Stephen Holland runs Page 45, a comic shop in Nottingham, England, with Mark Simpson and Tom Rosin. He has a monthly column in Comics International, and appears perennially as a small Japanese Maple in West Bridgford.
Who is... Alan Donald?
In his dreams Alan Donald is a multi-award winning writer of comic books, animation, theme park shows and rides, children’s books, novels, television, internet animation and more.
In real life Alan writes this column, which has been described as more than a lifestyle than a weekly column. He used to write SBC's All The Rage.
Where was I? Oh yeah we asked each other “Why not”…
Why not? It is a fair enough question, isn’t it?
There we were in bed and it struck us both at the same time… why the hell don’t we just start a comicbook shop? How hard could it be?
Ha! We’ll get onto that at a later date.
What to do first? Research seemed like a good idea we had to seek out suppliers, shops and so forth. We needed a business plan and a clear idea of where we were going.
Planning.
Research.
Not really the sort of thing I could get my teeth into first thing in the morning so I ignored all that and sat down to make a list of names for the shop. We realised we were selling a dream, ideas, stories, tales… our list of possible names ended up taking up 7 sides of A4… and typically it was the 3rd name on the list we settled on:
Pipe dreams.
The shop was a pipe dream, we were selling dreams and it just sounded right.
A day on the computer and we had a logo – nice and simple:
Pipe dre@ms. The ‘@’ was to stand out and to signify we were modern etc. The type face was Vag rounded with the main letters in blue and the ‘@’ in red. Try it… go on. Looks cool, huh?
Day one of the businesses existence had been spent giving it an identity. We didn’t even know how to contact Diamond Comics at that point but sod that – we had a name!
What makes a good comic book shop? That was the question we asked ourselves next. We had a long way to go but we wanted to know exactly what we were aiming at. No matter what compromises we’d have to make along the way we were sure that if we identified the traits of the best possible comic book shops we’d be able to work them into our plans.
Our first port of call was to mentally revisit all the comic book shops we’d ever been to and to compare/contrast their strengths and weaknesses.
Our local shop (Automattics n Corsham) was small but friendly. Matt knew his subject and could point people to the right product with ease. Matt had a good balance between action figures and comicbooks which we liked but his lack of space limited what he could stock.
The Forbidden Planet chain had all the stock but their staff were often unhelpful and their shops soulless. It was very strange to walk into comicbook supermarkets that had everything a fan would ever want but I still wanted to run out of there screaming because of the coldness of it.
Another local comic book shop wasted loads of space at one end and packed the comics into a tiny area at the other. The shop was hard to find, the staff were sometimes good and sometimes… well… This one was a real shame as despite the poor access there was so much that could have been done to improve it (hahahaha, I should really point out that they are still in business whereas I’m now a teacher).
We went through loads of comic book shops, visited a score of them but we kept on coming back to one in particular – ACE Comics in Colchester. ACE had been my first real comicbook shop. I spent so much money there when I was at University that I ended up living on pasta with chilli powder during my degree. ACE was awesome (don’t just take my name for it Craig, the boss, you know the “little Kahuna” was a customer of theirs back when their shop was based in a bedroom. Craig… do you wish to inject a little here about your experiences?) [Ed’s note: I could write an entire article on my experiences with ACE and Martin, the owner, stretching back to buying comics from him when it was a few boxes out of a back bedroom, through to his first, second and third shops…but I won’t. Suffice it to say, that without ACE Comics, I would not be working for SBC today.]
ACE changed a bit over time it became Planet ACE as it moved into bed with the Forbidden Planet chain, then it became a Forbidden Planet in its own right before falling out of bed with the big nasty giant and going it alone once more. Customers of theirs I’ve spoken to talk about a great shop that sold its soul to the devil, became an enormous monstrous zombie before returning from the dead bigger but as caring as before. Biff, the owner would only say that ‘it didn’t work out’ and that ‘all money that went in one direction has gone back the other way’. ACE was a medium sized shop with an enormous mail-order service that as far as outsiders can see makes Biff alone almost as big a player as the Forbidden Planet chain.
The ACE I remember was blinding. There were back issues to die for, posters, t-shirts and a fledgling action figure range (this was before the boom in the action figure market). The new comic books were displayed on great racks clearly separated into company sections. The staff were very friendly and helpful and my God did they know their stuff. This was a shop where they’d keep back things you might like to avoid you missing out and where the staff would recognise you and draw your attention to things you’d like.
There were so many little things that the shop did, it would be a-whole-nother column to list them all. Needless to say we did list as many of them as we could and started to think about how we could integrate them into our plans.
We were starting to write down whole lists of ideas and possible layouts for shops. We had loads of ideas about what we wished to stock but no idea where to get the stock from. Gradually we were building a picture of what we wanted to do. We hadn’t told anyone what we were planning at this point; I was working in a motorway service station fish and chip shop, which was fun. I managed to keep my head together and avoid losing it by focusing on the shop and what we may one day have.
Ever worked in a fish and chip shop? I’d given up the nice management post I had to get the free time I needed for the business but good Lord it is stinking, horrific, brain numbing work. I hate motorway services with a passion and I hate them even more having worked there.
One thing that always does fascinate me is the concept of going behind the scenes in places that the public is generally forbidden to do so. Working in a hotel you can just wander behind the bar, into the cellar, into the kitchen, into the bedrooms, wherever. It is normal. When you are a customer there is an invisible line that you know you can’t cross. It always strikes me as odd. Motorway Services have more going on behind the scenes than they do in front of the customers (as it were). Getting to see all that was cool. I’ve had tons of jobs and I always find it odd when that invisible barrier gets erected again. Often it is when new staff come in that don’t know you but with big companies or official buildings it is the second you walk out the door on your last day. This has nothing to do with our story I thought I’d just share it with you.
We started to build quite a collection of magazine articles and such all of which we dutifully filed with our ideas and plans. Our next job as we saw it was to look at where we could get help and where we should put our shop…
