The shop has history. Chapel Hill Comics was called The Foundation Bookstore when Larry Shapiro first opened the place in 1977. At the time it was only the second science fiction bookstore in North Carolina. I missed this event, busy being born back in Ohio. Dan Breen, former owner of Foundation's Edge in Raleigh, bought the store from Shapiro in 1984, renaming it "Second Foundation," I guess because "Norby The Mixed Up Robot," was already taken. Ask an Asimov fan.

Ten years later, Breen sold all of its roleplaying games and merchandise to Cerebral Hobbies, to better focus on books and comics. (Info pillaged from here.) Since then, the store has managed to survive multiple floods, a shrinking 90s comics market, and Breen's own exit from the picture.

It was under Breen's watch that I first discovered the store--as Second Foundation--when we moved here in 2002, though I divided my local comic perusing between the new Ultimate Comics in Durham (next to Shiki Sushi near South Point) and the Chapel Hill store until last year when two things happened.

First off, I moved to a place where I could walk there easily. Ultimate Comics is a fine store and I still stop there on occassion--I think their subscription service is a pretty good value for those who buy monthlies--but I'll avoid getting into a car if I can help it.

Secondly, Andrew Neal, a longtime employee and then manager of Second Foundation, bought the place from Breen and reorganized. The move to Franklin Street is just the most recent in a string of good decisions, starting with making the old location more friendly and open (new comics are now in the back where you can actually peruse the shelves without bumping into people), then changing the name to the less-esoteric "Chapel Hill Comics" ("Second Foundation" is the third book in Isaac Asimov's Foundation novel trilogy. You heard me. The third book.), and taking advantage of community involvement opportunities like discounts on election day and sponsorship of the Nevermore Film Festival of Durham. (Or it's possible they've been doing those last things all along. Gimme a break, I only got here in 2002.)

So now I go there about once a week, usually buying things I didn't intend to buy, and when they move to Franklin Street I'll probably be in danger of visiting more often. But there's another reason I'm interested in this move.

I wrote a script for a television pilot last year for Bravo Television's Situation: Comedy contest. It was called Fanboys, a sitcom about a bunch of twenty-somethings running a comic book and RPG shop on Franklin Street, something like Kevin Smith's Clerks meets Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, meets my Undersweet comic strip, meets a few of my more unique friends, meets Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (the real-world power of storytelling and myth). It was a pretentious writing exercise that taught me that I'd rather write for comics than television, but that's not the point.

At the time of my writing "Fanboys," I didn't know of the Neals taking over the store, or that they weren't much older than me. And I certainly didn't know (and I imagine they didn't either) that they'd be moving the store to Franklin Street so soon after taking it over. These coincidences don't fascinate me, since my script wasn't that original in the first place, but one of the ideas I proposed in the script still does:

I've never seen a comic book store with a location itself that generated foot-traffic. Comics stores are in the basement of Grandma's Cheese Barn or in run-down strip malls in the middle of nowhere; you probably won't see one at South Point or on 9th Street in Durham. That's mainly a matter of storefront costs, but it's also a problem with comics as a market: it caters to its existing fanbase, making little or no effort to find new customers. "People go directly there on appointment," Warren Ellis wrote in an April 2000 column, "to perform a specific transaction." If you know the current location of Chapel Hill Comics, more than likely you were already looking for a comic book store, and maybe even an already-determined book.

But what if you, as a non-reader of comics, were to stumble across Chapel Hill Comics next door while waiting for your haircut appointment at Moshi Moshi, or after a three-dawali lunch at Mediteranean Deli? You're already out of your car and there's a fun little poster on the window. It's an open and inviting space with walls painted a warm Flash Gordon (or plain old Flash) yellow and red. Maybe Vanessa is at the register, and you discover that she bares no resemblance to the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons and has no open sores on her hands or face.


And maybe you enjoyed the X-Men or Spider-Man movies, or even Ghost World or Road to Perdition, and somebody told you how they're all based on comics. And you go in and discover that it isn't just about super heroes. Comics are just another medium for telling stories. And some of the art and stories speak to you. And you take your comics fandom and move to the far corners of the earth to spread the joy, because Chapel Hill is a transient town--the compulsion to leave is added to the water with the flouride.

Is that so far-fetched, beyond the crap about the water? Ideally, I'd like this dream-expansion of the comics audience to hit just after I break into writing them. I'll be finishing up some hackwork on a Brooding Avenger/Justice League of Caucasia crossover event, while negotiating my first creator-owned series so that by the time it hits the shelves, they'll be a readership hungry for what I'm ready and able to produce.

See? There are no selfless acts, super heroes or no. I painted those walls yellow for me.

This doesn't mean the Neals can rest on the strength of their new foundation, but it does give them some new opportunities. And if you go to the new store and they still don't have a new doorknob yet, then the moving sale's probably still going on in the back of the Bank of America building. Check out a piece of town history and find yourself a bargain on sequential art through March 12, when the old place closes its Rosemary chapter for good...

...four days before she rises from the dead as every superhero who's ever died has eventually done before her.

Filed under Carrboro Area, Comic Stripping, Journal, Peers & Peerless, Vanity Smurf
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