We’re back again with a new entry in VIDEO BACKLOG, the blog series where I, Fire Guy Ryan, hold your hand and take you on a whimsical journey through the magical backlog of ComicTom101 video content!
Russ, one of the cohosts of our channel (follow him on Instagram here!), is the owner of Mill Geek Comics, a comic shop up here in Mill Creek, Washington. Earlier this year he upgraded, and relocated to a bigger, more visible store; and in today’s VIDEO BACKLOG I’ll be discussing the live stream in which Tom, myself, and Russ gave a live tour of the new and improved Mill Geek Comics location. If you don’t feel like reading any more and just want to get straight to the video, click here to head to our channel and check it out! If not, scroll down and reward me for the work it took to type up this article by reading all of the valuable insights I shall provide imminently; in that trademark, overlong, drawn-out, Fire Guy way.
In September 2018, Tom and I decided the channel needed a long-form, recurring show that we could bring to the community on a weekly basis. We liked the idea of YouTube live streams and wanted to do more of them, so we decided to start our very first Bags and Boards Live Show on September 30th, 2018. We sat down for an hour, live, with the community in the chat, and just had a conversation. We were also joined partway through by our editor, Slav, for one of his very few appearances in front of the camera! It was very unscripted and rough, but a lot of fun, and pretty successful to boot. Here is the link to that first Live Show, if you feel like checking that out. That’s certainly not the video I’m here to write about today, however!
We continued the tradition of doing a Bags and Boards Live Show every week for about nine months. During this time, Russ had made the decision to move from his smaller shop, on the backside of a 7-11 with no street visibility, to a much larger shop just down the road that can actually be seen from the street! The first week that his shop was up and running, we decided to host our weekly Bags and Boards Live Show from the shop itself and give the audience a tour while we were at it.
The first part of this half-hour video is just Tom and myself up in Russ’s office, explaining why we’re in a different place than our usual live shows and setting up the audience for the tour of the shop that we’re about to take them on.
However, this happened to be an interesting time in the history of our channel. This day - March 6th, 2019 - was the day our first partnership with the YouTube channel Variant Comics went live! Variant Comics is one of the largest comic book channels on YouTube, and we partnered with them for a giveaway centered around the Captain Marvel film, which was about to premiere at that time.
Arris, the host of Variant Comics, released his video - featuring our channel! - during our live stream, so we watched it live alongside our community. (Skip to the 14:00 minute mark in the video if you want to see this part!)
As you can plainly see by these photos, this was clearly an exciting day for us.
Russ joined us in his office after this, and he explained his move in more detail. After this explanation, the three of us left the office and began the tour of the shop.
It’s a big store. Two floors! We started out in the upstairs of the shop, where Russ’s office is. He gave us a tour of the upper-floor communal space, which has at least four separate rooms, a bathroom and shower, AND a kitchen.
Downstairs is where the important rooms are! That’s where the COMICS are. And there are plenty of them. Mostly in the large, open area in the back of the shop, where new comics are prepped every week, by your very own Fire Guy Ryan himself!
This is also the space where we assemble the Mystery Mail Call every month. What’s the Mystery Mail Call, you ask?!
Why, dear reader, it’s our monthly comic book subscription service! For more details, click this link!
We then went from the back of the shop to the front of the shop, where all the new comics are displayed in glorious fashion:
This is also the part of the live stream where Russ tried to explain the then-popular Ziggy Pig Silly Seal secret poop variant to me. I was not getting it.
At the end of the video, Tom mentions that we were approaching 10,000 YouTube subscribers at the time we shot this (March 2019). That was just over one year since the start of our YouTube channel, back in February 2018. Right now, as I type this, we’re approaching 19,000 subscribers. Meaning we’ve gained almost as many subscribers in the past six months as we did in the entire first year of our channel being online! This really put things into perspective for me and caused me to reflect on our insane growth as a channel in the past year and a half. That’s a big part of the reason I’m writing articles on older videos like this one! So everybody who wasn’t around at the time can see some of the gold that we have in our backlog!
So stay tuned! I’ll for sure have another one of these articles ready to go in the near future. I’ve already got some more interesting videos in mind that could use a bit of a spotlight on them. Hopefully you enjoyed this article and find value in this concept! I’m enjoying the trip down memory lane, so if nothing else this entire exercise can just be an excuse for me to wax nostalgic. Thanks again to everybody who made it this far. We wouldn’t be here without you!
-Fire Guy Ryan
Fire Guy Ryan (sometimes just known as Normal Ryan) is one of the co-hosts on the ComicTom101 YouTube channel (and podcast!). When he's not reading comics or talking about them with his friends Tom, Russ, Jeff and Eryn, he's most likely working his graveyard job at the hotel in Seattle or sleeping in the daytime, and those are the two reasons he's probably not answering you right now. He's a lover of storytelling - film and television in particular - and every now and then he tries writing his own screenplay. He totally didn't write this blurb about himself either.
Comments