Books Are My Business: Matt Melis of Stoneybatter's Little Deer Comics

Matt Melis runs Little Deer Comics in Stoneybatter, Dublin, where he lives with his wife and two children. Originally from the US, he is also a comic creator and founder of Dublin Comics Arts Festival and previously worked in animation.

Sat, 05 Aug, 2023 - 14:00

Marjorie Brennan

How did you come to own a comic book shop?

I was the founder and organiser of the Dublin Comic Arts Festival, which gave birth to Little Deer Comics.

Larger conventions and festivals have a budget to invite guests from overseas but we have never had that amount of money.

Instead, as I couldn’t bring these artists to our festival, I started importing their books and it grew from there.

We had to stop holding festivals and doing markets during the pandemic so we switched to mail order, which eventually outgrew our terraced house in Stoneybatter.

We started as a pop-up at Maureen’s, a former grocery in Manor Place in Stoneybatter in 2021.

In 2022, the owners thought they were going to redevelop the building and we moved to a spot in Inchicore for eight months.

The plans have been delayed and we moved back into Stoneybatter last November.

As long as we can keep making rent we get to stay here until any redevelopment happens.

What is the ethos of Little Deer?

We are a comic book shop, specifically focused on creator-owned comics.

There are two different worlds of comic books, the work that people create and own and then there is work for hire, which is an extremely exploitative system that unfortunately is the foundation of a chunk of the comic book industry.

Most superhero work is work for hire, which means the creators, if their book or character is wildly successful, or goes on to be in a billion-dollar movie, they don’t see a dime.

Our shop essentially doesn’t stock those books.

We have some that people bring in for trade-ins or our free pile but we don’t buy them new because we are trying to support artists who own their work.

We don’t have a lot of manga, mostly because of storage space.

Kids would love us if we had more but we are in a very small shop and even one series of manga is like 20 or 30 volumes.

We also believe that graphic novels and comics are not a genre, they’re a medium.

Sometimes in a bookstore, you would see all genres and then you would see comics.

We divide the store by genre — fantasy, sci-fi, memoir, drama, history, art books, poetry, parenthood, music, fashion, mystery, crime, race, gender, romance, queer, classic fun papers and so on.

That helps people who are coming back to comics find what they want to find, rather than having everything from Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home to Batman side by side, which is really difficult to parse.

It also makes things easier for people who are shopping for others.

We have our local comic book creators section in the shop as well.

That was also part of our reason for starting the shop.

There are so many people making brilliant comics in Ireland and most of them have to go abroad to find either a store that will stock them or a festival to offer them at.

We should be able to share our stories here where we live.

What do you like most about your job?

I like that people really quickly upon entering the store seem to get what we are about and seem to really appreciate it.

They like that right at their fingertips they can find comics from a variety of perspectives and places around the world.

We also have things that are difficult to find in Ireland, a good portion of our books are not available in any other shop.

What do you like least about your job?

The impact of the rent crisis.

If Little Deer does not survive at any point in the next few years, it will be because of rent, because we finally ran out of savings or couldn’t ask family for help anymore.

Three comic book recommendations:

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton is a devastating memoir about Kate's years working off student debt in the oil sands of western Canada.

Girl Juice by Benji Nate, a collection of sharp comedic strips that mix well-observed 20-something friendship dynamics with bonkers humour.

Alison by Lizzy Stewart, out in paperback in August, a confidently told drama about leaving an isolated rural life for the urban fine-art scene in the mid-20th century.