A customer walked in, found the shop small, bought nothing, and left with a list of other comic and toy shops in the area to try, because the owner had recommended several of them.
Then he went home and wrote a review saying that it said a lot. It does. A shop owner who points a customer toward competitors is choosing the long term over the transaction standing in front of him. It’s also the sort of thing that produces reviews from people who didn’t spend a cent.
Before I’d read a word about the stock, that story put me on this owner’s side. A referral to the competition takes a kind of spine most of retail lacks, and it tells you he cares more about comics surviving in this region than about one sale on one afternoon.
What is Feed Your Imagination Comics?
A comic shop at 7213 Central Avenue in St. Petersburg, well west of downtown toward the beaches. The phone is 727-710-6189 and the site is fyistpetecomics.com. One hundred and twelve Google reviews at four point six, which for a shop this size means it’s been there a while and people keep going back. The stock covers vintage and modern comics, graphic novels, action figures and toys drawn from iconic films and television. Customers describe a strong showing of both older issues and current releases, organized well for the footprint, with prices repeatedly called great. It’s small. That comes up in nearly every review, usually paired with a note that the selection is better than the size suggests and occasionally with a wish for more room.
The shop buys as well as sells, though at least one seller has written that the offer on a collection came in lower than hoped. That gap between collector value and dealer offer is universal in this trade and has nothing to do with this particular counter. I wrote about it at more length in the piece on The Comic Book Underground in Largo.
Why does a shop recommend its competitors?
Because in a region this size the comic shops aren’t really competing with each other at all.
They’re all competing with eBay, with online back issue dealers, and with the general drift of collecting onto a screen. A customer who finds what they want locally is a customer who keeps driving to local shops, and the shop that sent them across town this week gets the visit next week.
It also builds something no advertising buys. Another customer called ahead about a comic-related project he needed help with. The shop told him to come down, solved the problem and didn’t charge him for it. He wasn’t buying anything either. Two of the most useful reviews this shop has came from people who spent nothing. I think that’s wonderful. Generosity like that is a business decision and a character trait at once, and in a shop this small you can’t pull the two apart.
Where it fits among the comic counters
The region has three comic specialists in this series and they’re different businesses.
Emerald City in Clearwater is the large one: seven thousand square feet, open since 1989, four rows of standing-height back issue boxes and a separate gaming room running sanctioned tournaments. It’s where you go when you want to spend two hours on longboxes.
The Comic Book Underground in Largo is the vintage toy specialist with glass cases of Mego and Star Wars figures and a comic pressing bench. It’s where you go when the thing you want is behind glass.
Feed Your Imagination is the neighborhood shop. Small, west St. Pete, classic-leaning, priced to move. It’s the one you stop at because you were passing, and the one where the conversation is with the owner because there’s nobody else in the room.
Every town needs a shop like this. The big stores are where you go on a mission, and the small ones are where somebody wanders in on the way back from the beach and walks out hooked.
Wilson’s Book World, also in St. Petersburg, runs a comic room at the back of a fifty-year-old used bookstore. That’s a fourth option again and a completely different visit.
Why a reader should look in
Because comics solved problems that prose is still arguing about. A shelf of back issues is a structural education at a few dollars a chapter, and the reason is that in comics the constraints are visible. A novel hides its problems inside paragraphs. A comic puts them on the page in a grid, where you can count them.
Look at a bronze age run and you can see the exact panel where somebody realized they had two pages left and three things still to happen. You can see which scene got cut to a single wide frame. That’s craft under pressure, shown on the page instead of described.
I respect comics as a teacher of structure. Plenty of novelists look down on them, and those same novelists could learn pacing from a twenty-two page issue that had to land its ending with no room to spare.
The toys and figures do the other job. Objects from a specific decade, in their original packaging, are period detail you can’t reconstruct from a search. What a toy aisle promised a child in 1984, in the typography and the color and the price sticker. For anything set in living memory, that’s research sitting on a shelf.
When is Feed Your Imagination Comics open?
Monday through Friday from eleven in the morning until six, Saturday from ten until five, closed Sunday.
Central Avenue runs the full width of St. Petersburg, and at 7213 the shop sits well west of downtown, closer to the beaches than to the Grand Central District. Parking is on and around the avenue.
From Clearwater, around twenty-five minutes straight down. It’s an easy addition to a beach day. That’s how a lot of people end up here.
Small shops and long memories
There’s nothing this shop sells that’s not available online, usually cheaper and with better photographs and a return policy. That’s been true of every comic shop in America for twenty years and it hasn’t closed them all. What survives is the counter. Somebody who knows the stock, will talk about it, will take a phone call about a problem that earns him nothing, and will tell you to try the shop across town when he can’t help.
None of that ships, and none of it shows up in a price comparison. After 33 years in enterprise IT, twenty of them running computer operations for a national retailer, I’ve got real respect for what online systems do well. The knack of reading a customer and sending him across town to a rival isn’t on that list, and I’d much sooner give my money to a man who still does it.
