Comics in Circuit Interview: Aneesh Chopra
In order to showcase some of the many individuals who are creating, publishing, interpreting, collecting, and studying comic books and graphic novels today, the Rare Book School exhibition Comics in Circuit includes a series of monthly interviews by RBS Associate Curator Ruth-Ellen St. Onge.
In June 2018, Ruth-Ellen dropped by Planet X Comics in Toronto, Ontario, to speak with Planet X President Aneesh Chopra about how he became a comic book store owner, the early days of his successful business, and what he thinks are the three biggest changes in the comics industry since he began his career.
How did you get into the business of being a comic book store owner?
I graduated university and I started looking for a job. It was a little tough back then, but I decided to get some income going on the side, and comics were my hobby at that point. There were three of us who used to go down to the Comic Connection store in Hamilton and basically as we were visiting it and discussing it, we thought: “hey, this is a great business venture,” and we thought about how we would do it differently. So we started up a sort of low key comic store. It did very well for us, to the point that in a couple of years, I was able to buy out the two other partners and keep the business going.
And was that the store that is located in Richmond Hill?
Yes. We actually started in a flea market, and then moved to a brick and mortar store, a permanent location, and when we did that move, one of my partners wasn’t interested: he got a job somewhere else. I bought out the second partner about a year later.
You founded your business in 1992. Around the same time, wasn’t there a boom in comic books?
There was. The big thing that made it so enticing was the Death of Superman.
Death of Superman is actually in the exhibition.
Yes, that was sort of the big tipping point to whether I wanted to continue looking for a job, or stick with comics as a career. And Death of Superman was so profitable, it sort of tipped me towards sticking to it and staying in the comic business.
You mentioned that you started your business after you got your degree. What did you study?
I have a Masters in Mechanical Engineering, with a specialty in high density heat transfer. So I have a very specific specialty.
And comics were just a hobby before you opened the store …
Yes, it was a bit of a sideline hobby. I wasn’t really into it in university because I was busy studying, and in the last year, as I was writing my thesis, I was looking for escapism—something else to do other than read papers, so that’s what I ended up doing.
What made Planet X different from other stores at the time?
We’ve always been product-oriented. Sometimes I get made fun of for that reason, but it’s about investing in the future. It’s about looking at something and saying, ok, this is a collectible, this is not, and then identifying what to acquire. And that’s what we felt that some of these stores didn’t do. They didn’t identify collectibles, not just on a financial basis, but a collectible as in: “I’m interested in this.” It’s kind of easy to come up and say, it’s an Amazing Spider-Man #1 now, forty or fifty years later. But, to decide in the moment that something you have coming in today is going to be a collectible five or ten years down the road, that was what we thought made us unique.
At the same time, back then, most comic stores were just comic stores. We ended up sourcing our products from other places, like the U.S. and India. We were more merchandise inclined. That added to our uniqueness. When we first opened up our store, I would say eighty percent was comics, but we also carried a lot of toys and merchandise. That made us distinct from everyone around us. At one point, we had a visit from Toys “R” Us. The head office was in Concord (outside of Toronto), and the Vice President used to drive across Major Mackenzie Drive, past our Richmond Hill store. As he was driving by one day, he came in. He had heard about us through his kids or someone else, and he looked at the toys on our wall and said: “How did you get these toys? We just got solicited for these.” We had gotten in touch with somebody in California, who was able to get us those toys faster, then, even than the distributors in Canada. Back then, there was no Internet. It was phone calls, and you saw this person in this magazine, and you saw somebody at a show. I had met a gentleman down at the Philadelphia Comicon, who introduced me to somebody in California, and we were getting some products in before the distributor in Canada was getting the product.
What have been the biggest changes in the comics industry and how have they affected your business?
I guess one of the biggest things, along with online business, would be that at one point, the market sort of absorbed itself into one distributor. There used to be almost sixteen distributors in North America, and it went down to Diamond Comics. That was a major shift because it also affected the ability to source out material, whereas before, we took advantage of having sixteen different places to source out things and that was one of our strengths. Back when we started, there was a Toronto distributor, Andromeda, and a Burlington distributor called Multibooks, and a distributor in Winnipeg, and there was also a distributor in Montreal called Universal. Just between the four of them, that basically required a bi-weekly call, for us to say: ok, this book is out, it sold well, do you have any left? In some cases there would be products made specifically for the French market that you could only get through Universal. In other cases you would have something that would fall through the cracks—something that one distributor and nobody else had. We would also deal with the U.S. distributors. As the distributors went away, and Diamond took over, that shifted around where we sourced our stuff. We had to be more “outside the box,” more aggressive, going and looking at places that we didn’t normally look at. That was a big shift for us.
Online, that is an obvious change, and everybody sees that. Working online has also made sourcing merchandise easier. It all comes back to identifying collectible stuff, just like it did twenty-five years ago for us. The only difference is that there are many, many more sources to look at.
Finally, comic book movies, over the past ten or fifteen years, have brought more customers into the store. In the first five to seven years the interest was mostly merchandise-oriented (t-shirts, toys, and so on) but now we’re seeing a shift to the actual comics. People come in and say: “I’ve seen the movie; I’ve bought the toy and the t-shirt. Hey, I want to know more about where this actually came from.” The market seems to be more reader-oriented: the customers are picking up trade paperbacks of comics, or they are picking up dollar comics.
I’ve heard that some people are worried that the success of comic book movies and online comics may result in paper comic books being pushed out, but it sounds like you’re seeing the opposite trend.
I think as an industry, we do have this loyal following of people, and that we sometimes get entrapped with the idea that they are the only customer base. This happens in every industry. You see people who get into comics for one or two years and then they leave and do something else. I think that casual customer base is always going to be around, and I don’t think that the availability of online comics will take that away. People will read things online and then come into the shop to pick up the paper comic. Somewhere along the line they are really looking for a tactile experience. They want something that they can hold in their hands. I believe that will continue. I think that it’s a matter of identifying the product or products that they will want to come in and pick up. That’s the challenge that we have as comic stores—we need to find out what that product is.
Image (from the RBS exhibition Comics in Circuit)
Detail from the collected volume of The Death of Superman (New York: DC Comics, 1993).