Dark Horse Entertainment Shutters Its Stores, Pivots Business Strategy Away from Comics
Dark Horse Comics is no longer in the business of the medium that brought it to prominence. Amid the news that the company’s creators want to unionize, they announced the permanent and total closure of its brick-and-mortar chain store, Things From Another World. The outlet has a famous location on the Universal Studio CityWalk as well as others in Oregon – and they’re all going away.
Dark Horse put out a statement regarding their plans to shutter their comic stores and expand their operations in other areas that are looking more lucrative, such as film, TV, games, and streaming. At a glance, this seems like a wise move with the uptick in those areas. The Umbrella Academy was a hit on Netflix, and Hellboy movies are still getting made. Like it or not, quality be damned.
The integral part of this redirection is the launch of their interactive brand, Dark Horse Games. The parent company needs to find capital, and they figure the best method is to allocate funds from the retail leases. That was becoming more difficult for them to maintain anyway.
Between labor costs, jacked up by inflation, and steep commercial lease rates combined with dwindling comic book readership, owning, operating, and maintaining physical hobby shops is an increasingly low-margin, low-benefit venture. Specializing exclusively in comic publication and distribution presents challenges, as it has for many years – even decades.
Yet, Dark Horse still claims that they aren’t giving up on distribution entirely; they’re just shaking things up and recalibrating the model. Moreover, they will help existing independent retailers. Not running their own stores reduces overhead and frees them up to deepen supply lines and relationships with local comic book stores across the country.
Dark Horse started in the comic book retail industry back in the mid-1980s when it was founded by Mike Richardson, who used profits from his shop to fund the start-up imprint. The steady straying from the company’s roots may have been the plan internally for some time, but it’s really kicked off now that Richardson has been removed from his place in the hierarchy of his life’s work last March.
