My Ebay Business- L&K’S Anime Otaku Heaven- Part 1 February 23, 2008
Posted by 54071 in : Uncategorized , 2 commentsHi Everyone.
As I’m sure by now, anyone reading Fanboy@50 realizes that I run a Ebay Home Based Business called L&K’S Anime Otaku Heaven, and I thought it was high time I gave everyone a little bit of background about my business…
I started my business, L&K’S Anime Otaku Heaven four years ago on Ebay….but anime figures and anime in general was not what the business’s original direction was aimed toward…nor was it called ” anime otaku heaven “…
In the summer of 2003, around my birthday to be exact, myself and my friend Ken decided that we could do things better than the local hobby shop where we were buying magic cards from ( and I was purchasing my comics from at the time ) and so we launched our Ebay business which was called…L&K’S Collectible Cards and Comics…get it…Lew and Ken…I thought it was a good business name. 
Originally we had decided to concentrate solely on used comics ( which of course were my finished readings ) and deal in Magic the Gathering, CCG ( Collectible Card Game )cards, which of course we were intimately familiar with due to our actually playing the game.
The initial first year of this business was a learning experience for the both of us, and since we were basically a two man operation, the chores of running the business at the time were split between the both of us, as far as listing items and following thru with the shipping of items purchased to our customers. Of course in the first year, we really made no profit, as we were both learning the in’s and out’s of Ebay’s structure…and by structure I mean all the fee’s that were associated with running an online Ebay business which included at the time…
- listing fees
- store fees
- final value fees
these were just the Ebay fees back than, Paypal’s fees for transactions processed were a separate entity at that time, and were deducted after someone paid for an item.
This is how Paypal still works today, the only difference between than and now is the fact that Paypal is now just another Ebay asset/ acquisition, so basically this is just another Ebay fee, that goes into Ebay’s coiffures if you will.
In year two, we decided to expand the business into Miniatures gaming which included Hero Clix and ( at the time I thought was just a passing fad ) Mage Knight figures from a company called Wiz Kids Games.
We also decided to include the Lord of the rings CCG game, produced by Decipher games ( I should say that this was more a decision based on the fact that the first movie was being released at about this time ) rather than how popular this game was at the time.
Another year of business passed by with out a lot of movement and at best lackluster sales.
I had decided in our third year, that I wanted to go beyond Ebay and our online presence…which due to our lack of available funding would necessitate our having to bootstrap this end of the business or in other words we would have to pay cash out of our pockets for anything we wanted to do outside of the net.
At this point we had another person working with us, a friend who I’ve known ever since he was a kid, named Chris.
Year three was also the year I took more control of the direction that L&K would go in, and what we would aim for…in the area of NY State that we happen to reside in, there were several ( at least two card shops that I was aware of ) that held CCG card tournaments every once in a while, along with the local Toys R US in the town I happen to live in.
The thing was only one of the two card shops were running sanctioned tournaments..I won’t go into detail about running sanctioned tournaments at this time, but maybe I’ll talk about them in a future post…so we were going to start to run tournaments…Magic the Gathering tournaments to be exact, and of course I wanted to make sure that they would be sanctioned tournaments, so to that end I got in touch ( and not without a lot of problems, due to the fact that we were not a brick and mortar shop ) with Wizards of the Coast, the company responsible for Magic, and found that we would have to get another card or comic speciality shop to sponsor us, so that we would be able to offer points to the players that were involved in playing in any tournaments that we ran. I also at this time got involved with a new card game from a company called Upper Deck, the same company that puts out all kinds of Sports Cards ( and now are responsible for the CCG Game, World of Warcraft, based on the hugely popular online game ) called the VS System, which is based around comics book characters from comic publishers DC and Marvel respectivly.
I was so driven to make these events a success, I even got myself sanctioned to be a judge in order to officiate the VS System tournaments in particular.
So in the winter of 2005, we held our first tournament/ comic book and miniatures event, this event would also include our first Hero Clix tournament, which would be sanctioned due to our having a judge who was experienced in playing and judging Hero Clix game tournaments.
