Jim Hanley's Universe MANHATTAN : 4 West 33rd Street New York, NY 10001 Tel: 212.268.7088 Fax: 212.268.7728 Store Hours: Mon - Sat: 9:00am - 11:00pm Sun: 10:00am - 9:00pm STATEN ISLAND: 325 New Dorp Lane Tel: 718.351.6299 Store Hours: Mon - Sun: 12:00pm - 9:00pm

A Journey Into the Universe of Comics
By Robert Covarrubias

Hailed as New York City's best comic shop in 2001 by The New York Daily News, Jim Hanley’s Universe is any comic book fans dream. With two locations in Manhattan and Staten Island Jim Hanley’s Universe has a full range of comic titles and related merchandise that is available to anyone. Carrying mainstream comics from DC and Marvel as well as Manga, Graphic Novels, Small Press, Indie and Mini Comics including an extensive back issue collection and lets not forget the Statues, Toys, T-shirts, DVDs, Trading Cards, Books and more!! I met with both Rich Hafstead who is one of the founders and Ron Hill who’s been the senior store manager since 1985.

Ron Hill and Rich Hafstead

Robert Covarrubias: Who founded Jim Hanley’s Universe?

Ron Hill: The store was founded by Jim Hanley and Rich Hafstead in 1985, Jim was a life long comic fan…he was involved in early comic book fandom. He used to go to all the Comic Conventions back in the late 60’s early 70’s Jim and Richard are both from New York and Jim is someone who has worked in retail for many years before he opened this business and his goal was to provide a higher level of customer service that wasn’t being supplied at the time in 1985 in comics stores, cause up to 1985 most comic stores were off the main street. They didn’t have cash registers they were usually these little backdoor shops set up by fans who didn’t have much to do with real retail and Jim’s goals were to bring comic book retail up to the levels of other types of retail by putting the stores in places that weren’t on back roads but on main streets. He started bringing in cash registers and lights and cleaning the place and on top of that also having a very good selection of merchandise especially catering to all types of comic fans cause most comic stores in the early eighties only really dealt with people like Marvel and DC comics. Jim being a huge fan of comics realized that there was a lot of potential catering to all fans of comics which were being ignored by the eighties. Most comic stores you’re gonna go to till this day still ignore people who like Archie and Robert Crumb you cant find the stuff in most comic stores and we have all that here.

RC: When did the toys start to come into play with the comic business?

RON H: Well we were carrying toys from day one, we didn’t have a lot of toys because in the mid eighties there wasn’t really a meaningful way to get the toys. Most of the comic book toys that were being produced were by Mattel, Kenner and places like that. They weren’t really selling to the direct market so we would get stuff here and there but it wasn’t a big focus of the company in the early days because the supply wasn’t there. If you were Toys R Us you could get the stuff but it wasn’t really readily available in the comic stores and then in the early nineties Diamond started picking up more and other distributors started carrying more and more toys. Toy Biz kind of made some entries into the comic book market with the Marvel toys. Probably the big turning point was back to the first Batman movie cause Toy Biz did those Batman toys and we started getting more stuff. Before then we were carrying things from like Applause, like the PVC figurines but there wasn’t really a whole lot of comic book toys up until the late eighties early nineties. First couple of years were mostly about comics but once Batman started happening and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles then all the original Toy Biz Marvel toys that’s what kind of bought us in more into the toy business.

RICH H: It was four years before we had a toy key on the cash register.

RON H: So, the first four years up until 1989 we didn’t even have a key for toys…

Rich Hafstead: Just miscellaneous…

RON H: We’ve tracked our monthly sales on this stuff since 89’ so it has grown and also that same time the whole world of statues started happening also in the early nineties and that became a big thing too.

RC: I noticed that when you enter the store you have announcements posted for all types of comic book artists is that something that this store is known for?

RON H: We do it a lot we don’t always feel like we do it up to the full potential; we’re always trying to find a way to publicize these things to get a better turn out.

RICH H: without spending money (laughs) …

RON H: without spending money, we try to build up interest. We love comic books, we love comic art and we’ve always believed in the people who create them without the creators there’s nothing we wouldn’t have a business here we wouldn’t have toys the comics, t-shirts we wouldn’t have any of this stuff if it wasn’t for the guys who think up these things and so since day one we’ve been very aware of identifying the creators who are doing the new and important things and supporting their work.

RC: What is the turn out like?

RON H: It depends on who it is, sometimes the unknown guys have small turn outs they get 20 or 30 people sometimes you get Jim Lee and you get a line down the block it depends on who the creator is, we do give a platform to some people who are new. You don’t necessarily get the best turn outs but it does have the effect of our clientele maybe seeing their work and going “oh, who’s this guy” and looking at their stuff and getting the ball rolling. We do create appearances large and small.

RC: Do you guys attend conventions to promote the store?

RON H: We don’t actually sell at conventions anymore but just last week we’re handing out a circular at the Big Apple Con down the street. Sometimes we do bag advertising and hand out flyers.

RICH H: for a long time we didn’t do it because as the store grew…you have the opportunity to do what a convention does and it just became less relevant where as when your just starting out doing six hundred dollars on a Saturday, it was like Wow and now, my partner describes the convention as, there are ten hour days with two hours of heavy lifting on either end, there’s just no motivation for it.

RC: Do you also sell your items on a website?

RICH H: Passively, it’s not something we do aggressively by any means

RON H: Our website presently is just like a full color brochure for the store we do sell some stuff on Ebay, we are making some moves towards trying to set up a full retail department on the web we’re actually making some moves towards getting a point of sale on the toy system. Getting out a more modernize inventory control and with that hopefully will come the web retailing and then we’ll make a meaningful entrance in there …right now there are a few guys who are doing it but that’s one of the things that we’re going to pursue in the future, we don’t wanna do it half assed.

RC: So what is the website address?

RON H: jhuniverse.com

RC: The world of toy and memorabilia collecting is becoming bigger each day thanks to the world of comics, what is your feeling on how this hobby is growing?

RON H: I feel like its kind of like the same people…It’s seems that it’s become cheaper now to make accessories if you’re a fan of something it seems like there’s a lot more sculptors in the world and the whole cost of manufacturing things is cheaper and now it seems much like comics, you can do a small run of toys and hit your whole audience and make a profit where as twenty years ago you had to make a million figures or else you wouldn’t make a dime, now you have these small shops out there who do all these weird toys that they never would of thought of making, I mean they have toys for R rated films now regularly that you didn’t have twenty years ago…

RICH H: I’m not sure what the whole process is but like years ago you had to make the mold and the mold was usually expensive and it was low cost per unit so you had to make a lot of units and now it’s a different production so that you can do it in small quantities so that it isn’t that high up front hit for the mold.

RON H: The manufacturing process has gotten to the point where you can have all these Scarface toys and x-rated toys, we don’t really get much of the x-rated toys but if it’s genre film based, we carry it. We carry stuff that’s related to comics, we get a little far out sometimes…80% of the time it’s directly related to products already selling that are tied into comics. This May is our Twentieth Anniversary, it’s been a rocky twenty years but we’ve survived and were still here. rated toys but if it’s genre film based, we carry it. We carry stuff that’s related to comics, we get a little far out sometimes…80% of the time it’s directly related to products already selling that are tied into comics. This May is our Twentieth Anniversary, it’s been a rocky twenty years but we’ve survived and were still here.