Welcome to The Corner Box with David Hedgecock and John Barber. With decades of experience in all aspects of comic book production, David, John, and their guests will give you an in-depth, and insightful look at the past, present, and future of the most exciting medium on the planet—comics—and everything related to it.

[00:24] David Hedgecock: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to The Corner Box. I'm one of your hosts, David Hedgecock, and with me, as always, is my very, very good friend, that handsome devil, John Barber, but we're not alone, folks. We are joined by Challengers Comics + Conversations comic shop owner, Patrick Brower, and this is the second half of the interview that we conducted with him. The first half came out last week. Let's finish off our interview with a real-live comic book retailer. Yay!

All right. We talked a little bit about one of the biggest challenges. I want to ask you, what has got you excited in 2025, and one or two of the things that make you look forward to 2026, not only in your business, but also personal-wise, in terms of comics? Because I'm assuming that you're still a fan of comic books. That is a big assumption, and John and I certainly have not been fans of comics, from time to time, while we've been working in the industry, but I'm assuming your love of comics is undefeated. Business-wise and personal-wise, what’s got you jazzed in 2025, and then the follow-up, what are you looking forward to over 2026?

[01:33] Patrick Bauer: The way I like to describe it is that, while I'm often angry at the comics industry, I always love comics. Comics just get me excited. The number of times I close a book and just say out loud, “that was so good,” is way more than me not saying it, and one of the things I like to say regularly is, comics are better right now than they ever have been. There's more great books coming out now than ever before. There's also more bad books coming out than before, because there's more books than ever before, but with the sheer volume, which does make it difficult to--and I don't like using the word curate, because it gives us more credit than we deserve. We're just ordering what we think we can sell. We're not ordering based off of any high-level sophistication. We're just trying to buy for our store, what we think there's an audience for, whether we like it or not. I think curating it would only be putting out books we like, and it would be a very different store than the one we have now, but yeah, I still love comics, and I'm excited by just good comics, and what worked for us this year, and I'm sure if you talk to other retailers, everyone's going to give you the same answer--It's the Absolute Universe, it's the Energon Universe, and it's the Ultimate Universe.

Those things are selling, for the most part, so much better than everything else in the industry, and I say for the most part, because they all have their lesser performing books of each one, and it's not necessarily a level of quality, but it's true that Absolute Green Lantern doesn't sell anywhere near as well as Absolute Wonder Woman, that kind of comparison, and while the Energon Universe for Skybound, that has G.I. Joe, and Transformers, and Void Rivals, there's definitely levels of what those books sell, but as a universe, they get people excited to come in, and excited to buy a lot more than just a book in that series, and Dal and I were just talking about Absolute Batman, which is on Issue #15, and we have yet to find that book's ceiling.

[03:30] David: That's crazy.

[03:31] Patrick: The most recent issue was an Absolute Joker issue, not his first appearance, and we ordered an aggressively high number, and sold out in 48 hours, which is insane to us, because the number we ordered was to get us through until #16 came out, and we failed on that, and people are going crazy. It's Absolute Joker, but he's been in the book before. Sure, this issue was all about him, but people buy this book like everything is a first appearance, when they're not, and people buy multiples, and variants. They'll buy the A cover, and a variant cover, and there's so many variant covers, and we think it's so unnecessary. I don't mind if you’re just like, “I just want the C cover this time,” but it's when you're buying the A cover and the B cover, and the C cover, my comic loving brain always says, “Why don't you buy three different comics for that same money? You have three things you can read.”

[04:31] David: “Because I want all the covers for Spider-Girl, Patrick.” That's why, and the fact that you make that difficult for me is my only bone of contention. I want to subscribe to all the--

