‘GEEKS’ (and Others) WELCOME - Comic Store Owner Has Powered-Up Shop And 'Never Quit' Attitude

Robert Young is serious about comics.

So, he spent $1.3 million and three years to purchase and renovate a new home for Borderlands Comics and Games at 410 S. Pleasantburg Drive. He opened almost two years ago.

“I felt in my gut that if we could create … someone described it as a department store for geeks … if we could do that in a friendly, welcoming way, it would change everything – in a good way,” Young says.

The 16,000-square-foot store is quadruple the size of the former location on Laurens Road.

“After the move, we had the best year the company's had in 33 years. This year sales continued to grow, even in a struggling economy. It’s almost awkward to say. It’s a level of success I never expected.”

Young was only 21 years old when he came to Greenville in 1991 to manage what was then Heroes comic store – after a childhood history of seizures crushed his plan to follow his father and grandfather into the military.

By the time he was 22 years old, he was overseeing six stores in three states.

“I didn't know how that would affect my life,” he says. “I'll always be thankful for that opportunity to learn, to screw up and learn.”

When a co-worker at Heroes, Stan Reed, bought the Greenville location and founded Borderlands, he hired Young to help run the business.

Back then, the store occupied 800 square feet in a strip of shops across Laurens Road from Wilson’s Five and Dime. By 1995, Reed had crossed the street and moved the business into a spot next to Wilson’s. It was a fixture there for nearly 30 years.

Meanwhile, Young left the business for corporate jobs at Hitachi, Cox Newspapers and GE. But the store maintained its pull on the kid who loved baseball cards, comics, and Dungeons and Dragons.

“I tried to buy the store every year. Stan would let me buy dinner. Then he’d turn me down,” he says.

In 2010, Reed insisted on paying for dinner and wrote a purchase price on the back of the check.

Young called his wife, Michele, on the way home. When she asked if they could afford the price, he told her that they could not. “She asked me, 'Then why are you so excited?'

“I said, ‘Because I'm going to buy it. He put a number on it. All we have to do is get to a number that we both hate, and if we get to that number, that's the fair price.'”

Reed financed the deal himself. “I knew you’d die before you quit,” Reed told his eager successor. And he was correct.

“I'd be at the store at 6 a.m. and work until midnight. I did whatever I had to do. I got the opportunity to do what I wanted later in life. I was 41. I just didn't want to fail. I had a family to feed,” Young says.

The pressure hasn’t changed much through the years.

“You don't have to be better than your competitors, you just have to be the last to quit,” he says. “If you keep failing and getting better, and failing and getting better, you'll eventually be better than them. But you have to not quit. We don’t teach that anymore: Don't quit.”

Young acknowledges that luck has also had a role in his successes. The industry rocketed in 2011 when DC Comics relaunched its superhero comic books with a series of storylines called The New 52.

“The New 52 created awareness. But we had to take advantage of it,” he says. “How many people get an opportunity and squander it? When you get it, you've got to grab it and work as hard as you can.”

Young also grew and diversified the store inventory and cultivated an atmosphere of openness and customer care.

“Every person who walks in has something in common with somebody who works here. Nobody can know everything. But somebody here knows about what you like,” he says. “That's the piece that gives it a little bit of magic, that makes it really cool.”

The offerings range from comics to games to collectibles.

Borderlands has one bin with 30,000 comics that each cost $1 — but also sold a comic book for $40,000.

The store sells Pokémon and Magic, the Gathering; every kind of board game – including Monopoly and Scooby-Doo Monopoly; vintage video games like Nintendo and Super Nintendo; Dungeons and Dragons; toys; T-shirts; manga. The store imports statues straight from Japan.

“If it's a geeky thing, we try to do it,” Young says.

The Youngs launched an ambitious “geeky” thing in 2014 – the South Carolina Comicon.

This year, fans can attend two family-friendly Comicons at the Greenville Convention Center – a one-day event from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Oct. 27 and another on the weekend of April 5 and 6. Tickets start at $15 for “Comicon Jr.” in October. Details for the spring show have not been released.

Michele handles most of the logistics for the big show – 150,000 square feet of displays and activities that draw 20,000 people each year from multiple states.

“Every year, I walk the line and thank people. I appreciate them,” Young says.

The couple also has made it a priority to help their community “give back to itself.”

At the store’s Black Friday sale, products are discounted. Customers who bring 10 cans of food get an additional 10% off the price of their purchases.

Borderlands has collected 4.5 tons of food for the Harvest Hope Food Bank through the years, Young says. Customers have also donated to the Blood Connection, Toys for Tots, Upstate Warrior Solution, the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, St. Baldrick’s Foundation, and the Hero Initiative (which raises money for struggling comic creators).

Young estimates that the store has had a charitable impact on the local community of more than $250,000.

“It’s really important,” Young says, explaining that he and his wife both come from families that struggled financially. “It’s one of the things that I'm most proud of. It’s a big deal to us.”

This article originally appeared on Greenville News: Comic Store Owner Has Powered-Up Shop And 'Never Quit' Attitude