Joel Rosenberg, In His Own Words
“Once the comic book store was established, I expanded to other items that appeal to the same kind of people who like comics: T-shirts, action figures, collectible card games, I discovered that there are a lot of people who have things to sell, don’t want to sell them on eBay, and are looking for a place to sell their things. For people who have never done it before, eBay is very daunting, and, for those who have, it’s very time- and money-consuming. I wanted to provide a really valid service, helping people to sell their collections, not only of comic books, but all kinds of things, including movie posters, TV posters, even a complete collection of TV guides, I mean, every one ever printed!  Bottom line, I set out to help people sell any collectibles they had, and almost anything today can become collectable!  How about this: last year, the lead singer of U2, Bono, was sitting at a sidewalk café in Melbourne, Australia, eating a hamburger and French fries, and, when he finished, a guy ran off the street, took a French fry off his plate, which he then proceeded to put on eBay, and for which he got $350! While that’s a bit extreme -- $350 for a FRENCH FRY (!) that there is no way to authenticate, I wanted to help people sell all kinds of collectibles. And, I always wanted to extend my reach from New York City’s northern tier to the world. I wanted to take all my knowledge and experience and bring it to serving the world. Hence, this website.

Lots of people walk into The Phoenix with horror stories, like their parents throwing out Superman #1, or Batman #1, or their Captain America comics from the late 40s. Nonetheless, people still do have collections of this stuff cluttering up their attics, and they’re always wondering what it’s worth. If you’re marketing to a smaller group of people, the collections are worth less, but selling to the world, a bigger audience, this increased demand helps bring up prices. This is how we help people get the most money they can for their things.

Many other countries publish comics – Germany, France, Scandinavia, and, of course Japan, with its subset of Anime. But, the comics that are best known and collected are from America, and, with the explosion of comic book movies, there’s been an explosion of interest in the comic characters. We have created this web site to serve this growing, global need.

Comics as a whole are no longer for kids. When I was young, and people I know were young, we bought comics for a dime or 12 cents, they were simple good vs. evil stories, the good guys won in the end, there was no excessive sex or violence, and everyone went along their merry way.  As comics have evolved over the last 10, 20, 30 years, they have become much more for adults. The story lines are much darker and deeper, the violence and sex have been ramped up, not to the “x” level, but clearly for adults. Of course, comics for kids are still published, and we sell them in the store, but most of our customers are adults, who evolved as readers with the evolution of the comic trade. Today, the plot lines are for mature readers, the books don’t end in one issue, and story lines go on for up to dozens of issues.

In earlier days, as I said before, each comic was a standalone issue.  Now, they’re not writing comics anymore, they’re writing the great American novel. They write a 120-page story, they cut it up into six 20-page sections, and they publish it as a trade paperback or graphic novel. A lot of people don’t want to wait 6 or 7 months to see how the story works out, they want to buy it all in one form, and the graphic novel has boomed because of that. There are now a great amount of original graphic novels, one of the most prominent, for example, being “Maus” a cartoon series about a mouse in the Holocaust, which won a Pulitzer Prize.

Then we go into sports cards, which all kids, let me say boys, collected as youngsters. Now the sports card industry has also exploded, they cover almost every sport, they have cards for every movie that comes out. They had a set for Hannah Montana, for High School Musical cards, cards now for girls, seemingly cards for everybody. And what they put in these packs are collectibles, for example, if you buy an Iron Man card, you may get an autograph of Robert Downey, Jr., which could be worth a lot of money. There are now industries for all ages, groups, genders – no matter who you are, someone will cater to you.

Also, there are now games, which started in the 90s with ‘Magic,’ all about wizards and spells and monsters and such, where people collect cards and can then play the game. Obviously, the better players win the games, but there are different cards that you can get that give you a more powerful deck, and these become highly-valued collectors’ items. Our store hosts 10 to 15 tournaments a week for these games. There are regional and national tournaments, and there are people making six-figure incomes playing these card games!

I get asked a lot about the movies of recent years, and my feelings about them. As the movie industry ran out of ideas, they began tapping this market – it’s much easier to make ‘Spiderman 2’ when you’ve made hundreds of millions of dollars on ‘Spiderman 1,’ than come up with an original story yourself. Hollywood is now mining the comic book industry for movies. They specifically make them for a worldwide audience, for example, in the last Superman movie, they cut out the line, “’Superman fights for truth, justice and the American way,’ ands now he fights for ‘truth, justice and all that stuff.’ For the died-in-the-wool Superman fan, hearing that line is like being hit on the back of the head with a hammer – it just stops your thought process! While I understand that they are trying to address a worldwide audience, it would have been better for them to cut that line out altogether than to modify it like that.

I’m in this business – now online – to serve the true comic book fan, and to provide a physical gathering place for comic enthusiasts, writers, artists and people hoping to break into the comic industry.”