[04:38] Patrick: Marvel makes it difficult for you, because we can't just say “David gets the A, the B, and the C cover,” because they don't differentiate like that. Yet our system, Managed Comics, does, and God forbid, let's say--Mark Brooks always does a cover--It's not always the same barcode extension. The first half of the barcode means Marvel Comics. The second half means Spider-Girl. Then you have the extension, and the first half of the extension means issue number. The back half of the extension means printing number. Well, there's nothing in there for variant covers. So, the variant covers now have to extend into the printing section. So, let's say it's Issue #12. So, it's 012-0111/0112/0113 for the different covers, and publishers like Dynamite, or lately DC has been doing some books, especially the Marvel/DC, DC/Marvel crossovers, that have 22 covers per book. You're blowing through the 10 digits you could possibly have for the printing number. So, they have to keep creating new codes, which then, when you change the extension that much, it becomes a new series code, but if you knew that Mark Brooks was always doing the B cover, you could have the right number. So, it could be issue 012-002, 013-002--oh, I'm sorry, 0112--You'd always know “the one that ends in 12 is a Mark Brooks.” No, because they don't always put his cover in that section. So, in our system, you could be signed up for the A, B, and C cover, and never get them. Comics Data is the biggest bane of my existence.

[06:20] David: I see the veins in his forehead right now. For a comic book retailer, I thought they were much more angry than Patrick has been so far, but I'm seeing it now, John.

[06:29] John Barber: I can go on about UPCs for about half an hour without stopping myself.

[06:34] Patrick: Every publisher does it differently now, when Diamond used to fix all of that. There's no Diamond to fix it, and nobody cares. Lunar does everything the same way for all their publishers, which is great. PRH doesn’t. So, that means the data we get per shipment will have different data annotations for Marvel, for IDW, for Dark Horse, for Boom! Boom! is the worst, because the way they format it--and this is a conversation I just had with someone at Skybound. In a previous life, I was an inker in the comics industry, in the late 90s, early 2000s. I've worked on books. You're never going to find a bigger proponent for comic book inking than me--Inkers' names don't belong in the title in the data file. If you want to say Cover A, Ryan Ottley, great. I don't need to know who colored it. I don't need to know who inked it in the data file. Put that on the cover, absolutely. Give them all the credit in the world. Don't muddy up my data files with the full names of everyone who worked on a cover. I want title, issue number, cover designation, artist's name. I don't care about first names, but I'll accept it, and if it's a second print. I don't need everything to say variant cover, because guess what? Every single cover on a comic is a variant. If there's more than one cover, each cover, in itself, is a variant. The main cover is also a variant, because there's a different choice.

In 2025, Marvel and DC working together again has been amazing. The different Batman/Deadpool books, and Deadpool/Batman books, the dumbest thing about it is that they're each different books, but it's called Deadpool/Batman or Batman/Deadpool. So, when the DC version came out two months later, and because they each had 20 covers, even the--God, the Marvel reprint, the second printing of it was so dumb, because it had a logo cover that's Logan and Lobo on the cover, but it still says, Deadpool/Batman in the corner. You look at that, like “what is that?” Everybody thinks that the DC version is just a new printing, not realizing it's an entirely new book, entirely different creative team.

[08:44] David: Yeah, I can totally see how, as a publisher, you wouldn't put that together, but I can totally see, in practice, how that completely c*cks things up.

[08:56] Patrick: Because there were so many covers for the first one, and for the second one, literally half the covers didn't have Batman or Deadpool on them. It was just “hey, let's put a DC character and a Marvel character together.” So, they're doing it again. Next year, we’ve got Superman and Spider-Man, and then Spider-Man and Superman. At least for the DC version, all the variant covers have iterations of the characters that appear in the story. So, it could be Ben Rielly's Spider-Man with Superboy-Prime. There's a super and a spider per cover, fine, but we're going to have the same problem two months later. When the Spider-Man/Superman book comes out, people aren't going to know, and we sold so well on the first one that we ordered higher on the second one, when in theory, we should have ordered lower, because we didn't realize people would not know that it was a new book. Not that they don't want it. They just don't know. We did have more pre-orders on the second one, but in general, people coming in off the street, looking at it, they just think, “I’ve got that already,” and if we're not there to correct them, then it's just a lost sale.

[09:59] John: That's one of the things that I feel like publishers have always been bad at, and I imagine it's even worse now, is that not realizing that your average customer isn't the expert customer you're hearing from on the internet. I do that, too, nowadays. I'll walk into the comic bookstore, and I'll buy a sh!t ton of stuff. I'll just see stuff on the shelf, and I'll be like, “that looks neat. I didn't know this existed.” It's my job. I keep up, relatively, with comics, but--I don't know--I missed--There was a John le Carré comic coming out from Dark Horse, and I'm like, “what is this?” There's a lot of stuff like that, but I think, yeah, that's fascinating.

