99 Issues Comics Opens Second Store in Daphne With Marvel and DC Artist Signing

While print media across the country fights a downward slide, a locally owned comic shop is bucking the trend with a Baldwin County expansion. 99 Issues Comic Books & Gaming is opening a 1,400-square-foot second location at the Jubilee Pointe Shopping Center in Daphne in mid-October 2014, with a grand opening planned for Nov. 1 — a bet that the Gulf Coast’s appetite for comics, gaming and collectibles can support more than one storefront.

A Celebrity Artist for the Grand Opening

Headlining the grand opening will be artist Steven Butler, a veteran illustrator whose work includes Spider-Man and X-Men for Marvel and Superman for DC. Butler was set to sign autographs for collectors and fans, giving the new store the kind of launch event usually reserved for much bigger markets. Artist signings have become a proven traffic-driver for comic shops, drawing both dedicated collectors who bring books to be sketched and curious families who turn out for the spectacle.

99 Issues is still a young business — its first store opened in March 2013 at the University Village Shopping Center across from the University of South Alabama campus. Together with FOS Comics, the two shops are the only local retailers catering to the area’s growing market for comics, graphic novels and related merchandise, a boom tied to superhero films becoming Hollywood’s defining product. Each blockbuster release sends new customers through the doors of shops like 99 Issues, looking for the source material behind the characters they know from the screen.

Owner Chris Barnett credits comics’ collectibility for their staying power in a digital age. “Digital will eventually take over the news and book formats. What will save comics from the slow death of digital is the fact that comics are also collectors’ items,” Barnett said. “Most physical copies of comic books include a code that allows the reader to download the digital copy for free… My feeling is that digital and paper can live together in peace, feeding off of each other.”

The numbers back his optimism: year-to-date sales growth averaged 223 percent since the original store opened. And if Daphne goes well, Barnett said a third store — in Mobile — could follow in the second quarter of 2015.

Why Comic Shops Are Surviving

The resilience Barnett describes runs against the fate of other print categories. Comic shop sales have held up while newsstand and book-store channels have collapsed, and the specialty shop remains the primary marketplace for monthly comic books. Part of the answer is the collector’s market that Barnett emphasizes: variant covers, first appearances and key issues trade at prices that no e-book can match, and a bagged, boarded comic is a physical asset as much as a story.

The other part is community. Comic shops function as clubhouses — weekly release days, game tables, signing events and the recommendations of a knowledgeable owner — an experience no download replicates. The industry’s direct market distribution system ties publishers to shops, and shops like 99 Issues serve as the retail backbone that keeps monthly comics viable at all. A second location in Daphne extends that footprint east across Mobile Bay, putting the shop model within reach of Baldwin County’s fast-growing population without a bay-crossing trip.

The timing tracks with the entertainment industry’s superhero boom. Film studios have scheduled comic-adapted movies years in advance, and each release lifts demand for back issues, trade paperbacks and merchandise tied to the featured characters. Shops that positioned themselves during the boom — as 99 Issues did with its 2013 opening — have ridden that wave, with growth rates like the store’s 223 percent reflecting a small base expanding quickly rather than a mature business plateauing.

What It Means for Baldwin County Retail

Jubilee Pointe Shopping Center gives the new store a built-in customer base of Daphne neighborhoods and passing U.S. 98 traffic, and its 1,400 square feet fits the compact footprint typical of successful comic shops. Local retail watchers have noted that specialty stores with devoted followings — gaming, comics, collectibles — have been among the more reliable tenants in a shifting retail landscape, drawing destination traffic that general merchandise stores struggle to match.

Export-Import Bank Backs U.S.-Built Airbus Jets

In news with direct bearing on Mobile’s Airbus assembly plant, Export-Import Bank chairman Fred Hochberg told Reuters the bank would finance exports of Airbus airliners provided they were assembled in the United States with sufficient domestic content.

The policy matters enormously for the A320 family final assembly line taking shape at the Brookley Aeroplex in Mobile. Aircraft financing sits at the heart of the commercial airplane business — most airlines and leasing companies around the world buy jets with the help of export credit agencies — and an aircraft factory’s sales case depends heavily on the financing that follows its product. By signaling that American-assembled Airbus jets qualify for Ex-Im backing, the bank effectively aligned its financing power with the Mobile plant’s output, strengthening the argument for customers considering jets built on the Gulf Coast.

For Mobile, the announcement reinforces what local officials have said since Airbus selected the city: the assembly line is not just a construction project but the anchor of a long-term aerospace cluster. Final assembly brings supplier facilities, specialized trades and maintenance, repair and overhaul work to the Brookley complex, and financing support for U.S.-built jets makes the factory’s product more competitive against jets exported from Europe. The stipulation about domestic content also works in Mobile’s favor — an aircraft assembled at Brookley with American-made components is precisely the product the bank’s policy was designed to support.

Together, the two stories sketch a picture of a Gulf Coast economy diversifying on two fronts: a specialty retail business expanding across Mobile Bay on the strength of collectors and fans, and a global aerospace manufacturer positioning Mobile-built jets for the worldwide market. Both depend on the same fundamentals — a growing regional population, mobile consumers and a business community willing to invest ahead of the demand curve.

For now, attention turns to Nov. 1 in Daphne, where Butler’s signing will mark the opening of 99 Issues’ second act, and to the quarters ahead, when Barnett will decide whether the market can support a third store across the bay in Mobile.

The Collector’s Economy

The collecting side of the business deserves a closer look, because it is the engine behind numbers like 223 percent growth. Key issues — first appearances of major characters, landmark storylines, death issues and variant covers — appreciate in ways that make comics function like alternative assets for some collectors, and the speculation market feeds back into demand for new printings. When a character is announced for a film, the shop network often sees a run on that hero’s earliest appearances within days, something digital-only readers can never participate in.

Barnett’s dual-format approach reflects how the industry has adapted. The free digital code packed with print issues, now standard across major publishers, lets a collector read on a tablet while keeping the physical copy on the shelf — a model that treats digital as an enhancement rather than a replacement. For shop owners, the code is also a hedge: customers who sample digitally often return for the print issues of the stories they loved, and collectors still want the tangible artifact regardless of how they read.

Gaming gives the Daphne store a second revenue stream beyond monthly comics. Card games, tabletop titles and gaming accessories turn the shop into a destination for weekly play, filling the calendar between comic releases and building the habitual footfall that keeps a specialty retailer healthy. Owners across the industry have found that gaming events create customers who become comic readers, and vice versa — a cross-pollination that a comics-only shop would miss.

Growing Pains and Opportunities

Expansion brings its own challenges: hiring staff who know the product, splitting inventory between two stores and managing the cash flow that rapid growth demands. Barnett’s timeline — October opening, November grand opening, a possible Mobile location by mid-2015 — is aggressive but consistent with a business that has more than doubled its sales base since spring 2013. The Daphne store’s early months will determine whether the third store moves forward on schedule.

For the local market, the stakes are simple. Before 99 Issues opened in 2013, Gulf Coast fans without a shop of their own drove to Pensacola or ordered online, sending their collecting dollars out of the area. Two stores — soon possibly three — mean conventions, signings and a fan community with local anchors, and a retail niche growing fast enough to support them all. The grand opening on Nov. 1 will be the first public test of how deep that market runs east of the bay.