Today we’d like to introduce you to Randy Lander.
Hi Randy, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I’ve been working at my comic and game shop for just over 25 years.
My college degree is in journalism, and while getting that at Colorado State University, I worked part-time at a store in Fort Collins called Fusion Comics. My hobby has been comics and games since I was a teenager, and with the advent of the internet, I started doing comic book reviews while working full-time for Austin Community College. I did that for a about five years, eventually turning it into a career in 1998 when I moved to New York to run a brand new comic review and journalism site called Psycomic.
After Psycomic folded, another victim of the dot com bust, I moved back to Austin and worked remotely for Newsarama, another comic book site, until eventually I build up The Fourth Rail, an independent review site, with my partner in comics Don MacPherson. Since that job didn’t quite pay the bills, I worked as a server of Texas Land & Cattle, and I accepted the offer of a “low paying job” from the owner of Dragon’s Lair in 1999. While building my own review site, the gone-but-not-forgotten Fourth Rail, I was working part-time at Dragon’s Lair, and when they opened their first expansion into Round Rock in 2001, I was the assistant manager working with the manager, Dave Farabee, who remains one of the management team at Rogues Gallery until this day.
Around 2006, when the owner was considering a change, I mentioned that if he ever wanted to sell the store, I’d appreciate getting a chance before he put it on the auction block, and it turned out he was interested. So after some fairly brief negotiations, I secured a business loan using some money made from selling our house and buying a new one as collateral, and became the owner of the newly-named Rogues Gallery Comics & Games in February 2007.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The core management team of myself, Dave Farabee and Nick Budd have been a staple for the last 18 years, and in 2022 we added Serena Fast, who quickly became indispensable.
With that team in place and a variety of great employees over the years, we’ve survived the a recession, a move, a couple minor floods, the disruption of our entire distribution system, and a global pandemic, not to mention the usual ins and outs of business. Early on, as the economy hit a recession, we were definitely worried that the loan payments were going to kill us, but we managed to renegotiate with our lender and pay off the loan exactly on time anyway. I was diagnosed with cancer on my 41st birthday in 2012, but my staff and managers helped carry the store through as I had chemo, radiation, and surgeries, ending up in remission in 2015, which thankfully remains true to this day. in 2017, we moved into a larger space, with the help of numerous volunteers from our past employees and customers.
The pandemic was a struggle for everyone in retail, but we were very focused on keeping our customers safe, with mask rules and social distancing, and we even did home delivery for a little while during the shutdown. The pandemic also crashed the game and comic distribution market, splintering it and requiring us to move from dealing with 2-3 distributors to 20 and counting.
Through all of that, we’ve built Rogues Gallery into not just a place to buy comics, role-playing and board games, but into a community hub for a diverse, queer-friendly crowd.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
My day-to-day job is a mix of customer facing retail, ordering and restocking product, marketing, problem solving and it all requires a strong knowledge of games and comic books, not to mention various computer programs for ordering, our point of sale system, social media, and more.
I think the parts of the job I’m best at, and not coincidentally the ones I enjoy the most, is figuring out what people might like and being able to recommend games and comics to them. I am not one to brag, but I think the level of knowledge I have of comics and boardgames and role-playing games, built from 40 years as a hobbyist and professional, puts me at the top of my field. So if someone wants something new to read or play, I can usually pick something out for them based on what other media they enjoy. Or if someone remembers something about a comic or game they’ve enjoyed, but can’t remember the name, I can usually help them find it with a little bit of description.
What I’m most proud of, though, is how we’ve built the store up into a community. People feel safe at Rogues Gallery, they feel at home, and that is important to me. I recently got a very nice note from a young man graduating high school who credited us for helping to shape him. We had a surprise 40th birthday party for one of our long-time customers who has become one of my dearest friends. We do a weekly podcast discussing comics and pop culture that keeps a conversation going between us and our customers and friends. When we get reviews, I’m happiest with the ones that note us as having a friendly and knowledgeable staff, and we often hear good things about our selection.
Having a good selection of product is something that takes a lot of my time, ordering from a half dozen distributors every week and others less consistently, and so it is nice when we hear that we have, for example, the best miniatures selection in town, or graphic novels and games people haven’t seen anywhere else.
How do you think about happiness?
I have come to realize that some of my biggest joy comes from sharing something I love with other people. So connecting someone with a story or experience they love is at the heart of what I do. If we didn’t live in a system where I have to make money to pay my bills, I could be just as happy giving away comics and games to people and hearing them talk about what connected with them. I’m lucky to be able to do that for a living.
As to why that makes me happy, I can’t entirely tell you, I just know that seeing someone connect with a story of an experience reminds me of the joy I get from connecting with stories and experiences, whether it’s a comic, TV show, or movie I watch or a boardgame or role-playing game that I play with friends.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/roguesgallerytx
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/roguesgallerytx
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@roguesgallery6539