[10:35] Patrick: I have a hard time knowing when things are out, because especially if it's something that I've unpacked for next week, the number of times when I say to somebody, “oh, man, did you read the new issue of Amazing? It was so good. Wait, is that next week's? Oh, can I not sell that yet? Oh, no, sorry.” I'm constantly confused with when the actual on-sale date for books are anymore.

[10:58] David: Yeah, that makes sense.

[11:00] Patrick: Yeah, especially if you just did initial orders, and the FOCs like, “wait, I was just reading about this book. What format of the cycle am I in?

[11:09] David: I think the simple solution for that Batman/Deadpool thing is just, hopefully they hear from retailers that are saying that, you just put a subtitle on it. It's Superman/Spider-Man: War of the Worlds, and then the Spider-Man/Superman is Two Worlds Collide.

[11:23] Patrick: What I would say is, the easy answer, which they're never going to do: whoever comes out second, put a #2 on it.

[11:30] David: There's no way they're going to do that.

[11:31] Patrick: You're absolutely right, but I mean, that's the clearest indicator to a reader that it's a different book.

[11:37] David: But it's not a #2, and there's no way that Marvel's going to have a #2, and let DC have the #1, and vice versa.

[11:43] John: I’ve got the solution. The first one that comes out puts a #2 on it, because it comes out first, but it's got the two, and then the second one is the one.

[11:51] David: What if we make one of them a zero issue?

[11:53] John: The second printing would be a zero.

[11:56] Patrick: Yeah. I mean, it is a long-standing tradition in the comics industry to have books published out of numerical order. In fact, the current Batman run, the Matt Fraction-written Batman run, which is up to Issue #4, wasn't supposed to come out until the previous run ended, which makes perfect sense, but there's still two issues to go of that previous run, the one that Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee are doing, and they couldn't wait. So, they just started putting the new one out. So, there are two books coming out just called Batman.

[12:29] John: Has the DC interest in the Absolute Line bled into stuff like DC K.O.?

[12:34] Patrick: DC is currently our number one publisher, which they haven't been for a very long time. As a comic book reader, my Marvel pile is anemic, and my DC pile is almost everything.

[12:47] John: DC K.O., there's parts of it where I'm like, “man, is this where we're at? We're just literally doing the exact thing that a crossover is, with no pretense to anything else,” but there's the other part of me that's like, “I just bought every single round, because I can look at the covers, and I know exactly what to read next. Well, it says Round 3.” I don't know. It's well-executed and clear.

[13:11] Patrick: And just the concept is easy to pitch, and it's fun. It's like, “don't you want to see all the DC heroes and villains go out at it Mortal Kombat style?” There's your pitch, and you get one side, or you don't.

[13:21] David: It's nice and easy, and simple, and there's plenty of room for complexity within that, and I think they're really hitting on it. K.O.'s got me, for sure. I'm into it. I'm interested in the whole Darkseid subplot that's been happening for the last year or so--a little over a year, I guess. I'm more and more intrigued by it, […]. Last year, at the beginning of the year, I was like, “man, if they fold the Absolute Line back into the main line somehow, and just say it's a Darkseid thing, I'm going to be so angry,” but the more we get closer to exactly that, I'm just okay with it, at this point, because the stories that they're telling to bring these two universes together, in a way, it's fun. I'm enjoying it quite a bit.

[14:00] Patrick: It's not taking away from anything happening in the Absolute Universe. Those books aren't crossing over into this. It's just using those characters. If you just read Absolute Wonder Woman, which you should, because it's the best of all the Absolute books, and that is saying something, you can still just read that, and not be affected by, “it has to cross over into a thing,” like every Marvel book has to do regularly.

[14:22] John: To me, the thing that makes it super exciting is the personality that each one of those books has.

[14:27] Patrick: Oh, yeah.