There was just one problem with our first event attempt…
First, we had done some advertising, and hoped that the fact that we left flyer’s at some of the local comics shops would be enough to have parents bring their children to where the event was being held…
Second, and this was to be a major hurdle…was mother nature!
The second Saturday of the new year would bring to us an Ice and Snow storm…I know, Lew why schedule a tournament in that mess!
In my defense, I had been making all the plans for this first tournament, including getting the place to play, the local Howard Johnsons, for $100 for the entire day, getting the magic cards and the vs cards that we would need for the day, making sure that what we charged would be enough to at least cover the cost of the cards themselves, and hopefully make some sales between having cards to offer and the miniatures and of course the used comics ( which I might add were four full case boxes comics mind you! ) and of course everything had been paid for in advance. The only thing that I couldn’t plan for was the weather, and unfortunately everything had been set in motion so there would be no turning back.
Needless to say, mother nature kept most of the players away, and the kids who did show up wound up coming to play in the Hero Clixs miniatures tournament.
In the end, we wound up making enough cash to cover the cost of the Howard Johnson’s fee, and not much else, so we went home early that day. I was pretty disappointed with the whole experience, and we went home with a ton of inventory that would have to be listed on Ebay to make up for what we had not made at the tournament.
The original plan was to have another event or two at best that would make up the rest of our push to go outside of the Ebay store…in my excitement and drive to make the business grow ( and ultimately be able to leave a job that was slowly but most assuredly making me very sick on the inside ) I had decided to up the ante and schedule another two tournaments/sales events ( for lack of a better term ) that would take place by the end of June…my thinking at this point was that we needed to try to have consistent events in order to draw people and make a name for L&K…so the next event was going to happen in March of 2005, and would include everything that we had in the first disaster in January.
While this event went a bit better, and the weather was much nicer, it still was pretty much a sleeper, with some kids who were playing Magic, no one playing VS, and again the big winner for the day was Hero Clix.
We did better in the sales department this time around, but still went home with a lot of inventory to have to list on Ebay.
At this point, I was a bit frustrated with how the event had done, and I was thinking of just scrapping the idea of another event all together.
I mean, I was was starting to use my own credit cards to finance a lot of the expense involved with getting the stuff we needed to make these events happen, and that was something I did without hesitation, but it was not something I would be able to do for another two or ( possibly dependant upon my desperation at the job I hated ) three events.
And than one day in April of 2005, I had seen a commercial on television for an item that would change my outlook on the business that ken and I had based on comics and card games…it was a DVD…for a film by the legendary Hayao Miyazaki…
The film was called Spirited Away…and I was!
end of part 1
East & West- The difference between American and Japanese Comics
Posted by 54071 in : Comics , 4 commentsThis morning I came across this post from a blog called ” He’s Just So Stackable ” and the title to the post was Comic Books Are Good.
What caught my eye actually was the title of the post, so of course I had to take a gander at what was being written, and of course I had to leave my two cents worth of opinion which was this…
The beginning of the post started with this….
“
Lately I’ve been doing a lot of reading.
Of course, there are many people who wouldn’t call what I was reading real reading, because I’ve been reading a lot of comics lately. People who say comics aren’t real reading can go read the latest Danielle Steele novel or something equally productive.
Anyways, I started with the mini-series leading up to DC’s big Infinite Crisis from a couple of years back. I had read many of the spoilers for that big thing, but I found it enjoyable regardless. To be honest, I also enjoyed Zero Hour way back when, so maybe my opinion doesn’t count for much.
Generally, I find myself pretty non-critical (for the most part) when I’m reading a superhero comic. Still, I found the whole thing too serious. That’s probably why I enjoyed the Day of Vengeance lead-up so enjoyable, because Bill Willingham knows how to make a comic fun and still have high stakes (go read his Vertigo series Fables. I haven’t read it for a few years, but it was great up to issue 20, and continues that way, by all accounts). ”
And to which I had left the following comment…
” Nice title for the post.
