BONDED BY BOOKS

Comicazi’s Book Club Is a Boston Institution.

BY JIM DANDENEAU

Book Clubs Are Great Ways

to find new books, an excuse to jump out of one’s comfort zone and read something challenging. But they’re also a great way to build community, something equally true today as it was more than 20 years ago when comic store Comicazi in Somerville, Massachusetts, first started its comic book club. “It was really just an excuse to get together,” says Jill Carter of Comicazi. “We were trying to build up different events for the shop [and] that seemed to make sense.”

Carter, who uses they/them pronouns, says that getting outside of their comfort zone is a key factor in the club’s longevity. So Comicazi orders widely. “I think most of the

[book club] members are really just trying to read widely and see everything that the industry has to offer,” they tell us. “There’s always Marvel and DC and indie and manga and all ages. It really runs the gamut.”

Recent book club selections have been all over the place: Sarah Gailey and Pius Bak’s soapy class horror comic, Eat the Rich and Alice Oseman’s YA webcomic Heartstopper have been two recent features, alongside classic superhero fare like the Geoff Johns/ Rags Morales Black Adam story “Black Reign” from JSA, or John Byrne’s Sensational She-Hulk Ultimate Collection. “People put in suggestions for what to read,” says Carter. “I’ll build a list based on new releases and best sellers just to mix things up.”

This is, of course, good for the shop too. The shop displays the last 10 book club picks prominently, and sales definitely follow. Book club books “end up being some of our best sellers all year,” says Carter.

And it’s not just Comicazi patrons who are pleasantly surprised by book club picks. Carter told us that they’re typically into indie books and don’t vibe as much with superhero stuff (“I’m a pretty big Jeff Lemire fan, and anytime there’s a new book out, that will inevitably end up on the list,” they say). But last February’s book club pick was an outlier for them in that it was both a superhero book and it was a behemoth: the Milestone

Compendium, a new collection of the first year or so of stories from each of the original Milestone Comics titles, the comic company founded in the ’90s by a group of spectacular Black creators like Dwayne McDuffie, Denys Cowan, Derek Dingle, and MD Bright, among others. “We did two sections out of the Milestone Compendium,” Carter tells us. “I personally really always liked Xombi [a book about a Korean-American scientist who invents a nanotechnology virus and gets infected with it by his assistant to save his life, becoming immortal in the process]. We did that as part of a Black history month push, reading Hardware and Static for all of February, and that was really great.”

Of course, keeping things fresh after 20 years of running the club means getting creative with procurement, too. Comicazi has to go deeper than just ordering what their distributor has in stock from DC and Marvel. “We buy a lot of collections, so we’re pulling used books out of the bargain bins and bringing in our own copies and trading them around,” Carter says. “It’s not always about just selling a lot of books.”

In Comicazi’s case, it’s about reading them with friends.

Comicazi’s comic book club meets on the first and third Tuesdays of every month. Upcoming books include James Patrick and Rem Broo’s Kaiju Score and Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen’s Little Monsters. Comicazi is located at 407 Highland Avenue, Somerville, MA 02144. If your shop does something fun and unexpected to get more people to read comics, tweet us @denofgeekus.