[14:27] John: In a way that I feel like we've gone for several years of things angling toward being the most replaceable, interchangeable artists on things. I mean, we’ve talked about it a few times. There's a certain house style that's a more commercial version of what Stuart Immonen was doing on Ultimate X-Men and Nextwave. CG backgrounds, that everybody's doing, and then, you saw the Absolute Batman art for it, and you're like, “oh, my God,” and then Hayden Sherman on Wonder Woman--I mean, I love Kelly Thompson.

[14:57] Patrick: Sure.

[14:58] John: Hayden Sherman on Wonder Woman is a revelation.

[15:00] Patrick: And that's one of the things that made Absolute come out of nowhere is, first of all, they're like, “Scott Snyder's doing Batman.” I literally said out loud, “why? What more can he possibly say about Batman?” Oh, my God, so much more, but also, these artists were not A-list artists. Okay, Nick Dragotta has got a specific style. Hayden Sherman was, for a guy who was, at any given point, doing two books at the same time, not really well known, and then you have Rafa Sandoval over on Superman. Those are not people you would launch a universe with, but they're, no pun intended, Absolutely the people you should have launched a universe with, because they're so good and so unique, and now you have a hard time envisioning those characters by anybody else, and there have been fill-in artists, and sometimes they work.

[15:46] John: […] great on those. There are times where I picked up Absolute Wonder Woman, and Hayden Sherman's my favorite artist, I'm like, “Awesome. It's not Hayden Sherman this month. It's another good artist.”

[15:55] Patrick: Mattia de Iulis, who worked with Kelly Thompson on The Cull, and really photorealistic, in a way that freaks you out, because the foreground and the background are in focus, unlike the way your eyes work, which freaks me out, because it's photorealistic. It should be blurry depth, but it wouldn't be, obviously, in art, but most of it works all the time. I don't want to name names, but there was one miss on a fill-in of Absolute Batman that didn't quite do it for me.

[16:29] David: Clay Mann.

[16:30] Patrick: I'm not saying any names, whatsoever.

[16:34] David: Anecdotally speaking, I feel like a lot of people were into the idea of Clay Mann, but the execution, seeing it, it just didn't jive right, […] and once you're fed a steady diet of Nick Dragotta, it becomes Nick Dragotta's book. It's hard.

[16:54] Patrick: Yeah, but I mean, Marcos Martín killed those couple of Freeze issues. […] how that works?

[16:58] David: Yeah, […].

[16:59] Patrick: The editing of that, is it Ben Abernathy who does the Absolute Line? The choices are amazing.

[17:05] David: I think Abernathy's the Energon Universe.

[17:08] Patrick: Oh, whoops. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, I'm not really good at my behind-the-scenes things. Yeah, whoops. I should definitely know that, and I admit that I really love the concepts of Absolute Green Lantern, but I didn't like the manga-inspired art. It didn't work for me as much, but then when you talk about art, and you talk about Absolute Martian Manhunter—insane. Anybody that works on a level where you have to hold pages up to the light, so the page behind it shines through to give you more--come on. That is why comics are the best medium in the world, because no one else can do that. In a book, you're reading how somebody else dictates it. In a movie, they have a limited special effects budget. Comics don't have those.

[17:53] David: Yep. Through all the challenges of new distribution, and things, the Absolute Line and these other lines, and the mixing of the two companies, Deadpool/Batman, did you have a good year this year, with all of that?

[18:07] Patrick: So, I need to preface this. 2025 is easily our best year ever, and we are up over $100,000 from last year.

[18:17] David: Gross.

[18:18] Patrick: Yeah, I know. It's disgusting. No, but we're spending way more to make more, and it's not an equivalent formula. We're ecstatic to do more, but we're spending a non-equal amount more to do that, and that's because everything costs us so much more. The prices of everything goes up. For the first 12 years we were open, our bags and boards cost the same price. In the last five years, they've gone up three times what we have to charge people, and that's just one tiny example. We lose discount percentages all the time, opening new accounts with new distributors. It takes us three times as long as it ever did before to do the same amount of work, because everybody has a different billing procedure.

