Nirvana Comics of Knoxville, Tennessee, doesn’t just have a good kids’ section, they have an award-winning kids’ section: The store won the 2022 Diamond Best Practices Awards for Best Kids/All-Ages Section (see “Michigan Retailer Gets 5K”), and it has been nominated for this year’s Will Eisner Spirit of Retailing Award.

The young-readers section is painted bright green, and co-owners Jasmine and Grant Mitchell keep it stocked with a range of early-reader, middle-grade, and young adult titles, with books for older kids on the higher shelves. There’s also a Little Free Library. “That way, a price sticker does not stand in the way of a kid reading a book,” Grant said.

Getting comics into young readers’ hands was important to the founders of the store, Richard Davis and his late wife Amber. “I want to honor them for starting that vision,” Jasmine said. She and Grant started out working at the store, and the kids’ section has been Jasmine’s responsibility from the very beginning. She and Grant became partners with Richard in 2021, six months after Amber’s passing, and they are currently in the process of buying him out completely.

The award-winning kids’ section started as a single rack of comics. “We had some single issues, and I got signage and stuff, and then I just kind of kept building on and building on it,” Jasmine said. Eventually she converted a hallway that had been used to store longboxes into a dedicated children’s area. “That way their parents can walk around the rest of the store, and they have their own section where they can just go and sit down,” she said.

Most of the stock in the kids’ section is graphic novels, with DC’s original middle-grade and YA graphic novels among the best-sellers. “They take these already established characters that we know and love, and they put the cool filter on them,” Grant said. “It’s not the comics I grew up with, but it’s what kids and teenagers today look for.” Jasmine cited the recent John Constantine middle-grade title The Mystery of the Meanest Teacher as an example: “It's just kind of a fun teen coming of age book, perfect for middle school, where they're not yet ready for Spawn and Venom,” she said. The Mighty Marvel Masterworks series are also popular, as are Marvel’s middle-grade Marvel-Verse books and collections such as Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur. In the nonfiction realm, the “I Am” biographies of figures such as Harriet Tubman and Marie Curie have gone over particularly well.

Jasmine, who is biracial, was a fan of the Milestone character Static as a child, and she understands that representation matters. She uses opportunities such as Black History Month, Asian American and Pacific Islander Month, and Pride Month to spotlight diverse creators and characters in the kids' section and the store as a whole.

The Mitchells do a lot of community outreach, including giving out coupons for single-issue comics as rewards for the Knoxville public library’s summer reading program, hosting a storytime with a local LGBTQ+ group, and taking part in local events. Like much of the rest of the comics world, they will be celebrating Free Comic Book Day on May 6.

Their efforts attracted nationwide attention in February 2022, after the local school district removed Art Spiegelman’s Maus from the eighth-grade curriculum: The store posted on its Facebook that it would give or loan a copy of the book to anyone who wanted one, and soon their in-box was flooded with donations. They ended up raising over $100,000 to purchase and send out the books (see “‘Project Maus’”). In February 2023 they gave away another 300 books and raised $1,000, which they will use to keep the Little Free Library stocked (see “Shop Talk”).

Grant estimates that kids’ comics (including YA) are about a quarter of his business, but he admits that’s a rough number. “We have a lot of families here, so the parents are getting stuff for themselves and then also for their kids. It's hard to put a hard number on it because it's such a important part about what we do here. Most of our sales throughout the day do touch the kids section some way or another.”

His advice to retailers who want to start or improve their young-readers section: Go all in. “Don’t go halfway,” he said. “You have to make a space for them to feel welcomed. Kids are always expecting to get the short end of the stick, to go the kids table. You have to make sure that their experience is just as well thought through as the adult’s.”

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