I’ve always found ( on a general reading level ) that comics are good. I learned to read because of comics, and I also took a major interest in everything to do with art and animation ( initially ) due to reading comics. The problem ( here in the US ) has always been that we trivialize the comic, unless a major event happens and becomes newsworthy…two examples would be pertaining to ” Death ” in comics..The Death of Superman, as far as I can remember was the first time that the news media actually ran any type of reports on comics in general that was not aimed as a major witch hunt to dig out some sort of ” subversive ” issue in the comics page. And very recently the ” Death of Captain America ” was a featured article in the news, along with a post on USA Today.com ( I believe ) just the other day about the ” New Red ” Hulk, and Marvel’s trying to get some cheap publicity for the new Hulk movie due this summer movie season.
I could write a bit more here, but I might just save it for my blog and a nice comparison between East and West attitudes towards the Comic…”
Lew
So I thought that a comparison of the American Comic and the Japanese Comic ( Manga, for those of you who might not have been sure..) was in order…
The American Comic
The early format of the comic book was introduced in the 1930’s with a book called Famous Funnies, which was a compilation of Sunday comics, this was basically a collection of the Sunday funnies without the whole newspaper.
This collection of comics was to be followed up later with the release of the first actual format printed comic book, and the introduction of the first super hero, a character named Superman, introduced by two kids named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.
Siegel was an American writer, and Shuster was a Canadian born Artist, who were living in Cleavland Ohio at the time of their collaboration of superman.
The introduction of Superman heralded in what would be termed the Golden Age of comics, to be followed later by the Silver, Bronze and the Modern Age of comics.
Okay, so there was your little bit of comics lineage…the real thing that I want to talk about as far as the American comic is this one name…
Frederick Wertham.
Wertham wrote a book…
Wertham’s book, Seduction of the Innocent, a book published in 1954, warned that the comic book was a bad form of popular literature, and was a major cause of juvenile delinquency. The book would be at best a minor bestseller….at it’s worst, it was what galvanized parents and would later be the main cause for a US Congressional committee to be launched, and this committee would take a cold and hard look at the comics industry, and thus was the Comics Code Authority launched, voluntarily by the the comic book publishers to self censor their own titles.
I refer to this incident because of how we as Americans still look at the comic today, but before I continue I want to take a look at the Japanese comic…
The Japanese comic is called Manga.
Now I have seen at least two different meanings for the term Manga, this explanation was taken from the book I am currently reading, Manga - Sixty Years of Japanese Comics…
” From the Oxford English Dictionary…they are Japanese comic books and cartoon films with a science fiction and fantasy theme “…this is wrong on two counts…”
Manga are not Japanese films, and they deal with a wide range of subject matter..the other explanation reads like this…
Taken from Wikepedia… “ Manga, literally translated, means “whimsical pictures”. The word first came into common usage in the late 18th century with the publication of such works as Sant? Ky?den’s picturebook “Shiji no yukikai” (1798), and in the early 19th century with such works as Aikawa Minwa’s “Manga hyakujo” (1814) and the celebrated Hokusai manga containing assorted drawings from the sketchbook of the famous ukiyo-e artist Hokusai. “
From what I have read so far, the manga comic in Japan is a widespread phenomenon, and is an accepted part of their culture.
In Japan, Manga are not just for children…Men, Women, and Children ( and or teenagers, male & female ) all read Manga.
It is common place in japan for the business man to be on a train, either on the way to or from work reading a Manga magazine or book.
As a matter of fact, the Japanese have built up the manga to the point where it, the Manga Comic, is able to stand up to the dominance of film and television.
This is how rooted into their culture, the Japanese comic, the Manga is in Japan…
There are no congressional hearings into the comic in Japan…but rather in Japan, the comic is a strong, accepted, and apparently wide spread, accepted reading medium, that is accepted by all…with out the stigma or ridicule…
While here in the US, we still frown upon the comic… we still keep the comic book hidden from view…we still make fun of the adult who reads it…we still only get excited about it when it can be newsworthy…
And just maybe, because of our own cultural differences with our Japanese counterparts, those who read the Comic, or if you will the Manga, and just maybe, our own short sightedness, the American comic will always be relegated to being nothing more than a minor note in our American culture.