Also, Penguin Random House is the--I leaned in, listener. I leaned into the microphone to show how serious I am--PRH is the biggest distributor of books in this country. Not just comics. Books. They don't have an online payment portal. Their invoicing system is insane. You get a monthly statement that has a line item for every shipment you've ever made. In that time period, if you report a damage of a book, and they replace it, that one book gets shipped out by itself. That's a separate line item. There are 70-100 line items on your monthly invoice, and if you have payment terms which are beyond 30 days, nothing that you've paid is reflected on that invoice. So, you get all these totals. You don't know where you actually stand, and what's due when, but more than that, you can't pay them online. We were still sending checks in. Who sends checks in 2025?

[20:12] David: I don't think I even own a check anymore.

[20:15] Patrick: I personally don't. It's like if they were saying, “you have to submit all your orders via fax.”

[20:19] John: Yeah. I was going to say […].

[20:22] Patrick: I mean, we send ACH payments through our bank, but that is still way too much legwork, on our end, to find out the amount, and even sending an electronic payment is still--there's a five day period for it to get there. Just let me pay online. Lunar's a brand-new company. They make it so much easier. You see every invoice, every shipment. You know when the invoice was sent, when it was due.

[20:46] David: Here's the thing, Patrick.

[20:47] Patrick: Yeah.

[20:48] David: The CFO of Penguin Random House is about 97 years old, and he's not about to change what he's doing, or the way he's been doing it. He's been doing it this way for 40 years, and it's worked the whole time. He's not going to change it now. I'm just making that up. I don't know if he's that old or not. Doesn't that feel like what it is? It's just like there's somebody in charge, like “it's fine. Just leave it the way it is.”

[21:14] Patrick: It’s archaic. The number of--Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Scholastic, PRH, we all send them ACH payments through our bank, because there's no portals to pay these distributors. Come on--and also a quick aside about working with book distributors, as opposed to comic distributors. Book distributors don't care about quality or condition of books. Ingram is one of our distributors, and they at least put all of your books on a flat cardboard sheet, and shrink wrap it, and then put it in a box. So, if anything shifts in the box, it's just that one thing as one piece, because it's shrink wrapped together. They put a nominal bit of paper in it, but the paper does nothing. Nobody else cares, and it's been explained to us, because if you're a bookstore, you're ordering cases of books, not pieces of books. If you're a Barnes & Noble, which there's a Barnes & Noble four blocks away from us that has literally just put a 10-year-old bookstore down the block out of business, and has dramatically decreased our manga sales. Our manga sales are okay, but they were doing much better until Barnes & Noble moved in down the block, but anyway--bookstores order theirs in cases, and if there's damages, they just return them, because they're buying all their product returnable. So, forever, the Penguin Random House, or whomever, got used to just sending books out loose in a box.

[22:37] John: Yeah. That was a disaster, when PRH started shipping that stuff like that.

[22:40] Patrick: Oh, yeah, and comic customers care a lot. We are very liberal in our damages. We'll be like, “okay, this is bad. We'll still take it.” It's got to be really messed up for us to say, “no, we're not going to put this on the shelf,” but that still happens, multiple books per shipment. A lot of times, if people are like, “do you have an un-bent copy?” No, because that's how they sent them. God forbid you're a subscriber who orders an independent book we only carry just for you, and that book comes messed up, because if we need to get a replacement, 80% of the time, it comes messed up again, because they're sending it by itself in one little flat mailer.

[23:14] David: Brutal. That makes me itch.

[23:15] Patrick: No customer looks at a bent book, and thinks, “I wonder how this showed up in its box.” They just think that we did something to it. 

[23:23] David: Sure, of course, it's your fault. It is your fault, Patrick.

[23:27] Patrick: That's fair, and I'm used to that, because that's what most people do. So, while it was a tremendous year, on paper--I was talking to a fellow retailer. I'm like, “why is it that we're making more money than we ever have before, and I'm personally broker than I ever have been in my life?” I have no savings. I have debt. Luckily, my car’s going to be paid off in a few months, and the store is like that. It's like, “yeah, the store is doing great on paper, but only if you see the plus column.” Look at the minus column, you realize, we are still losing money every year, because comics--none of us, in this industry, on this podcast, have gotten into this business to get rich.

