About Manage Comics
Comics subscription software for comic storesGeek Roots
Manage Comics was founded by Brian Garside, a lifelong comics fan who had several stints in the four colour retail trenches.
In the late 80’s and early 90’s, Brian worked at a series of comic and gaming shops including the well known London Ontario comic shops Bid Time Return and Heroes Cards and Comics.
In 2005 he co-founded All New Comics along with his partner Peter Fisico, and sold his interest in the online store to Peter in 2011.
In 2015, the pair re-launched All New Comics as a new website, and Brian built out Manage Comics as its own standalone service in order to provide All New Comics, and other shops around the world with the best subscription tool on the market.
The store front end:
Each store gets its own front end, and a unique URL. The store front end can be customized with a unique logo, and the store colours, to provide branding, but all stores leverage the same template, and a shared image pool. This allows each store to stand out, but ensures that all stores are completely mobile responsive, and adhere to website best practices.
The management console:
The management console is the heart and brains of a store, giving the owner full insight into changes to customer lists, current order totals, current subscription revenue, and full reporting tools which can report on revenue, taxes, and much more.
Content marketing with the Manage Comics blog:
In its first year in business, Manage Comics did zero marketing, growing exclusively through word of mouth, however in May of 2017, we began posting frequent blog posts to a dedicated Manage Comics blog. In the beginning, we posted information adjacent to Manage Comics, but we quickly started posting informational posts like “How to Promote an Event for Your Comic Book Store on Facebook”, and “How to use Instagram for your Comic Book Store”.
The Manage Comics blog became about more than promoting Manage Comics, and instead became about helping retailers to succeed.
The site saw steady growth, and has seen an increase in the number of requests to demonstrate Manage Comics, all with no advertising spend.
Pre-Authorized Payments are New and Improved!
Pre-authorized payments are one way that we’re helping comic shops manage their cashflow better. We first introduced this feature back in 2019 as a way for customers to “set it and forget it” with their accounts, but many store owners wanted to be able to set specific customers to be required to add pre-authorized payments.
New Feature – Creating Weekly Pulls from your Invoice
We’ve added a new feature to simplify your weekly pulls. Now in addition to the “Shipping this Week” method (which many of our retailer partners have told us is often not accurate), you can instead choose to upload your weekly invoices.
FOC and Initial Order Reports Available for all Distributors
We’ve released new updates to Manage Comics which incorporates UCS and Lunar codes into various places. We’ve also updated the admin side to allow you to generate initial order and FOC information for Diamond, UCS, and Lunar.
New system updates for May 9th
We've added a couple of new features to Manage Comics that will make the admin side of the business better, a bunch of small quality of life improvements, and some tweaks to the customer side which will improve the search-ability of Manage Comics sites (making them...
A Look Back at 2019
2019 was a big period of growth for us as 15 new stores became part of the Manage Comics family, and our customer count ballooned to nearly 5,000! We’ve added a few stores who have seen major transitions in 2019. Our store partners have asked us for changes, and we responded.
Shipping Dates, Email Additions – Manage Comics Updates
We’ve got a ton of updates we’re trying to crank out before the end of the year, but right now we’ve got a few cool ones that are ready to go.
New Updates including reusable titles, initial order updates, and automated emails
We’ve got a bunch of new features for Manage Comics, with well over a half dozen new things added, including a feature we added just because of the insanity with Marvel’s new #1’s shipping while the old series are still running.
New Pulls Process (incorporating special orders)
We’ve improved the Manage Comics pull system by adding special orders to the flow, this means that you’ll pull your regular pulls first, then do your special orders, and finally wrap up your special orders before confirming everything and generating your pull lists.
New Mobile Styles for Your Store
We are constantly making little improvements to Manage Comics in addition to the big things that we do. Our latest improvement just makes things better in general for mobile users.
When we added our Featured Images, we noticed that things looked really bad on mobile screens. Luckily Sean, or CSS Ninja got in there and really made that area sing. We use your primary colour as the background for this area, so it’s another way that your site will stand out when its seen in mobile.
