the genre. "So many large publishers have their little comic arm now," notes Alex. The two order galleys, read them and then choose what they think their customers will like—in other words, they act like owners of an independent bookstore. And it looks like their approach is working. After their first week in business, they had done as well as they had hoped to do after six months. Alex reports that, while they haven't yet paid off their business loans, they are definitely making a good profit.

The people coming into Rocketship don't fit the stereotype of comic geeks. One young man came in with his baby, Lilla. "I come here a lot—yeah, with my baby in tow. She loves looking at comic books. It's all those bright, highly inked pictures." One of the reasons for not having spinner racks was to accommodate mothers with strollers. And Alex reports a lot of young, shojo-age girls coming in, "but they aren't buying shojo. Manga isn't a huge seller for us. They're buying [Jeff Smith's fantasy epic] Bone and [Brian K. Vaughan's teen super-hero hit] Runaways.

"We were working at St. Marks Comics, my partner and I, and it seemed like we didn't have anywhere else to go, except maybe start our own store," says Alex. St. Marks is your stereotypically cluttered comic book shop, jammed ceiling to floor with comics, books and merchandise. But the comics shop business model doesn't always fit the new generation of graphic novel readers, especially in cities with large populations of creative professionals or just plain artsy people. The design world, for instance, likes graphic novels but doesn't like cramped, unplanned spaces. The brightly lit Rocketship, with its gallery-like feel, Kevin Huizinga drawings on the walls and carefully chosen book list, may be the way of the future for urban comic book stores. It's certainly doing well in Brooklyn, which is rumored to have the highest percentage of artists on earth.

In the short time it has been open, Rocketship has become known for its artist readings. Jessica Abel, Kevin Huizenga, Gary Panter and Anders Nilsen have all read there. "We didn't think we'd have many readings at first," explains Alex. "People just wanted them, and then artists called wanting to read." And graphic novel publishers seem ready to follow the model of sending their authors on book tour. Fantagraphics paid for Huizenga to come and read, and Alex indicated that other publishers had funded trips to Rocketship for their artists.

The store has a blog, which has become sort of a repository for the news from the reading/parties. Alex and Mary pull up the old shoe-store benches from the basement, put them in the backyard (decorated with Christmas lights and stencils of rocket ships) light the tiki torches (cuz you gotta have tiki torches) and bring out the free alcohol. The beer is donated by Brooklyn Brewery, and the wine is donated by the wine shop down the street. People arrive, the artists read, and everyone drinks and talks. Rocketship has had over 400 people at some of its fetes, jammed into the elegant but not particularly large space. (The blog lives at http://rocketshipstore.blogspot.com/.)

Superhero comics do good business for Rocketship, but it's the more arty graphic novels that really sell. "That graphic novel rendition of Paul Auster's City of Glass, we can't keep it on our shelves," says Alex. "Nor Black Hole. That goes fast, too. Also La Perdida and DMZ. You know, I never thought, a year ago, that I'd be ordering 50 copies of Gary Panter's Jimboand expecting them to sell. And they will sell."

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