*What is Wakeup Comics?
Wakeup Comics is a micro-business. It’s a few shelves inside The Groove, a record shop in East Nashville,Tennessee, where I sell predominantly independent and self published comics and zines. Well, mostly that… occasionally any weird printed stuff I find that is focused on comics.
*Who is Wakeup Comics?
Me, myself, and … I’m the owner, founder, CEO, CFO … all those titles. It’s just me. I’m a one man army. I mean, The Groove actually process the sales and stuff. I’m not there. I don’t sit at the register or anything. That’s all part of the micro business model. It’s setup as consignment for sales tax purposes, so they’re definitely a huge part of this since they allow me to set up there and remit those for me. But I’m the one that handles all the ordering, processing, and everything like that.
*How did all this happen – got a cool origin story?
I was bitten by a radioactive independent comic book. Ha, the full story is there used to be another indie comic store here in The Groove called BrainFreeze Comics…I always plug this place. It existed for years before Wakeup. Anyways, it was run by Stewart Copeland, and it started in 2014 and I discovered it not long after I moved to Nashville by total happenstance.
I’d never been in The Groove, I had a friend who was here visiting, a big vinyl guy, and so we went in there and I just randomly saw all these comics that I had only seen on the Internet. I’d never seen them in person. I never thought would unless I was in Chicago or somewhere, you know a bigger city, but here was BrainFreeze. He eventually moved it another location, but he kept going for about four years and because of several factors he moved away. It shut down in 2018 and I was really disappointed.
I really liked the place. And I thought it was so cool. He had that business model, and allowed him to kind of do what he did because he was not having to worry about making money off the store. So I tried to see about buying BrainFreeze, and I wasn’t the only one… I think there were several people interested, but he decided not to sell it. He’d gotten rid of inventory and just kind of put it to bed. And that was that.
But the idea just won’t let me go. I thought about it for months. So later, like still early 2018, I thought: I can just do what he was doing. Just make it my own thing. And that was kind of wierd starting up…but I decided, you know, I was gonna do it because I wanted that place to still exist. It was so cool that it was here. It was so great you could get that stuff around here. In Nashville. And so I emailed some places. I tried to reach out to people. Talk to them and see if anyone was interested in hosting that kind of micro-business in town. The Groove was the only place that responded. So we got it up and running. Our shelf, now two, of indie comics and zines.
*Why DO you do this? What keeps ya going?
Now that I kinda got it, it’s not as much work. At first, it was like I had to buy a ton. I had to start up all these relationships from scratch. That’s kind of weird but it’s also maybe a little bit easier because it’s indie comics and artists. You just ask. Just email them about selling their books and they’re like sure. All I had to do was say ‘Hey, I’m openning this store I’m gonna sell indie stuff. Would you be interested? Maybe sell to me at wholesale?’ That’s all you gotta do, but I had to go through that whole process. I had to learn all that. Establish those connections. And I had a small budget. I had to be okay with losing money. I said to myself, okay, if I lose all this money… I’m fine. I mean if I never sell them. I knew that it was something that was gonna take my time and my money. I work another full-time job which allows me to do this because I’m not worried about making money so I can buy books that I can break even on and sell that I wouldn’t be able to do if I was really worried about my balance sheet. But I just love comics, I guess. What I would say and I really wanted that place to exist here. I felt really lucky to have a place like that once with BrainFreeze. I never would’ve thought of it. I’m so glad he said that up with that business model. And I’m so glad that The Groove has allowed me to stay there because they could have anything in that spot, and it would probably make them more money. Like literally anything. I think fortunately there’s a lot of people that appreciate it. It’s a great outlet because those comics are just not out there in the wild. There’s really not very many places like WakeUp.
*What is the future for WakeUp Comics?
I have thought about this probably too much, but it might just be what it is now. There might not be more to it, you know. I think that would be okay. I’m not a crazy ambitious person and the fact that I was able to get it going, and it’s still here six years later is kind of surprising. I do have to put time into it and I can do this thing. I can keep buying books and hopefully not lose money. I don’t really make any money from it. It’s… I can import books and I can also get books that people can buy so they don’t have to pay to import them. They can discover new things. There aren’t a lot of people like me and looking at this crap all day long and trying to find new and strange stuff. Reading the comics journal every day. But I do this because there are people out there trying to find new comics. And I love finding new creators I can buy from. Discovering new things. I like that, you know, people told me that they find new stuff here all the time. Stuff they’d never heard of. And I do like that I can provide…or…that I’m kind of providing a service, I don’t know. I don’t really think of it that way but I am doing what I do. So what’s the future like? I might try to move it somewhere else… but I think I would have be forced out of The Groove to do that. I think, you know, maybe, I just keep doing what I’m doing.
*Have you ever thought about getting into PUBLISHING for yourself? Running a Kickstarter?
I will be this year. I have a plan for a like a behind the scenes book but it’s going to be higher production. It’s going to be a critical appraisal also celebration of the comic COPRA. It’s that’s gonna be the first thing I try to publish myself. I’ve commissoned a lot of the articles and art. Most of it is already here. It’s been coming in over the past year and so that’s gonna be my first project.. But I don’t know it’s gonna be physically printed. I hope it will be. It will definitely be digital, but since I’m the one paying for it. All for me as far as paying the artist and the writers that just depends on the money. How much will printing be? But that’s the first thing I’m gonna do that I thought about doing not necessarily COPRA, but various kind of stages.
I was kind of inspired by this project called Critical Chips, which is a few several years old now they were two volumes of it that Zainab Akhtar did. It was really cool. It was kind of like an independent writing thing, but it was more just about comics in general, but I love critical writing about comics. So I got some of the best writers to write about COPRA and it’s gonna be really cool. I hope it’s gonna be awesome. I’ve never done anything like this before but I’m gonna do maybe something like a smaller scale after that. Maybe something I do more myself. We’ll see how the first one goes.
*ANYTHING YOU HAVEN’T GOTTEN TO SAY THAT THE SMALL NUMBER OF INDIE ARTISTS READING THIS NEED TO HEAR?
Yeah, so… Comics and indie comics is not always the best field financially or anything. But there’s so many great comics being published now and just being able to stock and sell some of them to a wider audience is great. I’m glad that all those people are still out there doing them even if it’s not a financial thing.. it’s more of an artistic thing which is probably for the better. So yeah, just keep on doing what you’re doing and hopefully maybe one day indie comics might take over the world, but who knows.
