Last year, the publisher I work for, SLG Publishing, joined Drawn and Quarterly and Fantagraphics in opening a retail store and gallery. Since opening, the SLG Boutiki (as the store is called) has hosted gallery parties every month on downtown San Jose's First Friday Art Walk, comics workshops, and, this past Saturday, Free Comic Book Day.
Daytime foot traffic in our area of downtown is light, but with the help of advertisements in a local weekly newspaper, some promotion at our First Friday event the night before, and some big signs in the windows (the latter attracted the attention of some locals who were on their way to Mescal, a San Jose Oaxacan restaurant that serves crickets), customers came in throughout the day. The DC Kids Mega Sampler was popular with families with young children (I hurriedly covered some of the cartoon nudes in our gallery, mindful of lawsuits that have arisen out of Free Comic Book Day mishaps), and a couple of people came in specifically for Alterna's Attack of the Alterna-Zombies. Customers also spent much time at the tables where we had boxes of free damaged comics and toys.
The night before, we'd had one of our most successful First Friday parties with the opening of a show devoted to the art of Eric Jones, artist on DC's Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade and The Super-Scary Monster Show. Free Comic Book Day's turnout was modest in comparison, but it still went well enough for us to feel like we're on our way to becoming an established presence in San Jose.
And this is, of course, a good thing. I don't know the other publishers' reasons for their ventures, but we make no bones about our motivation at SLG: We needed another "revenue stream." (Sorry, but I can't bring myself to use business-speak without quotation marks.) SLG has operated for a long time under the notion that comics by themselves aren't enough to keep us afloat and relevant—we've been selling T-shirts and toys for a long time now. Now we've had to examine the idea that selling our comics and merchandise through retailers might not be enough, either. So we have the store, the gallery, and the workshops. It's expanding our business model, but it's also doing business on a smaller, more intimate level than the usual publishing work.
More focused ventures like this are necessary, though, as the comics industry has become ever more hostile to small-scale success even as it's become harder to make a few bucks; Diamond has refused to carry our minseries Warlord of Io by James Turner because of the expectation that the miniseries will not meet its sales benchmark, for example. But in the Boutiki, the industry's presales and expectations are not the model our sales follow. When customers buy comics, they buy from across our stock, from the all-ages Wonderland to the mature audiences Lulu and Mitzy. And, just as he was on FCBD, James Turner is the Boutiki's bestseller. After the first issue of Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the Eighth Grade, The Warlord of Io and Other Stories has been the past month's bestseller. Turner's Rex Libris ranks just after it.
And these are sales to customers who, most of the time, come in without knowing of SLG, or even much about comics. So if anything, the Boutiki has taught us what the market will support, if only the market would support it. The orange walls and tiki bar counter of the Boutiki are a little haven against a market that seems to want to force failure on us.
Jennifer de Guzman is editor-in-chief at the independent comics publisher SLG Publishing. She also writes fiction—mostly in prose, occasionally in comics—and holds an M.F.A. in literature and creative writing from San Jose State University.
