Where Did You Come From, Where Did You Go? (Part Three)

The finale, featuring the fire, and the flood.

2022 was relentless. The year began with a bout with depression. Turns out, bottling a trauma so you can just get through December retail is a very bad long term plan. I don’t recommend it. By February, I started pulling out of the funk, and managed to squeak out the only piece of writing I would complete all year. Then, came the gauntlet.

In mid-March, after years of waiting due to the societal effects of COVID-19, my partner Danica was finally scheduled for a minor surgery she had been waiting for. We spent weeks preparing the store for her time needed for recovery. The surgery went without a hitch. She slowly started feeling better and better… and then the local comic book industry went sideways.

On Sunday March 27th, at roughly 2am, someone set fire to the largest store in the city: WonderHarbour. Shortly after, word spread through the community. Once the owner had made the official announcement, we reached out to him offering help in any way we possibly could. The offer ranged anywhere from helping with clean up, to offering a place to sell items on their behalf for items already on their way. Danica and I also discussed hiring their manager if the situation merited it. He was (and is) a good friend of ours, but with all of the chaos, we didn’t want to say anything until we were able to talk with the store owner about how he planned to move ahead - if he planned to move ahead. We weren’t exactly sure if we could even afford to hire the manager, but figured if WonderHarbour wasn’t moving forward, we could at least be a safe landing for someone.

The days that followed were an absolute blur. Phone calls flew back and forth between ourselves and the owner. By Monday evening, we had a game plan: Variant Edition would be the home for WonderHarbour and their customers for the foreseeable future. We would also be hiring the manager on a permanent basis. As for product already ordered and on the way, the base plan would be for us to sell their product through a separate payment system, and send them 100% of the sales from said product. On Tuesday, we had the owner on our weekly streaming show to talk about the arson, and how things would be going forward - at least publicly.

After this was an absolute flood of never ending work. Danica started coming into work to do what she could, even as she was in the middle of recovery. We began to work out how exactly orders would be going forward for the influx of customers. This involved contacting everyone individually in regards to whether or not they wanted to continue with us, venture to another shop, or just press pause indefinitely. It involved coordinating with the WonderHarbour owner and the different distributors on what product would still be on its way in, and which product we would have to reorder ourselves. At the time, it felt like the status of incoming orders changed daily, with distributors saying they couldn’t delete any outstanding orders, before changing that stance with no actual notice. It was tough to keep up with.¹

All of this was made even more tricky because of two wrinkles. The first? Paper shortages had cause some series that were past final order cut-offs to have intense delays - so while in times past, orders would have been cleaned up within a month or two, we were looking at fixing orders for single issues through to July. On top of that, WonderHarbour had been helping a couple stores bring in their DC product, and they had orders that we had to separate out and bill until they could get their own sources running. While we were happy to do that work, it was quite taxing with everything going on. Obviously some things slipped through the cracks at various points - but in the end, we managed to get everyone the books they ordered with minor delays at worst.

Through all of this, we were running two different lists of pulls, with necessitated double the work during final order cut offs and processing days. Not only that, but we had just started running a new version of our subscription service, and had been dealing with straggling special orders on our old system. All of this made for a swampy few months of slogging through data on top of the intake of files.

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Concurrent to all of that, Danica ended up testing positive for COVID on the Friday after the fire. We’re relatively certain that she nabbed it while she was in the hospital for surgery, as I tested negative twice. This meant we were a person down during the early days of the transition, with caused more chaos. Shortly after this, Danica’s mom ended up having to stay with us for a couple of months after hip surgery. Her parents had been on their way to their new home in Nova Scotia when they were called about the surgery time. Danica’s mom turned around and came back, instead of hopping onto another waiting list. This meant that Danica had to stay home to help her mom with recovery while the transition period continued to linger.

Shortly before Danica’s mom recovered and her dad came back to take her to Nova Scotia, we purchase a place of our own. We had been renting forever, bouncing around from place to place with the hope of staying still eventually, when some help from family set us up in a position to buy. In July, we started moving into a mobile home in a beautiful community, free from rent or a mortgage. This obviously presented some personal logistical challenges, which extended to some light renovations that didn’t happen in a timely manner, including flooring which should have been done before we moved in.

It took until early fall for things to settle not just at home, but at the shop. While we felt relief for a couple of quick seconds, we started to notice the piles of neglected projects that had built up over time. We set about tackling those, and found ourselves getting incrementally closer to where we were before everything blew up.

The rest of the year was mercifully uneventful. With things finally sitting, I started doing twice monthly talks at schools about comics, and community. Through that, I finally started getting the itch to write again, but getting the store caught up again took us right through to December retail, and now… we’re here.

To say it’s been a journey is a bit of an understatement. One of the harder bits (and all things considered, it wasn’t that hard in comparison) was trying to reconcile the idea of venting about this period of my life with the reality that we didn’t have a store that burned down. We knew that despite everything, we had it pretty good, but it didn’t stop us from completely burning out several times. Complaining or venting just seemed like being ungrateful for surviving. It still does. But I know that I have to get these things out.

The truth of one thing doesn’t negate another. Yes, it is quantifiably worse to have your business taken away from you for no fault of your own. And yes, dealing with what are the benefits of that as another business can be taxing amidst a storm of your own. Those ideas can co-exist. At this point, they kind of need to for my brain to keep functioning.

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I disappeared for a while. I stopped talking about the things that I love. I stopped engaging with the industry in a meaningful way. That ends now.

This is going to be the year that I let myself breathe. This is the year that I don’t attach sadness to an excuse to avoid something that brings me great joy.

Thank you for taking the time to listen, and for weathering this mess of an ending. The real work begins shortly.

Talk with you all soon,

-B

1. I do want to shout out Universal Distribution (who DC very recently made a full distribution partner) for being the absolute best distributor to deal with, both during that time, and beyond. They were clear with how things would proceed, and worked out a deal with us to keep the orders of the two companies straight while the transition period continued.