Our comics retail map is made with information provided by retailers themselves, is searchable by location or different adaptive service option filters, and each immediately clickable business directory listing points to a link designated by comic shops themselves as the best method of contact or transaction. The idea is just to provide a single, consolidated and comprehensive resource that shows how drastically the comics retail landscape has changed while also providing the ways we too can adapt, and continue supporting them.
We will continue tracking, monitoring, and updating the retail map as we hear from more retailers offering quarantine-adaptive services, and as we complete our work going through a considerable backlog of existing entries from the many comic shops who've reached out to any of our members already. We will publish our "Submit a Shop" area of the website once we've finished.
In addition to this; soon we'll be rolling out even more resource support projects also currently in the works--one a directory for the different and inventive ways that professional comics creators can uniquely provide an additional layer of support and visibility to retailers, while a separate subcommittee is also working on collecting and organizing support resources set up to help freelancers and comics creatives of all professional backgrounds during these uncertain times.
This effort began when Leah Williams (Marvel writer; X-FACTOR, GWENPOOL STRIKES BACK, AMAZING MARY JANE) saw numerous shops asking creators on Twitter for assistance in getting the word out about all their new quarantine-adaptive service offers, and as a result she began consolidating and this information in the hopes of collecting it a single interactive, clickable map resource using a Google Maps’ “Create Map” feature. But what started with thirty shops with adaptive services quickly snowballed into nearly 300 within two days, she realized how rapidly the entire comics retail industry was changing as the shops adapted en masse, at which point Vita Ayala (Marvel writer; CHILDREN OF THE ATOM, MORBIUS, PRISONER X) immediately stepped up to help with the consolidation, logging, and tracking of all this information. As the number of comic shops asking for help continued to rise; so did the the number of creators and industry professionals wanting to help Leah and Vita; and our team is now comprised of nearly thirty comics industry professionals from all different professional backgrounds and publishers including Iván Brandon, Rich Douek, Jody Houser, Matt Mair Lowery, Justin Richards, and more. We are all volunteers. (And we are all volunteers working very hard on establishing and galvanizing avenues of support to comics retailers, so we ask that you please always point your wallets straight to the shops, and never at us!)
As the Comics Industry Collective, we are dedicated to working together so that we can provide the best possible support to retailers during a very difficult time in our community. The Comics Industry Collective will continue developing crisis management solutions uniquely designed to support comics shops, as well maintaining his website, its resources, and the service it provides to the comics community for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic.
