Hey everyone!
Normally Nick is the one to give a little message at the end of each year. But he’s given me (Brayden, hi 👋🏻) the reigns, as this past year I maaaay or may not have been the driving force behind our system change over. So with that, and a bunch of hugely successful and exciting developments in comics and manga, let me give some insights from behind the counter of our little local comic shop! 👀
Fair warning, this is longer than I meant for it to be sorry I got carried away because there is just so much to talk about!
Let’s start with the fun personal stuff: Ross & Jana got engaged! 💍 Dan & Claire had their 2nd baby, Ramona! 👶🏻 My partner & I finally got a home loan! 🏠 Mark turned 50! 🥳 Nick did some stuff too! 🤷🏻
The year started off strong with January bringing the news headline that shook the industry: “Diamond Comics Distribution Declares Bankruptcy”. OOFT. This set off a chain reaction of changes we had to make as a comic shop that still relied heavily on DCD. While organising changing distributors was a lot of work, I won’t bore you all with the details. The part I will expand on is that DCD ran the service that gave us new product details and database management for both products and customer subscriptions. Losing this is umm… how you say… really f***ing rough. 💀
Thankfully, I’ve been listening to the podcast from the awesome folks at Challengers Comics & Conversation in Chicago for a while now. They’ve gone through a system change in recent years, and from hearing how it went I thought their playbook was going to be best for us too. So I basically came to a staff meeting and said “We’re doing this!” and the rest of the team just trusted me to get it working. 😅
So now our whole shop is run off Shopify, both in-store & online, and our database for new products & keeping track of Subscriptions/Special Orders works through Manage Comics! The change over has certainly had its quirks, but we are so far super happy with how it’s going and personally I think it will do wonders as we go forward with it.
Let’s also give some time to the ABSOLUTE-ly wild year comics themselves have had. DC have been top of the charts for us, with the Absolute line-up just smashing it and a new Batman #1 that we’re loving so far! Not to forget the return of the DC x Marvel crossovers with Deadpool x Batman, although we suspect 2026 will prove even crazier for these crossovers with Superman x Spider-Man on the horizon. There were plenty of other amazing books but there are a bunch of articles online covering that so go check those out and let us know if you want anything ordered in!
Manga continued it’s trend of a new anime adaptation coming out and causing the entire collection to sell out each time, with this years prime examples being the continued popularity of ‘DanDaDan’, ‘Delicious In Dungeon’, ‘Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End’ & ’The Apothecary Diaries’, but the new kid on the block was the bright coloured covers of ‘The Summer Hikaru Died’. Learning from this, I’m going to force Ross to order a crazy amount of ‘Witch Hat Atelier’ which sells out all the time anyway which means when the anime hits in 2026 it will likely go astronomical!
I’m not sure where I heard the phrase but I’m totally stealing it now: This year really felt like the rise of “The Dog Man Generation”. I’ll explain what the **** that means don’t worry. The kids who grew up and read Dav Pilkey’s ‘Captain Underpants’ spin-off series ’Dog Man’ when it first released back in 2016, are now teenagers. But to expand on this even further, “The Raina Telgemeier Generation” are now in their late-teens to mid-20’s! The children that grew up reading more graphic novels than traditional prose novels are returning to read comics, manga and graphic novels with their own money. At our store at least, we have seen a huge rise in our percentage of regular customers in that 16-25 age group, with a lot of those being new single issue comic book subscribers! Exciting! This is of course supported by the virality of ‘Absolute Batman’ being shared all over TikTok, YouTube & Instagram, which is something we desperately need more of as marketing and advertising is a real sore spot for a lot of us little local comic book shops.
I’ll wrap up my ramblings here with a tremendous thank you to the amazing community that has been built up over the past *checks watch* NINE YEARS?! Yes that’s right! Free Comic Book Day/Comics Giveaway Day will be Greenlight Comics 10 Year Anniversary Extravaganza! We’re planning for it to be a big fun event for the full day so lock it into your calendars. May 2nd. I've also got a bunch of ideas for the shop in this coming year so hopefully we continue to grow to be the best comic shop we can be!
Once again, thank you so much. Yes, you! If you’re reading all the way to the end of this post then a massive thank you, as you’re likely one of our awesome regulars. See you soon!
Brayden 💚