[24:09] David: No. I have said many times that if I had as much passion for pizza as I did for comic books, I would be a multi-multi-millionaire. I would own a chain of restaurants that covered this entire country. I know so much about comic books that if I applied it to any other business, I would be literally a millionaire, and yet I refuse to do anything but stupid comics, which keeps me broke.

[24:36] John: Somewhere out there, there's a poetry publisher saying, “hold on.”

[24:48] David: Patrick, congratulations on a great year.

[24:50] Patrick: Thank you.

[24:51] David: It sounds like you had to work twice as hard to get there, but it's great that you're getting there, and I'm sure--the good news is that there's always ways to cut costs, and there's always ways to find efficiencies, now that we have ChatGPT.

[25:00] Patrick: I can't fire Dal, David. He co-owns the store.

[25:06] David: For 2026, I'd like to hear the thing that you're looking forward to the most, and as a retailer, your biggest, boldest prediction for the year. What is the big, bold prediction, and what are you most excited for?

[25:17] Patrick: I haven't given the big, bold prediction any thoughts. So, I'll put it in the back of my head, as I'm working on this, but what I'm most excited about for 2026 is, it feels like the sales volume we're doing now is going to continue, and comics are always weird, because when the economy is at the worst is when comics are doing the best, and when things get really good for people, they stop buying comics. I don't understand that, because I've never stopped buying comics since I was six years old, but I think Superman and Spider-Man crossing over is a much bigger deal than Batman and Deadpool crossing over, and I think that we can do just as well with that, and the people that only came in for Batman/Deadpool or Deadpool/Batman--I know I'm saying the wrong title first. It's historical pedigree. Batman comes first--Once they see that there's another one, maybe they'll stick around. Maybe they'll get some more.

I feel like the best books of 2026 are obviously things that have yet to be announced, creators we may have even never heard of, who are going to come in and blow the doors off of the place, and make us sit up and take notice, like Zoe Thorogood did a couple of years ago, and we'll be able to say, “this is the future of comics. Comics are in good hands.” The number of small creators that I've found on Instagram--we make bookmarks that we give away with every graphic novel that we sell, and every bookmark is a different artist, and we do T-shirt designs, and other stuff, where we need creators, and we always try to find different and new people, and Instagram is a great way to be exposed to artists never heard of before. Our next bookmark, which hasn't debuted yet, and I don't even remember their name, but it was literally somebody who just moved to Chicago, and emailed, saying, “do you have any positions open? I'm a local artist who'd love to work at your store.” I'm like, “no, we have no positions,” but I looked at their online portfolio, and said, “can we hire you to do art?” and they said, “yeah, for sure,” and the next bookmark that's coming out from us, they killed it. It's so good, and we offer everybody the option of doing a Patrick and Dal caricature for the back, and they did, and they’re so different and unique, and we love them, and it's great, and we just got Gabi Mendez, who did the Scholastic graphic novel last year, Speak Up, Santiago! She did next year's sales shirt for us, and just turned in the art this week, and it's excellent, and I'm constantly in awe of the new creators, and the younger creators.

I was worried, at this point in my career, that I would not be the person you would go to, to find out what's new, and what's hot, and what's good, because I'm an old man now, and why would an 18-year-old listen to a 57-year-old about what's good, when they have way more access to knowledge than I do? And I thought, literally seven years ago, “I’ve got to sit down when I'm 50, because I'm going to be too old for this.” Comics are so good that I can't leave. I can't leave, and my 63-year-old brother, who got me into comics, recently confessed that he was at a point in his life where he said, “Am I ever going to give comics up, because I've been doing it for so long, and I'm just not that person anymore?” and then he looked at his to-read pile, and he said, “no, I'm never giving comics up.” Comics are just that good. So, I'm always looking forward to what I don't know exists, and what makes me so excited to be still in comics.

