31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
How does a comic book shop stay open in 2025? Ask this longtime Miami business owner
On a rare chilly Friday in South Florida, Jake Berger and his family traveled from frigid Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, to Miami for a cruise vacation.
While his family planned to get lunch and prepare for their trip, Berger had other ideas. A Yelp search showed him that he needed to be at A&M Comics and Books on Bird Road.
Berger, 25, is one of the many visitors in search of rare collectibles who journey to A&M, a Miami-Dade comic shop that has been in business for more than 50 years. The 1,000-square-foot shop, said to be the oldest comic shop in Florida, has long boxes of vintage comic books and stacks of collectible Spider-Man figures stacked to the ceiling.
That's the way store owner Jorge Perez likes it. As much of entertainment shifts to digital subscription models and as comic book movies have become more popular than their source material, Perez has maintained his shop, affirming the cultural importance of the comic books he sells.
Perez, 59, said that a moment in junior high — helping a friend buy lunch at Little Havana's Citrus Grove K-8 Center — changed his life forever.
'I lent him a dollar for lunch, and the next day, he didn't bring me back my dollar. ... He brought me five comics,' Perez said.
With a desire to build a comic collection, Perez began frequenting A&M Comics, named for its former owners, Arnold and Maxine Square.
In 1984, when Perez was 19, his father died. Perez went to A&M to cancel a subscription so he could better focus on taking care of his mother. Arnold Square offered his condolences and made Perez an offer to run the shop for five months. Square said he had to go to New York for chemotherapy and would return to run the shop afterward.
But Square died of cancer five months later, and Perez didn't want to run the store … yet. Instead, Perez worked for one of Square's business partners who bought the shop. A few years later, the store changed ownership again, and by the time Perez reached his mid-20s, he was finally ready to take it over.
'By September 13, 1990, I was interested and bought it,' he said.
With a renewed enthusiasm for comic books and collectibles, Perez began to learn more about collectibles like baseball cards and sci-fi paperbacks. But nothing could have prepared him for 1992's 'The Death of Superman.' In the comic book story, the 'Man of Steel' died in a highly publicized event that made headlines the world over.
'It revitalized the industry completely,' he said. 'I ordered 400 issues. We had never bought 400 issues of anything.'
Perez said he had to hire a bouncer to ensure only five people could enter the narrow shop at a time: 'When I showed up that day, over 100 people stood in front of the whole [plaza], blocking parking completely.'
Perez called other local comic shop owners, who said that they were selling their copies for $30. After hearing that, he sold his copies of the comic, priced at $2.50 by the manufacturer, for $20 apiece.
By 2000, the days of reselling comics for 10 times their original price were long gone. Comic shops like A&M were on the verge of closing as the comic book bubble burst due to overproduction of comics that sat on shelves and speculative prices that sent wholesalers into debt.
It was around that time that a longtime customer had died, and Perez attended the customer's funeral when he was approached by the customer's 91-year-old widow.
'This was my husband's passion, not mine,' the woman told Perez. 'I enjoyed going with him on the hunt to your store to visit you and talk with you, but I don't have that much time left, so I'd rather his collection ends up with somebody who helped him form it and who was like family to us.'
Perez was floored. The offer was flattering, but there was no way he could afford to buy the collection of immaculate comic books from the 1940s to the '60s. The widow told him that she wanted him to take the comic books for free.
After four trips in his small car to the widow's house and back to A&M, Perez transported a large collection of vintage comic books, other books and fine china to his shop. He sold it all for $150,000 and says that collection would be worth up to $2 million today.
Gifts like that one have helped keep A&M in business even while other comic book shops across the country have closed their doors. Perez is well-versed in collectible markets outside of comics and sells a handful of pricey items throughout the year, helping the business stay afloat. The small shop also does not have a large staff, allowing Perez to keep his overhead low.
READ MORE: Miami's oldest comic-book store was on the verge of closing due to COVID. Enter Batman.
Since the release of 2008's 'Iron Man' movie, A&M has sold comic books to new generations of collectors who have grown up watching film adaptations of the same superhero comic books that fill the comic shop. Like Berger, the cruise passenger from Philadelphia, fans of all ages hunker down next to densely packed boxes of comic books looking for their next holy grail.
As Perez talked about his favorite Batman movie on a recent weekday, a young employee in a pair of black Converse sneakers climbed one of the wooden shelves holding collectibles to get comic books for a customer.
'I'm going to probably be here a while longer, and then Ruben will probably be running [this],' Perez said of A&M's nimble manager, Ruben Arenas.
Arenas, 25, moved to Miami shortly after his birth in Zaragoza, Spain, and lives in South Miami near the shop. Arenas first visited A&M in 2019 and has worked there on-and-off again ever since.
'I never really liked comics at first,' he said. 'And then, after a few years of working here, I got into [independent creator] Robert Crumb.'
Though he is not a huge fan of superhero movies, Arenas understands how the shop meets customer needs and learns from Perez on a daily basis.
Even without a significant online presence, A&M's reputation as the oldest comic book shop in Florida has gotten the attention of high-profile collectors like Star Wars creator and billionaire George Lucas. Perez said one of Lucas' assistants knew an A&M customer and bought original art from the comic shop — the valuable black-and-white artwork from which many comic books are made.
Through research years later, Perez said he discovered that Lucas was purchasing original art from shops like his to build a museum of comic book art.
Sitting at his computer to answer emails, Perez said he is aware of the changes that have happened in his industry over decades. The two top-selling comic books are Absolute Batman and Ultimate Spider-Man, each a new version of well-known superhero stories.
No matter what latest movie comes out or what trend pops up in comic books, there's one thing that he believes will remain constant.
'I know that the comics sell across the board as long as you have an interesting story,' he said.
