Callie Elkins
In the nearly two decades since Kevin Drennan has been running Santa Fe’s premier comic book shop Big Adventure, a lot has changed—especially for nerd communities. Since the pandemic, the general interest in items like tabletop role playing games, video games and comics has grown exponentially, something that goes doubly for Santa Fe, which has an impressively large nerd scene for such a small city. Existing at the intersection of book stores and nerd stores, Big Adventure Comics (328 S Guadalupe St, (505) 992-8783) has carved out a very specific niche for itself. Given that we’re all nerds here, (that includes whoever’s reading this, btw) it felt appropriate to check in with Drennan to see how the business and community surrounding comics have changed in the past few years. This interview has been edited for clarity and concision. (Callie Elkins)
What led you to becoming the owner and operator of Big Adventure Comics, and how has the comic market changed since you became the owner?
I’ll tell you the truth. I was getting laid off from another gig. I had been doing corporate IT for 18 years, and I was ready for a change, and I had been kind of helping the previous owners with their computer stuff, inputting data into their point-of-sale system. I didn’t really intend to, but I kind of ended up taking over all the technological parts of running the store, and I found it very interesting. So when I found out I was going to get laid off from my corporate job, I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to see if I can make them an offer to buy the business.’
Why did I want to do it? I mean, it’s partly because I’ve always loved comics. I was into comics as soon as my dad would let me buy them at the grocery store, but, like, I’ve always loved reading novels, too. It was a chance to own a bookstore. It wasn’t like I was dying to sell Captain America to people, I was just really dying to own a bookstore. I liked the idea that I could leverage all my technology skills to do it right, because increasingly it was becoming point-of-sale- and database-focused to run a retail store, and I was good at that.
Over the last 10 years, the comics specialty business in the US has been moving more and more to a bookstore model—more graphic novels, more manga, more things that aren’t magazines. And I love that, so we’ve been pulling that string. We’re selling a ton more manga. We’re selling a ton more graphic novels, because comics, like the monthly serialized magazines, they’re very flat right now. We have them, and we have a big customer base for it, but it’s fairly flat with some bumps. Stuff still happens there, but you know, we become more and more of a bookstore each year.
How has your experience been as a business owner in Santa Fe?
We’ve pretty much stayed in [the Railyard] neighborhood. If you look on a map, we’ve basically done a full circle, we used to be on Guadalupe, and we’ve kind of gone to Cerillos, then we came back over to the [Jean] Cocteau building, and then we came [across the street]. My most recent experience is that the construction on the Guadalupe corridor was an absolute nightmare. The last couple years have been rough for business owners, and the city of Santa Fe, if you ask me, are a little tone-deaf in terms of how best to support retail. And obviously, this is a town that needs to have a lot of businesses that appeal to visitors, so my experience has been mixed. I love Santa Fe, and I’m totally committed to the place because of the vibe and the environment, but some of the nuts and bolts of business here are challenging because the markets are kind of small and seasonal.
Regarding the people in Santa Fe, because we’re such a niche type business, we have a bunch of dedicated regulars. I have people who I’ve known since they were 8 years old, and I also have adults who have been customers for 15 or 20 years. Because I worked here before I bought it, it’s been over 20 years that I’ve been seeing the clientele. And I love that, right? People you can forge relationships with is another point for local retail. I think people are hungry for it, because they want to come in and deal with a human sometimes, and they want to feel like the store where they spend money knows them, so we lean into that. One of the things with comics, maybe not so much the book side but the magazine side, is that people have a subscription list, so we pull comics for them. They come in every week and pick up their stack, so we know what they like to read, and we can get really deep into suggesting stuff and that kind of thing. I love the folks in town and I love the customer relationships. It’s one of the things that I lean on to keep me positive, to be honest.
What do you feel your impact has been on the larger Santa Fe nerd scene?
I hope we’ve underlined the value of reading. I don’t want nerds to just get obsessive about collecting stuff, but to remember to enjoy the art of it, too. I’d like to think we’ve had that impact. I think it’s important for people to see guys running a business, right? I mean, I don’t know that’s an impact we’ve had on the culture, but that’s an important thing for me. One of our missions is to make sure that men and boys are still exposed to reading, because that’s a problem, right? Reading makes better citizens, makes better people, at least I think so. Hopefully we’ve had some of that kind of impact. Some people who love us might just see us as a place to find old issues of Heavy Metal or something, and they might think, ‘Oh, they’ve been great for my magazine collection.’ And I’m happy about that, but that’s kind of a sideline to what we really want to do, which is to emphasize reading and art.
