The Secret Origin of Manage Comics – Manage Comics Thoughtstream Issue #1

It’s the first official issue of Manage Comics Thoughtstream – not not an imaginary story, not an alternate universe – this is the real deal! This week while Brian got the volume nailed down, he adjusted his lights too bright! Holy Hotness Batman!

The Secret Origin of Manage Comics

What is the Secret Origin of Manage Comics? It’s a story nearly 50 years in the making!  I built this timeline of the events that went into making Manage Comics what it is today.

• 1971 – The Great Escape! SUDDENLY Brian is born!
• 1988 – Brian starts working at Bid Time Return
• 1989 – Endless Adventure opens, and Brian is there!
• 1991 – the Robinson brothers open Heroes Cards and Comics – Brian helps set things up, gets locked in the H.E.V.V.R., and much fun is had by all.
• 1993 – The second escape! Brian leaves London for the bright lights and big city of Toronto!
• 1990’s through 2000’s – SALES! Brian sells comics at comic conventions and through private sales. Buys a motorcycle, a car, many comics, and goes on dates with the girl who will become his wife!
• 1996 – Brian begins shopping at Shining Knight.
• 1999 – Brian starts shopping at Comics n’ More
• 2001 – Brian gets married 😉
• 2002 – Brian meets Peter
• 2004 – Brian moves to Ajax Ontario
• April 2005 – Brian and Peter incorporate All New Comics and build V1 of the website.
• June 2005 – AllNewComics.com launches – we have about 5 friends and family as subscribers, mostly Brian’s co-workers at TSN, but it’s enough people to start a Diamond account.

• August 2005 – Brian’s first child is born! Real smart starting a business just months before your first child!
• April 2006 – All New Comics V2 is born, incorporating a subscription tool built by Aurora Award Winning Author Ryan McFadden!

• December 2006 – The Return Home – Brian takes a job in London, and begins to move his family there (2 hours down the road from Toronto).
• October 2008 – Brian and his wife welcome their second child into their family!
• Spring 2011 – Brian and Peter agree on terms for Peter to take over the business, Brian stays on to do marketing.
• October 2011 – All New Comics V3.0 launches. It boasts a cleaner front-end, and a much easier searchable website. We felt like this was an awesome website for the era, and it would do well for the next few years.

• August 2015 – Brian leaves his cushy IT Job in London, and creates NorthIQ, his first client is his old buddy Peter Fisico from All New Comics.  Brian totally revamps Peter’s website, and starts building Manage Comics – the comics subscription service with his friends at Code Elves.
• November 2015 – THE LAUNCH OF MANAGE COMICS – Manage Comics is born, first with a small group of All New Comics users who give feedback, and then later with a wider selection of folks.
• January 2016 – All New Comics version 4.0 launches, now powered by WordPress and WooCommerce, this new version of All New Comics is faster than ever, and ready for the future.

• November 2015 – May 2017 – Manage Comics improvements, we spent two years working with All New Comics customers, asking surveys, getting feedback, and making improvements to the way that Manage Comics worked.
• May 2017 – Manage Comics starts content marketing, first on Medium, which they soon left (Why We Left Medium – A Cautionary Tale), then on our own internal blog.
• July 2017 – Manage Comics welcomed our first store, the Uncanny Comic Shop, followed closely behind by Off the Wagon Shop and AJ’s Comics.
• August 2017 – Manage Comics 1.67 launched – with a ton of front end updates, and a lot of administrative functionality
• December 2017 – Manage Comics signs its 5th store – Tales of Tomorrow in Farmington New Mexico!
• February 2018 – Manage Comics hits 10 stores!
• February 2018 – Manage Comics 1.7 launched – Currency, customer notes, removal of the Manage Comics SKU in a lot of places, and much more
• March 2018 – Manage Comics 1.701 launched with the launch of Special Orders (followed shortly after by the ability to search for a specific comic).
• August 2018 – All New Comics V 4.2 launched with a redesigned theme and new layout.

• September 2018 – Manage Comics hits 20 stores.
• November 2018 – Pre-Filled Pulls, rather than having to select everything every single week!
• March 2019 – Loads of fixes including Customers with No Email Address
• March 2019 – Manage Comics launches the “Managing your Shop” series on Bleeding Cool.
• June 2019 – Special Order updates and a new “All Titles” feature
• July 2019 – Pull sort options, special order codes, followed by new, cleaner mobile styles.
• September 2019 – we completely revamped the pulls process, including special orders in the pulls process!
• November 2019 – Reusable titles, initial order updates, and automated global emails.  This one was huge from a marketing standpoint, we revamped how we sent out global emails and made it even easier for stores to send out info.
• December 2019 – Updates to shipping dates on products, email changes.
• February 2020 – as the world of comics began to change, Manage Comics launched an email course called “The One Hour Hero“, which was a 16 week course on changing your business, one actionable item at a time.

The One Hour Hero

• In March of 2020 when the world stood still and comics were put on pause for months, Manage Comics suspended all payments for customers, retooled, restructured, and revisited how we did everything.  We built systems to take care of the two new distributors, and built an entire new database that we would go on to test.
• We immediately went into help mode and started helping stores keep the lights on even when their doors were closed. We aided a number of stores in getting their customers set up with billing, and made sure that stores could weather the storm of no new comics.
• April 2020 – in response to requests from customers hoping to improve their cash flow, we made changes to the system to simplify pre-authorized credit cards.
• May 2020 – we updated special orders, added more tweaks to pulls, and incorporated Lunar and UCS into the system. When comics began shipping again, many stores were in a better position than they were pre-shut down from a technology stand point.
• May 2020 – Brian appears on Comic Book News with Dan Shahin to talk Comic Shop 2.0, and what the comic store of the future would look like.
• June 2020 – Brian appeared on Comic Book News again to talk about the Future of Comics Retail.
• July 2020 – We built FOC and Initial order reports for all distributors to simplify ordering new comics.
• July 2020 – Manage Comics teams up with BinderPOS to give hobby shops superpowers!
• September 2020 – GeekFetch beta tests begin. We created a new tool to allow stores to quickly create products for their Shopify stores.  We started with a closed beta of three stores, and ramped up to six.

• August 2020 – Manage Comics hits 50 stores!
• October 2020 – Creating weekly pulls from invoices. We improved our pulls system so that stores could use their invoices from their distributors to create their weekly pull lists.
• November 2020 – GeekFetch Shopify App work begins. The Code Elves taught themselves how to create an app in Shopify, and we worked to create a beta of the GeekFetch app.
• January 2021 – Pre-Authorized Payments improved. In order to improve cash flow for stores, we made massive improvements to Pre-Authorized Payments
• January 2021 – Work begins on Manage Comics 2.0 – Manage Comics + Shopify!
• February 2021 – The GeekFetch Products Shopify App launches, quietly and with very little fanfare.
• March 2021 – Manage Comics is in over 80 stores in Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia!