Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by retailer Steve Bennett of Mary Alice Wilson's Dark Star Books in Yellow Springs, Ohio. This week, Bennett talks about the joy of comic strip collections:

First, if any of you were thinking that I was just making Johnny Canuck up, well, here's proof.  Yes Virginia, there really were Canadian comic books way back in the Golden Age (as recently cover featured in Alter Ego magazine) and if someone out there were interested in putting together a collection of them, well that would be just swell.

Second, I really never expected the amount of attention I received from my last couple of columns, never imagined so many people would be interested in the doings at Dark Star Books and Super-Fly Comics & Games here in postage stamp sized Yellow Springs.  Tuesday I got a nice call (and dinner invitation) from Checker Comics publisher Mark Thompson and yesterday received from Joeming Dunn of Antarctic Press a very nice selection of their indigenous manga and How To Draw Manga books.

I've got to tell you, the publicity is nice, the well wishes fine, but so far I like the swag best of all.  So if DC would like to send us a box of their Golden Age Archives and Marvel some of their Masterworks (while we're on the subject, it's getting close to Christmas, any chance of you releasing reprints of either Mystic or Daring Comics?) I wouldn't exactly complain.

Still, upon reflection it occurred to me last week that I had committed the cardinal sin of burying my lead, to wit the fairly revolutionary premise a comic shop needn't carry new comic books to be a comic shop -- that comics are so much more than comic books.

One of the chief benefits of dropping the monthly comics is seeing your weekly Diamond bill drop by over two-thirds, freeing up funds that can be spent on other products. Last time I mentioned we've been filling some of the newly emptied shelves with comic art books and How To Draw Comics books, but there's room for other things as well.  Like...

High-end literary comics, you know, the ones that actually deserve to be referred to as 'graphic novels' like Fun House and Persepolis.  Oh we've carried them in the past and sold quite a few, but up until now they've been pushed to the side, lost in a jumble of 'alternative' publishers.  Now we have the space to create a section devoted to those kind of break out, breakthrough volumes.

Last month Diamond featured their back list of How-To Draw Comics books and we stocked up; they've declared this Classic Comic Strips Month and we're planning to do the same.  I've always been a big comic strip fan and felt reprints could do well for us, but it's pretty hard to justify ordering a single hardcover volume of Complete Peanuts of Popeye when we could be ordering several copies of She-Hulk instead.

Then a week before the new direction, we received a copy of volume one of IDW's absolutely beautiful Terry & The Pirates collection.  I immediately thought it must be someone's special order but it had been ordered for the shelves.  That week the shelves were groaning with new product and the book kind of got lost among the new releases, but the next week with the new comics gone, there was plenty of room to prominently display it...and three hours later it sold.

Sure, it could have been have a one time thing, but it's enough to give me confidence to order more comic strip reprints, and not just the 'classic' ones.  People are always looking for used copies of the Garfield books in our humor section, so why couldn't we start carrying new ones?  I mean, they're not exactly to my taste (which run more to Dondi; I'm so old I remember reading it growing up in the pages of my hometown paper The Akron Beacon Journal), but then neither is Marvel Zombies.

Finally, if you want an indication of just how ubiquitous comics are and how many of them fall outside the purview of the average comic book guy, while working at my desk last Sunday I was listening to NPR and heard a story celebrating the 10th anniversary of a Webcomic I'd never heard of.  Now reading them for forty years convinced me I know at least something about comics so it was pretty frustrating hearing there was (a) a comic I had never heard of and (b) it had been around for ten years. Afterwards I spent a good solid twenty minutes trying to find it on the Web without results, and just when I was about to give up it occurred to me I could check the NPR site itself.  This is where I found out I couldn't find it because I'd been trying to find Slappy Freelance when the actual title was Sluggy Freelance...