Heroes for Sale has been a stalwart of the comics scene for 30 years. But when multiple outside forces conspired against owners Stu and Sue Colson it looked like doom for the Auckland institution. We find out how they conquered these foes and turned adversity into triumph – with a little help from Uptown.

The story of Heroes for Sale is bigger than comic books. It’s a story about following your dreams and then finding yourself crushed by forces far bigger than you could ever imagine. It’s a story about not just losing all hope, but losing something much, much worse: passion.

But, as any comic book reader will attest, stories don’t tend to end on a bum note. Neither does this one. Ultimately, the story of Heroes for Sale, and by extension its owners Stu and Sue Colson, is one of redemption, one of rediscovering one’s joy, and how the couple found both in Uptown.

Heroes for Sale began from Stu’s passion for comics in the mid- 90s. The shop had always been centrally located, but found a long-term home at the Ponsonby end of Karangahape Road in the mid-90s. But one day they came to work and found their previously accessible entrance on K Road blocked by diggers and the ubiquitous road cones, both of which lingered outside their door for two long years.

The couple toughed it out as long as they could, but it was a losing battle. Stu repeatedly spoke to the council and repeatedly got nowhere. He cites sales figures that don’t indicate a drop-off as much as a face-first freefall onto a concrete slab.

“I thought, ‘wow, I'm going to lose my business to inefficient bureaucracy’. My wife and I thought, ‘the comic shop’s done.

There’s nothing we can do to keep this going’.”

Out of options, they decided to close up shop and go to India to focus on their software business. Around 2012, Stu had been developing ComicHub, a back-end point-of-sale, e-commerce and inventory management system for comic book retailers that also linked up with a front-end app for customers that tracked and organised their collections and simplified the discovery and ordering of comic books.

These were all problems he’d faced running Heroes for Sale. He figured other retailers must be too. After five years beavering away on it, ComicHub got a massive attention boost when Heroes for Sale was nominated for the prestigious Spirit of Retail Award at the international Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards. Judges for the award were so impressed by ComicHub they contacted him about licensing the software.

Still in Beta, that interest was the boost needed to take it to the next level. After securing funding, he set up a development team in Jaipur, India, to prepare his software for market. ComicHub is now used in hundreds of comic shops and by tens of thousands of readers around the globe, all run remotely from the couple’s Auckland shop.

But returning to 2020, it was a different story. They had no shop and were all set to go to India. Bags were packed. Tickets were in hand. And then Covid hit.

“We were due to fly to India 12 hours before the world shut down,” he sighs. “I was all ready to go to the airport. We felt absolutely screwed. Wrong side of 50, nowhere to live or run our business.”

Forced to pivot, they quickly leased a shop in Newmarket. They knew it was the wrong location, but it had one killer feature: a living space out the back. They stayed for four years as Heroes for Sale limped along. By this stage, they were in a deep funk.

“We were at a party and someone said, ‘What do you do? I said, ‘You know, comic shop.’ and I was aware that I just said ‘comic shop’, whereas in the past I was always animated and excited,” says Stu.

“I’d forgotten what we were doing. And why.”

The revelation was a catalyst for change. Leaving Newmarket became a priority. Wanting to stay central, they soon found a bright and spacious new home on Symonds Street, which they moved into in May.

“It's been so much better,” he beams. “It's night and day. There’s been people from the community coming into the shop, people who you’d think had never bought a comic or a graphic novel in their life, coming in to say ‘Hi, what are you guys about?’ Just about every business has come in to say, ‘Welcome to the neighbourhood’. And we’ve had lots of people who live in this area just popping in. We’re over the moon.”