Comic book nerds unite! Rejoin the "Atomic Revolution" at this beloved metro Phoenix shop

Joe Furman, Mike Malve and Scott Hagen have one thing in common: They all love comics.

For Scott Hagen, that love meant biking to the store and picking up a comic book with all the money he’d earned from his paper route earlier in the morning. For Joe Furman, comics meant learning how to tell his own stories through redrawing and tracing his comic favorites. And for Mike Malve, it meant loving comics so much as a kid that he opened up his first comic shop when he was just 19.

“Atomic Comics” is what he called it. Until the retail shops (Malve opened up five shops in the Valley over 25 years) closed in 2011, it was one of the largest comic book retailers in the country.

But the brand is back. On Wednesday, Nov. 24, on national Local Comic Shop Day, Atomic Comic was reborn, reopening in SanTan Village in Gilbert. Hagen, Furman and Malve are the owners.

“There should be something for everybody in Atomic Comics,” Malve said. “If you weren’t part of the Atomic Revolution in the '80s, the '90s, and the 2000s, come out to Atomic Comics in '21 and see what we are all about.”

Atomic Comics, then and now

When Malve was a kid, comics were his life. The day his tonsils were taken out could’ve been a bad one, but reading comics made it better. Though he suppressed his love for comics during high school because “back then it wasn’t cool,” Malve said, the moment in 1985 when his car broke down in front of a used bookstore on 24th Street and Indian School Road was a pivotal one.

“While I was in there waiting for a ride, the owner of the used book store asked if I had read comics before, and I said, ‘well yeah, when I was kid,’ and he started telling me about comics (then),” Malve said.

The rest was history. It was a year later that he opened up Bubbas Comics, later changed to “Atomic Comics,” in 1986.

The shop, though only 2,000 square feet, was right next to an AMC movie theater and Lionel Playworld in a high-profile area in Mesa. By 2002 Malve had opened five shops across the Valley including a 20,000 square foot store. It became one of the biggest comic shops in the world.

Soon, the shops gained national prominence, which Malve attributes to the chain's innovativeness. It was a comic store, but it also became a hub for community events and celebrities.

Comic book creators consistently came to the shop, and so did bands like hip-hop group Public Enemy, who performed at Atomic to celebrate its own comic series debut.

The movie “Kick Ass” also filmed scenes in the store.

The shop hosted a competition where winners were flown out to New York City to be editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics for a day. Another idea meant creating a comic book for the 2008 presidential election.

“We actually recreated a website just for that so you could vote by buying a comic book,” Malve said. “If you want to vote for Senator McCain, you bought the McCain comic book, and if you want to vote for Obama, you bought the Obama comic. We had a poll you can see every day who's winning the comic book election.”

It wasn’t long before the shop became one of the top three retailers in the nation, Malve said, and one of the first comic book shops to go online.

'It was sad'

But in 2011, Malve declared bankruptcy and closed Atomic Comics. Thoughts of closing the shops started in 2006 when a 16-year-old uninsured driver burst through the 20,000-square-foot Mesa superstore. The accident resulted in more than a million dollars of repairs as the vehicle crashed into the water main and flooded the shop, Malve said.

The closure of the shop resulted in a great loss of business. And after the economic recession in 2008, Malve said paying all his creditors became impossible. On Aug. 22, 2011, Malve sent out a newsletter announcing the closure of the shop.

“It was sad,” Malve said. “It was a sad time for Atomic.”

After the closure, Malve opened another business: Captured Planet Studios, a business that worked with Marvel Publishing Company to produce trailers for comics. The company also worked with publishers to digitize comics.

Dreams of reopening a comic shop were always on the horizon, Malve said, but it needed to be at the right time. It wasn’t until July of 2021 that it was.

Malve always wanted to open another comic shop

Restaurant owner and entrepreneur Scott Hagen had been friends with Malve for years. The two met while comic book shopping back in the 80s, and since Atomic’s closing in 2011, they’d thought about reopening another shop. The idea was five years in the making when Hagen met 30-year-old Joe Furman, a CIO and system administrator time.

Furman was dining at Hagen’s restaurant, Craft 64, when he noticed an empty building right next door. He too, was looking to open up a comic shop business. While there, he asked for the space owner’s card — and got Hagen’s business card instead.

“He called and told me he wanted to use the space for a comic book store and I started laughing and said, ‘well we should get lunch because I’ve been looking to do the same thing. I guess some things are meant to be,” Hagen said, laughing.

Within an hour of lunch together, two drove around the Valley scouting for a location. On July 27, Malve’s birthday, Hagen invited Malve to be the third owner. It wasn’t long before the three sat down and made an executive decision: They would reopen Atomic Comics.

The timing was right, they said. Aside from finding a prime space to open the shop — in the outdoor marketplace, SanTan Village, right next to a Harkins Movie Theatre — the pandemic increased the interest in comic books.

When the pandemic hit, it gave a lot of middle-aged guys an opportunity to go into their basements and look at all the old stuff and realize they missed it.

Atomic Comics, the 2021 version

Though the shop will host its official grand opening in February 2022, the soft opening welcomed nearly one thousand comic book lovers. Furman, who led the shop’s design process, said the 4,100 square foot store is clean and modern with high ceilings and plenty of room for events they plan to hold in the future.

The shop has more than 10,000 comic books on the floor from Marvel to DC to independent comics. Customers can sign up for regular subscriptions for their favorite comics, as well as invest in older, collectible, vintage comic books, said Furman.

The shop also features a one-of-a-kind FUNKO-pop figurine collection, added Malve.

“People are going to see them when they go to atomic comics this week, probably the first time they've ever seen them besides seeing them on eBay or seeing a picture online, but they’ll see them in the flesh,” Malve said.

The Gilbert shop has no other comic shops within an eight-mile radius, Furman said, which makes that “untapped” part of metro Phoenix the place to be.

“We also like to say that we wanted to make a space that was mom-friendly so that moms could feel comfortable coming into this store, which doesn’t happen a lot with comic book stores,” Hagen said.

Though Hagen and Malve will continue their other jobs while also working the comic shop, Furman will run the shop full time. The shop, he said, keeps them the kids they want to be.

"Scott and Mike are just the bigger kids," Furman said, laughing. "I mean, if you want to be a kid for the rest of your life, you've got to work at or own a comic book store."

Details: Atomic Comics at SanTan Village, 2270 E. Williams Field Rd, Suite 108, Gilbert. Hours are 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday. 480-909-6166, https://stores.comichub.com/atomiccomics

Reach the reporter at sofia.krusmark@gannett.com. Follow her on Instagram @sofia.krusmark

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Atomic Comics is back after a 10-year absence. Here's what we know