My first Comic Guru Blog!

Hello!

This is the first time I've managed to find time to actually put a blog into my profile here. Its also the first time I've ever attempted to write up something like this. Please bear with me.

What I'd like to do here is showcase the comings and goings of my comic shop and let you in on some of the secrets of the trade as well as log things of note. It could be visits from debt collectors or BBC news teams and it should give people reading an accurate portrayal of my business how it runs and the thought processes of myself and Haydn who works here with me.

Names will be changed to protect their privacy or my lack of anything resembling short term memory. It will also protect the innocent. Lets face it what I write here will be subjective but hopefully balanced. If you recognise yourself on here then I'm glad as I hope I'll be accurate and truthful with anything I write. Only you will know who you are however. If anyone has any questions just ask and when I have the time I'll try and answer them to the best of my ability.

First off a little bit of my history. I was born on October 4Th 1971. My earliest encounter with comics was during my first eighteen months of life. I believe my father had been found out in a lie. Possibly involving a local barmaid at which point I was placed in my fathers box of rare comics and proceeded to eat his copy of X Men issue 1. All I can remember with any clarity was the cover picture and the awful flavour of the paper.

I suppose you could say that was my first full TASTE of comics. LOL. Still lots of note happened after that and my parents divorced during the following year in a rather bitter and acrimonious way.

Lets leave out the intervening years for the sake of brevity and move on to 1999 where I was asked by a friend of mine to take over the running of his little market stall comic shop where I got my weekly fix of four colour action.

Steve was a good guy but we had different ideas about where the business should go and ended up with a bitter parting of the ways. I was supposed to have only worked there as a favour for a few weeks while he found someone else but ended up working there for almost three years. I used to be a successful Balloon Modeller and Children's Entertainer which is what I was doing to make money at the time so I worked for Steve for free but I did have my comics and other things off him in lieu of wages. At the time I didn't mind but with hindsight it wasn't the worlds cleverest idea and inevitably led to our eventual falling out.

Anyway after Steve and I parted I spent a year generally moping around with a sense of intense loss. I was also getting less enamoured with entertainment work now that my favourite pastime of Comic Shop geekery was ended. I blamed Steve and with good reason but in the end it didn't work out.

A few of my customers and friends came to me and asked me whether I'd be interested in opening up my own shop. Some even offered support both financially and metaphorically. After discussing it with my brother we decided to go into business together. Him as a silent partner and myself as general manager due to my expertise. Basically I'd taken a small market stall with a turnover of around £100 pounds per week and turned it into a thriving business turning over more than eighty thousand pounds per year in the space of three years. I figured if I could do it for someone else I could do it for myself.

Sadly things didn't work out so well with my brother and he and I parted company when six hundred pounds of initial funding went missing after my father had passed it to him for me. I did receive the two thousand four hundred however and began the process of finding a property making an offer on that property and borrowing Ten Thousand pounds from two very good and very special friends. All that remained for me was to open the shop which I did on October 4Th 2003 which coincidentally was also my 32ND Birthday.

On that day http://www.thecomicguru.co.uk/ went live and the rest is History. Tumultuous and deeply terrifying but definitely history.

Now I sit here on 11Th September 2008 only a month before I celebrate my 37Th Birthday and the shop celebrates its 5Th Anniversary trying to condense what happened over my life into a few brief paragraphs.

I hope I've managed to do just that and I've whetted your appetite about what will happen next. The truth is I don't know what will happen but I promise I'll try and be truthful when I describe things when they happen.

Happy times and places. Comic Guru.