Jay Bardyla loves comic books. You can tell this much from just a few minutes of conversation with the comic shop owner/Alberta comic scene supporter.

The former Ontario local has been involved in the comic book community in Alberta since he first moved to Edmonton in 1996. In 1999, he opened the first Happy Harbor Comics, which was original a Direct Sales Outlet rather than a full retail store. By 2009, Happy Harbor expanded to encompass four retail stores across Edmonton, winning such distinctions as the 2007 Joe Shuster award for Best Canadian Comic Store and 2008 Finalist for the Will Eisner Retailer of the Year award.

“Every day I wake up, I go to work,” says Jay, “I hang out with people who are customers, I tend to always talk comics when I’m at home watching T.V… I had career paths that I had tried in my life before, and they didn’t pan out. I made this life for myself now, and I’m pretty happy with it. I can’t for a minute think of what I’d be doing right now if I wasn’t involved in this business.”

Up to this point I’ve focused this column on comic creators and publishers – and while Jay could be considered both, as he is a writer himself and has (through Happy Harbor) published a number of anthologies, the reason I approached Jay for an interview was due to his contributions to the province’s comic scene.

It seems to be impossible to hold a conversation about the comic community in Alberta without either Jay’s name or Happy Harbor coming up. In the decade that he has been running Happy Harbor, his efforts in co-running the online forum Canadiangeek.org, publishing the open submission anthology Tales from the Harbor (Vol. 1 -4), organizing a shwack of annual community events, and establishing a support system for local creative talent, have led to Jay’s name becoming almost synonymous with Alberta comic book culture.

“It wasn’t necessarily something that I thought that I needed to try and build,” says Jay about his efforts to help cultivate a healthy comic community, “it was something that I wanted to be a part of. For my own personal benefit, I wanted to learn how to become a better writer and I wanted to make comics and meet artists, so ingraining myself in the community was a matter of personal benefit.  Being that it was something important to me, and I had the space and the opportunity to provide the conduit/forums for people to come together, why shouldn’t I do that? It’s beneficial to everyone, the community as a whole.”

Jay says that his initiatives to help build a community out of Edmonton fell into the grander scheme of Happy Harbor’s business model.

“I thought, ‘what can I do that’s cool and different, and that will keep people engaged in their hobby?’ We wanted to transcend just being a store, and being involved in the community was an important part of that for us.”

These days, the community is thriving. To Jay, one big indicator of this is a shift in community interaction from the virtual world to becoming more ‘face to face’.

“In today’s society that’s the inverse of how things seem to work,” says Jay, “Things tend to start with a handshake face to face and then break down into nothing but virtual contact and communication, whereas the Alberta community has gone in reverse. People have been learning about each other virtually through forums (Canadian Geek in particular) and then connecting in person.”

Canadian Geek was created as a starting point for locals to begin communicating with each other. Jay realized that you can only have so many people coming through the Happy Harbor stores at one time, and getting everyone together all at once was generally not a realistic goal.

Jay also credits the Tales from the Harbor anthologies as being an important component in bringing together members of the current comic community.

“People who were involved in the book were obviously picking up a copy for themselves,” says Jay, “and they were now getting exposed to everyone else’s work. So first you have the forum, which is the virtual world, then you’ve got actual published material that people can see and get an idea where the other creators are coming from, and now you have the final step where we’ve moved into the realm of people coming face to face and beginning to pitch ideas and critiquing each other’s work and that kind of stuff.”

It would be difficult to deny that Alberta’s comic community has reached an impressive level of cohesiveness.  This is something that Jay acknowledges enthusiastically, adding that the benefits to having this kind of community are numerous.

“It’s that, ‘hey – I’m not alone’ feeling these days. These people all know each other, and they’re all supporting each other. Another thing we’re accomplishing through this is legitimizing the past time in the eyes of the general public. The average person doesn’t look at someone who says ‘I make comics’ with a whole lot of seriousness, and they might potentially be a little dismissive of them. But now you can go back and say, ‘I make comics’, and they’re like ‘oh are you part of that collective that helped raise thousands of dollars for big brothers and big sisters?’ – ‘why, yes I am’. So you’ve got a little bit of validation, and it’s nice to get that every once in a while.”

When asked about whether he plans to open a Happy Harbor location in Calgary, Jay’s response is tentative.

“We do, though obviously with the change in the economy there’s a lot of positives and negatives to consider before moving forward with something like that. We’re still just discussing things, and being careful about what we want to do.”

He explains that taking a tentative approach isn’t just a matter of being fiscally responsible, but also based out of a desire not to aggressively barge in to a market that already has many longstanding comic retailers.

“That’s just bad business. The analogy often is, ‘the pie is only so big and everyone has a slice, and the only way you expand is by taking someone else’s slice’.  Happy Harbor’s approach has always been, well, why don’t we just make a bigger pie? One of our biggest business objectives is to try to find ways to grow the market. How do we get people who aren’t reading comics, or who don’t know about comics, or who stopped reading comics – how do we bring them in?”

Over the course of the past year, many comic shop owners like Jay have received a boost in this department from a source that might previously have been considered unlikely – Hollywood. Jay refers to the recent surge in comic-to-movie adaptations as ‘free advertising’, using the example of the Watchmen trailer’s impact on sales last summer.

Jay says that prior to the release of the trailer, Happy Harbor sold 3- 5 copies of the seminal Alan Moore graphic novel a month. After the trailer hit theatres, that number increased to 3-5 copies a day. Interestingly enough, he says that the comics which have benefited most from the Hollywood comic adaptations are, like Watchmen, mostly properties that moviegoers were initially unfamiliar with. This means movies like Iron Man, the Hulk, or Spider-man don’t necessarily increase sales of the respective matching franchises. Often instead, the attention presently afforded to comics in the media will bring fans into shops looking for something new.

This attention has been a large factor in helping the comic industry cope with the recession, though Jay says the economy has still taken its toll on how Happy Harbor approaches ordering new material.

“It’s always a delicate balancing act, because of the slow creeping of cover prices and the amount of additional titles that the big two (Marvel and DC) keep introducing to the market. You have to be savvy about what you bring in, and what you push onto your customers. While the comic industry is still relatively healthy and stable these days, it’s taken a lot more work these past eight to ten months to maintain that balancing act.”

Jay cites the volume of comics being sold on eBay and through auction houses like Heritage, as well as the fact that more and more key books are breaking sales records, as indicators that people are still willing to spend money on comic books despite the economic downturn.

He says that it’s becoming easier to focus on the business side of things these days, thanks to other members of the community stepping up to lead new initiatives.

“It’s getting so that all I have to do is pretty much keep the door of my store open so that people can come in and sit down and have the space as a community to use. Instead of being the idea guy and the provider, I’m more and more the provider – when I’m needed. Which is pretty cool, since that also means I can start looking at making comics myself again.”