I mean, it's December. So, they're just starting to give us what we're getting in March, and nobody's reinventing the wheel. There's no major changes or announcements. One of the biggest things is, Oni is going to be publishing the Archie characters, but doing it in an Oni style, and doing Oni creators. The guy that does Ice Cream Man is writing Archie, Maxwell Price. That's going to be a super fun take. So, stuff like that is always neat. What I hope for, most of all, is that 2026 is at least as good for Challengers and bookstores as 2025 was, because I think most people were doing much better in 2025. I will take that again in 2026. My prediction is that there is no major headline story. There's going to be no “Diamond closes,” or even if Diamond officially goes away, no one's going to care, at this point. Now that Angoulême is self-correcting and off the board, I think there's going to be no controversy to that level, which I guess is good.

[29:31] John: You don't think somebody at Netflix will accidentally cancel DC Comics?

[29:36] Patrick: No, because even if that sale goes through, it's going to take at least a year for that to happen. So, am I petrified of that? Yes. Do I think DC characters will always exist somewhere? Sure. Am I worried about losing DC? Yes, but not in 2026.

[29:51] David: Yeah, it's not 2026. It's future problems for us, but not 2026. I agree. There's no way that Netflix doesn't farm that stuff out. Either they're going to break that thing off as its own company and sell it off, which I think would not be a bad--to have that in a smaller ownership group wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, A--or B, they'll just license all that stuff out to Sony or Boom! Studios. We'll still be getting Batman comic books till forever.

[30:21] Patrick: I've managed to go this entire podcast without mentioning wrestling. We're huge wrestling fans, specifically AEW, All Elite Wrestling. All of their broadcast rights are tied up through Warner Bros. So, this sale is a big deal for my wrestling fandom as well, but still, it's all just a “we’ve got to wait and see.”

[30:40] John: I think it's bizarre that, so many times, Warner has been bought by companies whose business model has ceased to exist during the course of their ownership. You go back to Time buying them--was it the 70s or 80s?--AOL buying them, and I mean, I know Netflix is a thing that changed everything, but they're also a company that is not profit-based, and at some point, those chickens are going to come home to roost. Are they the next thing that becomes “whatever happened to AOL?” I'm like, “well, they are getting bought by Netflix, because that's Warner.”

[31:14] Patrick: I'm just disappointed that Time Warner rejected the Blockbuster video bid from the early 90s.

[31:22] David: I think that's a good place to stop. I think we found our ending point. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.

[31:27] Patrick: Yeah, this is a blast. Thanks for having me.

[31:29] John: You're about an hour away from where I grew up, and I was checking the route over there, of how you get from Elmhurst to--

[31:35] Patrick: Did you shop at Gem Comics when you lived in Elmhurst?

[31:38] John: I was 8 years old when I moved away. So, I didn't start going to comic bookstores until I moved out here, but it was right around that time.

[31:45] Patrick: Okay, because Gem Comics is the longest still-in-business comic shop from the early 80s. One day, a couple years ago, Dal and I, just on a Wednesday, were like, “who's still open from everybody that was open when we were kids?” And we just started calling places, and it was Carl Bonasera's All-American Comics, but he eventually got out of the business. So, it falls to Gem, and they're still there. So, we literally called them to ask if one of the owners was there, so we could chat about their longevity, but no owner was there.

[32:18] David: All right. Well, Patrick, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was a pleasure. We'll have to have you on again sometime, maybe mid-year, to see how things are going, to see what big changes have happened in the industry. I continue to enjoy your Contest of Challengers podcast. Thank you so much for doing that. I really do enjoy it. It is, like I said, the first thing I listen to every week, and congratulations on another good year with your store, and you and co-owner W Dal Bush at Challengers Comics + Conversation in Chicago. Do you want to give a plug, or anything?

[32:48] Patrick: ChallengersComics.com. We have a robust online subscription service, run by Manage Comics, one that David himself has access to.

[32:56] David: You guys are great about sending a good number of emails. Not too many, not too few. I get notifications about when I'm supposed to check my pre-orders. Anything else you want to plug before we pop off, Patrick?

[33:07] Patrick: No, I just want everyone listening to keep reading comics.

[33:09] David: Thanks, everybody. We'll talk to you next week.

[33:11] John: Bye.

[33:12] David: Bye.

This has been The Corner Box with David and John. Please take a moment and give us a five-star rating. It really helps. Join us again next week for another dive into the wonderful world of comics.