Off Panel: A Comics Interview Podcast · SKTCHD

Fun and Fundamental with Eitan Manhoff

June 9, 2025·1 hr 8 min·5 clips

Two customers at Cape and Cowl gave up the last copy of a comic to each other, sparking a conversation about new releases.

Cape and Cowl is still closed. In that quiet morning stretch, David Harper has room to settle into Eitan Manhoff's day: dogs, a kid's play date, and the slow shift into shop mode. The talk stays loose. Eitan comes in as the owner of Oakland's Eisner Award-winning Cape and Cowl Comics and a 2025 Eisner Award judge, but the episode quickly feels more like shop counter talk than resume talk. Hours matter more than they sound like they should. David sticks with the simple question of when a comic shop owner gets in, because that routine says a lot about how the place actually runs. Then the market conversation takes over. The question is whether single issues are struggling because of quality, volume, attention, or the messy pileup of all three. Eitan does not blame the books. If anything, he says there may be a million great books, which becomes its own headache. Great books still need to be seen, stocked, handed to the right reader, and kept moving. David ties that to recent creator conversations about original and creator-owned comics competing against the dependable top end of the market. The examples are concrete: Absolutes, Ultimates, Energon, Marvel events, Ultimate Spider-Man, Avengers, and Marvel Zombies. Customers only have so much money, and many already follow those big lines every week. Eitan treats that pressure as real, but not as an excuse. The shop can still put smaller books in front of readers. That is where the episode works best. It is not panic about the market. It is the everyday business of knowing what people buy, watching where their money goes, and still making room for comics that need a little help finding their people.

As heard by us

A shop-floor comics conversation that turns market pressure into something concrete.

Off Panel stays close to the daily work of a comic shop, using Eitan Manhoff's schedule and store-level view to widen into a larger look at the current comics market.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you care how comic shops juggle creator-owned books and the big franchise pile, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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