We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Peter J Mellini a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Peter J, appreciate you joining us today. Any thoughts about whether to ask friends and family to support your business. What’s okay in your view?

Asking friends and family to support my business, in my head, can be the hardest thing to do but realistically it should be the easiest. Your friends and family are your first fans! These are people who support you even before you start a business or do anything creative. I’ve worked in comic shops for almost half my life and I’ve owned a store for over a decade, in that time I’ve made a lot of friends who just walked into the store one day looking for some comics.

I think the reason it feels difficult is because it’s a weird feeling of maybe guilt or worrying about it being perceived as taking advantage of the friendship, I don’t know. But most people have people that want to support them and want to see them succeed. As long as you remember that and appreciate it, then it’s a good thing.

With The economy the way it is I truly appreciate the regular customers who walk into the shop and put down their hard-earned money for their comics. I’ve run a couple of Kickstarter in the last few years and as stressful as they can be, there’s a thrill when people support the project.

If you want to get over feeling weird asking friends and family to support your business, crowdfunding will do that for you haha…

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

That’s a big question haha..

So I started reading and collecting comics when I was 10 years old. I’m 42 now so yeah, comics have been a part of my life for a long time. It’s something I enjoyed even though it wasn’t the cool thing to be into. Since then I wanted to work in comics in one shape or form. When I was younger I wanted to draw comics and quickly learned I didn’t have that talent haha. So I looked into writing comics, I started taking a lot of creative writing classes and just reading a lot. Once I got out of high school there really weren’t courses to write comics like there are today, so a lot of comic writers I admired were part-time journalists, so I studied that.

While going to college I worked at a comic book store part-time for about 4 years, I learned a lot and also got to see the other side of the industry. I worked there until that store closed and then I just kind of floated around, working in offices, I worked after school learning center, and although I was making decent money I wasn’t enjoying it at all. Then I accepted a full-time position at an Asian food distributor and that lasted about 2 months until I was laid off with a group of others a week before Christmas. I took that as a sign.

So I took the “bonus” they gave me, applied for unemployment, and decided to go back into selling comics. I still had connections and friends who helped get me product and for a few months, I was selling comics out of the back of my car to a dedicated group of friends and customers I had kept in touch with from the old store. Through word of mouth, I built a decent-sized customer list and within a year I got an offer to run a comic shop in San Gabriel.

So I worked in that shop for about two years and it was great. It was a small boutique shop, kind of hidden and we were only open 3 days a week and that made it special because you knew people who showed up made the effort to do so. The owner had a full-time job and a family and eventually, he couldn’t do it anymore and so instead of closing I made him an offer and bought the store and run it since 2011.

Since then there a been a ton of challenges, we had to change how we did everything during the pandemic, and in 2021 the storefront got sold and we moved about half a mile up to a storefront that is three times the size (which has been a challenge on its own.) As stressful as it can be it’s still a lot of fun and not sure I can see myself doing anything else.

In 2017, a group of friends and I started the first Comic Book Expo in our hometown of East LA. The East LA CAPE (Comicbooks, Art & Pop-Culture Expo) was held in 2017-2019 at the El Gallo Plaza in the heart of East LA in the heart of East LA. The show was put together by a committee of people who grew up or lived in East LA and wanted to help bring something that doesn’t normally come to an area like East LA. I hoped it would be popular but it was huge. We housed like 90 vendors, we had lines around the block of people trying to get in, we had a dream list of organizations we hoped to work with in the future and they were reaching out to us in the build-up of the first event. The community came out for this show, the local community as well as the geek community. It was a rollercoaster.

Everything was going great and we were prepping for a 2020 show and the world changed. We haven’t held a CAPE show since 2019 a lot has changed since then but we are working on bringing it back in one form or another. There is still a strong following from the community and we see it and want to bring it back too.

In 2019, after the success of two East LA CAPE shows I decided to finally get in there with a comic of my own. Teaming up with my long-time friend Miguel Acedo, a screening writing professor at Cal State LA, we wrote an all-ages comic book. Gordo The Teenage Flying Saucer is a sci-fi, all-ages, action-adventure comic about a 13-year-old who is struck by a green light in the sky which gives him the powers and abilities of a flying saucer. Along with his friend CeeCee, a shapeshifting alien butt kicker, they protect the small desert city of Stardust.

I met Miguel Acedo as a customer at the first comic book store I worked at in college, so it felt only fitting that I met the artist of Gordo The Teenage Flying Saucer, Valeria Ontiveros, as a vendor at CAPE. The three of us got together and threw around some ideas, developed the book for a few months, and then premiered the first issue at the 2019 East LA CAPE. Since then we’ve had two successful Kickstarter, three issues, with a planned 4th and 5th this year in celebration of the fifth anniversary.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I think like everyone the pandemic was a big change. We went from having new comics to sell to customers that came in weekly to being closed for nearly 4 months. It was scary and honeslty I wasn’t sure if the store would surivie. I tried to avoid stressing out by using that time make some changes on how we did business. Alot of stuff I had planned to do but now I had the time to put into place. I overhauled the store website, created a mailing list and really went all in on the social media. In the end keeping connected to customers is the key, takes a lot of work sometimes but it pays off.

Can you talk to us about your experience with buying businesses?

So buying the comic shop was a kind of no brainer to me. It was a childhood dream to own a comic book and the opprotunity was there. Honestly buying the shop was pretty simple, the store had been open for about 3 years when I bought it and I had run it for 2 of those years so things seemed natural. I hadn’t run a business before so it was alot of learning as I went, I caught on as quickly as I could. The one thing I will say is I kept the name Nostalgic, which has grown on me but it wouldn’t have been my first choice haha.

Contact Info:

• Website: Www.NostalgicComicShop.com
• Instagram: @NostalgicComicShop
• Facebook: @NostalgicComicShop
• Twitter: @NostalgicComics
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/nostalgic-comic-shop-san-gabriel

Image Credits
Marisol Ceja, Joanna Morales, Kristen Parraz