Comics, on the cheap

[womzilla]

For the last fifteen years, my Friendly Neighborhood Comics Shop has been Cosmic Comics, in Manhattan on 23rd Street between Madison and Fifth. I started shopping there when I was still getting the vast majority of my comics by mail order from Second Foundation (now Chapel Hill Comics); besides being close to my office, Cosmic was the only store I could find in the New York area which carried the Capitol City Distribution catalog, Advance Comics, which listed a wider selection of small-press titles than Diamond Comics's Previews catalog. (This is, of course, why Cap City failed and Diamond endured: Cap City concentrated on selling comics, while Diamond concentrated on buying other distributors and reaching monopolistic agreements in restraint of free trade. But that's all water long fallen over the dam.) Cosmic has retained my business through a combination of reasonable discounts (a 17% customer-loyalty credit), stocking a lot of material, and being conveniently close to the Flatiron Building, where the weekly NYRSF meeting is held--not coincidentally, on Wednesday, aka New Comics Day. I go there still even though there's a branch of Midtown Comics across the street from my office.

Summer is traditionally a slow time for Cosmic, because a lot of their customers are students at one of the two nearby colleges--the School of Visual Arts and Baruch College. So, this summer, they're trying to boost business by giving an across-the-board discount of 30% from June 1 to August 31, on everything in the store.

If you find yourself in need of comics during the summer, and you're in New York--hey, you could do a lot worse than 30% off EVERYTHING EVERY gosh-dang DAY. Check it out.