At Borderlands Comics and Games' new Greenville location, geeks (and others) are welcome

Robert Young is serious about comics.

That’s why he moved his business, Borderlands Comics and Games, from its home on Laurens Road to a renovated building at 410 S. Pleasantburg Drive.

It took three years for the top-to-bottom repairs and improvements to be completed. By the time the new store opened in November, the cost of the project – including the property – totaled $1.3 million. At 16,000 square feet, the new building is almost four times the size of the former location.

“I felt in my gut that if we could create … someone described it as a department store for geeks … If we could do that in a friendly, welcoming way, it would change everything – in a good way,” Young says.

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“Last year was the best year the company's had in 33 years. Our sales were up 50% this January over last January. It’s almost awkward to say. It’s a level of success I never expected.”

Young was only 21 years old when he came to Greenville in 1991 to manage what was then Heroes comic store – after a childhood history of seizures crushed his plan to follow his father and grandfather into the military.

By the time he was 22 years old, he was overseeing six stores in three states.

“I didn't know how that would affect my life,” he says. “I'll always be thankful for that opportunity to learn, to screw up and learn.”

When a co-worker at Heroes, Stan Reed, bought the Greenville location and founded Borderlands, he hired Young to help run the business.

In those days, the store occupied 800 square feet in a strip of shops across Laurens Road from Wilson’s Five and Dime. By 1995, Reed crossed the street and moved the business into a spot next to Wilson’s. It was a fixture there for nearly 30 years.

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Young left the business in 1997 and headed to corporate jobs at Hitachi, Cox Newspapers and GE, but the store maintained its pull on the kid who loved baseball cards, comics, and Dungeons and Dragons.

“I tried to buy the store every year. Stan would let me buy dinner. Then he’d turn me down,” he says.

In 2010, Reed insisted on paying for dinner, then wrote a purchase price on the back of the check.

Young called his wife, Michele, on the way home. When she asked if they could afford the price, he told her that they could not. “She asked me, 'Then why are you so excited?'

“I said, ‘Because I'm going to buy it. He put a number on it. All we have to do is get to a number that we both hate, and if we get to that number, that's the fair price.'”

Reed financed the deal himself. “I knew you’d die before you quit,” Reed told his eager successor. And he was correct.

“I'd be at the store at 6 a.m. and work until midnight. I did whatever I had to do. I got the opportunity to do what I wanted late in life. I was 41. I just didn't want to fail. I had a family to feed,” Young says.

The pressure hasn’t changed much through the years.

“You don't have to be better than your competitors, you just have to be the last to quit,” he says. “If you keep failing and getting better, and failing and getting better, you'll eventually be better than them. But you have to not quit. We don’t teach that anymore: Don't quit.”

Young acknowledges that luck has had a role in his successes. The industry rocketed in 2011 when DC Comics relaunched its superhero comic books with a series of storylines called The New 52.

“The New 52 created awareness. But we had to take advantage of it,” he says. “How many people get an opportunity and squander it? When you get it, you've got to grab it and work as hard as you can.”

Young also grew and diversified the store’s inventory and cultivated an atmosphere of openness and customer care.

“Every person who walks in has something in common with somebody who works here. Nobody can know everything. But somebody here knows about what you like,” he says. “That's the piece that gives it a little bit of magic, that makes it really cool.”

The offerings range from comics to games to collectibles.

Borderlands has one bin with 30,000 comics that each cost $1 — but also sold a comic book for $40,000.

The store sells Pokémon and Magic, the Gathering; every kind of board game – including Monopoly and Scooby-Doo Monopoly; vintage video games like Nintendo and Super Nintendo; Dungeons and Dragons; toys; T-shirts; manga. The store imports statues straight from Japan.

“If it's a geeky thing, we try to do it,” Young says.

The Youngs hosted their first South Carolina Comicon in 2014 at the Greenville Convention Center. Michele handles most of the logistics for the show – 150,000 square feet of displays and activities that draw 20,000 people each year from multiple states. This year’s Comicon will be on April 15 and 16.

“Every year, I walk the line and thank people. I appreciate them,” Young says.

The couple also has made it a priority to help their community “give back to itself.”

At the store’s Black Friday sale, products are discounted. But customers who bring 10 cans of food get an additional 10% off the price of their purchases.

This year, they collected 1,500 pounds of food for the Harvest Hope Food Bank. A recent blood drive drew 145 people. They have donated to Upstate Warrior Solution. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they purchased food from struggling restaurants and treated employees to lunch.

Young estimates that the store has had a charitable impact on the local community of more than $100,000.

“It’s really important,” Young says, explaining that he and his wife both come from families that struggled financially. “It’s one of the things that I'm most proud of. It’s a big deal to us.”

This story is featured in Marketplace Greenville, which is included in the print edition of the Greenville News.

This article originally appeared on Greenville News: Greenville's Borderlands Comics and Games thriving at new location