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Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Childhood Fascination: Heroes owner Alan Bahr poses next to a poster of comic book hero Captain America. Bahr has owned and operated the Campbell store since 1995.
Public Citizen
A Comic Book Life
By Erin Mayes
Alan Bahr remembers receiving his first comic book as a 6 year old growing up in Minnesota.
Starting at that young age, he began collecting the books as a hobby.
"I learned to read well before I went to school because I wanted to know what was in those little word bubbles," Bahr says.
He started dealing in comic book conventions and trade shows in the mid-'80s, and then, in 1995, selling the popular publications became his profession,
The 38-year-old Sunnyvale resident owns Heroes, a comic book store at 24 E. Campbell Ave.
The shop is one of very few left in the Bay Area, which Bahr attributes to an "implosion" of the market after comics made a brief comeback in the '80s and stores popped up all over.
Bahr describes the demographic of his customers as mostly males between the ages of 22 and 35, and 90 percent of his customers are regulars. Forty percent of his business comes from the Internet.
"The majority of business comes from baby-boomer males," he said. "It's the classic case of recapturing their youth. Comics really took off in 1960, 1961. Guys who come in grew up in that period."
Bahr says some people collect comics from older periods, such as the 1930s, when comics first started coming out. In the '50s, during the McCarthy era, comics fell out of the public's favor and were blamed for many of society's ills, Bahr says. They were deemed un-American and much too violent. This brought about the Comics Code Authority, an agency that regulates comics to this day. Large publishers, such as Marvel Comics, are still regulated by the authority, which decides how much sexual content, graphic violence and profanity are allowed in each issue. Bahr says the requirements on the profanity and violence are less stringent than they used to be.
Some smaller publishers choose not to submit their comics to the authority, which means they don't get a stamp of approval, but they are still allowed to publish unrestricted.
Bahr says some of the best sellers are oldies but goodies such as X-Men, Batman, Spiderman and Superman.
"A lot of the landmark characters still do quite well," he says.
About 2,000 new titles come out every month, and Bahr wades through the new material to decide what to sell. For this task, he partially relies on his 5-year-old daughter, whom he says is a Power Puff Girls fanatic.
"She's a pretty good marketing assistant," Bahr says with a smile. "She's got a pretty good eye for what she'd like to get."
Bahr and his wife of eight years, Terri, also have a 2-year-old son.
One of the biggest challenges Bahr faces in the comics business is attracting juvenile female buyers.
Young girls used to be a large part of the customer base when romantic comics, the Archie series and Millie the Model were running, he says.
The problem with attracting new buyers is that there doesn't seem to be a new generation of comic book collectors, and, Bahr says, "We're not really a reading society anymore."
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Campbell, California
